The Oldie Spring issue 412

EXTRA 32-PAGE REVIEW OF BOOKS NICKY HASLAM ON PICASSO

‘You are as old as you feel’ – HM the Queen Spring 2022 | £4.95 £3.96 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 412

Two Rons make a right Madeline Smith on the joy of acting with the Two Ronnies

RIP Rinka – A N Wilson on Norman Scott and Jeremy Thorpe Downton Abbey goes to France – Gareth Neame ‘My greatest mistake’ – Tina Brown on Harvey Weinstein

Come and stay at the Villa Albrizzi See page 77

Shooting The Deer Hunter page 16

Features 11 Hostesses from hell Roger Lewis 14 The Two Ronnies: what a fine pair Madeline Smith 16 The Deer Hunter's genius director Charles Elton 20 Inside the court of Lord Lebedev Matthew Norman 22 I love Half Man Half Biscuit Robert Bathurst 24 Why aren't I funny?

Benedict Nightingale 26 Children’s books aren’t child’s play Penny Phillips 28 Downton’s tricky French lessons Gareth Neame 30 The last gentlemen’s outfitters Mark Palmer 34 In search of lost love Barry Humphries 40 Why frumps disappeared Liz Hodgkinson

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What were cue sheets? Janet Radley 12 Modern Life: What is WWOOFing? Valerie Crossley

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Downton Abbaye in France page 28

13 Media Matters Stephen Glover 33 Small World Jem Clarke 36 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 37 Country Mouse Giles Wood 38 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 41 School Days Sophia Waugh 41 Quite Interesting Things about ... cows John Lloyd 42 God Sister Teresa 42 Memorial Service: Dame Vera Lynn James Hughes-Onslow 43 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 44 Readers’ Letters 46 I Once Met… Michael Winner Roderick Gilchrist 46 Memory Lane John Jolliffe 61 History David Horspool 63 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 63 Rant: Engineer abuse Alan Mordey 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

Chatsworth revisited page 80

91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books 48 Elizabeth Finch, by Julian Barnes Frances Wilson 51 An Accidental Icon: How I Dodged a Bullet, Spoke Truth to Power and Lived to Tell the Tale, by Norman Scott A N Wilson 51 A Life of Picasso Volume IV: The Minotaur Years 1933-43,

by John Richardson Nicky Haslam 53 Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart Nicholas Lezard 54 One Day I Shall Astonish the World, by Nina Stibbe Lucy Lethbridge 57 An Author Writes: The Platinum Queen’s golden smile Robert Hardman

Travel 80 Chatsworth revisited Harry Mount 82 Overlooked Britain: Lululaund, Hertfordshire Lucinda Lambton 85 On the Road: Tina Brown Louise Flind 87 Taking a Walk: the Isle of Thanet Patrick Barkham Oldie subscriptions ● To place a new order, please visit our website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk ● To renew a subscription, please visit myaccount.theoldie.co.uk ● If you have any queries, please email help@ subscribe.theoldie.co.uk, or write to: Oldie Subscriptions, Rockwood House, 9-16 Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH

Arts 64 Film: Benedetta Harry Mount 65 Theatre: Singin’ in the Rain William Cook 65 Radio Valerie Grove 66 Television Frances Wilson 67 Music Richard Osborne 68 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 69 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 71 Gardening David Wheeler 71 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 72 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 72 Restaurants James Pembroke 73 Drink Bill Knott 74 Sport Jim White 74 Motoring Alan Judd 76 Digital Life Matthew Webster 76 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 79 Bird of the Month: Black Grouse John McEwen

Reader Offers Literary Lunch p43 Reader trip to the Veneto p77

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The Oldie April 2022 3

The Old Un’s Notes We can thank Colin Sell, the pianist on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, for revealing the late Barry Cryer’s favourite cartoon (pictured).

Sell told the story during Radio 4’s tribute to Cryer after the Clue veteran and great friend of The Oldie died in February. But Sell wrongly attributed the cartoon to James Thurber, when it was actually the work of someone else.

His name was Roger Pettiward. He was born in 1906 into a long line of wealthy London landowners.

At Eton, his gift for draughtsmanship won him a succession of prizes. During the 1930s, he contributed cartoons to Punch – work with an often surreal touch, which delighted in puncturing pomposity and satirising the ruling classes, of which Pettiward – pseudonym Paul Crum – was himself a member.

Pettiward was 36 when he was killed during the ill-fated Dieppe Raid of August 1942.

As the 80th anniversary of his death approaches, we can be sure that Barry Cryer, so expert in comedy history, would want the record put straight.

Are you in search of an appropriate funeral or memorial-service reading?

You might find an answer in Peter J Conradi’s new book, On Grief: Voices Through the Ages on How to Manage Death and Loss.

There are moving passages by everyone from Joyce Grenfell to John Donne and Nick Cave. And the selections even go back to Virgil, from the first book of the Aeneid: Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent Tears are shed for things even here and mortal things touch the heart Aeneid 1.462 Seamus Heaney translated

those first three heart-stirring words, ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum’, as ‘There are tears at the heart of things’.

So true in these troubled times, particularly when you watch the news from Ukraine.

The whole point of vicars, one might think, is to convert souls to Christianity. Or is it? Clerics arriving for the recent Synod at Church House were asked not to discuss religion with staff at Church House in case it ‘caused offence’.

In Parliament recently, MPs held a debate entitled ‘Levelling up in the

Among this month’s contributors Madeline Smith (p14) played Miss Caruso, the Bond Girl in Live and Let Die who has her dress unzipped by Roger Moore with a magnetic watch. A Hammerhorror star, she was also in Up Pompeii.

Robert Bathurst (p22) was in Cold Feet and Downton Abbey. He played Ed Howzer-Black in Toast of London. A National Hunt devotee, he wrote, directed and starred in The Fall, a film about racing.

A N Wilson (p51) is a leading novelist, biographer and historian. His most recent book is The King and the Christmas Tree.

He has written biographies of Tolstoy, C S Lewis, Iris Murdoch and Jesus Christ.

Nicky Haslam (p51) is a writer and interior designer. He wrote Redeeming Features and Folly de Grandeur: Romance and Revival in an English Country House.

He recorded an album, Midnight Matinee.

east of England’. What, the Fens? Were they not flat in the first place?

The Donmar Warehouse production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, starring Kit Harington as the king, was quite exciting. But one thing jarred. At a couple of points, Shakespeare uses the word ‘lieutenant’. This was pronounced by the young cast as ‘lootenant’.

Sir Sydney Kentridge, defence counsel to Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, turns 100 in November this year. He stopped practising as a barrister only at the age of 90. Only John Platts-Mills (1906-2001), a Kiwi to Kentridge’s Springbok, was still arguing cases as a nonagenarian.

Jeremy Hutchinson (1915-2017), who did reach his century, chose by contrast to quit advocacy when a mere 69 years old. He declined attractive briefs to defend Clive Ponting and the Guildford Four, and went on to exercise his forensic talents in the House of Lords rather than the court room. At 100, he was made Oldie of the Year.

English judges have to retire by law. Lord Bridge, then senior law lord, referred to this practice as the ‘statutory presumption of senility’.

English barristers, though, can go on working till they drop. As long as they pay the annual levy for their practising certificates and fulfil the The Oldie Spring 2022 5

Important stories you may have missed Woman guilty in lettuce row i

Football club picks up keys to changing rooms Walden Local Police in Leicestershire offered gifts including posters of Jamie Vardy and three bags of doughnuts Hinckley Times £15 for published contributions

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Scotland the brave: Ian Wallace in his Coventry strip

‘Hello, Ms Fergis? I’m afraid I won’t make it into the office today – I’ve just died’

somewhat fluid responsibilities of continuing professional obligations, they can claim to be members of the Bar. That applies even if – like Uncle Tom, Rumpole’s oldest colleague – you spend your days practising your putting and vainly dreaming of a sympathetic solicitor to summon you once more to arms.

Greg Clark MP brought along a splendid oldie to Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons in March – former Flight Lieutenant Colin Bell DFC, who flew his de Havilland Mosquito in 50 missions over Nazi Germany.

Four days before his visit to the Commons, he had celebrated his 101st birthday.

Bell, in the gallery, looked as spry as a man of 80. When Clark mentioned his name and the massed house gave

hear-hears of approval, he raised in acknowledgement a single hand, just as he must have done when signalling to ground crew that he was ready to take off in his Mosquito.

The 1970s may have been the decade that fashion forgot.

But, as time passes, the Old Un rather admires the pure, outlandish joy of some of the outfits – and haircuts – on show then.

Two new books celebrate those glory days. In Get It On: How the ’70s Rocked Football, Jon Spurling looks at the horrors of racism and commercialism in the decade’s football. But he also commemorates the sartorial highs – and lows – of 1970s footballers. Take Coventry City’s Ian Wallace (pictured). Wallace (born

Plenty up top: Marc Bolan in 1972

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6 The Oldie Spring 2022

1956) was a talented striker for Coventry, Nottingham Forest and Scotland.

What a barnet Wallace sported! And what a football strip! As Spurling says of this picture, ‘In a move towards “earth toning”, Wallace poses in Coventry’s now infamous Admiral-designed chocolatebrown away kit.’

Few people could match that level of fashion chutzpah – except for the pop stars pictured in the other new book, Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ’n’ Roll, by Peter Stanfield. Pictured is the glorious Marc Bolan (1947-77) on the cover of a 1972 Record Mirror special. They don’t make hair like that any more.

‘We were lucky to get a table by the patio-heater’

Sir Edward Heath wasn’t to everyone’s taste – he could be a bit of a grump – but there has been something rather decent in the way old friends have defended his name from false rumours started by the sex-crimes fantasist Carl Beech.

Those led to a witch hunt headed by Wiltshire’s ex-Chief Constable Mike Veale. Veale these days is paid £100,000 a year to advise the Police and Crime Commissioner for Leicestershire. Former

Heathites such as Lords (David) Hunt, (Patrick) Cormack and Lexden (Alistair Cooke) defended Ted’s reputation. Oddly, no one asked why a police and crime commissioner needs a £100k-a-year adviser. Is that not arguably just as great a scandal?

This year marks the 140th anniversary of the birth of the cartoonist and illustrator Alfred Leete (1882-1933).

One of his drawings was later turned into the most famous recruiting poster of all time. For Leete was the designer of the celebrated and much-imitated First World War poster ‘Your country needs YOU’, featuring Lord Kitchener and his dramatic pointing finger.

The drawing first appeared (with slightly different wording) on the front cover of London Opinion magazine on 5th September 1914. It was so successful that it inspired Italian, German and Hungarian variants during the war, as well as the 1917 US design by James Montgomery Flagg, with Uncle Sam replacing Kitchener.

Later versions included the children’s-comics character Desperate Dan saying, ‘YOU can help Britain by collecting waste-paper’ (Dandy, 1942) and many satirical antiVietnam War posters.

Lord Kitchener needs you – by Alfred Leete

Pastiches of Leete’s iconic design have been used recently, featuring Boris Johnson and Donald Trump during their election campaigns.

After reading Simon Weston’s moving memories of the Falklands War 40 years ago, Oldiereader Kath Garner, from Tollerton, North Yorkshire, sent in her own.

Aged 17 at the time of the Argentinian invasion in April 1982, Kath kept a diary with details of major battles, locations of ships and lists of names of those killed in action.

When HMS Sheffield was hit, she wrote down the name, rank, home town and age of each man lost – in red ink.

Kath says, ‘I don’t know now why I chose to write them in a different colour, but poignantly their names stand

‘So have you finished Supermansplaining?’

out from the pages of scrawled black ink. Some were only a couple of years older than me and my friends.’

She also became pen friends with several servicemen. One of them was aboard the Sir Galahad, the ship hit on 10th June 1982.

She says, ‘Each day, I read the newspapers looking for his name [in the list of those injured or killed] and breathed a sigh of relief when another day passed without it appearing.’

Luckily, he had disembarked from the Sir Galahad when it was hit, but his belongings were lost and several of his comrades were injured or killed. He had her last letter in his pocket. So he had Kath’s address and he wrote to her to put her angst-ridden teenage mind at rest.

Nearly 20 years later, Kath went to the Falklands with her husband, serving in the islands’ garrison. She visited those places familiar from her teenage diary: Bluff Cove, Fitzroy, San Carlos, Goose Green, Port Stanley, Darwin and Goose Green. She says, ‘We were surprised to find we could still read large POW letters painted on farm buildings where locals had been rounded up during the Occupation, and when I

climbed Mount Tumbledown, I was amazed to see the remains of communication cables still hanging from the rocks and sleeping bags stuffed into crevices, exactly where they had been left nearly 20 years earlier.’

The islands weren’t declared mine-free until November 2020. So Kath had to watch her children on the beaches and to make sure they didn’t pick up anything bright or shiny.

She concludes, ‘Although I was there for only a year, the Falkland Islands has a huge place in my heart. It reminds me of that young teenage girl who spent each evening carefully writing down the day’s events and noting the names of each British casualty. Those men, their families and their ultimate sacrifice will not be forgotten.’

Lord Grimstone, a trade minister, has announced greater cooperation with Greenland. It turns out we do quite a lot of trade with that distant and icy territory. Forty per cent of our cold-water prawns come from Greenland. Whitehall now wants to increase links with Greenlanders on issues including ‘science, research and gender equality’.

Unisex igloos?

The Oldie Spring 2022 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Peter taught me how to live – and die The great actor was on top form as he faced the final curtain

Over the years, I have noticed how courageous and good-humoured people can be in the face of death. Twenty-four hours before he died, aged 45, the actor Simon Cadell – star of Hi-de-Hi and my best friend from school – looked up at me from his bed in the Harley Street Clinic, whispered ‘Cheerio, old chum,’ grinned and gave me a double thumbs-up.

Not long before she died of cancer, aged 66, the actress and Oxo-ad mum, Lynda Bellingham, telephoned me to say, ‘It’s all fine. I’m ready to go. Don’t worry, be happy – I am.’

And just recently, a month before he died of cancer on St Patrick’s Day, my wife and I had lunch at a local restaurant with our friend and neighbour, the actor Peter Bowles, and his wife, Sue. Peter, 85, had known he was terminally ill for many months and had endured the consequent pain and treatment with heroic stoicism and matchless grace, maintaining his elegant, slightly raffish appearance to the last.

Over lunch – ‘I can’t taste a thing,’ he said, smiling. ‘Side effect of the chemo’ – he told some of his favourite stories about some of his favourite actors: Olivier, Michael Gambon, Albert Finney.

‘You’re in chipper form,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he confided, ‘I’ve just been to the undertakers – good people, very helpful – and I’ve got it all sorted.’

He went on his own to arrange his own funeral and was surprised to learn from the undertaker that it wasn’t an unknown phenomenon.

‘I liked them,’ he said, ‘You should use them – when the time comes.’

Lunch over, we came out into the spring sunshine and watched Sue and Peter, arm in arm, walking away, wonderfully upright, brilliantly brave.

As they reached the corner, Peter turned back to give us a farewell salute with his silver-topped cane. It was the cane he used when he played Sir Anthony

Knight and the Red Queen and were eccentrically amusing.

My wife and I got to know them in the late 1960s: they were delightful. Not necessarily very exciting as performers – in the profession Dulcie Gray was nicknamed ‘Gracie Dull’ – but dependable. And decent. And devoted to each other. Dulcie told us that when Michael heard that his cancer was terminal, he dressed himself in his very best suit to break the news to her.

Is it just actors who handle these things so well?

Adieu, old friend: Peter and Sue Bowles

Absolute in The Rivals at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.

A lovely man, he had style as well as substance. He showed us how to live and taught us how to die.

Peter and Sue Bowles were married for 61 years. Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray were another theatrical couple who enjoyed a long and successful marriage.

They were together for 59 years.

Michael (1915-98) is best remembered for playing Algernon in the famous film of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Dulcie (1915-2011), as well as being an actress, wrote murder mysteries and was an authority on butterflies.

I recall first seeing the two of them on-stage in Alice Through the Looking-Glass at the Palace Theatre in the King’s Road, Chelsea, at Christmas in 1955. (It was built as a variety theatre in 1903 and demolished to make way for Heal’s department store in the 1960s.) They played the White

In the wake of the murder of Sir David Amess MP, the town of Southend, which he had represented for many years, was given the status of a city, and the other day the Prince of Wales went to Essex to do the honours on behalf of the Queen – which reminded me of the old story of another royal honour bestowed on another English seaside town.

You will recall that when Prince Charles’s great-grandfather, George V, died in 1936, the rumour quickly circulated that His Majesty’s final words were ‘Bugger Bognor!’, apparently muttered in response to one of his doctors, who had tried to lift his spirits by suggesting that he would soon be well enough to convalesce at his favourite seaside resort.

I prefer the version of the story set in 1929. The King is recovering from a bout of ill health and is about to leave Bognor. A deputation from the town council comes to call on His Majesty, both to pay their respects and to ask that the town might in future be known as Bognor Regis. The request is conveyed to the sovereign by his private secretary, Lord Stamfordham.

‘Bugger Bognor!’ says the King. The private secretary returns to the delegation: ‘His Majesty is touched by your request and graciously pleased to accede to it.’

Gyles’s Odd Boy Out is out now (Michael Joseph) The Oldie Spring 2022 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Fake yellow lines make bad neighbours The parking row that finally sent me over the edge matthew norman

You will have seen the distressing news that Neighbours, the Aussie soap that gave us Kylie, Jason and so much more, has been decommissioned.

It goes without saying that devoted viewers such as myself, who last saw an episode in 1987, will miss it immeasurably.

The one drop of consolation in this melancholic ocean is that the central message of its theme song will eternally outlive the show.

‘Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours’ – and especially of the kind whose proximity and innate goodness destine them to become good friends.

And yet, as Nanny almost used to say, ‘I need’ never gets. For the sound of mind in towns, suburbs and above all rural villages, the only good neighbour is on holiday, or dead.

Inevitably, Larry David put it best in Curb Your Enthusiasm. After a dodgy character is spotted in the area, someone suggests he ask the people up the road if they’ve seen anything. Larry scornfully points out that he’d much rather be burgled than talk to a neighbour.

Perhaps I should overstate in another misguided stab at comic effect. The lovely family next to me in Shepherd’s Bush are such good neighbours that, 15 years after they moved in, we are close to opening pre-negotiations about having a drink.

But you cannot extrapolate from the neighbourly spirit that qualifies my manor as the Ambridge of crystal-methsuffused west London.

Take my mother’s private road in north London, in which double yellow lines are to be found. These have no legal standing. They exist solely pour décourager les autos.

It was on these lines that I had just parked a few days ago when a man from a few doors along approached, making the wind-down-the-window gesture. I complied, and he asked why I’d parked on the yellow lines.

10 The Oldie Spring 2022

I had parked there, I explained, in order to bring the car to a halt. In a gutsy if flawed bid for novelty, he asked why I had parked on the yellow lines.

After being referred to the answer given some moments before, he did manage to develop the crossexamination. Why had I parked on the lines, he asked, when there was an empty space on the drive outside my mother’s house? I counter-questioned whether, and if so how, this could be any concern of his.

If the exchange had acquired the flavour of a dazzling All Souls high-table exchange between Isaiah Berlin and Bertrand Russell, so it went on.

It was his business, said the neighbour, because he lives there.

Unable to pick a hole in that, I wondered instead whether, at this particular moment in human history, he felt that this perceived problem warranted its parking spot at the forefront of his consciousness?

Sidestepping the geopolitical, he stuck to the parochial. ‘Why are you always parking on the yellow lines?’ he asked.

Now and again, as with the intense holiday friendship that has the life span of an aphis, the speed with which a relationship explodes truly astounds.

We had been acquainted for less than 90 seconds, and I felt trapped in wedlock that had passed its best-by date many years earlier.

After all, that scattergun ‘always’ is the classic identifier of a marriage curdled into passive-aggressive

I had parked there, I explained, in order to bring the car to a halt

resentment. ‘Why you do always do that?’ begins the ritual exchange. ‘Why do you always say “always”?’ is the correct response. ‘Go on – if it’s always, name me one other time I did it?’

‘I don’t always say “always”. Tell me the last time I said “always”.’ And on it goes, all the way to court, mediation or manslaughter by dint of diminished responsibility.

Examining the man more closely as Psychotic Fantasy No 27c (the ricincoated meat cleaver) took hold, I took in the wispy beard, smug demi-smile and air of moral certainty of the 1970s sociology lecturer. ‘I park here once a fortnight, at most,’ I counterstruck, ‘when a friend or carer who needlessly fears your silly yellow lines visits my mother.’

After a peremptory demand for a parking-permit application, the debate fizzled out until he departed with the shock announcement that he didn’t like me one bit.

I congratulated him for saving the best until last, waiting until deep into added time to fire home an observation with which anyone normal would agree.

‘You look flustered,’ said my eagleeyed mother when I belatedly arrived with her coffee. ‘So I assume you’ve had your daily row.’

‘I have had a minor contretemps, as it happens,’ I confessed. ‘Some prissy neighbour of yours who’s taken grave umbrage at my parking on the yellow lines.’

‘Why are you always having childish rows with people about absolutely nothing?’ she tutted.

For a millisecond, I was tempted to argue. But there didn’t seem much point in disputing that ‘always’. So I parked the objection, and headed for the internet to check out the cost of hiring a small fleet of juggernauts to grace some phoney double yellow lines.

Roger Lewis hates dinner parties held by bitter, sneering show-offs who never listen

Hostesses from hell

L

ong before COVID lockdowns, one of the reasons I stopped accepting invitations to dinner parties was the hostesses.

Not the hosts, who tend to hover sheepishly in the background, taking the coats and dispensing the drinks – a sort of Johnnie Cradock role.

It was always the hostesses who were the problem, showing off, being overbearing, launching around the room being characterful – and getting away with it, too, as this is their home territory, where they can be impossible with impunity. You can’t easily chuck them out in the street or lock them in the garage, though I was often tempted to do so.

Hostesses are like bad actresses, and give these terrible impersonations of Margaret Rutherford or Penelope Keith, complete with chiffon capes and wooden beads. When I was in digs at university, and still young enough not to realise quite how ghastly grown-ups mostly are, my landlady would summon us to dine, and before long she’d be plastered on cooking sherry and wielding a boilinghot jug of coffee. It was pretty painful when one got splashed. Her husband sat there smiling weakly.

Dons’ wives were gruesome. Bitter, overlooked and relegated anyway, a don’s wife saw a dinner party as her chance to

be avenged. Terrible food, insufficient drink, sharp looks – and, as a Junior Fellow, I had to endure these evenings without complaint. It was my turn to smile weakly, as these old bags maundered about geraniums or their charity work.

I had a full dose of all of this again, in Cornwall, just the other day. I received three reminders about the night in question, each more pressingly fulsome and insistent than the last. When I arrived, I was barely greeted. The hostess spent the whole evening giving the impression she was massively put out.

There were no place settings – so she got cross when we sat where we pleased.

Under orders, I had to swap places about five times, ending up next to an ex-tree surgeon who runs a donkey sanctuary.

The hostess also had a horrible habit of losing focus, losing interest, turning away from people when they were still in mid-sentence, changing the subject abruptly and irritably. I saw her wander off to the kitchen, come back, look at the table and her guests with a sneering expression, and then head off up the stairs to make phone calls.

Unfortunately, she came back again.

Appallingly rude. We were her captive audience for this exhibition of madgirlish sadism. Never again.

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what were cue sheets?

Cue sheets were the pieces of paper used in broadcasting, with a list of the timings of events and the links between commentators.

Now, in my retirement, Friday afternoons are much like any other. But when I was working at the BBC in the 1960s, they were the low point of the week, something to be endured before the lure of the weekend and all that swinging London had to offer.

For a production secretary in Outside Broadcasts, the fun side of the job was sharing an office with sports commentators Brian Johnston, Raymond Baxter and Rex Alston, and generally looking after them. But Friday afternoons saw me immersed in preparing cue sheets for weekend sports coverage.

I was reminded of this when my

what is WWOOFing?

Fifty years ago, Sue Coppard, a young secretary living and working in London, formed the Working Weekends on Organic Farms organisation (WWOOF).

It has now spread to more than 130 countries around the world, from Costa Rica to Thailand.

Coppard loved spending time on a cousin’s farm as a child, but once she was an adult had nowhere to run away to.

She wondered if organic farmers would be interested in using willing but unskilled townie labourers.

A friend suggested that Michael Allaby, editor of the Soil Association journal, might help. He put her in touch with Emerson College in Forest Row, Sussex, the training college for the application of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical philosophy – including biodynamic agriculture on their 200-acre farm.

Several sceptical farm managers were persuaded to give Sue and other volunteers a trial weekend. She placed an advert in London’s Time Out 12 The Oldie Spring 2022

granddaughter talked recently about a visit we once had to a rural life museum where, intrigued by an old Imperial typewriter, she asked ‘Where’s the delete button?’ Where, indeed.

The dreaded cue sheets were typed on to a stencil. The ribbon of the manual typewriter was disengaged so that the keys punctured the skin of the stencil, which was then rolled on to a Roneo machine, its perforated heading corresponding to metal pins on the machine. Ink from the drum penetrated the typed stencil, so that when the handle was turned, a printed version emerged. Too much ink and the whole thing smudged.

But then the phone would ring: ‘Weather foul, racing at Kempton Park abandoned.’ Or ‘Cue to the Oval now 3.30.’ The only way to make the changes was to obliterate the original typed cue sheet. This was achieved with a pinkish fluid, Correctine, which could be painted

over the lines to be altered and, when dry, re-typed on. More than one change, though, and the stencil began to look like a doily, too fragile to withstand the rigours of the Roneo. That meant starting all over again.

And all this was against the clock. I could not begin until the schedules had been finalised, which was usually midafternoon, and the final set of cue sheets had to be taken over to Egton House, in Langham Street, in time for Radio Newsreel’s live round-up of weekend sport. (Egton House was demolished in 2003 to make way for the new wing of Broadcasting House.) I still remember the clack of my stilettos as I hurried down the steps, hoping I’d made it in time.

The delete button and the ability to cut, paste and print were unheard-of then. They would have transformed my cue sheets – and my Friday afternoons at the Beeb.

Janet Radley

representatives from magazine, which 15 countries. By 2012, produced 15 enquiries. there were more than The weekend was a 50 groups worldwide. great success. Soon The organisation now there were more has more than 12,000 organic farmers and hosts and over 100,000 smallholders willing volunteers. WWOOF UK is to host people keen to part of the Federation of work on their farms WWOOF Organisations. in exchange for food Organic farming is the and accommodation. primary activity of hosts.

The British Some groups now have organisation health and healing centres, developed rapidly, pottery and arts centres, adapting its systems to building and buildingmeet the needs of restoration facilities, their hosts. As news organic restaurants, eco travelled, the villages, breweries and organisation spread to nature guide centres. other countries.

‘When I first dreamed So began the up WWOOF, I had no idea worldwide network of First Wwoofer: Sue Coppard it would one day become a volunteers working for thriving worldwide network with four to six hours a day on farms in members from so many countries exchange for food and accommodation. criss-crossing the globe,’ says proud No money changed hands. founder Sue Coppard. ‘Let’s hope the In 2000, the name was changed to next 50 years will be as successful as the Worldwide Opportunities on Organic first 50 years.’

Farms. The first WWOOF international conference was held that year, with Valerie Crossley

Media Matters

Why my son went to Ukraine

War reporters do brave, admirable work for little reward stephen glover Nadine Dorries may not be my favourite politician, but my heart warmed to her when she recently shed a tear in the Commons while expressing her ‘heartfelt thanks and admiration’ to BBC, ITV and other journalists who are risking their lives in Ukraine.

The question I want to ask is: why do they do it? Most of them don’t win fame, and none earns great riches. I imagine that many of us can’t remember more than a handful of their names. The BBC’s Lyse Doucet, perhaps, and a few others.

Can you recall the bylines of correspondents in your daily newspaper (if you still read one) who are risking their lives to bring you the news?

That it is dangerous can hardly be doubted. As I write, at least five journalists have been killed in Ukraine, and I am sure there will be more. Others have been injured, including Stuart Ramsay of Sky News, who was shot in the back, seemingly by a saboteur Russian reconnaissance squad. It’s said that some Russian soldiers deliberately target journalists.

These reporters generally have very little back-up. Most have body armour, and usually the help of a local Ukrainian ‘fixer’ who knows the area. The TV crews (don’t forget the brave camera-operators who are often unacknowledged) tend to have the advice of professional security people. Newspaper journalists have less support. Some of them are entirely alone, without even the assistance of a fixer.

I speak with some feeling, since for three weeks my younger son, Alexander, was in Ukraine as a journalist – for most of the time in Kyiv, until he got out in one piece to Lviv, thanks to a generous Sky News team. We should think of the wives, husbands, parents and siblings who watch helplessly as those they love report on a foreign war. Anxious relatives are able to communicate via WhatsApp with extraordinary ease, but can do nothing.

So why do these journalists do it? As I say, it can’t be for the money or the fame, since there is little of either. The best might hope to earn the respect of colleagues, which is always a nice thing to have, though it’s inevitably ephemeral. Journalists are often a cynical bunch, but I suppose that most of them – including even columnists who seldom leave their armchairs – are animated by a desire to pass on the truth.

Occasionally I find myself wondering whether it is worth it. Like many people, since the horror began I must have watched dozens of hours of television footage of suffering people and demolished cities. (The journalist with a camera has a dramatic advantage over the one who deals in words. Modern war favours television over newspapers.) I have sometimes asked myself: is it really worth risking your life for yet another shot of corpses lying in the street, or another ruined building?

Such heterodox thoughts are doubtless induced by a kind of watcher’s fatigue. Haven’t we seen enough? Why must (usually young) men and women put their lives on the line for a 30-second clip, which will be soon forgotten – if absorbed at all at the end of a busy day – or a few hundred words below the fold which may not be properly read or understood?

‘You’re on the king’s bucket list’

And then I remind myself that everything we know about the war comes from these journalists. What they give us may only be fleeting snapshots, but cumulatively they inform us about an incredible and horrific conflict. We may overreact, or we may underreact, but we should know. These brave reporters are offering us a precious service – which is why, like Nadine Dorries, I take my hat off to them in a spirit of gratitude and awe.

Is the identity of a journalist’s source always sacrosanct? Like most hacks, I believe so.

Nevertheless, a recent case involving former Labour MP and Blairite minister Chris Mullin has set me thinking. Mullin did more than any other journalist to establish that the six men imprisoned for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombing (in which 21 people died) were innocent.

In the course of his investigations more than ten years later, he interviewed a man who confessed to being a party to the atrocity. Mullin gave notes of his interview to the police but withheld the identity of the guilty man. The police used counterterrorism laws to make him reveal it, but a judge has just found in Mullin’s favour.

This is probably correct. In any case, the name of the alleged murderer has been published. Relatives of victims are naturally upset that Mullin won’t confirm it, while he claims there is no prospect of a successful prosecution.

Journalists are justified in protecting their sources wherever possible. But it is surely wrong-headed to assume that this right is absolute and should always trump the public interest. I can imagine extreme cases involving national security when a journalist should be compelled to cough up, even if Mullin’s is not one of them.

The Oldie Spring 2022 13

Madeline Smith adored working with the legendary comedy duo, even if Ronnie Barker was obsessed with breasts

The Two Ronnies: what a fine pair!

DON SMITH / RADIO TIMES

W

hat were the happiest days of my life? Working with the Two Ronnies in 1971 would surely be up there.

It was an unalloyed joy being the heroine in the spoof classic serial, Hampton Wick, which straddled the entire first series in 1971.

I can’t pride myself on having been hired for my talent, but even that realisation does not cloud the memory.

At 20, I had a face still relatively unmarked by time. My character, dim heroine Henrietta, was a device to provide the foil and butt of all their jokes.

Ronnie Barker had me practise walking up and down with a completely expressionless face. He directed my entire part and nearly all of the rest of the scenes. It may have been comedy but he was deadly serious. I had already learnt the art of simplicity in acting from a master, Arthur Lowe. He knew the vital importance in comedy of never reacting to a joke or the humour in a scene in which you are participating.

Whatever lay beneath my character Henrietta’s bodice was brought unselfconsciously and proudly to the fore.

Henrietta must be totally unaware of this.

Nothing must be flaunted. Her innocence was paramount.

That provided lines for Mr Barker, such as ‘Please sit down and take the weight off your chest.’ I had the even riskier line ‘I can’t fasten my chest and fear my treasures may fall out.’

And fall out they did! One night, we recorded the first show of the series in front of a live studio audience at the BBC Studios in White City near Shepherd’s Bush. One of my tightly corseted treasures became unbound and slipped out of its bodice moorings.

It was a long scene. Much dialogue ensued between the two rascals, with the 14 The Oldie Spring 2022

Xxxxxx

Madeline Smith in Hampton Wick in the first series of The Two Ronnies, 1971

DAVID CAIRNS / GETTY

usual lack of reaction from me. I was sandwiched between them, in their heavy disguises of Bill Sikes and the Artful Dodger, in a scene only loosely based on Oliver Twist. The whole serial was written by Ronnie Barker under the pseudonym ‘G Wiley and A Gentleman’.

The unfortunate, accidentally released treasure is there on the recording for all to see. I feared for my life if I had stopped the take – and I don’t honestly believe the Boys would have forgiven me.

Those Boys worked as one. Seamless.

Their differences outside the working environment were thrown overboard once they entered the rehearsal room or studio. There was never an argument or a cross word. They were more like brothers than working companions.

I had first met Ronnie Barker in the BBC ‘glass doughnut’ in Wood Lane, west London, when almost all the studios and offices were based there. Ronnie was bathed in the orange glow of the setting sun while I was being interrogated for the part on the fifth floor.

I was distracted by the majesty of the setting. The building may have had no particular architectural merit but in my eyes it was beautiful. I loved this monstrosity with a passion, including the two nesting wagtails who lived somewhere up in the roof. I used to watch them from my dressing room, going about their business on the tiny central lawn. All the dressing rooms faced inwards in a circle.

I was soon to discover that Ronnie Barker loved elderly female wobbly bits.

The more ancient, the better.

He collected hundreds – possibly thousands – of postcards and prints of Edwardian ladies in all stages of undress.

They must have flooded in his direction from dealers and fairs in Ronnie’s private life as the proud owner of a Cotswolds antiques shop.

The most prominent features were their bosoms, encased in frills and lace.

Their heavily rouged faces smiled from every page. Ron B even published a number of lavishly illustrated bedside books filled with these delectable bonbons.

Whether my character Henrietta was a subconscious fulfilment of these innocent passions we can never know.

Ronnie was in fact deeply respectful when he asked me to remove a clumsy body stocking, in my persona as Lady Godiva streaking across the stage of the Theatre Royal, Bath. It was filmed so tastefully that my retreating posterior was a dot on the horizon. Thanks be to the gods!

Two decades later, I learnt from Ronnie himself that he wished to disown that first series.

And it’s hello from him... Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, 1969

We found ourselves in an awkward conversation together at the goldenwedding celebrations of actors Richard and Annie Briers. Certainly the first series was never repeated in Ronnie’s lifetime.

He gave me the excuse that he found the series ill-prepared and that it had not yet achieved his expected high standard of professionalism.

Hit by this bombshell, I walked away to find my coat. All the while, I was wondering if there may have been complaints from viewers about some of the content.

I loved my friends the Two Ronnies. I use the word ‘friend’ advisedly when discussing Ronnie B because, although I admired and adored him, he was almost impossible to know. He and I frequently used to share a taxi on the way to a sound studio to record my faux diary-page commentaries for each episode of Hampton Wick.

Ron was a man of thought, more than conversation. When our eyes occasionally met in the close proximity of the cab, I noticed his had the most extraordinary depth and variation of colour.

It was as though he had tucked himself away behind his glasses. He was a man of such complexity I often wonder if he ever really knew himself.

The two men were poles apart in nature, as well as build. Ronnie C was sporty, outgoing and diet-conscious; Ronnie B was introspective, diffident, sedentary and exceedingly fond of his tum.

But they shared an uncanny knack for learning lines and a tightly controlled work ethic – not least in the rehearsals for all the many sketches in the show.

On a Monday morning, the lads would sift through dozens of scripts. They were swiftly read and discarded to the floor. In moments, decisions had been made and I never saw any hesitation or heard a difference of opinion.

Writers such as Michael Palin, the late, great Barry Cryer, Dick Vosburgh, David

Fenwick and Graeme Garden occasionally lost their heads on that parquet floor.

Only a few made it to posterity.

By the end of the week, the Two Rons were word-perfect, while I, as ever, struggled with my few lines.

Ronnie Corbett was a dear, joking, kind man, of whom I was extremely fond.

He seemed on the surface to be a simpler soul than his friend.

But that would be to underestimate him. He was an almost impossibly hard taskmaster to himself, striving almost for the unachievable in his constant fight for perfection. His slight frame contained the beating heart of a meticulous man.

Once we got into the studio, he was tough on the floor manager – particularly over the famous seated monologue, delivered straight to the camera.

Gentle Brian Penders then ran the studio floor. He was later to become the director.

Brian’s eyebrows were raised over Ronnie C’s many demands over the positioning of the chair and the massive autocue: Ron never learnt the monologue written by Spike Mullins. I used to watch with glee during these rather exacting rehearsals.

Dear Corbett told me one day, over a location tea break, that he had been gazing at my pins. He thought they were a bit thin.

He was right, of course!

I may have lumps on my chest but my limbs were like soft, pink worms and no mistake. Not a muscle in sight.

I used to hide in the broom cupboard during gym class at St Anne’s Convent, Ealing, rather than encounter the horrors of chain-smoking Miss Latham, a pre-war relic dressed in Army fatigues.

Asphyxiation in the cupboard was definitely preferable to climbing the ropes while the teacher looked with increasing interest at our ascending posteriors, encased in flapping navy bloomers. No leg muscles appeared during my sevenyear sojourn at St Anne’s.

But let’s face it. I wasn’t hired for my pins.

The Oldie Spring 2022 15

Ruthless Michael Cimino took a downbeat, three-hour film about an unpopular war – and made a masterpiece. By Charles Elton

The genius who shot The Deer Hunter

Michael Cimino and Robert De Niro in Thailand, which doubled for Vietnam

PICTURELUX / THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE / ALAMY

O

n 8th December 1978, the day the Vietnam epic The Deer Hunter opened in Los Angeles, Michael Cimino, its director, sneaked into a screening – the first time he would be able to gauge the reaction from a paying audience.

He was nervous, as were most people connected with the film, particularly its distributor, Universal, who had fought constantly with Cimino and grimly watched the budget soar.

The Deer Hunter wasn’t a feelgood film: it was a downbeat three-hour movie about an unpopular war, which had ended only three years before and was still the subject of enormous controversy.

However, as the film ended, 16 The Oldie Spring 2022

something unexpected happened.

Cimino went into the lobby and found that ‘It was filled with women who were weeping and wailing and I just broke down crying. There were ex-vets who literally crawled up the aisle out of their seats. It was just an astounding reaction.’

It was a triumph for Cimino, who, by aggressive manoeuvring and a willingness to destroy anyone who got in his way, had clung to his vision and ensured that the film was made exactly the way he wanted it to be, with no compromises whatsoever.

Cimino (1939-2016) had been a successful director of commercials in New York before moving to Hollywood in 1971 to get into the movie business. In

1974, he had written and directed a Clint Eastwood thriller, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. It was a modest success but the least respectable kind of piece – a genre movie – worlds away from the cool, personal statements other young directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were making.

Since the Eastwood movie, Cimino’s career had languished, as he did rewrites on films such as the Bette Midler vehicle The Rose.

In November 1976, he was called for a routine meeting at EMI, the British film company trying to break into the American market. They had sent him a script to see if he might be interested. It was a project they had been trying to get

AF ARCHIVE / LANDMARK MEDIA / ALAMY

off the ground for some time, but which had been turned down everywhere – an incongruously light-hearted story of two hustlers in Vietnam who set up a game of Russian roulette.

Cimino hated it and, in an extraordinarily ballsy move for someone who had few cards in his hand, he pitched ‘a notion’ which kept only the setting and the idea of Russian roulette.

In fact, it was more than a notion – it was a fully formed story that took him an hour to tell.

It was called The Deer Hunter and began with the last few days of three blue-collar steelworkers in Pennsylvania before they go to Vietnam in 1968. After one of them gets married, they leave for Vietnam, where they are captured by Vietnamese soldiers and forced to play Russian roulette.

Cimino said he was amazed by EMI’s reaction: ‘I still don’t know what happened. They said, “OK. Do it.” I asked, “When?” They said, “Forthwith.” ’ This might be the only time the word ‘forthwith’ has been used in a Hollywood meeting and, in his telling, it is certainly the quickest sell in the history of movies.

EMI loved it but they wanted to get it into production within four months, an impossibly short time. Cimino wasn’t deterred. ‘Nothing was going to stop this,’ he said. ‘The thought of not putting this together – of failing – made me crazy.’ He suggested bringing a friend of his called Deric Washburn to write the script while he went on a location recce.

At the start of the project, Cimino had been co-operative and easy to work with.

‘He was a sweet little lamb,’ Michael Deeley, one of the producers, said. Now he had changed. He was dismissive of

Shooting stars (clockwise from above): Robert De Niro; Christopher Walken; Meryl Streep and her boyfriend, John Cazale

EMI, charging hugely expensive bottles of wine to the production.

Looking for the steel town where the film starts, he found eight places in four states with elements he wanted to incorporate into his single fictional town. He insisted on using all of them – expensively.

Deric Washburn delivered the script within six weeks and – in the first of a series of betrayals – Cimino sacked his friend, apparently saying, ‘It’s fuck-off time, Deric.’

Although the script went through several further drafts, the final film differs little from the original except for some additions that were very Cimino.

Always fixated on the nature of masculinity in both his life and his movies, he machoed up the script.

When someone is asked if only one shot is needed to kill a deer, he replies, ‘Definitely’ in the first version. In subsequent drafts, the response is ‘Two is pussy.’ The line ‘There’s times I swear I think you’re not normal’ becomes ‘There’s times I swear I think you’re a faggot.’ ‘Jerk’ is always changed to ‘asshole’. On the later drafts, Washburn’s name was gone and the credit read ‘An original screenplay by Michael Cimino.’

As the lead, the producers wanted to

cast Roy Scheider, fresh from the huge success of Jaws, but Cimino disagreed.

Within a few weeks, he had manoeuvred Scheider off the project and offered it to Robert De Niro, who signed on for an eye-watering $1.5 million.

Cimino had an intuitive way of casting. He liked to watch the actors walk down a long corridor towards his office because he felt they were themselves then. As soon as they walked through the door, they became someone else and he couldn’t see them naturally.

Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken soon came on board, neither of them at that point particularly well-known.

He also wanted to cast John Cazale, who had played Fredo in The Godfather, as the fourth deer-hunter, but there was a problem: Cazale, Meryl Streep’s boyfriend, was suffering from terminal cancer and was uninsurable. All films are heavily insured to cover financiers if someone is injured and shooting gets delayed. An uninsured actor dying in the middle of production with his part uncompleted would be an expensive nightmare. Cimino insisted and made sure the other actors were on his side.

EMI backed down and Cazale was cast.

The movie was set in autumn, because that’s when the deer-hunting season The Oldie Spring 2022 17

GRANGER / ALAMY

Filming the Pennsylvania steelworker scenes: Christopher Walken, Robert De Niro, Chuck Aspegren, John Savage and John Cazale

starts. However, when filming began, it was late June and the weather was sweltering. The actors were drenched in sweat; Meryl Streep’s hair had to be constantly dried; the false sideburns one actor wore kept falling off. All the trees were lush and green and the leaves had to be painstakingly removed.

When the production moved to Cleveland to shoot the big wedding sequence at an authentic Russian Orthodox cathedral, the problems began to mount. The sequence, which in the script should have lasted about 15 minutes, began to expand into a huge and expensive set piece. The extras were local Russian-Americans who were paid a little extra if they brought a dummy box that looked like a wedding gift.

Taking authenticity even further than Cimino expected, many of the packages contained real presents, such as toasters and china. On the last day of the Cleveland shoot, Cimino saw an old man crying and asked him why. ‘It was such a beautiful wedding,’ the man said.

Cimino insisted on an expensive location move. He wanted to shoot the deer-hunting sequences in the mountains of Washington state – way across the country – but when he got there, he didn’t like the deer: ‘They looked like Bambi. I went crazy. I told them there would be a revolution in theatres if we killed Bambi.’

