The Oldie magazine

MY BRUSH WITH THE VIRUS – DR THEODORE DALRYMPLE JOY OF VILLAGE HALLS

Spring 2020 | £4.75 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 386

Return to Brideshead Selina Hastings and Nickolas Grace

It was 50 years ago today – Craig Brown on the Beatles break-up Antonia Fraser and Gyles Brandreth self-isolate Barry Cryer explains Mornington Crescent

New Oldie British Festivals Guide!

p45

Rolls-Royce of pop groups page 14

Features 13 When Asian flu gave us the shivers Michael Barber 14 Here, there and everywhere Craig Brown 19 Liberty hall – the resurgence of the local village hall William Cook 20 From the Brideshead Revisited

film set… Nickolas Grace 21 …to Evelyn Waugh’s smart set Selina Hastings 24 The England that time forgot John Edwards 28 Ode to Wordsworth Frances Wilson 30 Model behaviour Hugo Vickers 33 Never go back Liz Hodgkinson

Regulars

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5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: Who was Sexton Blake? Nick Setchfield 12 Modern Life: What is wireless charging? Richard Godwin 32 Letter from America Dominic Green

Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA www.theoldie.co.uk 020 7436 8801 editorial@theoldie.co.uk

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ABC circulation figure Jan-June 2019: 47,116

Remembrance of England past page 24

34 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 35 Country Mouse Giles Wood 36 The Way We Live Now Dafydd Jones 39 Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu 40 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 42 School Days Sophia Waugh 43 Home Front Alice Pitman 44 God Sister Teresa 44 Memorial Service: Sir Michael Howard James Hughes-Onslow 45 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 46 Readers’ Letters 48 I Once Met… John Edgecombe Valerie Grove 48 Memory Lane 63 Media Matters Stephen Glover 65 History David Horspool 67 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 67 Rant: Yorkshire pudding 97 Crossword 99 Bridge Andrew Robson 99 Competition Tessa Castro 106 Ask Virginia Ironside Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor John Bowling Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Digital editor and events co-ordinator Ferdie Rous Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

Hugo Vickers’s royal models page 30

Books 51 Rake’s progress: My Political Midlife Crisis, by Rachel Johnson Frances Wilson 53 One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, by Craig Brown Lewis Jones 53 Queen Victoria and the Romanovs: Sixty Years of Mutual Distrust, by Coryne Hall Frances Welch 55 Thinking Again, by Jan Morris Mark Bostridge 57 A Little History of Poetry, by John Carey Charlotte Moore 57 The China Journals: Ideology and Intrigue in the 1960s,

by Hugh Trevor-Roper Mark Almond 61 Actress, by Anne Enright Alex Clark

Travel 86 My Holy Week in Israel Joshua Levine 88 Overlooked Britain: Penshaw Monument Lucinda Lambton 90 Carefree oldies on the piste Mark Palmer 93 Taking a Walk: along the Regent’s Canal Patrick Barkham Oldie subscriptions: write to The Oldie Rockwood House 9-16 Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH Call 0330 333 0195 or help@subscribe.theoldie.co.uk Website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk Advertising For display contact Paul Pryde or Sam Hambro on 020 3859 7095 or 020 3859 7093

95 On the Road: Anne Glenconner Louise Flind

Arts 68 Film: The Great Buster Harry Mount 69 Theatre: Upstart Crow Nicholas Lezard 69 Radio Valerie Grove 70 Television Roger Lewis 71 Music Richard Osborne 72 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 73 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 75 Gardening David Wheeler 75 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 76 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 76 Restaurants James Pembroke 77 Drink Bill Knott 78 Sport Jim White 78 Motoring Alan Judd 80 Digital Life Matthew Webster 80 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 83 Bird of the Month: Song Thrush John McEwen 85 Getting Dressed: Celia Philo Brigid Keenan

Literary Lunches p66

For classified contact Melissa Arancio on 020 3859 7094 melissaarancio@theoldie.co.uk Literary Lunch bookings Call Helen on 01225 427311 Monday to Friday 9.30am to 3pm reservations@theoldie.co.uk News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover Sportsphoto/Alamy

The Oldie Spring 2020 3

The Old Un’s Notes The Oldie sends its deepest sympathies to all readers in these sad times.

The magazine will still be published during the coronavirus crisis. Subscribers will receive their copies as usual and the magazine will be on sale in shops.

If you can’t get to a newsagent and would rather not take out a 12-issue subscription (see offer on page 45), you can order a print version of any issue for just £4.75 (inc. free p & p) by calling 0330 333 0195; or get a digital version for £2 by going to https://pocketmags.com and entering The Oldie.

This is a tricky moment for oldies but, as Vera Lynn, who’s just turned 103, says, the blue skies will drive the dark clouds far away one day.

Lady Antonia Fraser has kindly composed a timely poem for The Oldie.

Self-isolation – To Myself So we’re stuck together, You and I. Let’s make the best of it; Then I’ll die.

Come to think of it, So will you.

We don’t need lawyers To say, ‘Me too.’

How would you feel If we parted now?

OK, OK… Just tell me how!

Many congratulations to David Hare, once the progressive enfant terrible of

British theatre, who has finally realised, aged 72, how gifted oldies are.

Writing in the Garrick Club’s magazine, Hare admits that when he started off in the business, he wanted ‘to sweep away all the archaic rubbish which I believed was clogging it up’.

All his life, he’d argued that ‘The new play was more important than the old.’ But now, thank God, he’s seen the oldie light.

‘To my shame,’ Hare writes, ‘I did not realise how much the vitality of new plays depended on actors who had been classically trained.

‘Time and again, people like Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Tony Hopkins and Maggie Smith would arrive with all the skills and mastery they had learned by doing plays far more technically challenging than my own.

‘They proved the truth of Nijinksy’s words “Technique is freedom.” ’ Welcome to the oldie club, Sir David, and its trusty motto, ‘The only way forwards is backwards.’

How the Old Un misses Kingsley Amis.

Thank God his pithy lit crit

Among this month’s contributors Barry Cryer (p42) has been on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue since 1972. He’s worked with Morecambe and Wise, Bob Hope, the Two Ronnies, Tommy Cooper and Dick Emery. He turned 85 on 23rd March.

Frances Wilson (p28) is Thomas De Quincey’s biographer. A keen housetourist, she’s visited Walt Whitman’s New Jersey home, T S Eliot’s Kensington house and, for this issue, Wordsworth’s cottage.

Craig Brown (p14) is Britain’s funniest writer. He wrote the bestseller Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. His new book, One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, is just out.

Selina Hastings (p21) is Evelyn Waugh’s biographer. In addition she wrote Nancy Mitford, Rosamond Lehmann and The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham. Her next subject is Sybille Bedford.

has emerged once more from beyond the grave.

In the latest Anthony Powell Society newsletter, an old friend, Tom Miller, quotes Amis’s opinions, delivered in restaurants and pubs in the ’80s and ’90s.

Here are Amis’s measured thoughts: ‘Lolita is bullshit...

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is bullshit’; ‘By comparison [with Shakespeare], George Bernard Shaw is a pygmy’; ‘There hasn’t been a great novelist since Dickens’; and ‘One must remember that Henry James was an American, and therefore no good.’

Good old Kingers!

The Evening Standard has sacked the paper’s oldest columnist, chess writer Leonard Barden.

At the end of his chess column on 31st January, Barden, 90, modestly wrote, ‘Today is my final chess article for the Evening Standard.

‘The series began on 4th June 1956 and has continued for 63 years, 7 months and 27 days without missing a day, a world record in all journalism for a daily column by a single individual.’

The old boy told British Chess News his departure had been caused by budget cuts: ‘Otherwise I might have continued until I dropped.’

Dropped? Shouldn’t a chess maestro say, ‘until I was taken’?

The Oldie Spring 2020 5

Important stories you may have missed Youths throwing stones over river Sussex Express

In many hotels, British hospitality is an oxymoron. But not in wise hotels that employ oldies.

Many congratulations, then, to Kingsmills Hotel in Inverness, which had the wisdom to hire 89-year-old Bill Sloan. Bill welcomes guests, helps them with their luggage and gives them the benefit of his deep knowledge of Scotland, acquired in over 70 years working in hotels.

‘Older workers have got to be aware that there can be resentment from younger employees, whose attitudes are totally different,’ he says.

‘Older workers have got to make an effort to be involved. I try and relate to their interests

Butterflies to the rescue Cambridge News Man couldn’t give plea – as he was naked Salisbury Journal £15 for published contributions

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Service with a smile: Bill, 89

and am slightly humorous about things.’

As he approaches 90, Bill has no plans to retire. ‘One of the great joys of working at

‘Nothing serious. Try cutting down on your intake of coronavirus news for a couple of weeks’

my age is that I feel useful – valued, even – to be here.’

The Old Un raises a dram to you, Bill.

On page 14, Craig Brown writes about the Beatles splitting up 50 years ago.

Don Short, the Mirror journalist who first revealed the split, tells his story in a new memoir, The Beatles and Beyond.

A Beatles contact told him Paul McCartney was quitting the band. Short tracked down a second source, just as his deadline was approaching at 8pm.

An Apple Records executive confirmed the news and the Mirror splashed the next day, 10th April 1970, with the headline ‘Paul is quitting the Beatles’. McCartney confirmed the news that day,

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6 The Oldie Spring 2020

‘Help yourself to anything in the fridge’ Scientists have just discovered a 20,000-year-old mammoth fridge by the River Don, 300 miles south of Moscow. This was where Stone Age man kept his lunch of mammoth meat cool in an underground fridge, walled with mammoth bones.

And it was all predicted in this 2018 Oldie cartoon, above.

with an official statement, adding later, ‘I have a better time with my family.’

Beatlemania – a term Short invented – was over.

Ideal Holmes: Basil Rathbone

The Old Un’s Easter reading is sorted out: the first biography of the greatest Sherlock of them all, The Curse of Sherlock Holmes – the Basil Rathbone Story,

by David Clayton, published in April.

South African-born Rathbone (1892-1967), aka ‘Ratters’, fought bravely in the First World War before he embarked on the role that was to define him.

Sadly, though, writes Clayton, Rathbone ‘came to loathe a character he saw as one-dimensional, condescending, cold and mean-spirited.

‘Even worse, he despised the tacky, almost mocking recognition he received in everyday life that became almost unbearable for him.

His efforts to extricate himself from the great detective were ultimately doomed to failure and there would only be one winner.’

I’m afraid that won’t stop the Old Un worshipping Rathbone as Sherlock and the inimitable way he cried, ‘Watson!’

Is the Old Un the last person on earth who likes the feel of notes and coins in his pocket?

He was shocked to hear the Garrick Club’s till is ringing the death knell for cash. The club, beloved of barristers and actors, is trying to go cashless.

The Old Un sympathises with the reason, as explained in The Garrick, the club’s magazine: ‘The club is charged by the bank to deposit cash, and it is currently costing the Garrick more than £1,000 a year.’

Surely it’s time to end the scandal whereby banks charge you for looking after your money? Aren’t they supposed to be grateful for the stuff?

The Prime Minister can count on the warmest of welcomes from his Aussie relatives, should he ever make it Down Under.

His Auntie Hilary [his father Stanley’s sister], 80, who emigrated to Australia with her husband Peter as ‘Ten Pound Poms’ 50 years ago and now lives on a farm in New South Wales, says, ‘I know he has a lot on his plate right now and keeping in touch with his aunt 12,000 miles away is, understandably, not high on his list of priorities, but we’d love to see him and would naturally do all that we could to make him feel at home.’

An Australian trip is impossible now, thanks to the virus. The Old Un looks forward to the day we can all visit our far-flung relations.

The poet John Clare (1793-1864) came to fame 200 years ago this spring.

He must have then thought his future secure and his name made.

He didn’t imagine he would fade back into Fenland obscurity, and then fall further into isolation and mental breakdown.

The year 1820 was the big one for Clare – the high point of his life – though his best work was yet to come. He was 26, self-educated, impoverished and undernourished.

The publication in January 1820 of his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, happened rapidly. Clare had been introduced to his publisher only a few months earlier.

Clare was announced as ‘the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’. By late February 1820, when Clare made his first visit to London, a second edition was in preparation, with double the print run.

One of his songs was sung at Drury Lane; he was becoming famous.

The artist William Hilton was commissioned to draw him; the picture became the portrait in the National Gallery. He was taken to the theatre, and to Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where he is now commemorated.

The book was selling like hot cakes, with a third edition out in May 1820.

But despite promises aplenty, little fortune was to come Clare’s way. In August, he was working in the harvest fields. He was often pulled away from his labouring to be examined by fascinated visitors, eager to inspect the

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prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Chicken with curry sauce, apricots, avocado and spring onion on toasted ciabatta famous rural talent. He felt like a ‘puppet show’.

By 1823, he was penniless.

By 1837, poor Clare was in a lunatic asylum.

Stuck for a sweet Easter treat for your man? Marzipan confectioner Niederegger in Lübeck,

says Jan-Alexander Fock of Niederegger’s. Orders are strong for the macho marzipan.

This kind of marketing move wouldn’t be allowed in Britain. Nestlé had to remove ‘It’s not for girls’ from Yorkie wrappers, and tissues can no longer be ‘mansize’.

‘My compliments to the microwave-operator’

Germany, has the answer, in the form of Männersache (‘Man’s business’).

This manly marzipan eschews the usual soft tastes and pastel wrappers of the company’s other 50 fruity flavours.

Männersache is whiskyand Coke-flavoured marzipan, covered in dark chocolate, with a black foil wrapper with bold white-and-red print. It looks like something you find at the bottom of a toolbox.

‘It’s designed for dudes,’

Marzipan put the German town of Lübeck, encircled by the Trave river, on the map in 1806.

That’s when Johann Georg Niederegger created a recipe of two-thirds Spanish almonds, one-third sugar and a splash of rosewater.

Their marzipan hasn’t changed since.

Despite the dreaded coronavirus, the Old Un wishes a Happy Easter to all marzipan- and chocolatelovers, male or female!

The Oldie Spring 2020 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

I’m self-isolating – and self-improving

Confined at home, I’m reading the classics I should’ve read years ago Liking to look on the bright side of things, I’m hoping it could be that this coronavirus pandemic works out rather well in the end. That’s if you survive, of course. And even the gloomiest projections suggest that most of us will.

I once asked the great Dr Anthony Clare (he of the radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair) why it was that my father, and others of my parents’ generation, often spoke about the Second World War as the happiest time of their lives. At home, bombs were falling. At the front, those who were in the forces, like my dad, were risking their lives on a daily basis.

‘That’s easy to explain,’ said Dr Clare.

‘During the war there was a sense of common purpose – that makes people happy. And the servicemen who were putting their lives on the line were also being tested by the war – and being “tested”, being challenged by life, is essential to being happy. You very rarely find happy people sitting around not doing very much.’

Well, this self-isolation is certainly testing us oldies, eh? We do have a shared sense of purpose: we will survive!

And, given our improved hand hygiene, we are likely to survive longer than we might otherwise have done. What’s more, we are rising to the challenge of selfisolation – reading War and Peace at last, memorising The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (all 143 verses), learning to play the piano from scratch online (there are virtual courses on virtually everything online), building a model of the Shard with matchsticks, finally writing that long-awaited family memoir, doing any number of the things we’ve been saying for so long we were going to do if only we had the time. Now we do, so there’s no excuse.

It is exactly ten years since my mother died, aged 96. Were she still here, she would be reminding us all that she

survived the Spanish, Asian, and Hong Kong influenza pandemics of 1918, 1957, and 1968. She left behind 15 greatgrandchildren, a host of happy memories and a mountain of clutter. Much of it has been in trunks and cardboard cartons in the garage for the past decade and only now, in self-isolation, am I getting round to sorting it out. Packets of Christmas cards, balls of knitting wool, unopened boxes of Camay soap, her favourite lime-green cardigan – they’re all there and bringing her back into focus.

These things shouldn’t be rushed.

Margaret Thatcher told me that when her beloved husband Denis died, she felt she should go through his clothes straight away and send them over to the local charity shop. She did just that – only to find her son, Mark, arriving home the next day, enquiring, ‘What’s happened to all the clothes I left here, mother? Where have they all gone?’

Roy Hudd was a lovely man. I knew him for 50 years and I don’t think I heard an

unkind thing said about him ever. We shared an interest in the history of music hall and pantomime in general, and in the life of Dan Leno in particular. Leno, once champion clog dancer of the world, star of the Drury Lane pantomimes, billed as ‘the funniest man on earth’, was, after the King, probably the most famous man in the country when he died, exhausted and insane, in 1904, at the age of 43. The three and a half miles of his funeral route were lined with people standing three deep all the way.

I wrote a biography of Leno (available on Amazon, 1p + postage). Roy chose Leno as his specialist subject when he appeared on Celebrity Mastermind. Roy told me how as a boy, from about the age of 15, he had a recurring dream about a house where he always felt at home.

Years later, when he was in his late twenties, two friends invited him over to their house in Brixton. As Roy drove into the street he realised this was going to be the house from his dream. Before he went into any of the rooms, he was able to describe it in perfect detail. The house, needless to say, had once been the home of Dan Leno.

My self-isolation self-improvement programme includes reading all the classics I have not managed before. I have started with The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, both because I thought a novel set in the Great Depression might be timely and because I have long relished the story that’s told of Elaine Steinbeck, widow of the Nobel laureate, travelling to Japan and asking, through an interpreter, in a Yokohama bookshop, if they happened to have anything by her late husband. ‘Oh, yes,’ she was told. ‘We have several copies of The Angry Raisins.’

‘Every once in a while, my wife agrees with me, just to keep me off balance’

Something Rhymes with Purple, Gyles’s and Susie Dent’s weekly podcast about words and language, is available online: www.gylesbrandreth.net/podcast The Oldie Spring 2020 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

A coronavirus battle of the generations

SPORTSPHOTO/ALAMY

I’m diluting my parents’ Blitz spirit with Dettol matthew norman

Nothing in this world is more repellent, as the philosopher Larry David posits, than the ostentatiously happy family that coexists in a cocoon of unbroken serenity.

In this regard, if no other, my family is anything but repellent. We love each other deeply. Yet, regardless of what Ali MacGraw told Ryan O’Neal in that movie, love doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry.

What love means is ceaselessly having to say you’re sorry – but generally being too pig-headed, obstreperous and dumb to do so.

All of which is a preamble to the declaration that this column stands proxy for a giant mea culpa to my parents for the dementedly overbearing behaviour of recent weeks.

It would be distasteful for any writer, let alone a Jewish one, to describe that behaviour as ‘Hitlerian’. Even so, the remorseless screeching of rebukes and instructions has eerily reminded the three of us of the late Führer delivering one of his less temperate keynote addresses to a rally in 1936.

The cause of the crazy yelling, obviously enough, is a certain infectious disease emanating from the People’s Republic of China. My parents, possibly in common with a fair chunk of the Oldie readership, are not in absolutely the first flush of youth. In precisely which flush they are it would be indelicate to reveal.

But knowing that I am 56, you needn’t be the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics to compute that they are bang in the coronadanger zone.

Like most contemporaries, they have what we now call, with practised ease, underlying conditions. Unlike most of them, they share a home with an 18-year-old grandson, whose relationship with the aggressive application of 10 The Oldie Spring 2020

soap has tended towards the literally hands-off; and who until very recently travelled to and from work on the vast subterranean Petri dish known as the London Underground.

Between him and my parents, standing inter-generational sentinel like a Khmer Rouge death-camp guard, though with palpably less patience and charm, is me.

Their house currently moonlights as the makeshift set of the unfunniest family-tension-themed sitcom ITV neglected to commission in place of On the Buses (and how poignantly nostalgic that title sounds today) in the 1970s.

From soon after dawn until the edge of dusk, I patrol with the antiseptic wipes. Dettol poisoning is a likelier cause of death in this household than the virus.

If this were restricted to door handles, taps and the like, there would be less urgent need for this filial apology.

‘You know we appreciate your efforts,’ as my father murmured on finding his biro making no impression on his Sudoku, ‘but is it really necessary to wipe down every page of my Times?’

The truth is that I don’t know – and prefer to fill this knowledge void with a regime of draconian brutality.

‘I know we’re not allowed into America any more, but what about Cuba?’ I overheard my mother ask a friend down the phone after a furious reprimand for sharing kitchen space with a fork of unknown previous usage. ‘I could do with a break from this in Guantanamo Bay.’ She is no stranger herself to medical neurosing. She insists, for example, that tickling a baby’s feet causes irreversible damage to its autonomic nervous system. She Love is ... saying sorry

shies from a bottle of Sarson’s like a wild mustang rearing at a rattlesnake, in the conviction that vinegar ‘dries the blood’.

My dad, while generally a paradigm of stoical common sense, has had his foibles. Back when he was smoking 80 a day, he issued a fatwa against saccharine sweeteners on the grounds that ‘they cause cancer’.

Yet in the face of more genuine danger, both my parents are magnificently phlegmatic.

I’m not sure why. It might be that maturity brings tranquillity with wisdom, or that a childhood during the Blitz imbues lifetime immunity against fretting obsessively about other lethalities.

Then again, it may just have something to do with fatigue at being bossed about by their deranged offspring with the newly acquired sobriquet of ‘Edward Dettolhands’.

The panic buying of tuna and sardines, so that the cupboard is visibly more replete than the John West depot, they have endured with startling grace.

They have mistakenly brushed aside the threat to zap anyone who strays within 14 feet of an undisinfected kettle, with a Taser bought on the dark internet, as a joke. What threatens to break them is the edict, issued this morning, that they must wear one of the 500 pairs of vinyl gloves that arrived from Amazon yesterday when handling fruit, books, remote controls and teabags.

Whether love will be enough to sustain us as a family unit through the months of isolation to come is hard to call. But – and without any intention of reforming my ways – I am sincerely sorry for being such a bombastic bully that the least gifted facial analyst in Christendom would correctly translate their shared default expression at a glance.

O death, it unmistakably reads, where is thy sting?

who was Sexton Blake?

Thumped, coshed, manacled. Shot and stabbed. Flung from a rocketing car, booted out of a plane and locked in a cellar squirming with poisonous snakes.

Sexton Blake endured many indignities over the course of his capers, but being quietly forgotten must be the most bruising of all. Surely he was every bit as immortal, as much of a British icon, as Sherlock Holmes, his grand rival and fellow resident of Baker Street?

With one bound he was born, Blake in Azerbaijan, 1908

HISTORIC IMAGES/ALAMY

what is wireless charging?

I was due to meet some friends for a drink in Islington, north London.

But just as I stepped out of the Tube and checked my phone for the finer details, it ran out of battery charge.

As I blundered around, searching for a power outlet, a kindly stranger and/or my friends, I pondered this not-veryamusing irony. The more wireless the world becomes, the more we need wires.

12 The Oldie Spring 2020

introduced in the pages of the Halfpenny Marvel in December 1893. Billed as ‘a daring detective’, Blake was the creation of Harry Blyth (1852-1898), writing under the pen name Hal Meredeth. Blyth was paid a nine-guinea fee, surrendered all rights and died of typhoid five years later.

Blake, in rude contrast, became a phenomenon, thrilling Edwardian readers as he fought fiends, blackguards and everyday foes of Empire. In 1905, he leapt onto the pages of the Union Jack and then in 1915 earned his own title, the Sexton Blake Library.

Joined by Tinker, a bright-eyed, street-smart sidekick, Blake puzzled and punched his way through more than 4,000 adventures, said to be the work of some 200 writers, among them erstwhile lumberjacks and gold prospectors, one pseudonymous nobleman and at least two former members of British Intelligence. There were stage plays, radio serials and suitably square-jawed films.

Blake’s star would fade, eclipsed by tougher, randier post-war heroes such as James Bond (the 25th Bond movie, No Time to Die, is due out later this year).

The year 1957 brought a desperate, Chandleresque makeover, complete with swish new offices in Berkeley Square and leg-flashing dames on the covers. The Sexton Blake Library shuttered in 1963.

Once a household name with a wider readership than Sherlock Holmes, Sexton had survived steel spikes and boa constrictors but now faced the chillingly slow deathtrap of obscurity.

It’s rather a shame. There’s a rattling, breathless charm to these yarns, typed in haste by a tribe of hacks for no higher purpose than entertainment. With his hawk-like profile, ubiquitous pipe and doting landlady there’s no doubt he was only ever a writ away from Conan Doyle’s creation, but Blake was altogether more thrilling. Propelled by his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost or Moth monoplane, he raced from shadowy Limehouse alleyways to crumbling rural abbeys, the Alps to the Gobi, ever prepared to roll up his sleeves and punch wickedness in the chops.

And yes, Blake was, at heart, a bit of a blank, but his enemies were a gloriously rum bunch. There was Zenith the Albino, with his opium-dipped cigarettes and penchant for carving his initials into people’s faces with the business end of a sword-stick. Or the quite unkillable Waldo the Wonder Man, bulletproof and impervious to pain. And Dr Cagliostro, staging torture shows in an underground colosseum for millionaire sensationseekers. These rogues gave a distinctive spice to Blake’s adventures.

Unlike for Holmes, there would be no statue on Baker Street, no Hollywood blockbuster with a showboating performance by Robert Downey Jr. But all is not lost. This April sees a series of reprints from Rebellion Publishing. As dear old Sexton himself once observed, ‘There is a nostalgia conjured from faraway places and moments which have long since ticked into the infinite fog.’

Nick Setchfield

My old Nokia 8310 (c2001) needed charging only a couple of times a week.

My iPhone SE (c2016) needs charging twice a day.

Batteries have become exponentially better. We’re just asking them to do more and more. Our 21st-century ambitions are still tethered to 20th-century sockets.

But not for much longer, if the evangelists of wireless charging are to be believed. ‘Every battery ever made has the same flaw – it runs out of power at some point,’ Hatem Zeine, the chief technology officer of the American company Ossia, told the Financial Times

recently. Ossia has developed a ‘distance charging’ system it calls Cota: Charging Over The Air. The dream is to provide ‘power that feels like WiFi’.

Charging over the air? What sorcery is this? Nineteenth-century sorcery, actually.

Nikola Tesla lit up a New York street wirelessly in 1894. Imagine two circuits.

Each one has a coil of copper wire in it. If you create an electromagnetic field in the first coil, you can transmit electricity to the second coil without the need for the circuits to be physically connected. This is called inductive charging.

Electric-toothbrush manufacturers

have been using it for years; Nokia was the first phone company to introduce it, in 2012; Apple rolled it out for the iPhone 8 in 2017.

It works only over millimetre distances – so you need to put your phone in exactly the right place on the charge pad – but if you’re clever with capacitors and resonant frequencies and use really massive coils, you can transmit more power over greater distances.

WiTricity, a company founded at MIT in 2007, has invented a wireless charging system suitable for electric cars, capable of transferring up to 11 kilowatts up to 10 inches through the air.

In recent years, strides have been made in uncoupled charging – which uses radio waves, infrared or ultrasound frequencies to transmit electricity longer distances. Ossia uses radio frequencies to send electricity up to five and a half yards

Power surge: the modern miracle of wireless charging

away. And Walmart, the American supermarket behemoth, is trialling technology to produce digital price labels, wirelessly charged, on its shelves.

What’s wrong with printed labels?

Well, one application for digital labels is dynamic pricing. Food nearing its expiry date can drop in price, automatically.

Trials have shown this helps reduce food waste, lower prices and increase profits all at once. If you don’t need to put tiny batteries in all those digital price tags, it becomes easier to roll out at scale.

At present, wireless charging is used mostly in factories and warehouses, but the potential for the home is huge. It would make it easier to connect ever-smaller devices (smartlocks, spycams and trackers) into the so-called ‘internet of things’.

Your TV could transmit electricity to your remote control. Your microwave could converse with your fridge. Wireless evangelists speak of a world where all excess energy is harvested and nothing will need charging ever again.

Until that day, there’s a socket on the first floor of Waterstones on Islington Green that the staff might let you use if you ask nicely.

Richard Godwin

When Asian flu gave us the shivers The coronavirus is worryingly horrible – but it’s nothing on Asian flu.

In April 1957, the Times reported that ‘an influenza epidemic’, originating in China, had affected thousands of people in Hong Kong. The source was said to be wild ducks, a migratory species ideally suited to contaminating large areas by means of its droppings. Open-air markets – crowded, insanitary and full of livestock – were a fertile source of infection (and they’re thought to have been the source of the Wuhan outbreak of the coronavirus).

Within weeks, the virus had become global, with over a million cases in India alone. It had also acquired an official title, H2N2, but was more widely known as Asian flu.

When Asian flu arrived here in late August 1957, medical authorities were unperturbed, saying that, contrary to ‘scare stories in the lay press’, it was ‘milder’ than ordinary flu. They were in no hurry to import the vaccine that had just been developed in the USA, recommending aspirin, plenty of liquid and a few days in bed for infectees.

In fact, the virus was an entirely new strain against which most people had no immunity. A GP later admitted, ‘We were amazed at the extraordinary infectivity of the disease, overawed by the suddenness of its impact and surprised at the protean nature of its symptomatology.’

An estimated nine million Britons were affected, mostly for periods of between one to two weeks, after which

they were advised to convalesce for at least a further week. Typically, you began by feeling off-colour and a bit wobbly.

Then you got a fever, accompanied by aches and pains, by which time all you wanted to do was go to bed. If you were really unlucky you developed complications such as bronchitis or pneumonia, which posed a serious threat to the very young and the very old.

Flu thrives in crowds, so that institutions like hospitals and schools, particularly boarding schools, were especially vulnerable. More than half the boys at Eton were infected, said the Times, which also reported that the King of Denmark had withdrawn his daughter, Princess Benedikte, from Benenden until the virus had abated.

In my house at school, everyone

‘It’s an invitation to Dick and Jenny’s wedding. But they’ve asked us to stay at home’

caught it, including our matron. The arrival of her young and attractive locum was some compensation for missing a chunk of the rugby season.

The armed forces were also hit hard, as were claustrophobic industries such as mining. An estimated £10 million – a lot of money then – was spent on sickness benefit. The TUC’s Vic Feather, responding to criticism of union militancy, said twice as many working hours were lost through flu than through strikes.

Although nothing like as deadly as the catastrophic Spanish flu pandemic of 1918/19, which killed between 50 and 100 million people, Asian flu accounted for at least two million deaths worldwide – possibly twice that number. In Britain, there were about 14,000 victims, almost half of whom were children. This was far more than the number who died from polio, then one of the world’s most feared diseases.

By December 1957, the Asian flu epidemic here appeared to have run its course, only to revive in January and February, targeting mainly the elderly.

Then, as suddenly as it arrived, it went.

But a reminder that it was not dead, but sleeping, occurred in 2005, when flu-testing kits containing a sample were mistakenly sent to laboratories all over the world. Fearful lest the virus escape, those responsible alerted the recipients, who scrambled to destroy the kits and their lethal pathogen.

Michael Barber The Oldie Spring 2020 13

In the 50 years since they split up, the Beatles’ dominance has snowballed, says Craig Brown

Here, there and everywhere

MIRRORPIX /LMK MEDIA/ ALAMY

B

ack in 1967, the MP and philosopher Bryan Magee ventured a prediction in the Listener magazine. ‘Does anyone seriously believe,’ he asked, ‘that Beatles music will be an unthinkingly accepted part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?’

My old Latin teacher would no doubt have identified this as a num question – an example of a question expecting the answer ‘no’. But over half a century later, and well into the 21st century, it’s safe to say that Magee got it wrong.

Thinkingly or unthinkingly, the Beatles are indeed an accepted part of daily life all over the world.

There are now reckoned to be over a thousand Beatles tribute acts across the globe. When I was in Liverpool for the annual Beatles festival, I watched the Bertils from Sweden, Best Beat from Serbia (crowned ‘one of the 30 most prominent Beatles tribute bands on the planet’ by Newsweek), the Bits from Hungary, Clube Big Beatles from Brazil and the Norwegian Beatles, who came billed as ‘probably the world’s northernmost Beatles tribute band’.

Many of these groups – the Tefeatles from Guatemala, Rubber Soul from Brazil, the Nowhere Boys from Colombia and Abbey Road from Spain – have been together longer than the Beatles: Britain’s Bootleg Beatles and Australia’s Beatnix have both been going for 40 years or more.

14 The Oldie Spring 2020

April 10th 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ break-up. If you go back 50 years from 1957, when John Lennon first bumped into Paul McCartney, you arrive in 1907, when King Edward VII was on the throne, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was in Number 10, and the most popular singers were Marie Lloyd and Enrico Caruso.

Though they once seemed so temporary, they now concertina time in the most extraordinary way. The leader of the brass section on All You Need Is Love was a 41-year-old professor at the Royal College of Music called David Mason. In 1958, Mason had played the flugelhorn at the première of Vaughan Williams’s 9th Symphony, in the presence of the composer himself.

Williams was at that time 85, and died three weeks later. For the first ten years of his life, he had known his great-uncle, Charles Darwin. So we can go from Charles Darwin to John Lennon in just three handshakes.

Just as remarkably, Paul McCartney once called in on Bertrand Russell, who lived down the road from him. Russell had enjoyed childhood meetings with William Gladstone, who himself used to breakfast with the elderly William Wordsworth. So it’s Blackbird to Daffodils in three encounters.

Against all the odds, the Beatles have endured. When they first hit the big time, back in 1964, they were always being

asked what they were going to do when the bubble burst; so much so that, at a press conference in Kansas City in September 1964, when a reporter began, ‘It’s assumed that you will sing for quite some time yet, but what do you plan to do…’, the 21-year-old George was able to complete the question: ‘…when the bubble bursts?’

As it happened, Ringo, probably the most pragmatic of the four, was already

The Bootleg Beatles, formed in 1980

Press launch of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Belgravia,1967

making plans for just such an eventuality: he was going to open a chain of hairdressing salons in the north-west of England.

Despite Magee’s prediction, their music eked its way into every corner of our lives. When Paul McCartney visited Moscow in May 2003, President Putin told him that hearing the Beatles as a boy growing up in the Soviet Union was ‘like a gulp of freedom’. On that same visit, former president Gorbachev told Paul, ‘I do believe the music of the Beatles taught the young people of the Soviet Union that there is another life.’

In 2010, President Obama spoke of how the Beatles had changed America.

‘It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly half a century since four lads from Liverpool landed on our shores and changed everything overnight,’ he said.

‘In a few short years, they had changed the way that we listened to music, thought about music, and performed

music, for ever. They helped to lay the soundtrack for an entire generation – an era of endless possibility and of great change.’

And even our own dear Queen, never the most conspicuous of groovers, paid tribute to them on the occasion of her golden-wedding anniversary in 1997.

‘What a remarkable 50 years they have been for the world,’ she said. ‘Think what we would have missed if we had never heard of the Beatles.’

Why the Beatles? At one point in my new book, One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, I toy with the notion that in some parallel universe it was Gerry and the Pacemakers who became the most celebrated group of the 20th century, while their early rivals, the Beatles, are now known only for performing in Sixties revival tours and making personal appearances at Gerry and the Pacemakers conventions.

In this other world, Gerry Marsden was taken up by the ambitious Japanese conceptual artist Yoko Ono, and went to live with her in New York. In 1980, he

was shot dead outside their apartment by a deranged fan. Today, Beatles members John and Paul tour Britain with their ‘tribute to Gerry and the Pacemakers show’, thrilling audiences with their exact rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone. Touchingly, they still perform one or two of their own, more recent numbers – Yesterday and A Hard Day’s Night – in each set. ‘We sneak ’em in, even if no one wants to hear ’em!’ quips John.

Meanwhile, Ringo Starr, having retired in 1966, now owns and manages a succcessful chain of hairdressing salons throughout the north-west.

As it happened, history failed to follow that particular byway, but the more I found out about the Beatles’ early lives, the more random and chancy their story appeared.

For instance, in June 1957, Paul, a bright boy, was encouraged to take two of his O levels – Spanish and Latin – a year early. Had he revised harder, he would have gone up a year at school, as planned.

As it was, he passed Spanish but failed Latin, and so he had to remain in The Oldie Spring 2020 15

the Remove, alongside boys a year younger. This meant that he was forced to make friends with a little boy he would never have deigned to speak to had he gone up a year. So if Paul had passed his Latin O Level, George Harrison would never have become a Beatle.

What if Paul’s friend Ivan Vaughan had never suggested that they drop by the church fête in Woolton the following month? It’s unlikely Paul would ever have met John. What if the shy, young classical-music aficionado Brian Epstein hadn’t popped into the Cavern on a whim on 9th November 1961? And what if Epstein had given up on the Beatles, having received his umpteenth thumb’s-down from record executives?

In its haphazard way, providence brought these four very different characters together. Their variety was their essence. Other groups had a front man: your favourite was pre-selected for you. But there was a Beatle to suit every taste. Each personified a different element: John fire, Paul water, George air and Ringo earth.

Central to their art was the sharply contrasting combination of John and Paul. The EMI recording engineer Geoff Emerick watched them at work over a number of years. ‘They couldn’t have been two more different people.

Paul was meticulous and organised; he always carried a notebook around with him, in which he methodically wrote down lyrics and chord changes in his neat handwriting. In contrast, John seemed to live in chaos: he was constantly searching for scraps of paper that he’d scribbled hurried ideas on. Paul was a natural communicator; John couldn’t articulate his ideas well. Paul was the diplomat; John was the agitator.

‘Paul was soft-spoken and almost unfailingly polite; John could be a loudmouth and quite rude.’

The peculiar power of the Beatles’ music, its magic and its beauty, lies in the intermingling of these opposites. As John saw it, when they were composing together, Paul ‘provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, a certain bluesy edge’.

It was this tension that made their greatest music so expressive, capable of being universal and particular at one and the same time. Other groups were raucous or reflective, progressive or traditional, solemn or upbeat, folksy or sexy or aggressive. But when you hear a Beatles album, you feel that all human life is there.

Many of their songs have bright melodies but dark lyrics, or dark 16 The Oldie Spring 2020

melodies but bright lyrics. The words of Help!, Run for Your Life, Misery and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer are all about depression and psychosis, but they are set to jaunty tunes. Paul comes up with ‘We can work it out’ and John immediately undercuts it: ‘Life is very short’. Paul sings, ‘It’s getting better’ and John butts in with ‘Can’t get much worse’.

As I was to discover, the people who surrounded them were every bit as various – almost like characters from an Ealing Comedy. Some of the key figures, like John’s Aunt Mimi, stood in sharp contrast to the easy-going liberal ethos of the Sixties. Nowadays, her old house, Mendips, is owned by the National Trust, and sports a blue plaque. The National Trust guide, a retired teacher called Colin, introduces three tours a day by denouncing Aunt Mimi as a snob.

This is not the sort of thing one usually hears from National Trust guides, who tend to be tweedy types, sturdy apologists for snobs and snobbery, and stalwart defenders of the former occupants of their stately homes.

But not Colin. ‘She would cast her withering looks on the people who lived on the council estate. She’d call them “common” because they lived in social housing. And so did my mum. And that’s because Mimi was a snob and so was my mum! They were both SNOBS!’ But, for me, Aunt Mimi stands in the proud tradition of British aunts – bossy, determined, no-nonsense, imperious – as memorialised by P G Wodehouse and Richmal Crompton. Without her, John would have had nothing to rebel against. Even after he had become one of the four most famous young men on earth, she would criticise the way he dressed and the way he spoke.

To a 13-year-old Beatles fan who had seen John on television, she wrote, ‘When he came home, I said, “John, what’s all this about – what’s happened to your voice?” He didn’t really talk like that. I brought him up properly, not to talk like a ruffian.’

And on the release of Two Virgins, with its notorious cover photograph of John and Yoko naked, she made her feelings plain. ‘It would have been all right, John, but you’re both so ugly. Why don’t you get somebody attractive on the

‘If Paul had passed his Latin O Level, George would never have become a Beatle’

cover if you’ve got to have someone completely naked?’

The other characters in the Beatles orbit were every bit as colourful. They included the anguished Brian Epstein; the suave and sympathetic George Martin, whose background was as poor and downtrodden as Ringo’s, but whose wartime stint in the RAF had transformed him into a gent; John’s ne’er-do-well father, Fred, who released his own, dreadful single, That’s My Life, on the back of John’s success; and ‘Magic Alex’ Mardas, a Greek conman paid roughly £4 million by the Beatles on the promise to produce miraculous inventions such as a paint that made objects invisible, a house that hovers in the air on an invisible beam and ‘loudpaper’, a form of audible wallpaper.

For four years, Paul lived with Jane Asher’s arty and sophisticated family in Wimpole Street. Jane’s mother, Margaret, was a teacher at the Royal College of Music; she was related to Alfred, Lord Tennyson; her father had been T E Lawrence’s solicitor.

I particularly warmed to Jane’s father, Dr Richard Asher, a pioneering endocrinologist, who in 1951 had named and identified Munchausen’s syndrome, the mental disorder that drives individuals to fabricate symptoms of illness. Reading his witty articles in the British Medical Journal on subjects such as ‘The Dangers of Going to Bed’ and ‘Why Are Medical Journals So Dull?’ was one of the unexpected pleasures of the research for my book.

Paul had an extraordinary aptitude for self-improvement, and relished being part of this civilised household, where culture was valued.

In the music room of the Asher home, he wrote I Want to Hold Your Hand, Here, There and Everywhere, And I Love Her, Yesterday and many other Beatles songs, most of them flowing from his fertile young mind in no more than an hour or two, as if by magic.

Many, like Bryan Magee, dismissed the Beatles at the time. Noël Coward considered them ‘bad-mannered little shits’. William F Buckley Jr thought them ‘unbelievably horrible’. Anthony Burgess prayed that a special circle of hell would be set aside for them, where they would be bound to ‘a white-hot turntable, stuck all over with blunt and rusty acoustic needles, each tooth hollowed to the raw nerve’.

But, much to the despair of their critics, the Beatles’ bubble never burst.

Instead, it grew larger and larger, and now, 50 years on, it contains the whole world.

Liberty hall As the Government sets up a new £3m fund for Britain’s 10,000 village halls, William Cook visits his local one – and is enchanted

S

ome of my fondest childhood memories are rooted in those homely places known as village halls, in and around Stapleford, Cambridgeshire – playing ping-pong, frequenting jumble sales and watching my mum’s friends doing dreadful am-dram.

But then I went away to seek my fortune and left village life far behind.

More fool me.

Now, half a lifetime later, I’m back in a village at long last (hurrah!) – a pretty place called Ickenham, near Uxbridge, with a medieval church and a miniature railway and even a few independent shops and cafés. It’s on the edge of London – so much of its original village life has inevitably been buried beneath suburban sprawl, but it’s been a wonderful surprise to find that the village hall is still there.

Ickenham Village Hall is the hub of this community. Without it, I wonder if there’d be much of a community here at all. You can come here for morning coffee or afternoon tea. If you’re feeling more athletic you can do yoga or Zumba (a sort of sporty dance routine). There are quiz nights and even ferret-racing nights.

There are more than 10,000 village halls in England. Though they’ve struggled a bit recently, subjected to the same strains and stresses that afflict all local amenities, these splendid places are now enjoying a discreet renaissance.

I reckon it’s because we’ve finally become fed up with the soulless anonymity of the internet. We want to get out and meet our neighbours, as we used to. Then, as now, the village hall is the best place to do it.

So how did the idea of the village hall begin? Like the fruits of most good ideas down the ages, they evolved organically, rather than as a result of grand governmental diktat.

But, like lots of things we think of as eternal, many of them aren’t nearly as ancient as you might suppose. The movement really took off after the First

World War, when lots of village halls were erected as memorials to the fallen.

Some of the buildings they’re housed in are older, but they were often built for other uses, for example as schoolhouses.

St Margaret’s Hall in Alderwasley, Derbyshire, claims to be the oldest village hall in England. The original structure is 13th-century – it was built as a chapel and converted into a village hall for the 1977 Silver Jubilee.

Still, it’s never easy maintaining any sort of building, however old – or modern. So it’s good news that the Government has just stumped up £3 million for a Village Halls Improvement Grant Scheme.

More than £1 million has already been allocated, but that still leaves nearly £2 million up for grabs. If you’re involved in running a village hall, you can apply for up to £75,000 for alterations and improvements. These grants are administered by an admirable charity called Action with Communities in Rural England.

‘Village halls are more important and relevant than ever,’ said Rural Affairs Minister Lord Gardiner, launching the scheme earlier this year. Hear, hear.

However, a village hall is nothing without events, and booking these places used to be a challenge. You had to phone a number and speak to someone who

Drill hall: Captain Mainwaring musters the Home Guard in Walmington-on-Sea

never seemed to be there. In this regard, at least, it seems the internet has its uses.

A bright chap called Bernard Hammick has come up with a clever scheme called Hallmaster (www.hallmaster.co.uk) – a computer system that makes booking village halls easy-peasy.

Bernard’s computer system also books out church halls, and he’s not too bothered about the distinction. There’s a big overlap between the two institutions.

The church hall in Dad’s Army is forever hosting Walmington-on-Sea village gatherings, often clashing with Captain Mainwaring’s drill sessions.

But what’s remarkable about village halls is that they don’t have a big organisation, like the C of E, behind them. They’re entirely run by volunteers. The concept has been exported to Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia; it’s a peculiarly Anglophone phenomenon.

Germany has a community hall in every Dorf (village), but it doesn’t feel quite the same.

In the course of a single century, village halls have become integral to British culture, a familiar forum for many a Just William story, Miss Marple mystery or Dad’s Army episode.

Ten years ago, Oldie cartoonist Tony Husband toured over 100 village halls, in a double act with poet Ian McMillan, and discovered a rural netherworld of aerobics, tap-dancing and beekeeping. In one venue, they saw a poster billing them as a song-and-dance act. They asked why.

‘We were told the guy doing the poster was going on holiday and only had time to change the names!’ the cartoonist said.

So how can we support these sterling institutions? Well, next time you’re arranging an event and need to find a venue, why not forget the stuffy hotel that fleeced you rotten last time, and hire your village hall instead?

Meantime, I’ll be dropping into my village hall for a spot of ferret-racing, or maybe even to shake my booty in an energetic bout of Zumba.

The Oldie Spring 2020 19

On Brideshead Revisited’s 75th anniversary, Nickolas Grace recalls the joy of playing the camp, eyelid-fluttering Anthony Blanche

From Britain’s grandest film set...

H

ad I been born two years earlier, I would be as old as Brideshead Revisited, published 75 years ago! Still, I’d rather be younger.

One sunny morning in 1979, my agent asked me to read for a new series, Brideshead Revisited. My heart leapt – I adored the book at school. I dared to ask the question: which part?

‘Anthony Blanche.’

‘Oh God, isn’t that the queer guy with the stutter?’

‘The very same,’ responded my agent.

I went off to meet the director, the classically handsome, cigar-smoking Michael Lindsay-Hogg; the producer, the charmingly effusive Derek Granger (who turns 99 on 23rd April); and the casting director, Doreen Jones. She didn’t want me for the role! There was no reading at all; just an informal chat and an invitation to a screen test in Manchester.

I found Blanche’s stutter a genuine challenge. When the screen test happened, I just went for it, and found my eyelids fluttering with each stutter.

They said they’d be in touch the next day. I wandered back to the station, where I bumped into Lindsay-Hogg.

On the train, he declared, ‘You’ve got the part – so you can relax and we can chat all the way back to London!’

The next morning, I received from Derek Granger a huge package of letters and articles about Waugh’s contemporaries, including Maurice Bowra, Peter Quennell, Bryan Guinness and Harold Acton and Brian Howard – the two inspirations for Blanche.

The best information came from the puppet master himself, Mr Waugh. His first description of Blanche includes ‘part Gallic, part Yankee, part perhaps Jew: wholly exotic’. That gave me a huge canvas on which to paint.

20 The Oldie Spring 2020

Acton and Howard had been rivals at both Eton and Oxford, both vying for the title of ‘aesthete par excellence’. Like Blanche, Acton had stood on his balcony at Christ Church, declaiming Eliot’s The Waste Land through a megaphone to the ‘meaty boys’ walking below; as an undergraduate, Howard varnished his finger and toenails. When he was an AC2 in the RAF, he dragged up at weekends and worked as a waitress at the Ritz.

By the time I played Blanche, Howard had been dead for 21 years, and Acton locked away in his beautiful Villa La Pietra in Florence.

Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster’s Brian Howard biography is packed with outrageous tales of his extrovert behaviour. Predominantly, though, I relied on Waugh’s superb detail.

I used his ‘Gallic’ clue to introduce the French ‘r’. I exaggerated his stutter, and fluttered my ‘large, saucy eyes’ with each affected stutter, extending any innocent, unsuspecting word. The challenge was to convince the audience that it was the character who was over the top, and not the actor. Only you can judge.

At our first rehearsal, at the Spread Eagle in Thame, Jeremy Irons said,

Nickolas Grace and Jeremy Irons

‘You’re not really going to play it like that, are you?’ Anxiously, I looked to LindsayHogg, who gave me a definitive nod of approval. So I was off, and onto the B-B-Brandy Alexanders…!

All progressed swimmingly from April until, suddenly, filming ground to a halt, because of a technicians’ strike. When we started again in November, LindsayHogg reluctantly had to resign, owing to film commitments in the USA. Large chunks of John Mortimer’s script were rejected and, with Granger’s guidance, we restored much of Waugh’s original.

Despite the vicissitudes of the strike and the erratic schedule, it was one of the happiest and longest shoots of my life, from April 1979 to August 1981. Et in arcadia eram. When the series was finally broadcast, in October 1981, the reaction was unexpected and overwhelming.

I did eventually meet Harold Acton in 1984, when he invited me to his 80thbirthday drinks party at Claridge’s. He was still full of ‘c-creamy English charm’ but not as extrovert as I had hoped. On a postcard to me, he wrote, ‘Enjoy the fruits of your youth whilst ye may!’

As for Brian Howard, I received a letter from an elderly lady, Carley Dawson, Howard’s cousin, who invited me to Washington DC. She said, ‘But you’re so much nicer than Brian!’

I owe Brideshead a huge debt, and much gratitude to Lindsay-Hogg and Granger for casting me. It transformed my career, leading to an assortment of fascinating roles and unexpected, decadent adventures, some of which I shall reveal in my autobiography, when I am 80 – adhering to Sir John Gielgud’s instructions to me when I was working on his King Lear in 1994, commissioned by the BBC for his 90th birthday.

Happy birthday, Brideshead Revisited, and thank you very much!

GRANGER/ JONATHAN HODSON/ALAMY

And Selina Hastings remembers the friends who inspired Waugh’s most successful book

I

...to Evelyn’s smart set

t was in January 1944 that Evelyn Waugh managed to procure three months’ unpaid leave from the army, in order to begin work on what is regarded by many, myself included, as his finest novel, Brideshead Revisited.

At that particular period, Waugh had little to do. Nobody seemed to want him.

The war was going on elsewhere, and the jobs he had hoped for in his brigade had been allotted to others, his commanding officer explaining that he was so unpopular as to be almost unemployable.

Thus it was that he found himself staying at a small hotel in a Devonshire village, writing about a world far distant from the grim austerity of wartime Britain.

The book took him only five months to complete. For 6th June 1944, his diary entry reads: ‘This morning at breakfast the waiter told me the Second Front had opened… My only fear is lest the invasion upsets my typist at St Leonard’s, or the posts to him with my manuscript.’

An extraordinarily perceptive

Castle Howard and Evelyn Waugh

recreation of a vanished world, Brideshead conveys Waugh’s romantic veneration both for the aristocracy and for an English Catholicism for centuries sheltered and nurtured by the old recusant families. It also brilliantly displays his lethal wit and a remarkable perspicacity in depicting his characters, many based on people he knew.

The book begins during the war, with Charles Ryder arriving with his regiment at a camp set on an abandoned country estate. Ryder’s sudden recognition of the now deserted great house, Brideshead, brings back memories of his earlier years and of the family, the Flytes, who had become the centre of his existence.

The story then goes back a couple of decades to the period when Ryder, as an undergraduate at Oxford, meets Sebastian, the younger son of the aristocratic Flyte family, recent converts to Roman Catholicism. With Sebastian, charming, childlike and with no sense of direction, Ryder forms a close and The Oldie Spring 2020 21

enchanted friendship, Sebastian in almost every respect an image of Waugh’s own friend and lover from his university days, Alastair Graham. (In the manuscript of Brideshead, Alastair’s name appears inadvertently from time to time in place of Sebastian’s.)

Alastair, like Sebastian, was Catholic, also from an aristocratic family, although one of rather lower status than the much grander Flytes. Sebastian shares Alastair’s whimsical charm, his girlish good looks, his air of decadence and melancholy and, crucially, his addiction to drink.

brother, the charmless Lord Elmley, is a mirror image of the equally charmless eldest son of the Flytes, Lord Brideshead.

And the two families were involved in similar scandals. In the novel, Lord Marchmain leaves his wife and children to live abroad with a mistress, while Lord Beauchamp was forced to leave England because of rumours about his homosexuality, energetically spread by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Westminster. Westminster had always been jealous of Beauchamp’s distinguished career. Although

OLDIE MONTAGE

The real Lord Sebastian Flyte: Hugh Lygon and Madresfield Court, Worcestershire

Alastair ‘had no repugnance to the bottle’, as Waugh put it; and it was a letter of Alastair’s that inspired the scene in Brideshead where Ryder and Sebastian drive off for a picnic.

‘I have found the ideal way to drink Burgundy,’ Alastair had written to Waugh. ‘You must take a peach and peel it, and put it in a finger bowl, and pour the Burgundy over it. The flavour is exquisite.’

In Brideshead, Sebastian says seductively to Ryder, ‘I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Chateau Peyraguey — which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend.

It’s heaven with strawberries.’

Just as Sebastian ends up a hopeless alcoholic, so did Alastair, spending his later years not in a monastery in Morocco, but living as a recluse in a small village on the Welsh coast.

Another friend of Waugh’s who shared certain qualities with Sebastian was Hugh Lygon, younger son of Earl Beauchamp. The Lygons lived at Madresfield, a large house at the foot of the Malvern Hills, where Waugh was often invited to stay. Hugh’s elder 22 The Oldie Spring 2020

Beauchamp had fathered seven children, the Duke claimed to be outraged by his brother-in-law’s predilections – which, according to the gossip of the time, first came to notice at Madresfield through the heavy clunk of the footmen’s bracelets as they changed the plates at dinner.

Unlike the Flytes, the Lygons were not Catholic, although the Catholic chapel at Brideshead as described in the novel is identical in almost every detail to the art-nouveau chapel at Madresfield.

For Waugh, who had ‘gone over’ in his late twenties, his Catholic faith had become both the centre of his life and focus of his art. The Roman Church, in whose teaching despair was regarded as a mortal sin, offered him a safe and solid structure, a discipline and an ordered way of life, which once adopted held out a clear prospect of salvation.

As Sebastian explains to Ryder, Catholics are not like others, ‘particularly in this country where … everything they think important is different from other people’, an esoteric elitism that naturally appealed to Waugh.

The powerful, underlying theme of

Brideshead is one of Catholic revelation.

Ryder, the convinced atheist who impatiently condemns Catholicism as ‘mumbo-jumbo’, suddenly towards the end finds redemption as he enters the chapel. A lost soul is brought to God by means of the unseen hook and invisible line, the twitch upon the thread.

At the time of the novel’s publication, 75 years ago, on 28th May 1945, its critical reception was far from entirely favourable. A Labour government was about to be elected in July, a social revolution was under way, and much was being written in the daily press, enthusiastically promoting the age of the common man.

At such a time and for many people, the patrician setting of Brideshead rankled. In some indefinable way, it was considered morally reprehensible to write about the family of an English marquess.

The aristocracy was not ‘real’ in the good, honest way the lower, and even middle, classes were ‘real’. Henry Green, writing about servants and factory workers, was more in touch, more true to life, than Evelyn Waugh writing about the nobility.

This view was expressed by, among others, Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker, who wrote that ‘Waugh’s snobbery, hitherto held in check by his satirical point of view, has here emerged shameless and rampant’.

But, as Waugh himself stated, he had no interest in the working class: the crucial point, surely, was, he said, that ‘The novelist deals with the experiences which excite his imagination… Class consciousness, particularly in England, has been so much inflamed nowadays that to mention a nobleman is like mentioning a prostitute 60 years ago…

I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best.’

Despite such disapproval, the novel was an immediate success both in Britain and in the United States. Henry Reed in the New Statesman declared Brideshead ‘a fine and brilliant book’, while Wilson in the New Yorker predicted that the novel ‘will prove to be the most successful, the only extremely successful, book that Evelyn Waugh has written’.

In this judgement he was probably correct. Brideshead became a Book Society choice in England and Book of the Month in America, quickly selling over half a million copies, bringing Waugh not only fame and fortune but a new-found status as a literary celebrity, a reputation that now, decades after his death, continues to grow.

In the 1960s and ’70s, photographer John Edwards captured everyday scenes that have disappeared for ever

The England that time forgot

Above: Bikers by Brighton’s Clock Tower, 1971. Below left: Local children follow a rag-and-bone man in Moulsecoomb, a suburb of Brighton, 1973. Below right: Scuba divers act as bait for competitive anglers, Earls Court Boat Show, 1970

24 The Oldie Spring 2020

Above left: Bingo players in the amusement hall at Brighton’s Palace Pier, 1974. Above right: Strollers on the King’s Road, Chelsea, 1969. Below: Four ladies on the seafront at Seaford, East Sussex, 1971

The Oldie Spring 2020 25

250 years after the poet’s birth, Frances Wilson visits his house, where he ate steak, admired daffodils and wrote his sublime works

Ode to Wordsworth

MARK BASSETT/ALAMY

‘W

hat happy fortune were it here to live,’ Wordsworth wrote in Home at Grasmere.

His home, a former inn called the Dove and Olive Bough, has recently had a happy fortune – £5.1 million, to be precise – spent on its refurbishment. The new Dove Cottage was meant to open on 7th April, Wordsworth’s 250th birthday.

The virus means it’ll open later this year.

The purpose of the project, ‘Reimagining Wordsworth’, is less to prevent the whitewashed doll’s house from becoming another ruined cottage than to bring us closer to the ‘authentic’ Wordsworthian experience – with the help of a ‘learning

28 The Oldie Spring 2020

space’ and a ‘viewing station’, neither of which sounds very Wordsworthian to me.

It seems strange, given that the object of the ‘reimagining’ is authenticity, that the Wordsworth Trust has not restored the original name of Town End, which is what the Wordsworths called their home.

Dove Cottage was a later invention.

Town End was then the last house in Grasmere, a village described by Thomas Gray as ‘a perfect republic of shepherds and agriculturalists’. The cottage looked onto two other cottages, in one of which lived the Wordsworths’ servant Molly Fisher – who, Coleridge was stunned to discover, had never heard of the French Revolution.

But it has long been possible, without the aid of learning spaces and viewing stations, to reimagine life in Dove Cottage because Dorothy Wordsworth, who lived there with her brother, kept a journal.

Here she described in brief, lyrical entries their daily routine between Christmas 1799, when she and William moved in, and September 1802, when he brought his wife, Mary, to join them.

From The Grasmere Journals we learn that while William dug the garden, cleared the path to the privy and walked the three miles to Ambleside to get his tooth removed, Dorothy baked pies and mended clothes. One day, she made a shoe; on another day, she put in a

Above: Dove Cottage, home of the hippy Wordsworths. Below: His earliest known portrait – by William Shuter, 1798

window. Beggars came to the door with stories that moved her to tears. Swallows nested above her window ledge. She and William took turns to have headaches and upset stomachs, and they sat up all night with Coleridge, drinking tea or watching the moon.

Sometimes Dorothy gardened in the moonlight and sometimes she and William simply wrote and read, a pleasure she recorded in real time: ‘The fire flutters; the watch ticks. I hear nothing save the breathing of my Beloved, as he now & then pushes his book forward, & turns over a leaf.’

Dorothy describes their lives as if they were a married couple, and this their first marital home. Another entry records that, after eating ‘Beefstakes’ for dinner, ‘we made a pillow of my shoulder; I read to him & my Beloved slept’.

Separated as children after the death of their mother, Dorothy and William were reunited as adults; no amount of interactive reconstruction can return to us the emotional intensity of these years.

Not only were they rediscovering each

other, but William was discovering his vast poetic power and Dorothy was learning that her sensibility was essential to his genius. It was she who first recorded the daffodils by the lakeside, seen on one of her walks with William.

‘I never saw daffodils so beautiful; they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.’

That entry was written in 1802. Two years later, Wordsworth, leafing through her journals for inspiration, turned Dorothy’s description into a poem describing ‘a host of golden daffodils’.

In his version of the scene, he is wandering lonely as a cloud. In Dorothy’s version, they are vitally together, sharing each other’s ears and eyes. What we learn from The Grasmere Journals is that Wordsworth was never alone; nor was it possible to be so in a house this size.

What struck me about Dove Cottage as a child, when I came here regularly with my grandmother, who lived nearby, was how creepy it was. What magic the house had was created by the Wordsworths, who mythologised the place. Downstairs, the wainscoted walls looked black, the ceilings were low and beamed, the floors cold slate, and the parlour had only one tiny, diamond-paned window which looked onto the road.

Dorothy slept in a downstairs bedroom next to the kitchen, which had once been the bar of the inn. There were three more rooms upstairs, including Wordsworth’s study. But when he and Dorothy lived here together, before his children tore up and down the stairs, he wrote at the parlour table in his shirtsleeves with, Dorothy recorded, ‘his

Basin of Broth before him untouched & a little plate of Bread & Butter’.

Wordsworth was, on this occasion, composing To a Butterfly. On this same table, with another basin of broth going to waste, he may have also put together the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, with the preface in which he set out the gospel of Romanticism: ‘All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’

The Wordsworths were bourgeois intellectuals living like hippies and their unconventional behaviour was the cause of gossip. They did whatever they wanted, whether it was reading Boswell in bed in the morning, going to sleep in the afternoon or lying on the hillside watching the clouds.

But most of all, they walked.

Wordsworth was, as Seamus Heaney put it, a pedestrian poet. He composed in the open, pacing his lines into being. Dorothy describes the two of them walking ‘backwards and forwards’ in the orchard until dinnertime, with Wordsworth reciting his poetry.

Watching their eccentric neighbour walk was endlessly entertaining for the local farmers, one of whom described him ‘bumming and booing about’ as he marched up and down the road.

This bumming and booing was the composition of the finest poetry in the language, including the 1805 Prelude.

While Wordsworth composed, our witness reported, ‘She, Miss Dorothy, kept close behind him, and she picked up the bits as he let ’em fall, and tak’ ’em down, and put ’em on paper for him.’

Thomas De Quincey described the poet’s walk as cade-like, ‘a cade’, he explained, ‘being some sort of insect which advances by an oblique motion’.

We can therefore imagine Wordsworth edging Dorothy, holding onto her pencil and paper, off the path.

When the Wordsworths moved out of Dove Cottage in the spring of 1808, Thomas De Quincey took over the lease.

‘They who are dwellers in this holy place,’ Wordsworth wrote in Home at Grasmere, ‘must themselves be hallowed.’ De Quincey’s hallowed role was to be custodian of the Wordsworth shrine, but instead he turned the house into the opium den described in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

The Wordsworths were furious – but not as much as they would have been had they foreseen that the site of their experiment in plain living and high thinking is now ‘a dynamic destination for creativity, inspiration and enjoyment’.

Dove Cottage, Grasmere, will open later this year The Oldie Spring 2020 29

In 1964, Hugo Vickers started making 500 models of the Royal Family and Knights of the Garter – and then he met them in the flesh

Model behaviour I

was twelve years old when I decided to make a model of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 1964.

A few months earlier, we had Easter at my prep school, Scaitcliffe, Englefield Green. My headmaster took a few of us over to St George’s Chapel to hear the St Matthew Passion. He was one of those rounded men with extensive knowledge in many areas of life. Because we were in the queue outside, he spoke of the chapel’s history, of the Knights of the Garter, their banners and the Royal Vault, with its lift that descends dramatically during royal funerals.

I remember thinking that if I was lucky enough to get to Eton, just down the road, I would love to explore St George’s Chapel. It was the place for me – and so it has remained for the last 56 years. On my first Saturday and on virtually every Saturday and Sunday thereafter (between 1964 and 1969), I escaped from school and immersed myself in this fascinating world.

I had always liked making models. I was not drawn to cars or aeroplanes or guns; I liked buildings. As a child, I made models of Wellington Arch, Admiralty Arch and Marble Arch – all out of

cardboard. I liked doors and gates that opened and shut. And I liked special doors that were opened on special occasions – the great gates of Wellington Arch were normally firmly closed unless the Queen or a procession was expected.

It was a logical step for me to make a model of St George’s Chapel. In so doing, I not only examined the architecture but also copied all the banners of the Knights of the Garter (drawn on paper), and then the stall plates – tiny cardboard items smaller than a thumbnail.

For the building, I used cardboard, wallpaper, Fablon (ideal for oak or marble floors) and many, many tins of Sellotape. I solved problems more by luck than by anything else. Those little plastic studs the laundry put in shirt collars made admirable organ stops. The model eventually occupied an entire attic room in my parents’ Hampshire home.

Next, I needed to people it. And as I could not buy the people, I had to make them myself. I needed a Dean and Canons, Verger and sacristans and a choir; then Military Knights, the Royal Family and the Knights of the Garter; then their wives and, significantly, the widows of previous Garter Knights; then those people who came to the chapel for

various actual services, which required hasty additions to the collection.

I ended up with about 500 of them, some notably better than others. To get them right, I studied as many of the real-life characters as possible when they appeared at the real St George’s Chapel and I pored over papers and magazines.

I witnessed many services in the real chapel. I modelled 93-year-old Lord Iveagh in his wheelchair as he turned up for the opening of St George’s House in 1966. Princess Marina’s funeral in 1968 required me to make a King Umberto and a Queen Frederika, and a host of auburn-haired princesses who all looked a bit like Princess Marina herself.

In December 1968, some RAF candlesticks were dedicated in the Chapel in the Queen’s presence – I got some rather good fabric for the uniform of Bomber Harris, who was at the service.

Though I don’t think Lord Dowding attended, he was much in the news (there was a film about the Battle of Britain in 1969) and he was irresistible to do. When I saw Sir Robert Menzies unveil a statue of Churchill, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, I had to have him.

I spent the entire summer of 1968 stitching about 30 Garter robes in blue

Living dolls: Duke of Marlborough; Lady Baden-Powell; Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding; Queen Juliana; Duchess of Argyll 30 The Oldie Spring 2020

velvet, lined in white satin. That took for ever, and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s cope took me a week – Michael Ramsey, a marvellously craggy face to capture.

The models were made from cardboard, with a lot of crinkly paper, their faces covered with pink silk (white, if they were very old) – and the features drawn with biros in various colours.

Considerable attention was paid to uniforms, orders and decorations, with pins for buttons. This has since turned me into the scourge of Downton Abbey and The Crown, as I keep spotting howlers. It had me frowning at the television when Admiral Sir George Zambellas appeared at the 2019 State Opening in GCB riband – and Bath collar! The riband and the collar are never worn together.

From time to time, an interesting figure appeared in the press. I could not resist Olave Baden-Powell in her Girl Guides uniform, Bertrand Russell and Lady Violet Bonham Carter (whose voice on Any Questions accompanied me as I grew up).

Lord Snowdon’s bottle-green uniform for the 1969 Investiture was fun, and I put Princess Margaret into her Investiture outfit, too.

In 1972, the King of Denmark died, and I copied Queen Margrethe, Prince Henrik and Queen Ingrid – seen together in photographs from Copenhagen.

During my teenage years, I spent every waking hour of the holidays in that attic. I was a reclusive child, working away, and listening all day long to Radio 4 – so not entirely isolated. No doubt I was a worry to my parents, though they were lucky that I eschewed drugs, nor did they have to rescue me drunk from pubs.

What was I doing? I was escaping. I was not in tune with their essentially rural pursuits. Riding, shooting and fishing were not for me. But without analysing this at the time, I was creating in miniature the world I perhaps did not even realise that I wanted to belong to.

Years later, when editing Cecil Beaton: Portraits & Profiles, I discovered that people like John Gielgud first played with toy theatres and then went on to make that their careers. I was not a budding architect, but a biographer in the making.

As time went on, my obsessive hobby was laid aside, and I emerged into the real world. The chapel survived until the late 1980s, when some Rentokil men came – in my absence – and ripped much of it apart. They wrote me a ‘There, there’ letter and offered me £30 compensation – which I declined. But the models survived.

When I met the real-life figures, it may sound odd that I did not focus particularly on the fact that I had modelled them years before. I ended up writing biographies of several – the Queen Mother, the Windsors and Princess Andrew of Greece (Prince Philip’s mother) – and I must have written numerous obituaries of others.

The Countess of Avon, still with us happily at 99, and Lady Diana Cooper became real friends.

Widows of Knights of the Garter were a particular category. I thought I had rounded them all up, but some slipped through the net. One was Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough, whose husband had died in 1934. She became a real-life obsession. I found her in St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton, in 1975.

On one visit, I took some models to show her, though not the one I had made of her. Among these was her stepson, the 10th Duke of Marlborough. She held him for a moment and said, ‘I don’t recommend him to you.’ She wanted to throw him out of the window. Instead she lowered him gently to the floor.

Hugo Vickers’s biography of Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough – The Sphinx – is out now The Oldie Spring 2020 31

NEIL SPENCE

Vickers with Lord Hailsham (second left, in wig) and Harold Macmillan (far right)

Letter from America

The myth of the classless society

There are nine American classes, with subtle differences in dress dominic green I bumped into my English neighbour at the Stop ’n’ Shop – so we bumped elbows and stepped outside the supermarket to chat where the air was clearer.

Two days earlier, coronavirus had arrived in Massachusetts at Wellesley, an upmarket dormitory town west of Boston – best known for a great Turkish barbecue joint and the women’s college where Hillary Clinton delivered the Commencement address of 1969 in the key of Patty Hearst.

My friend confessed to hoarding three jars of Marmite. These are imported and cost as much per pound as gold bullion.

It was getting serious.

So far, ours was a white-collar pandemic. The COVID-19 culprits had all attended the same strategy conference at Biogen, an enormously valuable but strangely low-profile biotech multinational. Air miles had been accrued, cheeks brushed and power-hugs administered, and hands shaken vigorously while the hand-shakers maintained firm eye contact.

This news caused considerable distress in our social circles. Until then, we’d all quietly hoped that coronavirus was a disease of the poor and huddled, and that the higher your social class, the lower your exposure. Now it seemed you could catch it from leaning in: Sandberg’s Syndrome.