Finally, two large and indocile specimens were located in a game reserve in New Jersey. Cimino had them shipped across the country, and it took 30 men to carry the crates containing the deer up to the location.

At the end of August, the crew flew to Thailand, which was doubling for Vietnam, and the problems continued.

There was no film infrastructure and 18 The Oldie Spring 2022

almost no one spoke English. Local fixers were hired, whose ability to fix was often in doubt. More than that, the monsoon season had arrived early and there was torrential rain. To shoot the dangerous river sequence, the production moved up-country. The locals were nervous. To appease them, a small Buddhist temple was swiftly constructed by the riverside.

Cimino said he led prayers at dawn to bless the day’s work.

They proved ineffective. The soldiers’ trip down the fast-moving water and their eventual rescue from a rickety rope bridge by helicopter terrified everyone – except Cimino, who was immune to pressure.

When the crew limped back to Los Angeles at the end of shooting, the problems only increased. When the producers saw Cimino’s first cut running at more than three hours, they were pleased: they thought there was ‘a riveting film’ within it – but wanted cuts.

However, Cimino regarded it as his final cut and refused to budge.

The main area of contention was the wedding sequence, which lasted more than an hour. Behind his back, the producers did a cut that took 50 minutes out. Finally they agreed to preview both versions to see which one played better.

Later, Cimino alleged that he had bribed the projectionist to break the film 20 minutes into the short version; to take a long time to resplice the film and then start all over again, so that the audience

‘I told them there would be a revolution in theatres if we killed Bambi’

was restless, confused, and bored – giving that version a low score. The producers, though, said that the short version had played much better than the long version.

Cimino said he would refuse to do any publicity if the short version was released – a problem for a movie that needed all the good publicity it could get. More than that, Cimino had been secretly showing his long version to industry friends and there was talk around Hollywood that it might just be a masterpiece. The producers backed down and reluctantly agreed to go with Cimino’s cut.

As it turned out, the reviews could not have been better. That’s not to say they were all positive, but even the bad reviews were good for the movie.

It sounded bold and controversial: nobody was indifferent – always a box-office killer.

Cimino, employing his usual mixture of determination, divisiveness and aggression, had achieved, against the odds, everything he wanted. He had come up with a detailed outline of a complex movie in a week, got a finished screenplay written in six weeks and then pushed a huge and complicated movie into production within four months.

It was his triumph – nominated for nine Oscars, it won five, including Best Director and Best Film.

At the Oscars ceremony, Cimino spoke a few gracious words. In their acceptance speech, the producers thanked many people, but not the man who directed the movie.

Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate and the Price of a Vision by Charles Elton is out now (Abrams Press, £19.99)

For ten years, Matthew Norman worked for the Russian media mogul and mingled with his celebrity pals in London, Sussex and Umbria

Inside the court of Lord Lebedev

H

alf an hour into my first Evgeny Lebedev Christmas drinks party, it occurred that the only person in the room I didn’t recognise was me.

His central London flat had been magically transformed that 2015 evening into a kind of animatronic Madame Tussauds, thronging with scores and scores of the globally famed jostling for space.

David Cameron, Judi Dench, Eddie Redmayne, Mick Jagger, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Nigel Farage, Monica Lewinsky, Ian McKellen and on, and on, and on.

The corridor to the main reception room was too rammed to penetrate – so I nipped for Dutch courage into a side room with a bar.

As the tender poured, I glanced nervily around. Alone on a sofa in the corner, so still she might have been in cryogenic stasis, was Shirley Bassey.

Eventually, a former colleague wandered in, and we spoke in hushed awe about the mescaline-fuelled surreality of this, the professional autograph-hunter’s wettest dream.

‘Mind you,’ I murmured, ‘I’ve just spotted another civilian. That portly black guy over there…’

‘Ah yes,’ said the old colleague, ‘that’s the President of Gabon.’ At that moment, someone – Ginger Spice, perhaps, or the late Sonny Liston (one forgets) – meandered over to ask the president, Ali Bongo, how things were back in Libreville.

Whether Lebedev’s career as history’s most assiduous collector of the 20 The Oldie Spring 2022

celebrated can survive his ermine-robed controversy, time will tell. Friendships built on sturgeon eggs and woodpanelled executive jets are notoriously vulnerable when a mild zephyr of public opinion becomes a typhoon.

But whatever and wherever the noble Lord’s future, his past establishes him as one of modern Britain’s most emblematic and intriguing presences. Who is this man, and what is his game? Although I’d indirectly worked for him for years as an Independent and Evening Standard columnist, I first met him about a decade ago at dinner with a shared friend.

While his erstwhile KGB dad Alexander stayed in Moscow leading (or affecting to lead) the resistance to Putin, the son was bestriding glitzy London like a neatly bearded, mildly accented colossus.

I liked him. He was unpompous, mischievous and smart, and an astonishingly good listener.

After that evening, my favoured servant status brought sporadic invitations to meals and parties. I was the equivalent of the local GP in an Agatha Christie, asked to dine at the great house now and then to make up the numbers for bridge.

Besides, the grand need a sprinkling of little people to magnify their grandeur.

I was at the legendary garden party in Hampton Court where, two days after the Brexit vote, Lebedev posed with Rupert Murdoch and the Union flag-shoed Farage while an admirably drunk Lily Allen live-tweeted with photos.

By then, the invitations had become supplemented by summonses. At shortest notice, I was commanded to

REUTERS / DYLAN MARTINEZ / PA / ALAMY

a mock-medieval hotel in Sussex for dinner. The media tsar had acquired a cable TV channel, and had some notion of presenting a satirical show himself.

I think he wanted me to write it, and appear on screen as his sidekick.

Blessedly that came to nothing but, over breakfast the next morning, he spoke fascinatingly of a grandfather who served as Under-Secretary for Food Production in Stalin’s wartime cabinet.

I never heard a syllable about Russia’s present dictator.

It can’t have been any easier being him than anyone else gifted enormous wealth too young. Within 15 years of being able to afford Elton John LPs only at car-boot sales, he was flying Elton – not to mention a certain Foreign Secretary and future PM – to his Umbrian palazzo.

I made the journey once myself, albeit on easyJet rather than privateJet. He summoned me the week before Trump won the 2016 election, plainly intending to sack me. I was of minor use to him as the author of theatre-awards speeches and ghostwriter of occasional articles, but perhaps he was mildly fond of me as well. Whatever the explanation, a visibly nervous Lebedev bottled it, and we sat up drinking instead with a few members of his staff.

It was like being with Princess Margaret on Mustique. No one could retire until he did. Having been up since 4am for the flight, by 5am the next day, with at least a litre of vodka in me, I was edging towards fatigue.

The hangover cure he later conjured was a novel one. Revelling in his 007 baddie image, but slightly improving on the fluffy white cat, he introduced me to Boris and Lara, his pet wolves. However appalling the human Boris looked when returning from his visit, I looked worse.

A year later, the self-awareness and lack of pomp I had found engaging at that first dinner was replaced by imperious paranoia. An email arrived from someone with the unwittingly hilarious job title Chief of Staff to Evgeny Lebedev.

With it came an attachment.

Although, pre-Weinstein, the nondisclosure agreement had yet to acquire its current reputation, this one seemed sinister enough.

For the lavish consideration of £1, it compelled me never to disclose a dickie bird not only about Lebedev, but about anyone who ever set foot in any of his personal and business premises. It also sought to impose a legal duty to prevent others from speaking disparagingly about him, or to report anything of the

Evgeny and friends (clockwise from top): Elton John, Ian McKellen, Boris Johnson and Geri Halliwell

sort to his representatives. References to these obligations surviving my employ hinted that again he wanted to sack me.

I told the Chief of Staff that, what with being a journalist, I couldn’t conceivably agree to this; but that if he sent me one restricted to commercially sensitive information to which I’d been privy, I’d consider signing that. The Chief asked me to lunch and handed me what he called ‘a less thermonuclear’ NDA. I stuck it in a drawer, unread, and forgot about it.

My final encounter with this riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma came at his 2019 Christmas do, the night after the general election.

Among that familiarly Tussaudian crowd, a triumphal Johnson pitched up to kiss the ring. I left soon after that (one must retain some

standards about the company one keeps).

The very last time I set eyes on Evgeny Lebedev, he was in his usual hostly position. He stood on the outskirts of the room, looking blankly yet anxiously on as his guests edged towards the caviar.

As so often, he struck me as a character transposed from the work of F Scott Fitzgerald. A lost, vacuous, melancholic young man using wealth of dubious provenance to entertain those whose approval he craved for reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom, let alone explain. The Great Gatski.

The Oldie Spring 2022 21

For nearly 40 years, Half Man Half Biscuit have played clever, funny, religious songs. By superfan Robert Bathurst

Just my cup of tea

Singer-songwriter Nigel Blackwell performing in 2015, with Ken Hancock

M

ention Half Man Half Biscuit to anyone and you will get one of three responses: a blank uncomprehending stare; a wistful frown at some vague memory of the band in the 1980s; or the person freezes like a pointer, all time stops and they almost cry with joy, quoting their favourite lyrics.

Half Man Half Biscuit draw big live audiences today, more than 37 years after their debut LP, Back in the DHSS. The latest album, The Voltarol Years, is their 16th.

I make no presumption that anyone apart from their legion of fans would agree, but the noise they make and the words they utter give me as much artistic 22 The Oldie Spring 2022

thrill as the work of any other composer and songwriter. They are lyrically inventive and poetic; the work is laden with acute social observation and references to, inter alia, sport, religion, popular culture, literature, holidays, gardening, geography, art, the music business and cycling. It is underpinned by an unusual and strict moral view about, for example, graceless behaviour, drugs and any show of self-regard.

Half Man Half Biscuit are a four-piece band; the lyricist and leading force is Nigel Blackwell. I’ve never seen him smile and yet – or perhaps because of this – I laugh more freely when listening to him than to anyone else. The effect is physical and exciting – a warmth similar to any encounter with Spike Milligan or John

Lennon. Blackwell’s ideas come tumbling out with a startlingly nimble wit and playfulness, while the guttural bass guitar of Neil Crossley grabs hold of you.

How to define their musical style has been argued about for decades: postpunk, say some; others call it variations of indie/rock/folk. However people might try to categorise HMHB, they’ll get no help from Blackwell, who rarely says anything publicly about his work. There is no PR machine behind him, he doesn’t see the point. It’s not arch or disingenuous; he just doesn’t like fuss.

To the fans, this lack of fuss makes him all the more appealing.

The band’s rare performances, heavily attended and always on a Friday, usually take place in the

The Cold Feet cast with Robert Bathurst (left). Bathurst longed to use a Half Man Half Biscuit song in the ITV show

Midlands or the North because, it’s said, he likes to get home to the Wirral after a show. Blackwell’s chatty exchanges with the audience are natural and very funny, as if it is just a room full of mates.

Away from this secret society, life is not simple for a Biscuit proselytiser. My attempts to get some of the catalogue used in the soundtrack of the TV series Cold Feet fell at the first, second and third times of asking, as I repeated the call with successive producers over the years. They didn’t, wouldn’t or maybe couldn’t get the subtleties, musicality and original wit in every one of Blackwell’s 207 published songs.

However, once you’ve tuned into the way he thinks, a world is unlocked.

I’ve got fur in my kettle and a film on my tea I’m living in a hard-water town But I don’t let it get me down The inside of a Halex Three-Star table tennis ball Smells much like you’d expect it Religion is a recurrent theme.

In Christian Rock Concert, he goes backstage: Into the main marquee I walked The coke was Coke and the tongue was forked The rural dean lay down inert In his John 3:16 shirt And he’s good on mental confusion: Increasing doubt – decreasing hope

Even my imaginary friend changed his mind I was once grossly overdressed for an HMHB concert at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, when doing a play at the Bush Theatre next door. I had a ticket, bought long in advance. But, with the interval plus 20 minutes before my first cue in the second half, I was able to run down the fire escape in my costume (as a pinstriped Tory MP), get into the Empire and see several numbers, including The Light at the End of the Tunnel (Is the Light of an Oncoming Train), before running back up in time for my next scene on stage.

Another stumbling block for some people’s appreciation of HMHB is a snobbery about humour in music.

Blackwell is funny; he subverts what a post-punk/rock/indie/folk band should be about. He has no agenda or cause; there’s nothing pious or righteous about his lyrical poetry. The writer Anthony McGowan said, ‘There is not a single HMHB lyric that isn’t worth reading and, other than Dylan, I don’t think there’s any other band or artist in the history of rock music you could say that about.’

Blackwell’s distaste for celebrity and any expressions of grandeur is not an act. It defines him and informs many of his lyrics. There’s a well-documented incident from the early days, when he turned down an invitation to appear on the TV music show The Tube, a career-enhancing opportunity for a new band, because it was to be filmed when Tranmere Rovers were playing at home. He has been consistently and

resolutely independent of any corporate record company.

The song titles betray his skewed way of looking at the world: I Left My Heart in Papworth General; He Who Would Valium Take; and Something Rotten in the Back of Iceland. His jokes have led some to dismiss HMHB as a novelty act – an accusation that has worn thin after 37 years. Blackwell can’t be pinned down.

He’s a verbal jazzer, pulling apparently random thoughts together to weave a theme, cramming it with tangential cultural references, often with a deep sense of longing. Reading the lyrics – the poems – is to appreciate their density.

Lines of extraordinary, imaginative flight cascade over you.

I always return to HMHB, especially if there’s a crisis looming, playing them very loud and finding myself laughing. I’ve never known it not to improve the mood.

I went from the Andes to the Indies in my undies.

A light aircraft was on standby in case I got bored.

It’s best not to meet your heroes, though recently I had a close call. I was in Liverpool to discuss a project with Roy Boulter, film-maker and former drummer with The Farm. Blackwell was due to drop by at the same time. Luckily, he had an excuse: he had to go to tea with his mother in Rhyl.

Perfect. Just as it should be. No fuss.

Half Man Half Biscuit’s latest album, The Voltarol Years, is now out on the R M Qualtrough label The Oldie Spring 2022 23

The joke’s on me Benedict Nightingale has tried – and failed – to be funny for sixty years

W

hy are some people funny and others aren’t?

Or, to be painfully personal, why am I clearly not as funny as I like to think I am?

There are plenty of embarrassing moments to try to forget; the worst came many years ago, when I was briefly filling in for Sheridan Morley as the theatre critic of Punch.

Alan Coren, father of the authentically funny Giles, was then the editor and invited me to a lunch, over which he presided in his genial and amusing way.

I stayed quiet at the end of the table but felt more and more I should contribute to the general merriment. My opportunity came, so I thought, when someone spoke of an author – I forget which one – who apparently couldn’t write except while walking about.

‘But didn’t that mean he was in danger of writing pedestrian prose?’ I said with a somewhat self-conscious guffaw, then waited for a burst of appreciative laughter in response.

It didn’t come. No balloon ever contained more lead. Everyone on each side of what was quite a long lunch table – and seemed longer – turned their heads, stared at me, and said absolutely nothing.

Suddenly I was put in mind of a memory of my mother’s, of when she sought an annulment from her first husband, Evelyn Waugh. Young and frightened, she had to go to Westminster Cathedral and be quizzed by its priests.

As she evoked the scene, she sat at the end of a long table while on each side unsmiling men in black – two lines of human ravens, it seemed to her, or inquisitors preparing for an auto-da-fé – asked her a series of difficult questions and pondered her nervous replies.

Well, I felt a bit like that as the nation’s top humorists failed to see the funny side of me.

24 The Oldie Spring 2022

I should have known better. After all, I’d had previous experience of making people feel depressed rather than amused. And, as a theatre critic, I knew what every actor knows – that you should never strain for laughs when they aren’t coming.

Indeed, I’d learned that myself when I played Kinesias in an outdoor production of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata at Cambridge, back in 1962.

Kinesias is the victim of Lysistrata’s sex policy, a man in agony because his wife is withholding her favours from him. The director thought it would be hilarious if I looked up at an enormous oak while staggering about as if with a penis too extended to suppress.

Unfortunately I greatly overdid it, with the result that the audience saw not a frustrated Greek identifying with an erotic symbol, but an overwrought undergraduate inexplicably brandishing his pelvis at a tree.

They did not laugh. They looked baffled and, oh dear, embarrassed.

As I keep saying, some people just don’t have the gift, the trick, the ease, the wink – whatever it is. Take the case of Andrew Graham-Dixon, who is revered in our house for his art-history programmes.

The poor man apparently upset the Cambridge Union when he did a comic imitation of Hitler: a mistake, not just because some snowflakes took ritual offence, but because funny turns clearly

You should never strain for laughs when they aren’t coming

aren’t in his repertoire. Earnest enthusiasm is his thing. He’s essentially tweedy and it’s an implacable rule that tweedy men should never do Hitler imitations.

The awful thing is that I’ve yet to learn my own lesson. Recently I wrote a novel about the life of a theatre critic who reviews for a paper not-so-subtly called The Thunderer. One person thought it hilarious, but unfortunately that was me.

Publishers read it, didn’t read it or lost it, and anyway weren’t amused enough to buy it. It’s only now that, ruefully glancing at it again, I realise that all too often I pushed too hard for laughs.

True, the redoubtable Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, then my agent, did seem entertained by one section. It was based on an actual event, in which our theatre critic gets tipsy and introduces himself to The Thunderer’s new editor by giving him well-meant advice on how to stay awake during plays: ‘If you chew while sticking a biro into your hand, you can’t go to sleep.’

But nobody seems to have laughed at my favourite character, an irrepressibly vulgar TV chef given the job of critic by a tabloid wanting to exploit his celebrity.

Who could resist the episode in which his pet rat, the one he keeps in his pocket to help him sample dishes, runs riot just when the famous actress performing Beckett’s Rockaby is about to die? Well, everyone.

And who was it whose last words were that dying was easy but comedy was hard? Can’t remember. I’ve yet to test his saying fully but it certainly resonates with me.

Benedict Nightingale was theatre critic for the New Statesman, the New York Times and the Times

After 35 years as an adult-non-fiction publisher, Penny Phillips learnt how to appeal to young minds in her new book

Children’s books aren’t child’s play

O

nce upon a time, there was a woman with plaits in her hair who worked as an editor in book publishing.

For 35 years, she worked chiefly in adult non-fiction (at Bloomsbury, Piatkus, André Deutsch, then Bloomsbury again) across a range of genres, from political memoir, celebrity biography and cookbooks to popular science, miscarriage-ofjustice exposés (remember the Guildford Four?) and military history.

Those titles were usually illustrated – and finding the illustrations was a job in itself.

A gardening guide might need a diagram showing how to prune a pear tree. Film director Fred Zinnemann’s autobiography called for a film still of Burt Lancaster in a clinch with Deborah Kerr.

A memoir by an ex-SAS soldier needed photos of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege.

In the pre-internet era, picture libraries such as Hulton-Deutsch and Bridgeman

were physical spaces where the woman with plaits could while away an afternoon in search of the perfect image.

That woman was me. Why did I write all that in the third person? Perhaps because even though – or maybe because – I worked as an editor, I was always also drawn to story-telling. Stories are what life is made of.

And stories for children are where it starts.

At Bloomsbury in the 1990s, the children’s department was bang next to my office; I got used to the shrieks of enthusiasm or frustration coming from the other side of the wall – and, yes, Harry Potter was born within earshot.

Long before he became a worldwide phenomenon, I twice sent a first edition of the very first book to friends’ children, who, many years later, sold them for…

But that’s another story.

Choosing illustrations for adult non-fiction may have taken time, but it was quite straightforward. I probably vaguely assumed the same applied to children’s books. My own childhood favourites had included Babar, Winniethe-Pooh, Ameliaranne and the Green Umbrella, Uncle and Struwwelpeter.

The pictures just told the story, didn’t they? Nothing complicated about it. The illustrator drew what was in the text. You read the words and looked across the page and – pfff! The words were brought to life.

It wasn’t until I worked as a picturebooks editor, at children’s publisher Walker Books, that I paid proper attention to how children’s illustrated titles really work. It’s not simply a question of having images that depict exactly what the words say.

Animal magic: Rose the rabbit and bedtime (right)

26 The Oldie Spring 2022

The relationship between the text and the pictures, whether it’s direct or oblique, hinges on a kind of active symbiosis: they work together to create something that tells a bigger story.

The illustrator’s approach might be inspired as much by what isn’t in the text as by what is. A sentence that reads ‘Katy put on her green boots and hurried out into the storm’ is not, obviously, going to be well-served by a picture of Katy wearing red boots under a sunny sky.

But is a green-booted Katy stomping through the wind and rain enough? Might she have a hat? An umbrella? A puppy running beside her? Is she feeling excited or grumpy? Why is she in a hurry? An illustrator will often add either bold clues or fuzzy layers of suggestion that aren’t explicitly in the text.

A picture might portray a past event, or capture the present moment, or anticipate the story’s direction – for example with an unexplained footprint, or a broken gate.

Illustrations mustn’t contradict the text; yet they shouldn’t be confined by it

Clare Mallison gave the eagle glasses (above) and the antelope binoculars (below)

If the words say, ‘Tom jumped into the pond,’ does the illustrator opt to show what made him jump, Tom in mid-air or Tom sploshing into the water getting wet?

And what about Tom? Is he a boy? A bear? A penguin?

‘Bill crept down to the kitchen and ate the whole trifle.’ Do we see Bill creeping down the stairs, opening the fridge door, dipping a spoon into the trifle or licking his lips with an empty dish in his hands?

The illustrator’s job is to make pictures that both reinforce and enhance the story.

They mustn’t contradict the text; yet they shouldn’t be confined by it. Sometimes an illustrator might ignore the text altogether and break away on a flight of independent imagination.

Helen Oxenbury, illustrator of – among many other titles – Michael Rosen’s bestselling We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (1989), says she tries ‘not to religiously echo the text, but [to] give something a little more … [something that] develops, but doesn’t interfere with the actual story’.

Unless an author illustrates his or her own words – like Beatrix Potter, Dr Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Raymond Briggs or Chris Haughton – it’s often the publisher who will pair a commissioned writer with an artist. Given the freedom and scope an illustrator is likely to expect, it’s important that the author feels confident in their understanding of the text. If there’s no trust, there’s no synergy.

David Walliams said of the illustrator of his The Boy in the Dress (2014), ‘And of course he’s Quentin Blake – so you don’t need to stand over him while he does his illustration. He knows what he’s doing!’

As a book becomes known and loved, the illustrations are often so much a part of it that they resist even the notion of alternatives; they’re definitive. Imagine The Gruffalo illustrated by Beatrix Potter

– or Winnie-the-Pooh illustrated by Maurice Sendak!

In my view, when writing for adults, you’ve got to be true to your own vision and not think too much about readers, or you’re in danger of losing that vision. But writing for children is different. You need to be in cahoots with your young readers and give them the tools to interpret and enjoy what’s in front of them.

And that’s where illustrations come in.

Children interpret the world through visual images long before they understand anything via the written word.

I was lucky. Some years after leaving Walker, when it came to finding an illustrator for my own children’s book, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for. Nor was my publisher – until we found Clare Mallison. As soon as Clare read When Cherry Lost Terry, her enthusiasm was like a firework.

Because the story begins with an antelope (pictured below) looking out to

sea, Clare researched how antelopes stand and look: on their hind legs, which Clare found ‘an immediately attractive image and nice to draw – very elegant’.

And the ‘arms’ being up high seemed to lend themselves to the idea of holding binoculars … perfect. Ann keeps her binoculars close by throughout (though they come off her neck at bedtime).

The first set of rough sketches revealed the eagle wearing spectacles (another surprise to me!) and relationships between various characters evolving independently of the text. When the cat jumps off a ferry, Clare first drew the boat but then reconsidered: it was too literal, she says, and not really needed – the main thing was the leap, driving the reader forward, on to the next page.

The pictures complement the text but, as Clare says, ‘They have to be interesting, and pull the eye in. They have their own life’ – separate from the text. It’s important to capture the mood as well as the minutiae. And anything that might add to the conversation between an adult reading a story and a child following it can only be good.

Variety is important: children – and adults – can tire of looking at similar layouts page after page. Rose the rabbit’s head occupies a full page; children pounce on the boldness of it. Clare is a genius!

Certainly it’s great if, as the author, you have a rapport with the illustrator, but it isn’t really about that communication.

If you have to explain to him or her what you’re trying to say, the words aren’t doing their job properly.

Blake has said, ‘The fundamental collaboration is a collaboration with the words … with the story. I don’t usually talk to the author – I relate to the text.’

Lots has been written on this subject by people more expert than I am. Of course there are no rules. Some things work better than others. There’s a kind of magic – and logic, or deliberate absence of logic – in a successful children’s picture book.

And it does help if the story ends at bedtime.

When Cherry Lost Terry by Penny Phillips and Clare Mallison is published on 26th April by Old Street The Oldie Spring 2022 27

COVID was a nightmare for cinemas, cinemagoers and producer Gareth Neame – when he filmed the Granthams on the Riviera

Downton’s tricky French lessons

W

hen was the last time you went out to see a film?

I know we all watch them at home and a combo of Netflix and big domestic screens and speakers means we all have our own sort of cinema, in a way.

Box-office income has thankfully gradually started to increase, but might 2022 be the year to really tempt you back? And more specifically might Downton Abbey: A New Era be the film to do it? I think it really is rather good – so I do hope so.

Total box-office revenues in the UK and Ireland in 2021 rose 85 per cent to £597 million from the nadir of 2020’s £323 million. However, these numbers remain far below pre-pandemic levels, when the annual box office exceeded £1.3 billion in each of the five years up to 2019.

This has already started to affect the new films that get put into production.

Frankly, the viability of your nearest cinema continues to be challenged as never before in your lifetime. It really is down to you to help, I’m afraid.

In 2016, having concluded six seasons (as we all now call them!) of Britain’s biggest TV drama hit – and more importantly our biggest TV export – the logical next move seemed to be the big screen. The brilliant cast understandably wanted a break from the routine to explore other projects, but their affection for Downton meant an occasional cinematic return was in the offing.

And, in those golden pre-ghastliness days of 2019, the first film was released to great aplomb, becoming No 1 in North American and UK box offices.

The transition from a hit TV show to the big screen is a stony path. My 28 The Oldie Spring 2022

Downton Abbaye – the French sequel

partners at Focus Features were quite understandably cautious about risking the sums of money involved. Would a global fan base leave their comfy sofas for the movies? Fortunately, the audience turned out in droves. Very quickly, the conversation turned to what was next for the Crawleys and Downton.

As always, this was a discussion between Downton’s writer, Julian Fellowes, and me. As we generally follow the natural chronology of the main characters, the year was to be 1928-29. We first alighted on a story based on the making of the movie Blackmail (1929).

This started production as a silent film, switching to sound when director Alfred Hitchcock realised, following the

release of The Jazz Singer (1927), that his film would be behind the curve.

My grandfather Ronald Neame, later the producer of Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), and director of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), worked on that very film as a young assistant cameraman. His mother, the global beauty Ivy Close (1890-1968), was an actress whose career began to fade with the advent of talkies.

She was from the great town of Stockton-on-Tees – so I do wonder whether her own accent struggled to make it across the Atlantic, a predicament experienced by the character Myrna Dalgleish in our film.

Downton’s home is Highclere Castle, now rightly a beloved and famous historic house, which means we have to negotiate our time there with the many other events our hosts Lord and Lady Carnarvon undertake.

One practical solution has been to create stories where the Crawleys have stayed with family friends in Scotland and Northumberland and enjoyed the London season – all places toffs of that time might have legitimately visited.

But we have never taken these characters abroad. The time had come for us to see the Crawleys go to the Riviera, to echo what the great and the good would have done in the 1920s.

At that time, what had been a winter escape was becoming increasingly popular for well-heeled American and British holiday makers. And, from a commercial point of view, France was the third biggest market after the US and the UK for the first film – so it felt fitting to set some of our story there.

With the premise of our next film

Penelope Wilton and Maggie Smith; Gareth Neame at Highclere Castle

PICTURELUX / THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE / LANDMARK MEDIA / ALAMY.

Granthams at sea: Hugh Bonneville (left), Elizabeth McGovern and Jonathan Coy

settled, Fellowes and I were in New York City, preparing our new HBO series The Gilded Age. A matter of days before production started, the pandemic ground us to a halt. Repatriated to the UK (I noticed there was no hot water in the washbasins at the BA lounge at JFK, which seemed peculiar given the hot water we were in), we shared the cabin home with Sting – no longer an Englishman in New York.

With production on the series suspended for what we thought might be a matter of weeks, but ended up being almost six months, the one silver lining was that we had time to get started on the new Downton script.

With the turmoil and uncertainty of 2020, how smart I thought we had been to release the first film long before we had heard the word COVID. And even smarter that I didn’t plan to start the next movie until early 2021, long after the pandemic would have subsided – or so I assumed.

As the world lurched into the second year of the pandemic, we had a finished script and the cast all on board. Yet the big second wave now put the entire production in jeopardy.

The film industry had swiftly adapted to the new normal, with intricate COVID protocols involving mask-wearing and constant testing, with cast and crew in their own bubble. But if any of us actually caught it in production, we risked being shut down, at an enormous cost. The biggest problem was that vision I had had about foreign filming. As countries shut their borders, what should have been a fairly simple operation in normal times – to film for a few weeks in France – became fraught with difficulties.

There was a real risk we might start a film that couldn’t be completed. We had some very forthright conversations about whether we ought to risk going ahead.

Normally, film directors view prospective locations and intricately plan what is to be filmed, but our French locations near Toulon had to be selected virtually, as such scouting was prohibited.

We even had a back-up plan – so unpalatable that its code name was Plan Z (zee, not zed; it sounds better that way) – that involved shooting the whole French story here in Britain. Yes, really: Tender Is the Night in Bognor.

With all the British scenes successfully completed, we planned to send the cast and crew on chartered planes to the south of France, to remain within the bubble and minimise the risk of anyone’s catching the dreaded lurgy.

After months of worrying whether we would ever get there, I was glued to my flight app at home that morning, watching our two planes take off. My fingers were crossed as I tracked them both, flying over the northern coastline of France. I followed them as they landed – one in Toulon and one in Nice.

An hour or so later, a call confirmed that we had cleared the controls. Our French story would get made in France after all. There are worse places to have to quarantine for a few days, I suppose.

And the finished product is a very beautiful-looking film.

As and when you go to see it, I hope you are relieved to be in the real place.

While Ken Branagh’s Death on the Nile was brilliantly recreated in a studio, we might have had to make do with the Italian gardens at Hever Castle, a mansion in Lothian and West Wittering beach. Beautiful as these places are, they would not have delivered our story the way Downton fans would have desired!

With the lengths we went to to bring you back to Downton Abbey, if you haven’t yet ventured back to the cinema, I do hope that this title is the one that gets you there.

You’ll be helping British cinema to return to form – and I suspect have some laughter and tears along the way.

Downton Abbey: A New Era is out on 29th April The Oldie Spring 2022 29

Mahogany counters, salesmen with tape measures round their necks ... Mark Palmer is kitted out by the last men’s outfitters

Gentleman’s relish

LEEDS LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SERVICE / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

E

very respectable town or city had a clutch of them. Today, the very term gentlemen’s outfitters sounds prehistoric – and wouldn’t find favour with sensitive gender-neutral types.

We had several in Reading, where I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. There was one behind the huge Heelas department store (now a John Lewis), next to Chapstick, the sports shop.

My mother took me there to buy my first (and only) double-breasted blue jacket, with faux gold buttons. Tall and lean Roger Moore could carry off this sort of garment with aplomb but if you were short and fat, like me, you couldn’t.

‘Fits like a glove,’ said the dapper salesman, his tape measure slung nonchalantly around his neck – or words to that effect.

This struck me as odd because the jacket was singularly uncomfortable.

Mind you, from my mother’s perspective it seemed ideal because it was off-the-peg and she thought it would last for years.

Which it did. In fact, I still have it, lurking unloved somewhere in the back of the cupboard.

That particular gentlemen’s outfitters has long gone – and there are precious few of them left anywhere. The demise began in earnest in the late ’60s and early ’70s when postwar formality clashed with popular culture. Soon shops like Marks & Sparks joined the fray, and browsing became a new and enjoyable pastime – whereas you went to a gentlemen’s outfitters knowing exactly what you needed to buy and your outing was deemed a failure if you didn’t achieve it.

In the ’80s, ‘brand’ shops such as Gant and Benetton took more trade away – and wholesalers employing travelling salesmen, whom independent outfitters relied on, began going under.

Meanwhile, Burton and Debenhams, which just about could be labelled gentlemen’s outfitters, hit the buffers in 2020 under the stewardship of Sir Philip 30 The Oldie Spring 2022

Gone for a Burton: Burton’s, Briggate, Leeds, 1938

Green’s Arcadia Group. But they were nothing like that shop just off Broad Street in Reading.

Memory plays tricks, but in mine it had bow windows, mahogany and glass counters, wooden tie racks with metal clasps and parquet floors smelling of polish. Crucially, at any one time there were as many staff in the shop as customers. ‘May I help you?’ meant ‘May I help you?’

Some have survived. In Oxford, both Walters of Oxford (‘You will always be certain of the red-carpet treatment here’) and Shepherd & Woodward (‘Every detail can be guaranteed as correct’) have been trading for more than 150 years, but you wonder if they would still be around if the university weren’t there. Both rely heavily on the sale of academic gowns and robes.

The same can be said about Ede & Ravenscroft on London’s Chancery Lane,

which, established in 1689, is thought to be the oldest tailor in the world; it specialises in ceremonial robes and dresses the judiciary.

Gentlemen’s outfitters are not the same as tailors offering a bespoke and pricey service, who may or may not ask, ‘And which way do you hang, sir?’ – but Oliver Brown on Lower Sloane Street manages to offer both off-the-peg and bespoke, plus something in between, whereby they will alter suits, jackets and trousers in such a way that the garments look as if they’ve been made to measure.

I was there recently to buy some trousers, to replace those that were part of a suit until the moths feasted on them over Christmas while I was languishing in bed with COVID. Before leaving, I spotted a blue wool suit up for grabs in the shop’s January sale.

It needed a fair bit of alteration after being pinned expertly by a man who

MICHAEL WALD / ALAMY

had just moved over from Gieves & Hawkes following the Savile Row tailor’s going into administration.

He, too, had a tape measure slung over his shoulder, and when I folded the hem of one leg to the height I wanted, he said, sotto voce, ‘A mistake, sir. You need to go lower, if I may say so.’

Then he added that the £375 I was paying was some three times less than for anything I would have found at his old employers, but that the cloth was equally superior.

‘Walking into a proper gentlemen’s outfitters should be like arriving at a club,’ says Kristian Ferner Robson, Oliver Brown’s owner. ‘And the idea is that we will dress you from head to toe, but first we try to work out your wants and needs.’

Twenty-five years ago, Mr Ferner Robson worked two doors down at Buckleigh, which hires out dinner jackets and tailcoats. Oliver Brown, at the time, was primarily a women’s-wear shop – until it went bust and Mr Ferner Robson snapped it up ‘for a song’, as he puts it. He’s been pretty much singing all the way to the bank ever since, and has just opened a second store in Jermyn Street.

‘Competition is fierce in this neck of the woods and I get the impression that we’re not particularly welcome with some of our competitors. I can understand why. We sell shirts for £85 rather than £120 but ours, made in England and Portugal, will last just as long as theirs.’

I have made one other gentlemen’soutfitters discovery. Its offerings are cheap as chips – but you can almost smell the polished floors, even though

Last gentlemen standing: Ede & Ravenscroft, London; Walters of Oxford

Peter Christian, as it’s called, is strictly a mail-order company.

You may have seen their ads in the classified-ad section at the back of some national newspapers and various magazines that cater for a more mature audience – including this one.

Founder Nick Alderton, known to his friends and customers alike as Lord Trousers of Partridge Green (the West Sussex village where the firm is based) and his wife, Miranda, began the business in 2004. Both had the skills of pattern-cutting and manufacturing by using the last traditional British cloth mills in places such as Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire.

‘I could see that there was a hole in the market left by the disappearing of men’s outfitters, and I was determined to fill that gap with an online version,’ says His Lordship, 66. ‘Our catalogue is a little eccentric and is a reminder of some of the old boys who used to serve behind the counters.’

His moleskin trousers (£60, or two for £110) are described as ‘soft as a baby’s bottom and rakish as a guardsman’s

smile’ and his silver-fox models look like normal people, albeit one of them sports a monocle in his left eye when showing off a Harris Tweed jacket.

‘Give us a tinkle,’ says the Peter Christian brochure. And when you do, a human being stationed in Partridge Green rather than Karachi answers immediately.

Mr Alderton may have known a lot about men’s clothing, but he knew nothing about running a digital business.

Fortunately, his son, Maxwell, is a techie whiz and has expanded the business to the United States with considerable success.

Speaking of which, Brooks Brothers (founded in Manhattan in 1818) sadly has become a threadbare business, which filed for bankruptcy during the pandemic. Its Madison Avenue flagship store in New York is still there, but it’s a quarter of the size it once was and can no longer be called a gentlemen’s outfitters.

I looked in at the New Year and hardly recognised the place. It had the whiff of cheap clothes about it, rather than the scent of traditional beeswax.

The Oldie Spring 2022 31

Small World

Mum’s got me under house arrest

Virus restrictions are still rigorously enforced at my home jem clarke

STEVE WAY

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

‘I’ve got COVID,’ I gloomily declared with all the phlegmy fanfare I could muster.

I was speaking through a crack in the door to the kitchen, where my at-risk patients were sitting, hitherto blissfully unaware, at the breakfast bar, swinging their tiny legs like young things without a care in the world.

‘Oh, he’d have to have it, wouldn’t he?’

Mum said mockingly, as if I’d just turned up with a hula hoop or a faddish grilling machine. Their hatred of the modish, or simply new, is a bit rich: Mother has been having ‘bottomless brunches’ since the ’80s or whenever elasticated trouser waists were invented.

I now regret getting them a doublesize puzzle magazine – because, brains fully fired, they were soon putting a literal battle plan in place. Central to ‘Operation Don’t Catch COVID’ was my banishment to my bedroom. By banishment, I mean being roughly herded upstairs with immediate effect by a tiny woman poking me constantly in my ribs with a telescopic duster.

Once inside, I could hear further conversation on the landing. Then my door cracked open and a bucket hovered into view at head height, hanging from that same dastardly dusting device.

This was to be my ‘bathroom’ – nonnegotiable. I did try to negotiate, but my mother said, ‘Any nonsense and I’ll get your father to jam your door shut with the stepladders.’

This was no idle threat. Father was on a stepladder at that moment, head poking into the attic, coming back down with a tambourine – or rather an ad-hoc early-warning device.

‘If you’re coming down to use the kitchen, rattle the tambourine,’ he said.

I suggested using my mobile phone and just calling the house phone, but mother gave me full-on Kathy Bates in Misery eyes. I thought better of arguing.

If I lose my legs below my shins, I’ll be down to four foot something.

Worse, I had to phone my unnecessarily tall brother to tell him to postpone his trip to see us. He reminded me of how smug I’d been when he contracted COVID in 2020 – of course he had to be an early adopter, despite his austerely healthy lifestyle.

He said, ‘So there’s finally a variation of COVID microscopic enough to enter the body of the equally microscopic.’ He sounded just like a science supply teacher – which he is.

Suddenly, for the first time in half a century, Mother became only the secondmost significant threat to my life, as the full symptoms of COVID washed over me.

While I still had some strength, I searched the Government COVID offering.

I found a chart showing that, for a thricejabbed male of my age, the symptoms will probably be one and a half times as bad as influenza. More resilient men would have taken this in their stride, but it sent me into a panicky head spin – and soon I was on the phone to NHS Direct.

The kindly customer-servant explained, ‘The website does say, “Phone this number if symptoms persist,” not “when symptoms begin”. Are you a worrier?’

‘I should say so. Mother’s left me a bucket, and all I’ve got is a pack of pocket tissues and I can’t even open them in my weakened state.’

She suggested I phone back in five days. Resigned to my fate, I took to my bed and fell into a disturbed sleep. I had a nightmare in which I was trapped in a room with medical staff, but I secretly knew they weren’t really medically trained as they were terrible actors. Then I woke up and realised I had just left BBC1’s daytime show Doctors playing.

Still not of sound mind, I wrapped myself in my duvet, and went to the window to let in some fresh air. I didn’t manage it, though, because an unknown cat was sitting on my ledge in the afternoon sunshine, looking at me smugly with what I diagnosed as ‘rabid intent’.

For a second, I planned to attach a note to the cat’s collar, saying, ‘I am being held against my will, with inadequate facilities and what can I only describe as a couple with Texas Chainsaw Massacrelevel parenting skills.’

Still, I was uncertain about the ramifications of going into social-services care at the age of 51-ish.

My final humiliation was phoning up work the next day, to explain I was trapped in my house – so I simply couldn’t work.

My boss reminded me, ‘Aren’t you the guy who has been moaning that you won’t come back into the office, and actually want to work at home. Why can’t you now work from home, even if you have got COVID?’ ‘Because Mother’s unplugged the internet router.’

‘Why on earth has she done that?’

I went for a breathy, embarrassed pause, full of virus and deep existential regret. ‘Because I went downstairs for a Wagon Wheel and I forgot to take my tambourine.’

The Oldie Spring 2022 33

In search of lost love As a teenager, Barry Humphries painted Melbourne street scenes with a French beauty. Seventy years on, he tracked her down

CHRISTIE’S IMAGES / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

N

ot long after I had fastened my seat belt, I heard the voice of our non-binary executive in-flight hospitality technician exhorting us to ‘have a read’ of the air-safety card in the pocket of the seat in front of us. In my case, it was in a receptacle bedside me.

When I heard the usage have a read of, I felt, with a kind of rapture, that I was already in Sydney. To most Australians, the sound of an Australian voice on an aeroplane is infinitely reassuring.

I was once on a flight to Singapore when, halfway through an excellent Turkish soap opera, things got very bumpy and the hostie, in a tremulous voice, told us to adopt the brace position.

I struggled, unsuccessfully, to make my life flash before me, and resigned myself to the unthinkable. An ashenfaced officer burst out of the flight deck and ripped up a section of carpet in the aisle next to me. Opening a trap door, he disappeared into the belly of the plane.

By then, the aircraft seemed to be struggling and the Pacific looked very close. A baby was crying and so, silently, were we.

After ten minutes’ tinkering, the man emerged with a cheeky smile.

Soon we all heard the captain’s voice: ‘Relax, boys and girls – all good. We’ve fixed the bastard.’

Somehow this reprieve would not have sounded so welcome in any other language or dialect.

Going back to Melbourne is always a bit depressing, even when you are fully vaccinated and excited by the prospect of seeing your family and friends. Perhaps all home towns are like that when you return to them: a few too many ghosts

34 The Oldie Spring 2022

of childhood, school, adolescent anguish and past loves.

When I was about 17, I used to go out painting with a gorgeous girl.

I have always been a very good artist and I still like painting en plein air.

Mimi was French – a rarity in the city of my youth – and she looked like a beautiful midinette out of a story by Colette. She wore a ribbon of black velvet around her ivory neck and her hair à la garçonne, with a short muslin dress and biblical sandals. A thumbprint of lip rouge enhanced her pout. She resembled a drawing by Domergue.

We would set up our easels in suburban streets and paint whatever looked vaguely picturesque, imagining we were in Montmartre. They were blithe, carefree days, and I was proud to be seen in the company of such an exotic beauty.

We lost touch as I became engrossed in the extracurricular life of the university, and then the theatre, which has since been my principal amusement.

Now, in Melbourne, I suddenly thought of Mimi. Could she still be alive?

I am at a stage in my life when too many old friends have decided to retire.

Sometimes permanently. Mimi, however, was younger than me, and probably healthier.

I knew someone who knew someone who was acquainted with someone who

I searched her face for a trace of the Mimi I once knew.

Not a glimmer

might know someone who knew her number. How I miss the phone book!

Yes, she had married a psychoanalyst, long deceased.

I dialled the number. A sprightly voice greeted me. A sensible and youthful voice. Of course she remembered me!

Her grandchildren were great fans.

They lived in Israel. Morning coffee and what the world now calls a ‘catch-up’?

We agreed it would be in the lobby of my hotel at 11 the next day.

In eager anticipation, I broke my usual habit of tardiness and turned up early. The lobby was deserted. By ten past eleven,

I had sat down and was pretending to read the paper; then, at 11.20, casting it aside, I approached the desk.

‘Has there been a lady asking for me?

I’m expecting a guest.’