American being a land of willed illusions, it is considered unpatriotic to talk of class. There’s also not enough time to talk about it, because the American speciality is race.

Unlike race, class is hard to spot in America. ‘The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit,’ George Orwell wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London. I don’t believe this was largely true in London or Paris in 32 The Oldie Spring 2020

1933, and it’s still not largely true in those cities now.

It was and is, though, largely true then and now in America, where fortunes are made and lost faster, where the middle class stretches from sea to shining sea, and where the average millionaire wears golf pants.

These are not an item of underwear.

They are ultra-thin, sweat-wicking trousers, made of polyfibrous plastic but cut to look like chinos, and I recommend them for the humid months. Our president, a patriotically average millionaire, wears these putting pants whenever he disports himself on the greens. In this, Donald Trump is what Joseph Conrad would have called a ‘secret sharer’ with his mortal enemy, the avid golfer Barack Obama.

This would mean more, were it not that all males of the Biogen classes possess several pairs and sedulously play golf in them, because golf offers opportunities for professional advancement in America akin to those that lunchtime drinking once did in Britain.

‘You know you’re an American when you can wear golf shorts in the street and not feel embarrassed,’ a native advised me. I possess several pairs, yet I have never played golf in my life. Then again, the Americans collect pairs of sneakers, and most of them are too fat to walk.

Naturally there are as many classes in America as you’d like. In Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), historian Paul Fussell identified a nine-tier class system in three layers. At the bottom are the destitute and the ‘out

‘Americans can wear golf shorts in the street and not feel embarrassed’

of sight’ ­– not to be confused with the ‘outtasight’ One Per Cent whom we quite admire. The middle class contains four sub-classes: Low-, Middle- and High-Proletarian and Middle-Middle.

The top strata are Upper-middle, Upper and Top out-of-sight. The key marker here is less the golf pant, which is ubiquitous from the Low-Proletarian upwards, and more the gilet, the padded vest worn by men with no arms and Dominic Cummings.

The natural habitat of the American gilet overlaps with that of the fleece vest.

But, as Karl Marx would have written had he been a golfer, the gilet class is a wolfish predator upon the flock of fleece-wearers. Bill Gates wears an L L Bean fleece vest as the symbol of his empathetic Middle-Middleness. I, his choice of fleece says, order my private jets by mail-order catalogue too.

The fleece vest is ubiquitous commuter wear among office workers.

The Patagonia fleece monogrammed with the company name became such a symbol of Wall Street, and Wall Street so universally detested by the Middles, that Patagonia recently stopped monogramming. This seems unfair to the fleece-wearers. The real power lies with the gilet class. We know that because they have no need of the monogram.

In the Stop ’n’ Shop car park, my English friend and I wonder whether the Americans will pull together because of coronavirus. The sight of hordes of shoppers loading supplies into their cars suggests otherwise. She reminds me that in the panic after 9/11, two members of our Upper-Biogen class bought mopeds, to beat the traffic if there was an exodus from the city – like Roman Holiday, but with chemical weapons. His ’n’ hers Vespas. Now that’s class.

Dominic Green is Life & Arts editor of Spectator USA

Never go back Pensioners are increasingly returning to their home towns. Not Liz Hodgkinson, who doesn’t regret fleeing Cambridgeshire 50 years ago

ALLSTAR/ALAMY

E

ver since Dick Whittington, it has been the aim of ambitious youth to leave their little home towns or villages and escape into the big, wide world.

In the past, only a few exceptionally adventurous spirits were able to move away. But since the 1960s, thanks to the rapid growth of new universities, there has been such a mass exodus from dull provincial towns that many now have almost no native young people.

Usually the young are only too glad to leave and vow never, ever to return. This was definitely the case with my husband and me. When we met at Durham University in 1963, we bonded over the fact that we had both chosen an academic institution as far away from our home towns as possible. One of our motives in going to university was to escape our birthplaces and never to go back – as was the case with many of our fellow students.

And so, half a century on, how would I like to retire to my home town after many years away? Discussing this recently with my now ex-husband, we agreed it would be the very worst punishment that could be inflicted on us in our remaining years. To this day, we shudder every time we have to go anywhere near these places: St Neots, near Cambridge, in my case; and Belmont, in commuter-belt Surrey, in his.

You can certainly take the girl out of St Neots, but could you ever put her back?

No, never – even though there are now several retirement complexes in or near the town.

I am becoming a minority. Although traditionally people have retired to the seaside or perhaps to France or Spain, a new survey, from retirement-home company Cognatum, has found there is a growing trend for retirees to move to within 20 miles of their home towns, having left the area – at the time, they hoped, for good – in their teens and 20s.

Around 10 per cent of their residents have made such a move and are discovering more connections than they imagined.

Catherine Zeta-Jones & Ray Stevenson in The Return of the Native (1994)

John Lavin of Cognatum said, ‘When one is young, it can seem that the area in which one grew up is too small and too familiar. The urge is to escape to new and exciting pastures. But with age come new priorities along with a sense of nostalgia, and a move back to one’s childhood home can start to look very attractive.

‘There may be friendships that can be renewed, family still living nearby. Our residents who have moved back to their home towns are finding as much delight at they anticipated.’

Some of my friends and former colleagues have done just this and returned to their home village or small town on retirement after big careers in London or other major cities. They have joined the amateur-dramatic society, volunteered at local museums, written for the parish magazine and are seemingly happy with the slower pace of their lives.

Some species, such as salmon, return

‘My home town’s only attraction was the fast train service to King’s Cross’

to the place of their birth; does natal homing, as it is known, work with humans? Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) has a classic fictional plot, where a much-travelled former resident returns to his birthplace, only to cause havoc among those who have never left.

Whether or not you find the prospect appealing depends on the kind of memories you have of the place. There has to be some strong positive attachment, which in later life pulls you back. In my young day, St Neots was a small, inbred fenland town of stupefying dullness. There were around 5,000 inhabitants, everybody knew everybody else – and all their business – and there was a strict social hierarchy, from the Lord of the Manor at the top down to the turnip-pickers in the fields at the bottom.

Today it is an ever-growing conurbation of vast housing estates with about 40,000 residents and has become a commuter town for people working in Cambridge and London.

Retirement-home companies call it a ‘vibrant market town’ – but for me, at least, there has never been the merest trace of vibrancy. It is as dull now as it was then, as I discovered when I paid the place a visit two years ago, its only attraction being the fast train service to King’s Cross.

My ex-husband felt that his home village, within easy distance of London, was completely faceless and characterless. Unless you joined the golf club or went to church, there was nothing much to do. His views did not change on a recent visit to relatives still living there.

Bucking the trend to return, we will stay as far away as we can and never be tempted to retire back to where we came from. For us, prolonged absence hasn’t made the heart grow fonder.

The Oldie Spring 2020 33

Town Mouse

Dr Johnson, the king of clubs tom hodgkinson

In recent months, I have dined or drunk at the Garrick, the Groucho, the Union, the Academy, the absurdly luxurious 5 Hertford Street, the East India Club, the Phoenix, the Frontline and the rather more brash Soho House, a chain of hotels and bars for the young and ambitious.

In the 1990s I used to love the Colony Room, one of the clubs that sprang up in the forties and fifties as a result of pubs’ being closed from 2.30 to 5.30pm. I would also occasionally visit a basement club called Gerry’s (where Barry Cryer reveals that Mornington Crescent, the surreal game, was invented – see page 42), which stayed open late. A good club is like a good pub: you meet people there, but you can also quite happily sit on your own.

When the little mice arrived, though, it was hard to find the time to hang out at these places. In any case, I spent my thirties living in the wilds of Exmoor, where the Hunter’s Inn at Heddon’s Mouth was my most frequent resort. Mrs Mouse and I opened a bookshop and coffee house in Notting Hill. The idea was to create a meeting place for poets and anarchists, but the economics of the project eventually defeated us.

Now that the little mice are teenagers, I am finding I have just a little more leisure for sitting around in clubs. I am hoping that, as my fifties wear on into my sixties and seventies, I will have both more spare time and more spare money, and I plan to spend these resources liberally in Covent Garden, Soho and Pall Mall.

I even entertain fantasies of owning a small flat in the West End, so I can stagger from one convivial institution to another on foot – or by wheelchair – and have no need for taxi or tube train.

I remember going to interview Jeffrey Bernard in his high-rise council flat on Berwick Street in Soho in the 1990s. He 34 The Oldie Spring 2020

had only one leg then, but managed to wheel himself around from the Coach & Horses to the Groucho Club and then back home, where he had a carer. This struck me as a civilised way to spend one’s old age. I would rather trundle around the city streets, surrounded by people, than sit alone in an elegant manor house in Somerset. Bernard was extremely grumpy, though: a life of booze, fags and shagging had not mellowed him.

So clubs are a good idea and thrive today. And for this, we have Dr Johnson and Joshua Reynolds to thank. London’s clubs are really their legacy. It was by the fireside in the winter of 1763 that Joshua Reynolds proposed to Johnson that a group of their pals should meet up regularly. The illustrious artist was actually motivated by concern for Dr Johnson’s mental health. Johnson was prone to melancholy, and good company was a tried and tested method for him to keep gloomy thoughts at bay. Johnson was 52.

Johnson’s own definition of ‘club’

in his dictionary of 1755 was ‘an assembly of goodly fellows, meeting under certain conditions’.

The Club started meeting in February 1764 at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, Soho. Early members included Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke, as well as the young rakes Topham Beauclerk and Bennet Langton. Later members included David Garrick, Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon. By the time of Johnson’s death in December 1784, membership of the Club had grown to 35, which was far too many for Johnson’s liking. He’d argued for an upper limit of nine and, in 1776, said it was ‘quite spoiled by the introduction of too many members’. His biographers tell us that he stopped going in later life.

Today’s clubs are clearly quite different because they are tethered to a place and may have many thousands of members. So while Dr Johnson is certainly one of the parents of the modern club, the other would be the 18th-century coffee houses, many of which turned themselves into members’ clubs. In his Spectator, Richard Steele describes these early coffee houses as resorts for serious-minded chaps: ‘It is very natural,’ he writes, ‘for a man who is not tuned for Mirthful Meetings of Men, or Assemblies of the fair Sex, to delight in that sort of conversation which we find in Coffee Houses.’

White’s began life as a coffee house (or chocolate house); later the great Pall Mall clubs like the Travellers and the Athenaeum appeared. Some of them developed into meeting places for the daft and rich, as satirised by P G Wodehouse’s wonderful creation the Drones Club, where the lazy and useless (but charming) Bertie Wooster consorts with his fellow toffs.

Intelligent observers used to predict that the clubs would die. The Editor of this magazine tells me his grandfather spoke confidently of their demise after the war (and they did indeed decline for a while then). And I have friends who loathe and despise the very idea of a private members’ club, because they associate them with privileged groups.

But we all have a natural urge to belong to something. My 19-year-old son surprised me the other day by declaring that his latest ambition, once he has made his first million, is to start a members’ club. So an idea dreamt up by a humble lexicographer and his artist friend 250 years ago has shown remarkable staying power.

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

Country Mouse

Mary’s bus journey to Wiltshire’s lost world giles wood

At last the year is turning and, despite the ceaseless rain since September, the horticultural year is advancing as ever.

The primroses seem almost refreshed by the downpours, although the flattened wayside daffodils are clearly embittered.

Placing a bunch in a cheerful jug inside the cottage, I had a nasty surprise. Each flower trumpet contained a tiny mollusc called a keel slug, the legacy of its outdoor horizontal status.

If the sun breaks through, it is a case of carpe diem. So I rushed out to take a picture of my newly restored summerhouse before the scene becomes engulfed in spring foliage.

As I trudged across two flooded fields, the ground started to rise sufficiently for me to frame a postcard-style shot of the cottage, its pleasure gardens and the summerhouse converted from an ancient privy and washhouse. When I saw the curious illusion created on Mary’s iPad screen, I was prepared to believe my little estate was looking uncharacteristically covetable.

Something to do with visual compression and foreshortening had yielded, in the early-evening light, an idyllic image of a thatched dwelling situated amidst well-wooded, rolling countryside. The flattened perspective made the village church hover improbably above our roof and seem to be set in its own orchard, which it certainly is not.

Above the church, there was a bosky wilderness of thickets – and all this below a tiny field which in reality is so extensive that a visiting London friend once claimed to be suffering from a bout of agoraphobia as he hurried through it.

In the image, the downs are shown pockmarked with a trace-work of ancient human and animal traffic. Next to them stands an elevated oakwood – this much is true – which in only a matter of weeks will teem with yellow archangel and

trembling bluebells; serenaded, with luck, by a cuckoo, if it can escape the lines of gunshot as it flies here via Malta and Cyprus. And, through the wood, the hint of a phantom winding path. What is it that makes a winding path so visually satisfying?

I was, for once, pleased with the results of Mary’s digital camera, and pleased even by the slightly pixellated style that enlargement produced, redolent of the Divisionist style of painter Paul Signac.

The camera never lies – but, in this case, it has been economical with the truth. And another cliché springs to mind: distance lends enchantment.

But what entranced me was the complexity of the image when, in reality, as a Google Earth camera would show, our Anglo-Saxon village is just one tiny piece of a jigsaw of giant pieces of arable monoculture.

No one has written about responses to landscape better than Richard Mabey. He suggests, in In a Green Shade (1983), that our favourite landscapes all contain an element of mystery where ‘more information is promised than is actually revealed’. Hence the attraction of the phantom winding path.

‘What rotten luck’

At the risk of entering Pseuds Corner, as a landscape artist I expect a landscape to ‘speak to me’, but so much of Wiltshire’s farmland instead shouts at me, especially when the oilseed rape disfigures it.

The look of the landscape is not all the fault of the Common Agricultural Policy.

The gap in nature is partly due to Dutch elm disease. Elms were once so abundant they were dubbed ‘the Wiltshire weed’. I know what the downs should look like and they have mostly escaped the plough.

I came here too late to see what the Vale should look like, with marshy, undrained areas where lapwing and curlew could hide amidst the rushes and sedges. While I wish not to diminish the efforts of individual landowners in improving the appearance of the farmland, the former complexity is not yet restored. And what hedges have been replanted are mechanically cut too low. ‘The power of living nature lies in sustainability through complexity,’ says E O Wilson, the 90-year-old American biologist.

‘Destabilise it by degrading it to a simple state, as we seem bent on doing, and the organisms most affected are likely to be the largest and most complex, including human beings.’

Last week, Mary returned from the dentist in Devizes courtesy of a taxpayersubsidised local bus. There were six passengers on board and the driver wove through the Vale of Pewsey, dropping each of them at a bespoke disembarkment point. Mary, who had been engrossed in her book, suddenly looked out to see unfamiliar territory, which she knew, logically, must be within seven miles of our own cottage, yet she had never clapped eyes on it before.

By chance, she had discovered what the Vale should look like – uncut hedges, rough lands for hunting owls, small, undulating fields, receding into the distance in a pleasing, Stanley Badminesque way, and lightning-struck trees remaining in situ. Standing dead wood, a prized habitat for nesting owls and woodpeckers, is now a rarity. But since the bus driver had stuck to no official route, like Augustin Meaulnes in Le Grand Meaulnes, we have since failed in our quest to find this magical Lost Domain again.

However, we know it exists. Moreover, if post-Brexit agricultural subsidies cease to reward farmers for simplification and monoculture, and instead reward them for natural regeneration and the restoration of ecosystems, I am optimistic that we will see a return of the complexity in nature that all living things crave.

The Oldie Spring 2020 35

The Way We Live Now

And it’s off! Sadly, the point-to-point season has been cancelled because of the coronavirus. Racegoers managed to catch one of 36 The Oldie Spring 2020

dafydd jones

the last fixtures of the season at the South East Hunts Club Point-to-Point. Charing, Kent, 22nd February 2020 The Oldie Spring 2020 37

Profitable Wonders

Bloody amazing mosquitoes

TEVARAK PHANDUANG/ALAMY

james le fanu

The marvel of red blood cells is a commonplace as they effortlessly transport, millisecond by millisecond, billions of molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide to and from the tissues.

The fluid plasma in which they are conveyed is, if anything, more marvellous still. It’s a liquid treasure trove, brimming with over 4,000 chemical compounds necessary for the fabrication and functioning of the body’s 70 trillion cells. They include water, 13 vitamins (A, B, C, D, E etc), ten essential metals (sodium, potassium, magnesium, zinc etc), the 20 amino acids from which all proteins are made (alanine, glycine, lysine, methionine, valine etc), dozens of hormones (cortisol, insulin, thyroxine, oestrogen etc), fatty acids, triglycerides and cholesterol, the sugars glucose and fructose – and much else besides.

Blood, in short, contains the full range of nutrients – and so is an abundant source of pre-packaged ‘ready meals’ available to any organism with the means of siphoning it off from the veins of unwitting hosts. This requires considerable ingenuity, though, with the distinct advantage that the expenditure of energy involved is vastly lower than (for example) that of bees and butterflies when gathering nectar, herbivores when chewing grass or carnivores in pursuit of their prey.

This habit of drinking the blood of fellow creatures (haematophagy) is indeed the preferred form of feeding for an impressive variety of diverse species. They include, inter alia, ‘vampire’ bats, birds and moths; leeches and hookworms; fleas, bedbugs and ticks; blackflies, horse and deer flies and (most significant of all for humans) the mosquito.

While their lifestyles could scarcely be more different, the practicalities of bloodsucking require that they share several features in common. They are all small enough that their hosts are usually unaware of their clandestine intentions.

The mosquito: the most notorious of bloodsuckers

Better still, the hosts should be asleep – so these haematophages tend to be nocturnal. They must thus possess highly sophisticated, sensory organs able to detect (and locate in the dark) the source of their next meal by the smells and heat they generate. Their saliva must contain a medley of complex anticoagulants to prevent their hosts’ blood from clotting.

And their mouth parts must be adapted to form razor-sharp, needle-like or cutting instruments.

These common features apart, the fascinating (and sinister) connotations of vampirism are inescapable, prompting a grim interest in the specifics of the gory details.

Take that Gothic staple the vampire bat, whose distinctive feature, the one that sets it apart from its insect- and fruit-eating fellow species, is its chiselshaped incisors (so sharp that handling their skulls can result in serious injury), with which it makes a broad, shallow incision into its victim’s flesh.

The bat then drinks its fill of the blood oozing from the wound, facilitated by the piston-like movement of its grooved tongue and copious amounts

‘The leech falls off and can survive three years before its next bloody meal’

of saliva infused with three types of blood-thinning agent.

The feeding adaptations of the leech (a close relative of the humble earthworm) are quite different, though similarly ingenious. Firmly attaching itself with what Professor of Biology Bill Schutt describes as a ‘finely tuned suctorial device’ – a circular disc of muscle glued in place with sticky, glandular secretions – the leech can enjoy a more leisurely meal.

The saw-like movement of its three jaws, each lined with a hundred teeth, abrades the capillaries in the skin, oozing blood, which is then sucked under negative suctorial pressure into its gut – capacious enough to hold ten times its body weight. Once satiated, the leech releases its grip and falls off, able to survive for a further three years before its next bloody meal.

The most notorious of bloodsuckers is the mosquito – the unwitting transmitter of three mortal illnesses (yellow fever, filariasis and malaria). The mosquito’s elegantly designed mouth parts consist of six interlocking rapier blades. It advances four of these blades, sharp and serrated at the tip, into the skin by moving its head back and forth. The fifth blade encloses a narrow tube, down which it injects its blood-thinning saliva – while the sixth, at the centre, is a rigid, strawlike, bloodsucking tongue.

Together, the combination of these six rapier blades, readily discernible in the fossilised remains of mosquitoes preserved in amber from 80 million years ago, is by far the most lethal weapon ever invented.

The Oldie Spring 2020 39

Postcards from the Edge

The importance of being earnest about fresh meat

Mary Kenny buys beef from a lady butcher with an Oscar Wilde link

TOBY MORISON

‘Don’t be eating any of that chlorinated chicken imported from America!’ I’m told by an Irish pal, still vexed about Brexit. Certainly not: I always try to buy food from local shops. Here in Deal, we have an excellent butcher, Lizzy Douglas (current holder of the Young British Foodie of the Year Award in the meat section).

At Lizzy’s shop, The Black Pig, free-range chickens come from nearby Kentish farms, as does her beef, lamb and bacon. Yes, the meat is more expensive than the factory-farm produce from supermarkets (chickens are £3.40 a pound), though there are cheaper cuts of other meats available, too. She buys a whole cow practically every Wednesday and it all has to be used up.

It’s still unusual for a woman to be a butcher, but Lizzy, an energetic 45-yearold, says it’s also been an advantage. She thinks she brings something different to her trade – call it the aesthetic or artistic.

And a special feel for animal welfare.

‘When I was a youngster, I was involved with Compassion in World Farming, and I’ve always been interested in animal charities.’

The trade is not in the family tradition.

Lizzy’s dad is a poet and musician, Lord Gawain Douglas, of the Queensberry family (and thus a collateral descendant of Bosie, Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend). Lizzy herself plays the flute, a restful hobby in contrast to dividing up the insides of cows.

She has three daughters – will any of them become lady butchers? Probably not. ‘Too physical. Too labour-intensive!’

But Lizzy Douglas finds having such a physical job healthy and stimulating.

Indeed so!

Most of us know our postcodes off by heart and even recite them obediently, using the phonetic alphabet – ‘Charlie Tango 14, six Alpha Zulu’ being my coding relationship with the Canterbury postal area.

40 The Oldie Spring 2020

Now that GPS is taking over, with its robotic voice instructions, the narrative is being erased from locality – just as postcodes may neutralise location.

The resistance to using them in Ireland is an attachment to a sense of identifiable place: to Ballyjamesduff, Co Cavan, or Doolin, Co Clare, or Skibbereen in West Cork – not identified by the soulless A82NT92, V95VC56 or P81AC60.

In the end, the algorithms will win.

But it’s pleasing to see a little resistance just the same.

It’s all linked in to some globalised algorithm, and we’re told that nothing can now be safely delivered without this zonal moniker. It’s also, I suspect, a means of tracking us by the Big Brother data systems.

So it’s rather cheering to learn that more than 60 per cent of people in Ireland never or rarely use the postcode system assigned to them by Eircode.

Thirty per cent absolutely ‘never’ use it, and another 32 per cent use it only ‘occasionally’, according to the polling boxwallahs.

Are the Irish slow to take up the postcode system because there’s still a rebel element of being ‘agin the government’? Maybe. Or maybe because the postcodes are just a bit of a nuisance and householders can’t be bothered – sure, the postie knows where we live!

My explanation is somewhat more poetic. I think that people like an element of ‘narrative’ in describing location. It’s claimed that women are more inclined to this tendency. When a woman gives road directions, she’s more likely to say, ‘Turn right at the supermarket, go on a bit until you pass a pink house, turn left at the church, then you pass a school.’ A man is more likely to give technical instructions, noting road signage and the formal identification of a road (‘Left at the sign for the A278’).

At the springtime’s UK-EU negotiations, it was reported that ‘trade talks in Brussels will be held (primarily) in English’. The EU would pay for all translations into French (as well as presumably into all the other 23 official languages).

When I first reported from Brussels, back in 1973, French was blatantly predominant. But English has since gained ground on all fronts. The Swedes and the Dutch now publish their scientific papers in English. Forty per cent of Europeans speak English as their first foreign language – four times as many as speak French or German as a foreign tongue. There are even those who suggest that English should be formally adopted as the lingua franca of the European continent.

English is surely tops for trade talks – but German is still brilliant for those portmanteau words such as the glorious Schadenfreude – pleasure at the discomfort of others. Another terrific one is Fingerspitzengefühl – having an intuitive feeling, as if at the tips of one’s fingers.

And my absolute favourite: Verschlimmbesserung – the improvement that makes things worse.

Very apt for oldies lamenting ‘Why do they keep changing everything – and making matters worse’?

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Show me a parent – I’ll show you the child Five times a year, you sit in a hall in your coat, smiling at the streams of parents who perch anxiously opposite you. The evenings are emotionally exhausting and, after a full teaching day, leave us drained.

But they have their advantages, too.

Last night was one such night. Three hours of parents after five hours of teaching. We don’t – we can’t – look forward to them. We joke about how we’ll finally get our revenge on some child who makes our lives a misery – but those children and their parents are unlikely to turn up. So what are we left with?

The two real joys of parents’ evenings come from very different parts of my heart.

One is the proper, kind teacher side of me.

I realise, when the good children turn up, how incredibly lucky I am to be teaching such an amusing, diverse, hard-working group of young people. Sometimes in the thick of battle you can forget the good soldiers. You are pleased with them and you congratulate them, but most of your effort is expended on the ones you have to cajole or control or console.

The other joy of parents’ evenings is less honourable and maybe a bit sinister.

I’m a nosy person. I’m interested in other people. If I travel on a train, I mentally write my fellow passengers’ histories.

And I do the same, sometimes, with

GOLDEN NUGGETS Mornington Crescent, the mysterious game in I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, was born in Gerry’s Club, in a basement in Shaftesbury Avenue.

One evening, a group of writers were joined by a man who’d had a lot to drink. He kept on barging in on the conversation. When he went to the gents, one writer said, 42 The Oldie Spring 2020

my pupils. Meeting the parents gives me a whole different perspective on the children. Sometimes it raises questions; sometimes it answers them.

One area of interest is which parent comes. It is very rare that the father attends on his own; increasingly common that both parents come. (I don’t think you would ever have caught my father, the journalist Auberon Waugh, at any of his four children’s parents’ evenings.)

Some separated parents arrive together.

Others sit awkwardly together, competing as to who can demonstrate more interest in the hunched-looking child between them.

Others insist on separate appointments, which I always slightly resent.

The parents’ attitudes to you, and to the school, are also quite a giveaway.

Some sit awkwardly, panicking, repeating everything you say back to the child and silently begging the child to take advantage of school. You can see (and they often admit to) their own failed educations, the strict and furious teachers and the skived lessons.

Others treat teachers like second-class citizens. (‘Mummy says you have come down in the world,’ one child once said to me.) These are mostly the middle classes, who feel that they are ‘experimenting’ by sending their children to state schools.

These are the parents who defend their chickens to the last, sure that their darlings never put a foot wrong, are misunderstood and aren’t stretched enough. One child once stuck up for me to her furious parent: ‘Actually, Mum, Miss is right. I never do my homework. I don’t do any work. I talk a lot.’

Seeing how the children interact with their parents is also a giveaway. You see the class show-off, who with his parents sits silent and anxious; the child who sits through the meeting on his mobile, with no hint from the parent that this is rude.

You suddenly realise the anxious child in class is caring for her disabled mother, or the really hard-working one is doing everything he can to make his single father proud. You see which parents are pushy, which are anxious and which care barely enough to turn up. You see children turn up with social workers and older siblings (somehow, this is particularly touching), and sometimes even on their own because a parent can’t or won’t come.

On parents’ evenings, we see the world in miniature pass us by. So, although we complain about them and go home weary, we should never forget that they are as much part of our understanding of the children as they are part of the parents’ understanding of their children’s education.

Barry Cryer explains Mornington Crescent ‘Right, we’re playing a game – Tube stations. Mornington Crescent wins.’

When the man came back from the gents, he tried to join in but he was lost. They hammered him so much that he left. When he’d gone, one of the writers said, ‘Hang on – this is a good idea.’

I don’t know how the idea made its way to I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. But it works because it’s silly – grown men

and women acting the fool.

On the show, we get advance notice of topics and rounds that are going to be played a few days before.

But Mornington Crescent is all improvisation, with Jack Dee announcing the specific rules of that particular episode’s game just before we start.

The whole show is a great format, devised by Graeme Garden in 1972. I wasn’t on

the original panel but I did stand in once as deputy chairman for Humphrey Lyttelton in that first series.

Humph was a very experienced broadcaster on jazz and music – the suits said he wasn’t right for a comedy show. But he evolved his style brilliantly for it. He used to look bewildered – which you can’t see on the radio, of course. But it really worked.

It was a treat.

Alice Pitman: Home Front

STEVE WAY

Haunting tale of the ghost of IKEA ‘Ghosts,’ read a Top Tip in a recent issue of Viz. ‘If you want to be believed in, stop hanging around ruined castles and only coming out at night. Try a Lidl or IKEA on a Saturday morning.’

What a good idea for a ghost story.

The Haunting of IKEA. It could even be a promising film in the right hands (ie, a director who understands that suggestion is scarier than piling it on thick, like 99 per cent of most horror films these days). Imagine: tealights mysteriously ablaze in the marketplace after closing time; a lone Billy bookcase balancing precariously on a Klippan sofa for no accountable reason; Swedish meatballs spelling out malevolent words…

Ghosts in old castles and manor houses are as predictable as pub bores.

The inexplicable slam of a creaking door is the paranormal equivalent of someone at the bar asking, ‘How old do you think I am? Go on, take a guess!’

This is why the Enfield poltergeist case of 1977 caught the public’s imagination.

If it could happen in an ordinary council house, it could happen anywhere. The case had its sceptics. Ventriloquist Ray Alan even visited the house to study adolescent Janet – the focus of much supernatural activity – purportedly speaking in the gruff voice of the entity.

He concluded it was vocal trickery (unless Lord Charles told him to say that). But alarming incidents – levitating armchairs and whatnot – witnessed by many others, from policemen to BBC reporters, cannot be explained. I quite enjoyed the TV dramatisation a few years back, with Timothy Spall playing the kindly paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse.

But it was not nearly as chilling as the original TV reports from the time. (I remember being so disconcerted to see that Janet and I had the same Starsky and Hutch poster that I had to take mine down and replace it with Wings.)

Today’s early adolescents are too busy planning global climate strikes to concern themselves with anything as trifling as the paranormal. But at my horrible all-girls comp in 1977, fellow enthusiasts and I survived the tedium by telling one another ghost stories. Many of mine were passed down from the Aged P, who in turn got them from her Irish undertaker granny. The Angel of

Death featured heavily – knocking on doors of dying relatives or causing loud crashing noises.

In the early seventies, my mother was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. Though I was mildly intrigued by the quarterly journals, they were always a little too wordy, and had no pictures (rather off-putting for a child who found Look and Learn a bit challenging).

Given that my stepfather wrote a biography of Hitler and my mother co-wrote The Encyclopedia of Murder, living with our extensive library of crime books and artefacts felt like growing up in the Black Museum. This was why I wasn’t madly keen on reading. I yearned instead to become the first girl footballing prodigy, much as I imagine being raised in a political household made Harold Wilson’s son want to become a train driver. Apart from Black Beauty, one of the only books I read before the age of ten was The Wickedest Witch in the World by Beverley Nichols.

It was my White Fang, the book so beloved by Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love that he never bothered reading anything else.

Then, when I was ten, my mother suggested we read Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel together. (Shortly after I’d written that sentence, the Aged P

rang and said, ‘Do you remember when we took it in turns to read My Cousin Rachel to each other?’ Spooky!) I never looked back.

But I return to ghosts. I’ve never seen one, but I did once hear, when alone in the house, a thundering crash from my then-13-year-old son’s bedroom. It was as though an entire bookcase had been pulled over. If the dog hadn’t barked, I might have thought I’d imagined it.

Betty and I used to enjoy a popular TV ghost-hunting programme. (‘Load of old nonsense,’ Mr Home Front would sneer.

‘You don’t have to watch it!’ we’d chorus crossly.) One night, he came home and triumphantly announced that his new colleague, Dave, was one of the sound recordists.

‘I asked him, “Are those noises for real?” And he said, “They should be – I made them myself!” ’ I was as crestfallen as a child being told Father Christmas doesn’t exist.

(Although Dave did confess to seeing a terrifying apparition by the swimming pool on the Queen Mary.)

Anyway, I’m off to write my IKEA ghost story about a Bookham husband left to wander the warehouse aisles for eternity after his wife kills him in a fight over how to load an Ektorp sofa onto a trolley. Any resemblance to persons living is purely coincidental.

The Oldie Spring 2020 43

sister teresa

Easter joy bursts through the clouds Sun and Rain for the Lamb by Mary Newcomb (1922-2008) was Sister Wendy Beckett’s final Christmas card. She sent it accompanied by a short commentary, which she wrote shortly before she died on 26th December 2018.

‘This is not the pure white lamb on the green meadow that we associate with the Son of God,’ she wrote. ‘This is a tiny black lamb, almost invisible, hidden in his mother’s fleece. She is the only support for his frailty and vulnerability, and the field is a barren wasteland, sodden with rain from the storm which is just departing, with a farmhouse in the distance and an empty barn.

‘Yet, before that lamb, there spreads a puddle in which a watery sun, rain almost over, is making the world beautiful. It was to bring this glory down to earth that the little lamb renounced his royal state in the heavens and came to live among us, as unprotected as any human baby ever was. From now until his final sacrifice when he moves back into his natural brightness, he will not

A card for all seasons: Sun and Rain for the Lamb by Mary Newcomb (1975)

only bring the glory of the Son to earth, but will take us into it. We do not just see, but in Jesus we live the Glory of God.’ I thought, when I first saw this picture, that with its lamb it would have made a more appropriate Easter card. Using it as a breviary marker has meant that I have seen it four times a day, every day, for over a year, without ever getting bored with it.

It now strikes me that it is a fitting

image for both the birth and the resurrection of Jesus. Easter is the culmination of the Nativity of Christ and Sun and Rain for the Lamb takes us from the vulnerability of his infancy to his helplessness on the cross. There was nothing and no one to protect him and his cry ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27:46) expresses unquantifiable darkness, pain, despair and sense of abandonment.

We recognise that he took on the sins of the world but, at the same time, we understand so very little of his death and of the full shock of his question. Had he been wrong all the time? Now we see that he was right all along: ‘I am the light of the world; anyone who follows me will not be walking in the dark; he will have the light of life’ (John 8:12).

Newcomb’s bleak little Norfolk landscape is dark all right, but the light is winning through, bringing with it warmth, life and, in this apparently cheerless countryside, the possibility of a host of golden daffodils.

Memorial Service

Sir Michael Howard (1922-2019) Four military and literary knights gave eulogies to the distinguished military historian Sir Michael Howard at King’s College Chapel in London.

General Sir Nicholas Carter, Chief of the Defence Staff, read from Howard’s wartime memoir, Captain Professor, describing his experience at the Battle of Salerno in 1943 when he won an MC, aged 20.

‘There were times when I was downright cowardly,’ Howard wrote. ‘I always feel a fraud when I think of friends much braver than me who weren’t given awards.’

Sir Lawrence Freedman, former Professor of War Studies at King’s, first heard Howard lecturing 50 years ago. ‘He began by looking for a glass of water but only a bottle had been provided,’ said Sir Lawrence. ‘It’s very difficult to drink from 44 The Oldie Spring 2020

a bottle and do it eloquently. This is how you do it.’ He then demonstrated.

Sir Adam Roberts, Oxford’s former Professor of International Relations, said, ‘When I last saw him in July, he knew I’d written his obituary… I asked if I could use his story about his suicide pills. As a precaution, he had got rid of the pills but kept the envelope with its best-before date.

‘Some people were shocked when he left Oxford for Yale, but many were surprised he hadn’t gone earlier.’

He told how Howard had met partner Mark James, who died in February, in 1958; they entered a civil partnership in 2005.

Sir Max Hastings, his neighbour and fellow military historian, said, ‘[Michael] once told me the only thing worse than Israel having a nuclear weapon would be to go to war to prevent it.’

The Rev Tim Ditchfield, Chaplain of King’s, said Sir Michael had booked the Chapel 20 years before ‘to get in early. He told me he wanted a beautiful service and an enjoyable reception. He said, “There is no point in dying otherwise.” ’ Mark’s goddaughter Amanda Pitt sang a song by Richard Strauss, and Michael’s godson Rupert Frazer read Henry Vaughan’s Ascension Hymn. The old soldiers and scribes sang Jerusalem and a Coldstream Guardsman played the Last Post and Reveille.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

Theodore Dalrymple: The Doctor’s Surgery

Have I just recovered from the coronavirus?

Early on in the Second World War, the surgeon Wilfred Trotter pointed out in a letter to the Times that 600 extra road fatalities had occurred since the institution of the blackout restrictions – without a single German bomb having been dropped. The Germans had exacted a heavy toll – more than the bombing of Coventry – on the civilian population without doing anything.

Of course, it would have been wrong to conclude that blackout precautions would never be necessary, but it was a powerful reminder that doing a lot is not necessarily better than doing a little, and that in such situations timing of actions is all.

As it happens, I write this just as I am getting over a cold. I have now fully recovered. Was it the dreaded COVID-19? I will never know. The symptoms were not precisely those advertised but, as with all diseases, there is variation in the symptomatology. It could have been the disease and, if it was, my survival will have distorted the mortality rate a little and made the disease appear a tiny bit more dangerous than it is.

But it might not have been the disease, in which case I would be just as susceptible to it now as I was before. (We don’t even know whether, and for how long, an infection might confer immunity on us, though it seems likely that we won’t get it twice.) Therefore, like so many others, I am faced with the option of being an ostrich with its head in the sand or a headless chicken running around, flapping its wings to no avail.

Unlike the Spanish flu, which had a marked predilection for young adults, this latest epidemic illness kills mainly those who, like me, are over 70 (the death rate among detected cases over the age of 80, according to Chinese figures, is about 15 per cent).

The outlook is grim for those of our age treated in Intensive Care Units. Not only do most of us not survive, but many (if not most) of those who do survive will probably suffer from cognitive impairment. For them, life will never be the same again. An insufficiency of ICU beds is possibly not an unmixed curse for our generation.

My inner ostrich comforts itself with the reflection that deaths from the disease in the whole world are comparatively few so far, being approximately a sixth of the number of deaths from cardiovascular diseases in Britain alone during the same period.

But then my inner headless chicken points out that deaths from the disease are increasing exponentially, that is to say extremely rapidly, in geometric rather than arithmetic progression.

My inner ostrich replies that this cannot go on for ever; the growth will stall sooner or later, and in any case a projection is not a prediction. But, says my inner headless chicken… And so the dialogue continues between the two foolish birds contending for my soul.

Reluctantly, and without deep conviction, I come to the boring conclusion that the official advice, such as it is so far, is right. It is sensible for us old uns to isolate ourselves from the word as much as possible until the epidemic blows over, to avoid crowds, to have as few social interactions as practicable and to wash our hands as if everything in the world were feculent.

For myself, increasingly reclusive, I would not find self-isolation so very difficult and, given the state of the world, would be prepared to recommend it even in the absence of an epidemic.

But for the old who live in homes, the absence of visitors will be a real hardship. Is it better to survive in abandonment than to die in the company of one’s loved ones?

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Joy of drawing De’Ath SIR: I inherited Wilfred from Larry, whose quick, witty drawings set the template for the ne’er-do-well.

The space then went a bit cinemascope – full colour. Cue Wilfred in crowds, gay parades in Brighton, Last Supper Oxford dinners with Terry Waite, Lourdes, French ferries and Gothic cathedrals.

You never knew what you’d be drawing, but the tone was always charming, particularly when he wrote about women. Wilfred must have been quite a player as a young, successful Beeb producer, as optimism with the opposite sex burned brightly. These were the best of reminiscences, and I got to draw a lot of femmes fatales with big hair, ’60s

Wilfred, my Oxford pal SIR: I was an exact contemporary with Wilfred at Oriel College.

In the Eighties, he lived in Oxford and I was his doctor and saw him frequently socially. I last saw him there at a gaudy in 2013 and he sent me a postcard saying how nice it was to see me.

Our next gaudy was on 20th March and I asked to sit next to Wilfred. Alas, he wasn’t with us. Please put together all his delightful articles and writings. Publish them as a complete volume.

Yours, Michael Kenworthy-Browne, Hortoncum-Studley, Oxfordshire

Joanna Lumley’s dream car SIR: Your articles ‘What were lovelylooking cars?’ and ‘Bentley’s beautiful bodies’ (March issue) brought back memories to me of the makes and cars mentioned. I worked at the Rolls-Royce/ Bentley plant in the mid-’50s as an apprentice when the Bentley Continental bodied by Mulliner was produced, and

Bentley Continental – Ab Fab! 46 The Oldie Spring 2020

Wilfred in Heaven – by Steve Way

eyeliner and French cigarettes. Indeed, the last time I saw De’Ath, looking deceptively well at The Oldie’s Christmas

party last December, he marvelled that I had caught one such bohemian lover so perfectly. Existentialist magic all round.

Opening his copy was like getting a postcard from a black-sheep uncle you rarely met.

Sadly, more recently, it was sketching the descent – sleeping bags on cold Cambridge night-shelter floors; hospital beds with drips. It’s still a shock he’s gone. Wilfred was good at seeing off Oldie editors. Harry Mount has had a narrow escape.

It was a privilege illustrating the rogue. As a cartoonist, you mostly draw strangers; Wilfred became kin. Every month, I’ll miss him.

RIP – but rant in Heaven.

Steve Way, Wilfred De’Ath’s illustrator, St Neots, Cambridgeshire

later owned an E-type Jaguar – surely two of the most beautiful cars ever made.

In surveys of motoring journalists and designers (including Enzo Ferrari), the E-Type was voted the most beautiful car.

When Joanna Lumley was a guest on Top Gear she described the most desirable car she had seen. It sounded to me like the Bentley Continental. I sent her a picture of one, and got a lovely note of thanks, saying, ‘That was the very car’.

Yours sincerely, Martin Quick, Stroud, Gloucestershire

Latin joke No. 5 SIR: To be well-dressed, remember the Latin wisdom: Semper ubi Sub ubi (‘Always wear underwear’) Jonathan Fletcher, London SW2

Latin joke No. 6 and Greek joke No. 1 SIR: I would like to submit two jokes, one Latin and one Greek, for your perusal.

Man (making advances): ‘Would you like to conjugate?’ Woman: ‘I decline.’

Man takes torn cloaks to tailor.

Tailor: ‘Euripides?’

Man: ‘Eumenides?’

Apologies if these are old hat.

Tim Cooper, Worcester

‘Oh no – Easter-egg hunt saboteurs’

The name’s Resin SIR: Your April coverline, ‘Bond, Uncle Bond’, reminds me of a family story.

My brother Michael, a surgeon, tells me that he had a friend, a dentist, who had a Harley Street practice.

His friend once treated Peter Ustinov and, during the course of treatment, said to Ustinov that he would be using a resin bond.

After the treatment was over, Ustinov went over to the mantelpiece where he rested his elbow and said, ‘The name is Bond – Resin Bond!’

Gabriel Lavelle, Chipping Norton, Oxon

Bond’s air shot SIR: Has anybody else noticed that the pistol James Bond is holding (April issue) is an air pistol? It is a Walther, I think his weapon of choice (or was it a Beretta?). It is very threatening but only an air pistol.

George Fawcett, Addlestone, Surrey

Waxing comical SIR: I hope you enjoy my caption to your photo in the Exhibitions review of Naum Gabo (March issue).

Peter Beard, Lincolnshire

The music of King George SIR: King George III not only appreciated music (‘King George was mad – about books’, April issue), but he was a proficient flute player. In the Royal Collection at Kew there is a porcelain flute made for him by Meissen. If you look up ‘Music in the Royal Collection’, you can watch a video of Ashley Solomon talking about this flute and playing it.

Veronica Watts, Dorking, Surrey

BA from the AA SIR: Your article about Oxford making the study of Homer and Virgil an optional part of the Classics degree reminded me of a meeting of Senate at my provincial

Naum Gabo, talking to Henry Moore with Barbara Hepworth: ‘I’m so glad you’re getting this earwax out. It’s been been plaguing me for months.’

Repeats ad nauseam SIR: I agree absolutely with Michael Theodorou in his rant. Equally annoying is when after ad breaks we get a recap of the previous part of the programme. You finish up watching the programme four times. It could be shown in half the time.

Richard J Pickering, Leicester

Saucy Grace Kelly SIR: Like Joseph Connolly, I was a 1960s ‘petrol head’ (‘What were lovely looking cars?’, March issue), though for me the ultimate head-turner was a Jaguar XK120, preferably with its six cylinders quietly throbbing away as it idled down our high street at 30mph. After I’d seen Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, my dream was to own a Sunbeam Alpine convertible (Sir Alfred was an enthusiastic pioneer of ‘product placement’ in his movies: who can forget the divine Kim Novak climbing into that Mk VIII Jaguar in Vertigo?), in the hope it might come complete with Grace Kelly at the wheel. One of Hitchcock’s smuttiest lines in that South of France jewel-heist thriller occurs when the virginal Kelly drives Cary Grant up into the hills behind Monaco for a picnic lunch. As he surveys the cold chicken in the hamper she has provided, she innocently enquires, ‘Breast or leg?’

Nick Jones, Hereford

Scotland the Very Brave SIR, Your article on the Jacobites (February issue) was excellent but there was a factual error. There were not, as it stated, two Jacobite uprisings: there were five – in 1689, 1708, 1715, 1719 and 1745.

Moreover the casualties at the first, at the Battle of Killiecrankie, were far worse than at either Culloden or the battle of the Boyne which are mentioned. All three incurred casualties of around 2,000 but at Culloden there were about 15,000 combatants and at the Boyne 60,000.

At Killiecrankie, which the Williamites lost, there were about 7,000; so almost one quarter were wounded or, in most cases, killed. Arguably this first uprising had the best chance of success, but the victory was Pyrrhic as the leader, Viscount Dundee, was killed.

Peter McKay, Kincraig

‘Are the calamari fresh?’

More letters on the Oldie App See page 6 The Oldie Spring 2020 47

DOUGLAS MILLER/KEYSTONE/GETTY

‘What’s your problem? I got you a Margherita and I got myself a Hawaiian’

university some 40 years ago. The Professor of Classics announced that he intended to introduce a new degree in Classical Studies that would remove the need for students to know either Latin or Greek by presenting all works in English translation only. The Professor of Geography welcomed the proposal and suggested he start a new degree in Geographical Studies – to be based entirely on study of the AA Handbook.

Peter Freeman, Cadgwith, Cornwall

I Once Met

MIRRORPIX/ALAMY

Johnny Edgecombe The six shots fired at Stephen Ward’s mews house in 1961 by Christine Keeler’s boyfriend Johnny Edgecombe became, as Bernard Levin wrote, the horseshoe nails in the Profumo scandal.

Edgecombe’s trial triggered Christine’s flight to Spain. Her confessions provoked denials. The trial of Dr Ward ensued. And so did the Tories’ downfall.

But what became of Edgecombe? I met him in 1989. We had lunch at Joe Allen and I wrote in my diary, ‘Man, he groovy!’

He told me about leaving Antigua in 1949, as a pantry boy on a Liverpoolbound cargo ship, his mother weeping on the quayside, his daddy piloting the schooner Perseverance. After many stowaway adventures, including spells in jail, from Texas to Tiger Bay, he landed in London. There he devised a neat game with two Jamaican pals. They would swagger into Bond Street jewellers, claiming to be African princes seeking to buy diamonds, ‘and a ring would disappear’.

Then he hit Notting Hill, ran a shebeen for Peter Rachman and lived with a hooker. ‘Everybody did!’ he assured me. ‘Any white chick who goes

out with a black guy becomes a hooker.’

He explained, ‘If you had fancied me, the word get round you go with black guys, you can’t go back to family, you stuck.

You become a hooker to survive.’

He’d met his nemesis Christine in 1962, when he was still hustling, driving jazzmen to gigs. One day, he was moseying along the Bayswater Road ‘hoping to score some dope and a beautiful chick’ when a taxi drew up and out spilled Christine. ‘The most attractive thing about her was her walk,’ he told me. ‘Chicks don’t walk nice any more.

I like a nice chick who wiggles, who moves nice.’

They were together for three months.

On Edge’s birthday, 22nd October, they were in a Soho club when Christine’s former boyfriend Lucky Gordon showed up. In the fracas, Lucky got cut.

Christine and Johnny fled to her mother’s, but then fell out and she took refuge at Ward’s place. When Johnny came after her, brandishing a gun, she Edgecombe: from Keeler to Kerry tea room

cowered behind the door. Shots rang out, but he discovered that ‘You can’t shoot a lock off a door like in the movies.’ His Old Bailey trial went ahead without its key witness and the ‘missing model’ (she’d flown to Spain), but in court the whole saga came out. ‘I on the front page,’ he told me with pride, ‘till the Train Robbers came along.’

He served five years and came out in 1967 to a different London: open-air rock concerts, love-ins, miniskirts, free love – all a cool dude could desire.

He married a Dane, and they set up a tea room in Tralee, County Kerry, improbably enough, with two daughters, Jasmine and Camilla. Then he had another daughter, Melody, and became an exemplary single dad.

He’d shown me the typescript of a novel. ‘I just want to make some bread and buy me a big boat,’ he said. ‘I tryin’ to escape even before Enoch make his offer!’ I wish I could tell him that Black Scandal, the paperback of his novel, is priced at £24 on Amazon – but he died in 2010, aged 77.

Valerie Grove

Happy to be a teenage clippie

I took A Levels a year early. The results were fine for my plans but, urged on by my ambitious headmaster, I stayed on to become head boy and to take the Cambridge scholarship.

No offers of any kind were made. So in March 1957, at 18, I faced the prospect of pointless months at school.

Why not leave now, I thought, find a job, make some money and relieve family finances?

So it was that I applied to become a bus conductor!

Remember those? My entry test began with some mental48 The Oldie Spring 2020

arithmetic tests: ‘They want two elevenpenny tickets and three sixpennies. They give you two half-crowns. How much change do they get?’

If you got that question right (1s 8d) and several others, you moved on to being shown how to operate the ticket machine. That was the model with a handle on the right, which wound tickets through to be torn off and handed to the passenger. All that went well. So I was asked to sign up to work shifts as required – from 5am ‘works runs’ to late-night pub-closing runs.

I was to start ten days later.

I reported back to the headmaster, who was appalled: ‘But think of the honour of completing a year as head boy of this fine school!’

‘Ah, yes,’ I thought silently, ‘but think of the money!’

I donned my uniform, collected my ticket machine and began what turned out to be six months of extraordinary education.

The early-morning shifts were rewarding in many ways. They were always ‘works runs’ – almost all, in my bit of Nottinghamshire, ‘pit runs’. The colliers were a generous lot. Knowing they were much better off than me, quite a few of them would say, ‘Don’t bother wi’ a ticket, son. There’ll be no inspectors this early! Keep money for yersen!’

How could I refuse?

Late-night runs had very few nasty drunks; more often well-oiled happy ones. I

remember one who came down the stairs for his stop early, waved airily and said, ‘I’m paying for this lot!’

I don’t think he knew most of them, but I wound off about the right number of tickets.

He gave me a note, said, ‘Keep the change, mate!’ and staggered away singing.

With mixed emotions, I left my work after six months of invaluable variety and life education – ready for supposedly higher education.

By Bob Rollett, Uppingham, Rutland, who receives £50.

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

More Memory Lanes on the Oldie App See page 6

Books Book of heroic failure FRANCES WILSON Rake’s Progress: My Political Midlife Crisis

By Rachel Johnson

GARY WING

Simon & Schuster £16.99 The British love a good failure: the pluck, the brio, the have-a-go approach.

True failure is a form of heroism and a mark of patriotism; it is also a competitive sport and Rachel Johnson, the most competitive woman on earth, learned that the best way to survive in a family of winners was to fail better than anyone has failed before.

She therefore stood as an MEP for Change UK in 2019, a party of Remainers whose policies were ‘just some wishywashy, hopey-changey “set of values” ’.

While all political careers, as Enoch Powell noted, end in failure, Rachel’s ‘began with failure, too’. Change UK had, she stresses, ‘a fight to lose’ and lose they would, so long as she was on the tour bus.

Having failed at the first post, she tried again, failed again, and failed better next time. Her overall failure, she boasts, was ‘land-speed record quick’.

‘You’ve been fired by everyone,’ her admiring husband put it, ‘and even the public has sacked you now. It’s a badge of honour.’ Rachel Johnson, with her ‘reverse political skills’, was the Eddie the Eagle of British politics.

Rake’s Progress is about how she failed to get herself elected at the same time as her brother Boris strolled effortlessly into Number 10. It’s full of slapstick and faux pas and nearly-missed planes: she washes her hair in dog shampoo the night before the party launch; she tells the Times she’s the rat that jumps onto the sinking ship; she screws up her postal vote so that even Rachel Johnson didn’t vote for Rachel Johnson.

Struck dumb in every interview, she is aware that her ditsiness reaches its crescendo when, asked by the Today programme to name a Lib Dem policy she disagrees with, she can’t think of a single Lib Dem policy. The second hand ticks loudly as she racks her brain: one, two, three … six … eight … ten seconds.

On its website, the Spectator invited readers to ‘click here’ so they could listen to the sound of silence themselves.

‘I refuse to be embarrassed by it,’ writes Our Girl. ‘In a campaign desperately needing wins, it felt like an achievement.’

As Rachel soldiers on, the villain of the piece is Ann Widdecombe, then standing for the Brexit Party, whom Rachel last met in the Celebrity Big Brother house (Widdecombe was the runner-up; Rachel was the second to be evicted). On the political front, Widdecombe also ends up being more popular than Rachel.

Johnson’s political mortification is measured against her other mortifications, such as the time she made a joke on Have I Got News For You which, when no one laughed, she made again. ‘ “Rachel, a word of advice,” said Paul Merton. “If a joke bombs the first time, don’t repeat it.”’

She quotes Paul Dacre’s comment that her Mail on Sunday column gave ‘banality a bad name’; she reminds us that she won Celebrity Pointless and the Bad Sex Award. She resents being known as Boris’s sister and hates being told how ‘irrelevant’ she is – but these are precisely the cards she plays. She has a degree in Classics from Oxford, but writes articles about her bum.

There must have been difficulties over the Brexit division among the Johnsons, but Rachel is a clan member first and a publicity whore second and so the inside story will remain unpublished.

Rakes’ progress: Rachel and Boris Johnson The Oldie Spring 2020 51

What she gives us instead is a wildly entertaining look at the workings of British democracy and a baffling insight into the workings of Rachel Johnson.

Why, I wondered on every page, can’t she take herself a little more seriously?

She does, after all, care with passionate intensity about the European Union, and Brexit is the onlyy subject on which wh she and her husband have ever agreed.

Why would a shrewd and intelligent woman with a high level of self-esteem and 25 years of media experience not prepare for interviews? Just as Boris’s ‘whole “bumbling buffoon act” ’ is, she writes, ‘well, an act’, so too is Rachel’s performance as a blonde show pony.

Spectacular failure is a complicated joke but then humour, Rachel explains, is her currency. ‘I find anything straight and sincere squirm-making. Jokes, yes.

Passionate intensity – please, God, no.’

Fab Beatlemaniac LEWIS JONES One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time

By Craig Brown 4th Estate £18.99 There have been any number of books about the Beatles, but none as original and funny as Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four.

Published to mark the 50th anniversary of their break-up, it embraces what he calls ‘the random, subjective nature of history, a form predicated on objectivity but reliant on the shifting sands of memory’, and deploys the ‘exploded biography’ technique he invented for Ma’am Darling, his book about Princess Margaret.

In 150 chapters, hopping about in time and space, he gleefully mixes contemporary reports and anecdotal reminiscences, biography and autobiography (recalling, for instance, as many oldies will, the painful plastic Beatles wig he was given as a child), criticism, beguiling trivia and parody.

Some of the story is familiar, some of it less so. Brown manfully tackles the band’s early history, which strikes him as ‘as demanding as the Wars of the Roses, or the Schleswig-Holstein question’, from the members’ beginnings in the summer of 1956, as the Quarrymen, through their various incarnations as Johnny and the Moondogs, the Beatals, the Nerk Twins, the Silver Beetles, the Silver Beats, the Beetles and Long John and the Silver Beatles, during which there were ‘at least nine’ changes of

personnel until, in August 1960, they at last settled on the Beatles.

On Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, where they lodged in spectacular squalor and gorged on sex and drugs, their name was pronounced ‘Peadles’, which is German slang for ‘little willies’: ‘Oh, zee Peadles!

Ha ha ha!’

John Lennon distinguished himself in various ways, not least by mooning the audience halfway through a song. ‘Unversed in Liverpudlian manners,’ Brown remarks, ‘the Germans applaud politely.’

Soon after their return to Britain, the drummer Pete Best was sacked – some said because the others were jealous of his good looks – and replaced by Ringo Starr, with his ‘bus-driver’s face’.

Rather than the sweet and beautiful Paul, the rebellious and witty John, the shy and spiritual George, it is Ringo who most appeals to Brown’s comic eye. For all his working-class pretensions, compared with the others ‘John was Lord Snooty’, from a posh district of Liverpool, while Ringo was the real thing, from a rough part of the Dingle. ‘We were working class,’ Ringo explained, ‘and in Liverpool when your dad left,’ as his did when he was three, ‘you suddenly became lower working class.’

What he lacked in talent and charisma, he made up for in ordinariness. Ringo was ‘a workhorse among prize ponies’, and the only Beatle who ‘could be described as a bloke’.

Apparently, when ‘the indomitable Japanese artist’ Yoko Ono visited the Beatles’ office in 1966, looking for John, she found him absent, but Ringo was there; so she aimed herself at him instead. Unable to understand a word she was saying, he fled.

‘Who knows?’ Brown speculates, ‘If she had spoken more clearly, and on more down-to-earth issues, we might now be talking of Ringo and Yoko… His influence might have been felt in her poetry, too: “Sit at the dock. Watch the

‘OK – what shall we not talk about?’

seagulls dance. If they come near your chips, give them a good whack.” ’ In similar vein, he delights in mishearings of their lyrics: ‘There, beneath the goose and bourbon skies’; ‘But if you go carrying picture of German cows’.

He has great fun with the many charlatans and chancers who latched on to them, such as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (that ‘leathery old guru with his easy promises of levitation’), Allen Klein, who succeeded poor Brian Epstein as their manager and had ‘the charm of a broken lavatory seat’, and Jeffrey Archer, whom Ringo summed up as ‘the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it’.

With a masterly lightness of touch, Brown considers every conceivable aspect of the Beatles, such as the tribute acts, currently numbering more than a thousand around the world, and the mad prices fetched by memorabilia – a 1964 notice announcing that a lounge at Liverpool Airport would be closed for a press conference, signed by the group, sold for £31,250.

At one point, he remarks that ‘when you hear a Beatles album, you feel that all human life is there’. The same may be said of this endlessly entertaining book.

Victorian battle royal FRANCES WELCH Queen Victoria and the Romanovs: Sixty Years of Mutual Distrust

By Coryne Hall Amberley Publishing £20 Queen Victoria’s suspicion of the Romanovs was profound and lifelong.

As a young woman, she was rattled by tales of Catherine the Great’s expansionist propensities and Tsar Alexander I’s show of might against Napoleon.

On a more personal level, she was upset by the sad fate of her beloved Aunt Julie, whose husband, Grand Duke Constantine, turned out to be a rabid wife-beater. Whenever Julie was being particularly tricky, he would stuff her into a giant Chinese vase; helpers would have to be summoned to release her.

The queen’s impression of Russians as ‘all rather savage’ was borne out by at least two of the tsars. As she wrote of Tsar Nicholas I, ‘There is an expression in the emperor’s eyes – one might almost say wild – which is not prepossessing.’ The wild-eyed tsar brought his own camp-bed to Windsor Castle and then demanded straw from the stables, with which to stuff the mattress. His grandson, the bear-like Tsar Alexander III, liked to bend horseshoes with his bare hands.

The queen was not impressed, The Oldie Spring 2020 53

dismissing him as ‘a sovereign whom she does not look upon as a gentleman’.

Grand Duchess Marie, the only Romanov to marry into the British Royal family, also proved rather savage, refusing point-blank to marry in England or to employ the right nanny, while denouncing visits to Windsor and Osborne as ‘boring beyond belief’.

Her sister-in-law, the future Queen Alexandra, reported that when one of Marie’s babies threw up over her, the Russian duchess ‘ran about with her big breast hanging down in front of everyone and wiped the dress clean with a ha ha ha!’.

Queen Victoria was not amused.

Indeed, she was frequently unamused to the point of outrage by the Romanovs, especially concerning their covetous attitude to India and Turkey.

But what Coryne Hall’s richly comprehensive book shows is that the queen’s 60-year rage with the Romanovs was offset by an almost equally strong fascination. In the course of her reign, she fell for several visiting Grand Dukes: Sandro was ‘very tall and good-looking’ and Michael ‘pleasing-looking’.

Her favourite was the future Tsar Alexander II, who boasted ‘a pretty mouth with a sweet smile’. Her feelings were initially not reciprocated. ‘She is very small, her figure is bad, her face plain,’ sniffed Alexander. But after dancing the Grossvater – with its elaborate displays of handkerchiefs – the young tsarevich was smitten with the teenage Victoria, later weeping over his lost love.

Given her own weakness, perhaps the queen shouldn’t have been surprised when her two favourite granddaughters elected to marry Romanovs. She was, predictably, charmed by the suitors themselves: Grand Duke Sergei was ‘very tall and gentlemanlike’ and the Tsarevich Nicky (the future Nicholas II) ‘so natural, simple and kind’. But she was also, equally predictably, bitterly opposed to the marriages; nothing could dampen her suspicion of Russia – ‘so bad, so rotten’.

When Ella, the elder of the two, arrived at the Russian Court, she found that her husband, like Aunt Julie’s Grand Duke Constantine, had a quick temper.

While he did not try to cram her into vases, he was far from the ‘sweet, gentle creature’ of the queen’s imagining.

The Grand Duchess was jubilant when she succeeded in inveigling her younger sister, Alicky, to join her in Russia; the queen less so: ‘Cela me révolte, to feel that she [Alicky] has been taken possession of and carried away, as it were, by those Russians.’

After Alicky was crowned Tsarina, the queen was anxious about her granddaughter’s precarious position on that ‘thorny throne’. But when she issued a firm instruction – ‘It is your duty to win their [the Russians’] love and respect’ – Alicky was obdurate: ‘You are mistaken, my dear grandmama … the Russian people revere their tsars as divine beings from whom all charity and fortune derive.’

Alicky misjudged her adopted people.

In 1918 she and her sister were both murdered by Bolsheviks.

Queen Victoria was never to know how spot-on she had been in her pen portrait of the Russians as ‘horrible, deceitful and cruel’.

Welsh wizard’s adieu MARK BOSTRIDGE Thinking Again

By Jan Morris Faber £16.99 ‘And so to bed.’

With this Pepysian flourish, Jan Morris closed her ‘Thought Diary’, published two years ago under the title In My Mind’s Eye. At the start of her tenth decade, with no other book on the stocks, Morris decided to keep a diary for the first time. The result was a collection of 188 daily entries.

These were at once prosaic and profound, underpinned by the melancholy of advancing years, and conveyed with a strangely ethereal quality that is perhaps best described as like watching a feather falling softly through the air.

Now Morris returns with a sequel, covering her life in 2018 and 2019. She is still living in her converted stables, Trefan Morys, in north-west Wales, driving regularly into the nearest town, Criccieth, with its magnificent view of a 14th-century castle across the bay, in her beloved but battered Honda Type R. Elizabeth, her lifelong friend and partner, is still at her side, though sadly

‘A fine choice, madam’

trapped in the ‘cursed dominion of dementia’. Morris’s routine continues to include a walk in all weathers. The once great traveller is now limited to a statutory thousand paces each day, sometimes along the lane at Llanystumdwy, humming a jolly tune such as Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.

Lights out is preceded by another chapter from an old favourite, Anna Karenina.

Long ago, in Conundrum, her account of her ten-year transition from man to woman, Jan Morris wrote that ‘One must live not for the day but for the moment, swiftly adjusting to circumstances.’

These diaries show that even her 90-plus years have not prevented her from achieving this. The greatest challenge for the diarist is the question of whether he or she can make something out of the short change offered up by an average – or below average – day. Morris rarely fails in this respect – and when she does, she throws in her hand and admits that she has fallen short.

This diary allows Morris to gather up the driftwood of memory, recalling the simple holiness, from the vantage point of adult agnosticism, of childhood Christmases when she was a boy chorister at Christ Church, Oxford; or her experience at age 16 as a member of the Home Guard during the Second World War, which unlike Dad’s Army was ‘not in the least farcical’ but was ‘just as endearing’.

She labels the symptoms of old age as ‘tiresomely normal’, and finds her faith in the kindness of unlikely strangers constantly renewed. ‘Gigantic lorries stop to let me cross the street! Wild, uncouth youths keep doors open for me! Evident harridans offer me gaps in queues.’

There are, of course, the downsides.

There is the frustrating business of dealing with her bank by phone, as all her local branches have closed (I thought of my own mother, at 93 the same age as Morris, facing the same problem). ‘A profound silence … falls upon my enquiry,’ followed by the operator telling her, ‘ “It has been a pleasure assisting you, Jan [for senior citizens should preferably be addressed by first names].” ’ The general mood of the world is discouraging, oscillating ‘between despair and resentment about the state of everything’, though she finds something forgivably childlike about President Trump’s manners (or lack of them): ‘like the sulks and outbursts of a spoilt schoolboy’.

Morris derives much of her strength from her Welshness – her father was Welsh and she has lived in Wales since the 1960s – and from her contemplation of ‘the very nature of Wales’.

The Oldie Spring 2020 55

Throughout the diary, she returns to the question ‘What is it about Wales?’, and when she comes up with the answer – that it is distinguished by its introspection, its respect for tradition, its nostalgia and its imagination – she seems almost to be providing her readers with the salient characteristics of her own personality.

‘I am approaching one of the tremendous mysteries of existence,’ Morris writes movingly at one point. This is a gentle, unpretentious, perceptive book, unfailingly optimistic, but unafraid of facing up to both the highs and the lows of getting old.

At the end of it, I was reminded of a letter of Victor Hugo’s from his final years, in which he speaks of the ‘mysterious rejuvenation’ he is experiencing. His body may be sinking, but his ‘mind sees the grave and feels the spring’.

The process, he says, is like ‘an unfolding of the wings’.

Poetry devotion CHARLOTTE MOORE A Little History of Poetry

By John Carey Yale University Press £14.99 When we were reading English at St Anne’s, Oxford, my friend Cathy and I loved hearing John Carey lecture on Elizabethan poetry.

He was by far our favourite lecturer.

We admired his air of energy and insouciance as, having imparted wit and wisdom about Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser et al, he would fasten his bicycle clips round his chunky, earth-coloured corduroys and wheel off, tweed jacket aflap.

Cathy and I would then repair to a tea room in Longwall Street, eat florentines among the macramé baskets holding drooping spider plants, and discuss what we’d heard.

Carey was a real influence on the way we read – so I’m delighted, 40 years later, to review A Little History of Poetry.

Yes, 40 years on, he’s still got it. At 85, John Carey is an oldie to be proud of.

This is the latest in Yale’s Little History series (digestible books on big subjects by eminent authors – alas, none of them female). Carey’s task is to condense worldwide poetic achievement over 4,000 years into 295 pages.

There are no scholarly footnotes; no discussions of critical theory. Carey tethers the poems lightly to the time and place within which they were created,

‘Can’t you show some self-reliance for once?’

and asks us to consider why these have survived when countless others have not.

Poetry, says Carey, is ‘language made special’; he wants to show us how.

One problem is that it’s difficult to show what’s special about the language of poems in translation. He starts with Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian epic preserved by the pressing of wedgeshaped bits of reed onto wet clay tablets, and admits that we have no idea what it sounded like. So is Gilgamesh a poem at all, or just a story?

Our knowledge of Homer’s Greek and Virgil’s Latin is so very much more sophisticated that we can justifiably claim to understand something about their use of language. But, in covering works written in 15 languages ancient and modern, Carey often resorts to describing subject matter rather than sound and rhythm – the qualities that make poetry resonant and memorable.

Not that subject matter isn’t important. It’s fascinating to trace the emergence of dominant themes – love, death, suffering, heroism, worship and immortality; in essence, ‘the meaning of life’. And by ranging from China to Chile by way of France, Russia, Germany and more, Carey draws comparisons and contrasts which illuminate the English-language poetry that is his prime territory.

Carey can condense such a mass of material in a helpful and entertaining way because of the clarity of his thought.

This is his unique selling point. He can summarise without triteness; we see exactly why he thought this poem or that poet mattered. Here he is on Satan’s defiance in Paradise Lost: ‘We can all recognise that as heroism, and the poem teaches us that heroism can be evil.’

Whitman’s Song of Myself is ‘an epic of the new America … voiced by a giant consciousness that spans the whole continent and all the spaces beyond, and tells its readers that they are part of him’.

Burns’s ‘great gift is authenticity’. He

writes, ‘How people speak, move, dress and look are vital for Browning’s art – even their proneness to catarrh.’ Ted Hughes’s ‘aim is to reinvigorate language’. ‘What makes [Donne] new is that he is always arguing,’ he says.

Carey, like his admired Browning, has a gift for the specific. Marianne Moore’s poems ‘often feature small creatures in cramped or menacing surroundings’; in Shakespeare’s art, ‘abstract nouns are made agents, performing real acts’.

Carey’s preferences peep through. He particularly loves Edward Thomas, rates Larkin as the poet of his generation, and thinks Kubla Khan the most marvellous poem of all time.

His judgements, occasionally, are too strong – he’s out of sympathy with Dante and Petrarch, is dismissive of lovely James Thomson and decides Tennyson’s greatness ended in 1855.

Inevitably, there are omissions. My chief regret is for English medieval lyrics, the Scottish makars, dear Edmund Blunden and nursery rhymes or any other children’s poetry. Others will search in vain for contemporaries such as Duffy, Armitage, Oswald and Nagra, groundbreakers such as e e cummings, or the influence of rock and pop. And surely we should glance in the direction of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer?

But Carey simply couldn’t include everything in his Little History, and overall it’s a miracle of compression.

Carey guides his lucky reader with the confidence of experience and – dare I say it? – the wisdom of age.

Mao’s Chinese whispers MARK ALMOND The China Journals: Ideology and Intrigue in the 1960s Hugh Trevor-Roper, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines Bloomsbury £25 Hugh Trevor-Roper made his fortune and public reputation with his Last Days of Hitler.

His work as an MI6 officer investigating what had been the dictator’s fate at the end of the war enabled him to become one of the original media dons. Then he suffered ridicule for his authentication of the so-called Hitler Diaries in 1983.