‘No one, Sir Humphrey,’ said my favourite Asian receptionist. ‘There is just that lady over there.’

Yes, there was another person in the lobby. A person easily missed. Way over near the lifts stood, or wobbled, an old lady in a voluminous puffer coat. She had a fawn-coloured face and she was very, very fat. She supported herself on a chromium walker.

‘She’s been there since ten to eleven, but she not ask for you, sir,’ said little Nilda behind the counter.

I tiptoed over. ‘Mimi?’ I whispered to the stranger.

The girl I had not seen for 70 years turned her face up to me. It was a plump and puckered countenance, in which the small eyes were carelessly embedded.

Sparse grey wisps framed her brow, and her chin and upper lip were lightly stubbled and might recently have been roughly assailed with a blunt razor.

Her dazzling denture emphasised her age and, as I shook her freckled, marsupial hand, I noticed that she wore on her wrist that infallible emblem of widowhood – a man’s watch.

Over coffee in the hotel lounge, Mimi was utterly charming, cheerful and chatty. She remembered the painting expeditions, the concerts and the late-night suppers of long ago. She had had an interesting life of travel and adventure with her late husband, and her family had – not seldom – spoken of me and followed my exploits.

All this time, I searched her face for a trace of the Mimi I once knew. But not a gesture or inflection; not a glimmer.

Nothing that recalled that other person: loved friend of my youth.

I am glad – grateful even – that I called her. She died, I was told, six months later. But, as we parted that morning, I bent forward and kissed her cheek.

For the first time.

My nostalgic gloom was lifted by news from a friend. A family man with a lively and cosmopolitan lifestyle, not short of a shilling, he has made a major sacrifice to support beleaguered Ukraine. He no longer flies Russian hookers into Heathrow The Last Glance (1926) by Jean-Gabriel Domergue (1889-1962) The Oldie Spring 2022 35

Town Mouse

Read all about it – in silence, please tom hodgkinson

The Beano comic has just launched a scheme called Libraries Aloud. The idea is to get device-addicted kids going back to libraries by allowing noisy readings of books out loud.

Town Mouse has absolutely nothing against reading out loud to children, or indeed children in libraries. But libraries are not the place for raised voices, tumult and bustle.

If I arrived at the Reading Room of the British Library and quietly got out my books, only to be disturbed by a group of small children shouting, ‘Behind you!’, I would be rather annoyed. I’d hope a librarian would stare down the kids and hiss, ‘Shush!’ at them.

Libraries and a deathly hush go together like a horse and carriage. When I was a small Town Mouse, my mother would take us to the children’s library in Richmond. There was red lino on the stairs, a parquet floor in the library, a strong smell of wood polish and fearsome librarians who would stamp your books. I remember gazing at the stamps with as much fascination as I read the Thomas the Tank Engine hardbacks we took out.

We learned how to shut up – a useful skill in life.

Later, when I was a teenager, studying for O and A levels, I’d sit and work in the grown-ups’ section of the library.

Libraries continued to be my friend during university – a sanctuary of calm, built for study, free from distractions.

More recently, I’ve written whole books in libraries.

But something has happened to them recently. From slightly scary centres of learning and monastic retreats from the bustle of the world, they morphed into bold, bright community centres.

My local west London library in Shepherd’s Bush – which, with some hubris, describes itself as ‘one of the most exciting and innovative libraries in the 36 The Oldie Spring 2022

country’ – is a hideous, glass-sided repository of about 14 paperback books, with not a wooden shelf in sight. It embarrassingly describes itself as ‘a place to study, surf, relax and have fun’ but its main use seems to be as a collection point of those see-though plastic bags for recycling. It also offers free internet and boasts the following facilities: ‘Public toilets and baby-changing facilities, food bin to collect donated, tinned and dried goods for redistribution through the Hammersmith & Fulham foodbank, small electrical recycling bin, small batteries’ recycling tubes, small lightbulb recycling box and Amazon locker’.

There’s nothing wrong with a community centre. It just isn’t the same thing as a library. Providing an Amazon

locker is feeding the hand that has completely destroyed you: citizens today are encouraged to buy cheap paperbacks via Jeff Bezos’s retail monopoly rather than do the eco thing and use a library.

Libraries started off as ecclesiastical institutions run by monasteries. Posh people also had private libraries. Then the do-gooding Victorians, lovers of improvements of all kinds, opened them up to the public. Hence working-class education, D H Lawrence, miners’ libraries and the line from Britpop band Manic Street Preachers ‘Libraries gave us power’.

The library as we know it really started in 1850 with the Public Libraries Act. This allowed boroughs to use public funds to establish libraries. Winchester was the first town to open a library of this sort, closely followed by Norwich.

The library boom did not really gather steam till the 1890s, when businessmen such as Henry Tate, Andrew Carnegie and newspaper magnate John Passmore Edwards endowed new libraries.

Tate was perhaps feeling a tiny bit guilty about rotting everyone’s teeth with his processed sugars. Bertrand Russell snobbishly said of him, ‘Now we have the spectacle of people like Henry Tate “going in for a bit of culture”.’ Rather in the same way, gangster Tommy Shelby, in the new series of Peaky Blinders, set in the 1930s, put his name on the front door of a worthy institution, a free hospital.

The money may or may not have been ill-gotten. But the results of this philanthropy were laudable: by 1914, 60 per cent of the population has access to a public library.

As for today’s libraries, there are some old-school examples left in London. My favourite is the Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green in central London.

It retains something of the red-lino-andwood-polish vibe of the Richmond Library, having been thankfully unmodernised. It’s jam-packed with left-wing books and brings researchers from all over the world for its collection of Spanish Civil War-related titles.

It boasts a function room with a banner made by William Morris that reads ‘Hammersmith Socialist League’.

There’s also a kitchen and a tiny study where Lenin worked on his newspaper, the Spark.

Sadly the library receives no public funding. And today’s Tates and Carnegies are unlikely to support its efforts to promote the interests of labour against capital. Still, you can help them. An annual membership costs a mere £25 – and you can guarantee there’ll be no gaggles of screaming kids.

Country Mouse

Even I love Paris in the springtime giles wood

There had not been so much agonising since the Gang of Four left the Labour Party to form the Social Democrats in 1981. The impasse in family talks was over which European city to take a break in. Not for the first time, Mary’s PA saved the day (just as Polly often does in Fawlty Towers).

‘Just because you can’t all agree on the same destination is no reason to end up going nowhere,’ observed our Polly.

‘Quite,’ I gulped – not realising that my elder daughter had already booked the trip to Paris and even booked a table at the 137-year-old Brasserie Lipp to help realise my ambition to sample hareng Bismarck.

I haven’t been master of my own house for many years. Wondering at what point in time my authority had begun to wane, I now concluded it was my inability to embrace internet technology that has left me stranded, digitally excluded and – in international airports and railway hubs – as useless as Mr Bean.

Having been cornered into going along with the Euro jaunt, I had to resolve one final dispute – on the vexed subject of outdoor clothing. Mary insisted that, instead of my usual disguise as a Big Issue seller, I should ditch the anorak for her late father’s more dignified ‘funeral coat’. I agreed on condition that, although no self-respecting Parisian flâneur would be seen dead in them, I could wear my hiking boots.

The gift of powered flight we take for granted, but never does it fail to impress that you can board a train at St Pancras and, just over two hours later, like Liam Neeson in Taken, be speeding along the back streets of Paris in a taxi to a hotel (albeit with steamed-up glasses from wearing a mask).

It took no more than an hour for a sense of exhilaration to replace this

COVID hermit’s negative mindset.

Nevertheless, city breaks can be exhausting. All that tramping across cobbled streets, undergoing mood swings from (coffee-induced) euphoria to distress, when sudden clouds threaten to eclipse the sun as we are tucking into croque madame at an alfresco table, as usual set with spotless white linen tablecloth and napkins.

Perhaps the happiest time was sitting on the steps of Sacré-Coeur with a panoramic prospect of Paris spread out below us and the scent of almond blossom all around. The wind dropped and the infamous brilliant, sometimes glaring light became more limpid the longer we tarried.

It was then I noticed the house sparrows. Central London has carelessly erased them in my lifetime and yet here they were, feasting as hardy clowns should, on tourist leftovers.

In his essay ‘The Plainest City in Europe’, Richard Jefferies states that ‘Central Paris has no character. It is without individuality and expressionless.’

(You might say the same of London now.)

But in 1884 Jefferies was objecting to the destruction, as he saw it, wrought on the city by the world’s first urban developer, Georges-Eugène (Baron) Haussmann, who ripped up the

‘I’ll just pencil in some dates for cancelling the dates we just pencilled in’

medieval, unsanitary city, replacing it with wide, tree-lined avenues, flanked with imposing buildings of neatly dressed ashlar with intricate filigree iron balconies.

Haussmann’s improvements were not universally welcome. Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables (1862), whose storyline draws on the degrading and unhygienic conditions of Paris, even accused Haussmann of destroying the city’s ‘medieval charm’.

At Le Petit Palais, a misnomer if ever there was one, there is an engaging, full-length portrait in the Realist school of Adolphe Alphand set against a building site by Alfred Philippe Roll.

Alphand was a landscape architect working for Haussmann at the time Jefferies visited Paris to sketch in the Louvre.

Quelle dommage that, in a parallel universe Jefferies could not have settled his differences with Alphand over an agreeable glass of absinthe in one of the cafés that seem preserved in aspic since the 19th century, where nothing is too much trouble for the solicitous patron.

But there’s no pleasing Jefferies.

Haussmann’s interventions, he griped, had brought ‘unvarying rigidity’ to Paris.

‘It is made straight; it is idealised after Euclid; it is stiff, wearisome, and feeble.’

Yet somehow Paris has miraculously retained its character and charm – just try spending an afternoon windowshopping in the historic Passage Jouffroy.

Why is it that I feel civilised here – but oppressed in London?

Why were three provincial elderly ladies eating toast loaded with sardines, tuna and anchovy at 4pm, as if it were perfectly normal? Why were the Parisians generally engaged in animated conversation with one another (and not a mobile telephone in sight), as they walked the streets and populated the galleries and restaurants?

As we approached the Pompidou Centre, one daughter observed, ‘It looks like a hamster cage that needs a jolly good clean.’ Time has not been kind to the building, which now seems as funny and relevant as the Dead Parrot sketch from Monty Python. But at least this ‘most visited attraction’ acts as a sort of vacuum cleaner, funnelling in aimless folk, and thus leaving the rest of Paris relatively unvisited for those in search of the miraculous.

And yet, had not the Euro jaunt been presented as a fait accompli, I might have mouldered the rest of my life away in the cottage. It turned out to be the best shot in the arm since my COVID booster jab.

The Oldie Spring 2022 37

Postcards from the Edge

Goodbye to gymslip mothers

TOBY MORISON

Teenagers stayed at home more during the pandemic – and had fewer children. By Mary Kenny It’s so true, what old Harold Macmillan said: change happens because of ‘events’.

And not just in politics either.

Among other changes COVID has wrought is the end of the rebel teenager, a stereotype we’ve cherished since James Dean broodily gazed out from the screen in Rebel Without a Cause.

Lockdown brought adolescents back to the old days – when children were often educated at home. According to the Education Policy Institute think tank, some became thoroughly comfortable with it. Studies find that, for the most part, youngsters like being with their parents and their parents like being with them. Family harmony!

Teenage drunkenness fell, as did teenage pregnancies. So did sexually transmitted disease among teens.

Conceptions were declining anyway, and some ascribed that to better sex education. It seems teenagers turned into old-fashioned homebodies, snuggily ensconced with their parents. And, of course, with their mobile phones.

How well I remember the concerns over ‘gymslip mothers’, which began rising in numbers in the 1960s. There was the conservative ‘Lock up your daughters’ school of thought, to halt teen pregnancies. Societies in Latin countries had long provided chaperones for nubile young girls. Then there was the liberal ‘give them sex education and the Pill’ argument. Even public conversation about the 1967 Abortion Act often centred much more on fears about ‘gymslip mothers’ than on choice.

The gymslip is no more: and social media, plus time spent with families, seem to be proving better deterrents to teen pregnancy or too-early sexual experience – which is surely a good thing.

‘Events’ brought about the altered state.

French intellectuals have changed too.

They used to be left-wing Marxisants

– Marx-ish if not fully Marxist. Now some of the leading French philosophers are angry reactionaries, delivering two-hour speeches on YouTube about God and civilisation.

My cousin in France has put me on to Michel Onfray, a currently fashionable philosopher. He is that strange paradox, an atheist who says we must nevertheless have God, because without the framework of Judaeo-Christianity the West will collapse.

Very much on-trend is Michel Houellebecq, who denounces sexual liberation, moral decay, feminism, ‘leftist scum’, individualism and the market. He considers the world without God ‘a horror’, although he is not a believer.

I have bought Houellebecq’s latest novel anéantir (‘annihilate’ – yes, lower case), which is said to expose with withering clarity the conditions of modern life. By the time it is published in English in the late spring, I will be all set to engage in a pretentious conversation about its meaning.

It’s a pity Éric Zemmour turned out to be a bit of a rubbish candidate for the French presidency, as he was a sparkling, provocative and knowledgeable journalist, writing weekly in Le Figaro.

And something of a TV star, too – Piers Morgan crossed with Blaise Pascal.

I thought it was a little edgy when he

began saying that children born in France should compulsorily take a French forename, such as Jean-Pierre.

Some people suspected he intended to disparage the name Mohamet for French-born infants, and maybe he did.

But he also said that French parents should cease giving their sprogs ‘American names like Kevin’.

I beg your pardon! Kevin is totally, utterly Irish! St Kevin, Abbot of Glendalough (died in 618, feast day 3rd June) was the founder of a school of Celtic monasticism, whose ruins lie in the beautiful Wicklow countryside. The Prince of Wales, who likes monastic sites, has visited it on several occasions.

As the Irish monks inspired St Bernard of Clairvaux and French monasticism, ‘Kevin’ is a perfectly suitable alternative moniker for little Jean-Pierre.

I have a new portmanteau German word: Verantwortungsgemeinschaft. It means ‘community responsibility’ and it forms part of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s programme to enhance rights for gay and transgender people. The plan is to spare LGBT+ folk the bother of the complex bureaucracy they’ve had to endure in the past, such as consulting a doctor before formally identifying as transgender.

Very innovative for Germans to do away with bureaucracy!

I love pronouncing these long, Teutonic words – a compensation for the fact that in real life I could never get much beyond ‘noch ein Kaffee, bitte’.

My favourite compound still remains Verschlimmbesserung – ‘the improvement that makes things worse’, since that seems to relate to so much of everyday life. Such as BT replacing cable-based landline phones with digitalised systems as an ‘improvement’, which will ensure some people will be completely cut off when storms blow.

A perfect example of VSBR. The Oldie Spring 2022 38

Farewell to frumps Where have all the dowdy charladies and Miss Marples gone?

Liz Hodgkinson remembers a lost breed

W

here have all the frumps gone?

In the 1950s and ’60s, they were everywhere, as we were reminded by seeing Judi Dench and Helen Mirren frumped up – or down – in two recent films, Belfast and The Duke. The films, based on true stories, are set in the past – Belfast in 1969 and The Duke in 1961 – when frumps reigned supreme.

The retro TV series Call the Midwife has a statutory frump in Miss Higgins, the austere, no-nonsense and terminally dowdy doctor’s receptionist and busybody, brilliantly played by Georgie Glen.

We oldies remember those great frumps Margaret Rutherford, Peggy Mount and Irene Handl. Irene Handl, particularly, specialised in frumpy spinsters and charladies. These women were so common in British films between about 1945 and 1965 that a whole PhD thesis has been written about them: Claire Mortimer’s Battleaxes, Spinsters and Chars: the Ageing Woman in Post-War British Film Comedy.

Screen frumps were a mainstay of film comedy because they were such a feature of real life at the time. I grew up in the 1950s surrounded by frumps, who were mainly, although not always, spinsters.

Most of my primary and secondary schoolteachers were frumps. So were the older staff in my short career as a teacher in girls’ schools in the mid-1960s.

Frumps were characterised by dreary clothes, scrubbed and make-up-free faces and iron-grey hair that never went near a hairdresser. Sometimes their dowdiness was due to lack of money. But not always, as many early career women were frumpish in the extreme. Female academics tended to be frumps with their own name – bluestockings. It was as if brains and beauty could not possibly exist in the same person, and you had to look drab to be taken seriously.

If you wore colourful clothes and high 40 The Oldie Spring 2022

Queen of frumps: Irene Handl (1901-87)

heels and dyed your hair blonde, you were a sex symbol, not a Latin mistress.

Female politicians were rare, but they did exist and were symbolised in the public’s consciousness by Bessie Braddock (1899-1970), the long-serving Labour MP for Liverpool Exchange – seen as a frump and a battleaxe.

Lots of women embraced frumpishness by their late twenties, so keen were they to be seen as sensible adults rather than flighty teenagers.

Vicars’ wives were often the worst offenders – they seemed to believe you couldn’t possibly serve both God and glamour.

You never see women like this nowadays, except in period films or TV series. The last frumpish Miss Marple was Joan Hickson (1906-98), who played the amateur detective from 1984 to 1992.

There’s a lingering reminder of the frumpy classical bluestocking in Mary Beard, although I feel her appearance is shrewdly calculated, rather than arising out of lack of concern for her looks.

What brought about the frump’s

demise? My generation, the slick chicks of the 1960s, sent her packing permanently. We were the first group to go to university in large numbers. And we were definitely not going to relinquish our miniskirts and sharp haircuts when we left college life and went out to work.

In my first job as a teacher, I was pulled up sharply by the frumpish headmistress for my short skirts. I refused to exchange them for a schoolmarmish tweed costume and stout brogues.

That’s why today’s female teachers and academics are chic and stylish. The dowdy vicars’ wives of old have evolved into vicars themselves, having come out from the shadows of their husbands.

They now have their very own range of up-to-the-minute, even sexy, clerical wear. Much of it is designed by the Rev Sarah Sykes, who became tired of the dreary clothes on offer and, with her daughter, creates vicars’ outfits that include sequins, satin and lace. And why not? You rarely see a modern female vicar without make-up, either.

Female politicians can be as well dressed as film stars, whatever their political stance. Even charladies, once seen as the ultimate frumps as exemplified by Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street, with her curlers and headscarf, have gone glam. My cleaners arrive in full make-up, with false eyelashes fluttering and painted nails so long that they keep piercing their rubber gloves.

No profession is left where frumps exist, and actresses who convincingly play them are far from frumpish in real life. When Helen Mirren, 76, received her Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement award, she looked as glamorous as ever and a million miles removed from the downtrodden cleaner she played in The Duke.

The frump may still turn up in other nostalgic films, too. As for the actual version, we shall, thankfully, never see her like again.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

A literary tragedy: a school with no library We have no library. There can obviously be sadder sentences in the English language than that, and indeed more shocking ones, but within the context of a school this is pretty bad.

You might ask how we have come to such a state of affairs – and I have done exactly that. Often.

When I arrived at the school, there was a well-stocked library, and a librarian who was on long-term sick leave. In her absence, teaching assistants stepped forward and manned the desk at lunchtime, so children could borrow books. Later, keen prefects were trained to issue and re-shelve books, and some semblance of order was kept. But then the librarian left and the one we hired also left, hoping to make her name in reality television. That didn’t happen. And then?

It is a slight mystery. The library space was taken over by another department and the books shunted to the upper floor, shelved but parked any old where. We advertised for a librarian. And advertised again. And again. But no librarian was forthcoming. And so, quietly but inevitably, it became impossible for children to borrow books.

Don’t misunderstand me. The school is very pro-reading; one morning form-time is given over to silent reading and another to being read to by tutors. Teachers from all departments make encouraging noises

when they see children reading, and are willing to contribute to school-wide conversations about reading. But the children still can’t borrow books.

This discriminates against poorer (culturally and financially) families.

Those who care take them to the town library or buy them books, but an enormous number of our children don’t come from that background.

The Glorious Benefactor has (unknown to him) come into play again, as I can buy books for those children I see who are yearning for – or even mildly interested in – reading. Now the books are not just going to those who are already interested, but making their way towards those who might become so. There is an intrinsic unfairness here, too: you have to catch my eye to be given a book. The agreement with the GB was that only I should be able to sign off the account, as he didn’t want anything being diverted away from individuals. The school does occasionally

‘He’s great at both sit and stay’

try to get me to spend the GB’s money on ‘general readers’, but he and I are all about children beginning their own libraries, taking pride in their books.

I am making a mini-lending library of my own. I’ve raided my children’s bedrooms for their books to lend out – which is all very well and good but, as I have many daughters and no sons, the choice is a little limited for the boys. I’ve also taken books from the sad shelves in what was the library, for which I will probably be reprimanded, but who cares.

I have a purloined exercise book on my desk on which I have written in large letters ‘Books lent BECAUSE WE HAVE NO LIBRARY’. A pathetic stand against I am not quite sure what.

We are not the only state school in this position. School libraries everywhere are being squeezed and squeezed until nothing is left. If there are no libraries, no one will want to become a librarian, and the situation will worsen.

I am pinning a tiny bit of hope on Ofsted. What will the inspectors say when they come in and see the state of affairs? Let’s hope it’s a smart rap over the knuckles for any school in our position, followed by a mad rush of hiring and buying.

And now I’m going to look for some Shirley Jackson for a Year 11 girl who wants to write dark fiction as a career.

Quite Interesting Things about … cows Cows share 80 per cent of their genome with humans.

Cows can be vain, shy, considerate, bossy and inventive. They have best friends, play hide-and-seek, and enjoy having their coats brushed.

Cows can detect smells up to six miles away.

There are fewer cows in America today than at any time since 1952.

Seven per cent of American adults believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

In Alabaman slang, a cow without horns is a butt-head.

A cow’s stomach holds about as much half-digested food as a bathtub.

There’s no evidence cows lie down before it rains.

American scientists are

developing heat-resistant cows that can withstand global warming.

In 2017, a Danish animalrights activist who had lived in Switzerland for 33 years was denied citizenship because she kept complaining about cowbells.

In 2018, armed police rushed to a cowshed in Aberdeenshire to intercept a tiger. After it failed to move for 45 minutes, they

discovered it was a cuddly toy.

In 2021, a 74-yearold Cambodian widow married a cow she says is the reincarnation of her husband.

The Vatican uses milk from the Pope’s cows to paint its buildings.

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

sister teresa

Happy Easter, Fotherington-Thomas!

I have always had a very soft spot for Fotherington-Thomas.

He was the macho and cynical Nigel Molesworth’s ‘girlie’ companion at St Custard’s, from Geoffrey Willans’s Down with Skool (1953), illustrated so brilliantly by Ronald Searle.

Fotherington-Thomas is prone to saying, ‘Hullo clouds, hullo sky,’ and has a touching little round face with a beaming smile going from ear to ear. I don’t think he is on record as saying, ‘Hullo flowers, hullo sun,’ but he might easily have done.

That same enthusiasm is to be found, in a more serious vein, in George Herbert’s Easter: I got me flowers to strew thy way; I got me boughs from many a tree; But thou wast up at break of day, And brought thy sweets along with thee…

Can there be any day but this,

Though many suns shine to endeavour?

We count three hundred, but we miss: There is but one, and that one ever.

Herbert takes us all the way from Jesus’s short-lived triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, past his Passion and crucifixion and on to the baffling joy of the empty tomb. Jesus beat everyone to it on Easter Sunday morning – not just Herbert, but also ‘Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Salome [who] brought spices with which to go and anoint him. And very early in the morning on the first day of the week they went to the tomb, just as the sun was rising.’ (Mark 16:1-2) ‘And brought thy sweets along with thee’ is a wonderful line. The sweets are not a bag of toffees but something unimaginably richer.

They take us back to the ointments and spices of the women going to the

tomb and further back to the myrrh offered to the infant Christ for his burial.

None of these is ultimately needed, since to live in Christ is the fulfilment of all our longings.

We have been through a long, damp, grey winter with its permanent threat of Omicron. It is now time for blossom and daffodils to come into their own, and for the sun to rise in the East and to warm us through. Not just the sun of our solar system, but the Son of God. The cosmic Christ can seem a very long way away, and inconsequential.

Herbert assures us that this is not so, and that we are the heirs of that unique occurrence: the Resurrection. He neatly rounds off the 365 days that make up a calendar year to ‘three hundred’, then reminds us that there is only one day that really counts: Easter Sunday. All our other days are subsumed into it.

Hullo flowers, hullo sun, indeed.

Memorial Service

Dame Vera Lynn CH (1917-2020) The Central Band of the Royal British Legion played the Flanagan and Allen song Run, Rabbit, Run, as the Forces’ Sweetheart was celebrated at Westminster Abbey. The Abbey echoed to Glenn Miller, Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major and The Dam Busters March.

Sunshine flooded through the abbey’s Gothic windows, lighting up members of the armed services and the dashing scarlet coats of the Chelsea Pensioners.

Dame Vera’s daughter, Virginia Lewis-Jones, said a prayer, saluting her gifts as ‘wife, mother and friend’. Katie Ashby and the D-Day Darlings sang The White Cliffs of Dover. Katherine Jenkins climbed to the top of the organ loft for a rousing rendition of We’ll Meet Again.

The Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, praised ‘the only centenarian to have an album in 42 The Oldie Spring 2022

the top ten’. Jonathan Dimbleby, son of war correspondent Richard Dimbleby, recalled her effects on soldiers at war: ‘Vera reached right into their hearts.’

Actor Anthony Andrews remembered his father working with Dame Vera as a BBC conductor and arranger in the 1940s. He recalled, too, her 100thbirthday concert in 2017 when, sadly, she was too ill to attend. The Queen came and sat next to Vera’s empty chair.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the London Palladium. Praising Dame Vera’s great longevity, Alan Titchmarsh remembered her performing 75 years earlier at the 16th-birthday party of Princess

Elizabeth in 1942 in Windsor Castle during the war.

Tim Rice read from Corinthians on ‘varieties of gifts’. Hymns included O Praise Ye the Lord, Charles Wesley’s O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing and William Blake’s Jerusalem. The choir sang the anthem How lovely are thy dwellings fair, O Lord of Hosts.

Dame Vera’s honours – from the Companion of Honour to the Burma Star and War Medal – were carried up the nave by three members of the armed services. As they made their journey, a recording was played of Vera Lynn singing, in that unique, heart-stopping voice, Travellin’ Home.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Should you keep on taking the tablets?

Paracetamol might raise blood pressure – but remember the benefits theodore dalrymple The problem with medical research is that it’s always finding things for us, whether we be patient or doctor, to worry about – especially in an age of hypochondria like ours.

Just as we think that something is nice and safe, research shows that it isn’t, or at least might not be.

For example, what could be safer than good old paracetamol – apart from when you take it in overdose, as about 80,000 people do in England and Wales each year.

At the last count, 235 of them died – a quarter of all who died by self-poisoning.

It has long been suspected that paracetamol might raise the blood pressure, as do non-steroidal antiinflammatories, but this has not been definitively proved. Raising the blood pressure would be a bad thing, because it would probably lead to an increase in the number of heart attacks or strokes.

An Edinburgh experiment established that, in people already slightly hypertensive, paracetamol taken regularly for two weeks raised the blood pressure by 5 millimetres of mercury.

Doctors in England and Wales issue about 1,500,000 prescriptions for paracetamol annually, but it is a cheap over-the-counter analgesic available everywhere. There must be large numbers of people taking it all or most of the time.

The experimenters measured the subjects’ blood pressure at the start of the experiment and the end. So the question of when, exactly, the rise in blood pressure occurred – immediately, after two days, or after a week? – was not answered. Nor was the question of whether longer periods of consumption raise the blood pressure further.

Of course, the blood pressure in this experiment is what is called a proxy measure: it measures something that is strongly associated with something else that is of more direct clinical interest, namely heart attacks and strokes.

Though it stands to epidemiological reason that a rise in blood pressure would lead to an increased number of these events, this may not actually be the case, as many readers will have discovered.

As with all medication, there is the question of risk against benefit. Risk can be expressed both relatively and absolutely: a doubling of a trivial risk might be greatly outweighed by a small increase of a substantial risk.

Furthermore, the risk and benefit may be incommensurable: how much pain relief is equal to one extra stroke? (I won’t go into the evidence that the value of paracetamol in the relief of chronic pain is now a matter of dispute.)

THE SUN / NEWS LICENSING

Literary Lunch Andrew Roberts on George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch A defence of not-so-mad King George

Norman Scott on his memoir An Accidental Icon: How I dodged a bullet…

The real story of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal

In association with

Julia Boyd on A Village in the Third Reich The gripping tale of everyday Bavarian village life under Hitler

Benefits and risks, moreover, have to be evaluated in the light of the alternatives, if any. Drug A may be risky, but drug B, the alternative, may be riskier. There is always the question of whether any risk at all has to be taken.

To this, likewise, there is seldom a definitive answer.

The conclusion of the report of the experiment is wonderfully indefinite (it is not only politicians who are slippery and evasive): ‘[It] adds to concerns regarding the safety of regular [paracetamol] treatment, especially at risk of developing ischemic heart disease and stroke.’

It adds to the concerns, but does not state how serious these should be. The sample was small. The experimental subjects were highly selected and not representative of the population as a whole. The start, duration and evolution of the hypertensive effect were unknown. A proxy measure was used. There are enough unanswered questions to keep clinical pharmacologists researching for decades.

In the meantime, the doctor is confronted by a specific patient who either should or should not take paracetamol. The doctor must exude a confidence that he or she may not feel, at least after reading the latest research.

Such is life.

Tuesday 7th June 2022

At the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE TO BOOK TICKETS email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call Katherine on 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-3pm). The price is £79 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks l Fish and vegetarian options available on advance request l Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm l Authors speak 2.30

The Oldie Spring 2022 43

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

Prayers for Ukraine

Elizabeth Taylor in Oxford, 1966

Liz’s Oxford blues SIR: I read with interest David Wood’s article on Burton and Taylor (February issue). At the time, I was a 20-year-old undergraduate at Merton College, when I and a colleague, Alan Watson, got wind of the two stars coming to lunch with the Fellows. We parked ourselves in Fellows quadrangle early on to catch a glimpse. They were some two hours late but Alan and I stuck it out and were duly rewarded.

The most striking memory I have of their visit was the appearance of Elizabeth Taylor. She had wonderful looks and features which, in the flesh, outdid her splendid screen and photographic images. It was really exciting to be so close to a megastar.

We took photos of her (pictured) which display a pensive and wistful demeanour. Could she and Burton have had an early-morning tiff? Surely not; they were only two years into their first marriage, which lasted ten years.

I attended one of the performances of Doctor Faustus at the Playhouse. It was very good, but I did detect a little slurring of words in Burton’s speech.

We all knew he liked his booze, so could he have had a snifter before coming on stage?

Yours, Mark Price, Knutsford, Cheshire

44 The Oldie Spring 2022

SIR: Reading A N Wilson’s fascinating article yesterday (November issue) was eerily apposite.

Wilson wrote of Norway then, but we are witnessing Ukraine now. Both these young democracies faced/face a grave threat from a megalomaniac invader who wished/wishes to replace the life of freedom enjoyed by the people of those developing nations with a life of tyranny under an alien power. Norway had to suffer much to regain her precious independence, and it seems that Ukraine is being forced to do the same. Britain offered sanctuary to the leadership of Norway so that, when the war was over, Norway could resume her life of freedom.

If only that were possible now.

I fully support the politicians and diplomats who have been striving so strenuously – and so far successfully – to prevent a Third World War (which would almost certainly turn into a nuclear war).

The pity is that the innocent people of Ukraine are having to play the role of whipping boy on behalf of the rest of Europe.

I send my prayers and my admiration to the embattled people of Ukraine for their plucky resistance against a powerful, unbalanced bully.

Frances Aitken, Littlehampton, West Sussex

The King’s English SIR: Kingsley Amis would have had at least a few words of complaint about Serena Greenslade’s elocution lesson (April issue). For example, on the subject of how many syllables to give a word (Serena suggests five for particularly); in his The King’s English, Amis says that multisyllable pronunciation of certain words ‘is offensive’. His ‘interesting’ is ‘intruh-sting’, ‘temporarily’ is ‘tempraly’, and he says ‘only a wanker makes three syllables of ‘casual’.

As for dropping consonants, Amis defends doing so in ‘Christmas’ – and what about ‘Wednesday’?

The King’s son Martin has an amusing anecdote in his autobiography Experience in which he shocks his young

sons by explaining that he taught himself to say ‘Mon-dee’ and ‘Tues-dee’, because it sounded posh, and it was cool to be posh in the 1970s.

Colin Crews, Westow, North Yorkshire

Grammar lessons SIR: I enjoyed Serena Greenslade’s article (‘How to talk proper’, April issue). I concur with all she says but feel she has left out some very common current grammatical aberrations.

Why do people say ‘sat’ when they mean ‘sitting’? And, likewise, ‘stood’ when it should be ‘standing’? Also very common: ‘were’ when it should be ‘was’.

I have noticed these errors even among TV presenters – including a knight of the realm! Surely programme directors should remind them not to do it?

Why don’t people try (just try) to not start sentences with ‘So’ unless it is applicable, like using it instead of ‘Therefore’. Even this is common on the BBC. I must admit to doing it myself, but kick myself when I do!

Another one: ‘wow’. Please try a more original expletive occasionally. A few people on The Repair Shop do actually succeed in avoiding ‘wow’.

Does all this matter? I suppose not in the world order of things, but it irritates some people and it is the small things that annoy. Personally, I like train stations to be referred to as ‘railway stations’, as they always used to be but, hey ho, I can’t argue with the logic – so there it is.

James Crawshaw, Battle, East Sussex

Alistair MacLean’s double SIR: In the early 1970s, Roy Plomley was keen to get the novelist Alistair MacLean on to his programme Desert Island Discs.

It was only during an excellent lunch at the Savile Club in London that questioning revealed that the Alistair Maclean who was Mr Plomley’s guest was in charge of the Ontario Tourist Board, not the great novelist. Nonetheless, after lunch, the two set off for the studio and made the recording. Needless to say that programme was never broadcast.

Yours faithfully, Charles Halliday, Warminster, Wiltshire

Britain is a casino

in the Underworld. It starts ‘When I was King of the Boeotians…’ and continues in sad, witty tones describing how his life had been before he died.

Regards, John Megoran, Weymouth, Dorset

later this year, as another feature of the Hull Maritime City Initiative (Kingston upon Hull being Yorkshire’s only port city).

Regards, Martin Rispin, for Hull Civic Society

SIR: Matthew Norman (‘Confessions of a gambling addict’, April issue) rightly bemoans the government’s lack of action over personal gambling and the selfdestruction that may result – but personal gambling is only part of the story, as the government is itself highly reliant on a particular part of the gaming industry.

Over different governments, the UK’s prioritisation of capitalism has increased inequality in Britain and around the globe by the implementation of an enterprise culture, an entrepreneurial and monetarist economic strategy. This has led to the City of London becoming a major centre for international capital and investment, something seen by many as a positive entity.

The City is however epitomised by its population of bankers, financial advisers, investment analysts and hedge-fund managers, who seem to be carrying out work of little social or ethical value – gambling with other people’s money is surely morally worse than gambling with your own.

Dr Patrick Hoyte, Minehead, Somerset

Wild in the country

Anthem for rude youth

SIR: While reading your excellent ‘Growing Old Disgracefully’ supplement (April issue), I read Alan Titchmarsh’s piece on the current rewilding craze. Had I not been in a state of advanced decrepitude, I would have run round the room cheering wildly.

People talk today as if no one had ever noticed nature before. As Alan Titchmarsh said, our countryside has always been managed. There is no prelapsarian idyll.

Riding through our local, unmanaged woodland not so long ago, I was constantly blocked by old fridges, burnt-out cars, et al. The meadows, for the most part left to themselves, are full of thistles and ragwort, which throttle the other wildflowers. Stop and think, indeed.

Olga Danes-Volkov, Maidstone, Kent

Speak up!

Hull’s time ball

SIR: Carolyn Whitehead’s Rant (March issue) had me muttering my full agreement and support, growing in volume with every line as I read.

Mumbling and whispering actors, wrongly thinking they are sounding more sinister in doing so, are the curse of modern TV dramas, especially for those of us who are hard of hearing.

I hope that someone of influence in the TV world has read the article and takes long overdue action to remedy the problem, but I won’t hold my breath.

I say to Carolyn a very loud ‘Hear, hear.’

Basil Jones, Neath

SIR: The informative article by Karen Peck (Olden Life, April issue) omitted to say that probably the last time ball constructed (and also the only one on a municipal building, plus the highest time ball in England) sits atop Hull’s Guildhall.

Hull’s time ball was constructed between 1915 and 1916 for the benefit of ships in the town docks and on the River Hull and Humber Estuary, and has not worked now for more than a century – but recently a restoration programme has been completed and the gilded time ball will start to function again

SIR: Great to read (Postcards from the Edge, April issue) about Mary Kenny’s experience with the young when so often it seems to be doom and gloom.

I am afraid it was not always so.

My dear brother, who recently died at the age of 90 after a lifetime of service to others, told me what happened when he offered his seat to a young woman on the London Underground. In no uncertain manner he was told not to patronise her, and to ‘Get yourself a life, you miserable old man.’

He never forgot this and needless to say never gave up his seat on public transport again!

Whatever this woman’s feelings about gender roles, it was pretty unkind to react in this way to what after all was a simple act of kindness that our generation was expected to do.

Yours, Ben Oglesby, Beccles, Suffolk

King Bron of the Boeotians SIR: As one of the judges for Auberon Waugh’s monthly poetry competition in the Literary Review for more than a decade, I got to know him a little bit, admired him a lot and on one occasion heard him singing his party piece King of the Boeotians (as described by A N Wilson, March issue) in the Academy Club. However, at the risk of adding corrections to corrections, this did not come from Gluck’s grand opera Orpheus but was a song from Offenbach’s much less serious, ribald and satirical comic operetta Orpheus

‘I’m at the perfect age. Old enough to drink too much and young enough not to know better’

Eating Grandma SIR: Theodore Dalrymple (‘My audition for Dr Death’, April issue) warns us elderly folk to watch out for relatives who might want to harm – or kill – us.

That put me in mind of Charles Darwin’s voyage on HMS Beagle. In his journal he notes that the natives of Tierra del Fuego, when pressed in winter by hunger, will kill and devour their old women before they kill their dogs. The reason given? ‘Doggies catch otters.

Old women no.’

Apparently the old ladies would be suffocated by being held in the smoke of their own fires. Those who ran away into the mountains to escape would be pursued and brought back to their fireside to be cooked and eaten by their own hungry family.

Perhaps we gentlemen should be learning how to catch otters. On the other hand, as grandparents, should we not be ready to make sacrifices to help our grandchildren thrive in the bleak future that awaits them, but not us?

But no Grandma Specials Cookbook, please.

Regards, Paul Elmhirst, York The Oldie Spring 2022 45

I Once Met

Michael Winner To enter Michael Winner’s Piccadilly office, I had to negotiate an eight-foothigh shiny steel door with a big wheel to open it. It had once guarded a City safe.

He said he bought it from the Bank of England to use as a prop for The Jokers (1967), a Michael Crawford caper he directed about a plot to steal the Crown Jewels.

‘You’d need gelignite to open it,’ he cackled, puffing on one of his eight-a-day Montecristo cigars. ‘No one can get me here. Not even the taxman. Ha, ha!’

The Death Wish director died in 2013, aged 77. I was the last of his friends to visit him on his deathbed. He’d fallen ill eating shellfish at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados, where he spent £100,000 every Christmas. He refused to have his left leg amputated, which might have saved him, and was now awaiting the Grim Reaper.

He was wrapped in a fur rug, slumped in a director’s chair in his peach-painted bedroom at Woodland House, a Queen Anne Revival mansion overlooking Holland Park.

The old braggadocio had gone but he still displayed a wintry courage and was in confessional mood. ‘Lovely house, isn’t it, Roddy,’ he said. ‘Do you know I’ve put more love into this house than into any of the women I’ve known. Poured all my movie money into it.’

He put it about that he was the great lover, but also admitted he had to pay almost all of his girlfriends a stipend, fixing them up with a nearby flat and monthly allowance.

‘I always need a woman on my arm when I go out socially,’ he confessed. ‘It gives me confidence.’ I suggested he try arriving at first nights and parties on his own. Then he might meet someone wonderful he could love, without the need for a fiscal arrangement.

‘What do you expect me to do – jump out from behind a pillar when I see a nice girl and shout “Cooeee – I’m over here!’’?’

None of his romantic gestures had ever worked out: ‘I took Jenny Seagrove to Vienna to celebrate her birthday. I spent a fortune tracking down Anton Karas, the Austrian musician who played the zither on the soundtrack to The Third

Man, my favourite film. I had him play at a party for her. It was a terrific gesture.

She just didn’t get it. Wondered what this old guy playing a funny instrument was doing there.’

All this hearts-and-flowers stuff belies Winner’s reputation as an abusive bully.

He once ordered steak at the Connaught and called Claridge’s to have chips sent over – just so he could humiliate the chef.

To a poor church mouse like me, he was unfailingly generous. He once arrived in an open-topped Rolls-Royce at the home I had just bought, but was too broke to furnish, with a beautiful oil painting, saying, ‘This will help you get started.’

Apart from his house, his great love was gossip. While making The Wicked Lady (1983), with Faye Dunaway, he told me how her husband, celebrity photographer Terry O’Neill, solemnly presented her co-star John Gielgud with an autographed studio still of the actress, as if it was a great honour.

‘Gielgud accepted with theatrical gratitude,’ Winner said. ‘I asked, “What will you do with it?” “Wipe my arse with it,” Gielgud replied. Ha, ha.’

Roderick Gilchrist

Helping Ukraine – 60 years ago

The present appalling plight of Ukraine reminds me of the early 1960s, when I was chairman of the London branch of the Anglo-Ukrainian Society.

Its founder was the admirable maverick politician Auberon Herbert (1922-74), who never made it to the House of Commons. Standing as a Conservative in the hopeless seat of Aberavon, he won a few votes by learning to propel a coracle on a local river. (He later came closer to success in Sunderland East.)

The Society’s aim was to be a rallying point for the 30,000 Ukrainians granted 46 The Oldie Spring 2022

Birch Grove, West Sussex, 1962 British citizenship after 1945.

Many had settled in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where there were flourishing branches, not least in Halifax, where the Conservative Maurice Macmillan, Harold’s son, owed a large portion of his tiny majority to the Ukrainian vote.

This led to a London-branch outing to Harold Macmillan’s home at Birch Grove, where the gardens were open for charity. On arrival we were briskly greeted by his wife, Lady Dorothy, with the words

‘It was last Sunday, Auberon, but now that you’re all here, you’d better come round.’

Another high point was a brains trust, featuring David Floyd, the Daily Telegraph Russian correspondent, who was later Solzhenitsyn’s first port of call in England. Better still, it included Malcolm Muggeridge, who, as the Manchester Guardian’s man in Moscow in 1932-33, had witnessed the genocidal famine ordered by Stalin, which led to the deaths of at least three million Ukrainians.

Those deaths account for their later greeting the Germans as allies against the enemy who had been responsible for this particular holocaust, and for the iron determination of their resistance today.

In London, I was also able to arrange the visit of heroic

dissident General Grigorenko, champion of the oppressed Crimean Tatars. Through Liberal politician Jo Grimond, a lunch was held for him in the House of Commons, attended by historians and various Russian experts.

The General also addressed Russian A-Level students at Eton, though he showed scant interest in the window in College Chapel dedicated to the memory of the Etonians who fell in the Crimean War. Auberon’s quixotic attempts to underline the significance of Ukraine came 60 years too soon, but his foresight surely deserves to be recognised.

By John Jolliffe, Somerset, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word

Books Jules rules

In his new book, Julian Barnes proves he’s now the best novelist in that 1983 photograph. By Frances Wilson

T

here they are, Granta’s young novelists of the future, named and famed and gazing down on the Promised Land.

Not that they look very happy about it.

None of them is smiling. Pat Barker and Rose Tremain seem positively gloomy, as well they might: to be awarded a prize on the basis of your potential is a poisoned chalice if ever there was one.

And, anyway, this is clearly a boys’ club, with Martin Amis, leader of the pack, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Ian McEwan, his second-in-command.

Amis, aged 33, has already produced four ‘big-cocked’ bestsellers (including his debut, The Rachel Papers), while McEwan, The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers tucked under his belt, is going through his macabre period. Up there on the back row, Adam Mars-Jones (yet to write his first novel) looks ready to lock horns with them both – and seven years later, in Venus Envy (his polemic against Amis and McEwan), he will.