One reason he fell for the hoax was that the manuscripts of the Hitler Diaries, which he inspected, lay in a lucky place for Trevor-Roper. It was in the same Swiss bank vault that he had found the diaries of Sir Edmund Backhouse The Oldie Spring 2020 57

(1873-1944) – ‘The most obscene thing I had ever read,’ he told me – which formed the basis of his bestseller Hermit of Peking (1976), which exposed how much of the accepted history of lateimperial China had been manufactured by the fantasist revealed in his diaries.

Without knowing Chinese, TrevorRoper showed it was possible to see through an intellectual fraud working in that language. He had in fact visited China only once – in autumn 1965 – with a delegation under the auspices of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. What Trevor-Roper came quickly to understand about Mao’s regime and its Western admirers ensured he would not be asked back.

His diary of the visit is full of the frustrations of depending on poor-quality interpreters translating propaganda pap from repetitive Communist officials.

Brainwashing may have been the Maoist regime’s speciality – the Chairman told another visitor that he washed his own mind once a decade – but the mindnumbing propaganda was a revulsion therapy for Trevor-Roper. He was in China as the Cultural Revolution’s frenzied attack on the heritage of Chinese civilisation was beginning.

Barely 15 years after Mao seized power, his British delegation got to meet scholars who had made their reputations before 1949 but were still in post – though those naïve enough to fall for Mao’s One Hundred Flowers trick to flush out critics had disappeared.

Trevor-Roper soon worked out that the vice-president of any given institute or the vice-director of even a primary school was the Communist Party’s local representative – and therefore the real boss, with an ageing and intimidated superior quietly avoiding the risk of saying anything interesting.

Trevor-Roper catches the mindbending boredom of being trapped in an official delegation led by the nose and prevented as far as possible from seeing anything interesting, and also draws out the characters of his fellow travellers. The playwright Robert Bolt is the sceptical exception to the rest of the party, who are

‘Please don’t rescue me... please don’t...’

Aubrey Beardsley’s Virgilius the Sorcerer (1893). From Aubrey Beardsley, edited

by Stephen Calloway and Caroline Corbeau-Parsons (Tate Publishing, £25).

The Beardsley show at Tate Britain is suspended because of coronavirus

bent on seeing the positive in every staged, ‘spontaneous’ encounter. The self-appointed leader of the delegation was an early queen of the quangos beginning to regulate so much of British life in the 1960s.

Mary Adams was on the board of the Council for Industrial Design, as well as sitting on the ITV authority and being a senior figure in the Consumers’ Association. She showed no interest in anything in China other than being introduced to important people, who

sadly failed to recognise the Quango Queen for her worth. And an invitation to meet Mao’s Number Two, Zhou Enlai, evaporated.

Trevor-Roper relished a public scandal and used this experience to expose how the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding was really a front organisation for Mao’s regime. Mobilising a variety of Oxford dons, some with similar intelligence backgrounds, Trevor-Roper fought one of those Cold War battles that now seem so remote.

The Oldie Spring 2017 59

Maybe when we think how many ‘experts’ and entrepreneurs fell head over heels for the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, as a model reformer, yesteryear’s enthusiasts for ruthless rulers such as Stalin and Mao as the hope for humanity will seem less incredible.

These diaries are as much about the forgotten world of Britain’s intellectual and academic élite in the Cold War as they are about China. They offer unusual light on the cultural Cold War underway in the West between fellow travellers of the Communist regimes, then apparently on the rise, and Western anti-Communists of various strains.

Trevor-Roper’s rare service in both MI6 and MI5 gave him intelligence contacts who shared information about doubtful characters across academe and cultural life. Trevor-Roper’s Oxford was also where future Cold War intelligence officers such as John le Carré cut their teeth as student informers on the pro-Soviet left.

All this might seem a footnote to the history of the 1960s, if it weren’t for the footnotes provided by Richard Davenport-Hines. If not a book-withinthe-book, they provide a retrospective counterpoint to Trevor-Roper’s grand themes from the mid-’60s, correcting occasional errors and misjudgements, and amplifying what he got right.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

My mother’s ruin ALEX CLARK Actress

By Anne Enright Jonathan Cape £16.99 Memorialising our parents is an inevitably ambiguous process.

Our constructions include childhood memories, both striking and indistinct, and distant periods, including their own early years, that we have not personally experienced.

There are also the intrusions of other figures, the ebb and flow of familial sympathy and tension, and the sense that what they were also constitutes a complex, fugitive part of our own identity.

But for the writer of fiction, such a frame can be immensely productive, offering the opportunity to range over generations and periods and, more crucially, to provide a distilled exploration of the difficulties we often undergo in granting to our parents a fully fledged, individual personhood.

If the person under consideration has

‘What are you waiting for, Harry?’

also been a public figure, as is Katherine O’Dell, Anne Enright’s titular character, then the experience is potentially even more fraught. In the first few pages of Actress, an arresting picture of Norah FitzMaurice’s mother has emerged: hazel-eyed, holding a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in another, presiding over a party of theatrical types, ‘a shifting band of big, drinking men, all of them good company’, in her kitchen; and photographed for a diary column in that same kitchen, opening the door of her steamy new dishwasher, one of the first to arrive in Ireland.

But we also know that she died in the 1980s at 58, a few years after shooting a film producer in the foot and consequently being committed to a mental hospital. What, then, is the story?

It’s a story that Norah is trying to work out for herself. Now in middle age, long married and with two grown children, she is trying to piece together what made, and unmade, her mother, even as she knows that ‘I would swap all the information in the world for her happiness, and she was never happy.’

Enright is formidable in combining the concrete detail of lives – think of the extraordinary array of sibling portraits in her last novel, The Green Road – with an acute understanding of the inchoate lives of families: the push and pull of loyalty; the projection of desires; the smothering of disappointment and unhappiness.

Here she conjures the rollicking story of Katherine’s journey from an itinerant theatrical family – all Othello, musicals and ‘anecdotes of cheap disaster’ – to a brief period of fame in New York and Hollywood and thence to Dublin, where she trades in glamour and Irish intensity: ‘After Hollywood, she was all about emigrant nostalgia: she could miss the

old sod while standing in her own kitchen, she used to say. And indeed, she often did.’

When she sings a Yeats poem, set to music on RTÉ’s opening night in 1961, ‘it was better than the moon landings’; when she assembles those hard-drinking men around her, ‘even their lechery was over-styled’.

But overlaying that story of celebrity and of a changing Ireland is the codependent relationship between her and Norah, the child who is frequently left waiting at home in the company of the housekeeper, and who, as she grows older, struggles to puzzle out her own sexual appetites. Shadowy but significant men – a priest turned therapist; the wounded producer; one of Norah’s lecturers – circle around them, flitting in and out of rooms, offering counsel and imposing their own implacable wills upon them, and turning them, in one way or another, into prey, commodities to be manipulated and deployed at will.

At some moments, we are reminded that Norah is addressing this memoir of her and her mother’s lives to her husband. At others, she seems entirely alone, an only child, her mother dead and her father unknown, a solitary in the narrative.

The prose is clear and droll – even dry – but with an undertow of anger and regret. At its heart is the feeling that to preserve a person’s life in memory takes up at least as much emotional energy as accommodating that person in reality; and that to pore over their remains is a question not of choice but of unavoidable reckoning. ‘What kind of a mother was she?’ a PhD student asks Norah. ‘Well,’ she replies. ‘She was mine.’

Which, as we all know, is only the start of the story.

The Oldie Spring 2020 61

Media Matters

Turn on, tune in, switch off...

Keep informed about the virus – but not at the expense of your sanity stephen glover This column assumes that its readers are interested in the print and broadcasting media. So it may surprise you that its one piece of advice during this period of prolonged self-isolation necessitated by the pandemic is to watch as little television news as possible.

A daily dose of not more than half an hour should suffice. That will be more than enough to absorb the latest instructions from government and glean useful information. I am convinced there is a danger to one’s psychological health in watching and listening to endless bulletins. Believe me, I speak from experience.

My own day starts at around 7 o’clock with Radio 4’s Today programme.

When it ends, two hours later, I am usually pretty depressed. After a light breakfast, I read the newspapers – a far less lowering process because they carry articles on subjects other than coronavirus.

Then I scour the BBC website and various online publications, and throughout the day consult them with neurotic regularity. I sometimes turn on Sky News to hear a pundit droning on, and I seldom miss Boris Johnson’s late-afternoon press conference.

Radio 4’s World at One and PM are habitual ports of call. In the evening, I binge on television news programmes (admittedly somewhat anaesthetised by generous quantities of wine) before wrapping up with BBC2’s Newsnight – and a nervous headache.

Unfortunately I probably have little choice since I am required to pontificate about the contagion in the public prints.

But for those who are free of such obligations I suggest a lighter diet. And yet I suspect that many of those holed up in their homes are becoming mesmerised by the constant onslaught of coronavirus news from every corner of the planet. It may be because they are bored. Or

possibly they are reduced to abject jelly by fear or an irresistible fascination for the morbid.

For such people, too much coverage (which, by the way, is repetitive, and lengthened by long-winded speculation) may be especially harmful.

So my recommendation is to turn off the news once the essentials have been grasped. Why not read a book? TV oldie Esther Rantzen has recently extolled the delights of P G Wodehouse, and I follow her sound advice whenever I can snatch a moment between news bulletins. These are probably not the times for gloomy Russian novels, though everyone will have different preferences.

Television other than news is another fruitful path. Unwatched box sets can be dusted off. The more technically minded will ransack Netflix. Meanwhile the BBC could turn out to be a cornucopia. In fact, even in the midst of disaster there may be cause to celebrate, since the filming of tedious soap operas such as EastEnders has been suspended to protect members of the cast and crew from infection.

I daresay the first thought of unimaginative BBC bosses will be to unearth equally tedious recent repeats to fill in the gaps. Yet Auntie has an unexplored treasure trove of almostforgotten programmes from the golden age of television.

I am thinking of the likes of Play for Today, which ran from 1970 to 1984, and Screen One, which produced excellent dramas throughout the 1990s. By the way, if Tony Hall, the Beeb’s directorgeneral, happens to be reading this,

‘Newspapers still carry articles on subjects other than coronavirus’

could he consider reviving Prince, a wonderful Screen One film written by Julie Burchill, starring Sean Bean and my wife, Celia Montague, which hasn’t been shown since its first airing in 1991?

As for comedies, the BBC and ITV would bring joy to millions if they brought back comics such as Frankie Howerd, Eric Sykes and Tommy Cooper.

And what about the affectionately satirical All Gas and Gaiters, probably not remembered by anyone under the age of 60?

These are going to be testing weeks for many of us. But they will be more trying still if we spend them glued to the television news, crowding our minds with dismal and fearful thoughts. We must keep informed, of course. But if we wish to maintain our sanity, we will have to learn to switch elsewhere.

Here is an extraordinary fact. According to the analytics company Comscore, in January the Independent online had a slightly larger audience than the Guardian online. Its so called ‘unique browsers’ in the UK (visitors who look at a website one or more times over a defined period) were put at 24.7 million versus the Guardian’s 24 million. The Independent also did better than the Telegraph or Times online, and far better than digital-only publications such as BuzzFeed.

Success has brought the online paper modest profits, whereas in its 30-year life the print title turned a profit in one year only. In the year to September 2019, the Independent made £2.3 million.

It happens not to be my favourite newspaper website, being hysterically anti-Brexit and rather left-wing. Some of it is quite downmarket. It’s certainly aimed at readers younger than me.

Nonetheless, it is a publishing triumph which almost no one predicted when the print edition was closed four years ago.

The Oldie Spring 2020 63

History

Not the new Black Death

Coronavirus pales next to the plague that killed half of Europe david horspool I’m always wary of ‘lessons from history’.

Still, at the moment there is one event from the distant past that offers a parallel, or perhaps a warning. When we deal with it, we should don the historical equivalent of a hazmat suit before drawing any conclusions.

The Black Death arrived in Europe in 1347, having already devastated Central Asia, southern Russia and Constantinople.

It came to Italy first, arriving in Genoa when a vessel docked with a diseased crew fleeing the plague in the East. Another infected crew, according to a contemporary, arrived in Venice around the same time.

‘And when one person had contracted the illness, he poisoned his whole family even as he fell and died… Thus death entered through the windows, and as cities and towns were depopulated, their inhabitants mourned their dead neighbours.’

Without any knowledge of how to stop the spread of the disease, the population of Europe succumbed to it, territory by territory, through the Holy Roman Empire, into France and Spain, and across the Channel, where it arrived in a western port – Bristol, Melcombe or Southampton – in 1348.

In less than a year, the ‘pestilence’ had run across two continents and killed, modern historians estimate, half the population of Europe; maybe more – around 50 million people.

Most died from bubonic plague, named after the swellings, or buboes, that formed in the lymphatic nodes at the groin, armpit or neck: apple-sized, foul-smelling and horribly painful. They generally accompanied several days’ illness, from which only a few were seen to recover.

Quicker, more infectious and deadlier was the pneumonic form of the plague, which attacked the lungs, caused the victim to cough up blood, and almost always resulted in death, sometimes within hours of the first symptoms.

The disease affected pets and livestock

as well as humans, so that a wave of death seemed to be crashing over all Creation.

As fields and crops went untended, that began to include even the plant life on which everyone depended to a greater or lesser extent, according to social rank.

Death on this scale was unprecedented, unrepeated even in later outbreaks – and is almost unimaginable.

Medieval chroniclers are not famed for outbreaks of emotion, and their reports save their most passionate outbursts for laments about the wickedness that had brought this ‘fierce mortality’ down on their contemporaries’ heads.

Some saw all-purpose sin as the problem. ‘Their greed, scorn and malice were asking to be punished,’ wrote John of Reading. Others, including the poets, were more specific: tournaments; disobedient children (William Langland’s Piers the Plowman quoted Solomon, and translated the Latin for the ignorant, ‘Which is in English, if you want to know/ Who spares the rod, spoils the child’); idleness (‘The sloth of the shepherds leaves the flocks straying’); or fashion (‘Women … wearing clothes that were so tight that they wore a fox tail hanging down inside their skirts at the back, to hide their arses’).

We know that people’s behaviour was indeed partly responsible for the spread, but because of sanitary standards rather than sinning.

The plague bacillus Yersinia pestis (named after one of its discoverers, Alexandre Yersin) was identified in the 19th century. It finds its way into rat fleas, and then into humans.

‘Death on this scale was unprecedented – and is almost unimaginable’

In recent years this explanation has been challenged, but it is still by far the most accepted cause. In the 14th century, divine vengeance, planetary alignment or, with grim predictability, the Jews were seen as the only possible sources.

In England, Jews were not blamed – but only (one assumes) because there was no Jewish population after their expulsion 50 years before.

Attacks continued even after the Pope, Clement VI, had ordered that they stop, not only because they were unjust, but on the grounds that ‘the same plague … has afflicted and afflicts the Jews themselves’.

These assaults weren’t spontaneous popular pogroms, but directed by secular authorities; people like the Castellan of Chillon in Savoy, or the knight-bailiff of Lausanne.

Were there chinks of light in the blackness? A few. Some, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, decided to accentuate the positive: ‘Those of us who have survived and been mercifully spared

by Providence (although we do not deserve it) must break forth in praises and devout expressions.’

When the Patriarch of Catania couldn’t persuade his congregation to give up their holy relics to assist the citizens of Messina, he washed the statue in holy water instead and went to the Messinese, blessing the faithful with the water and ‘curing all sorts of sick in great numbers’.

In Paris, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu tended their patients without cease, despite the risks which killed the majority.

But when it was all over, though some acted more penitently, setting up chantries to say prayers for the dead, others tried to put the clock back, attempting, for instance, to impose pre-plague wages in a seller’s market.

If there are lessons from the Black Death, they are overwhelmingly ones of perspective. Things won’t, we hope, be like that today.

The Oldie Spring 2020 65

LU FU N LL CH R IS EF CA UN N DI CE F LL A ED

Literary Lunches

Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/lunches for more details

In association with

London lunches hosted by Barry Cryer

TUESDAY 21ST APRIL AT SIMPSON’S IN THE STRAND – £75 Virginia Nicholson Tim Benson on Ed Stourton on

on How Was It for You? Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s The sexual revolution from the point of view of the women who lived it.

Nicholson gives voice to debutantes, activists and bunny girls as she examines the founding moments of the modern world.

Britain’s Best Political Cartoons 2019 Britain’s foremost cartoonologist will present a slideshow of the finest political cartoons of 2019. With several elections, two prime ministers and the endless headache about the dreaded B-word, there’s a lot of promising material!

Today: A History of Our World through 60 Years of Conversations & Controversies For over six decades, Today has brought worldchanging stories to the UK public. Today veteran Stourton covers the its finest hours, including the fall of the Berlin Wall.

TUESDAY 19TH MAY AT SIMPSON’S IN THE STRAND – £75 Charlie Mortimer Barry Fantoni on A Craig Brown on

on Vintage Roger: Letters from the POW Years Roger Mortimer joined the Coldstream Guards in 1930. He lived a life of Chelsea luxury.

Then, in 1940, he became a POW. Over the next four years, he wrote endless letters.

His son has collated the best of them…

Whole Scene Going On: My Story of Private Eye, the Pop Revolution and Swinging Sixties London A memoir of the swinging sixties, from the author’s early days at Private Eye on, taking in icons such as Paul McCartney, the Kinks and their contributions to the scene.

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time A chronicle of how the Beatles changed the world. Brown looks at the character of each Beatle and the extraordinary people around them, combining essays, fan letters, history and etymology.

TUESDAY 16TH JUNE AT SIMPSON’S IN THE STRAND – £75 Owen Matthews William Martin Bell on War on An Impeccable Spy: and Peacekeeping Dalrymple on The

Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company In 1765, the East India Company had defeated the Mughal Emperor and held sway in his richest provinces, with an army twice the size of Britain’s run from a small office in London.

Experienced war correspondent Martin Bell reflects on 60 years of visiting war zones – which he has done as soldier, reporter and UNICEF ambassador.

He looks at the international order and what we can learn from past failures.

Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent Richard Sorge was at the heart of the Third Reich’s diplomatic corps. He was both German and Russian. Deluded by his experience of the First World War, he became a committed communist.

TUESDAY 14TH JULY AT SIMPSON’S IN THE STRAND– £75 Rachel Johnson on Rake’s Progress: Anne Glenconner on Lady in Waiting:

My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting spills the beans on the extraordinary life, loves and tragedy of her controversial employer whom she knew since childhood. She lifts the veil on the shadowy underside of the glitz and glam of aristocratic life.

My Political Midlife Crisis. In 2019, as the battle over Brexit raged, Change UK came to the fore – and the PM’s sister threw her hat into the ring.

In Rake’s Progress, she remembers her brief fling with the world of politics, from a sweary tennis match with David Cameron to that long and awkward silence on Radio 4…

TO BOOK TICKETS, please go to www.theoldie.co.uk/lunches

or email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-3pm). 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

66 The Oldie Spring 2020

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Hullo clouds, hullo sky When I hear that someone has been on a journey, a metaphorical one that is, I inwardly groan: it’s almost always a tale of tedium. But sometimes I discover words through a journey of a kind – an account of an event or an observation that uses an unfamiliar expression. This is roughly how I have recently come to learn a little about cloud words.

The words here have nothing to do with the ‘cloud’ that stores enormous amounts of digital data, nor do they refer to cloud nine or even to seventh heaven.

They have reached me, more mundanely, via the warm, wet blanket of grey cloud that seems to have hung over England for most of the past six months, punctuated by gales and storms. In some of the – few – interludes, it has paid off to raise one’s eyes from mud and flood and look up at some unusual cloud formations. I won’t pretend to have seen them, but others have, and their reports have considerably widened my cloud vocabulary.

Ever since humans first slithered out of the sea, they must have had names for clouds. Even today a few cloud-related terms are recorded among the dialects of the British Isles. In Orkney, a ‘gamfer’ (from the Icelandic word for a ‘troop of witches riding through the air’) describes the appearance of clouds before a storm.

And when the sky is mostly overcast but contains some glittering clouds, they are ‘glamsy-like’ or ‘skyran’, two words rooted in Norse. In Essex, a cloud that

Yorkshire pudding Isn’t it time we waved ta-ra to the Yorkshire pudding?

Can’t we just agree that this batter concoction is simply toad-in-the-hole that has been deprived of its rightful sausage? Originally it was an aid to economising, served as a first course with gravy, to fill people up so they

broadens out as it rises from the horizon is called a ‘Noah’s ark’ and elsewhere a ‘dintless’ sky is a cloudless one. We’re all familiar with a ‘mackerel’ sky and sometimes we see an ‘anvil’, but most of us have few names drawn from English to describe different clouds.

The names we use – if we use them at all – we owe, I learn, to Luke Howard, a Quaker pharmacist of the late-18th and early-19th century. Howard had something in common with Basil Fotherington-Tomas, the effeminate, mid-20th-century creation of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle in Down with Skool, who went about saying, ‘Hullo clouds, hullo sky.’ Howard did much the same, having early in life developed a passion for gazing out of the window. But Howard had a tidy mind, a flair for observation and the ambition to promote the usefulness of meteorology through

‘Ever get one of those days when nothing anyone says offends you?’

weren’t so hungry for the pricy meat that followed. This echo of hard times up north does not really fit in these days with the comfortable setting of a middle-class Sunday lunch.

There is, of course, a great mystique about the precise recipe for the batter, a game of one-upmanship and an argument about whose granny’s Yorkshire pudding was more authentic.

I admit that it can be fun to pour gravy into the sunken crater in the middle – but we must act our age and put away childish things like this.

The Yorkshire pudding has turned into a showpiece. How high can you make it rise? It must stand proud on the

the study of clouds. And for this a classification was needed.

His solution was to divide clouds into seven groups, to which he gave Latin names: cirrus, cumulus, stratus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus, cumulostratus and cumulocirrostratus or nimbus. (‘Stratus’ wasn’t strictly a Latin noun, but ‘stratum’ had already been bagged by geologists.)

Howard’s classification of 1802 soon caught on abroad and, remarkably, is still in use today. A Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, had proposed something similar just before Howard, but his scheme was complicated and his cloud names were French. They went nowhere.

Additions have been made to take account of peculiarities, such as those seen this winter in British skies. The blanket of fluffy pockets that in January caused so much twittering in West Wittering were just cumulostratus clouds, though in an unusual formation.

But the wave-like clouds above Newport in February were ‘fluctus’ or ‘KelvinHelmholtz’. And Storm Ciara a day or two later filled the heavens over North Yorkshire with an infinity of drooping udders – ‘mammatus’ clouds – which presumably threatened the locals with a flood of milk. Goethe, who so admired Howard’s work that he wrote a poem with a verse for each of his cloud categories, would surely have had something to say about that.

plate, a unique combination of the brittle and the soggy.

(In fact it probably came from the supermarket freezer rather than from a recipe handed down through generations of Cleckheaton grannies.)

SMALL DELIGHTS Shaking pills into your hand to put them in a pillbox and getting exactly the right amount.

MARGARET HALL, SHAWNEE MISSION, KANSAS, USA Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

Worst of all, this dish has been taken hostage by the purveyors of the ‘traditional Sunday roast’. Pubs dish up these monstrous, teetering towers of roasted batter, like stunted Pisas. The two veg, the sickly potatoes and the meat cower at their base. It dominates. It comes with everything – beef, lamb, pork and chicken. The whole of Yorkshire must surely wince.

The pub landlord knows that it is, at least, fulfilling its function of dulling the appetite, deceiving us customers into feeling satisfied. So it’s good for profits. As they say, back at the brewery, where there’s batter there’s brass.

OLIVER PRITCHETT The Oldie Spring 2020 67

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT THE GREAT BUSTER (PG) MILITARY WIVES (12A) Is Buster Keaton (1895-1966) still funny?

I only chuckled once in The Great Buster, a charming documentary written and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. (The release is delayed, thanks to the virus.)

But I could see that he was funny at the height of his fame, particularly in his greatest films, Sherlock Jr (1924) and The General (1926). Then the talkies arrived, in the shape of The Jazz Singer, in 1927, and destroyed Buster’s career.

He was the son of vaudeville actors: his father performed with Harry Houdini in the Keaton Houdini Medicine Show Company. Little Buster’s role was to be thrown around stage by his father – literally: he had a handle sewn into his clothes for easier child-throwing.

That brutality stood him in good stead. When he became an adult star, he executed pratfalls with extraordinary skill and strength: most famously in the scene where a house façade falls on top of him, leaving him unscathed as he passes

through an open window. How bravely he somersaulted down steep hills or grabbed a passing car at full tilt. He broke his neck in one stunt and didn’t find out for years.

His other gift was his deadpan expression; his nickname was the Great Stoneface. Combined with his anxious eyes, this made him understandably funny in the ’20s, when so many fellow comedians were gurning and grinning.

Paul Merton, who presented the preview screening I saw, said his deadpan comedy was partly inspired by Buster. Merton realised that, when he told a joke, ‘If I didn’t find it funny, it would be funnier.’

And it’s near-impossible to judge silent movies through the prism of 90 years of talkies. Take sound away from films today, and they’d fall apart.

Silent movies weren’t in fact silent either – they had a musical soundtrack, played live in the cinema, which made all the difference. Watch a silent movie with no sound at all and it loses power.

And it must have the right sort of background music. Merton remembered seeing a Charlie Chaplin film at the Imperial War Museum to a modern soundtrack of drum and bass – pure agony.

Sad eyes say so much: Buster Keaton and Kristin Scott Thomas 68 The Oldie Spring 2020

Buster’s life after the talkies followed a classic movie arc. His own early talkies were no good; two marriages fell apart; his fees collapsed; he turned to drink. But then, in his sixties, he had a late-life comeback, starring in films and adverts, and contracted a happy third marriage.

When he attended the Venice Film Festival in 1965, a year before his death, he had a ten-minute standing ovation – the longest in the Festival’s history. How uplifting – and how right – that The Great Buster won the Best Documentary on Cinema at the 2018 Festival. And Buster died playing bridge – is there a better way to go?

Military Wives has been out for some time now. It’s worth seeing – if you can see it through a semi-permanent veil of tears.

Has there ever been a better actress at getting the tear ducts working in overdrive than Kristin Scott Thomas? Who can forget her dead straight, heart-wrenching tearjerker of a line in Four Weddings and a Funeral, when she confesses to Hugh Grant that she loves him? ‘You, Charlie.

It’s always been you, since first we met.’

Here she plays Kate, the colonel’s stiff-upper-lipped wife in the Tattersall shirt and bodywarmer, trying to get together a choir of soldiers’ wives, to the backdrop of the Afghanistan War. At moments of deep sadness – and there are plenty here: Kate’s son has been killed in the war – Scott Thomas knows that less is more; that restraint of emotion is more effective than its indulgence. When she flips those big green eyes open to full beam and then looks down and sideways, lips pursed to hold in her tears … mine came flooding out. As the credits went up, I heard a great big snuffle behind me as another cinemagoer lost control.

The posters declare Military Wives to be the ‘feelgood film of the year’. It’s really the ‘feelsad film of the year’ – and I mean that as a compliment.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE NICH0LAS LEZARD UPSTART CROW Gielgud Theatre As I was sitting almost stony-faced in the stalls of the Gielgud (now closed due to the virus – please consult the theatre website for production updates) while all around me the audience exploded with mirth, I tried to account for my mood.

I was a little unwell, but then I had been so the previous evening, when I had binge-watched, with increasing delight, the first series of the TV show that this play is a version of.

Written by Ben Elton and starring David Mitchell, it came out in 2016, and was a comic, very Blackadderish take on Shakespeare’s genius, and if it looked as if it wanted to be Blackadder then that was fine, because Ben Elton wrote both, and writers are allowed to rip themselves off.

So I went back home and watched the second series, to see if I had gone off the whole idea of the show. Nope: the second series was, if anything, even better than the first: beautifully written, tight as a drum, with jokes so good and clever, and delivery so perfect that at times I was crying with laughter – and, once or twice, with more complex tears, for at times the show dares poignancy, and achieves it.

I suppose part of the stage show’s problem is that it’s more or less criticproof. (The title comes from the very fact that Shakespeare was called ‘an upstart crow’ by his contemporary, the critic Robert Greene.) Look at the wall of the Gielgud, and look at all the five-star reviews. I’ve never seen so many.

So I was really looking forward to seeing the play. It had David Mitchell in it. It was written by Ben Elton. Several of the other stars from the TV show resume their roles on stage. What could possibly go wrong?

The play opens on to bare, woodpanelled walls: like the series, the stage show makes a virtue of its cheapness.

An African princess is washed up on shore (the sea being a gloriously cheesy blue sheet being manipulated in the wings). She makes her way to London and … look, there’s really no point in following the plot. It’s a mash-up of Twelfth Night, A Comedy of Errors, Othello, The Winter’s Tale and just about every convention of Shakespearean stagecraft that Elton can cram in. There’s a dancing bear, Mr Whiskers, who is a big hit with the audience, and is brought on to supply Shakespeare with his most famous stage direction. You know the one I mean.

Plenty of Will power: Kate (Gemma Whelan) and Shakespeare (David Mitchell)

The whole thing is very silly, you might think, when you notice that Dr John Hall (Mark Heap)’s codpiece gets bigger and bigger with each scene – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a lot of Getting Back at Shakespeare in this, and that’s entirely understandable.

For Shakespeare unites a nation in frustration at the fact that the greatest writer in all human history wrote plays that went on for hours, and not only that, but in Elizabethan English.

Actors and writers have to study him; even more so than everyone else. But the show, both TV and stage, always keeps in mind the fact that Shakespeare is great; and when, in Act 2, a five-minute scene from Othello is done straight, the audience is silent and reverent. That this was the highlight of the evening is telling.

But let’s concentrate on David Mitchell. It’s his show, and the stage feels empty when he’s not on it. Amazingly, this is his first West End role, and he throws himself into it. There is something hugely generous about this.

He is one of the great adornments of the age, and we should be grateful to have him.

His schtick, as we all know, is vigilant and occasionally appalled selfawareness; and you’d think that, after 25 years or so, this could get exhausting, or exhausted. But it doesn’t look like that: not only do we not tire of him, but he doesn’t tire of himself, because he started tired. (Actually, I begin to think he’s the Greatest Living Englishman, or at least our most beloved comedian, Stephen Fry having handed over the crown.)

Mitchell is superb, of course, as Shakespeare: he plays Shakespeare as David Mitchell – the tetchy littleEnglander grump who knows he’s brilliant but has been condemned to live in a country where people who are brilliant are routinely put down, in one way or another, by almost everyone they meet.

But the play, lacking the disciplined format of the 30-minute episode, fails to ignite in the way the TV show does. Here, then, is a lesson in the anti-magic of theatre. Mitchell has to deliver all of his lines forte, because otherwise you won’t hear him, and this means much of his nuance is missing. And the audience doesn’t care, because – look!

It’s David Mitchell! And Mr Whiskers, the dancing bear!

RADIO VALERIE GROVE Once again, the news dominates life.

Isolated within our domain by our bossy, panic-inducing young – several days before the government locked us all down – we echo the Eumenides’ chorus in T S Eliot’s play The Family Reunion: ‘There is nothing at all to be done about it./ There is nothing to do about anything./ And now … we must listen to the weather report/ And the international catastrophes.’

‘It’s amazing,’ said Tom Sutcliffe, ‘how disruptive a particle one-fiftieth the size of a human blood cell can be.’ Opening Start the Week, he told us that one guest, James Shapiro, was stuck in America. And, The Oldie Spring 2020 69

by the time you read this, if we’re spared (as grannies used to say), many more programmes will have been similarly disrupted. The subject is inescapable.

‘Age, ageing and mortality laid its hand on much of the radio output this week,’ said Jake Yapp, making his Pick of the Week. How true. Suddenly every programme invited the views of a self-isolating oldie. ‘I’m depending on Radio 4 to cheer us up,’ chirped Esther Rantzen,79, on The World at One (on the Ides of March). Give us laughter, she implored Mark Mardell: ‘Lots more P G Wodehouse, and Martin Jarvis reading Just William’ (which they did the following day, combining the two: Jarvis’s Jeeves and Wooster.) Joan Bakewell, 86, had chin-up advice – ‘I belong to a Good Neighbours app’ – while Norman Lamont, 77, sagely advised the Any Questions audience that time spent alone yields self-knowledge.

Michael Rosen objected on Today to being constantly reminded he was ‘old’ at 73. ‘Is it overkill?’ asked his companion Eithne O’Sullivan. ‘Or is it – kill?’

Anyway, she added, at 78 she could hardly call it premature if she did die.

But then along came angry David Blunkett (72) on Jeremy Vine’s phone-in on Radio 2, to say how dare they lump him with ‘the old and vulnerable’ when he is fit as a flea, out walking his dog every day? ‘And if I’m stuck inside,’ he added, ‘for God’s sake, play us something more melodious than that’ – Vine had just played Stupid Love by Lady Gaga. I wonder if Lord Blunkett had heard, earlier on Today, someone called Mr Motivator (66) instructing over-70s how to get up out of their chairs. The cheek.

If incarceration and the cancellation of social gatherings risk rendering one a slippered pantaloon (forbidden even to babysit one’s grandchildren), they also offer unexpected richesses of guilt-free spare time. Tennis! The garden!

I’d spent my first lockdown day delving into old BBC tapes, seeking a programme about the Black Death – far more gruesome than COVID-19.

In Our Time did it in 2008: you can get it on BBC Sounds. Graphic but disappointingly unenlightening, I thought: I never found out why the causes of bubonic plague were not uncovered until 600 years later.

But how youthful the Bragg voice sounded, 12 years ago. On Desert Island Discs, Dorothy Byrne, head of Channel 4 News, chose the voice of Bragg as her castaway luxury. ‘If I can’t sleep, I put on Melvyn Bragg. His voice has got a certain sound to it,’ she said, ‘and I just float away...’

70 The Oldie Spring 2020

It is the voice of Glenda Jackson I want to praise. In Sitwell in Scarborough, she played Dame Edith returning home to Renishaw, confronting her childhood self in sharply intelligent, no-nonsense tones.

As a child, Edith was known as Dish, which was how her little brother Osbert pronounced her name. A plain child with a bent spine and a crooked nose, she was tortured into painful leg-irons, corset and nose-brace – and never forgave her parents for it. Good to have Glenda, former Oldie of the Year (for her King Lear), again enjoying her true métier after her time as an MP. How powerless is a politician, after all, compared with a virus?

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS ‘My idea of Hell,’ said Anita Brookner, ‘would be Ambridge. Quiz Night at the Bull, the ultimate punishment.’

Having lived two decades in the Herefordshire Balkans, I fully concur. I was so bored I thought I was dead.

The brilliance of This Country, therefore, is that blissful comic capital was mined by Daisy and Charlie Cooper from rural claustrophobia, where there is nothing to do save look forward to the scarecrow festival, vintage steam fair or annual duck race. An afternoon may be killed getting a pound coin out of the drain with a magnet. The setting is the Cirencester environs, where they still rely on dial-up internet and Fred West is remembered fondly as a reliable builder.

Kerry and Kurtan Mucklowe, whose days the cameras dwell upon, follow a cat around the village, try to avoid Mandy, the village psycho, bicker about whose turn it is to have use of the top shelf in the oven, and wonder if there may be a

Right royal farce: Vicki Pepperdine as Princess Anne in The Windsors

job going in Halfords in Stroud. Kurtan thought about doing a GNVQ course in Swindon, but was dissuaded by something called pesto on the cafeteria menu. Kerry, having been a pet babysitter, is sacked from the local recycling dump after she purloins a discarded foot spa.