Granta’s 1983 list of the 20 best British novelists under the age of 40, now repeated every decade, transformed the perception of fiction-writing from the pursuit of mild-mannered aesthetes to a spectator sport. Hindsight, as William Blake put it, is a wonderful thing – so how did they all fare?

48 The Oldie Spring 2022

The original brat pack was selected by Michael Holroyd, Beryl Bainbridge and two judges from the book trade. Mystic Meg could not have done a better job: of the Big Five – Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro – only Amis failed to win the Booker (‘posh bingo’ as Barnes called it), while Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017. Other Booker winners from the cohort were Pat Barker and Graham Swift.

For some, however, the category of next-best novelist proved too narrow.

Alan Judd, the former soldier and diplomat who might himself be a fictional character, has combined novel-writing with security analysis and his position as the Oldie motoring correspondent, while the ambidextrous A N Wilson pens fiction with his left hand and biographies with his right, while tapping out his journalism with his toes.

Clive Sinclair is essentially a shortstory writer and Philip Norman, whose biography of the Beatles was published before he made the Granta list, continued to record the lives of rock stars. Christopher Priest disappeared into the oubliette reserved for fantasy writers and Buchi Emecheta, who died in 2017, was ghettoised as a Nigerian novelist.

Shiva Naipaul, the younger brother

of V S, died of a heart attack in 1985, Rose Tremain and William Boyd became part of the literary landscape, Salman Rushdie spent two decades in hiding and Martin Amis won the reputation of a popinjay – but whatever happened to Ursula Bentley?

Ursula who? I hear you ask. A former convent girl, selected on the strength of a sly and distinctive debut called The Natural Order, Bentley later admitted that she hadn’t heard of most of the other novelists on the Granta list – nor had they heard of her.

Three further books followed, but Bentley lacked the sporting instinct and so stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate instead. She died of cancer aged 58.

Did the media pressure block her as a writer? Hype can be as destructive for a novelist as having a fatwa on your head or finding yourself force-fed to sixthformers. Since Ian McEwan’s oeuvre appeared on the English A-Level syllabus, his writing has become formulaic, while Klara and the Sun,

The school of 1983 have their best work behind them, except for Julian Barnes

SNOWDON / TRUNK ARCHIVE

Granta’s Best of Young Novelists 1983. Back row: William Boyd, Adam Mars Jones, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker, Clive Sinclair. Middle row: Buchi Emecheta, A N Wilson, Ursula Bentley, Christopher Priest, Maggie Gee, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis. Front row: Shiva Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Norman, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain, Lisa St Aubin de Terán (Salman Rushdie and Alan Judd are missing).

The photograph was taken by Lord Snowdon

Ishiguro’s first novel as a Nobel laureate, inevitably failed to reach the 2021 Booker Prize shortlist. Adam Mars-Jones, who along with Ishiguro made it on to Granta’s second 20-under-40 list in 1993, has yet to produce his magnum opus.

If we were to plot their reputations on a graph, we would see, in most cases, a sharp rise followed by a fall and a horizontal line. Pat Barker peaked in the ’90s with her Regeneration trilogy.

Graham Swift peaked with his two early masterpieces, Shuttlecock (1981) and Waterland (1983). Rushdie peaked with Midnight’s Children (1981), Martin Amis with Money (1984). And Ishiguro peaked, in my opinion, with The Remains of the Day (1989).

So the school of 1983 have their best work behind them – except for Julian Barnes, that is, who has got better and better. The line on his graph is vertical.

Having made the Granta list on the strength of Metroland and Before She Met Me, Barnes then instantly fulfilled his promise in 1984 with Flaubert’s Parrot, a book whose sheer bandwidth makes you punch the air with pleasure.

Geoffrey Braithwaite, Barnes’s Flaubert-obsessed narrator, is determined to track down the stuffed parrot that sat on his hero’s desk while he wrote Un coeur simple. The result is an upside-down, inside-out cubist

masterpiece. Part biography, part fiction, part literary criticism, Flaubert’s Parrot is one of those books that Changed Everything – but then everything Barnes writes changes everything, otherwise why would he bother?

‘In order to write,’ Barnes has said, ‘I have to convince myself, first, that I have never before written a novel like the one I am about to undertake; and, second, that no one else in the history of literature has ever done so, either.’

Setting the bar sky-high, he vaults it every time. Like Borges and Nabokov, Barnes, who is now 76, does what the hell he likes with the novel form and his books are entirely unpredictable.

Flaubert’s Parrot was followed by A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, the first of which is an account of Noah’s Ark as witnessed by one of the termites on board, while another chapter is devoted to Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa.

Elizabeth Finch, Barnes’s latest novel, must be read at least twice for the full force of its voltage to be felt.

The narrator is a former bit-part actor called Neil, who joins an adult education class on Culture and Civilisation. His teacher is the charismatic, chainsmoking Elizabeth Finch, who delivers her note-free lectures on early Church history in perfect sentences. Neil is

so besotted by E F, as he calls her, that 20 years later he is able to repeat her words verbatim, and he does so in these pages.

Before she dies, E F leaves him the contents of her study, including her gnomic reflections on her own mentor Julian, the last pagan emperor, which Neil turns into the manuscript that forms the heart of the novel. But this is not Julian Barnes’s book about Julian the Apostate, because Neil’s real interest is in E F herself, whose life he would write if he could verify a single fact about her.

A cryptic crossword of a novel, Elizabeth Finch is a tricksier and even brainier version of Flaubert’s Parrot.

Once again, we enter entirely unknown terrain (unless, that is, you are an expert on Flavius Claudius Julianus), and once again we are brought up against the problem of biographical truth and ‘a life that does not amount to a narrative’. If the novelist’s task is, as Barnes believes, ‘to reflect the fullest complications of the world’, he can finally rest on his laurels.

So 40 years later, the prize for Best British Novelist Under 80 goes to the man in the back row in the white shirt and red tie.

Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, £16.99) is published on 14th April The Oldie Spring 2022 49

RIP Rinka A N WILSON An Accidental Icon: How I Dodged a Bullet, Spoke Truth to Power and Lived to Tell the Tale

By Norman Scott Hodder & Stoughton £20 Hanging in the hall of my house is a framed election poster for the Dog Lovers’ Party.

My friend Auberon Waugh stood in this interest for the North Devon constituency against the sitting member, Jeremy Thorpe, after the latter’s strange involvement with a plot to shoot a beautiful Great Dane named Rinka. It is Rinka’s friend and owner who writes the present volume.

‘You will now retire and consider your verdict of Not Guilty,’ Peter Cook, in wig and judge’s rig, told the jury in his satirical version of the trial of Jeremy Thorpe and his grotesque band of co-defendants, on trial for conspiracy to murder the author of this book in the incident that ended up with Rinka being shot.

Given the fact that the hired assassin had admitted his offence and gone to jail, it was a remarkable verdict. But then Jeremy Thorpe had been to Eton.

Norman was a bit camp, had a bizarre upbringing – and was now being a bit too talkative about an affair he’d had with Thorpe during the years that this was still illegal.

One witness recalled Thorpe saying, of the plot to murder Norman, ‘It’s no worse than killing a sick dog.’ And probably that is what many members of the Establishment, including the judge, believed. The real-life judge, Joseph Cantley, reminded the jury that Norman was ‘a fraud. He is a sponger. He is a whiner. He is a parasite.’

Whether ghosted or not, these memoirs read as if blurted unstoppably forth by word of mouth, rather than written. After the success of the TV drama A Very English Scandal, the story is familiar to most of us.

Norman was a war baby, born out of wedlock to an Irishwoman called Ena Lynch, who later married a man called Mr Merritt, and then a fellow called Albert Josiffe. It was by this surname that Norman first made his appearance in the newspapers during the 1970s. A man named Andrew Newton had shot Rinka on Dartmoor, before a botched attempt to murder Norman himself.

Why? Because Norman had worked as

a stable boy for a rogue named the Honourable Brecht Van de Vater – ‘Van’ to friends. One day, a flamboyant 30-something-year-old friend of Van’s, dapper in his black homburg hat and well-cut suit, paid a visit to Squirrels, a riding stables near Kingham in Oxfordshire. The distinguished visitor did not appear horsey, but he gave the handsome young Norman his card and told him that if he ever got into trouble with Van, he should get in touch. The visitor’s name was the Rt Honourable Jeremy Thorpe MP. Van turned out to be a rotter. After the inevitable row, Norman left him, aged 21, but could not retrieve his National Insurance card, without which it was impossible either to claim the dole or to get another job. This business of the NI card first surfaces 30 or so pages into his tale and, thereafter, he repeats it again and again and again. It is never explained why he did not simply go to the nearest dole – or post – office (or whatever), explain the situation, get a replacement for the NI card and pay any sums that might have been owing.

Instead he entrusted the task of getting a new card to Jeremy Thorpe, whom he visited at the House of Commons in November 1961. It still causes him anguish that his little dog, Mrs Tish, had to witness Thorpe anally raping Norman in a bedroom in his mother’s flat later that evening.

A former Roman Catholic, Norman appears to believe to this day that penetrative sex between men is disgusting, and that only gentler forms of lovemaking are beautiful.

There followed years in which Norman became Thorpe’s regular lover, still obsessing about the NI card and still believing Thorpe, when told that the matter would be dealt with by his secretary.

‘He walked out on her for a women with smaller energy bills!’

As with the televised dramatic version, so, in real life, the story of Norman and Jeremy is a story about class, and about the crazy British attitude to sex, especially to gay sex.

The Ancient Mariner who bursts forth with this version of the tale comes across as very slightly mad, but also rather sweet, deeply fond of an ex-wife, and of his daughter and grandchildren, his dogs – and his long-time, male partner who, while not sharing Norman’s equestrian obsessions, obviously likes country life and animals.

Had things turned out differently, Norman Scott says at the end of this book, he might have ridden for Britain in the Olympics and Jeremy Thorpe might have been prime minister. Maybe. He is surely right to continue to be angry.

Yet one of the beguiling things about the book is that he clearly has a sense of humour. Despite the trail of ruined lives and even suicides that unfold, the story of Thorpe, Norman and Rinka, if a tragedy, was one predestined by some cosmic farceur.

God and monster NICKY HASLAM A Life of Picasso Volume IV: The Minotaur Years 1933–1943

By John Richardson Jonathan Cape £35 In the dusk of an evening in the late 1950s, we were drinking vin blanc cassis on the terrace of the Hotel Nord Pinus.

It was late summer, and we had come to Arles for the last of the season’s corridas, to see the gloried and glamorous matador Luis Miguel Dominguín fight the bulls. Before us, waves of Provençal aficionados streamed through the square towards the arena, its Roman arches rising floodlit beyond.

Then, off to our right, we heard staccato applause. The crowd parted and, down into the light, their arms interlocked, came a trio of figures; the furthest, a handsome young man; then Dominguín’s wife, the beautiful actress Lucia Bosè and … Picasso.

They passed, quite close – Picasso’s outline indelible, his aura tangible, dazzling – and it took some moments before I was able to recognise the third.

John Richardson (1924-2019).

John was on the brink of an association with this genius, which was to develop into a deep friendship.

Picasso came to trust John with much mutual empathy and many public manifestations of affection, The Oldie Spring 2022 51

not the least being the original sketch for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The rapport would last the artist’s lifetime. No one could have been better placed than John to chronicle Picasso’s art and age.

More than 60 years on, Richardson’s posthumous fourth and final volume on the maestro’s life has been published.

Though I hardly expected to find a corresponding account of that evening in Arles, I did somehow hope this magisterial work would bring Picasso into the years he became, for most of us now, the supremely significant (pace Warhol) artist of our times.

But no; regrettably it goes up only to 1944. Picasso lived for another three decades, during which he produced so much of his controversial work. It is our loss that Richardson elected to exclude these latter years when his subject’s most audacious bravura – and their friendship – was at its apogee.

The decade – from 1933 – covered by this superbly illustrated book is dense with vignettes of abstruse academics and the worldly intellectual gossip in which Richardson has always revelled. But it reveals his subject to be oddly parochial.

Picasso never went to America, the Far East or Russia, preferring an unvaried beat between Paris, the Riviera, Barcelona and the Biarritz villa of his earliest patron, the Chilean heiress Eugenia Errázuriz.

These seasonal cycles read, dare one say, somewhat repetitively – despite Picasso’s monstrous ego, his callous treatment of those he loved or, rather, those who loved him and his indifference to the political situation.

At the outbreak of war, hot-footing it back to Paris, he stored his paintings in secure vaults: his banker was otherwise unable to guarantee his finances. Remaining there throughout the Occupation, he consorted with those who, if not out-and-out collaborators, were figures the Nazis turned a blind eye to.

Among them, astonishingly, was Hitler’s favourite sculptor, Arno Breker.

Having commandeered Helena Rubinstein’s palatial apartment, Breker was brazenly melting down Paris’s metal monuments, casting his own musclebound Volkshelden to replace them.

Picasso’s unflagging work routine, the rows with dealers and friends, and the slightly scary, clowning humour of his company are manifest. But it all seems somehow dimensionless; there’s little colour and texture to clothe the god of paint.

While the author’s sources are legion,

‘Hi, I’m de-cluttering’

there is, most strangely, absolutely no reference to a revealing essay on the artist written by Janet Flanner in precisely the period this book covers.

As the New Yorker’s correspondent in Paris, she describes Picasso’s ‘wild little right eye like a Spanish bull’s, and a kinder, larger, more human, left’ and his being ‘racially and constitutionally tragic-minded, sad, sarcastic, with malice in speech taking the place of wit’.

Still, after dickering with and eventually abandoning an offer of director at the Prado, post-Guernica Picasso sent the Spanish government large sums to buy planes. After defeat, he sent equally large sums for refugees huddled across Spain’s border with France.

And Flanner includes a note of his more poignant persona. This monstre sacré owned, at various times, kittens, a Mexican hairless puppy, a white mouse he kept in a drawer and a dachshund named Lump.

Dominguín dedicated his first bull to Senorita Bosè, his last to Picasso. After the final, fatal sword blow, the matador offered him the bloodied, black ears. He stood, the spectators roared, and the gore-glossed beast was dragged out. The trumpets blared, the lights dimmed. The golden stones faded to grey monoliths under a violet oval of sky.

With that last broad gesture over this scene of gore and glory, bravery and beauty, cruelty and compassion, Picasso’s core – and his coeur – were gone, his aura lingering on the falling night.

It was time for a cognac on the terrace.

Mother’s ruin NICHOLAS LEZARD Young Mungo

By Douglas Stuart Picador £16.99 Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 for Shuggie Bain, the story of a boy, the youngest of three children,

living in a Glasgow tenement with an alcoholic mother.

That novel recalled events in the 1980s, but had a framing device set in 1992: which is roughly where we are with Young Mungo. Mungo is the youngest of three siblings living with an alcoholic mother. Mungo is not Shuggie: and his mother is not Shuggie’s mother, who dies in Shuggie Bain.

This is not explicitly Douglas Stuart’s story, but he knows what he’s writing about: the hard, precarious life of the housing schemes, a world of endless sectarian violence and varying degrees of hopelessness; the kind of place where it is bad enough to be gay, as Mungo discovers himself to be; much worse if the boy you fall in love with is a Catholic. This, you think to yourself, is not going to end well.

Well, it does, in a way, but only after some quite spectacularly explosive violence which, after a long build-up, is enough to jangle the nerves of the stoutest reader. It starts uneasily enough, with Mungo going on a fishing trip with two men who, it dawns on you, are not to be trusted: ex-inmates from Barlinnie, Glasgow’s big jail, alcoholics, and … well, let’s not be getting ahead of ourselves.

The novel is the story of how he ended up on this weekend fishing trip, and what happened there.

I hope I do not make the novel sound too grim. It is grim – there’s no getting around that – but it also has its moments of humour, even if it’s just the recorded banter of the youngsters, particularly Jodie, Mungo’s sister. She is able to see through everyone and lets them know she can – up to a point. She talks of the Modern Studies teacher, Mr Gillespie, who ‘sees it as his wee project to stir up the proleytariat in the East End while he drives his Sierra estate to the Marks and Spencer out at Bishopbriggs and spunks his wages on baguettes and Merlot… I saw him peeling a kiwi fruit in the staffroom the other week.’

Jodie seems, in a way, too good to be true: very much the voice of harsh reason that, in a household like hers, doesn’t go down well. And, when we learn what Mr Gillespie has been doing to her, we realise that, yes, she is too good to be true. Her brother Hamish is a hooligan, which is too polite a word for what he gets up to; there is a psychopathy to him that made me think of Begbie, the nutter in Trainspotting. But Hamish’s circumstances – a father at 18, with the mother 15, and with absolutely no prospects in a city that is dying all around them – has at least some kind of The Oldie Spring 2022 53

excuse for his violence and thievery.

It gives him something to do besides fencing stolen car radios and selling freshers massively adulterated hash.

Mr Gillespie may be mocked for his left-wing pieties, but this is as vivid a picture of the Thatcher-inspired decay as you could hope to see.

As for Mungo’s mother, she is one of the great bad mothers – in her midthirties but ruined in drink: awesomely neglectful and selfish, leaving most of the childcare to Jodie. And yet, again, you can see how she got there. And Mungo, who has a soft heart, loves her.

This novel could have been called Mother’s Boy (a title this year already taken twice that I know of).

What keeps you going is the fact that this book is incredibly well written. Not only is its construction flawless; there isn’t a false note in the prose, which can be beautiful. Clever, too: the legend of Saint Mungo has its echoes throughout.

But the miracles attributed to him (the bird brought back to life; the fire rekindled) are here inverted. Hamish prefers to be called Ha-Ha, but he’s not funny. And Jodie has a verbal tic: in moments of stress, which rather abound in Young Mungo, she says, ‘Haaah-ha’ – always in italics, at the end of sentences that themselves contain no laughter; no possibility of laughter.

It is a world vividly and harrowingly realised, right down to the static that can be smelled off the telly if you sit close enough to it, to drown out the sound of what your mother is doing to get her next drink.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Victoria Wood redux LUCY LETHBRIDGE One Day I Shall Astonish the World

By Nina Stibbe Penguin/Viking £14.99 Nina Stibbe is a chronicler of a world immediately recognisable as provincial mid-20th-century Britain.

Even when, as in her latest novel, she is actually writing about the last three decades, her characters are comfortably locked in the endless 1970s childhood of the middle-aged middle class.

This is part of her novels’ great appeal: they are touchingly elegiac in their celebration of a kind of low-tech cosiness.

She has a peerless ear for the befuddling euphemisms of middle England and an astute but tender eye for foibles, delusion and pomposity. Her fictions crackle with 54 The Oldie Spring 2022

sharp dialogue in search of a good sitcom to display it to advantage.

In One Day I Shall Astonish the World, set in an imaginary town called Brankham, clustered about the campus of the University of Rutland, teenage friends Susan and Norma work together in Norma’s parents’ haberdashery store, the Pin Cushion, and discuss their futures.

Keen-to- please Susan is the one who tells the enigmatic but hard-boiled scientist Norma about literature. Norma is the one who goes off and becomes an academic and an award-winning poet.

Meanwhile Susan gets pregnant, marries her boyfriend Roy and stays behind the counter of the Pin Cushion.

It’s discombobulating to meet a Susan, Norma and Roy in the early 1990s. Those names surely belong to young people a generation earlier; to a period when high streets still commonly had haberdashers.

But this is Stibbe’s out-of-time England – and, being intensely familiar, it has its own coherence.

Talkative Susan is the narrator and, like her creator, is an entertaining observer of the changing scene, with a beady eye for absurdity – especially the absurdity of men. In particular, there’s poor old Roy with his Ford Escort and his job at the golf club, his Diet Ribena habit and the way he carefully places a watercress garnish in the ashtray.

Roy won’t eat any vegetables but baked beans and iceberg lettuce. Like all the best comic writers, Stibbe knows how to turn bathos into pathos and then turn it back again. An iceberg lettuce is infinitely funnier than an ordinary lettuce because its name suggests pretensions to grandeur far beyond sandwich-filler. Roy likes to experiment with sex on the stairs,

‘it being easier for his knees’. There are echoes of Victoria Wood and Joe Orton.

Norma marries, too – to a wealthy investor in the Pin Cushion with another unlikely name, Hugo Pack Allen, who turns out to be not only a marijuana dealer on the side but also a ‘sex addict with a lifetime’s disqualification from driving’.

Over the next 30 years, we see Susan and Norma’s lives develop and intersect.

Honey, Susan and Roy’s daughter, gets through a tricky period and ends up with a special friend called Darnley, formerly Heather. It turns out that Roy has had a precocious illegitimate child, Grace, with his former landlady who is a faddish health nut.

When the middle-aged Susan becomes PA to the university VC (Stibbe has some fun with acronym fever), she gets a bit of a crush on smooth academic careerist Crispin Willoughby but (spoiler alert) it takes an unexpected turn.

Stibbe’s talent is for depicting the surreal heights of hyper-ordinariness.

Sometimes this feels a bit strained, like a sentence in which the subordinate clauses unbalance the overall coherence.

We need to know more about Norma’s inner life to work out how she reconciles her glittering literary career with ferrying her husband to twice-weekly dogging sessions in a lay-by on the bypass.

She doesn’t feel as though all her reading has given her more than a good job and a clutch of lampoonable opinions. ‘Isn’t it fabulous,’ she says of Rachel Cusk’s latest. ‘So cleansing.’

There are some delicious moments in this book. Stibbe sees all the silliness of modern life and its changing conventions – but she finds so much to forgive and indulge in her characters that you end up feeling positively optimistic.

An Author Writes

Platinum Queen’s golden smile

TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

How she’s changed – from serious princess to beaming monarch Robert Hardman

Call of duty: Princess Elizabeth’s 21st-birthday broadcast, Victoria Falls, April 1947

Gathering his thoughts at the end of Princess Elizabeth’s international debut, one of the great courtiers of the 20th century offered his verdict on the future Queen.

Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, who would serve four monarchs, wrote home to his wife that the heir presumptive was made of the right stuff. ‘She has come on in the most surprising way,’ noted the King’s Private Secretary. ‘Not a great sense of humour, but a healthy sense of fun… For a child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic of that family.’

Lascelles had just spent the early part of 1947 travelling around southern Africa with the King and Queen, plus the two Princesses who were making their first overseas tour. The trip is best remembered for the future monarch’s still-moving pledge to serve her peoples – for ‘my whole life, whether it be short or long’ – during her 21st-birthday celebrations in Cape Town (even though I have now learned that it was prerecorded in a hotel garden in Victoria Falls in what is now Zimbabwe).

Though the Queen has now comfortably outlived all her predecessors on the throne, both her pledge and Lascelles’s analysis still hold true in almost every regard, as I have discovered while writing my biography.

The one exception is his observation about humour. It is certainly true that she was a serious and conscientious child. As a young woman, Cynthia Gladwyn noted in 1949, she still retained ‘a charming diffidence’ while being ‘seriously aware of her rank and responsibility’.

One striking change through the decades is the way in which the Queen has been seen to smile more and more as the years have progressed.

Back in the early stages of her The Oldie Spring 2022 57

STEVE REIGATE / DAILY EXPRESS

Queen of comedy Far left: at Runnymede, 2021.

Left: the Olympics opening-ceremony spoof with Daniel Craig

reign, courtiers talked about her ‘smiling problem’ in public, particularly when she was on tour. ‘She couldn’t maintain that smile for a motorcade lasting 45 minutes,’ her lady-in-waiting Lady Pamela Hicks said later, recalling the great first post-Coronation tour of 1953-54. ‘You get a twitch.’

What the public rarely got to see was that in private the Queen was a quickwitted, happy person.

There was a marked change around the time of her Golden Jubilee in 2002.

It was a year marked by the death of both her mother and her sister. She had adored them both and spoke to them almost every day – yet the public now detected a new serenity.

By her ninth decade, she was beaming away. And just weeks after the death of Prince Philip, at the age of 95 she was in manifestly good spirits, despite the ongoing sagas of the Dukes of York and Sussex.

Joining the rather po-faced G7 leaders for their group photo at their 2021 summit in Cornwall, the monarch was the one who livened up the proceedings by joking, ‘Aren’t you supposed to look as if you’re enjoying yourselves?’

During her Birthday Parade the next day, the television cameras caught the royal foot tapping away in time to the music.

It is that perception of a morose, even miserable Queen that runs through the Netflix drama of her life, The Crown. It is a depiction that ignores what she was really like in private all along. Former private secretary Sir William Heseltine, who worked for the Queen from the early 1960s to the 1990s, remembers a boss who, in private, was always upbeat, unlike Olivia Coleman’s dour onscreen alter ego: ‘She just looks glum and disapproving all the time. The Queen very seldom had a glum look on her face.’

She has always been much funnier in private than in public, specialising in the 58 The Oldie Spring 2022

dry aside, without being caustic.

During one foreign tour, a nervous photographer managed to drop his glass on the floor at the Queen’s media reception. A few hours later, his camera seized up at an important engagement, prompting her to remark, ‘Just isn’t your day, is it, Mr Reed?’

Many years ago, during Prince Charles’s bachelor days, a new girlfriend arriving at Windsor Castle was greeted with a friendly, ‘Did you find it all right?’

The Queen has always found that a modest injection of levity can make everyone a great deal more comfortable in the most formal situations.

Few occasions come with more layers of ritual and tradition than gatherings of the Order of the Garter, the oldest and noblest order of chivalry. Yet one of their number remembers the ceremony for installing a new knight as a combination of medieval rites, plus some delightful Elizabeth II touches. ‘It’s a terrific show,’ he says. ‘She’s very funny. When she invests you, it’s a mixture of “Oh, we must get this right” and “I can’t bend down – so I’ll get someone else to put the Garter on.” That mix of formality and informality is very typical, I think.’

Why the shift from serious young Queen, back in the days when the monarchy could do no wrong, to the bright, cheery matriarch of more troubled, recent years? In short, say those who know her best, it boils down to confidence.

One Palace veteran described her early years on the throne as ‘the unfinished reign’. Back then, she was determined to do things exactly as her father had done, under the tutelage of avuncular old men such as Lascelles and Winston Churchill, who would routinely refer to her as a ‘child’ while keeping Prince Philip well away from affairs of state.

By the 1970s, she was starting to reign in her own image. Jokes started to appear

in her speeches. Prime Ministers began to find her less biddable, as when Labour’s Jim Callaghan attempted to make the choice of the monarch’s private secretary a political appointment. She and her officials quashed that idea.

Edward Heath might have succeeded in stopping her going to the troublesome 1971 Commonwealth summit in Singapore. When Margaret Thatcher tried to stop her going to the 1979 summit, the Queen was having none of it.

Though her confidence took a serious knock during the reverses of the 1990s, notably the ‘annus horribilis’ of 1992 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, she stuck to her guns.

‘Storms will come and go, some worse than others,’ Sir John Major told me, reflecting on his experiences with the Queen during the 1990s. ‘But she will always put her head down and plough through them. The Queen has always lived by the doctrine “This too shall pass”.’

While the Queen has sometimes been accused of being slow to act, there has never been a charge of panic. Her default mode in the face of a crisis is stillness.

‘During the whole annus horribilis, I don’t remember a single occasion when I went to see her and she exclaimed, “No! What next?” ’ says her former private secretary Charles Anson.

By the Golden Jubilee of 2002, she knew she had turned a corner. By the Diamond Jubilee of 2012 – not long after the marriage of the Cambridges and just before the London Olympics – she was at the height of her powers, more confident than ever, and has remained so ever since.

What on earth would Lascelles be saying if he had seen her Olympics opening-ceremony spoof with James Bond?

Queen of Our Times by Robert Hardman (Macmillan) is out now. He writes for the Daily Mail

Ed McLachlan

‘I suspect match-fixing here’

60 The Oldie Spring 2022

History

Ukraine’s saint – a Swedish Viking

LONDONSTILLS/ ALAMY

The poor, war-torn country is Christian, thanks to St Volodymyr david horspool When I lived in west London, ambassadors at his court.

I used to walk past him on my He also considered Judaism, way to the Tube every day. St because the Khazars, who Volodymyr, ‘Ruler of Ukraine ruled to the East, had adopted 980–1015’, as the inscription that faith. on Leo Mol’s statue has it.

After consulting the If I had happened to be at diplomats, Volodymyr sent out this spot in Holland Park in his own envoys, who made May 1988, I would have seen uncompromising reports on a gathering of the senior their findings: the (Muslim) churchmen of Ukraine in all Bulgars existed in a state of their finery, Orthodox and ‘sorrow and a dreadful stench’; Catholic, celebrating the they saw ‘no glory’ in the unveiling of a statue to a (Catholic) Germans’ worship. founding father of a nation The Khazars had already that was, at the time, still in been discounted, on the grounds the unwelcome embrace of that Volodymyr didn’t want to St Volodymyr in the Soviet Union. embrace a religion whose God Holland Park Though Volodymyr was had shown his anger with his posthumously canonised, most of his followers by exiling them. career was not conspicuously saintly.

Which left the Byzantine Christians, His people were Kyivan Rus’, who prayed in buildings so magnificent that ‘We knew not whether we were in descended from Swedish Vikings – ‘river kings’, as a recent historian (Cat Jarman) heaven or on earth.’ has described them. They travelled down Volodymyr was sold on the idea, the Volga and Dnieper, trading, raiding ordering the destruction of his pagan and intermarrying with Slavic tribes. idols, the baptism of his people and paving the way for the flourishing of Volodymyr came to power after a church building and art under his fraternal bloodbath: one brother killed successor, Yaroslav the Wise. another; Volodymyr killed the survivor.

Volodymyr’s adoption of Christianity He secured his position by attacking was certainly a personal choice. He his neighbours and hiring Swedish rejected Islam on the basis that he mercenaries. He was at this time still couldn’t give up alcohol: ‘Drinking is a pagan – a ‘fire worshipper’ in the description of Muslim writers who were the joy of the Ruses. We cannot exist fascinated and terrified by these northern without that pleasure.’ warriors. But his mother had been a But the conversion was also a good Christian, and Volodymyr seems to have political move, positioning Kyivan sensed that adopting Christianity might Rus’ as a natural ally of the Byzantine be a good move.

Empire. This was confirmed when the That, admittedly, is not exactly the Emperor Basil II offered his sister way his conversion is described in the Anna in marriage.

The connection between Byzantium nearest historical source. Nestor, the and Kyiv was strengthened further 12th-century Kyivan monk who wrote when Volodymyr offered his Swedish the Russian Primary Chronicle, tells the story of Volodymyr browsing through mercenaries, known as Varangians, to monotheisms, discussing Islam and the Emperor. The Varangian Guard Catholic and Byzantine Christianity with became an essential part of Byzantium’s

inner defences for the next four centuries.

Harald Hardrada built a reputation for himself in the Guard as one of the most fearsome fighters in Europe before he came a cropper fighting on his own account at Stamford Bridge in 1066.

In Kyiv, Volodymyr was buried in 1015 in the first stone church to be constructed there, known as the Church of the Tithes because Volodymyr had given up a tenth of his wealth to fund it. That church was destroyed and rebuilt several times, before finally being wiped off the map by the Soviets in 1928.

But Saint Sophia, the cathedral begun

by Volodymyr’s son, is still standing, one of the ‘Seven Wonders of Ukraine’ chosen in a public vote.

Ukraine’s Viking history has often caused controversy, dividing along nationalist lines between those who believe the Vikings mixed in at all levels, and those who argue that Kyiv was basically Slav with a Viking elite on top – known as the ‘Normanists’ and the ‘anti-Normanists’. Each side has their own amateur historian tyrant to draw on.

Hitler said that the ‘Russians would still be living like rabbits’ if it hadn’t been for the Vikings, while Putin managed not to mention the Viking connection at all in his history essay on Russia and Ukraine published online last year.

In both cases, of course, ‘history’ is being harnessed to an evil cause. Only a madman or a fool would use it as justification for an invasion of a sovereign territory. But the London statue of Ukraine’s royal saint is an unimpeachable reminder that this is a very old culture, which has claimed its own identity for a very long time.

The statue stands in front of the Ukrainian Institute, which has some helpful suggestions on how to support their compatriots in their fight for survival (ukrainianinstitute.org.uk) The Oldie Spring 2022 61

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Longhand: the last rites

TOM PLANT

Among the signs of my general decrepitude is the increasing untidiness of my handwriting.

It was never elegant but it used to be reasonably neat and, I think, easy to read.

In the 1980s, I would file handwritten stories from abroad by fax. Now my longhand is messy. The lines stray from the horizontal, the letters are irregular and the words distorted. My writing seems to be reverting to that of early childhood.

I could blame alcohol for this, or old age. Either is plausible. But I suspect the keyboard plays a part: I am simply out of practice. Some teenagers I know are yet to get into practice. Their writing is awful.

An eminent archivist tells me that learned graduate students summon documents from the stacks but are unable to read them: they are so unused to joined-up writing that even the finest copperplate baffles them.

What would Marion Richardson (1892-1946) make of this? Once the youngest member of something called the Primrose Scribbling Club, she became a powerful influence in the teaching of both art and handwriting. ‘Good handwriting,’ she wrote, ‘is, like good manners, really a part of [the author] and something we may all possess.’

Throughout history, of course, some people have had bad handwriting – the fault as much perhaps of bad teachers as of bad pupils. For years, children were rapped on the knuckles for wayward

Engineer abuse Why does every list of professions include doctors, solicitors, teachers, dentists and many others, but never engineers?

I don’t mean the technicians who come to fix washing machines or dishwashers. I mean proper chartered engineers with degrees or even doctorates. They are members of the Institutions

longhand, and left-handers were forced to learn to write right-handed. David Cameron and Barack Obama might have signed their documents very differently had they been born a few decades earlier.

In modern times, though, even after the invention of the typewriter, to be educated has usually meant to be able to write legibly, if not beautifully. Ever since the seventh century, when spoken English was first written down, the ability to write was a precious asset. It certainly was in the 19th century, as Sir Joseph Porter pointed out in HMS Pinafore: ‘As office boy, I made such a mark / That they gave me the post of a junior clerk. / I served the writs with a smile so bland, / And I copied all the letters in a big, round hand… / I copied all the letters in a hand so free, / That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!’

A big, round hand doesn’t get you far nowadays. Word processing and personal computers have made elegant handwriting no more useful than a top hat. Documents may still need signatures, but these can be quite unrelated to the letters in a name.

Donald Trump’s autograph, for instance, might be mistaken for the ECG printout of someone unlucky enough to work for him. Even so, that may tell us something about him. Graphologists claim that his signature reveals ambition, extroversion, dynamism and determination. They could be right.

of Civil Engineers – or Structural, Electrical or Mechanical Engineers – or any of a number of institutions with Royal Charters.

I concluded some time ago that engineers are rarely mentioned because people never think, ‘I need an engineer,’ the way they think they need a doctor, or a dentist, or a solicitor. They notice civil engineers only when, for instance, highway or railway projects are delayed, or a job goes wrong and it affects people going to work.

Never mind that almost everything that makes our lives convenient is the result of design work by teams of engineers and their assistants beavering away. If projects go

Marion Richardson certainly believed that our handwriting reflects something about us. But that doesn’t mean, she said, that we shouldn’t be taught how to form and join letters in a particular way.

‘To write well is as pleasant as to speak well,’ she insisted. ‘Yet we know that, however correct the diction, two voices are never alike. So with handwriting.’

Whatever model is taught, she said, the writing ‘from the very first will express the individuality of the writer’.

Mary Wellesley would go further. In her recent book Hidden Hands, about manuscripts and their makers, she argues that ‘handwriting remains a personal expression of the self’.

What makes manuscripts so compelling to her is that they are made by hands that ‘tell us a great deal about the people attached to them’. Pick up an old document and it is almost as though ‘the hand … might reach out to touch us’. That is the magic of the manuscript.

Something similar will be known to anyone who can remember receiving an envelope addressed in the familiar hand of a parent, a friend or a lover: the pleasure extended to the letter within.

How could it be otherwise? Would Fats Waller sit right down and type himself a letter?

Longhand is going the way of the scribe, the secretary and shorthand.

Too bad: living and loving will be poorer without it.

wrong, it is often because when design engineers have presented their designs to the client, who wants a structure, a length of road or anything else, the client has said, ‘How much!?!,’ and has told the engineer to go away and make it cheaper – with predictable results.

SMALL DELIGHTS Memorising the afternoon bus timetable in a very rural part of the country.

TILLY JAMIESON, BERKSHIRE Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

Utility services such as water and electricity come to our houses courtesy of all manner of professional engineers. But does anybody ever ponder the highly sophisticated distribution network those services are part of? The answer is probably not, and people become aware only when things go wrong with a supply, which they rarely do.

One of the few comforts professional engineers have is from that man of great wisdom, sadly now gone, the Duke of Edinburgh, who said, ‘If God didn’t make it, an engineer did.’ At least it’s nice to be acknowledged by a top man, if by nobody else.

ALAN MORDEY BSC MSC CENG MICE (RETIRED) The Oldie Spring 2022 63

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT BENEDETTA (18) Hot Lesbian Nuns would have been a rather more accurate name for this film.

With admirable chutzpah, Paul Verhoeven, the 83-year-old director, has applied his sex-and-violence trademark to the tale of a 17th-century nun in Counter-Reformation Italy.

Verhoeven directed RoboCop (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992), the masterly Michael Douglas thriller that propelled Sharon Stone to fame in that leg-crossing scene. Benedetta is, if anything, even more graphic.

It’s based on the true story of Benedetta Carlini (1590-1661), Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God in Pescia, near Florence.

Benedetta was investigated by the Church for her stigmata and her visions of being married to Jesus Christ. Christ allegedly told her the plague would hit Pescia because of the residents’ sins.

All this is covered in the film. But Verhoeven’s real focus is on the lesbian affair Benedetta had with a fellow nun, Sister Bartolomea. The investigation found that they did indeed have an affair – and Benedetta was sacked and jailed.

But she was right about one thing – the plague did indeed come to Pescia in 1631.

So if you want to watch lots of topless shots of two gorgeous actresses, Virginie Efira (playing Benedetta) and Daphné Patakia (as Bartolomea), this is the film for you. It’s like a French Carry On film: their habits are forever slipping down to their waists, and Verhoeven’s camera conveniently catches their exposed breasts.

It gets even ruder when Bartolomea takes a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary and fashions it into an object for Benedetta to, um, play with. At this point, the film is essentially soft porn – 64 The Oldie Spring 2022

17th-century porn: Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia) and Benedetta (Virginie Efira)

and I certainly wouldn’t advise any devout Christians to watch it.

That said, soft porn was fine when it was injected into a film such as Basic Instinct, with an edge-of-your-seat plot and a brilliant screenplay by Joe Eszterhás.

The plot of Bernadetta is a good one, as well as a grippingly salacious one.

Verhoeven plays with the idea of whether Bernadetta inflicted her own stigmata or whether she was the real deal.

The acting by the two principal women is convincing, even when they have to deal with some ludicrous situations that engineer them into naked grapples. Charlotte Rampling pulls off a fine cameo as Soeur Felicita, a previous abbess who doubts Benedetta’s authenticity.

The theme of the plague, too, has chilling modern resonances. Even though Benedetta was filmed before the pandemic – its release has been delayed because of it – the sudden appearance of black lumps on the flesh and the infected fleas that cause them give you the real creeps.

Best of all are the sets, which take advantage of some of the greatest hits of European architecture: Perugia,

Montepulciano and several Cistercian abbeys in France. Just point a camera at those old stones and the past springs immediately to life.

But Verhoeven’s screenplay – cowritten with David Birke and based on Judith C Brown’s book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (1986) – lets him down. It’s just too stodgy and selfconsciously olden-days.

There’s no reason a film set in the 17th century has to have cat-sat-on-themat dialogue – as if everyone born before 1700 spoke only in simple sentences and never said anything funny or clever.

You can set a compelling film in the distant past. Just look at The Name of the Rose (1986), set in 1327 in an Italian monastery, with the plot, acting and screenplay as good as anything set in the 21st century.

The Blackadder series, the first season apart, showed how you could be funny – and have natural, modern dialogue – in any historical period you like.

I hope Paul Verhoeven has another go at an olden-days thriller. He can keep the soft porn if he wants but he must sex up the screenplay, too.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN Touring nationwide Cinema used to look to the theatre for inspiration. Nowadays, it’s the other way round.

The best musical I saw last year was Mary Poppins, a brilliant stage version of a classic film, and the best musical I’ve seen this year (or will see all year) is this silky adaptation of that timeless movie Singin’ in the Rain.

Singin’ in the Rain premièred at Chichester Festival Theatre back in 2011 and then went into the West End. It had a run at Sadler’s Wells last summer, and now it’s touring, with a new cast. It’s a perfect tonic for these troubled times – a seamless show full of wonderful songs which makes you want to dance your worries away.

The film is now 70 years old, but it hasn’t dated in the slightest (I saw it again just the other day and it still felt as fresh as ever.) Sensibly, this stage version sticks pretty faithfully to the MGM original. After all, it’s commonly – and quite rightly – regarded as the greatest musical movie ever made. Why change a winning formula?

What made the film so good? The songs, of course, and the dancing, but above all it was the interplay between the three principal performers: Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor. Naturally, the stars of this stage show can’t hope to imitate them, and thankfully they don’t try. Rather, they create a relationship that’s all their own.

American Sam Lips has the unenviable task of filling Kelly’s dancing shoes, and although there’ll only ever be one Gene Kelly, he brings something new to the part of Don Lockwood, the silent-movie star whose career is thrown into crisis by the arrival of the talkies.

His footwork is faultless, and beyond even that his sensitivity brings the role alive. His Lockwood hides insecurity beneath a brash Hollywood veneer. But when he falls for aspiring starlet Kathy Selden, his compassion shines through.

Charlotte Gooch is enchanting as Selden – her rich singing voice illuminates every note – and again it’s the quality of her acting that elevates her performance above the level of showbiz razzmatazz. It’s relatively easy to wow an audience – far harder to make them feel.

Ross McLaren is full of fun as Cosmo Brown, Lockwood’s faithful sidekick, with an instinctive flair for comedy and a smile that lights up the stage. His gutsy

Dancin’ in the rain: Sam Lips as Don Lockwood

rendition of Make ’Em Laugh deservedly brought the house down.

You really believe in these characters.

This belief sustains the drama, making this production far more than just another jukebox musical. Yet ironically, a jukebox musical was exactly how Singin’ in the Rain started out. It began as a ragbag of golden oldies, nearly all of which had already featured in other MGM films. The title song was a number one hit for ukulele-player Cliff Edwards way back in 1929.

The thing that saved Singin’ in the Rain from B-movie status was the warm and sassy screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the writing team behind Gene Kelly’s On the Town. Since most of the songs were old favourites, they decided to set it in 1927, focusing on the opening of The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, which killed off silent movies. I was glad to see that so much of Comden and Green’s script has survived.

Every aspect of Jonathan Church’s production is faithful to the spirit of the film, without ever descending into pastiche. Andrew Wright’s choreography is spectacular and often steamy, but it’s sensual rather than raunchy, and never overly acrobatic. It was Kelly’s naturalism that was most impressive, not his athleticism. Somehow, he seemed to stroll through these numbers, rather than dance. This cast all do him proud.

But the big surprise – for me, at least – was Faye Tozer’s feisty performance as Lina Lamont, the leading lady with the awful voice whose inability to sing, dance or act is revealed by the advent of the

talkies. I knew Tozer was an accomplished singer and dancer (you have to be very good at these things to send them up) but I had no idea she was such a fine comic actress.

How refreshing to see a show that makes you feel better about the world around you. And how nice that these evergreen songs still make you hum along, a century after they were written.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE My COVID sickbed was an ideal, martyrish place from which to hear news bulletins, I found: trapped and miserable, vaguely hallucinating.

Hoping, every hour, that someone might have dealt the coup de mort to the little madman always referred to by our Ukrainian lodger (who was with us ten years, waiting for his visa) as ‘Putler’.

Of course it’s the pictures that ‘show, not tell’ about atrocities of war, as Sarah Dunant said in A Point of View. But the power of radio – today, as in 1940 – comes through the words, speculation, analysis and straightforward truths emanating from the sainted and trustworthy Lyse Doucet, Jeremy Bowen and co.

There was much to tell about the strutting, dead-eyed homunculus in the series Putin (BBC Sounds) from the well-informed voices of Oliver Bullough, sundry Russians, Misha Glenny and even Andrew Lloyd Webber (who was warned off mentioning Bulgakov to Putin The Oldie Spring 2022 65

NETFLIX

because of some imagined superstition).

There was more from Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell on their The Rest Is History podcast.

Sometimes, voices of friends hove into earshot. There was Maureen Lipman offering a dose of laughter, with a young Canada goose called Ryan Gosling (Maureen and Friends, Radio 4). Then came Richard Cohen’s book Making History, being read in ten parts, with the line ‘Machiavelli was not really very Machiavellian.’

And Simon Jenkins was down the line to The Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2: ‘I totally sympathise with the Ukrainians, but if every country in a dispute with its neighbours can ask the West to come to its aid, on pain of a third World War, it’s just what Putin wants. This is exactly how world wars do start… It is not our dispute.’ That did wake me up.

There was a spate of north-east accents on Radio 4. Hailing from the north-east myself, I was braced for it, having just bestowed plaudits on Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent for nailing the Tyneside accent in the film The Duke.

Radio 4’s eight-part Our Friends in the North began, revived by Peter Flannery from his TV serial of 30 years ago. Its narrative started in 1965, just when I was up there in my gap year, learning to be a reporter.

It’s all so familiar and horrible. T Dan Smith was intent on transforming Newcastle into Brasilia, demolishing the old city centre, aided by his architect John Poulson. Dirty money, lying politicians, urban neglect and decay, high-rise buildings that were deathtraps… Couldn’t happen today, eh?

But the accents were impeccably Geordie.

As they were again in I Must Have Loved You, a play about the more palatable Tyneside association with music. It was 1965 again – the era of the Animals. It was a collaboration between Sting (once Gordon Sumner from Whitley Bay) and Michael Chaplin.

Accurate references – to Chas Chandler and the J G Windows record shop – enhanced it, as did the Sting songs. I wonder how many other listeners were checking the authenticity.

Kate Hutchinson’s recommended podcast The Last Bohemians featured the artist Maggi Hambling, who had just given an interview to John Wilson’s This Cultural Life on Radio 4. I thought I’d compare them. Well, they were almost word for word the same: both interviewers simpered slightly. But then Hambling – posh, smoky, scathing – is 66 The Oldie Spring 2022

always good value, like Hockney. At the end, she told Wilson she just had to go to the lavatory.

‘It’s been fine, John,’ she was heard to say. ‘Thank you.’

Wilson (obviously wounded): ‘Fine?’

But it was Hutchinson who got her to be more quotable: ‘I’m a woman. I’m a dyke. And I’m older. All very hip things to be.’

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON Bonkerton, as Bridgerton (Netflix) is now known, is back, with its intimacy co-ordinator again presiding over the rumpy-pumpy.

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it and her name is Lizzy Talbot. Talbot’s remit is to choreograph the sex scenes while ensuring that the actors are in a ‘safe space’, which means creating three barriers between the bodies. These are achieved by a semi-inflated netball which allows the couple to roll around without touching, merkins (pubic wigs) for that extra layer of covering, invisible, strapless thongs which stick to the bum, and dainty pelvic cushions made of lambswool.

Lizzy’s kitbag also contains nipple daisies, breath mints, lubricating aloe vera, heat pads and glycerine spray. We’ve come a long way from Last Tango in Paris, where Bertolucci’s only prop was butter.

With this paraphernalia in mind, I re-watched the shagging montage in Season 1, where Daphne and the Duke of Hastings release their pent-up desire all over his country estate (filmed at Castle Howard). ‘There’s so much going on there,’ Talbot explained in an interview. ‘We were inside, outside, up ladders; we were everywhere! We were working in the dry and in the rain, on flagstone floors and up against walls and in Regency beds.’

It apparently took three months to perfect the three-minute sequence, and if this is the effect of deflated balls and woolly cushions and heat pads, the sex shops are

stocking the wrong hardware. Bridgerton offered the best sex on television. Neither meaningless nor embarrassing, nor extraneous to the plot, here was an articulate exchange between two partners with a great deal to say to each other. With a starter as good as this, what could Season 2 posssibly offer as a main course?

The eight Bridgerton siblings, named in alphabetical order, belong to the grandest family in Grosvenor Square.

Having watched Daphne discover her libido, we’re now following the fortunes of the eldest, Anthony (Jonathan Bailey), who is also the Viscount.

Our first view of Anthony, in Season 1, was up against a tree in Green Park in the company of an opera singer, his handsome bottom heaving up and down. The bottom itself, I now understand, was encased in skin-tight, bottom-coloured underwear.

Anyway, Anthony, 29, the paterfamilias of his seven siblings, now has his breeches back on and is finding himself a viscountess among the debutantes.

Because love causes nothing but pain, he is opting for a business arrangement with this season’s ‘diamond’, the anodyne Edwina Sharma (Charithra Chandran), fresh off the boat from Bombay. Edwina is chaperoned by her statuesque sister, Kate (Simone Ashley), a hunting, shooting tornado of a girl determined that Edwina should marry for love. Kate’s opposition to Lord Bridgerton as a match and Lord B’s irritation with Kate’s interference result in an articulate exchange, and we all know what that means.

Except that the bonking in Season 2 is much ado about nothing. Lizzy Talbot’s genius can be admired in two minutes at most over the seven episodes, which will leave 40 million excited viewers as deflated as one of those netballs.

For those not yet addicted to Bridgerton, it may come as a surprise that the Regency marriage mart contains Indian debutantes, but the world reimagined by the show’s creator, Chris

Phew! Phoebe Dynevor (Daphne) and Regé-Jean Page (the Duke of Hastings)

Ed McLachlan

Van Dusen, is a multicultural utopia. The Duke of Hastings is black, as is Queen Charlotte herself (Golda Rosheuvel). The idea comes from the suggestion that Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was directly descended from a black branch of the Portuguese royal family.

In Bridgerton’s ‘what if’ version of history, the wife of George III opens up the court to other people of colour, and this – along with the romping – is the selling point of the series, turning it from a formulaic romcom to a mildly subversive and surprisingly witty jeu d’esprit. This is not colour-blind casting because racial integration is central to the plot.

Meanwhile Lady Whistledown, whose identity we now know, continues to influence opinion in her weekly scandal sheets and Eloise, the fifth Bridgeton sibling (Claudia Jessie) is attending talks about women’s rights in Bloomsbury.

On the other side of the square, the newly widowed Lady Featherington is trying to marry off her daughters while preparing to share her home with her husband’s heir. If the Bridgerton family storyline is a remix of Pride and Prejudice, the Featherington storyline is Sense and Sensibility, with Mrs Dashwood and her three daughters dependent on near-relatives.

Season 2 is as relaxing as an opium pipe.

Sadly, however, it is all good clean fun.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE CHOIR REFORM AT ST JOHN’S, CAMBRIDGE: ALLEGRI’S MISERERE ‘The Choir of St John’s, Cambridge,’ crowed the college’s newly appointed Master, Heather Hancock, ‘has a stellar reputation for its contribution to the rich choral tradition of the UK.’ How typical of our times, then, that one of Mrs Hancock’s earliest announcements concerned the ending of a key element in the choir’s distinctive contribution to that tradition: its all-male make-up. This, in part, ‘to honour the College’s overarching commitment to [gender] equality’.

How much Mrs Hancock knows about the inner workings of the UK choral tradition, I’ve no idea. One person who might is the chair of the committee that appointed her, Professor Emerita Deborah Howard, an architectural historian who made extensive on-site use of the St John’s choir during research for her groundbreaking study Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice (Yale, 2009).

The differences between girls’ and

boys’ voices, Howard has written, is ‘much debated’. Nowadays it is campaigners who mostly have the floor: singer Lesley Garrett, who in 2018 launched a media campaign against Cambridge’s King’s College choir (‘an excuse to hand on male privilege’); or the fellow who wrote to Private Eye recently suggesting that the paper’s calling all-male cathedral choirs ‘one of the glories of English culture’ was ‘akin to defending fox-hunting’.

Highly trained boy trebles are, of course, the tenors and basses of the future. Ponder, if you will, what the lessening of that supply entails.

A particular enrichment of our choral tradition these past 70 years has come from a revolution in the fashioning of boys’ voices initiated by two remarkable choir-makers: George Malcolm at Westminster Cathedral and George Guest during his 40 years at St John’s.

The floaty head-voice that Victorian choirmasters had encouraged boys to perfect – a thing, at best, of ineffable beauty – was anathema to Malcolm.

What he sought was the sound of the boys of the great Continental cathedral choirs: one that’s gutsier, more emotionally engaged, with greater depth of colour. ‘A strong, resonant chest sound,’ says David Hill, a The Oldie Spring 2022 67

The choir of St John’s, Cambridge

former director of music at St John’s, ‘that boys produce naturally.’

It was Malcolm’s 1959 Westminster Cathedral recording of Victoria’s Tenebrae Responsories that first took our choral community by the ears, though it was the recording (now on Decca) of the Missa brevis Benjamin Britten wrote for Malcolm that same year that offers the more immediate sense of how viscerally engaging that revolution was.

Another revolution, in which King’s and St John’s were closely involved, was the appropriation by Anglican choirs of Gregorio Allegri’s setting of the Miserere, the great penitential psalm at the end of that candle-dimming service of Tenebrae (‘darkness’) that used to be performed in Catholic churches during the final days of Holy Week.

Allegri’s was the last of 16 settings of the Miserere composed for the Sistine Chapel choir between 1514 and 1638 – and the most famous. Encased in legend, it became a powerful drawer of crowds during the centuries that followed, as the great and the good of the musical and literary worlds jostled to join the mayhem the event inspired in this most theatrical of ecclesiastical spaces. (For a ringside seat, read Dickens’s report in Pictures from Italy.)

The entire story has now been told by Graham O’Reilly in an academically rigorous yet thrillingly narrated and beautifully written book, Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel (Boydell, £45). There are parts of the story that might do service as the basis for a Netflix blockbuster. Nothing is more surprising, however, than that Anglican takeover.

This took root in 1963 with a famous recording at King’s, Cambridge, in which the 12-year-old Roy Goodman, 68 The Oldie Spring 2022

unrehearsed and fresh from the rugby field, was the treble soloist. Rarely have those stellar high Cs – never part of Allegri’s score but who’s counting? – been sung with such consummate ease.

That was sung in English, though by the 1970s the psalm was again being sung in Latin, in a performing edition by George Guest that regularly featured in the BBC’s Ash Wednesday broadcast from St John’s. It’s also used in a matchless 1990 St Paul’s Cathedral recording, Jeremy Budd the treble soloist, directed by another former St John’s musician, John Scott.

Last autumn, the St John’s choir released a CD, The Tree (Signum Records), a moving retrospective of its work with four directors. Three of the finest tracks come from the current choir under Andrew Nethsingha. They include the 34-year-old James Long’s thrilling Isaiah-inspired and trumpetaccompanied anthem Sicut aquilae (Like eagles).

It starts with the cry ‘Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard?’, two questions we might well ask of the college’s current management.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON SONGS IN WARTIME So far, nothing from Bob Geldof, and nothing from those celebrities who came together to warble Imagine on Zoom during the lowest point of the pandemic, but it can’t be long now.

The first Rock 4 Ukraine gig has been announced (in Bournemouth, headline act, the tribute band Meetloaf) and dealers in NFTs (please don’t ask me to explain) are selling one-off digital images of Artists for Ukraine such as Tina Turner. Turns out that where there’s trucks in muck, there’s brass.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has blotted out everything else and, in the five clear minutes between the end of the pandemic and the

beginning of the Third World War, I keep having this thought: my father was born during the Second World War. He is now past 80 and the next one is upon us, which means his entire life has been one of peace and prosperity. Talk about timing being everything, eh?

My father – along with Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney – came of age with protest songs, which he sang to us, his children. We Shall Overcome.

If I Had a Hammer. This Land Is Your Land. Blowin’ in the Wind. These were the first songs we ever knew, living in America in the 1960s, until the assassination of Bobby Kennedy freaked out my mother so much that we came back to England. My father didn’t sing us war songs, though war songs are just as powerful, in a sweeter, more plangent way.

What will the soundtrack be to this one? There are no reference points.

Nobody under 80-something has been in a world war before. We have to imagine the raw emotion coursing through the moist-eyed listener in the 1940s as they heard Vera Lynn singing about the white cliffs of Dover on a crackly Decca LP, or Flanagan & Allen hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line, or as they travelled even further down memory lane to the Great War, Pack Up Your Troubles or Keep the Home Fires Burning.

This new war of 2022 is not in a faraway country of which we know little.

My husband took my elder son to watch Liverpool play Real Madrid in Kyiv in 2018!

Nothing can convey in music the escalating awfulness of events. Any attempt to write a song to channel the fury of the civilised world as it contemplates the icy tundra of Putin’s Siberian soul would be catchpenny and bathetic. Ra Ra RatPutin – Russia’s Greatest Death Machine?

Let us only hope the war is over (if you want it, as John Lennon said) before anyone tries.

COVID serenade: Gal Gadot, Mark Ruffalo, Will Ferrell and Jamie Doran sing Imagine

Above: Raphael’s The Procession to Calvary (c 1504-5).

Far left: Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Julius II (1511-12).

Left: Donatello’s bronze David (c 1440s)

EXHIBITIONS

NATIONAL GALLERY / ELA BIALKOWSKA

HUON MALLALIEU RAPHAEL National Gallery 9th April to 31st July DONATELLO Palazzo Strozzi and Bargello, Florence, to 31st July A month ago, the National Gallery announced that Raphael’s The Holy Family, in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, will no longer be included in this Raphael show. No one was surprised.

We must hope it isn’t impounded like an oligarch’s yacht. The exhibition of about 90 works will still include 17 stellar loans from Italy, France, America and Germany, and the Gallery’s own group is unrivalled.

Originally intended to mark the 500th anniversary of the painter’s death in 1520,

it should have run just after the still larger show at the Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, so that international loans could be seen at both. COVID put paid to that, but a walk-through of the Rome show can still be found on the Quirinale website.

Such was Raphael’s standing that when he died at 37, contemporaries recorded his age as 33, making him the same age as Christ. His death is considered to mark the close of the High Renaissance, and his reputation has waxed and waned ever since.

To many, he was the ‘prince of painters’, and detractors have criticised his long influence on painting – well into the 19th century – rather than the man himself. This was true even of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose real target was his great admirer ‘Sir Sloshua’ Reynolds.

What the latter saw in Raphael as ‘simple, grave and majestic dignity’, others have found over-sweet. It is time for a balanced re-evaluation.

Like Leonardo, Raphael was a manyfaceted artist: painter, sublime

draughtsman, printmaker, architect, designer and antiquarian. This show gives a complete overview of his short but intense career, including the powerful portraits of Castiglione and Altoviti. It is only sad that we cannot know how he might have responded to Michelangelo’s developing Mannerism.

Donatello (c 1386-1466) was born about a century before Raphael. His bronze David has been described as the first major Renaissance sculpture, as well as the first free-standing nude since antiquity. It is usually displayed in the Florence Bargello, its home since 1865 and the stage for the last Donatello show, 80 years ago. That display has been partially recreated.

Works have been assembled from around Italy, including the original marble reliefs from the outside pulpit at Prato. Many, such as the bronzes from the font at Siena, have been moved for the first time from the churches in which Donatello installed them 600 years ago.

It makes for a superb array of loans.

The Oldie Spring 2022 69

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER MY STORMY WEATHER Through torrential rain, the white van bravely sploshed its way from south Devon to south-west Wales. Comforted by refreshments and a brief walkabout at the National Botanic Garden of Wales, just 20 miles from our door, both driver and navigator were with us to unload their cargo shortly after midday.

Not a vast consignment compared to some of my previous extravaganzas, it nevertheless gave me, my partner and our day-a-week gardener plenty to be getting on with.

Space for colourful woodland planting was granted by winter storms Arwen, Barra, Corrie, Dudley and, most noxious of all, Eunice. The latter finished off what her cohorts failed to achieve – the complete uprooting of a fine, rare, 100-year-old, 40ft-tall ‘Old Cornish Red’ rhododendron that was something of a local landmark.

Our new shipment bestowed more than 100 new plants – including multiples for close companionship of cotinus, enkianthus, magnolia, osmanthus, parrotia and that glorious small-flowered lavender-blue Rhododendron augustinii ‘Werrington’. Each in its own way was chosen to confer spring or autumn floral and foliar colour or rich fragrance.

Vigorous Cotinus ‘Grace’, one of the ‘smoke bush’ clan, bears subtle, soft, purplish leaves that turn a magnificent long-lasting scarlet during many September and October weeks. Like its close cousin ‘Flame’ (both raised by former ace propagator Peter Dummer at the world-famous Hillier Nurseries in Hampshire), it stands magnificently alongside some of the best late-season Japanese maples, furnishing the autumn garden with breathtaking splendour.

Much too can be said of the less-familiar

Enkianthus displays down the years; they campanulatus, a tough now flaunt another. Common ornamental woodlander orange crocosmias proliferate from the Far East, blessed hereabouts, proving that the also with a showy genus thrives locally. As profusion of small flowers centrepieces for the pots, I at this time of year. chose one called ‘Citronella’, The magnolias are of an almost identical shade of the stellata kind – smallyellow to match the colour Luma apiculata in flower growing and, in my of the house. I’ve partnered experience, slightly better them with some blues: able to tolerate those damaging late Caryopteris ‘Dark Knight’, Perovskia frosts that all-too-often wreak havoc on ‘Little Spire’, Penstemon ‘Heavenly Blue’ this noble tribe. and that timeless, low-growing good-doer, I might, though, be a hostage to fortune cerulean Campanula poscharskyana. when it comes to Myrtus luma (now I’m told the wholesaler’s white van had renamed Luma apiculata), a plant I’ve a drier homeward run – as I hope it will long admired in favoured Cornish and again if and when extravaganzas (or, more Irish gardens. Its fabulous, cinnamonlikely, destructive storms) strike again. hued bark, like antler velvet to the touch, is something of a marvel. We pray, David’s Instagram account is therefore, that it’ll settle happily in our @hortusjournal none-too-dissimilar near-coastal climate.

KITCHEN GARDEN Why, you might ask, was I buying from a nursery 200 miles away when, on SIMON COURTAULD our doorstep, we have the all-providing WILD GARLIC Farmyard Nurseries that I wrote about in March? Answer: the Devonshire folks are I may have mentioned before that I have wholesalers and I was buying in not had much success with keeping garlic quantities qualifying for trade prices. grown at home – certainly not for the Individual gardeners with smaller several months claimed by some requirements should club together for gardeners. Garlic cloves should be similar gains. planted in late autumn and lifted in My supplier also raises herbaceous summer, but another member of the perennials – plants for the stately row of allium family is ready to be picked in eight large terracotta pots, with four of spring. This is wild garlic, a hardy them on each side flanking the sunny perennial also known as ramsons. front portico. Now more than 40 years Adapting, and misquoting, Oberon old, they were fired at a high temperature in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I know to prevent frost damage by the renowned a bank near here whereon the wild garlic Wrecclesham Pottery on the Surrey/ grows. At this time of year, the plant has Hampshire border, founded by one white, star-shaped flowers and leaves Absalom Harris in 1873, and are still resembling those of lily-of-the-valley. It functioning. Two foot tall and 20 inches grows so abundantly, with its carpet of across, each requiring a barrowload of flowers, that I felt I would do no harm compost, the pots now exhibit an by lifting a clump and replanting it in exquisite mossy patina. our garden.

They’ve housed myriad botanical That was three years ago, and I am The Oldie Spring 2022 71

looking forward to another crop of the pungent leaves this month (the flowers are edible, too). The Latin name, Allium ursinum, is a bit of a mystery, but may go back to the time when bears roamed the forests and dug up the bulbs, rather as dogs and pigs do with truffles.

The 16th-century herbalist John Gerard advised that wild garlic may ‘very well be eaten in April and May with butter, of such as are of strong constitution, and labouring men’.

However, you do not need to be a labouring man to enjoy the taste of the leaves which, once cooked, lose some of their strength. The smell and flavour are most pronounced when the plant is picked and the leaves are bruised.

It had not occurred to me that wild garlic seed would be available, but it can be obtained from Pennard Plants of Shepton Mallet, Somerset. The seeds can be sown under glass, either in March or in autumn and planted out in spring.

Alternatively, spread the seed in moist, well-drained soil, under trees in semi-shade, from April onwards. Wild garlic can also be grown from bulbs.

As for the name ramsons, might it derive from Aries the ram, the zodiac sign for March/April, when the plant appears above ground?

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD EASTER TREATS The great festival of Easter, the most important feast day of the Orthodox Christian year, is celebrated throughout Eastern Europe at the time of spring planting.

With many families no more than a generation away from the land, returning home for the holiday is a chance to exchange news, revisit old memories and provide willing hands to help in the fields.

For the Ruthenes of Ludomirova, Ukrainians marooned in the High Tatras on the Slovak-Ukrainian border in the wake of the Second World War, the traditions of Easter now have a particular poignancy. At the time of my visit in 1991 – the year Ukraine declared independence from Soviet Russia – a film crew from Kyiv, to the surprise of the villagers, came looking for their roots.

The patriarch of Ludomirova’s monastic church was free throughout the years of Communism to celebrate a Mass of Resurrection on Holy Saturday and, thereafter, to sprinkle holy water over his congregation’s Easter baskets. These – prettily covered with hand-embroidered 72 The Oldie Spring 2022

Hercules, author of Mamushka, an award-winning cookbook on her native Ukraine. Serves 2-4.

Juice of a large lemon 2 tsp caster sugar 1 fennel bulb 150g tender young rhubarb 150g radishes Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

cloths and filled with freshly baked bread, newly churned butter, ham from the brine pot and the last of the winter stores – had first to be taken to the graveyard to ensure ancestral goodwill.

Then the baskets were placed in a double line outside the holy confines of the church with the covers drawn back to receive a sprinkling of holy water from the patriarch. It was also a reminder to a higher power of the need for spring rain.

The baskets could be taken home for the enjoyment of all (including me, a fortunate guest). The ham was carved in thick, pink slices to eat with pickles, relishes and buttery babka still warm from the oven. And, in pride of place, an all-egg dumpling as round and golden as the sun.

Easter egg dumpling This unusual recipe, a solid sphere of scrambled egg, looks decorative, slices up neatly and goes well with the last of the ham from the brine pot. Serves 6.

1 litre full-cream milk 10 large eggs, whisked 1 tsp salt Extra egg for glazing Bring the milk to the boil, remove from the heat and whisk in the eggs. Add the salt and keep whisking until the egg is thoroughly scrambled.

Tip the mixture into a sieve lined with a clean linen cloth (maybe a large square of old sheet), tie the ends together and hang in a warm place to drain – overnight is best – with a bowl underneath to catch the whey (save it for pancakes).

When it’s perfectly drained and firm, tip it on to a baking sheet, paint with beaten egg, and slip it into the breadbaking oven – 350oF/180oC/Gas 4 – for 10 minutes to give it a shine.

Olia’s rhubarb-and-radish pickle A fresh little relish to accompany the Easter ham recommended by Olia

Mix the lemon juice, sugar and a pinch of salt and pepper in a middle-sized bowl.

Trim the fennel, removing the tough outer stalks and reserving the fronds.

Slice the rhubarb, radishes and fennel as finely as possible, then toss with the seasoned lemon juice in the bowl. Leave for 10 minutes to pickle a little, then finish with roughly chopped fennel fronds.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE BURGER MASTERS Another gastronomic watershed in the West End: a vegan burger bar.

V Honest Burgers, with its 100-per-cent plant-based burgers, was launched in January, at 17 Garrick Street, bang next door to the eponymous club.

To celebrate, I have sent vouchers to the PM’s three sirloin-loving security guards, who are still in hock to Stephen Glover, their erstwhile host, who was shaking a tin at The Oldie’s 30th-anniversary party last month.

Burgers have come a long way since 1953, when J Lyons converted their Coventry Street branch into a Wimpy.

Unlike McDonald’s, whose founding brothers, Dick and Mac, had dispensed with cutlery and plates in 1948 in a bid to increase speed and drive down costs, Wimpy clung to a Formica formality.

The average time spent at a table by its customers was a graceful 20 minutes.

By 1969, there were 461 Wimpys adorning our high streets. Yet the svelte grey burgers, whose diameter was about two inches, were not the only attraction. Let’s hear it for the Bender Brunch (two halved beef tomatoes encircled by a grooved frankfurter) and the Knickerbocker Glory. The first McDonald’s opened in 1974, followed

by Burger King, again in Coventry Street, in 1977.

In that same year, Broadway’s Joe Allen opened in the basement of 13 Exeter Street. You’ll remember the shock of it: the speakeasy Bugsy Malone atmosphere, the walls engulfed in theatre

posters and those red-and-whitecheck tablecloths.

Yet for me, the greatest shock was that this glamorous restaurant sold burgers, then the staple breakfast, lunch and dinner of lorry drivers. And I didn’t have to ask for ketchup. That bête noire of the refined classes was already on the table. I was living the dream.

These burgers were huge. And they were actually made of minced beef. None of us ever questioned the content of a Wimpy burger, but it was widely, if silently, assumed, that the cow had barely a walk-on role.

So what sadness when I read the legend was closing – only to be replaced by elation at the news of its reopening in nearby Burleigh Street. Those Seventies theatre posters (and Elaine Paige) are still there. And those burgers, as we aficionados know, are still not on the menu. They are ex-directory and have to be asked for. Hurry back!

Beautiful towns like Bradford-onAvon deserve a great restaurant. And the Bunch of Grapes is just that. Set in a stunning Georgian building, it’s owned by people clever enough to appeal to all budgets and tastes, as if it were a pub.

The ground floor has an elegant bar where you can as easily order a pint of Butcombe as a Negroni. You can even bring your dog, after a good walk along the Kennet and Avon canal.

The panelled first-floor dining room is pure elegance, with long tables down each side. And the menu matches it. It’s the perfect venue for roast beef (£18.50) on a Sunday. Needless to say, they too offer various burgers, not least one made of Cajun cauliflower and garlic mayo.

Save for the smoked cheddar, it would be worthy of V Honest Burgers in Garrick Street.

Joe Allen, 2 Burleigh Street, London WC2E 7PX; tel: 020 7836 0651; www.joeallen.co.uk The Bunch of Grapes, 14 Silver Street, Bradford-on-Avon BA15 1JY; open Thurs-Sun; bookings at table@thebunchofgrapes.com; www.thebunchofgrapes.com

DRINK BILL KNOTT THE ART OF THE APERITIVO The barman at the Pino Azzurro in Linguaglossa, a small town north-east of Mount Etna, looked at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Negroni?’

Frowning, he rolled the word around his mouth a few times, and then tapped it into his phone.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, reaching for bottles of gin, Campari and Martini Rosso, before combining equal measures of each in a small wine glass with no ice.

I should have stuck to beer. I thought the Negroni had conquered the world, but there is at least one corner of Sicily it has yet to penetrate.

The island’s reluctance to embrace the concept of the aperitivo – drinks and a few snacks before dinner, something of an art form in Turin and Milan – may simply be because Sicilians do not finish lunch until around five in the afternoon. Up north, however, it is practically a sacrament, from cicchetti and prosecco in Venice to the spritzes and stuzzicati of Bologna and beyond.

It has even spawned the apericena, bastard offspring of the aperitivo and dinner, much beloved of impecunious students who can nurse a solitary beer and load up with carbs for 15€ or so.

The genius of the Negroni, as we know, lies in its use of alcohol as a mixer, but those wishing to pace themselves more prudently might prefer to scan the bar shelf for an amaro, to be mixed with ice and a splash of soda. Or, might I suggest, to make a bicicletta.

Amari – ‘bitters’ – are generally intended to be consumed chilled and neat as digestivi, to settle the stomach after a good meal. The history of many of them involves monks, apothecaries, and a bewildering selection of mountain herbs, happily blurring the lines between religion, medicine and intoxication.

But they are also admirably suited to being judiciously mixed with white wine (it is the perfect way to use that dodgy bottle of Pinot Grigio that has been sitting in the fridge door for a month), lots of ice, enough soda to provide a prickle of bubbles and perhaps a slice of orange.

Campari – technically an amaro, but invariably taken before a meal – is the classic choice for a bicicletta, but you might substitute amari based on rhubarb (rabarbaro: try Nardini’s version), artichoke (Cynar is the classic brand), or more nebulous concoctions such as Averna or Fernet-Branca.

There is even, so I have discovered, an amaro from Etna, made with ‘more than 26 herbs and aromatic plants’: although, at the Pino Azzurro, the ice might still be a struggle.

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: an intriguing white made by an Englishman in Romania; a Spanish red with an almost Burgundian complexity; and a great example of how well Cabernet Franc can perform in South Africa. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Solevari Reserve Feteasca Regala, DOC, Viile Timisului, Romania 2018, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 A mouthful of a name and a mouthful of a wine: terrific dry white with delicate stone-fruit flavours, made by Bristolian Phil Cox. Vermell, Celler del Roure, DO Valencia, Spain 2019, offer price £13.50, case price £162.00 Made from Garnacha, Monastrell and the indigenous Mando grape, and aged in amphoras: a beautifully balanced, medium-weight red.

Cabernet Franc ‘Dolomite’, Raats, Stellenbosch, South Africa 2019, offer price £13.50, case price £162.00 Plush, silk-smooth, fruitforward Cabernet Franc made by Bruwer Raats.

Splendid with roast lamb.

Mixed case price £147.96 – a saving of £22.91 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

Call 0117 370 9930

Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price.

Free delivery to UK mainland.

For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 23rd May 2021.

The Oldie Spring 2022 73

SPORT JIM WHITE CHELSEA’S RUSSIAN REVOLUTION We can wince at the company he kept. We can be appalled by the way he pillaged the Russian economy. We can wonder how he was ever allowed to seize control of such an important cultural asset.

But of this there can be no doubt: Roman Abramovich revolutionised English football.

Sure, it is best to wear a nose clip when thinking about the bloodstained source of his money. But wherever it came from, what he did with it was to transform Chelsea FC. So successful was his stewardship – the club accumulated 19 major trophies in his time – that an inescapable conclusion is he knew what he was doing.

The usual pattern of football-club ownership before Abramovich arrived in England in 2003 was that the local businessman done good would be in charge. Manchester United had been run by successful butchers, Aston Villa by a travel agent and Liverpool by the family who had invented the football pools.

Then along came a man who had apparently discovered a rouble mine in Siberia. The initial assumption was he would soon tire, taking his cash with him at the first kink in the road, and Chelsea would sink into debt-ridden austerity.

But he didn’t leave. He committed himself to nearly 20 years at the club, underwriting it and sorting it out. He never once accepted an invitation to be interviewed, in a way many a look-atme football chatterbox might emulate.

He weaponised silence, turning himself into an international man of mystery.

He worked instead by delegation, employing talented executives and trusting them to run things properly.

That is not to say he never intervened.

When he moved – generally to fire one of the 14 managers he let go in his time (and he sacked Jose Mourinho twice) – he did so with the kind of ruthless lack of sentiment that showed that to cross him in business would not be wise. And Chelsea carried on winning things.

They did so because he invested in the right place: he was the first to open a stateof-the-art training ground. He pumped money into the academy, developing a conveyor belt of talent that could be either eased into the first team or sold on.

His association with Chelsea opened the way for the new breed of owners. He was the first of the world’s mega-wealthy to acknowledge that the Premier League had the potential to conquer the world.

He recognised this was a cultural phenomenon with both enormous value 74 The Oldie Spring 2022

as a wealth-generator and, for those – unlike him – wishing to promote their own agenda, unbeatable public-relations value.

At Stamford Bridge on match day, he would host in his personal box some of the most influential movers and shakers.

This was an unofficial Russian embassy, where business was conducted discreetly, without brouhaha.

And those who noted what Abramovich was doing and followed him – the US sporting operations, the Middle Eastern governments, the Chinese corporations – subsequently changed the game for ever.

At the time of writing, no decision has been made about who will take on the club, now Abramovich has suffered the proper consequence of his close association with the war criminal in the Kremlin and had his assets frozen.

But we can be certain of one thing. It won’t be the local garage-owner who picks up the reins. Abramovich’s legacy is that the ownership of Premier League clubs is now a business open only to billionaires.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD DIGITAL ARTHUR DALEYS ‘Clocking’ cars – turning back the odometer so that it shows fewer miles – should have been nullified by the arrival of computers; these record mileage electronically and can secrete that record deep within a car’s systems.

Not so: electronic manipulation of odometers not only is rife but has reportedly increased by 45 per cent in the past five years. Car-checkers HPI reckon that a practice previously confined to dishonest traders now involves dishonest private sellers who download clocking techniques from the internet. There are even companies that advertise ‘mileage correction services’.

Owners of leased cars under mileage-limited deals are especially tempted – as apparently are some unscrupulous cab-drivers who plug a data-blocker into the dashboard circuits.

Research by Autocar and HPI on ten popular makes registered in 2016 found that, on average, winding the clock back from 90,000 miles to 50,000 increased each car’s value by just under £3,000.

But aren’t mileages for the past three years recorded on MOT certificates, and can’t you check online on previous MOTs? Indeed you can, and of course it will be obvious if the MOT records 50,000 miles this year after recording

90,000 last year, 75,000 before that and so on.

But it needn’t be that obvious: a dodgy owner could simply reduce the mileage covered year by year from – say – 15,000 to a plausible 5,000. And anyway a functioning odometer isn’t demanded by the MOT – it’s not a safety issue. So it could simply be disabled.

If you’re buying a car and don’t want to be deceived, what’s to be done? First thing is paperwork – check the service history, including all invoices. If it’s over three years old, check the MOT history.

Ask the seller, especially if it’s a trader, if the odometer is accurate. They can’t always guarantee it, but a main dealer should be able to with cars they’ve maintained. Then get an HPI check – again, not infallible but it’s another indication. Finally, take time to look at the car. If it’s allegedly low-mileage and there are signs of wear on the pedals, steering wheel, gear lever and driver’s seat, be suspicious.

Not that mileage is as important as it used to be, though drivers still act as if it is. Time was when many engines didn’t get much above 50,000 to 60,000 miles without serious work, whereas modern engines can manage 150,000-plus miles with no more than proper servicing.

When they do fail, it’s often the electronics that let them down.

Minor under-readings are sometimes unavoidable. I bought my 1983 Land Rover from a friend. The odometer read 3,000 miles, the original cable having snapped at 115,000 (no electronics on this old girl). The MOT history bears it out. On the way home, the cable went again, possibly because the wrong one was fitted. I continued home – about 150 miles – ordered another cable, drove around until that arrived, found it was the wrong one, sent it back, got another and fitted it a week later. I probably drove about 400 unrecorded miles. Not too much to confess.

Unlike the claimed 51,000-mile Volvo 740 estate I bought 30 years ago. The seller made sure to run it up to operating temperature before I arrived, by insisting he pick me up at the station. Every time it started from cold thereafter, it filled the street with embarrassing clouds of black diesel smoke. I spent more than £1,800 on ineffective remedies before selling it to a shifty character who didn’t care about smoke. He was taking it to Belfast, he said. Perhaps it became a bomb.

Enquiries with Volvo revealed that, two years before I bought it, the mileage was 90,000.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

The internet’s nasty flash mob When reading The Oldie, I often think of the great Michael Flanders, who, with Donald Swann, entertained us so elegantly in the white heat of the 1960s satire boom.

He would sometimes open their shows with these encouraging words: ‘The purpose of satire is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth; our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.’

I can’t help thinking that The Oldie still carries that torch, to some extent.

Consequently, I hesitate to address an indelicate subject in pages that most of us regard as something of a sanctuary.

However, we must face facts. The invention of the internet, like all

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Council tax gov.uk/council-tax-bands Find out the Council tax band for any home in England or Wales; see what other local houses pay and check that yours is in the right band.

Property prices gov.uk/search-house-prices Find out how much a property sold for in England and Wales.

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

innovations, has had good and bad consequences. One of the vilest is that it enables what is crudely, but accurately, called cyber-flashing. This involves men and boys sending, unbidden, pictures of their genitalia to women. Why they do it is beyond me, but it is a growing problem, apparently.

It’s bad enough sending repellent pictures to someone in your contacts list (at least they will know who sent them), but there is something much worse called ‘air dropping’ which is wholly anonymous.

AirDrop is a clever feature of every iPhone (not Android phones) that allows the easy sending of pictures to nearby iPhones (up to about 30ft away) without having to use emails, texts or similar.

Teenagers have been using it for years to share jokes, news, pictures and so on; that’s fine. The trouble is, if you leave the AirDrop widget switched on, with the security settings at their most relaxed, anyone nearby can see you are accessible and can send you anything, entirely anonymously.

This has inevitably attracted the deviants, who in a pre-iPhone age would have had to hang around park bushes to expose themselves and get their perverted kicks.

No longer. I’m afraid it’s become common for women on public transport who have left the AirDrop feature active to be cyber-flashed, with the upsetting, even frightening, certainty that the man who sent the unwelcome pictures is on the same bus, possibly sitting very close.

Even more disturbing, he is probably watching her reaction to the picture and,

presumably, gloating inwardly at the ‘success’ of his warped behaviour.

This is a bigger problem than you might think. According to research done in 2020, three quarters of girls between 12 and 18 and half of women between 18 and 24 have been sent unsolicited nude pictures of boys or men, and not just using AirDrop, but through networks such as Snapchat, Instagram and others.

The problem is that the laws that aim to deter such abhorrent behaviour were mostly drafted before mobile phones were invented, never mind AirDrop.

However, parliament is finally catching up, and the soon (I hope) to be enacted Online Safety Bill will, among other things, make cyber-flashing and some other similar digital activities an offence – so at last a legal line will have been drawn.

Those who are convicted will face up to two years in prison and will go on the sex offenders’ register. That’s good, and they may well be caught if they use third-party platforms, because the new law will also impose a duty of care on the social networks to protect adults and children alike from illegal or distressing content.

However, the complete anonymity of AirDrop must surely make catching the offenders very difficult. So I urge you to remind any iPhone-owning women you know, if they need reminding (which I doubt), to set the AirDrop feature so that only known contacts can send them anything, or even turn it off altogether when not using it.

As ever, prevention is better than cure.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Insure against travel worries Alongside the excitement of booking a holiday, there’s the worry about getting a refund if your plans change – particularly if the reason is outside your control.

Although the COVID rules have been relaxed in the UK, there is still the possibility that they might return and travel might be again banned, restricted or inconvenienced, either in this country or in the one you are visiting.

76 The Oldie Spring 2022

And pandemics are not the only danger. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a sharp reminder that international travel rules can change very suddenly.

Vaccinations, PCR tests and quarantine became irrelevant when the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office red-listed Ukraine and travel there was not advised in any circumstances. People who had already bought flights to

Ukraine could get their money back from the airline, because all flights were cancelled. Anyone entering by other means would find their travel insurance invalid.

For your holiday this year, travel insurance is essential. Older people, particularly those over 70, find policies painfully expensive – they can cost more than the holiday itself, even if you’re

healthy. Age-discrimination laws do not apply here – insurers charge you more simply because you are older. The price is higher still for anyone with serious pre-existing conditions (and you must disclose even mild ones).

Despite the temptation to travel without insurance, that is more risky than ever because COVID will be an issue for a long time to come. Buy the insurance as soon as you book your holiday. That may be many months before you travel, but you need to be

holiday because the country you are going to changes its rules and refuses you entry.

You might be covered if you are denied boarding on the way out but perhaps not if you’re refused on the way home.

You will not receive compensation if ‘ … and what kind you simply change your mind about of a title is Bible?’ travelling, even if you’ve done so because the local situation has changed and you’d feel unsafe in the country you are visiting. If a flight goes ahead and you choose not to take it, the airline has no obligation to refund you and travel covered immediately in case you have insurance is unlikely to pay out. to cancel.

When we were in the EU, we could ask It’s also important these days to check for a European Health Insurance Card exactly which reasons for cancelling are (EHIC) or E111 card, which allowed some acceptable, as insurers use words loosely. emergency health care in Europe.

They may say the policy ‘covers COVID’ These cards remain valid until their but check precisely what they mean by expiry date and have been replaced by a that. Most will pay if you have to cancel Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC), because you tested positive before setting which you obtain through the NHS off and if you test positive while you are website (www.nhs.uk). Beware of fake away. Few, if any, will pay if there is websites that ask you for money. another lockdown in the UK. The GHIC card is free, but it is nowhere Few will pay if you have to cancel your near a substitute for travel insurance.

invites you on a unique reader trip Come to the Villa Albrizzi, in the Veneto, with Robert Fox 13th-20th September 2022 In 2016, Robert Fox led an Oldie trip in the north of Italy, whose towns read like a list of Shakespearean locations: Padua, Mantua and Verona. And, this time, our small group will have the joy of staying in the wonderful Villa Albrizzi (www.villaalbrizzi.it), which is located on the edge of Este, a small town south of Padua, 30 miles from Venice Airport. The villa, set in eight acres and with its own pool, has been owned by the Albrizzi family for three centuries.

Thursday 15th September – Verona and Sirmione Morning tour of Verona, followed by lunch

by Lake Garda and a tour of the Roman love poet Catullus’s villa

Friday 16th September – Vicenza and Asolo Morning tour of Palladio’s city and the extraordinary Teatro Olimpico; lunch and tour of the pretty hillside village of Asolo

Saturday 17th September – Modena

Limited to 12 guests (3 doubles, 3 twins)

Morning tour including the early Romanesque cathedral, followed by lunch and free afternoon at the villa

Tuesday 13th September

Sunday 18th September – day at the villa

Depart Heathrow at 1330 with BA; arrive Venice at 1645 Transfer to the villa; dinner there

Wednesday 14th September – Padua Morning and lunch in Padua followed by free afternoon at the villa

Lunch at the villa; supper in Este

Monday 19th September – Mantua and Sabbioneta Visit the Ducal Palace, with fine frescoes

by Pisanello and Andrea Mantegna. Lunch at the spot where the villainous deeds in Verdi’s Rigoletto take place. Return to the

villa via Sabbioneta, the miniature citadel of the Gonzagas and their horses

Tuesday 20th September – Chioggia Morning and lunch at the seaside town of Chioggia in the Venice lagoon Depart Venice at 1735 with BA; arrive Heathrow at 1855 PRICES AND BOOKINGS: £2,450 per person in a double/twin room for seven nights’ full board including wine with meals, transport and excursions. You will need to buy your own flights. We will require a deposit of £750.

Please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk

The Oldie Spring 2022 77

The Black Grouse by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

CARRY AKROYD

Good morrow to thy sable beak, And glossy plumage, dark and sleek, Thy crimson moon and azure eye, Cock of the heath, so wildly shy!

Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), from The Black Cock To see the lek or communal display of the lyre-tailed male black grouse (Lyrurus tetrix) or blackcock is increasingly rare in Britain.

Seventy years ago, black grouse were widespread, except in uninhabited Ireland. Now their stronghold is the Angus glens, with a smattering in the Borders and northern England and barely any in Wales. The UK population is 4,850 (2016).

Last September, Carry Akroyd and I were privileged to see a lek on one of Angus’s best and largest grouse moors.

I associated leks with spring – that is when the females, aptly called greyhens, attend to mate with the polygamous cocks. But in fact, leks as social jousts cease only in deepest winter and from late June through August.

I also envisaged them hidden in the wilds. On the contrary, the head gamekeeper drove us along the glen’s main road until, in a pasture up ahead, dots magnified into blackcocks. A bordering fir plantation allowed us to drive up a farm track unseen and into the field’s top corner, from where we stealthily descended until the 17 birds came into view. A game of grandmother’s footsteps ensued as the vehicle inched closer to the group, stopping when an occasional dispute developed.

This entailed one bird scurrying towards another and challenging it with a threatening display – wings drooped to expose two bold white shoulder spots, tail fully fanned and fluffed underneath into a flamboyant white rosette. Challenges were either met or avoided. After an hour, one yard too far in the vehicle sent them off as a covey on to the ‘hill’.

Leks are not always so conveniently placed. On this 17,500-acre estate, which supports about 120 black grouse, there are half a dozen lek sites. A lek lasts from dawn for several hours.

Black grouse feed at dusk. In winter and rough weather, they descend to shelter and forage on less exposed ground. Like red grouse, they flock from the end of autumn. Their favourite habitat is heath and moorland, combined with birch and pine woods – buds and berries are their staple diet. Habitat change, with drainage and commercial forestry the chief enemy, is the main reason for their decline.