Now and again, the characters bump into the vicar, who is always trying to maintain his jollity, wanting everyone to like him. There’s also Len, a disgusting pensioner, and June, the busybody, who complains about ‘scuffage’ on her lawn-sprinkler. Though there is no musical accompaniment, the soundtrack is loud with sweet birdsong. There are lingering shots of hedgeless, bleak fields, pylons receding to infinity, rancid caravans and dual carriageways with petrol stations.

Celeste Dring, who plays Kayleigh, Kurtan’s subnormal girlfriend, without strain plays Princess Eugenie in The Windsors. Clearly the peasantry in This Country have much in common with royalty: everyone is a genial idiot with little inclination actually to earn a living.

The Royal Family expect a free life of luxury, and hard work might entail hosting parties for Arab businessmen, wearing uniforms, attending Bond premières, opening leisure centres and visiting Hitler in Argentina in the Sixties.

In The Windsors, Meghan is always going on about ‘self-actualising’, and Kate is happy to be a demure baby machine, ‘conformist and robotic’.

The entire thing is more plausible than The Crown, and my bet is that the Palace much prefers it. Harry Enfield, with red cheeks, is the Prince of Wales, who has waited so long to ascend the throne he has gone slightly bonkers.

Haydn Gwynne is simply wonderful as a Camilla who has turned into Cruella de Vil, knocking back the whisky and laying plots like a panto Plantagenet.

The evillest woman on telly in ages was Imelda Staunton in Flesh and Blood.

Her face scrubbed, her eyes beady and tiny, she was the poisonous next-door neighbour, always popping in unannounced, steaming open the post, poking through bedroom drawers, fiddling with the contents of the medicine cabinet. It was hardly a surprise, therefore, when she was unmasked as the villain, who’d tried to smother Stephen Rea when he fell off a balcony and landed in the rockery.

All the characters, indeed, were obnoxious. Rea was a creepy ex-surgeon who’d seduced newly widowed Francesca Annis; and her grasping children, their inheritance imperilled, weren’t having

Ed McLachlan

‘And now I’d like you to give a warm welcome to our latest superhero – Manman’

McDonald and Dodds is not going to make him the next John Thaw, despite this being a cerebral cop show, with Bath instead of Oxford. Watkins was the eccentric whom everyone begrudged, but of course he always cracked the case.

Robert Lindsay was a thumping crook.

As we live in a right-on politically-correct era, those in the cast who weren’t black seemed to be gay, ie over-groomed.

Watkins, it occurs to me, should be the new Poirot, when the Suchet shows inevitably get to be remade.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE ROLL ON, BEETHOVEN – AT 250 Handel was the first composer to write a series of masterpieces that have remained in the repertory since the day they were first performed.

But his achievement is as nothing compared with that of Ludwig van

AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY

any of it. Russell Tovey, the son, was a gigolo, Claudia Blakley, the daughter, was a cow in charge of an NHS trust, making doctors redundant, and Lydia Leonard, the other daughter, stalked her boss and wanted to have his babies.

I remember Francesca Annis when she was Elizabeth Taylor’s handmaiden in Cleopatra. She’s still an attractive woman, despite going in for these spaniel clumps of hair on either side of her head.

I do wish, however, that we hadn’t needed to see her jogging along the shingle beach and generally making efforts to keep fit. It always annoys me, the elderly taking exercise. What’s the point? The months or years gained will only be spent staring into space in a care home. They should be setting an example, smoking and drinking, not watching their weight. When Francesca’s character started having funny turns, I had no sympathy.

Much as I revere Jason Watkins,

Beethoven, the fiery young piano virtuoso from Bonn who caught Vienna by the ears in the early 1790s, before going on to create a body of music – symphonic, instrumental, chamber and choral – that would not only remain in the repertory but help feed and sustain it for the next two centuries.

But what of this year’s 250th anniversary of his birth and the wall-towall coverage it’s currently receiving? Do we need it? And, if we do, who exactly was ‘Lovely Ludwig van’, as Alex the teenage tearaway in A Clockwork Orange calls him?

It’s clear from the very first chord of his very first symphony, premièred in Vienna in April 1800, that here’s a man who needs to be listened to. ‘Now sits Expectation in the air,’ as the Chorus cries in Henry V. Yet just two years later, this prodigiously gifted entertainer found himself drawing on Stoic philosophy and faith in the divine to banish thoughts of suicide and teach himself patience in face of the certain knowledge that he was going deaf. After that, all his music was created from within, beginning with his Third Symphony, the Eroica, which changed the face of symphonic music for ever.

The philosopher Susanne Langer defined tragedy as self-consummation and comedy as ‘an image of human vitality holding its own in the world amid the surprises of unplanned coincidence’.

We find both in Beethoven, most readily in the 32 piano sonatas which he wrote between 1796 and 1822. As with Shakespeare’s output, all the essentials of human experience are here, and approachably so. Even with works as seemingly abstruse as the late string quartets, the man in the street never doubted what the music meant. But, then, who could not be moved by

Ludwig van fan: Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), A Clockwork Orange (1971) The Oldie Spring 2020 71

PENNIE SMITH

something like the cavatina of the Op 130 Quartet, over which Beethoven is said to have wept as he wrote?

Mozart’s music came to him fully formed. Not so Beethoven’s. His genius for saying surprising things and saying them with complete cogency, as Leonard Bernstein memorably put it, cost him dear. He battled with his sketched-out ideas, just as Michelangelo battled with his marble. ‘Myself I must remake,’ writes Yeats in a late poem, summoning up the spirit of ‘that William Blake/Who beat upon the wall/Till Truth obeyed his call’. Beethoven was another such beater on walls.

Yet the man who created the titanic Fifth Symphony also created the Apollonian Fourth; just as the man who loosed the Seventh Symphony upon the world also gave us his own first great ode to joy, the matchless idyll that is the Pastoral Symphony.

‘Joy’ was a key word for Beethoven.

‘Oh Providence – grant me at last one day of pure joy,’ he wrote in 1802. But what kind of joy? Joy in its roistering, capover-the-windmill sense, or what Wordsworth called ‘the deep power of joy’ that enables us ‘to see into the life of things’? Beethoven celebrated both.

Wordsworth was also born in 1770 – the anniversary falls on 7th April, as Frances Wilson reminds us in this issue – and I’m surprised so little has been made of the two men’s shared vision.

Like Wordsworth, Beethoven loved nature with a fervour that overtopped everything. And, like Wordsworth, he evokes not so much the landscape as the relationship between landscape and the conscious mind. ‘More the expression of feeling than painting’ is how he describes his Pastoral Symphony.

A strong feeling for the sublime was also common to both men – not something the English necessarily relish.

Yet understanding Beethoven’s powerful sense of a force or forces beyond ourselves – intimations, present in the Pastoral Symphony, that reach their apogee in the Missa Solemnis and the central meditation of the finale of the Ninth Symphony – is vital to understanding how far he travelled spiritually and philosophically during his 56 years.

In this Easter season, I always think of his penultimate piano sonata, Op 110, and the recitative, arioso and fugue that make up its latter half. Alfred Brendel calls it Passion Music: betrayal, crucifixion and resurrection. This transcendence-seeking motion was of its time; Goethe called it ‘The Fall upwards’.

Wordsworth has it, too, in the closing 72 The Oldie Spring 2020

pages of The Prelude, as he climbs Snowdon at night, ascending through the darkness until he moves above the clouds into a radiant, moonlit landscape.

There was nothing of the cockeyed optimist about Beethoven. He knew that life on earth is no picnic. He often says as much in his music. But the life force within him was that of a true visionary.

In an age increasingly in hock to the babblings of the crisis industry, we probably need him more than ever.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON MY CLASH WITH BORIS I felt old for the first time the day Joe Strummer died, in 2002.

The Clash were the soundtrack to my youth. London Calling, the seminal 19-track double album – hailed by Rolling Stone and NME as the album of the seventies AND the eighties, now pimped with its own show at the Museum of London – was released in 1979.

The Clash turned me and my siblings into public-school punks.

As I was at day school, I could more easily pose and pogo around the many pubs and dives of Ladbroke Grove – the band members lived around there – with spiky, gelled hair and black nail varnish, whereas my brothers tragically had only Eton High Street.

The Clash was Our Band. In 1985, I was driving through Spain with my brother and we had one cassette (well, three – Sandinista was a triple album) between us.

All our stuff had been nicked in Madrid on our first day, along with our camping stuff and the first-aid

kit – everything right down to Boris’s stinking espadrilles).

We started arguing about who the lead singer was: I maintained it was Paul Simonon; he maintained it was Joe Strummer.

My refusal to give in annoyed him so much that he pulled over the yellow Ford Fiesta, on some autovia in Andalucia, and asked me to get out of the car. We stood on the hard shoulder. I wasn’t sure why. Then he thumped me.

‘It’s JOE STRUMMER,’ he hissed, ‘OK?’ I have never held this against him. I said, ‘You can’t be right because you’re not cool – AND I AM!’ So I deserved all I got.

When he was Spectator editor, I was trying to get three infants upstairs to bed and the telephone rang. ‘Joe Strummer wants to say hello,’ Boris said with a note of glee.

I couldn’t breathe. I’d seen him play live only once, at the Brixton Academy in 1984, and by then the Clash were trying to put the fizz back into the bottle. But still. Strummer was our hero!

‘I hear you’re something of a fan,’ an amused voice drawled, to me in Brussels in 1998. And then he died.

The diligent rock critic now has to go to the exhibitions (like the ones on David Bowie and Pink Floyd) as well as concerts. This is the first show I’ve been to that’s devoted solely to one band’s one album.

If you’re into the Clash, and lots of people are, not all of them related to me, it’s vaut le voyage.

There is the very guitar Simonon smashed on stage (that made the cover image of London Calling) and Strummer’s battered white brothel creepers.

All of it made me feel even older – but happy that at least I was young and trying to be cool at the same time as my local heroes of British punk.

The Clash in 1979: Joe Strummer, Topper Headon, Paul Simonon, Mick Jones

The genius of genus humile: Cranach’s Portrait of a Lady and Her Son (1510-40), oil on panel

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU CRANACH, ARTIST AND INNOVATOR

ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST

Compton Verney (temporarily closed due to the virus) Philip Melanchthon, the Lutheran reformer and philosopher, graded the three greatest German 15th- and 16thcentury painters as genus grande (Dürer), genus mediocre (Grünewald) and genus humile (Cranach).

This did not mean that Cranach (1472-1553) was a humble man, or even a painter of low subjects, but his art was unambitious, especially when set against the aesthetic of Renaissance Italy.

In fact, he was extremely successful, both socially, being ennobled as court painter to the Electors of Saxony, and commercially, running a workshop and producing too much. There were many copies by his son and followers.

It is as well to have some understanding of the Reformation politics and religion – essentially the same thing – that formed his art.

Cranach was a friend and passionate

supporter of Luther, and his are the first true Protestant paintings. Most saints, other than the Apostles, were no longer acceptable subjects, and Mary was shown principally as a mother, rather than as the Queen of Heaven.

Mythology replaced Catholic imagery, allowing for seductive nudity in the form of pagan goddesses.

These are among the first painted ladies, who attempt to seduce us directly as well as their companions in the pictures. Some of Cranach’s figures and portraits, especially the women, may seem a little naïve at first glance, but that is deceptive; they are full of strength and character.

‘Has this rhubarb been forced?’

The core of this show, organised in association with the National Gallery, is Compton Verney’s own Cranachs: a Venus and Cupid, the Portrait of Sigmund Kingsfelt and a Lot and His Daughters, together with loans from the NG and other national institutions. As usual nowadays, his influence on modern and contemporary artists is explored.

The Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain provoked irritation and hilarity by ‘woke’ labelling.

As a cutting found in my first edition of Salome shows, Victorian critics were less mealy-mouthed: ‘We noticed Mr Oscar Wilde’s Salome when it first appeared in the original French version.

We have now to notice a fantastic and extraordinary volume entitled Salome: A Tragedy in One Act, translated from the French of Oscar Wilde; pictured by Aubrey Beardsley. The translation is the work of Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas [Oscar Wilde’s lover], as we learn from a dedication prefixed by the author.

‘To our thinking, this very unattractive tragedy is even less attractive in its English rendering than it was in the original French. As for the illustrations

by Mr Aubrey Beardsley, we hardly know what to say.’

The Oldie Spring 2020 73

Pursuits

HENRY ARTHUR PAYNE

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER ROSES GO NATIVE ‘Introduced from another country’ and ‘alien’: those two definitions of ‘exotic’ are familiar to gardeners everywhere.

Is exoticism eternal? And if not – plants of course being seen differently from human beings – how long might it take for a vegetable incomer (en- or discouraged) to claim native status?

Few plants seem more at home in an English garden than roses, yet only a few – Shakespeare’s eglantine (the sweet briar, Rosa rubiginosa), for example, and the burnet rose of Pembrokeshire (R pimpinellifolia) are deemed truly native.

Another, our familiar hedgerow dog rose (R canina), once had quaint medicinal functions, according to Geoffrey Grigson, when ‘used against a hundred ills, from St Anthony’s Fire [ergotism, a hot, bright red skin infection common in the Middle Ages] to the French pox [syphilis]’.

Earlier still, roses were sufficiently well settled in our soil and mindsets to enable the Houses of Lancaster and York to be represented by them – red and white respectively, supposedly plucked in Temple Gardens in London (pictured).

The question remains, though: whence came these prickly bushes? Did an ancient wind or wave ferry their seeds from afar?

I’m seldom distanced from Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora of 1955, a ‘repository of magical ideas’, full of fascinating tallies of beautiful, intriguing, poetic, sometimes puzzling, occasionally confusing and easily lost or forgotten, regional and vernacular plant names.

I wouldn’t want to see or join a fight between sole collectors of either the native or the exotic. My largely exotic collection of woodies is skilfully ‘nursed’ by many British natives – principally silver birch (Betula pendula). They grow fast, have attractive gnarled bark – even as

juveniles – and their minuscule seeds provide life-saving winter foraging for flocks of long-tailed tits. Importantly, birch shade is dappled, less dense than that thrown by other commoners such as oak, sycamore, chestnut, beech and lime, so other plants can thrive in its understorey.

I also nurture two species of native cherry: Prunus padus (bird cherry or hackberry) and P avium (the gean, Housman’s ‘lovliest of trees’). Both wear ‘white for Eastertide’ (Housman again), the first sporting several-inch-long racemes of clustered flowers, the other exhibiting corymbs of up to six individual blossoms bunched together like miniature single roses – appropriately, as cherry trees, botanically, belong to the rose family.

The fruits of both – botanists call them drupes – are small and beloved of many garden birds, often before they are fully ripened. Our dogs mindlessly truffle fallen ones, oblivious of their tiny amounts of cyanide (the same flavourgiving chemical compound found in almonds), and so we try not to linger in the grove in that season.

Human fatalities from overeating bitter almonds (the nuts of P dulcis) are not unknown. While both our wild cherries are British natives, they are also

Plucking the Red and White Roses in the Old Temple Gardens, Henry Payne, 1910

found throughout mainland Europe, across Asia and in cooler parts of North Africa. The bird cherry also lodges in Japan, a country famed for outrageously beautiful cultivated flowering cherries.

Of lesser stature, the wayfaring tree (Viburnum lantana) inhabits British woods and hedgerows – and, indeed, our garden.

Spring displays of creamy-white flowers are followed by red berries (whoops! more poison) in autumn, finally ripening to a deathly-looking stay-away black.

The wayfarer’s kin, the guelder rose (V opulus) gave Grigson a delightful flight of fancy: ‘Get [the flowers] close and they smell like crispy-fried, well-peppered trout [his wife, remember, was a cookery writer], if you can imagine that trouty, peppery smell with a touch of sweetness.’

Native trout, presumably.

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD SPRING ONIONS/CHIVES Spring onions for spring. How very appropriate; though, to have them ready this month, the seeds should have been sown in September. However, if they are sown now and then every fortnight until June, there should be spring onions to be pulled throughout the summer months, maturing about nine weeks from sowing.

These members of the allium family – also known as salad onions and scallions, especially by Americans – require little attention. They should not need thinning, provided the seeds have been well-spaced, and are suitable for growing in a pot or a windowbox. Downy mildew is the only potential problem; you can best avoid it by not overcrowding the plants and keeping the soil free of weeds. White Lisbon is the most popular variety of spring onion, quick to mature and mild in flavour; Kaigaro is said to be resistant to disease; and Apache, The Oldie Spring 2020 75

somewhat predictably, is red-skinned.

Welsh onions, and the weird-looking tree onions, also called Egyptian walking onions, are of the same family as spring onions. But chives are the closest, and most useful, relative: the green parts of spring onions are similar in taste to the chives’ thin, green stems. Chives can be grown from seed but the better option is to buy and plant a clump and then divide it in autumn.

The great advantage of chives is that, once established, they keep going, year after year, requiring only to be cut back when they produce purple-flowering heads (which will also happen with spring onions if they’re left in the ground). In my experience, chives are fit to be cut and used between the end of January and November, with a dormant period of little more than ten weeks.

I expect to continue enjoying our garden chives for as long as I can bend down to cut them. When I lived in the village of Chieveley in Berkshire, I was told that it was so named because the Romans planted quantities of chives there. True or not, the wild chives began appearing every winter on the roadside and the field edges.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD PASCHAL LAMB Easter Sunday without roast lamb used to be unthinkable. Not any longer. The rise of vegetarianism among the nation’s youth presents something of a challenge when you’re planning a traditional Sunday roast with all the trimmings.

Tread carefully with a slow-cooked pistache provençale for the meat-eaters and a whole roast cauliflower for the veggies that’ll double up as a side dish.

Pot-roast lamb with 50 cloves of garlic The Provençal way with the Easter lamb is en pistache – anything cooked in a closed pot with loads of garlic. Choose garlic heads with juicy cloves and soft rather than papery skins. Serves 4-6

ELISABETH LUARD

Unboned lamb shoulder (about 4½lb) 50 garlic cloves (about 5 heads), skinned 2 tbsps olive oil or goose fat 150ml white wine Bouquet garni: thyme, rosemary, bayleaf, parsley 1 curl dried (or fresh) orange zest Salt and pepper Wipe over the lamb shoulder and make about 20 small incisions all over with the point of a knife. Shove a garlic sliver into 76 The Oldie Spring 2020

each incision. Place the joint in a casserole into which it fits neatly, season with salt and pepper, trickle with oil or goose fat, tuck in the bouquet garni and pack the remaining garlic cloves into the spaces. Add the wine and enough water to come two-thirds of the way up the meat.

Lid tightly and transfer to the oven at 350°F/180°C/Gas 4.

After 30 minutes, reduce the heat to 300°F/150°C/Gas 2, check and add more boiling water if necessary, and leave to cook for another hour or so, until the meat is perfectly tender and the garlic melted and soft. Serve with flageolets or haricots to soak up the garlicky juices.

Spiced roast cauliflower This is the star of the menu at abcV, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s fashionable restaurant in downtown Manhattan. Do experiment with seasonings and finishings.

Serves 2 as a main course, 6 as an accompaniment 1 large, firm cauliflower (about 1kg trimmed weight) 4 tbsps olive oil zest and juice of 2 lemons 2-3 garlic cloves, slivered 1 tsp crushed peppercorns sea salt Finishing dressing 2 tbsps olive oil 1 fresh bird’s-eye chilli, de-seeded and finely sliced 1 lemon, zest and juice 1 tbsp honey or maple syrup 2 tbsps capers, drained (or rinsed if salt-cured) 2 tbsps toasted pine nuts or slivered almonds generous handful fresh herbs (cilantro, mint, parsley), chopped Slice off the cauliflower stem so that the base sits flat, cut a cross in the stalk and hollow it out a little, then place in a roomy pan with enough cold, salted water to come halfway up. Bring to the boil, drain immediately and pat dry.

Rub the cauliflower generously with olive oil. Make a few slits with a knife and push in the garlic slivers. Trickle with lemon juice and zest. Salt and pepper.

Roast at 350°F/180°C/Gas 4 for 45-50 minutes till the curds have taken a little colour and the inside is nearly soft – test with a knife. Loosen the florets a little and baste with the pan-drippings, salt, pepper, oil and lemon juice. Return to the oven for 15 minutes till prettily browned.

Meanwhile, prepare the finishing dressing: warm the olive oil in a small pan with the spices and chilli. Just before it bubbles, add lemon juice, zest, capers and honey. Pour the mixture over the cauliflower. Finish with the toasted nuts and a shower of chopped herbs.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE Sam’s Riverside, London W6 The Swan, Bampton, Devon Few plays are set in restaurants, and even fewer in a theatre with a wondrously raucous restaurant within the same building.

Love, Loss and Chianti was recently brought to the stage by Robert ‘Cold Feet’ Bathurst, and was an irrepressible double bill of two of the great Christopher Reid’s prose poems: one, A Scattering, about the loss of his wife; the other, The Song of Lunch, a tribute to the ‘truancy’ of a botched lunch with an old flame.

Our hero is a Grub Street irregular, hewn from the same Bloomsbury stone as The Oldie’s patron saint, the late Jeremy Lewis. He’s on a mission: ‘Sometimes, a man needs to go out on the rampage, throw conscientious timekeeping to the winds, help kill a few bottles – and bugger the consequences.’

He returns to his old haunt, Zanzotti’s, after a long gap, only to find all its old charms have vanished, not least the padrone, Massimo. The crew of familiar Italian waiters have been replaced by a mixed (and cold-hearted) bag, and the menu, once the haven of pollo alla sorpresa and other AngloItalian masterpieces, is now ‘a twanging, laminated card, big as a riot policeman’s shield’. Sadly, the show has just been cancelled but look out for it on its return after the church bells ring.

So there was double rejoicing as we strode into Sam’s Riverside, feeling the mighty buzz that only 1980s emporia like Rowley Leigh’s Kensington Place used to deliver unfailingly – no surprise, given that Rowley helped Sam Harrison launch the joint, and clearly sprinkled some fairy dust (and Parmesan churros) on the way out.

Every single dish was an unfussy winner: baked celeriac, grilled octopus, venison chop and duck. The waiter was completely engaged, albeit mostly with our Dorset friend Shanie, but he found time to pour us some Chianti, at just £28 a bottle.

There’s lots of glass and mirrors through which to spy on handsome young oldies or the river behind. This summer, there will be 40 seats outside. So if you’re smart, you’ll book a table outside for their set lunch followed by a matinée of Love, Loss and Chianti, before 17th May. The sign of a good country pub? They sell sweets. And champagne by the glass.

The Swan at Bampton does both: a local boozer with a brilliant chef. We were staying with friends who had just moved from London to Exmoor, only to find God’s own pub is on the doorstep. Our host made the classic DFL faux pas of greeting the landlord by his first name.

Only to get it crashingly wrong.

Fortunately, the Swan’s regulars were too busy to notice, owing to a rammed funeral wake for the town’s football coach.

In amongst the jolly mourners, the five of us shared starters brought to us by a fast and friendly waitress: crab, scallops and other local delights. Meanwhile, the misnamed landlord saw his target and offered us a delicious Barolo for just £35.

And another with our steak, ale and kidney suet pudding. Yes, suet – not a microwaved bit of pastry on an ovenproof beige bowl of lumpy meat, but an impervious suet pudding whose supernaturally heartening powers will act as the local coronavirus vaccine for those Rhett Butlers among you who will break the blockade.

Sam’s Riverside, 1 Crisp Walk, London W6 9DN; tel: 020 8237 1020; www. samsriverside.co.uk; 2-course lunch £19.50 The Swan, Station Road, Bampton, Devon EX16 9NG; tel: 01398 332248; www.theswan.co; suet pudding £13.95

DRINK BILL KNOTT TRIPLE MALT BEER When, in 2010, the Belgian brewer Duvel took over the famous old De Koninck brewery in Antwerp, the new owners decided to streamline their operations and bottle De Koninck’s beers at their modern plant 12 miles south of the city.

This left them with a lot of warehouse space. Rather than convert this into dream loft-style dwellings for Van Dyck-bearded Belgian hipsters, however, the Duvel family set about turning the old buildings

into a kind of gourmet’s theme park, the sort of place where I could happily while away a whole day. So I did.

It helps to like beer, of course. The Belgian palate for ale traditionally favours maltiness, strength and sometimes sourness over the pale, fragrant hoppiness of new-wave, American-style IPAs: fortunately, so does mine. The ‘brewery tap’ at De Koninck features the whole De Koninck range, including the punchy Tripel d’Anvers (8% ABV), a spicy, golden ale so called because it is made with three times the usual amount of malt.

Also on tap is the classic De Koninck, the amber pale ale that has flowed through Antwerp’s veins since 1833, always served in a fat, bowl-shaped glass called a bolleke, a giant, glitterball version of which is suspended from the towering ceiling. And there is invariably a beer from master brewer Sven Dekleermaeker’s secret cellar in the basement, converted from an old filtration plant.

Dekleermaeker’s current project is ageing Imperial Russian Stout – strong, sweet and dark – in old spirit barrels (calvados, cognac, even tequila) for nine months or so, to add another layer of complexity. In this, as I discovered, he is aided by Barry White: his greatest hits play continuously in his cellar; Dekleermaeker maintains (with a commendably straight face) that the Walrus of Love’s sonorous bass-baritone harmonises perfectly with the beer. The results bear him out: his gently peaty, whisky-cask-matured stout is full-bodied, fruity and richly resonant… Barry White in a glass.

Elsewhere in the various old brewery buildings is a superb cheese warehouse, Van Tricht, in which thousands of wheels of the world’s finest cheeses are matured; a butcher, Luc De Laet, who makes a sublime cured ribeye; a chocolatier, Jitsk, renowned for its pralines; and The Bakery, which makes terrific sourdough.

And two restaurants: the rooftop barbecue joint Black Smoke, and the Michelin-starred The Butcher’s Son, aimed squarely at nose-to-tail carnivores.

Antwerp, with her fine old merchants’ houses, the famously unfinished cathedral (it is missing a tower, but boasts three Rubens masterpieces), and Rubens’s house and studio, where Van Dyck was a pupil, is a great place for a short break at any time of year, and just a short hop by train from Brussels. And if you go during one of several annual beer festivals you'll be immersed in Belgian beer culture. The next one was due to be the Beer Passion Weekend, 19th to 21st June, staged in the city’s main square, and featuring more than 200 brews from all over Belgium.

Now that’s a load of bollekes.

Wine This month’s mixed case from DBM Wines comprises four bottles each of three wines: a multi-varietal white that is setting new standards for Valencian wine; a splendidly refreshing Galician white that would partner shellfish perfectly; and a ripe, juicy red from France’s deep south.

However, if you wish, you can buy 12 bottles of the individual wines.

Celler del Roure, Cullerot, DO Valencia, Spain 2018, offer price £12.49, case price £149.88 Made from a plethora of grape varieties and aged in amphorae. Richly flavoured and well structured.

Lagar Do Xestosa, Godello, DO Monterrei, Galicia, Spain 2018, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88 Crisp, citrus-spiked white from the north-west; unoaked, with added complexity from ageing on lees.

Casse Noix, Cabernet Sauvignon, IGP Pays d’Oc, Languedoc, France 2017, offer price £8.99, case price £107.88 100% Cabernet Sauvignon: dense, dark fruit with hints of cedar and spice.

One for the Sunday roast.

Mixed case price £129.88 – a saving of £22.99 (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 29th May 2020.

The Oldie Spring 2020 77

SPORT JIM WHITE JAILHOUSE COX – AND CREW As unlikely as it sounds, I took a trip to Brixton Prison recently to watch some competitive rowing.

In the gym, I found eight inmates sitting on indoor rowing machines, pulling with all their might. And they weren’t doing this in isolation. They were trying to outwit a bunch from HMP Woodhill, Milton Keynes, who were doing exactly the same thing.

It was a compelling sight: eight men in absolute concentration, hauling, sliding and sweating.

In between their machines walked their coach, the former world champion sculler Imogen Walsh, quietly encouraging them to keep up the collective effort. And they did, several of them falling to the floor after they had completed the distance, prostrate and panting.

What they were engaged in was a new scheme called Boats Not Bars, introduced into half a dozen prisons earlier this year.

It involves putting men on rowing machines and then linking them up via the internet to others doing the same elsewhere.

‘This is a sport where you are only as good as your weakest member – so it’s about encouraging them to pull together as a team,’ Jason Sweetenham, the Ministry of Justice official who dreamed up the idea, told me. ‘This is a behavioural intervention. We’re encouraging them to work collectively for mutual pride. If you like, we’re getting them to be in a positive gang. The response has been amazing.’

Sweetenham’s idea is that eventually all prisons will be linked up in a national rowing league. Furthermore, he is urging boat clubs to mentor prisoners when they are released and get them out on the water. His aim is for a boat full of ex-offenders one day to row at Henley.

‘These guys had never heard of rowing before this,’ he says. ‘And they’re loving it.’

Already three ex-inmates from Feltham Young Offenders Institution have been taken out on the water at Fulham Reach Boat Club on the Thames.

‘I was staggered by how good those guys were,’ Steve O’Connor of Fulham Reach told me. ‘Here’s a chance for us to reach whole new strata of talent.’

But what was intriguing, watching the Brixton Boat Club in full sway, was not so much what they could do for rowing as what rowing can do for them. The utter concentration and commitment shown by the participants was extraordinary.

Nobody faltered or backed down; all of them pressed ahead through the pain to reach the concluding strokes. And when 78 The Oldie Spring 2020

they had finished, the groans of relief and satisfaction fizzed across the room.

‘It’s given me discipline, this,’ said one of the club members, a sizeable lad in his mid-twenties, his arms covered in gang tattoos. ‘We’re all about keeping fit in here, but this is something else. When I’m on that machine, it is the only time in here when my head isn’t filled with negative thoughts.’

He added that when his sentence ends in the summer, he will definitely head to Fulham Reach to try his hand in a real boat. ‘It’s not something I even knew existed,’ he said. ‘Now I can’t wait.’

Clearly it won’t turn every wrongdoer into a model citizen overnight, but rowing could have a significant role to play. If nothing else, a competitive session calms its participants down and sends them back to their cells or work duties with their energy productively channelled and a valuable sense of collective achievement.

Those rowing machines in Brixton prison are doing a lot more than toning the biceps of those participating. They could be changing their lives.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD A BORROWER AND A LENDER BE I’m now in happy possession of my fourth loan car. Not one a dealer lends you while yours in being serviced. Nor a car from some optimistic, car-sharing neighbourhood scheme.

No – my loan cars have all been lent by friends who wanted someone to use them for 12 months while they couldn’t.

Or, in one case, to hide their car.

The first was a 1968 Bristol 410, an exclusive, two-door, four-seater tourer, powered by a 5,211cc V8. I’ve always coveted Bristols, the early ones for their svelte curvaceousness, the later (up to the 1970s 411) for their understated elegance. I loved that car. Mechanically simple and robust, a thoroughbred to drive, it made you feel special without attracting unwanted attention.

My friend bought it, but when he got it home his wife took against it because of an intermittent petrol smell (later cured

To the manor born: Lada saloon, 1974

– and anyway my friend likes the smell of petrol, as I do). She assumed he had it on approval and would return it the next day. He hadn’t the heart to tell her he’d done the deal, let alone what he’d paid for it, and so he asked me to hide it and drive it while he found a buyer. That took a year.

The second loan car was an early Mark 1 Mazda MX5 with pop-up headlights, which I looked after for a few months for a friend overseas. A battered old thing, left-hand drive with a galactic mileage, it was utterly reliable and a delight. I’ve never gone in much for sports cars, but if I were to it would be an MX5 – probably a Mark 1 with those cute pop-ups. My friend will never get rid of it. He wants to be buried in it.

The third loan was a Porsche Cayman.

That did everything it said on the tin but I couldn’t love it. In fairness to the car, it took me a while to get the point of Porsches – which is that the harder you drive them, the better they are. But it’s hard to drive hard on our rural lanes.

That won’t be a problem with the latest loan. When sold here, they were the butt of jokes: what do you call one on top of a hill? A miracle. What do you call one with a sunroof? A skip. Honest John, the Daily Telegraph’s renowned motoring agony columnist, reckoned the only good thing about them was their big toolkit. Reader, it’s a Lada.

Yes, the original Soviet article, a 1974 1,200cc saloon imported from Estonia, based on the 1960s Fiat 124, and in the 1980s form known as the Riva. The Russians gave it heavier-gauge steel to withstand their winters, a different engine and brakes and a raised, simpler suspension. For decades, it was the only car available to aspiring Russian motorists – you probably had to be in the nomenklatura to own one.

With 18 million sold (60 per cent exported), it’s arguably one of the most successful cars of all time, bettered only by the VW Beetle. Indeed, it was known as the Second World Volkswagen. Some 350,000 were sold here between 1977 and 1997, when emissions regulations put paid to them. But they were made until 2012.

Now they’re a minor motoring cult.

There are clubs – the Lada Enthusiasts’ Club and the wonderfully-named Unloved Soviet and Socialist Register (patron J Corbyn, surely?), whose members love these cars for their simplicity and repairability. Some say they’re reliable. Maybe they are. This one runs OK, but the brakes feel like blancmange – so it’s head-under-bonnet time. Except the bonnet catch is broken, so I can’t open it. I’ll report back.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Computers ignore the Hippocratic oath We all know that there is no such thing as a free lunch online. Google, Facebook, Twitter and others provide their services for nothing in return for placing adverts under our noses. As the saying goes, if you are not paying for a service, it’s because you are the product they are selling.

Most of us understand that nowadays and we make allowances.

Unfortunately, in January a much grubbier use of freely acquired data was revealed at the conclusion of some American court cases.

When you visit your doctor, the details

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

The map mania of King George https://militarymaps.rct.uk/ George III’s collection of 3,000 military maps, painstakingly digitised by the Royal Collection Trust. Includes Waterloo.

Watch TV you either missed or miss https://tvark.org TVARK is the online TV museum, a joy for nostalgia enthusiasts. Clips and pictures from all eras – and the collection is growing.

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

are recorded on a computer. Do you know what happens to those records? If it’s an NHS doctor, the rules are very strict, but that is not the case everywhere.

Practice Fusion is a website used by over 30,000 American doctors; it allows a medical practice to keep its records efficiently. Appointments, consultation records, prescribing, invoicing and so on are managed by it, and apparently managed well. Organising any surgery is notoriously challenging, and doctors were pleased that this website seemed to offer a solution.

Even better, it used to be free to use; the overheads were covered by advertising.

I imagine that advertisers are prepared to pay well to reach such a precisely-chosen and well-paid group of people.

Sadly, that wasn’t the end of it. The website’s squalid secret was that it took money to manipulate its software to encourage doctors to prescribe a particular manufacturer’s opioid painkillers.

It worked like this: doctors would use the website while they examined a patient, entering symptoms on each patient’s records. Once entered, the website, claiming to be providing unbiased medical opinion, would analyse the records and produce a ‘clinical decision support alert’ (a pop-up) suggesting a course of treatment, including appropriate drugs. From 2016 to 2019, this happened over 200 million times.

But that opinion was far from unbiased.

Practice Fusion has admitted that it sought and received payments from a major drug company in exchange for ensuring that the

alerts would favour that drug company’s products, thus increasing the number of prescriptions issued. Sometimes they even allowed the drug company to draft the wording of the alerts.