They are less vocal than red grouse. A

far-carrying call like running water is the blackcock’s spring song. Usually half the maximum ten chicks fail to reach the safety of flight at 14-21 days. On maturity, the genders divide and become the wildest of game birds.

They are legal quarry but it is etiquette not to shoot them, even if they fly within range during a red-grouse drive. The estate we visited has nine gamekeepers, who keep legally killed predators such as stoats and crows to a beneficial minimum.

Such protection and exemplary moorland management also attract an exceptional variety of summernesting waders.

The Oldie Spring 2022 79

Travel Chatsworth revisited

The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire have boldly inserted modern art alongside the house’s ancient treasures. By Harry Mount

T

he National Trust could learn a thing or two from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

In recent years, the Trust has disastrously modernised by dumbing down. At Disraeli’s home, Hughenden in Buckinghamshire, they misspell his name.

Next to a tree there, they’ve planted one of their endless kiddie signs, saying, ‘Please do not climb on me.’ Inside the house at Osterley, another patronising sign says, ‘It was the scullery maid’s job to empty and clean the chamber pots every morning. A very smelly job.’

At Chatsworth, there’s none of this dumbing down. The picture captions are intelligent and grown-up; the signs free of baby language. But, still, there is constant modernisation going on.

Outside the house this spring, a taste of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada is coming to Derbyshire. The annual Burning Man event is being recreated in Chatsworth’s 1,000-acre park, with 12 giant sculptures scattered across the estate. When the show closes at the end of the year, one of the sculptures will be burnt to the ground, just as it is in Nevada.

Meanwhile, inside the house, dozens 80 The Oldie Spring 2022

The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire in front of Chatsworth

of new paintings and sculptures have popped up among the Old Masters and Renaissance statues.

In a new exhibition, Living With Art We Love, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire have placed their favourite works from acquisitions over the past 40 years, few of which have been on public display before.

The new jumps out sparklingly against the old. And the old stands forth in a different light when placed next to the new.

A luminous screenprint of a Corbusier chair by Michael Craig-Martin hovers

over William Kent’s classical chairs from Chiswick House, once the Devonshires’ west London home. Picasso sketches, collected by the Duchess, sit harmoniously opposite Chatsworth’s two heart-stopping Rembrandts, Portrait of an Old Man and Man in Oriental Costume. A ceramic pot, with abstract Chinese designs by Felicity Aylieff, soars above the baroque staircase (pictured).

The Duke of Devonshire says, ‘All the collecting generations of my family have added modern works and some have made significant changes to the

CHATSWORTH SETTLEMENT TRUSTEES / BRIDGEMEN IMAGES / ADRIAN LANDON

Rembrandt’s A Man in Oriental Costume; Deborah Devonshire by Lucian Freud; Felicity Aylieff’s Chinese Ladder at Chatsworth

architecture of the house. We are therefore following a well-trodden path in both these respects. Whether the modern additions fit in harmoniously is for each visitor to decide for themselves.

We are excited to have this opportunity, temporary though it is, to add our layer of taste to that of our forebears.’

Part of the show includes a whole corridor devoted to Lucian Freud in the artist’s centenary year. All the Freud paintings, drawings and prints in the Devonshire collections are on display.

Also on show are Freud’s paints, which he left at the house on a 1959 visit, with the handwritten notice: ‘Mr Freud’s paints. Please do not remove.’

The current duke’s father, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, started collecting and commissioning works by Freud after the two men became friends in the late 1940s. Freud stayed at Chatsworth and painted six members of the 11th Duke’s family, including the current duke and his father and mother, Deborah Devonshire, over a period of 20 years.

Sadly, the picture of a cyclamen Freud painted on a bathroom wall at Chatsworth – not unlike an early Banksy – couldn’t be manhandled into the exhibition room.

So a copy stands in for it in the show.

The current duke says, ‘Lucian Freud was wonderful company – very lively, irreverent and brilliant at talking to teenagers. I am still very fond of his portrait of my mother. I think it is the most beautiful thing in the house.’

Showing how the shock of the new fades with time, that 1957 portrait of Debo Devonshire, Woman in a White Shirt, horrified some family members when it was first painted. At teatime, the picture was covered up to avoid offending them. Now it has bedded in seamlessly alongside the show’s older pictures, such

as a moving Giovanni Boltraffio. Damien Hirst’s golden Saint Bartholomew stares across the chapel to Poussin’s strikingly different, earlier version of his Et In Arcadia Ego in the Louvre.

Hundreds of great houses were razed to the ground in the late-19th century and the 20th century – as recorded in the celebrated 1974 V& A show The Destruction of the Country House 1875-1975. But those that survived the wrecking ball are in as good a shape as they’ve ever been.

As Evelyn Waugh wrote in his revised 1960 preface to Brideshead Revisited (1945), his threnody for the country house and its blue-blooded inhabitants had been ‘a panegyric over an empty coffin’. These days, Sebastian Flyte would be in rehab at Clouds, and Julia Flyte would fling open the doors of Brideshead Castle to the public.

And Brideshead, like Chatsworth, would be preserved for ever in a house trust. The crowds of tourists who have flocked to Chatsworth – more than 20 million since 1949 – have kept the place going. Income from visitors and an endowment fund mean the Chatsworth House Trust has spent millions on the house without calling on grants or public funds.

Between 2005 and 2018, an enormous programme of essential restoration and conservation took place at Chatsworth.

The Duke of Devonshire says, ‘It was one of the largest projects undertaken at Chatsworth since the sixth Duke built the north wing between 1820 and 1828, and was essential to secure Chatsworth for future generations of visitors to enjoy.

Following the completion of this work, the house is now in a better state of repair, safer, and more accessible to visitors than possibly at any point in its history.’

When one looks at the hundreds of treasures on show, it’s hard to believe there were once even more. When the current duke’s grandfather, the 10th Duke, died in 1950, he’d handed over everything to his eldest son four years and eight months before. If he’d clung on for another four months, the gift would have avoided tax. Instead, 80 per cent of his estate was owed in death duties.

So the Devonshires handed over Hardwick Hall to the government, who handed it on to the National Trust. The National Gallery got a triptych by Hans Memling, The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors. The National Portrait Gallery got a full-size Holbein cartoon of Kings Henry VII and Henry VIII. ‘We had one piece of good fortune,’ wrote Andrew Devonshire, the current duke’s late father. ‘Of the three Rembrandts in the family collection, the one chosen to go to the nation, An Old Man in an Armchair (The Philosopher), proved not to be genuine. The two that remained at Chatsworth [on view to visitors today] remain authentic!’

As Evelyn Waugh also said, the country house is this nation’s greatest contribution to art and architectural history. But, for all that contribution, going back 500 years, country houses needn’t be frozen in aspic.

As at Chatsworth, their contents can be shuffled around from room to room, suffer great losses and be revived with new blood – and all without any dumbing down.

Living With Art We Love: An exhibition presented by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire is at Chatsworth House until 9th October. Radical Horizons: The Art of Burning Man at Chatsworth is in the park from 9th April to 1st October.

The Oldie Spring 2022 81

Overlooked Britain

Hertfordshire’s Xanadu

lucinda lambton Like Citizen Kane, film mogul and artist Hubert von Herkomer built himself a fantasy schloss – in Bushey

NATIONAL MONUMENTS RECORD, LONDON

Lululaund (1894) in its heyday.

Below: Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1849-1914)

If there is another house as grotesquely and as gloriously exciting as Lululaund in Bushey, Hertfordshire, I will eat my hat, munching slowly and satisfyingly through the sheer delights of such a discovery.

It was built between 1886 and 1894, only to be quite shamefully demolished a few decades later, in 1939. How tearfully and teeth-grindingly enraged I lament its passing. Its magnificent front door and tympanum survive, giving a most tantalising glimpse of the degree of its alarming splendour.

It was a splendour every bit as noble as its creator, Bavarian-born Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1849-1914). He created paintings of considerable note and fame – think of The Last Muster with the fine old faces of the Chelsea Pensioners in the Royal Hospital’s chapel. Or there was Hard Times, the painting of an impoverished and homeless day labourer’s family collapsing by the roadside.

He was appointed Slade Professor at Oxford University in 1885, in succession to John Ruskin, and he composed a wealth of music to accompany his own avant-garde ‘pictorial-music-plays’ 82 The Oldie Spring 2022

which he would perform in a theatre of his own design.

He also gave concerts playing on the violin or zither. A lecturer and teacher, he established an art school in Bushey – one of his ‘greatest schemes’ – and he wrote several books as well as umpteen articles. He was to end his working life as a pioneer film-maker on elaborate cinematographic productions, in a studio he designed and built himself. Before he died, Herkomer was about to make a film of Far from the Madding Crowd in collaboration with Thomas Hardy.

He was a man ahead of his time.

He had a passionate interest in the motor car, owning a Daimler and writing prophecies on the car’s eventual power over mankind.

In his painting The Future, a near naked, bosoms-to-the-fore beauty of a blindfolded woman is tied to the engine of an enormous motorcar. She cannot see what is coming – hence the blindfold – yet she is tightly tied to the engine that sweeps her forth unwittingly. Painted in 1905, it caused a sensation.

To top it all, Herkomer was a man who was as handsome as a man could be. I fear, though, that, by way of a flick of a flaw, modesty was by no means his middle name!

Of his humdinger of a house, he wrote, ‘A stranger of average intelligence and education, passing my house, involuntarily arrests his steps to contemplate what seems to him to be an unusual type of architecture. If he be an Englishman, his first formulated thought was that a house of such pretensions should stand in a park with a one-mile private drive up to it. To have built it within 30 yards of a public road, with front gates so low that almost a five-yearold child could look over them, suggests to his mind that only a foreigner or an eccentric would have spent so much money on a mansion that had practically no privacy attached to it.’

He was a foreigner and an eccentric, born into poverty in 1849 at Waal in the Kingdom of Bavaria. He was the son of Lorenz Herkomer, a woodcarver of exceptional ability. According to the pleasingly named publication Chums,

GRANGER NYC / ALAMY

Lululaund’s entrance front (left) and its remnants (right). Herkomer’s portraits of John Ruskin and Chelsea Pensioners in The Last Muster (1975)

‘The boy went to school for a month or two and, falling ill, never returned.’

With hopes for a better life, in 1851 the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, which they left after only six years. But the country left an indelibly important mark on the boy for the rest of his life. After triumphing in a multitude of dashingly imaginative endeavours in Germany and Britain, in 1899 he was ennobled by King Otto of Bavaria. For extra prestige, he added ‘von’ to his name. He was already a Knight of the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown. In 1907, he was knighted

by Edward VII. He was already a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order.

For me, his commission to paint Queen Victoria on her deathbed had the most delightful results. Enveloped in clouds of white tulle, with arum lilies in abundance, along with a quantity of lilies of the valley, the queen lies in their midst, holding a tiny bunch of them, along with a little wooden cross.

Herkomer produced many memorable portraits of famed grandees such as John Ruskin – giving him a hauntingly beautiful face – and Henry Hobhouse Richardson, Lululaund’s American

architect, the creator of the ‘Richardsonian Romanesque’ style throughout the United States.

Lululaund – named after his late wife, who was also his sister-in-law – is the only example of this work outside America, where it gloriously prospered with its rugged and richly varied rustication of colours and texture.

A handsome architectural amalgam of 12th-century southern French, Italian and Spanish Romanesque characteristics, the style took over much of the United States in towns great and small. It went as far west as Oklahoma in the early years of the 20th century, after which it died out.

What a handsome addition Lululaund must have made to Bushey’s townscape.

Herkomer loved his ‘fairy-tale castle’, as it was known locally. Having secured the services of the great American architect, he was determined to be the sole creator of Lululaund’s interior. Gold, blue and red were liberally painted on many of the richly carved wooden panels that smothered the walls, while his bedroom shone with a copper ceiling.

There were technically up-to-theminute details in abundance, with hot

and cold water in all the bedrooms and pathfinding electric light, from his own generator, blazing throughout.

Richardson had developed into a genial, monumental figure of a man, as can be seen in Herkomer’s portrait of him. He sits beaming with satisfaction, his great stomach filling a full half of the painting.

One of his most charming paintings is the triptych The Makers of My House, of three long-bearded prophet-like men: his father, Lorenz, and his brother, John – both woodworkers – as well as his second brother, Anton, a weaver.

Herkomer’s other most renowned works were his paintings of the poor.

They wrenched the public consciousness with harrowingly revelatory scenes of the extreme deprivation of the people, barely acknowledged before by artists.

Workhouses, queues for benefit payments, the bleakness of strikes … they all were his wretched fodder.

Another of his unexpected achievements was to fight for, design and pay for a house for Bushey’s first district nurse.

That he should describe what was then a remote Hertfordshire hamlet as ‘a sleepy little place’ is painful indeed.

Today it is surrounded by the heaviest traffic of dual carriageways, roundabouts and whopping great factories, to a quite unbearable extent.

After Lululaund’s grimly sad demolition – thought in part to have happened because of its German connection – a mere fraction of its façade survives, with the richly caparisoned doorway and tympanum.

This remaining original fragment (pictured) now takes pride of place on a small block of the original house that has now been turned into flats.

To end on a sorry note, when Lululaund was demolished in 1939, its masonry went as hardcore for Bovingdon Airfield in 1941. I weep.

The Oldie Spring 2022 83

On the Road

Harvey? My greatest mistake Tina Brown tells Louise Flind about Martin Amis, the Royal Family – and the bullying ways of Harvey Weinstein What is your favourite royal palace?

Windsor Castle by a long shot. I was there as a presenter at the Sussex wedding.

Was the Charles-and-Diana marriage doomed?

Yes. Diana’s crumpled taffeta train was the signifier of all the crushed hopes to come.

Does Diana still haunt the Royal Family?

Through Harry’s recent actions, yes, but in Kate there’s a new female icon.

Diana’s ghost is less potent than it was.

What do you think of Meghan?

You have to wait for my book The Palace Papers, about the years since Diana.

ERIK PENDZICH / ALAMY

What was it like editing the New Yorker?

Intellectually exhilarating, fulfilling, life-changing.

room wall of our house in Pimlico, drawing a frame round it and writing a headline and caption.

What is the difference between British and American magazines?

The high-low mix of British magazines and newspapers is the biggest difference – something I tried to remedy when I took over Vanity Fair.

Which is better – London or New York?

I dream of a world that is permanently suspended in between, which I think of as Transatlantica – New York diners and an English pot of tea.

What is your favourite building in New York?

350 Madison Avenue, site of the old Condé Nast offices.

What was it like working with Harvey Weinstein on Talk magazine?

The greatest mistake of my life. He never sexually harassed me, but he was a terrifying bully. He was a human wrecking-ball.

Was your childhood spent on film sets?

I did go to sets of my father’s films, a treat when the male lead was primed to tell me I looked so grown up. [Her father was George H Brown (1913-2001), producer of the Miss Marple films, starring Margaret Rutherford]

Which was the most enjoyable magazine to edit?

Loved them all. But perhaps Tatler was the most fun, with its staff of enfants terribles and nothing to lose.

What is your favourite building in Oxford?

The Sheldonian. I hosted a fundraiser concert for the Bodleian Library there when I was at Vanity Fair.

Which is your favourite magazine now?

One of my former ones: the New Yorker.

I adore the FT weekend section. How to Spend It is maybe the best glossy, though the current Tatler is on a winning streak.

What was Martin Amis like at Oxford?

Exactly the same as he is now. The best mimic in London. Screamingly funny.

What did your late husband Harry Evans (1928-2020) teach you about editing?

Everything. He literally showed me how to do a double-page spread by projecting a picture on to the living-

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

We didn’t have one. We got married on Ben Bradlee’s [the Washington Post editor who published the Watergate story 50 years ago] lawn in East Hampton with six people present. Our honeymoon was a night at the

Algonquin Hotel, but the rest of our life together made up for it.

Do you go on holiday?

I used to, I haven’t for two years, and I yearn for it.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

I never eat food to which I haven’t been formally introduced! I did once eat a wasabi ball, thinking it was avocado dip – unfortunately just before Harvey Weinstein introduced me to Leonardo DiCaprio.

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away?

At the top of a turret in Glamis Castle in Scotland – very haunted.

What are your top travelling tips?

Always take the first flight out, even if it means getting up at three in the morning. The first plane is rarely delayed.

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

My phone and my Stella McCartney sunglasses for the glinting streets of Manhattan.

Is there something you really miss?

Life as it used to be.

Do you travel light?

No. I am neurotic about ‘What if?’

What’s your favourite destination?

London. I miss it more than I can say.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

My parents built a house in the hills over San Pedro de Alcántara in Malaga, and the smell of bougainvillea and the barking of village dogs always take me back.

Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor – the Truth and the Turmoil is out on 26th April The Oldie Spring 2022 85

Taking a Walk

The Isle of Thanet, Britain’s big toe

GARY WING

patrick barkham

If Kent is Britain’s right foot, the Isle of Thanet is its big toe.

I’d never really touched this toe, and knew it only from the vivid reportage of James Meek who once wrote a brilliant essay about Nigel Farage’s attempts to win a parliamentary seat there.

An almost-island, which lost its geographical independence from England when the Wantsum Channel silted up in the Middle Ages, Thanet has long been a magnet for charismatic conquerors, from the legendary Hengist and Horsa, said to have been rewarded with the isle for helping the king of the Britons, to Lord Northcliffe, who launched the Daily Mail and kept alligators in the back garden of his seaside retreat here.

A friend recommended Joss Bay, which I reached on a bright early-spring afternoon. My map showed a stony coast – so I was surprised to find a perfect bay of bright yellow sand backed by low chalk cliffs. The beach was also surprisingly empty except for a solitary metal detectorist.

The chalky, blue-green tide was out and so I followed the beach around into Kingsgate Bay. Here the cliffs rose higher, topped by Kingsgate Castle, originally a mere stable block for the country pile that became part of Lord Northcliffe’s alligator-and-golfing estate.

Around Kingsgate, the cliffs turned a brilliant Dulux white, and it took me a moment to realise this meant their outer sections had recently broken away. Caves disappeared into the whiteness, various notices ushering us away for our own safety.

Wading through an ankle-deep layer of seaweed, I reached the end of Kingsgate Bay at a dazzling white archway, a natural threshold through the cliffs into another dimension, or at least another beach.

The moment the coast turned this corner into my third bay, Botany, was like listening to a new album and belatedly realising that this was a glorious piece

of music. This was a sensational walk.

We’re blessed with so much scenic coastline that Thanet is probably not top of many lists, but it should be. Forget the extremities of Land’s End or John o’Groats – what about the south-eastern extremity: England’s tremendous big toe?

Surrounded by so much sea and blindingly bright chalk, this isle possesses a particularly compelling luminosity. The light had ‘a vertiginous depthlessness’, just as Meek had written, ‘as if you’d come to the rim of the world and a few steps forward would take you into some infinite, radiant void’. J M W Turner told Ruskin that the skies over Thanet were the most beautiful in Europe.

Botany Bay was the loveliest of the three bays so far, a long, lustrous stretch of sand backed by broken-away sections of chalk cliff standing like statues on the beach. The chalk resembled freshly painted blocks of stone, as if laid down by stonemasons, not crustaceans.

At the far end of Botany Bay, I cut across Long Nose Spit, and strolled into Palm Bay, Margate glimmering in the distance. Then I headed back, along the clifftops of Cliftonville. Here was a decent

stretch of chalk grassland which would be stunning in midsummer and was pretty enough now; Alexanders were in flower and, above them, there was the song flight of a skylark, which performed a neat pirouette followed by a swallow dive in mid-sky.

Behind it stood legions of Sixties chalet bungalows with big picture windows. The neighbourhood echoed with the dull hum of lawnmowers. Given the beauty of the beach, I cut down to the sand, flint and chalk again, back through Botany’s arched door and into Kingsgate and then Joss.

There are various theories about the etymology of Thanet: tanet, meaning place of holm oaks, or thanatos from the Greek for death (of serpents); but the most likely name is ‘bright island’ from tân, Welsh or Breton for fire. The glory of this walk still flares in my mind whenever I recall it.

Joss Bay to Palm Bay and back is a gentle four miles with plenty of parking all along the coast. Check tide times – it is worth saving this walk for low tide. Then you can enjoy a beach walk from bay to bay The Oldie Spring 2022 87

Genius crossword 412 el sereno D represents the same word throughout Across 1 Spoil chance of a drink? (6) 5 Where D goes crazy for growth round field (8) 9 D’s work in America keeping artist employed at last (8) 10 23 created by X in school (6) 11 Give no credit to live bid – see in error (10) 12 Level as result of clock losing minutes? (4) 13 Forms of love – and a kiss rejected by court (8) 16 Short about one foot and looking suspicious (6) 17 Move round group (6) 19 D may be the main radio operator on play regularly (8) 21 Sound happy hearing couple from Liverpool! (4) 22 D may be obliged to keep nothing in hold loose (10) 25 Girl spilling his ale (6) 26 Set out Times flyer (8) 27 Frenchman attached to group as possible result of frostbite (8) 28 Seldom finding answer in right bank (6)

Down 2 Animal fur needing iodine (5) 3 Beat most of the right out of bounds (5) 4 Hail D, poorly Spanish nobleman (7) 5 Warning sound set off buzzers (7) 6 Files should ignore current people sleeping rough (7) 7 Vote in Republican providing Yankee shock (9) 8 Where some might be on the fiddle? (9) 14 D’s life-force lines lost in Hawaiian dance (9) 15 Granting unusually draconic start to government (9) 18 English doctor people welcome (7) 19 D’s old tax on neckwear (7) 20 Revealing fraud – it ordinarily involves this professional (7) 23 Reputation that’s nothing serious (5) 24 A slice of bacon, as always showing such sound quality (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries.

Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 4th May 2022. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Thesaurus and £25.

Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 412 Across 1 Brute, creature (5) 4 Mistaken (5) 10 Many and different (7) 11 Copper or iron, for example (5) 12 Italian staple (5) 13 A practical type (7) 15 Peaceful, unruffled (4) 17 Pals (5) 19 Icon; public face (5) 22 Shame (4) 25 Authenticity (7) 27 Hosiery (5) 29 More, surplus (5) 30 Raise (7) 31 Vicious (5) 32 Mendacious (5)

Genius 410 solution Down 2 Roof overhangs (5) 3 Come up for air (7) 5 Cuban dance (5) 6 Nil, zilch (7) 7 Take into one’s family (5) 8 Product of oyster (5) 9 Strongly criticize (5) 14 Give off (4) 16 Snakes (4) 18 Pea dart (anag) (7) 20 Enigma (7) 21 Wept (5) 23 Push into action (5) 24 Inquired (5) 26 Angry (5) 28 Shackle (5)

The C in question was CAR, whether a particular make, or the letters CAR Winner: Jim Ollerhead, St Helens, Merseyside Runners-up: J Bielawski, Southport, Lancashire; Jeffrey Woodham, Spalding, Lincolnshire

Moron 410 solution: Across: 1 Teak, 4 Aches (Teacakes), 8 Suspense, 9 Rear, 10 Wail, 11 Middling, 12 Resign, 14 Casual, 16 Perfumed, 19 Drub, 20 Stud, 21 Declared, 22 Alloy, 23 Leek. Down: 2 Expel, 3 Kinsmen, 4 Amend, 5 Hurdles, 6 Stain, 7 Humane, 13 Infidel, 14 Codicil, 15 Acumen, 17 Extra, 18 Muddy, 19 Drake.

The Oldie Spring 2022 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO ‘Why did you drop my king of hearts?’ asked East. ‘Surely your best percentage play, missing three cards, is to finesse,’ he added.

East is correct. The best a priori chance of picking up a suit missing king-low-low is to finesse, with a 50 per cent chance of success. Cashing (or leading to) the ace works only when the king is bare, which occurs on one-third of the 2-1 splits (just 26 per cent).

So why did the expert declarer play for the drop? It has nothing to do with a long neck and an unethical peek. After three passes, South had reached 4 ♥ and West had led the queen of clubs.

West ♠ K96 ♥74 ♦A75 ♣Q J 9 7 3

North ♠ 853 ♥AQJ3 ♦864 ♣8 5 4

East ♠ 10 7 4 2 ♥K ♦ Q J 10 3 2 ♣ 10 6 2

South ♠ AQJ ♥ 10 9 8 6 5 2 ♦K9 ♣A K

The bidding South 1♥ 4♥

West Pass Pass end

North Pass 2♥

East Pass Pass

Declarer won the ace of clubs and promptly played a heart to the ace. East’s king was felled, and declarer could draw West’s second heart and try a spade to the knave.

Although that finesse lost and, later, a diamond to the king also lost, declarer made 4 ♥ for the loss of one spade and two diamonds.

As declarer explained afterwards, ‘The only danger to my contract was West holding both the king of spades and the ace of diamonds. I therefore assumed it to be the case. However, if West, a passed hand, held the king of spades, the ace of diamonds and (revealed by the opening lead) the queen-knave of clubs, there was no room for West to have the king of hearts.’

Precisely. If it turned out that West did hold the king of hearts, and declarer had lost an unnecessary heart trick (by crossing to the ace rather than finessing), then the game was safe, for East would have to hold the king of spades and/or the ace of diamonds.

East clutched his stomach, the pain of declarer’s deductions affecting him (or was it the king prawns?), and said, ‘Alimentary, my dear Watson.’

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 278 you were invited to write a poem called Cold Feet.

It was a large and accomplished entry.

I’d hardly realised how much cold feet punctuated life, and that’s before we get to the metaphorical. Dorothy Pope made her moral touchstone a question from Solzhenitsyn: ‘How can the man who is warm understand / the man who is cold?’

Duncan Darbyshire found a fine phrase in describing another’s feet in bed: ‘They slide through the sheets / and press onto my warm legs /with sadistic innocence.’

Commiserations to them, congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Thesaurus for Catherine Gillemin.

My frozen feet were icebergs in the bed, You’d take them in your loving hands, and laugh – Cold feet, warm heart – it must be true, you said.

(I trusted you to shelter me from draughts!)

Sometimes, you cried and swore you’d have to leave – Make this bed, this hearth, your only home; There’d be both blame and rage, then time to grieve, But after all the tears, you’d surely come.

There’d be a splintering of bonds, a stone To shatter your good name, destroy respect, Unfathering your very blood and bone, Unshelt’ring those you’d promised to protect.

Cold feet then – yours, when at last it came – A leaving time which tore us both apart; We clung like drowning souls, you called my name – Your own words proving true about your heart.

Catherine Gillemin I hunker in the wings to play the bear, Wait for my cue, sweat in the prickling fur.

The costume’s dense, my feet are cold with fear – The crowds may fail to tremble at my roar.

Recall that grizzled, growling giant, Chained at the stake and red with wounds of war – Old Sackerson, who towers defiant?

He’s battled off a thousand dogs or more!

His dreams lie far from hot and naked streets, From snarling teeth and murder in men’s eyes;

The promised end lies only in defeat – To see no hope, nor peace, yet still to rise!

What if Old Sackerson broke free one night, Gazed up at Ursa Major where she soars, Shook off his chains, unleashed his fire and might?

My cue! His spirit claims me: I can roar!

John Clark I know their advice is kind and well-meant, The not yet widowed, my friends, all hell-bent On sharing their pearls of wisdom, plus tea, But they don’t understand how it feels to be me.

They say I should cancel your Telegraph, Go out for walks, re-learn how to laugh, Clear out your clothes, join a club, get a pet.

Can’t they see I’m not ready to let you go yet?

There is comfort at home; your presence is there, Your coat on the peg, the indents in your chair.

Your aftershave lingers in corners unseen And I still hear your voice on the answer machine.

But at night, in the dark, when I feel for your feet, Cold in the folds of the unchanged sheets, It’s their absence that kicks and, although you are dead, I still sleep in my half of our old king-size bed.

Vivien Brown Alas, I know my coward soul too well.

Its metaphorical feet go cold Just thinking of the existential hell That’s dentists, needles, flying, growing old.

Fear brings the tyranny of icy chill.

I feel it from my scalp down to my toes Or so it seems. It’s metaphor, but still I shiver as the trepidation grows.

There are no bed-socks that can bring relief – Unlike the pair that warm my literal feet.

Summers (to them) are short and far too brief So nine months wrapped in cashmere keeps them sweet.

Physical chill is easier to cure.

The inner cold’s relentless, sharp and sure.

D A Prince COMPETITION No 280 We seem to spend a lot of life cutting in various ways, so a poem called Cutting, please.

Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 280’, by 5th May. The Oldie Spring 2022 91

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

Q

I’m too fat for him

Over lockdown, I have put on an enormous amount of weight.

This has made me less attractive to my partner, or so he says. He’s quite apologetic about it, but he says he’s always only fancied slim women and there’s nothing he can do about it. But surely this can’t be true. If he loved me, wouldn’t he want to make love to me whatever shape I was? We always used to have a very good sex life.

Fiona B, Wantage You can love someone without fancying them sexually. I don’t think you know how men’s minds work when it comes to sex. Some men can put physical attractiveness to one side; some fancy anything with breasts and a skirt. And, honestly, if your husband were suddenly to turn into a waddling person with a fat face and fingers like Cumberland sausages, would you want to make love to him? Men and women are differently constructed and it’s possible for women to have sex just by lying back. Men have to get an erection before anything happens. I’d start trying to lose weight and think of it as an act of love and kindness; not an act of subjugation. I bet your husband misses your sex life just as much as you do.

A

What’s your name again?

Q

I’m finding I’m forgetting everyone’s name. Sometimes this comes over me with people I know quite well. I try to muddle through a conversation and sometimes I remember, but often I can be saying goodbye without having a clue who they are. Is it too bad-mannered to admit it?

B G, Oxford

A

I think just to say, baldly, that you haven’t a clue who they are is a bit humiliating for the other person. It implies they’re unmemorable – and when it turns out it’s perhaps the mother of someone your child was at school with, to whom you were quite close, it can be upsetting. What I’ve been known to do – and forgive me if it sounds horribly calculating and greasy – is to touch them on the shoulder or hold their hand (physical contact is important) and say ‘You must forgive me but I can’t even remember my own name these days … all I know is that you’re really nice and I like you very much. It’s just your name that’s slipped my mind.’ It is always amazing how everyone, including myself, laps up flattery, however over the top it is.

Happy to be childless

Q

Why do you dismiss Tessa G’s daughter’s wish to be child-free and say that a 30-year-old ‘has no idea what she wants’? Really? I think you are being very unfair on her mother by giving her false hope.

I knew from the age of 11 that having a child was not for me. It has nothing to do with who we’ve met or who we might meet – being a mother does not depend on having a partner.

In future, please treat people’s views with a bit more respect and don’t dismiss them.

Paula, by email ‘Being a mother does not depend on having a partner’? Of course it does. We are not like seahorses, animals that can reproduce without any input from another. We do depend on another’s input – and I think that’s right. On the whole, women do get pregnant. This woman’s daughter might

A

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98 The Oldie Spring 2022

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have been saying this in a fit of anger with her mother, knowing how much she wanted a grandchild – we have no idea.

None of us can predict the future.

Care without a carer

Q

My mother is getting a bit frail and I’m very keen on her having someone to live in as a carer – she lives in a big enough house. But she is adamant that she doesn’t need a carer.

She says they’d be under her feet all day.

So far she’s already fallen once and no one found her till six hours later. She is so obstinate – what can I do?

Name and address supplied You could beg her to wear a button round her neck so that, if she did fall, she could just press it and help would come immediately.

Look on Google to find one that suits her, such as Careline. Alternatively, why doesn’t she just get a lodger, like Helpful Housemates (unityliving.co.uk)? These are just like ordinary, rent-paying lodgers, but they pay less rent to give their employer five hours of care a week if they need it. I have a Helpful Housemate and mine is rather like a husband from the 1950s – he fixes everything from blocked pipes to computer problems and puts in light bulbs that are too high now for me to reach and so on. And he gets my shopping if I have Omicron etc.

Otherwise he’s completely independent, working on a degree and quite often working normally at a job nearby – and not intrusive at all. It works out very well.

A

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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Review of Books Spring round-up of the reviews

Somerset Maugham – Michael Barber on the 20th century’s bestselling author William Cook admires the creator of Hornblower Biography & Memoir Second World War Music History Novels Children’s books Spring 2022 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Power of the pen Review of Books Issue 59 Spring 2022 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie Run Rose Run by Dolly Parton and James Patterson The Red of My Blood: A Death and Life Story by Clover Stroud Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution by Terence Dooley Not Far from Brideshead by Daisy Dunn Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea by Tom de Freston One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage by Michael Crick A Class of Their Own by Matt Knott Tales of a Country Parish by Colin Heber-Percy

Spring has not started well: news from Ukraine continues to be overwhelming and utterly heartbreaking… In a recent article in the Times, AN Wilson wrote that ‘some of the greatest salvoes fired against the Soviet system were not fired from guns but from the pens of novelists’. He went on to describe how by their fiction Boris Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn did ‘more damage to the Soviet system than any amount of non-fictional argument’.

Wilson concluded: ‘Napoleon, like Putin, subscribed to the “Great Man” view of history. Tolstoy [in War and Peace] showed that the mysterious Fate which moves events and human beings is bigger than a tyrant’s vanity, and it always wins in the end.’

Others, of course, have written about the power of the pen: George Whetstone in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, 1582, wrote: ‘The dashe of a Pen is more greeuous [grievous] than the counterbuse [counter use] of a Launce; Rosencrantz, in Hamlet, says that ‘many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose quills and dare scarce come thither’; while in 1621 Robert Burton wrote in his The Anatomy of Melancholy ‘…how much the pen is worse than the sword’. And a few centuries later the novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton has Cardinal Richelieu saying: ‘True, This! – Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold The arch-enchanters wand! – itself a nothing! – But taking sorcery from the master-hand To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike The loud earth breathless! – Take away the sword – States can be saved without it!’

Let’s hope so. And during those times when the news just gets too much, why not look inside this supplement … there are plenty of books to explore as a brief respite from the horrors of the present.

Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

20 MISCELLANEOUS 23 FICTION

Michael Barber on Somerset Maugham

This Mortal Coil: A History of Death

by Andrew Doig

24 MUSIC

Constable: A Portrait by James Hamilton Against the Tide by Roger Scruton, ed Mark Dooley

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

Love Marriage by Monica Ali

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Helen Hawkins, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Deborah Maby, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Rafe Thornhill, Jamil Popat For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk

10 SECOND WORLD WAR 11 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

25 NOVELS 28 PAPERBACKS 30 CHILDREN’S BOOKS Emily Bearn

16 CURRENT AFFAIRS 18 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS

William Cook on CS Forester The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022 3

History THE TICKET COLLECTOR FROM BELARUS

AN EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND BRITAIN’S ONLY WAR CRIMES TRIAL

MIKE ANDERSON AND NEIL HANSON Simon & Schuster, 384pp, £20

THE BURGUNDIANS

A VANISHED EMPIRE: A HISTORY OF 1111 YEARS AND ONE DAY

BART VAN LOO, TRANS. NANCY FOREST-FLIER Apollo, 624pp, £30

Bart Van Loo’s history of the Burgundian Empire has proved a publishing sensation in Europe, having sold 230,000 copies in hardback, and was described in Le Soir as ‘a history book that reads like a thriller’. The Burgundian ‘empire’ lasted from 1369 until 1477, when it was absorbed into the Habsburg Empire. Yet, as Dominic Sandbrook explained in his Sunday Times review, ‘Burgundy was never a kingdom in its own right, but an autonomous grey area, uneasily poised between France, England and the Holy Roman Empire.’

It benefited from French monarchical weakness, but it was also an economic powerhouse, encompassing dynamic, urbanised Flanders. ‘A complicated story, then – but a thrillingly colourful and entertaining one too. Stuffed with elaborate feasts and bloody battles, Van Loo’s book has been an enormous success in his native Belgium and it’s easy to see why. He has clearly done his research, but wears his learning lightly and keeps the emphasis firmly on story and character. If there’s any justice, a blockbuster TV series awaits.’

Simon Sebag Montefiore chose it 4 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

Philip III, Duke of Burgundy, 1396-1467

as one of the Books of the Year in Aspects of History magazine. It is ‘a thrilling narrative of the brutal dazzlingly rich wildly ambitious duchy that was the most advanced and sophisticated economy and the most extravagant flashy court of its time,’ he wrote. ‘Filled with flamboyant murderous and debauched dukes, courtesans, courtiers and maniacs, it is a total pleasure to read.’

Burgundy still owes a debt to its great medieval dukes In the Times, Paul Lay explained that Burgundy’s ‘name was eradicated in the 18th century only to resurface as a regional council in 1972…Yet Burgundy still owes a debt to its great medieval dukes, who form the heart of Van Loo’s entertaining study. For its wine, among the finest and most expensive in the world, is the fruit of the pinot noir grape that Philip the Bold promoted in his Great Wine Law of 1395. There are worse legacies.’

And in the New Statesman, Michael Prodger welcomed Van Loo’s ‘lively, anecdotal unpicking of this fascinating but nebulous entity’, and concluded that ‘if we have reached peak Tudor, the Burgundians are even more rewarding’.

Anthony Sawoniuk was a ticket collector in Bermondsey. He also became the only person in British history to be tried successfully for war crimes. He was convicted in 1999 for the murder of 18 Jews in his Nazioccupied hometown of Domachevo in Belarus and served six years in prison before he died. As David Aaronovitch wrote in his review in the Times, this book illustrates the gulf ‘between court truth and historical truth’, and shows that ‘there are several distinct kinds of justice’.

Sawoniuk ‘ignored the advice of his own lawyers and took the stand’, wrote Saul David in the Daily Telegraph. ‘The old man’s angry testimony is the high point of the book... The authors have interviewed most of the key players in this heart-rending tale and the result is a sensitive and well-balanced account of an extraordinary moment in British legal history.’

For Kathryn Hughes, in the Sunday Times, the book was a ‘brilliantly gripping mix of true crime and narrative history’. She welcomed the fact that the authors ‘avoid piling on the horror, letting the court transcripts speak for themselves.

Perhaps the authors’ greatest scoop is getting access to the annotated trial transcript of the judge, Sir Humphrey Potts. He was a scrupulously fair and somewhat chilly presence, but his marginalia bring what could have been dry legalese crackling into life.

In particular M’lud could not believe the bold-faced ludicrousness of Sawoniuk’s claim that the Jews of Domachevo were never subject to special measures.’

SOLDIERS

GREAT STORIES OF WAR AND PEACE

MAX HASTINGS William Collins, 496pp, £25

‘As Max Hastings recognises, a book about soldiering should not concentrate on fighting, for that

History would give a false impression,’ wrote Gerard DeGroot in the Times. ‘The warrior’s life is instead a cacophony of mundanity – marching, drill, sleeping, eating, getting drunk, telling stories, getting laid, killing lice.

Hastings has spent most of his professional life researching or observing war. This book, which he has edited, is a glimpse into his junk drawer, a clutter of material that retains value but lacks obvious employment.

A sentry in the trenches, Ovillers, 1916

‘It’s a collection of brief observations on the soldiering life from a variety of authors dating from biblical times to the present day. They are anecdotes – some profound, some silly, others rather trivial. None is definitive or earthshattering, but together they provide a pointillist portrait of enthralling sensitivity.’ Soldiers’ stories, partly true but exaggerated, ‘tumble from the pages of this book like gems from a pirate’s chest’.

In his review for the Sunday Times, Nick Rennison found that ‘the sheer variety of voices for which Hastings has found room is impressive... The anthology opens with biblical warriors (Joshua at the fall of Jericho) and Herodotus’ account of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae; it ends with Hastings’s report from the Falklands conflict, a Russian soldier recounting the dog-eat-dog conditions in his regiment fighting in Chechnya, and a female member of a US intelligence unit describing her discomfort with interrogating suspects in Iraq.’ Although ‘the most famous names of military history, from Julius Caesar to Erwin

Rommel, have their places, yet some of the most compelling tales are those of ordinary, often reluctant warriors’.

A GRAND TOUR OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE MARCUS SIDONIUS FALX WITH JERRY TONER Profile, 304pp, £16.99

This is the third book in a trilogy which started with How To Manage Your Slaves in 2009 and continued with Release Your Inner Roman in 2016. Reviewing Toner’s ‘engaging, witty and learned’ first book in the London Review of Books, Tim Whitworth explained that How to Manage Your Slaves ‘masquerades as a newly discovered tract by one Marcus Sidonius Falx. Each of the 11 chapters consists of a short essay in which “Marcus” offers the benefits of his experience, along with some fortifying anecdotes, and a brief commentary by Toner himself discussing the context and parallels from genuine ancient sources.’

In this third volume, Toner, who is Director of Classical Studies at Churchill College, Cambridge, ‘again spins a tale that is enjoyable and informative’, wrote Patrick Kidd in the Times. ‘Each chapter of Falx’s travel guide is followed by a commentary by Toner giving the references in classical literature to support the seemingly tall tales.’ Not only are places ‘vividly brought back to life’, such as Ephesus, with its population of 150,000, but ‘there are

Augustus, 1st century AD, Vatican

also some lovely, if gruesome, tales of the road, such as when he visits the Olympic Games and describes a competition in the pankration, or no-holds-barred wrestling, that needed a stewards’ inquiry to decide the winner after both competitors died. In the end, the crown went to the body whose eyes had not been gouged out. In warning about unscrupulous inn owners he shares the story about one infamous for serving human flesh for dinner.

Toner notes in his commentary that the medical writer Galen wrote that man-meat is quite tasty and like pork.’

NEW ROME

THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE EAST AD395-700

PAUL STEPHENSON Profile, 432pp, £30

Stephenson takes an unconventional approach in this history of the decline of the Roman Empire and the first centuries of Byzantium. As outlined by the anonymous reviewer in Publishers Weekly, Stephenson ‘draws on the “new science of Roman history” to reveal how climate change, pandemics, invading tribes, and near-constant warfare led to the decline of ancient cities whose culture and tax revenues underpinned the imperial system.

‘For example, radionuclide and cave mineral deposits reveal that the empire experienced a long period of declining sunlight and less rain beginning in the middle of the 4th century, which contributed to a loss in cultivable land and the disruption of trade networks... Skilfully interweaving economic, environmental, and social history, this impressive chronicle offers an eye-opening perspective on a period of dramatic change.’

Gerard DeGroot, the reviewer for the Times, had mixed feelings about the book. ‘The revelations offered by new scientific approaches to history are concentrated in the book’s first section, which is by far the most illuminating. Stephenson examines ordinary life, painting a vivid and intriguing picture. Intricate details render these people very familiar.’

However, ‘after his delightfully detailed first section, Stephenson shifts abruptly to high politics. This section appears almost to have been The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022 5

History written by a different author; it is gratuitously complex and often tedious. The Romans built a mindnumbingly tortuous bureaucratic system – the origin of the adjective “byzantine” – but instead of trying to make sense of the complexity, Stephenson writes for that handful of readers who find incoherence illuminating... The confusion is worsened by Stephenson’s fondness for phrases such as “lacunose hexametric imperial encomium”. (I looked it up, but won’t risk an explanation.)’

DEVIL-LAND

ENGLAND UNDER SIEGE 1588-1688

CLARE JACKSON Allen Lane, 684pp, £35

Europeans found the English both baffling and infuriating obvious,’ Jones wrote. ‘But it sometimes reads like a history of English exceptionalism, even though the intention is clearly to characterise the English as exceptionally dysfunctional.’

Ronald Hutton in the Times Literary Supplement observed that English interest in their most dysfunctional century has tended to peak at moments like the present, ‘as the place of England in the world, in Europe, and in its own archipelago, seems once more to be in question’.

THE BBC

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY

DAVID HENDY

Fleet Street resistance.

‘Yet no sooner does Hendy introduce these characters than they largely slip out of the narrative.

Instead, an array of other functionaries appear and pretty soon Lewis is gone, the BBC has become a corporation and listening to the radio has shifted from an obscure hobby for the wealthy to a national pastime.

Exactly how that transformation takes place is lost in an abundance of information that never quite forms into a dynamic narrative.’ A sense of the unique product of the BBC is ‘what is most conspicuously missing from this conscientious but rather pedestrian history’.

Given the scale of Hendy’s task, wrote Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times, his approach is to make his book a ‘people’s history’ by ‘putting the voices of individuals centre stage’. However, ‘this laudable ambition is soon crushed by the weight of institutional detail. The

Profile, 638pp, £25

Published to mark the BBC’s centenary, Hendy’s semi-official history ‘is both engaging and fair’, wrote Allan Massie in the Scotsman.

It ‘is very much the case for the corporation, but it is a case that needs to be made’. Andrew Anthony in the Observer was left unimpressed. The reader is introduced to the trio who founded the BBC – Cecil Lewis, John Reith, and Arthur Burrows – and ‘is prepared for a dramatic tale of innovation and determination as the trio succeed in establishing their new business amid a hostile and powerful

STEPHEN CRAVEN

Clare Jackson claims that England in the 17th century was a ‘failed state, a byword for seditious rebellion, religious extremism and regime change’ – in the words of a Dutch pamphleteer in 1652, no longer ‘Angel-Land’ but ‘Devil-Land’.

‘Much of that century’s political devilry, Jackson contends, derived from a single source: the question of England’s proper relationship with Europe,’ John Adamson noted in the Sunday Times. ‘Jackson rises ably to the challenge.’ Leanda de Lisle in the Times agreed, describing the book as ‘a wonderfully clear and original history’.

‘Devil-Land works as a history of English foreign policy in the 17th century,’ Rhys Jones observed in the Financial Times. ‘But, really, it is about how Europeans, their ambassadors and envoys, found the English both baffling and infuriating.’

Jessie Childs in the London Review of Books and Lucy Wooding in the Literary Review both argued that this approach has its limitations. ‘Their utterances are undeniably fascinating,’ Wooding wrote, ‘but the individuals concerned were highly partisan, often ill-informed and generally shaped their comments to fit a particular agenda at home.’

Although Childs maintained that ‘for most of the century England was nothing like a failed state’, she conceded that ‘the research is impressive, the writing lucid and every page thought-provoking. It is also tremendously entertaining.’

‘Parallels with the present are

English Ships and the Spanish Armada, August 1588, English school, 16th century

BBC: a unique institution The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022 7

History loudest voices belong to senior executives, not actors or presenters, let alone ordinary viewers and listeners. Even landmark programmes such as EastEnders and Doctor Who come and go in a few sentences, with no new revelations or insights.’

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO COLOUR A CULTURAL HISTORY

JAMES FOX Allen Lane, 320pp, £25

The Elgin Marbles once showed tantalising traces of the vivid colours in which they had originally been painted. Then, in the 1930s, they were given a too-thorough clean by over-diligent curators using wire brushes and copper chisels. The colour was scrubbed off forever, leaving what an art historian called ‘lumps of stone … robbed of life, dead as casts’.

In her review of art historian and broadcaster James Fox’s book in the TLS, Kassia St Clair used this sad episode to illustrate a ‘stew of prejudices and assumptions about European identity. For Western European intellectuals, a marked preference for form and line over hue was a hallmark of the rational and civilised.’ Chris Allnutt took up the theme in the Financial Times, noting that ‘with more than 40,000 dyes and pigments available today, we live in an age of unprecedented vibrancy and Fox’s histories remind us that it has not always been so’.

In the Literary Review, Adrian Tinniswood enjoyed Fox’s range. The book ‘is all about context and the meanings that colours have acquired in different eras and different civilisations (though in his introduction Fox also provides a straightforward – and admirably brief – account of the physics).

Taking seven colours – black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green – he devotes a chapter to each, offering a wide-ranging and often intriguing series of meditations on their changing significance.’ In the Times, Laura Freeman loved it – ‘a brilliant cultural history in undeservedly drab covers. Dreary hardback, sparkling text. Fox paints a great rainbow of natural history, philosophy, religion, art, optics, myth and the occult.’

8 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

Architectural gem: The Circus, Bath, built between 1754 and 1768

THE GEORGIANS

THE DEEDS AND MISDEEDS OF 18TH-CENTURY BRITAIN

PENELOPE J CORFIELD Yale, 488pp, £25

In the Times Literary Supplement, Judith Hawley called The Georgians an ‘ambitious chronicle’. Corfield ‘can write with confidence and authority about the whole sweep of the period’, she continued, ‘because she has already contributed greatly to our knowledge of developments that shaped the age, including the rise of the professions, urbanization and democracy... There are chapters on sexuality, literacy, religion, politics, science and technology, trade and overseas expansion. She also looks into social diversity, stressing that although society remained hierarchical, there was a great degree of flexibility and fluidity in its structure, especially among the middle classes.’

Andrew Taylor, in his review for the Times, found Corfield ‘particularly interesting on the quintessentially British subject of class. In 1760 the income of a skilled Sheffield knife or fork grinder could equal that of a poor curate, although one was a lower-class artisan and the other thought of himself, in theory at least, as an educated gentleman...

Corfield is adept at switching from the general to the particular.’

In the Sunday Times, Dominic Sandbrook admired the book for finding ‘lots of room for eccentric and contradictory voices’. He was frustrated, however, that Corfield

‘stubbornly shuns any hint of narrative or character. Because the book is entirely thematic, we don’t really get a sense of change over time: one quotation might come from the 1690s, the next from the 1780s.

Potentially exciting moments come and go in a few words: the Seven Years’ War, arguably the world’s first global conflict and a pivotal moment in the making of the British Empire, gets half a sentence.’

THE GATE TO CHINA

A NEW HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC AND HONG KONG

MICHAEL SHERIDAN Wm Collins, 512pp, £25

This entwined history of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong illustrates how the financial prowess of the latter informed the economic liberalisation of the former but without the once-hoped-for social reforms. ‘You can understand a lot about China’s relations with the rest of the world,’ wrote Stephen Vines in the Sunday Times, ‘by looking at how Beijing has dealt with Hong Kong.’ In the handover negotiations of the 1980s, China still sought global approval, whereas ‘now the rulers of Beijing are confident not just of their economic ascendancy but also of their global political power’.

The significance of HK goes back, wrote Isabel Hilton in the Observer, to ‘the unequal treaty by which Britain acquired what was seen in the 19th century as an unpromisingly barren rock. A rock that was to grow into one of the world’s most dynamic and

History prosperous societies.’ This was in no small part, she pointed out, due to the proximity of China and the ‘benefit from the talent and energy of the millions who fled there’.

Hilton described the book as a ‘compendious new history’ which elucidates the role played by the prosperity of HK to the formation of former leader Deng Xiaoping’s ‘strategy to revive China’s desperate fortunes after 30 years of Maoist revolution’. Deng ‘transformed the material fortunes of the People’s Republic but China’s new middle-

Xi Jinping: grievance-filled nationalism

class aspirations for a more open society became a casualty of [current leader] Xi’s formula of a firmer party grip on this complex society’. The result is that: ‘An intense, grievancefilled nationalism is the party’s preferred narrative for a new era of strategic confrontation.’ Watch out, Taiwan.

THE GREEK REVOLUTION 1821 AND THE MAKING OF MODERN EUROPE

MARK MAZOWER Allen Lane, 572pp, £30

THE SEARCHERS

THE QUEST FOR THE LOST OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

ROBERT SACKVILLE-WEST Bloomsbury, 336pp, £25

One hundred years ago the word ‘closure’ had yet to acquire a palliative connotation, but it sums up what

hundreds of thousands of bereaved British and Commonwealth families sought after the Great War. Not only did every home have ‘an empty chair’.

More than half a million of them also had what Simon Heffer in the Telegraph calls ‘a void’. Their loved ones were ‘missing’ – presumed dead, but with no known grave. Luckily, help was at hand from one of the war’s ‘most compassionate, if forgotten, departments’, a Red Cross unit whom Robert Sackville-West calls ‘The Searchers’. These tenacious men and women dedicated themselves to identifying as many of the unknown bodies as possible, a macabre task that continues to this day.

In the Sunday Times John Carey described Sackville-West’s book as ‘compelling and often horrifying’. He reminded readers that, thanks to shell fire, ‘there were often no bodies to retrieve’. How fitting that Sir Edward Lutyens should style his shrine in Whitehall the Cenotaph, meaning, in Ancient Greek, ‘empty tomb’. Noting that ‘some families did not rely simply on detective work to trace the missing’, Simon Heffer said that ‘this was a golden age for spiritualists, all of them charlatans to some degree or other, but endorsed by no less popular and respected a figure than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’ – whose ‘journey from materialist to messiah’ Sackville-West describes.

Another famous writer, Rudyard Kipling, pulled strings to get his severely myopic son John a commission in the Irish Guards, only to lose him soon after at the Battle of Loos. John’s body was not identified until 1992, far too late to console his father, but a tribute to the War Graves Commission’s dedication.

The coffin of the Unknown Warrior in procession through the streets of London, 1920 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022 9

HULTON ARCHIVE_GETTY IMAGES

Mazower’s book ‘offers the best and fullest explanation, to date, for a series of events whose effects would change the entire geopolitics of Europe’, declared Roderick Beaton in the Times Literary Supplement.

‘Written with compassion and understanding for the human cost of that achievement, it deserves to remain the standard treatment of the subject in English for many decades to come.’

Between 1821 and 1829 the Greeks rose up against the Ottoman Empire and won their independence, with help from Britain, France, and Russia.

‘As the subtitle of Mark Mazower’s

new book maintains, events in Greece 200 years ago helped shape modern Europe,’ wrote the Economist’s anonymous reviewer. ‘His elegant and rigorous account also holds lessons for modern geopolitics: about the galvanising effects of violence, the role of foreign intervention and the design flaws in dreams.’ In the Financial Times, Tony Barber praised the author for his ‘engaging combination of fast-flowing narrative and insightful analysis’, while Daily Telegraph reviewer Julian Evans found the book ‘superbly subtle and thorough’. For Lea Ypi, in the New Statesman, Mazower uses ‘vivid detail, impeccable scholarship and great nuance’ to show ‘how the modern idea of the nation emerges out of the complex, sometimes random and often messy interactions between a plurality of agents’.

It was left to Noonie Minogue, writing in the Tablet, to depart from ruminations about geopolitics and emphasise the ‘epic narrative, both scholarly, breathlessly page-turning and packed with hauntingly romantic characters. Few historians dig so deep or with such sympathy into what history felt like to those living through it... anyone in search of an opera plot should scour these drama-packed pages.’

Second World War left confused, even seasick from the back and forth.’

The New York Times’s Benjamin Carter Hett was more appreciative: ‘The greatest strength of this book is its success in accomplishing something supremely difficult: it reminds us how contingent even the most significant historical events can be, how many other possibilities lurked beyond the familiar ones that actually happened – and how even the greatest leaders often have only a shaky grasp of what is happening.’

Canadian wounded, and abandoned Churchill tanks after the Dieppe raid

OPERATION JUBILEE

DIEPPE, 1942: THE FOLLY AND THE SACRIFICE

PATRICK BISHOP

KOLL

Viking, 400pp, £20

Soon after the Dieppe Raid had taken place, one of the officers involved said that it was a sea parallel of the charge of the Light Brigade. It lasted ten hours and out of 5,000 Canadian troops, there were 3,367 casualties, a rate of 68 per cent. The RAF lost 106 aircraft and the navy lost 33 landing craft and a destroyer, all for the sake of testing the feasibility of a landing and gleaning intelligence.

‘Bishop’s account of the operation is the best I’ve read,’ wrote Allan Mallinson in the Spectator. ‘He understands war, he understands battle, and he understands men. He marshals the material well; and there’s plenty of it, for failure generates much paper.’ Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, criticised the planning of the raid, while Vice-Admiral Louis Mountbatten, in charge of Combined Operations Headquarters, exaggerated the lessons learned in order to deflect criticism.

In his Sunday Times review, Max Hastings praised Bishop’s ‘exemplary account of this wartime fiasco... It was afterwards claimed that Dieppe taught important lessons for D-Day. This is true only if it is indispensable to stage a fiasco ahead of a proper operation of war. Bishop tells the sorry story with superb authority and verve.’

According to Daily Telegraph reviewer Saul David, ‘Bishop’s instinctive grasp of human nature and forensic analysis of the surviving evidence combine to pinpoint exactly why the hare-brained mission was 10 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

launched and who was to blame... The hundred or so pages covering the raid itself are a masterclass of heartstopping historical narrative as we accompany the doomed soldiers on their hopeless mission.’

HITLER’S AMERICAN GAMBLE

PEARL HARBOR AND THE GERMAN MARCH TO GLOBAL WAR

BRENDAN SIMMS AND CHARLIE LADERMAN Allen Lane, 510pp, £25

‘Given the choice,’ said Arthur Herman in the Wall Street Journal, ‘Hitler always went for broke. “It’s the only call I’ll ever make,” he told Goering.’ So after Pearl Harbor he gambled that America lacked the will to fight a war on two fronts, and would offer only token support to Britain and the Soviet Union. With his troops within sight of Moscow, he declared war on America. This, say Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, sealed his fate. Alas, they argue, it also sealed the fate of Europe’s Jews, who up until then had been held hostage. Unable to strike at America’s Jews, who he thought controlled Roosevelt, Hitler approved the Final Solution, which also, paradoxically, hampered the Nazi war effort.

Simms and Laderman concentrate on the hectic five days between Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s joining forces with Japan. ‘By unfolding the story in real time,’ said Saul David in the Times, ‘the authors are able to emphasise the contingency of the decision-making process. But the drawback of this constantly shifting narrative – across cities and even continents – is that the reader is often

BROTHERS IN ARMS

ONE LEGENDARY TANK REGIMENT’S BLOODY WAR FROM D-DAY TO VE DAY

JAMES HOLLAND Bantam, 592pp, £25

‘This is war as it should be written,’ Gerard DeGroot proclaimed in the Times, ‘painful to read, but impossible to put down. Seldom is war so vividly described – ordinary men facing extraordinary horror.’

Waging war in a tank might seem an improvement on the trenches, Patrick Bishop explained in the Telegraph, but these men had just exchanged one form of hell for another and casualties were far higher. Holland follows a single regiment, the Sherwood Rangers, ‘using his trademark technique of immersive detail and focus on a cast of well-defined characters’.

‘Going to war in a tank,’ Bishop observed, ‘meant men lived cheek-byjowl and depended utterly on each other...’ And ‘Inside the tank,’ DeGroot wrote, ‘they smelt an essence of cordite, fuel, sweat and urine.

Outside was the ever-present stench of rotting corpses.’

‘James Holland’s greatest strength as a military historian is that he brings humanity to his work,’ Katya Hoyer noted in the Spectator. ‘The book is a powerful and moving reminder that there is tragedy in statistics.’ And Nathan Greenfield in the TLS agreed: ‘Holland takes us down to the individual’s experience.’

‘The power of Holland’s book lies in the painful intimacy he creates,’ DeGroot commented. ‘We grow fond of these soldiers, then they die....’ He concluded: ‘Caught up in the drama of battle, we sometimes forget the good men who died. Holland, to his credit, forces us to remember.’

Biography & memoir THE WOMEN OF ROTHSCHILD

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS DYNASTY

NATALIE LIVINGSTONE John Murray, 480pp, £25

‘My heart sank when I received this book: it looked too beautiful to be serious,’ wrote Abigail Green in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘Yet within a couple of chapters, I was hooked.’ Green pointed out that ‘every Rothschild history relishes the fact that while her children and grandchildren lived grandly in London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, Gutle [the original matriarch] never left the modest home she and her husband had shared in Frankfurt’, but that ‘no Rothschild history I have read thinks to put Gutle centre-stage’. In Livingstone’s book ‘she emerges as a person, not a trope: fielding questions from the police during the Napoleonic occupation, hiring a follower of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn to educate the younger children, and worrying about her daughters’ prospects.’

Women were ‘a vital component of the family’s soft power’ In the patriarchal structure of the Rothschild family, the women were ‘a vital component of the family’s soft power’, wrote Daisy Goodwin in the Sunday Times. They were not permitted to join the family banking business, but they instead made their mark as political hostesses and philanthropists and later as activists, academics or patrons of the arts. ‘The only thing missing in this otherwise hugely entertaining book is any discussion of the downside of all that money – yes, it conveyed great freedom and privilege, but, like being a member of a royal family, it must colour the way everyone treats you.

Otherwise, this is a fascinating story, stylishly told.’

In what Mail on Sunday reviewer Kathryn Hughes called a ‘scintillating family saga’, Livingstone ‘reveals that the Rothschild ladies were, if anything, even more extraordinary than their fathers, brothers and husbands... Several of the women in

Louisa (née Montefiore), Lady de Rothschild, 1860s

this book played a key part in helping families escape from Hitler’s Holocaust. Later, some of them contributed to the setting up of Israel.

With consummate skill, Livingstone weaves together all these threads, the dark as well as the light, and the result is both thrilling and moving.’

THE CONTRARIAN

PETER THIEL AND SILICON VALLEY’S PURSUIT OF POWER

MAX CHAFKIN Bloomsbury, 400pp, £25

Libertarian kook, Bond supervillain, right-wing provocateur, inscrutable genius or sociopathic nihilist? The complex figure who, reviewers agreed, fits all these descriptions yet remains an enigma is the Founders Fund billionaire Peter Thiel. Villain, though, was the preferred description for most, casting Thiel as a ruthless entrepreneur, destructive disrupter and hater of all things liberal, who had helped bankrupt the Gawker site for outing him and had funded PayPal, Facebook and Donald Trump as his way of undermining capitalism’s liberaldemocrat status quo.

The Observer’s John Naughton enjoyed Chafkin’s ‘detailed, impeccably researched account’ of the rise of Thiel’s personality cult. In the Times, Hugo Rifkind wanted more detail still: ‘There is a little bit too much going on with Thiel for any

sketch to quite do him justice’; his fraught relationship with his PayPal co-founder Elon Musk ‘could be a book in its own right’, he noted.

Richard Waters in the FT also felt Chafkin had reduced Thiel to an unlikeable villain, the lead character in a ‘parable of Silicon Valley’, rather than delving deeper into his complicated activity as an investor.

For Waters, too much of the book relied on unattributed sources, people terrified of Thiel’s retribution. Naughton similarly wrote of the ‘reality distortion field’ surrounding him.

Anna Wiener’s judgment, in a long and thoughtful New Yorker review, was that Thiel is ‘genuinely eccentric’ and his contradictions a key part of his appeal: ‘There is something for everyone.’ Then again, she admitted that ‘what registers as mystique may simply be practised opacity’.

1000 YEARS OF JOYS AND SORROWS A MEMOIR

AI WEIWEI Bodley Head, 400pp £25

This is a ‘double memoir’, wrote Andrew Russeth in Art in America.

‘The first follows [Weiwei’s father] Qing, who was born into a well-off family in a village in Jinhua in 1910, travelled to Paris in the 1920s, and later became enmeshed in the politics of revolutionary China. The second follows Weiwei himself, who The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 11

Biography & memoir inherited his father’s artistic passions and his stubborn independence.’

Sean O’Hagan in the Observer described how Ai’s poet father was one of 300,000 intellectuals rounded up in 1957 and ‘exiled to the country’s remote border regions to undergo “reform through labour”’.

In 1967 Qing was sent to a desert region known as Little Siberia and Ai, not yet ten, chose to go with him.

‘While Ai inherited his father’s stoicism, wrote O’Hagan, ‘the defiance that would characterise his later activism was all his own.’ In 1989, ‘Ai compulsively watched CNN reports of the massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square’ and returned to Beijing. From there, the book ‘documents his art world ascendancy alongside his bruising battles with the Chinese authorities’, including detention and house arrest and a Kafkaesque 11-week interrogation.

Ai Weiwei, 2017: stubborn independence

Oliver Basciano in the Guardian thought it was in the ‘recollections of Weiwei’s teenage years in “Little Siberia”’ that the autobiography is at its most vivid. ‘Living in a dug-out pit, the boy foraged for firewood to keep warm, his father forced to clean latrines in which “faeces would freeze into icy pillars”’. Basciano wondered why ‘we hear little about the conceptual work that initially made his name’, concluding that for Weiwei art is too much of a safe haven, preferring to turn to ‘documentary-making to highlight the government’s corruption and censorship’. Politics, for Weiwei is in the end ‘a kind of readymade artwork’, he concluded — and considerably more dangerous.

MIGHT BITE

THE SECRET LIFE OF A GAMBLING ADDICT

PATRICK FOSTER WITH WILL MACPHERSON Bloomsbury Sport, 246pp, £14.99

In his late teens, Patrick Foster was a student at Durham University and a brilliant cricketer with Northamptonshire county Cricket Club. He had luck, looks and talent and his future was glowing. But, as Peter Carey in iNews put it, ‘this enviable combination started to slip away when he entered a betting shop for the first time’.

Foster’s account of his years as a gambling addict begins at Slough station where, £500,000 in debt, he is steeling himself to jump under a train.

He was running 75 gambling accounts under 65 names. Melanie Reid in the Times found his book an ‘unflinching account of entitlement, self-hatred and degradation’. The book’s title refers to the name of a horse on which Foster bid to win £200,000, losing the lot when it came second to Native River. Altogether, Foster lost nearly £4 million and lied to everyone he knew, loved and worked with. He was saved from jumping under the train only by a text from his brother telling him he was not alone.

In the Daily Mail Roger Alton thought it ‘no lolloping misery memoir’, noting particularly Foster’s description of how deeply hidden his addiction was: ‘He’s very likeable, sporty, good at his job and friendly, while riddled with this crippling secret vice.’ It should, thought Alton, ‘be in the hands of anyone who has eyed a bet once too often’.

WINDSWEPT AND INTERESTING MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BILLY CONNOLLY Two Roads, 389pp, £25

Billy Connolly could talk about his life for hours, literally, in his stand-up appearances, without so much as a note. Chutzpah? Or did he just have ‘too many funny stories lining up in his head demanding to be told?’ asked Dominic Maxwell in his Times review.

Dictated into his phone during lockdowns, the book is packed with anecdotes but few revelations; as Lynn Barber pointed out in her

three-star Telegraph review, ‘we knew the story already’ – of the boy who went from Glasgow tenement childhood to wealthy Florida retirement, via sexual abuse by his father, heavy drinking, comedy fame and film success alongside Judi Dench — thanks to two biographies

by Mrs Connolly, Pamela Stephenson.

It’s by no means a misery memoir, reviewers noted. Aidan Smith in the Scotsman claimed there were few shocks as you could hear Connolly onstage impersonating his childhood persecutors and ‘making them seem funny’.

Billy Connolly: joyful wit

So what’s to be gained from a new memoir? For Maxwell, Stephenson’s Billy (2002) was ‘the deeper dive, but this is where to go to hear Connolly’s life alchemised into anecdote’. Fiona Sturges, reviewing the audiobook version in the Guardian, argued that ‘his reading of his memoir’ is surely the ‘next best thing’ to his live appearances, as ‘the joyful wit is all present and correct’. Barber, though, suggested: ‘If you adore Billy Connolly you will love this book, but it’s still better to watch his old stage performances on YouTube.’

TERENCE

THE MAN WHO INVENTED DESIGN

STEPHEN BAYLEY AND ROGER MAVITY Constable, 328pp, £25

Sir Terence Conran, whose Habitat stores transformed the aesthetic of the 20th-century British home, died in 2020. Hardly had the dust settled on his reputation than it has been stirred afresh by design-meisters Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity, former employees of Conran.

In Terence, Bayley and Mavity The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 13

Biography & memoir have penned a portrait of their mentor which settles ancient scores.

They have written overlapping chapters, with Mavity’s tending to fawning and Bayley’s to fury.

In the Observer, Anthony Quinn found the alternating sections hard to read. ‘The contradictions of his character toll with maddening repetition through the book: he was a generous host and a penny-pincher; a voluptuary and a puritan; a tyrant and a democrat; a promoter of talent who skimped on crediting his colleagues.’

Quinn noted that Bayley, despite his fury, seemed unable quite to shake off the courtier’s mantle: ‘It is rather like watching a man angrily shaking his fist while unable to get up off his knees.’

In the Sunday Times, John Walsh enjoyed the bonfire. ‘The authors are well placed to identify Conran’s salient features, good and bad. The latter preponderate,’ he wrote. ‘In the index, entries include “ambitious”, “bully”, “callous”, “capricious”, “charming”, “childlike”, “competitive”, “controlling nature” and “cruelty”; and later “psychopathic trait”, “rude”, “ruthless”, “self-love”, “superior”, “tyrannical”, “unpredictable” and “untrustworthy”.’

Still, for all that, as Quinn noted, Conran ‘persuaded people to think about objects as something beautiful as well as useful. Britain was a better place because of him.’

ALL ABOUT ME!

MY REMARKABLE LIFE IN SHOW BUSINESS

MEL BROOKS Century, 460pp, £16.99

‘Brooks attacks his autobiography with a wholly characteristic lack of modesty,’ wrote Laurence Maslon in the Washington Post. The director cut his teeth on Sid Caesar’s TV comedy show in the 1950s, and enjoyed success with Carl Reiner on the comedy LP The 2,000 Year Old Man, before writing and directing his first movie, The Producers, in 1967.

‘Where the book comes up short is in any exploration of doubt, introspection or analysis... Handwringing is simply not a part of Brooks’s sunny disposition.

‘Indeed, the book’s most rewarding chapters are its earliest, with Brooks’s accounts of Depression-era Brooklyn and the European front of World War 14 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

Mel Brooks at his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony in 2010

II (and the early days of television, for that matter). This isn’t Clifford Odets or Norman Mailer, but an epic adventure of possibility and positivity... While other comedians of his era – Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, Larry David – were neurotic messes, Brooks was essentially, as the 2,000-year-old man put it, “jaunty jolly.”’

Geoffrey Macnab, writing in the i newspaper, found the book ‘a frustrating affair’, which ‘begins with promise’ as Brooks ‘evokes his Brooklyn childhood in very lively fashion’, yet ‘strangely, the more success Brooks achieves, the less engaging the autobiography becomes.

Once Brooks’s filmmaking career begins in earnest with The Producers, the book turns into a series of self-congratulatory case studies...’

Brooks is ‘an amiable narrator’ and ‘many of his jokes still hit the mark’, but he ‘refuses to look too deeply into his private life’ and ‘we’re left with page after page of ever more enervating and self-serving showbiz anecdotes’.

SEX CULT NUN FAITH JONES HarperCollins, 400pp, £16.99

With a title like Sex Cult Nun, Faith Jones’s memoir should fly off the shelves. Marion Winik in the Washington Post pointed out that the lurid title ‘doesn’t remotely capture

the flavour of Jones’s thoughtful, carefully recounted memoir. Not to imply the book is not disturbing.

There are many images you will wish you could forget, and descriptions of sexual mores and practices that call into question basic human values. But there are no nuns, and Jones’s life was anything but chaste, though not by choice.’

Jones was raised in a commune on the island of Macau, part of a cult, The Children of God, founded in 1968 by her grandfather, David Brandt Berg.

As Winik puts it, ‘This was no tiny splinter group of crackpots, but rather a highly organised international group that ran for almost 50 years with some 10,000 live-in disciples in 170 countries. Its extensive, secretive bureaucratic infrastructure involved so many acronyms and neologisms that the author provides a glossary.’

Life was dictated by Brandt’s ‘Law of Love’, which encouraged incestuous relationships with children, family members and fellow cult-members that believed in the impending apocalypse.

In an interview with the website Bitchmedia, Jones, now a lawyer, was asked why she thought so many cults were apocalyptic movements.

‘Psychologically, to get people to act, you have to have a sense of urgency.

An imminent threat. It’s that imminent threat of danger, attack, and catastrophe that gets people to act, oftentimes against their best interests.’

Biography & memoir MY UNAPOLOGETIC DIARIES JOAN COLLINS Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 373pp, £20

These diaries ‘weren’t written in the usual way’, minor movie star Collins told a Guardian interviewer. ‘I never put pen to paper. Between 1989 and 2006, I talked into a Dictaphone practically every night when I got home, then put it away and forgot about it for years.’ Collins ‘has promised us “unapologetic” – for which read, “bitchy” – but woo-eee, it is savage’, declared Camilla Long in the Sunday Times. ‘A special grade of revulsion is reserved for people with bad plastic surgery – Collins views this is as almost a moral failing: ugly and disorganised. One “ghastly” party, given by Melanie Griffith, is “a complete crush of hags, facelifts and ancient old men in flashy suits”.’

Celebrities are skewered, but the book is also full of ‘literally hundreds of people you’ve never heard of, sometimes for pages’.

For Roger Lewis, in his Daily Telegraph review, the diaries ‘show how much time she spends with incredibly boring people, whose only distinction is their wealth, the source of power... For long stretches, Collins’s diaries – which start in 1989 and end in 2009 – are as flat and uninformative as a Christmas round robin... what eventually emerges, giving the book its depth, is Joan’s real pain and a sense of waste. Her intensity and ambition are there to conceal a lot of insecurity... She is more circumspect than she pretends – names of malefactors are concealed as “a well-known actor”, “the woman is a celebrity”, “a society hostess”.

Stories peter out. It was a book I couldn’t wait to defenestrate.’

THE CHANCELLOR

THE REMARKABLE ODYSSEY OF ANGELA MERKEL

KATI MARTON William Collins, 344pp, £25

ARMIN LINNARTZ

The first English-language biography of Germany’s joint-longest-serving Chancellor, by Hungarian-American Kati Marton, was received very differently on either side of the Atlantic. It was favourably received by the New York Times, where Jacob Heilbrunn called it a ‘masterpiece of

discernment and insight’, but it drew stinging notices from UK reviewers.

They all, though, granted that Marton’s task was made exceptionally difficult by Merkel’s intensely private lifestyle and refusal to give interviews.

Peter Conradi in the Sunday Times conceded that Marton gave ‘lively descriptions’ of Merkel’s top-level meetings, thanks to the high-ranking movers and shakers she interviewed.

As the widow of Richard Holbrooke, US ambassador to Germany 1993-94, she had also met the Chancellor. This closeness, though, led her to an almost ‘sycophantic’ approach that didn’t view Merkel’s legacy critically, especially her handling of the 2015 refugee crisis.

Angela Merkel: intensely private

It’s an almost ‘sycophantic’ approach The Times’s Oliver Moody similarly commended Marton for her supply of anecdotes but deplored her inaccuracies and ignorance of European politics. ‘The book’s account of virtually every aspect of Germany’s political system, from coalition formation to Covid policy, is variously shallow, incomplete, misleading or flatly wrong.’

In the Guardian, Philip Oltermann disputed Marton’s depiction of Merkel as a feminist and suggested she found Merkel commendable as the not-Trump, her chancellorship ‘gossip-proof’. He was still waiting for a study that probed Merkel’s private motivations: ‘Marton’s diligently compiled but often overly reverential chronological overview is not it.’

Bob Mortimer: heartfelt testament

AND AWAY… BOB MORTIMER Gallery, 323pp, £20

‘I have never minded playing second fiddle,’ Bob Mortimer – known for much of his career as Vic Reeves’s sidekick – writes in this poignant and self-deprecating memoir. It tells the story, said Stephanie Merritt in the Guardian, of a man who nursed no ambition to perform. The youngest of four brothers who lost his father in a car crash at the age of six, Mortimer was ‘a desperately shy boy who suffered such crippling social anxiety that he endured three years of university barely speaking to another soul’. He was working, unhappily, as a council solicitor when he first saw Vic Reeves perform; ‘it was an epiphany’. A friendship, and eventually a collaboration, with Reeves, followed.

This book is framed by Mortimer’s near-death experience when he had a heart attack in 2015. His friend Paul Whitehouse took him fishing to help him recover his spirits, and that turned into the unexpectedly ruminative TV show Gone Fishing.

That showed a less madcap side to the comedian and, he writes: ‘In many ways, the show is the culmination of my journey back from sidekick Bob to standalone Robert.’

Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times called And Away a ‘delightful, quietly revelatory memoir’: ‘And… is not marked by tears-of-a-clown cliché, however (although Reeves becoming weepy in the hospital, aware that “one day in the future we wouldn’t have each other to play with”, might break delicate readers).’ She concluded: ‘It’s a precarious world, but And Away … is a heartfelt testament to the magic of finding your happy place within it.’

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 15

Current affairs

MATERIAL GIRLS

WHY REALITY MATTERS FOR FEMINISM

KATHLEEN STOCK Fleet, 320pp, £16.99

SONALI FERNANDO

Few academic philosophers can expect to write a book which garners the kind of attention received by Material Girls. Kathleen Stock’s gender-critical position on biological sex has sparked calls of transphobia and forced her resignation from her teaching post at Sussex University.

In the Observer, Gaby Hinsliff set the scene for confused onlookers. ‘To gender-critical thinkers, gender is a social construct imposed on women and to be resisted, since it’s driven by what men want them to be (Stock describes herself as a gender non-conforming lesbian). But trans people use the phrase “gender identity” to mean an innate sense of being male or female, which is fundamental to their identity because it explains why they reject the sex others perceive them as. To one side, gender is a terrible trap; to the other, it’s liberation from a trap.’

In Philosophers Magazine, Julian Baggini was ‘baffled’ by the ‘Manichean orthodoxy’ displayed by Stock’s detractors. ‘It is astonishing that Stock’s conclusion “As binaries in nature go, the sex division is one of the most stable and predictable there is” is now considered by many not only to be outrageous but prejudiced.

If the argument that the gender critical position is transphobic rests on the denial of biological sex, it must surely collapse.’

In the Evening Standard, Stella O’Malley felt an ‘intense relief’ that 16 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

Kathleen Stock: generous spirit

light had been shed on an issue many find difficult to get their heads round: ‘finally a comprehensive account of gender identity theory was presented and explored with both clarity and depth’. And Sarah Ditum in the Daily Mail pointed out that although the reader ‘will have to grapple with some high level conceptual thinking – and even some diagrams’, the most important revelation to be found in Material Girls is the ‘curious mind and a generous spirit’ of Kathleen Stock herself.

WELCOME TO THE WOKE TRIALS

HOW IDENTITY KILLED PROGRESSIVE POLITICS

JULIE BURCHILL Academica, 256pp, £24.95

For her fans, Julie Burchill always delivers. To publicise Welcome to the Woke Trials she penned a characteristically splenetic article in the Daily Mail (illustrated, inevitably, with a photo of Meghan Markle): ‘Wokeness is the roar of the entitled mediocre, desperate to hold centre stage and terrified by any challenge to their flimsy sense of self – a temper tantrum with a socially concerned alibi.’

However, the book only just made it onto the shelves, the author having fallen foul of the very attitudes she derides. It couldn’t have been better timing, publicity-wise. In Areo magazine, Brandon Robshaw filled us in: ‘Hachette Book Group had originally agreed to publish it, but dropped the deal after Burchill

engaged in a spat on Twitter that it deemed problematic. She then placed it with Stirling Publishing (Edinburgh), but this time she pulled the plug, after it emerged that its director had links to a far-right group. The book was finally published in November 2021 by Academica, a press based in London and Washington, DC, that specialises in scholarly nonfiction.’

Burchill loves a spat but few newspaper reviewers took up the cudgels. In the Times, it was left to Burchill’s fellow traveller Quentin Letts to sound a deliriously approving klaxon. Her book had the ‘force of epic poetry’, he wrote: it was ‘a long, filth-flecked yell against the illiberalism of “the woke insanity”.’

Burchill is ‘lewd, loud and careless of polite opinion’, Letts went on. ‘She writes breezily about her bisexual bed-hopping and drug-taking and jobs from which she has been sacked.

She moons at convention and roars at fashion’s wind.’

As Robshaw put it: ‘if you want an entertaining, over-the-top, anti-woke rant, full of scorn and spleen and sarcasm, fill your boots.’

INVISIBLE CHILD

POVERTY, SURVIVAL AND HOPE IN NEW YORK CITY

ANDREA ELLIOTT Hutchinson Heinemann, 624pp, £16.99

In 2013, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter Andrea Elliott ran a front-page series on the life and experiences of an 11-year-old girl called Dasani (named after a brand of bottled water), who lived with her parents and seven siblings in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Dasani captured the city’s heart – she became ‘homeless kid of the year’ – and the series focused attention on the pitiful state of the city’s homelessness provision.

In Invisible Child, Elliott expands and continues her coverage of Dasani over eight years of reporting. ‘And from the first page we are gripped,’ Christina Patterson said in the Times.

‘Dasani often wakes to “the popping of gunshots”. When she goes to use the communal bathroom, she knows she risks rape or assault. But she still does backflips at the bus stop, dances at the welfare office, “makes do with what she has and covers what she lacks”.’ Harrowing though Dasani’s

Current affairs ‘It reveals huge systemic inequality, with rich and poor living cheek by jowl yet worlds apart’ story is, Patterson wrote, ‘this is magnificent work, which will surely be a classic to sit alongside those by giants such as Studs Terkel and George Orwell’.

Anita Sethi in the I Paper said the book ‘unflinchingly reveals huge systemic inequality, with rich and poor living cheek by jowl yet worlds apart. The book sensitively traces Dasani’s life, coming of age as New York’s homelessness crisis deepens by the day.’

Elliott’s own paper the New York Times agreed: ‘The reporting has an intimate, almost limitless feel to it, the firsthand observations backed up by some 14,000 pages of official documents, from report cards to drug tests to city records secured through Freedom of Information Law requests. The result of this unflinching, tenacious reporting is a rare and powerful work whose stories will live inside you long after you’ve read them.’

SICK MONEY

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GLOBAL PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

BILL KENBER Canongate, 432pp, £18.99

Billy Kenber’s new book looks in depth at the global business of pharmaceuticals – and it discovers, few readers will be surprised to find, that corporate greed and exploitation plays just as much of a part in the

story as the selfless desire to push the boundaries of medical science and save lives. A host of books with titles such as Bottle of Lies, Bad Pharma, Empire of Pain, Dopesick, Selling Sickness and The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It have already told us as much.

That said, as Martha Gill observed writing in the Times, the Covid crisis did rather a lot to reform Big Pharma’s image: ‘A pandemic illustrates rather sharply the importance of having a $1 trillion industry dedicated to finding new medicines and translating those discoveries into billions of doses.’

Even so, Gill added, Kenber reveals that the story wasn’t that simple.

Drug companies don’t like vaccines (they eradicate diseases so you don’t get repeat customers), and when Covid struck most were reluctant to get involved until they were promised billions in government subsidies.

Even then, they preferred to sell the drugs to rich countries at high mark-ups and declined to share intellectual property rights with poorer countries.

Kenber’s indictment of the industry, she said, distinguished itself from its predecessors ‘by its investigative power and meticulous clarity’, and its scope goes far beyond Covid. It begins with the discovery of penicillin in 1928 and takes us to the present day ‘in an account studded with victims, villains and heroes’, notable among them ‘the South African drug company prepared to destroy stocks of a cancer medicine for children rather than bring down the price’.

The book ends with a call for action: ‘There is still hope for redemption, and Kenber lays out a plan for reform,’ said Gill. She added: ‘Whatever the remedy, it can’t come too soon.’

SHARE POWER

HOW ORDINARY PEOPLE CAN CHANGE THE WAY CAPITALISM WORKS – AND MAKE MONEY TOO

MERRYN SOMERSET WEBB Short Books, 160pp, £9.99

Pharmaceutical industry: greed

In her new book the editor-in-chief of Money Week magazine, Merryn Somerset Webb, draws a bead on fund managers. She says it’s

manifestly unfair that this ‘smallish group of very well paid, mostly group-thinking men’ ignores all but the wealthiest of their shareholders.

In theory, anyone who belongs to a pension fund or has an ISA – at least 20 million of us – is entitled to vote on how the fund is invested. In practice we very rarely get the chance. The technology exists for fund managers to canvas us. Isn’t it

Merryn Somerset Webb: accessible

time, asks Somerset Webb, that they made use of it?

To show what individual shareholders can achieve Somerset Webb recalls the Gilbert brothers, two American champions of ‘corporate democracy’, who made a nuisance of themselves at the AGMs of the 1,500 companies in which they held shares. One of them blew a clown’s horn every time a CEO said something he considered silly.

The Gilberts were wealthy individuals who inherited money made in the California Gold Rush.

But as Emilie Bellet noted in the Financial Times, ‘this concise and enjoyable read’ proves you don’t need to be a ‘big player’ to have your say.

‘There are a number of small steps that individual investors can take to ensure they have a greater share in the businesses they ultimately own.

These include being more visible and vocal by banding together in grassroots shareholder activist groups or engaging with investment platforms, fund managers and even local politicians.’

In the Times, Robert Colville described Share Power as ‘a breezy, accessible and admirably brief summary of what the stock market is, how it works, and where it isn’t working well enough …. Somerset Webb says it took her a while to write because “there are too many long books around – and I suspect very few are read from cover to cover”.

This one should be.’

The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022 17

Forgotten authors CS Forester’s stories are not only escapist entertainment but also great works of literature, believes WILLIAM COOK ‘It was not long after dawn that Captain Hornblower came up on the quarterdeck…’ So begins one of the finest series of historical novels in the English language, a series I devoured as a teenager then put aside for 40 years. More fool me. It’s only now that I realise what CS Forester’s wiser fans have always known: that his seafaring yarns aren’t just escapist entertainments – they’re also great works of literature. You can see why they were beloved by so many great writers, from Raymond Chandler to Ernest Hemingway.

Has Forester been forgotten? Not quite. Most of his books are still in print and he’s still familiar to readers of a certain age, but for one of the most widely read authors of his generation he’s endured a pretty steep decline. He’s been eclipsed by Patrick O’Brian, an author I’ve tried to like but can’t get along with. O’Brian’s literary talent is indisputable, but Forester does something O’Brian doesn’t do for me – he makes you want to turn the page.

He was born Cecil Louis Troughton Smith in 1899 in Cairo, the son of an expat English teacher.

His parents separated when he was a toddler and his mother brought him back to England. A voracious reader from an early age (Jane Austen and Henry James were among his childhood favourites), he was educated at Dulwich College and then Guy’s Hospital, but he didn’t take to medicine and left without a degree. He volunteered for the army in the First World War but failed the medical, whereupon he turned to writing.

Success came early. Aged 24, he wrote Payment Deferred, a thriller which spawned a movie, starring Charles Laughton. He subsequently wrote two good novels about the Peninsular War (Death to The French and The Gun, filmed as The Pride & The Passion, with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren) and two very good novels about the First World War (The African Queen, which became a fine film, with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and The General, which HG Wells – quite rightly – called ‘a magnificent piece of work’).

18 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

As a result of his prowess as a storyteller, he was invited out to Hollywood, and even though his flirtation with screenwriting was only fleeting (‘the fools ran after me and I ran after the whores’), he fell in love with California and ended up living there. It’s an amusing irony that his quintessential English hero, Horatio Hornblower, was conceived so far from home.

If Forester had never created Horatio Hornblower, he would still deserve to be remembered, but it was these timeless books that secured his reputation. Tautly written, tightly plotted and insatiably readable, they paint a vivid picture of the Royal Navy’s glory days during the Napoleonic Wars that (for me, at least) remains utterly unsurpassed.

The historical background is impeccable, and the battle scenes are electric, but it’s Hornblower himself who makes them so absorbing. Fearlessly brave but sick with nerves before every battle, bold and resolute but secretly tormented

It is Horatio Hornblower’s vulnerability that makes him heroic

by doubt and indecision, he’s so sympathetic and believable that we can’t help but adore him.

The first few Hornblowers, written in the late 1930s, were very well received, but during the Second World War Forester devoted himself to the war effort, travelling on a Royal Navy warship to research his wartime novel, The Ship (highly praised at the time, it doesn’t read so well today). He then travelled to the Bering Straits, to write a similar book about the US navy, but during the voyage he contracted arteriosclerosis, which left him disabled.

Mercifully, this handicap didn’t affect his writing, and the Hornblowers he wrote after the war were just as gripping. His last Hornblower book, left tantalisingly unfinished when he died, aged 66, shows as much promise as his first one, written 30 years before.

He married twice and had two children. Despite the ill-health that plagued him, he led a happy, productive life. Max Hastings, who knew him as a child, recalls ‘a lean, bony, ascetic figure with a twinkling eye which caused him to reflect in everything he wrote his consciousness that the play of human affairs is always a comedy’.

But it was a comedy tinged with tragedy, and that is why his books endure. Intrinsically reserved and diffident, yet forthright whenever duty calls, it is Hornblower’s vulnerability that makes him heroic, a vulnerability he shared with his affable, crippled creator.

‘Hornblower was no born fighting man,’ observed Forester in Lord Hornblower, arguably his finest book. ‘He was a talented and sensitive individual whom chance had forced into fighting, and his talents had brought him success as a fighter just as they would have brought him success in other walks of life, but he had to pay a higher price. His morbid sensitiveness, his touchy pride, the quirks and weakness of his character, might well be the result of the strains and sorrows he had had to endure.’