Their marketing approach was centred on improving the drug company’s sales; patients’ wellbeing does not seem to have been mentioned. Indeed, the US Department of Justice has said that these alerts ‘did not always reflect accepted medical standards’.

The local US Attorney described Practice Fusion’s conduct as ‘abhorrent’.

I can only agree. It’s also been a disaster for the respectable company Allscripts which bought Practice Fusion for $100 million in 2018 and must now cough up $145 million to resolve various court cases, including a $26m criminal fine.

Allscripts is one of the accredited suppliers of electronic patient record services to the NHS, by the way.

We should all be aware that the data revolution in the world of medicine (as elsewhere) is still in its infancy but is growing fast. This is usually to our benefit, but the Practice Fusion episode shows just how easily electronic health records can be manipulated for financial gain, rather than for the best care of patients.

I don’t believe new laws are needed. I think the old ones are fine, as Practice Fusion has discovered. But they do need enforcing. This is the first criminal action against one of the many similar records companies; I wonder if it will be the last.

It all makes my blood boil and run cold simultaneously, if that’s possible.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Bank fraud: be aware – be very aware Over Easter, standing orders and Direct Debits take a four-day holiday. Even though these regular bank transfers are done automatically by computer, they don’t happen on Bank Holidays or at weekends.

Bills you are due to pay, or money you expect to receive by standing order or Direct Debit, will not hit your account until the next working day, which over Easter is the following Tuesday.

Conversely, your state pension will be 80 The Oldie Spring 2020

paid early if it is due on Good Friday or Easter Monday. You will receive it on the Thursday before, Maundy Thursday.

Salaries too should be brought forward, but that is down to each individual employer’s making special arrangements.

Do not look for logic in the UK’s payments system. Standing orders go through the Faster Payments Sevice whereby money is transferred usually in seconds (though it can take up to two

hours). Either way, they operate only on working days, but a one-off payment through Faster Payments will leave, or arrive in, your bank account on any day of the year.

Direct Debits are paid through the Bacs system, which takes three working days.

The Faster Payments system has helped crooks steal hundreds of millions of pounds through the authorised push payment (APP) scam, tricking victims

into transferring money to fraudulent bank accounts. Because the money arrives in the fraudsters’ accounts so quickly, they can withdraw it before the victim realises what has happened.

A bigger help to APP scammers is the banks’ failure to check payee details properly. Astonishingly, until April 2020, banks checked only that the account number and sort code you gave matched the recipient’s details. If the name was different, payment still went through, even if the bank suspected it was fraud.

Very belatedly, banks have started confirming that payee names match.

Now the receiving bank tells the sending bank, who tells you if the names are the same. If they are, you must still confirm that you want to proceed. Payment will not be made automatically.

If the names are similar but not identical, you will be told the correct name and can change what you have written. But if the names are different, you are not told the name on the account.

Instead you need to check your information or contact the payee for a correct name if you still want to pay. This could, though, be a strong indication that you are dealing with a fraudster.

If you hear that confirmation of the

‘I’ve found people are generally good and will do just about anything to make you happy’

payee is unavailable, this is a warning to be extremely careful before you proceed.

Be aware that only the six largest banks initially agreed to the new namechecking procedure, though some smaller banks intend joining in. Also, it covers only banking by internet or telephone and Chaps transfers, not Bacs payments or Direct Debits.

Should you still agree to pay money

into what turns out to be a fraudster’s account, your bank is unlikely to refund you. It can claim you have been careless – and ‘careless’ is not defined. Banks have a voluntary agreement to refund careful customers caught by the APP scam, which is funded until 31st December.

Always be careful when transferring money: ultimately the onus is on you to get it right.

The Oldie Spring 2020 81

The Song Thrush

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd And after April, when May follows And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!

Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge – That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!

Robert Browning, from Home-Thoughts, from Abroad The ‘careless rapture’ of the well-named song thrush (Turdus philomelos) stops us in our tracks. Its voice carries and can be heard in darkest winter, save in the hardest weather, unlike the melodious blackbird’s; and both sing in town and country. ‘There is a thrush in Speaker’s Court,’ wrote Alan Clark in his diary for 15th June 1988, from the Palace of Westminster, ‘who sings goodnight so beautifully each evening. When I can, if I’m in my Commons office, I come upstairs to listen.

How could anyone shoot a songbird?’

Like the blackbird, the song thrush is an inventive singer, increasing its repertoire with age, and capable of incorporating snatches from other birds’ songs. Each phrase is repeated two or three times and a bird can have over 100 different phrases. Repetition means it sings a total of over a million phrases in a year.

BB wrote of one he listened to late into the dusk in his Northamptonshire garden: ‘He was singing out of sheer joy and wild delight in living’ (The Idle Countryman).

He also admired the beauty of their eggs, the nest lined with mud, at odds with the feathered softness most songbirds prefer.

‘It is a never-failing source of pleasure to see those lovely, azure, black-spotted eggs reposing in their mud casket (which should be lined with black velvet). For

they seem to me very like precious stones.’

As many as three clutches of up to five eggs between March and August have not saved the song thrush from a sorry decline – in the UK, by 54 per cent (1970-2010) – and it remains listed red for danger.

The latest Avian Population Estimates Panel (see British Birds, February 2020) registers a UK population of 1.3 million, while blackbirds number 5.55 million. It has been worst hit, like many other bird species, by intensive farming.

Gardeners value its taste for snails. It uses stone as an anvil for cracking shells.

On lawns, it cocks its head like the blackbird and stands still as if listening

for the worms. In fact, it is concentrating its gaze for surface movement. Worms can descend a foot underground when soil freezes; and snails then ‘lie up’, inactive, as they ‘overwinter’. Both events mean thrushes starve. Apples and pears, fallen or provided, are life-saving substitutes.

But it is the rapturous song that stirs the poets: ‘Here again, here, here, here, happy year!’

O warble, unchidden, unbidden!

Summer is coming, is coming, my dear, And all the winters are hidden.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Throstle The Oldie Spring 2020 83

Getting Dressed

Putting colour in David Bowie’s cheeks

DAFYYD JONES

Celia Philo has lived with David Bowie for decades, ever since she was involved in the production of his most famous album cover – the one for Aladdin Sane in which his face is painted with a red-and-blue lightning bolt.

At 25, not long out of art school, Philo was working for a graphic-design company in London when she met the Sixties photographer Duffy. He had just shot the pictures for a Pirelli calendar and was unhappy with the way the company had done the layout. But he liked Philo, who had just won the Design and Art Direction Award for another Pirelli calendar. He asked her to join him as co-designer in a tiny company he was setting up, Duffy Design Concepts.

Soon after this, he was commissioned to photograph Bowie and design Aladdin Sane. Just four of them worked on this cover: Duffy, Philo, Bowie and a make-up artist called Pierre LaRoche.

‘I remember quite distinctly that Pierre suggested they paint Bowie’s cheek with a small version of the lightning bolt that Bowie loved to put on everything – like a discreet tattoo. But Duffy said, “No, too small – paint it BIG.” ’ It was bold but they agreed – and made design history.

Soon after, Philo moved to France with her engineer husband. She had met and married him while still at art school – commuting to Maidstone by train every day, occasionally sharing a carriage with David Hockney or Quentin Crisp, who were her tutor and life model.

Their first child was born in Paris – an appropriate birthplace for baby Phoebe, who would become one of Silk shirt & trousers designed by, and white trainers popularised by, daughter Phoebe Philo

the world’s leading dress designers, working first as assistant to Stella McCartney and then as the creative director at Céline in Paris. She stepped down ten years later, in 2017. But, as I write this, the fashion world is feverishly speculating about Phoebe Philo’s next move. Is she about to start a new fashion venture? As an ex-fashion editor myself, I ask the same question – but Phoebe’s mum is keeping mum!

Celia is largely responsible for her daughter’s route to success, having given young Phoebe a sewing machine for her 14th birthday. ‘She was extraordinary: she’d come back from school with a bit of cloth she’d bought at the market and then run something up on the machine and go out that evening wearing it.’

When they returned from Paris, Phoebe was still a toddler and Philo spent the next few years working for an art dealer, taking time off as she added a brother and a sister to the family. Then she opened her own art gallery in Bond Street (‘Not as grand as it sounds – it was at the top of the building,’ she laughs).

It was then that she had an extraordinary piece of luck at a dinner.

She sat next to Bernard

DUFFY

Designer Celia Philo painted Quentin Crisp – and Bowie’s face brigid keenan

Celia Philo in 1973, when she worked with Duffy on Aladdin Sane (below)

Ashley (husband of Laura) and he asked her to help him with the collection of Edwardian art he was assembling for his new hotel in the Brecon Beacons. Philo had a blissful two years buying pictures for Asher and his Llangoed gallery. (After Sir Bernard’s death in 2009, the hotel and the collection were sold to a new owner, but the pictures are still there.)

Philo and her husband recently moved to Somerset to be near their daughters, who both live there. ‘All my creative juices have been used doing up the new house and grandmothering,’ she says.

Having a dress designer as a daughter is extremely handy. And Philo is as slim as a model and a great advertisement for her daughter’s clothes (and for those by Cos and Toast, her other favourites). ‘I eat anything and everything – so I guess it is in the genes. But I have put on weight since I turned 60 and occasionally when I catch sight of myself in a mirror at M&S or similar I don’t recognise the fat old woman approaching.’

Philo’s beauty regime is simple. She tints her hair with Garnier’s Olia (sometimes with a daughter’s help) and has it cut locally. Skincare has always meant just Nivea cream – ‘Apart from laugh lines around the eyes, the lines on my face only appeared when I turned 70 a couple of years ago. But, hey-ho, I would never dream of surgery or injections. Older faces are interesting, no?’

The Oldie Spring 2020 85

Travel My Holy Week in Israel When Joshua Levine flew over Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock and the site of Jesus’s resurrection still shone out prominently

BROKER/ALAMY/ PHOTOSTOCK-ISRAEL/ALAMY

A

s Easter approached, I was flown almost the entire length of Israel and Palestine (and across into Jordan) in a little light aircraft.

As it buzzed uncertainly along, I understood just how small Israel is, and how much of it is covered by stark, bare, uninviting desert. It is an environment in which only the most desperate would choose to settle.

We flew over two ancient sites – Qumran and Masada – settled by fugitives escaping Jerusalem. The Essenes of Qumran were Jews disgusted by the corruption of the Jerusalem Temple.

They fled the city 2,000 years ago to form an ascetic desert community. At Masada in around AD 72-73, Jewish rebels were besieged by the Romans. In their desert compound, the rebels chose to commit mass suicide rather than be taken.

The desert is now punctuated by Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements. The villages are poor, their flat-roofed buildings topped by water towers. The settlements might be gated communities in Florida, their pitched roofs capped with terracotta tiles. They sit at once together and apart, tied to the old stories. ‘Masada will not fall again!’ cry the settlers, the rebels’ heirs.

86 The Oldie Spring 2020

As we flew over Jerusalem, a golden cupola stood out. It caps the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine built over the rock from which Mohammed ascended to heaven. The site is also known as Mount Moriah, where King David set down the Ark of the Covenant and proclaimed his holy city. And on the same spot once stood the magnificent temples of Solomon and Herod, the base of which – the Western Wall – is Judaism’s holiest site. A few inches to the left, staring down

The Dome of the Rock, the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City

from the plane, I saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection.

I was awed by the influence of this thumbprint of land on the world. Down there is who we all are. Though I’m no longer religious, I mumbled the Shema, a Hebrew prayer. Partly out of habit. Partly because I still have no better method of expressing awe. And partly because I wish I could still pray and mean it.

I was here at the invitation of the sculptor Mark Coreth. Mark had recently carved a large bronze olive tree for the garden of St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital in the centre of the Old City.

Instead of leaves, the branches sprouted swifts, which nest happily in the holy sites of all three Abrahamic faiths.

Now Mark was leading a flight of eight small aircraft, containing Jews, Muslims and Christians, alongside the swifts’ annual migration path. A Jordanian general who negotiated the 1994 peace treaty sat with an astronaut recently returned from the International Space Station. An international expert on the behaviour of birds sat with a humanitarian adviser to the UN. Mark was carving ‘a message of hope and mutual respect’ above the Holy Land.

In the following days, I rediscovered

Christian crucible: Jesus’s tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Jerusalem. It isn’t really one city but four: the Jewish religious city, the Jewish secular city, the Arab city and the walled Old City.

Each of these is physically and spiritually separate, and no visit is complete without them all. A fifth city, the Heavenly City, is described in the Book of Revelation. It contains many features of the Garden of Eden and promises an end to suffering and death – but is no longer accessible.

From the air, the Old City appeared densely packed. On the ground it feels even more so. Divided into four quarters – Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Armenian – it is almost entirely resistant to change. Its walls have been built from the same golden limestone for over 3,000 years. Donkeys and zealots still pace its uneven, vehiclefree streets. A wooden ladder leaning against the Church of the Holy Sepulchre hasn’t been moved for at least 200 years. When Jesus returns, he will recognise the place.

He might recognise the people, too.

Every year, dozens of perfectly sane visitors are so overwhelmed by the city’s religious intensity that they begin to act

like Biblical characters. They preach in the streets, imagining themselves prophets and holy men. After a period of hospitalisation, they return to perfectly normal lives, having fallen victim to Jerusalem Syndrome, an officially recognised psychotic condition.

Jerusalem is so febrile that many visitors profess to hate it. But this is what fascinates me. As I watch Jews and Arabs and Christians jostling each other on the Via Dolorosa, they strike me as competitive members of a single family, despising one another for thinking ever-so-slightly differently about things that matter to nobody else. “You observe Sabbath on which day?”

The only time I’ve ever felt truly scared in Jerusalem was several years ago, when I accidentally drove into Mea She’arim, an orthodox Jewish area, on a Friday night, after the beginning of the Sabbath.

Men and boys dressed in unseasonal gabardines and fur hats began tossing rocks at my car. Not all exertion is forbidden on the Sabbath, apparently.

On the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I visited the Ethiopian Orthodox chapel. The Church is divided among the different Christian denominations – and the Ethiopians are clearly the poor relations. For centuries, they have been relegated to a tiny makeshift chapel with space for just three small wooden benches on either side of a narrow nave. I stood at the back during Mass – and listened to something that sounded remarkably like a synagogue service.

The service had been conducted in Ge’ez, a dead language similar to Hebrew.

The Ethiopian Church, it seems, is a 1,600-year-old throwback to a time when Jewish ritual was still morphing into Christian ritual.

Do visit the Israel Museum to fall back on some actual facts. The museum is unafraid of disproving (or, for that matter, confirming) Biblical stories.

While there, I became obsessed by a 2,000-year-old heel bone pierced by a rusty nail. This heel bone, belonging to a man named Yehohanan, is the only solid archaeological evidence of crucifixion discovered in the Roman world. Yet the exhibit on show is only a plastic copy: the Bible declares human remains to be a source of ritual impurity, and so the original isn’t on public view.

Towards the end, as my trip began to feel like a race to get home before the onset of Jerusalem Syndrome, I was grateful for my choice of guest-house.

The Austrian Hospice was an oasis of sanity in the Old City. Built in the 1850s for Austrian pilgrims, it was comfortable and inexpensive, serving unusually good coffee for Jerusalem. And it was an excellent base for wandering through the local shops.

The day before I left, I walked into a shop in the Jewish Quarter. The shopkeeper sized me up, before leaning under the counter and pulling out an aerial photograph of the Old City. It was perfectly nice – but something looked wrong.

Then I saw it. The Muslim Dome of the Rock had been Photoshopped out and replaced with a detailed rendering of Herod’s Jewish Temple. The shopkeeper grinned like a naughty schoolboy. Did I like it? Did I want it?

I was ready to go home to boring old London.

The Austrian Hospice costs from £125 for a double room. BA flies to Jerusalem from the UK (from £292) The Oldie Spring 2020 87

Overlooked Britain

The County Durham Parthenon

lucinda lambton Penshaw Monument was built to honour my great-great-greatgrandfather, ‘Radical Jack’, a reforming peer with film-star looks All my life, my heart has pounded with pride at the sight of Penshaw Monument, soaring high on a great hill over County Durham.

A tremendous Doric temple, with all the grandeur of the Acropolis rearing up over Athens, but here instead – until recently, that is – lording it over the coal-blackened landscape of England’s north-east. Today, with all the mines closed, this has been transformed into lush, new post-pit greenswards.

The temple, based on the Theseion, also known as the Temple of Hephaestus, in Athens, but with unfluted columns and in fact only half the size, was designed by father and son architects John and Benjamin Green, who left a significant architectural legacy in the north-east.

In Newcastle upon Tyne alone, there is the neo-classical Theatre Royal, as well as the 130-feet-high column to the 2nd Earl Grey. Then there is the neoclassical Literary Philosophical Society – and all three buildings are winners.

Seven miles south, at Penshaw, this monument rears its singular beauty over the new towns, motorways and the new post-pit greenery under hyperborean skies. How I always strain – heart thudding – for the first sight of it when heading north; it is surely enough to stir the vitals of a cast-iron dog!

It was built in 1844, paid for by popular public subscription. Every contribution was recorded – a Mrs Smith of Shiney Row gave two pennies. And all to honour my great-great-great-grandfather John George Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, the knee-weakeningly handsome Whig statesman, colonial administrator and liberal reformer, who, among his many triumphs, was made the first Governor General of Canada. He was also the prime mover and co-author – along with his father-in-law, Prime Minister Lord Grey – of the Reform Bill of 1831, which established the secret ballot, as well as gouging out the ‘rotten boroughs’ that up until then had so corrupted Parliament.

As radical as he was rich, Lord Durham was also quite astonishingly 88 The Oldie Spring 2020

good-looking, encouraging, I fear, a degree of arrogance: he had a reputation for imperious manners and ‘distinctive bearing’. He was reckless and romantic, ardent and impetuous and emotional to a frenzied fault. ‘If his discretion had been equal to his ability,’ wrote his biographer Stuart Reid, ‘he would not have made the enemies that he did.’

Treated by many of his fellow aristocrats as a traitor to his peers and denounced as ‘a dangerous demagogue in a coronet’, he was nicknamed Radical Jack. Surely no more glamorous figure could have entered Parliament. He was, though, much mocked for his pronouncement that ‘a man may jog along comfortably enough on £40,000 a year’ – roughly four and a half million pounds today.

He had inherited his immense fortune through coal mines in the north-east of England, with 2,400 miners in his employ. He was hailed as ‘King of the Colliers’ by the pitmen, thanks to his ever-active improving of their welfare. It was he who, for example, insisted that they establish their own unions.

He also put an end to the brutish

Knee-weakeningly handsome: the 1st Earl of Durham, mezzotint, 1838

behaviour of the pit operatives who were regularly punishing the workforce by stripping them stark naked and flogging them through the village before the eyes of their women and children. It was in his mine that his friend Humphry Davy first successfully tested his safety lamp, with Lord Durham by his side encouraging the experimentation.

His upbringing had augured well in that, rather than having a conventional education, he had been dispatched on the decidedly unconventional path of living with a private tutor called Thomas Lovell Beddoes. A scientist and a physician, a poet and a dramatist, Beddoes was married to the writer Maria Edgeworth’s sister – ‘a woman of great charm of character who seemed to have impressed everyone who knew her with her rare union of thoughtful sympathy and vivacity of speech’.

It was Beddoes who discovered Michael Faraday working in a humble apothecary’s shop in Penzance and bought him home to live with him at Clifton, near Bristol. Such, then, was the company streaming though Beddoes’s house, fine-tuning the young Durham for excellence.

While his fellow youthful grandees were kept somewhat rigidly in the background, Durham’s biographer wrote that ‘the guiding principles of his manhood were imparted under the roof of Dr Beddoes, being educated on a broad enlightened plan which in those days found no favour in the great public schools’.

Such an excellent atmosphere could not have failed to have been of some consequence to a young man of immense fortune, giving him some inclination of the power to be useful. Furthermore the boy was brilliant, exceeding, according to Beddoes, ‘any child I ever saw in industry, intelligence and active curiosity’. Aged ten and a half, he could write both poetry and prose in Latin and Greek, with ‘eyes on fire and cheeks flushed and in a paroxysm; I have little doubt but he would run against a drawn

sword or jump down a precipice. He was like a person in liquor.’

He rose steadily and successfully in the world of politics, perhaps helped somewhat by his marriage to the Prime Minister’s daughter Louisa. He was appointed Lord Privy Seal in 1833, and between 1835 and 1837 served as Ambassador to Russia.

How well I remember the velvetcovered Bible with enamel plaques, each surrounded by diamonds, that was presented to him at that time.

In 1838, as the newly appointed Governor General of Canada, he had been tasked with investigating the warring factions between the Upper and Lower Canadas. With his ‘Durham Report – The Affairs of British North America’, commissioned by Lord

Melbourne, he garnered so much praise that it was thereafter to serve as a template for how best the British Empire should manage its colonies all over the globe.

By recommending almost complete self-governance, it became one of the most important documents in the Empire; furthermore, this parallel nature of governmental organisation was continued until 2014 as ongoing proof of the long-enduring effects of its recommendations.

Hurrah for the brilliance of Beddoes, the Clifton physician whose liberal influences had weighed so well on the course of the Empire.

While Lord Durham relished the limelight of fame, so too did his beloved son Charles William, whose image was

– and still is – imprinted on the minds of the British nationwide: in 1825 he was painted by Thomas Lawrence as The Red Boy, which to this day still retains a wide popularity; on biscuit tins, chocolate boxes, calendars and the like. The picture hangs in the castle at Disneyland Paris.

He was a bewitching child, who sadly died when he was only 14. ‘My darling boy,’ Lord Durham once wrote to him, ‘shake Pol [his parrot] by the nose for me.’

By 1838, Durham was off to Canada as the Governor General, to quell the troubles between the English and the French settlers. Accompanied by two regimental orchestras to hail his glory, he entered Quebec mounted on a white charger, wearing a uniform adorned with silver lace – and was no doubt cheered to the echo!

The Oldie Spring 2020 89

PAUL HEATON

Athens comes to the north-east: the Penshaw Monument, based on the Doric Temple of Hephaestus in the Athenian Agora

Carefree oldies on the piste

Young skiers may be in decline – but the older Mark Palmer gets, the more he loves Kitzbühel’s downhill runs and its après-ski

S

ome of us aren’t too good at ‘living in the moment’.

Nice thought, but the phrase has been hijacked by the ‘wellness movement’ and the You Can Heal Your Life brigade.

But give me a snowy mountain and a pair of skis and I am, at the very least, roughly in the zone – and so completely happy that many of life’s wounds suddenly become mere scratches and don’t need much healing after all.

I love skiing even more as an older person than I did when first introduced to it aged seven by my father, over half a century ago – although recently I’ve taken against those dudes on their snowboards who carve up the piste and make a hideous screeching sound as they grind against the ice.

So what welcome news it is that some young people are turning their backs on winter sports – because they think it’s outdated and something fit only for their parents’ generation.

A survey by the Association of Mayors of Mountain Resorts (yes, there’s a grouping for everyone) found that the under-25s represent a mere 14 per cent of skiers in France, down from 20 per cent in 1995. And the tour operator Ski Weekends reveals that two-thirds of those who ski regularly are now aged between 43 and 65.

Costs are playing their part, of course.

It’s an expensive pastime, which explains why school ski trips of the kind I

90 The Oldie Spring 2020

Friends reunited: Richard Addis and Mark Palmer

experienced in Zermatt circa 1970, when we linked up with girls’ boarding school Tudor Hall and had the time of our amorous lives, are few and far between.

Apparently, ski resorts are being urged to do more to attract the young, such as offering faster internet access, more snow parks and dedicated ‘selfie stations’.

But just as those newspapers that slavishly chase after younger readers end

‘We ski hard, we drink a lot – and we talk. All that fresh air … no topic is off-piste’

up losing rather than gaining circulation, I doubt this will work because, unlike many sports, skiing is something to enjoy almost right up until you’re invited to take part in the giant slalom in the sky.

I take my lead from Peter Lunn, who captained the British ski team at the 1936 Winter Olympics. After a serious car accident, he was told he’d never ski again.

‘We’ll see about that,’ he said. And he continued to ski every year in the Inferno race in Mürren until he broke his hip in another car accident at the age of 90.

He missed that year’s race, but was back in 2004. ‘When you’re skiing, you have to adapt your style and your movements to the landscape,’ he said.

‘It’s a very intimate communion with nature … and doesn’t change with age.

When I ski, I am part of the mountain. Or is the mountain part of me? I’m not sure.’

Skiing has been a loyal friend to me.

Mind you, it was all a little austere at the start: in the 1960s, my parents insisted that we wore our leather ski boots for most of the journey out to Zurs in Austria – to get used to them.

We took the train from Reading to Paddington, the sleeper from Victoria to Zurich and then another smaller train up the mountain. It was an almost-24hour journey.

But now I look fondly on those days as I perch on a comfortable chairlift with heated seats. Just as I think about the many years of skiing with my own children, especially after I split up with their mother.

It was the one holiday that worked.

We may have been a ‘broken family’ but we were a united trio, sashaying down the mountain at great speed, my nineyear-old son behind me, his younger sister behind him, sharing the exact same tracks, riding each identical bump, negotiating every same inch of ice.

Today, I go out to the Alps with my friend Richard for three nights. We get only two and a half full days of skiing – and they have become increasingly precious.

Richard is a better skier than I am but he has a hopeless sense of direction, whereas I know exactly where I am at any given moment. We ski hard, we drink a lot – and we talk. Perhaps it’s all that fresh air and heightened elevation, but on our jaunts no topic is off-piste.

When you have only a couple of days, there’s no need for a huge, purpose-built area such as the Three Valleys or Tignes.

And we prefer places where there’s a church, a town hall and mountain people whose ancestors have lived there for ever.

Last year, we went to Courmayeur in Italy, which is the very opposite of

IMAGE PROFESSIONALS GMBH/ALAMY

offering ski-in, ski-out accommodation, and we loved every moment.

The plan was to ski the Vallée Blanche, which we did together 25 years ago. It’s a 20-mile off-piste descent that should be done only with a guide, starting either in Chamonix or in Courmayeur.

Although the weather was against us, we contented ourselves in deep snow and thick fog, using a ski lift to point us roughly in the right direction.

Our friend Arnie Wilson, the FT’s former ski writer, who is still mogulbashing with verve at the age of 75, had suggested that while in Courmayeur

Snow business: St Catherine’s Church, built in 1366, in car-free Kitzbühel.

Below: a grole, filled with coffee, grappa and heaven knows what

we should seek out the local playboy Giacomo, who runs a restaurant high on the mountain called Maison Vieille, where dancing on the bar is encouraged, especially if you’re half our age – and female.

Giacomo insisted that we take part in a friendship ritual, which involved passing round a grole (a type of clay pot), filled with grappa, coffee and heaven knows what. There were four spouts from which to drink and it was regarded as impolite and bad luck for the pot to be put down before all the liquid had been finished.

The year before, we went to Kitzbühel in Austria, where the British are treated with huge respect purely because a plucky public school boy called Gordon ‘Mouse’ Cleaver won the inaugural Hahnenkamm race in 1931 without even being a member of the British ski team.

It’s the toughest and most dangerous downhill race in the world and still takes place every year, with competitors reaching speeds of almost 90 mph.

On that occasion, Richard was in his Ernest Shackleton phase, insisting on wearing a Harris Tweed jacket, roll-neck jumper and woollen mitts. He won admiring looks – mainly from women skiers of a certain age.

Kitzbühel is the most civilised of resorts, with a magnificent, 16th-century, car-free old town, reached via arches cut into the city’s ancient walls. There are no self-service restaurants selling leathery burgers and soggy chips. Instead, family-run former farming lodges offer a sit-down service and seem genuinely pleased to see you. We were astonished by the prices, too – a mere £8 for a Tiroler gröstl (roast spuds, beef, bacon, cabbage and a fried egg on top).

One evening, we went and inspected the church which dates back to 1366 and then called in at a heaving bar called The Londoner, colonised by mainly British seasonal workers attached to various ski companies. We were twice their age but didn’t feel like it.

Some people love the yachty crowd; others warm to golfers, fisher-folk or game-bird shooters. Richard and I concluded that we love the ski crowd best of all. Whatever the conditions, they get on with it – and then reward themselves in wild fashion.

What’s more, they don’t seem to mind sharing the mountains with us oldtimers. Perhaps they’re the ones who are successfully ‘living in the moment’.

Ski Solutions (skisolutions.com, 020 7471 7749) offers seven nights at the Sporthotel Reisch, Kitzbühel, from £1,325 pp, incl. return flights & transfers The Oldie Spring 2020 91

Taking a Walk

Two wheels v two feet on Regent’s Canal

GARY WING

patrick barkham

The second I stepped onto the towpath came a first: I caused a crash.

Walking must be the safest way of getting around but I hadn’t checked both ways and a bike, hurtling along the path, hurtled into me.

The cyclist fell off. ‘Sorry!’ he yelped from a prone position.

‘Sorry!’ I said, marvelling at how we were both so unhurt and so magnanimous.

I was walking west from Broadway Market to King’s Cross along the Regent’s Canal, inspired by my dad, who in retirement has walked every single mile of every towpath in England.

I can see why: canals offer a parallel universe, possessed of a perpetual water view, where everything – boats, coots, time – moves slowly. Except bikes.

Of the 2,000 miles of English and Welsh towpath, the three miles from Hackney to King’s Cross are undoubtedly the busiest. I was foolishly walking during the morning rush hour, when cyclists swooshed past every few seconds.

Even with these reckless commuters, it was far more peaceful than the world above us.

A moorhen rippled across silver water and there were lots of narrowboats with pretty names such as Molly Malone and Emmaline. I didn’t see a single boat on the move because, in this location, each one is masquerading as an affordable home, moored three

abreast in many places. Each roof was adorned with items both practical and romantic: coal, kale growing in pots, decorative kettles, kayaks, candles, bikes, solar lights, generators and empty bottles of Prosecco.

Twenty-two years ago, when I lived in Angel, and the towpath was much quieter, I’d jog east and usually turn back beneath a derelict bridge beyond the A10 because the terrain looked so forbidding.

Today, that bridge carries the Hipster Express, otherwise known as the London Overground, between Hackney and Hoxton.

These days, the tatty council estates of De Beauvoir Town are thoroughly gentrified. The old industrial buildings – nine storeys, give or take a penthouse – blend in, but the newest flats are greedier and devour a larger slice of sky.

Over the pleasant, waterfall-like whoosh of water running through a lock gate came the menacing ‘ting!’ of a bell belonging to a fast-moving cyclist. It could mean ‘Please be careful – I don’t want to knock you into the water’ but it sounded rather more like ‘Move!’

Beneath each beautiful, old brick bridge, curved of back like a whale, the path narrowed to barely three feet wide. I cowered against the brickwork. If a bike came rushing in, we would collide – no question. ‘Be more tortoise and less hare’ implored a sign on a bridge. Some chance.

I felt sorry for my fellow walkers, constantly on edge. I felt less sympathy when I realised they were all plugged in to phones and podcasts, shutting out sensible belled warnings. Despite the near misses, there was never a shout.

Londoners – so stupidly dulled of senses, so marvellously tolerant – remained determined to ignore one another.

Beyond the revamped Packington Estate and the Narrowboat pub, the sun shone over the lake-like expanse of City Road basin. Eucalyptus, weeping willows and jasmine created a lush summery feel.

A walker strolled past in shorts. Ah, London in winter!

Ahead lay a cutting clad in sycamore and the dark hole of a long tunnel under a hill. This forced me up onto the streets.

I was relieved to escape the cyclists, but the blare of jackhammers and sirens was still a shock as I weaved through Angel before rejoining the canal where it popped out again shortly before the Caledonian Road.

Even the least tranquil canalside offers more peace than the everyday city.

I walked 2½ miles along the Regent’s Canal from Broadway Market to King’s Cross – but the walk can be extended east to Victoria Park and west through Camden and around London Zoo and Regent’s Park. I recommend avoiding morning and evening (bike) rush hours!

The Oldie Spring 2020 93

On the Road

‘I planned to poison Hitler’ Anne Glenconner, Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting, tells Louise Flind about royal perks, murder in Mustique and topless Tuvalu girls

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

My glasses, handkerchief and diary; I don’t do mobiles.

Something you really miss about travelling?

N0. I spent so much time travelling with Princess Margaret; then with Colin [Glenconner, her late husband].

Do you travel light?

Lighter than I did with Princess Margaret.

Earliest childhood holiday memories?

My home – Holkham, Norfolk – because my father was away in the Scots Guards and we were travelling.

What are your favourite places in Norfolk? What was it like in the war?

Holkham, the park, the beach and all the wonderful ilex woods. In the war, we were terrified and hungry all the time. We didn’t see out parents for three years and my sister Carey and I planned to poison Hitler if he landed on the east coast.

Are you surprised your book is a bestseller?

I’ve never worked so hard in my life. I’ve been commissioned to write three more which are going to be thrillers. I’m the new Miss Marple: Murder in Mustique!

Was the Queen very neat and Margaret less so when they were children?

Because they came with Nanny or a governess, they were both neat. Princess Margaret was more my age and more fun – quite naughty – and we were always jumping out at the footmen. In those days, we were all very neat in white socks and Mary Jane shoes.

What makes Prince Philip so tough?

I’ve known Prince Philip for a long time; his sisters were great friends of my parents.

Prince Philip was much younger and had a tough upbringing: his mother was in a loony bin and his father went off with his

mistress to the South of France. I think he learned at an early age to be self-reliant.

What was it like travelling with Princess Margaret?

It spoilt one for ever because she was representing the Government. The car drove straight up to the steps of the aeroplane – you never saw your passport.

And travelling with your husband Colin?

I was ‘in waiting’ – so in first class with Princess Margaret. Colin was led off to the back and suddenly I heard a ghastly noise. He was lying in the aisle, kicking and screaming. I said, ‘Oh, Ma’am,’ and she said, ‘Take no notice.’ I looked out of the window and saw two American cops dragging Colin off the aeroplane and he was turning round, saying, ‘Anne, help!’

Another time, in a tiny aeroplane with Barbara, my wonderful nanny, the six-month-old twins, Charles, Henry, Christopher and Colin, one engine failed.

As we went lower, Colin completely lost it and started scrabbling for the dinghy.

Barbara said, ‘Please, will you be quiet? You’re frightening us all.’ But he got the dinghy, which blew up inside the aeroplane. Luckily, we did land – but we couldn’t get out.

Do you still return to the Caribbean even though your husband left his estate to his servant?

Oh, that was awful. My grandson got the land back. I still go to Mustique and stay with Josephine Loewenstein [widow of Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the Rolling Stones financial manager].

Are you a traveller?

I love travelling – I’m going with the book to Australia and New Zealand. My grandmother came from New Zealand – when I was small, she never kissed me; we rubbed noses.

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

We went to Paris, then on the Queen Mary to New York, and to Cuba. It was meant to last six months but after I started Charlie I felt very sick. So we came home.

And how did Mustique come about?

The following year [1957], Colin took me to Trinidad, and he heard about Mustique, sailed down and bought it.

Where do you go on holiday now?

I’ve been to India 26 times with my friend Margaret Vyner. Then she got stuck in the bath – and I’ve never wanted to go with anyone else. Now we go to Lisbon.

Do you lie on the beach?

I love lying in the shade. When I first went to Mustique, every mosquito on the island decided to bite my lily-white skin.