Miscellaneous

From the Book of Hours of Alexandre Petau, Rouen, 16th century

HIDDEN HANDS

THE LIVES OF MANUSCRIPTS AND THEIR MAKERS

MARY WELLESLEY riverrun, 370pp, £25

‘This rather short book is packed with wonderful stories beautifully told,’ Gerard DeGroot wrote in the Times. ‘Her love of medieval manuscripts shines through her elegant and charming book,’ Linda Porter commented in the Literary Review.

‘Manuscripts do more than convey information. Their creation calls for imagination, physical effort, a love of meaning and beauty. They are works of art in their own right,’ Jonathan Sumption enthused in the Spectator. ‘Mary Wellesley is a serious scholar, with years of experience of handling these fragile artefacts. Her achievement in this book is to convey something of these sensations…. Few people have described the experience so eloquently.’

She ‘attempts to dispel the widely held belief that all medieval scribes were monks, and to illuminate the women who participated in medieval English literary culture’, Sara Fredman noted in the TLS. Radiocarbon analysis of teeth belonging to a 1,000-year-old female skeleton revealed tiny deposits of lapis lazuli pigment acquired when 20 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

she occasionally sucked her paintbrush – proof that women worked as manuscript artists and were trusted with the most expensive materials.

‘The range is remarkable,’ Sumption marvelled, in a book encompassing the most important manuscripts, such as the early 8th-century St Cuthbert Gospel, to the more obscure Gwerful Mechain, a gloriously bawdy 15th-century Welsh female poet. Boyd Tonkin in theartsdesk noted that ‘Wellesley also tries to recover the names and the stories of long-departed book creators’, women like the nun Leoba, ‘the first named English female poet’.

‘Wellesley tracks the after lives of her chosen texts,’ Tonkin noted. ‘She demonstrates how “the whims of scribes, the biases of collectors and the vagaries of chance” determined which works lived, and which died.’

The 15th-century The Book of Margery Kempe was only discovered when the owners of a country house were looking for a ping pong ball in a cupboard and stumbled on the manuscript instead.

‘A book so sublimely conceived and beautifully written deserves better presentation,’ DeGroot quibbled, bemoaning the paucity and positioning of the illustrations, but overall found it ‘an expression of love – deeply intimate and delightfully self-indulgent…’

ALLEGORIZINGS JAN MORRIS Faber, 207pp, £14.99

‘All the mysteries of creation, the Milky Way and the armadillo, art and mathematics, even love and hate, even the loss of a child — perhaps the whole damned caboodle is itself no more than some kind of majestically impenetrable allegory,’ said Jan Morris in her book, published posthumously, and so concludes her long life of writing, experience, adventure and reflection.

Allegorizings is a collection of short essays, which Alex Clarke in the Guardian found beguiling. They are ‘filled with whimsy’ and ‘jeu d’esprit’ and Morris proves that ‘being fanciful is not the enemy of seriousness’. Morris delves into weighty topics that range from the difference between nations and nation states, patriotism and

nationalism, as well as decidedly light musings on matters such as sneezing, marmalade and hot-water bottles.

Lynn Barber in the Telegraph, was delighted by Morris’s irreverent attitudes. ‘The peerless travel writer’s posthumous final book is a rallying cry in favour of “callowness and fizz”.’ Barber loved her ‘sharp, throwaway judgments – James Joyce’s Ulysses, is “unnecessarily obscure” and Princess Diana was “reassuringly common”.’

‘A joyful cascade of essays,’ said Libby Purves in the Times.

‘Outrageous but kindly, mischievous and fanciful but mercilessly descriptive, appreciative and mocking, in physical and mental travels she takes mishaps and glories with glee. She can hymn luxurious pleasure, but revels in scruffiness.’

With no cautionary note to sound, Purves found this last book, a ‘glorious envoi for this marvellous writer and sweetest of human beings’.

THE FAIRY TELLERS

A JOURNEY INTO THE SECRET HISTORY OF FAIRY TALES

NICHOLAS JUBBER John Murray, 336pp, £20

Nicholas Jubber has form in the history of storytelling. His 2019 Epic Continent: Adventures in the Great Stories of Europe ranges from The Odyssey to the Icelandic sagas. His latest, The Fairy Tellers, focuses on six identifiable individuals who gave us most of the well-known stories.

The Witch welcomes Hansel and Gretel into her hut, Arthur Rackham, 1909

Miscellaneous Among them are Gianbattista Basile who wrote down the first European version of Cinderella, the Syrian Hanna Dyab who brought us Ali Baba and Aladdin, and Dortchen Wild who gave the Grimms Rumpelstiltskin and Hansel and Gretel. As Melanie McDonagh put it in the Times: ‘Jubber digs up what he can of their background, travels to their places of origin, from Naples to Aleppo, and prefaces each with a snappy sample of their stories.’

Several reviewers pointed out that fairy stories were never intended for children. As Christina Hardyment noted in the Sunday Times, Jubber enjoys the gross details the tales revel in and ‘his ebullient enthusiasm and shrewd analysis of story structure introduce the listener to the ogres, vampires and demons of Somadeva and much more’.

Naturally everyone had absent favourites. For Rebecca Abrams in the Financial Times, it was ‘Celtic, English, African or Yiddish folk stories’, while in the Spectator, Philip Hensher was disappointed to find no mention of Andrew Lang’s wonderful collections: ‘I would have liked more about the different places of folk tales within different societies; and Jubber seems to end just when the story starts to become truly interesting. The scholars at the end of the 19th century who were applying the discipline of anthropology and the emerging concepts of narratology to the folk tale would have been worth his attention.’

But most, like Abrams, thought the book full of riches: ‘Jubber’s cornucopia of tellers and tales is a delight, a riveting celebration of a genre that revels in its own hybridity and the imaginative riches produced by the crossing of cultural and literary borders.’

MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH

THE BELGICA’S JOURNEY INTO THE DARK ANTARCTIC NIGHT

JULIAN SANCTON WH Allen, 368pp, £20

What a story! In 1897, a Belgian expedition led by Baron Adrien de Gerlache, in the ship Belgica, was the first to winter in the Antarctic, where trapped in ice, the crew, ill-equipped and short of food, were forced to

survive the coldest months. Julian Sancton’s book was hailed by critics as a huge success, telling the story of snow madness and heroism with panache and with a novelist’s eye for gripping detail.

In the Guardian, Geoff Dyer filled in the background. Belgium’s ‘lack of any tradition of polar exploration lent an allure to De Gerlache’s undertaking, however it also made it difficult for him to raise funds or find personnel. He ended up recruiting a ramshackle, multinational team of scientists and sailors: essentially anyone who was ambitious, up for adventure or lacked more tempting offers.’ Among the group, however, two leaders emerged: a young Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, who went on to be the first man at the South Pole, and a ‘dodgy yankee’ doctor called Frederick Cook.

In the Times, Sue Prideaux described the horror. ‘Realising that their lives depended entirely on the whim of the Antarctic ice pack, the men’s minds became unmoored.

They became prisoners of perpetual dark, with mirages so common they learnt not to trust their eyes.

Suspended in torturous insomnia, tormented by the squeaking of the ever-multiplying rats, the groaning of the ship, the roar and crack of moving ice, and unexplained screams …’ They were saved by Cook who spotted the symptoms of scurvy and prescribed a diet of raw seal blood which saved them. Sancton’s account is ‘captivating’, according to Michael Thomas Barry in the New York Journal of Books: ‘One can almost feel the sting of the Antarctic coldness and imagine the endless darkness and despair as it wraps its brutal shroud upon the crew.’

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ANIMALS

HOW CO-OPERATION CONQUERED THE NATURAL WORLD

ASHLEY WARD Profile, 400pp, £20

We can learn much from the way animals work together according to Ashley Ward, Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University of Sydney. Reviewers of his book were gripped by the strange examples of co-operation and diplomacy.

Animals are not as competitive in the

Bonobos: highly socially tolerant

game of survival as one might imagine. In the Guardian, Katy Guest was intrigued particularly by the ‘thought-provoking chapters about baboons, bonobos and chimpanzees’. Apparently their ‘complex societies are often founded on networking rather than domination by strength’.

African buffalo wake up and gaze towards where they want to go James McConnachie in the Sunday Times noted that ‘Some animal behaviour seems almost democratic. African buffalo wake up and gaze towards where they want to go; the herd heads off in the direction chosen by the majority.

Tonkean macaques line up behind candidates for a leader, like MPs voting in the Commons. Army ants even elect their queens: when founding a new colony, they form two columns down which the contenders march with their attendants; when a queen is accepted by each line, it sets off.’

In the Daily Mail, Christopher Hart praised a ‘smart, funny and thoroughly engaging book.’ But he sounded a note of caution. ‘Before we get too warm and fuzzy about this though, we should also note that co-operating animals get together primarily to . . . exploit, kill and eat other animals.’ Ward opens his book, Hart remarked, with a bloodcurdling scene in northern Trinidad where, ‘As dusk falls, vampire bats leave their daytime lair, an abandoned house deep in undergrowth, to look for blood.’

The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022 21

Miscellaneous Quentin Letts in the Times explained that Evensong is ‘three short books in one: a memoir of a childhood in Anglican parsonages after the war; a dilation on the author’s career as a church archaeologist and museum administration; and finally an account of John and Elsie’s [Morris’s parents’] story, which is done with tender understatement and is all the more moving for that sparseness.’ He summed up: ‘there is an elegiac decency to this book. In its restrained, courtly way it reminds us of the Christian context to British life that we are losing with each ahistorical shrug from our leaders.’

ISLANDS OF ABANDONMENT

LIFE IN THE POST HUMAN LANDSCAPE

CAL FLYN William Collins, 376pp, £16.99

Cal Flyn embarks on a ‘series of bold expeditions to examine the marks left on our land after humans have retreated’, explained Fiona Sturges in her review for the Guardian. The book describes ‘the isolated and often eerily dystopian fortress islands, irradiated exclusion zones, abandoned towns and shuttered industrial sites that have been recolonised by the natural world’. She goes to among other places Chernobyl, Estonia, Detroit, Montserrat and an uninhabited Scottish island – she herself is Scottish.

‘An ecological polemic must walk a tightrope,’ wrote Will Wiles in Literary Review. ‘If it presents an overly confident picture of natural resilience, it will lull the reader into a false sense of security. If it is bleak about the condition of the planet and the prospects for humanity – even if that is where the facts point – it might fill the reader with despair. Islands of Abandonment avoids these perils. It gives us grounds for hope, while not understating the huge task that awaits us in changing course away from catastrophe.’

Laura Hackett in the Times agreed: ‘Given its subject matter – when humans abandon a place, it is rarely for a good reason – this book could have been relentlessly negative.

But Flyn’s lyricism, combined with her awe at the power of nature to survive in the worst of conditions, 22 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

Volcano eruptions in 1997 destroyed Plymouth, the capital of Montserrat

makes for a more edifying experience.’

‘There is some thrilling writing here, a fine way with the telling detail, and a plea for radical revisioning of what we mean by “nature” and “wild”,’ wrote Kathleen Jamie in the New Statesman.

EVENSONG

PEOPLE, DISCOVERIES AND REFLECTIONS ON THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND

RICHARD MORRIS Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 336pp, £25

‘Evensong is an apt title for this beautifully written and moving meditation on the history and current state of the Church of England, partly because it names the service which more than any other incarnates the patient, meditative, undogmatic nature of the faith,’ began Ivan Hewett in his review for the Telegraph. ‘As Richard Morris puts it, “Anglican evensong has been described as a home for the hesitant, a service for those who put store by doubt as well as belief.”’

In the Church Times, Christopher Irvine, himself a vicar, wondered what kind of book it was: ‘was it another account of the current state of the Church? Or was it, rather like evensong itself, a book that helps you to unwind at the end of the day? Well,’ he continued, ‘these two elements are not entirely lacking, but the story that it tells is a very human story of a father and son, a vicar and an archaeologist – and a compelling story it is.’

IN DEFENCE OF WITCHES WHY WOMEN ARE STILL ON TRIAL

MONA CHOLLET, TRANS SOPHIE R LEWIS Picador, 304pp, £14.99

‘Chollet’s thesis is simple: women today are still on trial for the same reasons witches were: for independence, childlessness and ageing,’ explained Rose George in the Sunday Times. She wanted to ‘like this book, because skewering misogyny is fine by me’. However, she thought it ‘unsatisfying when so many forceful and forensic feminist books have been published recently...’

Rachel Donadio was more positive in the New York Times, calling In Defence of Witches ‘a thoughtprovoking, discursive survey’. She went on to explain that Chollet’s book was a best seller when it came out in France in 2018: ‘She has grown a following with work that calls attention to sexism, the gender gap in salaries and the societal pressures placed on French women in a culture with clear ideas about how women are expected to look and act… Chollet has emerged as a quiet revolutionary pushing back against the clichés and the patriarchy that shapes them.’

Keith Contorno, in the Chicago Review of Books, believed that the book is ‘an especially helpful read for providing additional contexts from which women may be empowered as well as how they may reject what was designed to privilege men and subjugate women’. He thought that ‘Ultimately, Chollet’s book leaves us with a lot to ponder and some hope, too.’

Fiction MICHAEL BARBER considers Somerset Maugham, the 20th century’s bestselling author – but was he second rate?

Somerset Maugham’s stock in trade was the vanity of human wishes, so it’s somehow appropriate that instead of the Order of Merit, which he believed he deserved, he had to make do with the Companion of Honour: ‘It means, Very well done, but …’ Was he ‘second-rate’, as his detractors alleged? Perhaps. But writers as different as George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and John le Carré said they learnt from him. And Maugham himself wondered ‘why, with all my faults, I have been read for so many years by so many people’.

One answer might be that he dealt with fundamental issues like greed, lust, love, courage, betrayal and death. He was also easy to read. ‘Too easy,’ sniffed some critics. But as Maugham noted, with characteristic pith, ‘To write simply is as difficult as to be good.’ He served a long literary apprenticeship, which was not helped by having spent his early years speaking French: his father worked at the British Embassy in Paris. On the other hand, orphaned at ten and then exposed to the rigours of Victorian boarding schools, which left him with a stammer, he experienced the ‘moderate unhappiness in childhood’ which is thought beneficial to future writers.

Obliged to choose a profession at 18, Maugham became a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital in 1892. His duties there gave him the material for his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, the modest success of which, allied to a small private income, encouraged him to write full time once he’d qualified. To begin with he found dialogue easier to master than narrative or description.

And it was as a very successful Edwardian playwright, who at one point had four plays running in the West End, that he made his name. Of Human Bondage, which established him as a novelist, was not published until September 1915, by which time his private life had become a mess.

Maugham rated sex as ‘the keenest pleasure to which the body is susceptible’. The writer Beverley Nichols said he was ‘the most sexually voracious man I’ve ever known’. But as Maugham confessed to his nephew Robin, ‘I persuaded myself I was three-quarters normal and one-

quarter queer, when really it was the other way round.’ So although he agreed to do the decent thing and marry Syrie Wellcome, the mother of his daughter, he only had eyes for Gerald Haxton, ‘Master Hacky’, the feckless, hard-drinking American hustler who for 30 years shared his life.

Maugham met Haxton in 1914 while serving with an ambulance unit in Flanders. Later he joined Military Intelligence and was sent as a go-between to Geneva, then full of spies, using writing as his cover. His duties had more of the cloak than the dagger, as was apparent when, calling himself Willie Ashenden, he came to fictionalise them. This unromantic view of espionage presaged the British spy story as patented in the Thirties by Eric Ambler. Ashenden and his ‘perfidy’ were denounced by Goebbels in 1940, following which the Gestapo added Maugham to their blacklist.

Unwilling to live more than a few weeks at a time with Syrie, who divorced him in 1927, Maugham spent much of the Twenties travelling

Chips Channon snobbishly said Maugham ‘was not of course a gentleman’

in the tropics with Haxton, who possessed the ‘engaging comehitherness’ that Maugham lacked.

Expatriates opened up to Haxton, who repeated what they said to Maugham, who turned their anecdotes into stories. When not travelling the couple based themselves at a well-appointed villa on the French Riviera, described by Maugham as that ‘sunny place for shady people’. Lurid stories circulated about what went on there, but guests were instructed that Maugham’s mornings were consecrated to writing, and woe betide anyone who interrupted him.

In 1930 Cakes and Ale, arguably Maugham’s greatest novel, was published. He also acquired a huge new following thanks to the talkies.

Noting how many of his books and stories were filmed, Gore Vidal said that ‘he dominfated the movies at a time when movies were the lingua franca of the world’. Later his work also found favour with television, a medium that offered Maugham a role himself, hamming it up as the worldly-wise Old Party who knows what fools we mortals be.

The diarist Chips Channon snobbishly said Maugham ‘was not of course a gentleman’. Maugham might well have agreed, because as his alter ego, Ashenden, acknowledged in Cakes and Ale, ‘It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.’ Just how hard became all too apparent during Maugham’s last decade. Instead of letting nature take its course he went, aged 80, to a Swiss clinic that specialised in ‘fresh-cell therapy’, a rejuvenation technique that did wonders for the body but not the mind. He developed a bad case of senile paranoia and egged on by Haxton’s successor, Alan Searle, vilified Syrie, who had died several years before, and tried to disinherit their daughter. Aghast, most of his old friends dropped him and his last years were bleak. But, lest we forget, the most popular British author since Dickens left much of his vast estate to the Royal Literary Fund, where even now it helps needy writers. There are worse legacies.

Many of Somerset Maugham’s novels are published by Vintage Classics The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022 23

Music 78-year-old McCartney’s undimmed energies: ‘As a writer and performer, McCartney is at home in virtually any style, from rock and country through jazz, R&B, and beyond. In terms of his musicianship, he is simply virtuosic, distinguishing himself time and time again as an inventive, often groundbreaking guitarist and perhaps the most innovative and melodic bass player to ever pick up the instrument.’

Lennon and McCartney in 1964

THE LYRICS

1956 TO THE PRESENT

PAUL MCCARTNEY Allen Lane, 874pp, £75

This boxed collection of Sir Paul McCartney’s lyrics, edited and introduced by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, comes with an epic price tag as befits its coffee-table gloss and bulk. In the Observer, David Hepworth found it revealing of McCartney’s ambitions. ‘Each song has a commentary drawn from chats with Muldoon, who was presumably the one introducing words such as “epistolary” and “intertextual” into the conversation. Macca rarely resists an upmarket comparison. If one Paul is keen to point out that the intermediary of She Loves You is like the hero of LP Hartley’s The GoBetween, the other Paul is quite happy to agree he may have been influenced by it.’

Like Hepworth, Blake Morrison in the Guardian, enjoyed the pleasurable alchemy created by the conversations of the two Pauls. ‘Fifty hours of them, in 24 sessions between 2015 and 2020, covering 154 songs.

On the face of it, the two Pauls have little in common: one a complex poet, the other a pop star. But they share an Irish heritage. And a few of McCartney’s rhymes (pataphysical/ quizzical, Edison/medicine) wouldn’t look out of place in a Muldoon poem.

At any rate the two hit it off. Though Muldoon has edited himself out of the text, you can sense him in the background, prompting and prodding.’ Though McCartney has been at the top of the tree for half a century and has met everyone, he here talks movingly of his poor Liverpool childhood and in particular the enormous influence on his work of the death of his mother, Mary.

On the arts website Salon, Kenneth Womack was awed by 24 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

concluded: ‘Candid and brilliant, touching if occasionally a bit repetitive, it is a collection of stories so bizarre you’d be more likely hear them from some rogue bloke down the pub than a celebrity. But that’s the thing about Ryder: he is some rogue bloke down the pub.’

FROM MANCHESTER WITH LOVE

HOW TO BE A ROCK STAR

THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TONY WILSON

SHAUN RYDER

PAUL MORLEY

Allen & Unwin, 304pp, £20

Faber, 603pp, £20

Against all sensible odds, Shaun Ryder is alive and nearly 60, after being front man for the band Happy Mondays on and off for four decades.

A legendary hellraiser and druggie, in oldie age he is now clean. The Guardian’s Emma Garland said: ‘Shy on stage and a pain in the arse everywhere else, he was an addict in a polo shirt and a pair of flares who, even during his rise to fame in the “Madchester” era, reputedly earned more money selling [ecstasy] than records. Split into short chapters covering everything from lyrics to haircuts, riders to rehab... [the book is] mainly an opportunity for him to reflect on the experience of going from a postie who didn’t know the alphabet to performing for 198,000 people in Rio.’

‘Wilson, who died in 2007, aged 57, of a heart attack was a Manchester star,’ said Miranda Sawyer in the Observer.

‘A local TV presenter, non-moneymaking entrepreneur, relaxed music manager and, as it says on his gravestone, “cultural catalyst”.’

Other people had other words for him. ‘“Tony Wilson is a wanker,” read the graffiti that started to proliferate around Manchester city centre in 1982,’ said Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times. ‘Richard Madeley, who at the time was Wilson’s co-presenter at his day job with Granada TV, asked his colleague if the insults upset him. “It doesn’t bother me,” Wilson said, “because I am.”’

Wilson created the legendary Factory Records (the label that featured bands such as Joy Division and New Order) and the equally legendary Hacienda nightclub (which went from a music lover’s dream to a place awash with drugs and guns). He also hosted cult TV music show So It Goes which introduced viewers to a band called the Sex Pistols.

Cultural historian Audrey J Golden, writing on music website Louder Than War, recognised the book as ‘a glorious and amusing homage to Laurence Sterne’s (in) famous novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Yet it’s also a work unto itself, solidifying Tony Wilson as a postmodern hero.’

Sawyer also saw ‘intelligence, bloody-mindedness [and] a romantic, revolutionary soul’ in the book. She said: ‘It requires concentration, mixing, as it does, careful interviewing with flights of fancy, revealing detail with time-travelling description. The book’s peculiarity and expanse and, yes, love means it becomes an immersive experience... very moving indeed.’

Ryder’s experiences aren’t necessarily gold-standard career advice ‘It is partly a repackaging of well-polished tales of chaos for both devoted fans and younger newcomers who know Ryder best via stints on I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! or Gogglebox,,’ said Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times. ‘He says he now thinks of himself as “an all-round entertainer” – an oddly benign term for a man who once passed out in the coffin of a Brazilian heroin dealer’s recently deceased grandmother.’

‘While there is a reprehensible kind of common-sense advice here – don’t throw TVs from hotel windows if you don’t want police attention – Ryder’s experiences aren’t necessarily gold-standard career advice,’ said Segal. And Garland

Novels

OH WILLIAM! ELIZABETH STROUT Viking, 240pp, £14.99

(C) LEONARD-CENDAMO

Lucy Barton, the writer-heroine from two of Elizabeth Strout’s previous books, My Name Is Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible, unravels her later years, the complex relationships with her ex-husband, William, their daughters, his mother, her dead second husband.

‘There is something beautiful about her characters’ heartache – particularly the way they are always so flummoxed by it,’ said Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times.

The theme of never really knowing your loved ones, and never being known by them, runs throughout Strout’s book. But for Corr-Thomas Oh William! is an ‘intensely truthful book not only about how we experience trauma but the ways we keep on reframing our perceptions of it’. Her narrative ‘feels devastating and vital, bleak and tender.

Cathartic? Yes. Comforting? No.’ Susie Mesure in the Spectator agreed. ‘What Strout is doing, in her customary crisp prose, is getting the reader – addressed throughout as “you” – to reassess every single relationship they’ve ever had.’

For Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph, Strout has a ‘distinctively female voice, expressive of ordinary family circumstance but also alert to the many ironies and falterings of the human heart’. But he wasn’t wholly convinced, describing the novel as ‘a hesitant account that

Elizabeth Strout: truthful writing

reads like a transcript of effortful psychotherapy sessions’. Finally, though, he seemed won over: ‘Strout’s strength doesn’t lie in narrative drive or philosophical depth: she is a novelist of the inner sensibility, and what makes her so compellingly readable is her rendering of the ebb and flow of emotion and impression.’

METAMORPHOSIS PENELOPE LIVELY Fig Tree, 323pp, £20

Now 88 and, in her own words, ‘at the end of my writing life’, Penelope Lively has selected the best of a lifetime’s worth of short stories to produce this collection, titled Metamorphosis. She has book-ended her choices with two new offerings.

Alison Kelly, in the TLS, enjoyed this ‘wonderful’ collection. The experience of change pervades the stories but ‘alongside change, a greater theme takes precedence throughout the collection: as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the unifying focus is on love’.

Isabel Berwick, who grew up reading Lively’s novels for children, found no change in her command of story-telling. In the FT she wrote,

‘Here we find characters who want to connect with their own past’

‘Lively’s humane vision and accessible, fluid writing style is universal,’ adding ‘perhaps this collection resonates most acutely for the older reader. Here we find characters who want to connect with their own past.’

Kate Saunders, in the Sunday Times, was delighted: her writing is always ‘sizzling with wit, irony, acute observation’. She found the stories to be ‘sometimes tragic, often very funny, with an occasional whiff of the supernatural. If there is a recurring theme, it is the pull of the past, and the various ways in which her characters are shaped by history.’

She went further: ‘Penelope Lively is a literary goddess.’ But as a Lively fan, she had one reservation: ‘The only thing I didn’t love about this book is the air of valediction, as if Lively had decided to clear out her life’s work, choosing what to keep and what to send to Oxfam.’

CROSSROADS JONATHAN FRANZEN 4th Estate, 580pp, £20

‘There was a moment — call it 1971 — when Protestant Christianity met the counterculture, when teenagers brimmed over with faith, hope, and love while wearing bell-bottom jeans and beaded necklaces, strumming guitars, even cursing and drinking beer,’ wrote Hamilton Cain on OprahDaily.com. This, then, is the setting for Jonathan Franzen’s ‘sweeping, sumptuous new novel’, which ‘peers back at this oddball moment, post-Manson Family and pre-Watergate, when Jesus was groovy and Nixon’s America teetered beneath the stresses of Vietnam and the ravages of drug use and infidelity’.

At the heart of the novel is the suburban pastor Russ Hildebrant, his wife, Marion, and three children, all at a crossroads in their lives, and a Christian youth group whose members are similarly positioned.

Cain considered that Franzen had ‘poured all his gifts into Marion, whose history is a vessel for some of the novel’s most vivid, perceptive writing — and the result is dazzling’.

Neither Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman nor James Marriott in the Times were impressed, though.

‘Franzen is a major writer with a minor style,’ complained Marriott, The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022 25

Novels adding that ‘Some of the sentences are worse than indifferent’, while Kelly concluded that Franzen was, ‘Not a prophet but a curtain-twitcher and of passable interest.’ For Max Liu in the i, however, this, the first in a planned trilogy, was ‘his best book yet’ — ‘A novel about a horny vicar, his depressed wife and some Nixon-era, corduroy-clad Christian teenagers that proves to be a page-by-page pleasure, a riveting way for Franzen to explore universal themes, tackled with ferocious creative intelligence.’

THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY AMOR TOWLES Hutchinson Heinemann, 576pp, £20

direction then another, at times feeling less a road trip novel than Wacky Races. At almost 600 pages, many readers may find it hard to stay this novel’s bumpy, often misdirected course.’

And Cal Reveley-Calder in the Sunday Telegraph agreed. ‘It bobs along as if aspiring to be a blockbuster road-movie script, but it’s unforgivably light on tension and impetus.’ And, oh dear, Barry Pierce in the Irish Times was similarly underwhelmed. ‘Those hoping for the classic road trip novel that the book’s blurb, endpapers and cover promise it to be will be disappointed as Towles decides to ditch the intended plot for a laborious cat and mouse storyline that takes up the entire novel.’

Melissa Katsoulis in the Times, however, went against the grain and loved it. Though she conceded that it took a while to get into. ‘Before the grand finale there’s a whole central casting waiting-room full of walk-on parts to contend with. We meet wise tramps and psychotic fake priests, eccentric professors and street-smart black kids, legless veterans and obliging farmer’s wives, happy hookers and kindly nuns.’

THE MORNING STAR KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD Amor Towles: on the open road

DMITRI KASTERINE

Amor Towles, whose 2016 novel A Gentleman in Moscow was an international bestseller, has looked to the open road for his latest, a picaresque adventure set in the American Midwest. Carrie O’Grady went along for the ride in the Guardian: ‘Hundreds of miles roll by over the course of The Lincoln Highway, a breezy Bildungsroman meets road trip that suits the Boston-born Towles’s expansive, folksy, anecdotal style down to the ground.’

The novel begins in Kansas in 1954 with 18-year-old Emmett Watson and his younger brother Billy about to head off to California to look for their mother who has walked out on them eight years before. Patricia Nicol in the Sunday Times was disappointed: ‘It struggles to maintain drive or direction. Juggling classical and American mythologies, evoking westerns and Broadway capers, its story hares off in one 26 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

Harvill Secker, 666pp, £20

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volumes of auto fiction, My Struggle, were one of the last decade’s literary sensations. Now he has returned to novels with a huge tome of 666 pages. ‘The sign of the devil may not be accidental,’ reflected Andrew Anthony in the Guardian. ‘The book is divided into discrete chapters,’ wrote Anthony, ‘that are first-person accounts by nine different narrators, all of whom experience disturbances or strange happenings that coincide with the sudden appearance of a large brilliant star in the sky, which may be a supernova.’

In the New Yorker, Brandon

It has that beguiling quality that Knausgaard seems to have made his own

Taylor was intrigued. ‘Under the mysterious sign in the sky, people go about the sort of stifled, frustrated lives that Knausgaard has made his domain: the creatively blocked, the spiritually starving, the terrifyingly sensitive, the queasily realistic failures.’ Anthony found ‘a shaggy dog story full of loose ends and narrative flaws, but it has that beguiling, elusively compulsive quality that Knausgaard seems to have made his own’.

But in the Spectator Stuart Evers was disappointed. ‘Men and women, young and old, speak with the same voice: they “slurp” their tea or coffee or beer; they light “fags”; they tell you what music they are listening to; they overuse one-sentence paragraphs; they ask a lot of rhetorical questions; they have interesting conversations pertaining to the key themes of the book. They have different names, different purposes and characteristics, but the prose is rigorously, unbendingly that of Knausgaard.’

OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS GARY SHTEYNGART Allen & Unwin, 336pp, £14.99

Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel, reported Sam Leith in the Guardian, is ‘very, very Russian – in the best possible way’. It tells the story of a group of friends riding the Covid pandemic out in self-isolation in a house in New York’s Hudson Valley – and takes its bearings from Chekhov and Turgenev. The host is a Russian-American novelist called Sasha, and guests include his university pals, as well as a vain and silly actor who’s supposed to be working with Sasha on a script, and a young woman writer who is flavour of the month in literary New York.

There follows a frequently hilarious series of minor reversals, beefs and humiliations, romantic misadventures and literary jealousies – but true to Chekhovian form, ‘on his stylistic mixing board the slider marked melancholy has been notched up to 11.'

Claire Lowdon in the Times warned that this contribution to the burgeoning genre of Covid-lit would date fast – ‘Gary Shteyngart’s fifth novel is so steeped in the present moment that we’re unlikely to be reading it in ten years’ time, let alone

Novels 100’ – but said that was all the more reason to read it now: ‘I will eat my facemask if anyone comes up with something quite as fun as this.’

‘It’s a true pleasure,’ Lowdon continued, ‘to sink into Shteyngart’s expansive, benevolent storytelling — hopping between his characters, dashing back and forwards in time, commenting on the world at large, revelling in the mechanics of his craft.’ She especially applauded the fifth-act ‘mood-switch from farce to elegy’. Writing in the FT, Erica Wagner was similarly charmed: ‘This is a warm, empathetic novel,’ she said, ‘written with a tenderness and close observation of this enclosed society.’

TO PARADISE HANYA YANAGIHARA Picador, 720pp, £20

very weird parts. The thing with the repeating names: it sounds bonkers, but it works. The genes of the same basic story express themselves again and again in myriad variants.

Utopias, dystopias, nested narratives, multiple genres, intricate world-building. Shameless swathes of exposition, crude indulgence of our darkest fears. Formidably fluent, morally simplistic, conceptually audacious, aesthetically overblown.’

In Slate, Laura Miller thought this amounted to a bit of a tease: ‘Yanagihara toys, dominatrix-style, with her readers’ desire for narrative fulfilment.’

But in the New Republic, Siddhartha Deb simply found a maximalist novel with minimalist returns. ‘Why has Yanagihara written a novel that announces such large questions and over such enormous length while showing little interest or ability to deliver on them?’

LILY

A TALE OF REVENGE

ROSE TREMAIN Chatto & Windus, 288pp, £18.99

Hanya Yanagihara: baffling but thrilling

(C) JENNYWESTERHOFF

Hanya Yanagihara scored a worldwide bestseller with her 2015 novel A Little Life. So expectations were high for her latest. To Paradise comes in at over 700 pages and reviewers seemed not altogether sure what to say about it. Many felt it was so difficult to understand that it might be a masterpiece. ‘I felt the impulse a few times to put down the book and make a chart – the kind of thing you see TV detectives assemble on their living-room walls when they have a web of evidence but no clear theory of the case,’ confessed Jordan Kisner in the Atlantic.

In the Spectator, Claire Lowdon was baffled but thrilled. ‘Ingeniously, improbably, all this hangs together to make a sui generis whole that’s decidedly greater than the sum of its

Rose Tremain’s latest novel received a tepid reception from critics.

Tremain has gone to the mid-19th century in Lily: A Tale of Revenge and the plot concerns a foundling child (Lily) rescued from wolves only to end up in prison waiting for execution.

In the Sunday Telegraph, Claire Allfree thought the author, as always, ‘terrific at summoning up historical period’. But she wondered if Tremain’s efforts to deepen our empathy for Lily rather than to ‘increase and complicate our understanding of the world in which such suffering exists’ had made the novel’s attitudes too modern. In the Guardian, however, Paraic O’Donnell thought the style unintentionally melodramatic, while over at the Spectator, Stephanie Sy-Quia thought Tremain had really laid it on with a trowel. ‘… packed with treacly images and cliché’, she harrumphed. ‘This is pulpy, mawkish pastiche veering on the penny dreadful, more Lemony Snicket than Charles Dickens.’

In the Times, Lucy Atkins was in general better-disposed, discerning that ‘a subtler, more interesting fairytale theme fizzles beneath the

melodrama with hungry mythical wolves, an evil nurse, two flawed fairy godmothers and a carriage trip to the ball (the garish Covent Garden opera)’. But even Atkins concluded that the novel as a whole hadn’t really worked: ‘More escapist than genius, Lily is cosy and familiar, expertly beguiling, but without the edgier sophistication of Tremain’s finest works.’

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND ANTHONY DOERR 4th Estate, 622pp, £20

The American writer Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2014 with his novel All the Light We Cannot See. ‘Through its exploration of loss, heroism, and destiny,’ Hephzibah Anderson explained in the Observer, ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land grapples with the climate crisis and humankind’s culpability, and does so with wisdom and clemency.’

‘The story crystallises around a book within a book,’ wrote Elizabeth Knox in the Guardian, ‘the existence of which is imagined by Doerr, though its author is a real writer of the ancient world. Antonius Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land is a fabulous adventure story written by Diogenes for his niece, to beguile and console her during an illness.’

‘It’s a celebration of books, the power and possibilities of reading’ Marcel Theroux, writing in the New York Times, thought it was a ‘wildly inventive novel that teems with life, straddles an enormous range of experience and learning, and embodies the storytelling gifts that it celebrates’. He summed up: ‘It’s a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is ultimately a celebration of books, the power and possibilities of reading.’

In the Sunday Times, however, Houman Barekat, thought the narrative ‘ponderous’ and ‘less than gripping’ and that the novel was a ‘long and dull grind’. But Melissa Katsoulis in the Times disagreed: ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land is an impressive The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022 27

Paperbacks

Novels

‘It’s bold of Edward St Aubyn to write a novel [Double Blind, Vintage, £8.99] that’s so much about science and about so much science: physics, genetics, epigenetics, botany, soil science, quantum mechanics, psychiatry, microbiology, neuroscience, immunotherapy and evolutionary theory (theology, too, if it counts),’ wrote Blake Morrison in the Guardian. St Aubyn’s previous ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical, but this, his tenth, has a ‘rich cast of characters’, according to Alex Preston in the Spectator, including Francis, an unworldly young botanist, and his girlfriend Olivia. It is ‘a novel with a heart’, in which ‘we learn what ”the corrupting exposure to the habits of the very rich” does to people, and what it takes to resist that corruption’.

But, said John Self in the Times, it has a ‘maddening lack of focus’, although it does have some ‘good jokes’.

In Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence (Wellcome Collection, £4.99) Dr Gavin Francis believes that ‘we should never give up trying to get better’, according to Imperial College’s Emily Mayhew in her review for the Guardian. It is ‘a short and informative book for those involved in their own recovery and those who support them as they do so. It contains fascinating and useful tips to supplement standard medical resources available to patients.’

Although Ian Critchley in the Sunday Times thought the book sometimes felt too short for its subject, he believed its ‘great strength lies in Francis’s discussion of his own experiences of sickness and those of his patients’.

Roland Philipps’s Victoire: A True Story of Espionage and Resistance (Vintage, £10.99) is about the double, turned triple agent Mathilde Carré, who died in Paris aged 98 in 2007. In the Times Saul David thought it ‘a grimly compelling story’, in which Philipps ‘fills in much unknown detail about Carré’s espionage career, the early work of France’s resistance movement and the German response’. As Clare Mulley in the Spectator explained, Philipps chooses ‘to focus on Carré’s "human contradictions and vulnerabilities, and her strenuous, sometimes heroic, attempts to overcome those”.

In doing so this is a deeply humane book, and humanly flawed.’

achievement and a joy to read.

Serious novels are rarely this fun. In a world where nature and stories are more precious than ever, this fine book is an education, a comfort and an inspiration.’

28 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

Novels

A TERRIBLE KINDNESS JO BROWNING WROE Faber, 400pp, £14.99

dead of Aberfan as a literary device that prompts a character to reengage with the troubles of their childhood?’

In the Observer, Hephzibah Anderson wrote: ‘This well-crafted tale contains many joys, the least expected its meticulous evocation of the hidden world of undertaking, with its clannish decorum.’

THE EVERY DAVE EGGERS Hamish Hamilton, 577pp, £12.99

Tragedy: graveyard in Aberfan

‘To generations of people in Britain the name of the Welsh village of Aberfan evokes more tragedy than its flat syllables should allow,’ began John Self in his review for the Times.

‘On October 21, 1966, a mound of coal waste slid down a hillside and engulfed Pantglas Junior School and the nearby houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Any author who adopts this terrible event as a premise for their novel will have access to ready-made, deeply felt emotion that must be used carefully and not exploited. Jo Browning Wroe’s first novel, A Terrible Kindness, avoids this risk with a respectful approach that nonetheless draws on the horror effectively.’

Barney Norris in the Guardian explained: the novel ‘purports to be the story of a young embalmer who attends the disaster. The first thing to say is that it resolutely isn’t: it is, in fact … a domestic saga about a young man struggling to overcome his childhood while joining the family business.’ But he’s a ‘difficult character to like’, Norris continued, and thought there was ‘a good deal of clunky writing throughout’. He ended his review: ‘Has the passage of time made it acceptable to use the

‘The novel is a follow-up to Eggers’s 2013 dystopian satire, The Circle, in which Mae Holland joined the eponymous social media company, a mashup of Facebook and Google, and rose through its ranks,’ explained Sara Collins in the Guardian. ‘It opens after the Circle has acquired “an e-commerce behemoth named after a South American jungle” and rebranded itself as the Every…’

‘Eggers sets out an Orwellian vision of a near future in which big tech has “transformed proud and free animals – humans – and made them into endlessly acquiescent dots on screens”.’ She thought Eggers was a ‘gifted writer who couldn’t write a bad novel’, but The Circle wasn’t a ‘great one’, although it contained ‘several funny sequences threaded together with skewer-sharp sentences’.

The Scotsman’s Stuart Kelly wrote: ‘Part of the joy and genius of Eggers’s novel is its hybrid genre nature. At one level it is a thriller…

On another, it is a comedy, in a vein almost similar to PG Wodehouse.’ He ended his review: ‘You read it and think: yes, this is set in the future but it is actually going on here and now.

It is an urgent and necessary book.

It’s also fun. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.’

Adam Roberts in the Spectator disagreed, thinking the novel had the ‘texture of suet’ and remained ‘drearily unenlivened, right through to its twist ending, which many readers will see coming an ergonomic mile off’. And Ron Charles in the Washington Post also had reservations: ‘At 577 pages, The Every suffers from the Web’s worst quality: unlimited space. It’s like a 27-hour TED Talk by some clever guy who thinks smoking is bad for your health.’

Books & Publishing

To advertise, contact Jamil Popat on 0203 859 7093 or via email jamilpopat@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 18th April 2022

Children’s books EMILY BEARN on books for all ages

Children’s fiction has come under increasing fire for being too political – but this spring’s picture books offer the world weary young reader plenty of scope for escapism.

Mister Toots (Harper Collins, £12.99) is another gem of a picture book by Emma Chichester Clark, author of the beloved Blue Kangaroo series. This time, she tells the story of a family of dogs whose friendship with a strange creature that can only say ‘Toot!’ demonstrates that lack of a common language is no barrier to affection.

‘They loved him with all their hearts.

Everybody did.’

When Cherry Lost Terry (Old Street, £12.99), by The Oldie’s sub-editor Penny Phillips, tells the enchanting story of a cat who loses his mysterious friend Terry, and must enlist the help of all the animals in the alphabet in order to track him down. ‘“Oh, please,” twitched a squirrel named Sue, / “Won’t someone decide what to do?”/ She skittered and hopped – / Then suddenly stopped / As out of a bush sprang … GUESS WHO?’ Illustrated by Clare Mallison.

And The Spring Rabbit (Frances Lincoln, £7,99) is an uplifting Easter story by Angela McAllister, following the adventures of a girl called Spring, who wakes from her snowbound slumber to discover the miracles of new life. ‘One winter morning, a sunbeam slipped between the trees and danced on the glistening snow.

Its warm touch stirred Spring from her long sleep.’

For older readers, Ambrose 30 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2022

Follows His Nose (Puffin, £10.99) is a newly discovered story by the late and much loved Dick King-Smith, who celebrates his centenary this year.

The story follows the adventures of a young friend who befriends a rabbit with a supernatural sense of smell (‘Ambrose has a very sensitive nose … a nose like a bloodhound’), and was completed by the author’s great-granddaughter Josie Rogers, who cleverly preserves his crisp prose and anarchic humour.

The Thief Who Sang Storms (Usborne, £7.99) is the much awaited new fantasy by Sophie Anderson, author of The Girl Who Speaks Bear.

This time, our heroine is Linnet, who lives on a magical island where the humans and the bird-people have become divided. When her father is captured, it will fall to her to save him, and unite her homeland.

Fantasy lovers will also find plenty to relish in The Sky Beneath the Stone (Floris, £7.99) by the debut author Alex Mullarky, which follows the plight of Ivy North, a reticent 13-year-old who is thrust into adventure when a sorcerer turns her younger brother into a kestrel. And in historical fiction, The Ship of Doom by MA Bennett (Welbeck, £6.99) charts the adventures of a girl called Luna, who discovers that her aunt’s boringsounding ‘Butterfly Club’ at the Greenwich Observatory has a most mysterious secret. Soon Luna finds herself transported in time

to 1912, and tasked with saving Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless radio from the Titanic. And Jummy at the River School (Chicken House, £6.99) by the debut author Sabine Adeyinka is a sumptuous adventure set in ‘the illustrious River School, the best boarding school for girls in Southern Nigeria’. Fans of Mallory Towers will find plenty of midnight feasts and ‘giggling late into the night in the dorms’, but there are also serious themes of poverty and inequality.

And no young literature student

From top: When Cherry Lost Terry, Spring Rabbit, The Sky Beneath the Stone and Jummy at the River School

should be without Shakespeare for Everyone by Emma Roberts (Magic Cat, £14.99), a deceptively informative reference book which gallops us through Shakespeare’s life and complete works in 64 jauntily illustrated pages. Covering everything from Dogberry’s foolery to the structure of a sixain, this is a children’s book which will have much to offer the self-improving grandparent.

And anything calling itself a ‘book of feelings’ might send some grandparents running for cover. But Sometimes by Stephanie Stansbie (Little Tiger Press, £6.99) is an exemplar of its genre, using immersive rhyming text to tell the heartwarming story of two children navigating the emotional ups and downs of a typical day.

‘Your body’s full of feelings: / like the tide, they ebb and flow. / Sometimes they lift you high / and sometimes they bring you low.’