Swimming is my great passion.

Strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

In Tuvalu with Princess Margaret, bare-bosomed girls gave us grey muck.

Biggest headache?

Travelling with Colin – he took no notice of queues and always went to the top, with me carrying his luggage. And it was wonderful with Princess Margaret – although quite often she’d refuse to fasten her seat belt and embarrass the stewardess. Then I’d say, ‘Ma’am, I don’t think they can take off.’

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in?

With Margaret Vyner in a brothel.

Top travelling tips?

Be very careful what you eat and drink – my tip is vodka.

Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown by Anne Glenconner (£20) is out now The Oldie Spring 2020 95

Genius crossword 386 el sereno Some clues appear to lack a proper definition. The wordplay will lead you to the correct answer to be put in the grid. The addition of a 5 letter word to each of these clues will give an extended solution. This word is hidden in the completed grid.Please highlight it Across 6 They may hold records for a song (7) 7 Lowest deck cut off by soldiers (5) 9 Food giving son a turn? (4) 10 Conventional image of character attached to hi-fi? (10) 11 Leave queen with no name floundering in tub (8) 13 Everything that is dead must be linked (6) 15 Wine found in aniseed flavoured drink? (4) 17 Commando’s gamble protecting Her Majesty (5) 18 Press knock drink back with humour at first (4) 19 Quartet going missing from celebration of the flesh (6) 20 Fundamental changes due to fish found in drinks (5-3) 23 Deal perhaps with person kissing flyer (10) 26 Discover courage is short (4) 27 Gardening tool seen around American orangery for example (5) 28 Japanese object, being unusually tense about our nation (7)

Down 1 Commitment shown by engineers with answer (10) 2 Saves Talmud, incorporating other holy scriptures (6) 3 Man perhaps lives life on the outside (4) 4 Divine female escort excited about area (8) 5 Definite line crossed by corporate excess (4) 6 Room service may follow endless spa (5) 8 Power increases will protect favourite tools (7) 12 Inexperienced workers and sailors in crowd, mostly (5) 14 Power invested in strange herculean Irish legendary character (10) 16 Area of water loaches destroyed (3,4) 17 Person convinced of the spread of evil in drink (8) 21 A & E charge to provide oxygen (6) 22 Organisation spies intermittently service (5) 24 Source of danger with blanket medicine (4) 25 Skye regularly imports popular cattle (4)

How to enter EITHER scan this page and email it to comps@ theoldie.co.uk OR post your entry to ‘Crossword 386’, The Oldie, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA, with your home address, which we will use only if you win the prize below. Deadline: 30th April 2020. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary 13th Edition and a cheque for £25. Two runners-up will receive cheques for £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 386 Across 1 Flaw (5) 4 Warmth (4) 7 Of us (4) 8 Rebellion (8) 9 Hardship (9) 10 Whiskey grain (3) 12 Dealer (6) 14 Grate; irritate (6) 16 Gamble (3) 18 Economic; fiscal (9) 21 Naive (8) 22 Possesses (4) 23 Chant (4) 24 Give way (5)

Genius 384 solution Down 1 Originator (7) 2 Doddery (8) 3 Hoodlums (5) 4 Shell; chaff (4) 5 Irritate (5) 6 Author (6) 11 One acted (anag) (8) 13 Spoilt (6) 15 Educated; discovered (7) 17 Boredom (5) 19 Suitably (5) 20 Yearn (for) (4)

School puddings of yore!

Winner: Stewart Walker Runners-up: Richard Love, John Byrne

Moron 384 solution Across: 1 Adder, 4 Belief, 9 Hull, (Had a bellyful) 10 Electra, 12 Femur, 13 Endorse, 14 Gen, 15 Carve, 16 Acorn, 18 Red, 19 Otalgia, 22 Asses, 23 Avarice, 24 Trek, 25 Ousted, 26 Edged. Down: 2 Drummer, 3 Enlarge, 5 Emend, 6 Inter, 7 Fraternise, 8 Degenerates, 11 Aficionado, 16 Adapted, The Oldie Spring 2020 97

Competition TESSA CASTRO ‘Points, schmoints.’ US bridge expert Marty Bergen used this wonderful, Yiddish catchphrase as the title of a book, and players and teachers say it to partners and students who fail to understand that high card points are only a guide. There is no prize for holding points, only for making tricks. Points have no intrinsic value once play begins. Witness this month’s deal.

Dealer South Neither Side Vulnerable

West ♠ AKJ53 ♥Q4 ♦KJ84 ♣Q 8

North ♠ 8642 ♥ A J 10 8 ♦ 10 5 3 ♣6 3

South

East ♠ Q 10 9 7 ♥96 ♦Q762 ♣A J 4

♠

♥K7532

♦A9

♣K 10 9 7 5 2 The Bidding South West North East 1 ♣ 1 ♠ pass 3 ♠ 4 ♥ 4 ♠ 6 ♥ (!) pass pass pass Do you think North’s jump to 6♥ was reckless or wildly over-optimistic?

Optimistic, yes; wildly reckless, no. Clearly his heart holding is excellent. Also, very powerful by inference is his spade holding, for he can deduce his partner is void. The opposing ten points in spades will take no tricks – his side is playing with what is known as a ‘30-point pack’.

An initial diamond lead would have scuppered the slam but West led a normal top spade and South was in with a chance.

He trumped the lead, crossed to ♥A and led ♣3. East played low and his ♣K held. He cashed ♥K and was relieved to see the even split. He then led a second club. East overtook his partner’s ♣Q with ♣A and switched to ♦2.

Declarer won ♦A, trumped a third club, trumped a spade and then cashed his three established clubs, discarding two diamonds and a spade from dummy. All that remained was to crossruff the last two tricks and he had made a slam with only 15 high-card points. East-West, with the traditional values for game themselves (25 points), had been completely routed.

West had not lost his sense of humour.

A kibitzer (spectator) praised him for his failure to double the slam holding sixteen points. ‘Points, schmoints,’ he replied.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 252, you were asked for a poem called In the Gallery. A spectacularly excellent crop of entries!

Congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations going to I White.

Distance lends enchantment and enchanted I am, By the art-lover several paintings ahead – Pretty as the proverbial picture, herself And also the image of someone I know well.

At least, I think she is. Or is that just my eyes, My ageing eyes, deceiving me? Could this old man Really, rightfully claim intimate acquaintance With that singularly eye-beguiling vision?

Hesitantly, I approach her absorbed profile – Is she, or isn’t she? – only to find myself, As soon as I am close enough, turning away, Pretending to study the nearest masterpiece!

Of course, it’s her, my daughter! Who else could it be?

But I am perversely content to say nothing, Pleased as any connoisseur merely to confirm The provenance of such a fetching piece of work.

I White My sorrow for their plight recurs Each time I see Les Grandes Baigneuses, Those lounging ladies who expose Nude vistas of their ‘quelques choses’.

They must have hoped their shapely youth Deserved a better-painted truth – Not stark, slab-sided flesh, unreal, Bereft of any sex appeal, The direst warning to all those Bold innocents who’d shed their clothes To flaunt what fires the artist’s eye Before their youth and paint set dry.

Theirs dried a hundred years ago; It’s time for them to dress and go.

They may in youth have all been ravers; Cézanne, though, did their looks no favours.

Martin Parker A starlit, lamplit balcony of stone And you and I some yards apart – your son, My husband, off somewhere – and you, alone In shadowed alcove drinking wine – what fun It would have been to talk to you, I

thought.

I had real things to say, a few in fact, Not just fan’s gush. I longed to speak. You caught Me looking at you twice, was glad of tact, Enjoyed your solitary drink but when The bell for Hamlet’s final act recalled Us all and people bottlenecked back in, You joined me, strolled me in as my reward, Right to my gallery seat up in the gods.

‘Bit parky,’ you remarked and to this day As then, there with cash-strapped unfamous bods, Your charm is what impresses not the play.

Dorothy Pope The Oberes Belvedere! Art at its best.

A day in that gallery verging on bliss.

No thoughts of returning to work in a day or two, Only of Schiele, and Klimt with his Kiss.

When back in my gallery: all 38 screens were Depicting atrocities, Greta or Trump, I lost concentration, a split-second lapse, The consequence brought me to earth with a bump…

A director’s worst nightmare had happened to me, All eight million viewers, their screens turned to black, For I’d thought of The Kiss and of Death and the Maiden.

So the Head of the News Channel gave me the sack.

With time on my hands I returned to my art, Time to gaze at one picture and not 38.

Though funds won’t allow a return to Vienna, I still have the National, the Guildhall and Tate.

Margaret Gilman COMPETITION No 254 Someone on Twitter is trying to summarise every book ever published in a limerick, giving Hamlet as: ‘Prince Hamlet thought Uncle a traitor/ For having it off with his mater./ Avenge dad or not?/ That’s the gist of the plot./ And he does. Nine soliloquies later.’ You are invited to summarise a Shakespeare play (please give the title) in a single limerick. Entries, by post (The Oldie, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA) or e-mail (comps@ theoldie.co.uk – include postal address), to ‘Competition No 254’ by 30th April.

The Oldie Spring 2020 99

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

Q

Let them have sex

My grandson is coming on holiday with us this summer to a villa I’ve rented, and he’s bringing his girlfriend. They’re both only 16, and my daughter has explained they’d like to be in the same bedroom. I must say, I’m not very keen on this idea. It’s nothing to do with them not being married, obviously – I’m not living in the dark ages – it’s just that they do seem a bit young. Do you have any advice on how I can handle this?

Audrey, Southampton Presumably they’ve already had sex or your daughter wouldn’t suggest this arrangement.

If you feel really strongly, you could insist they sleep in adjoining rooms and then turn a blind eye to any tiptoeing about in the night, but for sure you’re not going to stop them having sex, even if they have to go into the bushes to do it.

If I were you, I would let them share a room and then ‘suck it up’. Revolting phrase, but a good description: absorb the information without a fuss.

The sex drive is one of the most powerful in mankind’s whole battery of drives, especially at this age, but don’t think that your saying, ‘No’, is going to have any effect.

Frankly, you’ll be lucky if either of them ever emerges from their room, except to eat occasionally. In a few years, you might, if you arrange another holiday like this, at least get a sighting.

A

Ecofanatic parents

Q

My parents, both in their seventies, have become completely obsessed with

The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

106 The Oldie Spring 2020

recycling. It makes being in their house really stressful. We went there for the weekend recently, and they did almost nothing but bicker over whether the cartons you get soup in have an unrecyclable wax coating around them. Then my father cut himself, trying to scrape off all the metal wrapping round the top of a wine bottle before he put it in the green bin.

Finally, I caught my mother soaking some silver paper from a box of chocolates in hot water to separate the silver from the paper backing.

She then turned on the oven to dry out the mushy paper she’d scraped off to put into the recycling bag. I think they’ve gone nuts. They claim they’re saving the planet.

Geoff B, Hull Lighten up, Geoff! They’ve got nothing else to do and, until one of them falls ill and has to be nursed by the other, they perhaps feel that their lives have no meaning. This way, they can feel that they’re still contributors, useful members of society. What would you prefer they do instead? Read improving books? Play golf? Solve crossword puzzles? Write ranting letters to the Times? Theirs is a fairly harmless – if obsessive – and benign activity in which they can both share.

A

TV fanatic daughter-in-law

Q

I live on my own and have my small grandchildren over, once a fortnight. One of my great pleasures is thinking about things we can do together, like doing kitchen ‘experiments’ or making gingerbread men, or creating robots out of

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cardboard boxes – all things they seem to adore doing. Then I read them a story and they have a sleep before we go to the park, where we feed the ducks, or we learn the names of the trees and then make a chart when we get back. Or we play a card game. Recently, however, my daughter-in-law has taken to bringing them round with a bag full of

DVDs she says they want to watch.

I have no time to interact with them because they’re always screaming to watch films – even on sunny days.

The sad thing is, I’m sure she does this because she thinks I get tired out with them because we do so much. I do – but I also love it!

Anna Preston, Putney Could you make it a rule that you watch only one – the shortest one? Alternatively, buy some yourself that are short collections, like old Tom and Jerry or Popeye cartoons which can be watched in quick bites. Mr Bean is usually quite popular – just half an hour. And the BBC rerun very old Famous Five series, which are just 20-minute episodes.

The other thing you could do is to carefully remove one of the wires in the plug of the telly and claim it’s broken.

Or – that old ruse we tend to forget in these circumstances – simply tell your daughter-in-law the truth. You are giving your grandchildren a special time which they will always remember and love you for. It is tragic that they should be deprived.

A

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk – I will answer every email that comes in; and let me know if you would like your dilemma to be confidential.

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Review of Books Round-up of the reviews

William Cook praises the neglected Hammond Innes Charles Keen reveals his favourite book Joseph Connolly on collecting modern first editions Biography & Memoir History Current Affairs Entertainment Paperbacks Fiction Spring 2020 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Love it and list it Review of Books Issue 51 Spring 2020 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie The Big Goodbye: Chinatown by Sam Wasson The Dolphin Letters 1970-1979 by Saskia Hamilton Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a 20th-Century Jewish Family by Hadley Freeman Orwell: A Man of Our Time by Richard Bradford Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr Self-portrait by Celia Paul The Woman Who Always Loved Picasso by Julia Blackburn

A few days before Hilary Mantel’s third volume on the life of Thomas Cromwell was published (see Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s review on page 51 of the April issue), there was a letter in the Times stating that the correspondent was going to self isolate to coincide with the book’s publication. The letter writer asked if the Times reviewer could confirm whether 14 days would be sufficient time to read it in. It is certainly long — coming in at 912 pages and weighing more than two pounds.

Perhaps that is one reason why pre-sales of The Mirror and the Light in January were eclipsed by Mrs Hinch’s Little Book of Lists, to be published

by Michael Joseph in April. Mrs Hinch is the nom de plume of Sophie Hinchcliffe, an ‘influencer’ with 3 million Instagram followers, whose book of lists is a mere 216 pages. It’s a ‘whole book filled with just lists! Notebook goals! My idea of absolute heaven!’ says Mrs Hinch on her publisher’s website.

Of course we all love lists. Take, for example, Alex Johnson’s A Book of Book Lists: A Bibliophile’s Compendium (British Library, 2017). It’s not a ‘1,001 books you must read before you’re 40’ kind of book, writes the author in his introduction. Instead it lists the books most frequently left in hotels, prisoners’ favourite books, MPs’ most borrowed books, ‘lost’ books (eg, Byron’s memoirs, Melville’s The Isle of the Cross) and so on. Oliver Tearle, author of The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History (Michael O’Mara, 2016), thought the compendium would inspire readers to get ‘writing a few lists of their own: wish lists for new books to go in search of’.

So whether you are a habitual list-maker or not, delve inside this supplement and compile your own wish list from the books reviewed: biography, history, entertainment, fiction… over to you.

Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

Joseph Connolly on his passion for modern first editions

When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains

by Ariana Neumann On the Golden Age of English Church Monuments, and Other Matters of Life and Death by Nigel Andrew

Cover illustration: Bob Wilson

The Life of Bryan: A Celebration of Bryan Robertson by Andrew Lambirth Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Christopher Silvester, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Sam Hambro, Melissa Arancio For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, call 020 7436 8801 or email editorial@theoldie.co.uk

23 BOOK COLLECTING 24 FICTION

10 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

26 MISCELLANEOUS 27 CHILDREN’S BOOKS Emily Bearn

16 ENTERTAINMENT 19 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS William Cook on Hammond Innes

30 RUSSIAN LITERATURE

20 CURRENT AFFAIRS

Charles Keen on his favourite book

20 MISCELLANEOUS

30 PAPERBACKS The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 3

History

Oliver Cromwell after Samuel Cooper

PROVIDENCE LOST

THE RISE AND FALL OF CROMWELL’S PROTECTORATE

PAUL LAY

divine direction. This made the hotter sort of Protestants, the Puritans, off-balance and twitchy for approval, like social media addicts, Lay observes. None was more hooked on providence than Cromwell...’

As Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, explained in his New Statesman review, ‘the appeal to divine providence both energised and paralysed the Commonwealth regime’, which followed ‘a pattern familiar in revolutionary narratives: the point at which it ought at last to be obvious to all that the revolution was right and justified, when one could be confident of being on the side of history, keeps slipping over the horizon. Someone must be blamed and the revolution inexorably descends into factional warfare.’ For Leanda de Lisle, writing in the Times, Lay’s ‘witty and incisive book’ is ‘a reminder why the English, in particular, hate the bossy pieties of a Puritanical elite, and distrust radicalism’.

A HOUSE IN THE MOUNTAINS

THE WOMEN WHO LIBERATED ITALY FROM FASCISM

‘If the whole period of the 17th century is shockingly unfamiliar to too many general readers, the Protectorate is most of all so,’ wrote Minoo Dinshaw in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Partly this is a question of the imaginative distance involved in relating to an era of such apparently alien zealotry – a time for both fanatics and pragmatists, presided over by a fanatical pragmatist.’ Paul Lay, editor of History Today, has chosen to concentrate on the period from 1653 to 1659 during which first Oliver and then, briefly, his eldest son Richard served as Lord Protector. Lay ‘allows himself ample time and space to linger on those few confusing years, following a thread that contrives to carry both thematic variety and tragic, narrative force’.

Cromwell’s Protectorate ‘was one of the most extraordinary, exhilarating, innovative and anxietyinducing periods in British history’, wrote Jessie Childs in the Guardian.

‘The providence of Lay’s title is the lodestone Protestant belief that God in his mystery had a hand in all things. Nothing could happen, not salvation, nor a sneeze, without

CAROLINE MOOREHEAD

4 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020

CHECKPOINT CHARLIE

THE COLD WAR, THE BERLIN WALL AND THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE ON EARTH

IAIN MACGREGOR Constable, 340pp, £20

Chatto & Windus, 416pp, £20

Between September 1943 and May 1945, three wars were being fought in Italy: the war between the Allies and Germany, a civil war between Fascists and their enemies, and a revolutionary uprising. ‘In Caroline Moorehead’s book three plaited narratives track these various wars’ progression,’ wrote Lucy HughesHallett in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘Her book seems at first like a celebration of women’s audacity, and of all the partisans’ heroism, but she is too fair and subtle-minded a historian to leave it there. After the liberation, partisan reprisals were almost as ruthless as those of the Fascists had been.’

Moorehead tells her story, as Guardian reviewer Tobias Jones explained, ‘through the intersecting lives of four female friends in Turin who became staffette (couriers) in the resistance, delivering intelligence, letters and weaponry: Bianca (a communist law graduate and factory agitator); Silvia (a doctor); Frida (a literature graduate); and Ada (the

Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie, 2005

The Berlin Wall was built to stop East Germans ‘voting with their feet’. And very effective it was. What had once been a torrent was reduced to a trickle. President Kennedy might declare, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, but his rhetoric altered nothing. No wonder Khrushchev boasted, ‘Berlin is the testicles of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.’

Astonishingly, given the profusion of spies operating in Berlin at the time, the arrival of the Wall took the West by surprise. Or did it? In the Observer, Neal Ascherson, who was there at the time, claimed the

Adrian Purser

National Portrait Gallery

Head of Zeus, 326pp, £30

widow of the anti-fascist Piero Gobetti)... Their transformation from studious, dutiful daughters into daring, scruffy, exhausted combatants is brilliantly and subtly told... The narrative is told with such verve that I frequently had goosebumps: the men and women known from much drier history books come alive, only to be captured, tortured and killed.’

Reviewing it for theartsdesk, Boyd Tonkin found the book to be ‘crammed with dramatic and often horrifying incident’, but pointed out that ‘Moorehead’s quartet of heroines all lived; indeed, the radical lawyer Bianca Guidetti Serra only died – aged 95 – in 2014. They left the diaries, the letters, the documents and the family memories that have allowed her to tell their eye-opening and spirit-lifting stories so powerfully.’

History Americans knew 13 days in advance.

‘As a reporter I learned that most of the spying in the city was not so much cold war drama as simply a black market in information, less profitable than petrol or blue jeans, but safer.’

In the New Statesman William Boyd, whose Berlin Cold War thriller, Spy City, will be broadcast later this year, praised MacGregor’s ‘great fluency and drive. A curious sideeffect of reading his history is that, as the story steadily unspools, the reader vicariously encounters all the complex gamut of emotions that the Wall itself generated, almost as if you were a witness to the history being enacted, from the shock and consternation of its sudden presence in 1961, to the grim and fatalistic resignation of its endurance through the Sixties and Seventies, to the growing hopes and eventual euphoria of its demise and destruction in 1989.

It is a powerful and moving experience.’

BLACK WAVES

SAUDI ARABIA, IRAN AND THE RIVALRY THAT UNRAVELLED THE MIDDLE EAST

KIM GHATTAS Wildfire, 400pp, £20

Courtesy of St Hugh’s College Archive, Oxford

The strife-torn Middle East today is a consequence of three seismic events that took place in 1979: the fall of the Shah, the attack by Muslim zealots on the Grand Mosque at Mecca, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. So says Kim Ghattas, who grew up in Lebanon and then spent several years reporting on the Middle East for the BBC. Old enough to remember the joie de vivre that once characterised Beirut, she particularly deplores the puritanical misogyny imposed by fundamentalist regimes like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

‘But,’ said Toby Matthiesen in the Financial Times, ‘the book is not essentially about the veil, or about women. It is about power politics, and the complicated relationship between the Iranian revolution and its supporters on the one hand, and its enemies on the other.’ What impressed the Observer’s Ian Black about ‘this wonderfully readable account’ was Ghattas’s focus on ‘Intellectuals, clerics and novelists … because they represent ideas and suffering in the face of repressive regimes and intolerant ideologies.

‘It is a tract for our time. Read and weep. But also, like Ghattas, allow yourself to hope’ The contrast with many academic studies of these countries and issues is striking – and very much in the author’s favour.’

In the New Statesman, John Jenkins echoed Ian Black’s verdict: ‘While others have covered some of the terrain before... Ghattas has a wider and more contemporary sweep. There is a simmering anger not far below the surface of her book.

It is a gripping tale. It is a tract for our time. Read and weep. But also, like Ghattas, allow yourself to hope.’

LADIES CAN’T CLIMB LADDERS

THE PIONEERING ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL WOMEN

JANE ROBINSON Doubleday, 368pp, £20

Following her books on bluestockings and suffragettes, social historian Jane Robinson has turned to pioneering female professionals. In the Daily Mail, Helen Brown found the book fascinating: ‘I was gobsmacked by how little I knew of the first female lawyers, doctors, architects, academics, engineers, civil servants, churchwomen and politicians who flourished in the face of Establishment prejudice.’

Frances Wilson in the Telegraph was also gripped by a ‘crackingly good read’: ‘It is 100 years since the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, which allowed women to train as doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, academics and clergy. It was this, says Robinson, rather than the First World War that changed the shape of women’s lives. But instead of causing an immediate social revolution, with women everywhere exchanging aprons for white coats, dog collars and judicial wigs, the combination of prohibitive training costs and continued prejudice means that gender equality in the professions has been a tap-drippingly slow affair.’

Reviewers were shocked by the misogyny the women had to face. In the Financial Times, Isabel Berwick noted: ‘In the most shocking quote of the book, the civil service commissioner wrote in 1918: “Do you think that merely because a woman is equal to a man in competitive exams, therefore she is his equal or vice versa? . . . It is like comparing Chinamen with Englishmen or Hindus with Englishmen, or Hindus with Chinamen.”’

And in the Times Melanie Reid observed that ‘Modern professional women will read it with a slow burn of anger and a heightened respect for those whose actions, such a relatively brief time ago, made today possible.’

PRIESTS DE LA RESISTANCE!

THE LOOSE CANONS WHO FOUGHT FASCISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

FERGUS BUTLER-GALLIE Oneworld, 273pp, £12.99

Gwyneth Bebb Thompson: legal star

What would a Christian go to the stake for? Would it be to protect fellow human beings from persecution, whatever their faith or race? As Ysenda Maxtone Graham wrote in the Times, ‘some of the most unlikely people turn out to be saints and martyrs’, and warned the reader to ‘brace yourself for 250 pages of unbelievable goodness in the face of unbelievable evil’.

Author of the hilarious A Field Guide to the English Clergy, ButlerGallie’s natural voice is one of comedy, relishing human foibles in a cleric, and as Maxtone Graham noted, it ‘requires a skilled writer to The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 5

History walk this tragicomic tightrope’. ‘He loves a jolly, fat priest who guzzles his food and drink, or a nun who chain-smokes, and he celebrates these types here,’ she continued, ‘but the next thing you know, they’re dying at Auschwitz or being shot in a ditch.’

Marcus Berkmann in the Spectator praised ‘a fascinating and entirely benign book, imbued with a surprisingly muscular Christianity’.

Julian Coman in the Guardian wrote that this ‘hugely enjoyable if slightly eccentric account of clerical heroism in the face of evil’ was ‘timely and uplifting’ at a time when ‘hateful, divisive and xenophobic politics are being pursued in parts of Europe in the name of defending “Christian culture”.’ Paul Simon in the Morning Star agreed it was ‘timely’ and set a fine example.

John Arnold in the Church Times applauded ‘this splendid collection of 15 pen-portraits of Christians who in the encounter with Fascism knew the difference between right and wrong and were prepared to act on it ... all shared an unwavering belief in the common humanity of all humankind in Christ’.

THE STORY OF YOGA

FROM ANCIENT INDIA TO THE MODERN WEST

ALISTAIR SHEARER Hurst, 384 pp, £25

baffled its originators three millennia ago. Yoga was never intended to be squeezed into a stress-relieving lunch-hour break. As the Katha Upanishad (a Vedic text of around 500BC) described it: ‘Yoga is this complete stillness in which one enters the unitive state, never to become separate again.’

Shearer, who has written extensively on Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, approaches the subject, as Nicola Barker put it in the Spectator, ‘forensically, from every conceivable angle: historically, spiritually, geographically, culturally and commercially’. Barker thought the book ‘clear-eyed, elegantly written and wonderfully informative’.

Mick Brown in the Sunday Telegraph concurred, calling it ‘scholarly, elegant and engrossing’, and he enjoyed the way that Shearer points out that yoga practised ‘stripped of its sacred associations’ is really just extreme stretching – and in extremis can in fact lead to all sorts of physical problems.

In the Financial Times, Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan agreed with Shearer that the modern enthusiasm for yoga as, vaguely, ‘mindfulness’ is misguided. ‘Sacred knowledge is not designed to solve the travails of the modern world or clear up anxiety.

Believing it can single-handedly change lives smacks of a return to the magic of ancient days.’

LEADERSHIP IN WAR

LESSONS FROM THOSE WHO MADE HISTORY

ANDREW ROBERTS Allen Lane, 239pp, £20

A statue of Shiva in the lotus position

Alistair Shearer’s exhaustive examination of the history and purpose of yoga was widely reviewed – unsurprisingly, for it has for many years been hailed as an answer to all our modern ills: spiritual and physical. The sacred practice, which took yogis a lifetime to master, has undergone a range of Western permutations (including the everpopular Bikram yoga that involves a lot of sweating) which would have 6 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020

This book is condensed from a series of lectures Andrew Roberts gave a few years ago in New York. His subjects are Napoleon – ‘against whom all the others must be judged’ – Nelson, Churchill, Hitler – ‘a banal, soulless little weirdo’ – Stalin, Marshall, de Gaulle, Eisenhower and Margaret Thatcher – ‘who knew by early middle age that she could lead in a way that the men around her seemed incapable of doing’. Among the desiderata Roberts identifies are a sense of mission, an appreciation of history, boundless energy, the power of concentration, and a belief in the superiority of one’s nation and way of life.

‘But what about chance and luck?’

Stalin in exile 1915

asked Lawrence James in the Times.

Without these, said Napoleon, a General was lost. And surely it was a mistake to overlook such ‘humdrum’ activities as Intelligence and Logistics, which played such a vital part in the success of D-Day. Overseeing that stupendously risky operation and staying sane required ‘a sense of humour and a great faith, or a complete lack of imagination’, thought Eisenhower, who steadied himself with 80 cigarettes a day.

James concluded that these lectures ‘have not translated easily into print’. But in the Wall Street Journal Jonathan Jordan applauded Roberts, saying ‘his pithy insights reflect decades of diligent, patient study’. An equally appreciative verdict was reached by Julian Lewis MP, Chair of the Defence Committee.

Writing in House, he described Roberts as ‘a master of his material’, to whom ‘future generations of military leaders will have cause to be grateful’.

EIGHT DAYS AT YALTA

HOW CHURCHILL, ROOSEVELT AND STALIN SHAPED THE POSTWAR WORLD

DIANA PRESTON Picador, 368pp, £25

When Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Yalta in February 1945 Nazi Germany was still not vanquished and the Allies faced a fanatical opponent in the Far East. The purpose of the conference was to determine the post-war settlement. ‘“Yalta”, like “Munich”, has become a synonym for the cynical betrayal of the weak by the strong,’ Rodric Braithwaite wrote in the

History Spectator. ‘It’s an oft-told, welldocumented and controversial story.

Diana Preston retells it fluently, perceptively and with meticulous scholarship. Her judgements are admirably sensible.’

The conventional view has been that Britain and America ‘sold out’ Eastern Europe to the Communists, but Diana Preston’s ‘lively and nuanced account’, Victor Sebestyen wrote in the Sunday Times, offers ‘a stronger defence for Roosevelt and Churchill’. ‘As Preston explains, all three, broadly, got what they wanted,’ he continued. Poland was a casualty, but the Russians were already in occupation and ‘the question the critics have always failed to answer is how they could have got a better deal, short of war with the Russians’.

‘Preston’s book is shrewd on the main personalities,’ Sebestyen noted, ‘and goes beyond the horse-trading of three old men’ to describe other aspects of the conference. ‘And every bed had bed bugs, just as every room had Beria bugs,’ David Aaronovitch added in the Times.

Had Churchill and Roosevelt been naive, as their critics say? Rather the opposite, says Preston. In delaying D-Day, Sebestyen wrote, they made ‘a simple calculation: more dead Russians meant fewer dead Americans and Britons’.

As for Britain’s perceived betrayal of Poland, ‘There is a wider lesson,’ Braithwaite concluded. ‘Great powers should not offer or imply guarantees unless they are sure they have both the will and the means to honour them.’

THE NORTHUMBRIANS

NORTH-EAST ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE: A NEW HISTORY

DAN JACKSON Hurst, 320pp, £14.99

Dan Jackson’s admirably detailed survey of the north-east of England, once the kingdom of Northumbria, the home of St Cuthbert, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Jarrow Marchers, was hailed by Tom Holland in the Times as ‘the very best type of local history’. It was, wrote Holland, ‘a book of deep learning, displaying a knowledge of every detail of Northumbrian history and topography that is never less than staggering. It is also manifestly personal and all the more readable

Angel of the North by Antony Gormley

for it.’ Holland admired how The Northumbrians, which covers an impressive span from the building of Hadrian’s Wall right up to Brexit, was ‘suffused with a warm-hearted local patriotism’.

In the Church Times, John Arnold listed what the Northumbrians have given us. ‘Many of the inventions that have made the modern world, from locomotives to light bulbs. To hill-farming, fishing, and fighting were added mining, heavy engineering and shipbuilding, leading to a distinctive social culture characterised by pride in hard work, discipline, comradeship and communality, courage and persistence, and military, naval and sporting achievements.’ And in the Daily Telegraph, Michael Kerr (though he noted a bit of ‘sloppy’ text editing) praised Tynesider Jackson for a devotion to his fellow Northumbrians which does not preclude their faults: ‘He admits they are prone to sentimentality, that there’s a suspicion of individualism, and that the community spirit can sometimes turn suffocating and racist.’ Interviewed on BBC North East, the author said he had written a work of ‘cultural archaeology’, restoring the reputation of Northumbria as a place that had ‘always valued learning, literacy, storytelling and humour.’

STARING AT GOD

BRITAIN IN THE GREAT WAR

SIMON HEFFER Random House, 926pp, £30

This marks the third in a projected quartet of books by Simon Heffer which will cover British history from the beginning of Victoria’s reign to the outbreak of the Second World War. Andrew Roberts in the

Telegraph welcomed ‘the first serious and really wide-ranging history of the Home Front during the Great War for decades’. He singled out Heffer’s account of the causes of the war as ‘a masterclass chapter that ought to be taught in schools’, and relished his portrait of Lloyd George as the man who very nearly lost the war he was supposed to have won. ‘Heffer accuses the Welshman of “breathtaking dishonesty” and quotes with approbation Clementine Churchill’s description of him to her husband Winston as “the direct descendant of Judas Iscariot”.’ But Wynn Wheldon in the Spectator deplored Heffer’s antipathy to Lloyd George as revealing of ‘the ineradicable bias of the high Tory Englishman that the author is known

‘A masterclass chapter that ought to be taught in schools’ to be’. Aside from this Wheldon found much to enjoy among ‘the unexpected revelations of Heffer’s microscopic approach’, such as the ‘lachrymosity of the ruling classes’.

Several reviewers, including Leo McKinstry in the Literary Review, were struck by Heffer’s tale of artists, including Sir John Lavery and Augustus John, being arrested under the draconian provisions of the Defence of the Realm for painting outdoors. Gerard DeGroot in the Times was expansive – ‘I’ve studied the Great War for more than four decades, yet Heffer still told me much that I did not know. The book is longer than it needs to be, but its length is due to the author’s enormous enthusiasm, not to lazy editing.’

ISLAND STORIES

BRITAIN AND ITS HISTORY IN THE AGE OF BREXIT

DAVID REYNOLDS William Collins, 294pp, £16.99

‘The Brexit debate was certainly shaped by historical narratives,’ wrote history professor Michael J Braddick in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘In Island Stories, David Reynolds subjects these narratives to brisk, witty and often acerbic The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 7

History Reynolds says ‘is even vaguely unconventional’ and ‘his whole enterprise feels like a debate with somebody who simply does not exist’.

dodging to and fro across the globe and veering between tragedy and farce, high politics and low culture.’

CRUCIBLE

THE STORY OF A LANCASTER BOMBER CREW

THE LONG END OF THE GREAT WAR AND THE BIRTH OF A NEW WORLD 1917-1924

CHARLES EMMERSON Bodley Head, 739pp, £25

Living in the age of Brexit

appraisal. There are many treats along the way, for example his withering assessment of Theresa May’s negotiating priorities and political qualities, but his focus is four common narratives of the British past: of decline, of Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe, of British identity, and of the imperial past... This is not a book about the experience of ordinary Britons, but about how flawed views of Britain’s past have affected policy-making.’

‘Reynolds has done his best, but the book is a dog’s dinner’

8 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020

‘The reader is thrown raw, wet entrails and left to divine them’

DAVID PRICE Head of Zeus, 448pp, £25

As Trevor Royle put it in the Scottish Herald: ‘Of the many contentious issues remaining from the Second World War the seemingly indiscriminate area bombing of Nazi Germany is still an unresolved riddle.’ David Price’s latest book, The Crew, gives ‘a human face’ to the carpet bombing of German cities by following the exploits of an Avro Lancaster bomber crew from 97 Squadron RAF that survived 45 operational sorties over enemy territory. Ken Clark DFC, the last crew member, is, at 96, still alive and Price interviewed him personally.

Battle of Britain remembered

Joe Shute in the Daily Telegraph was engrossed. ‘What went through Ken’s mind the first time he released a bomb on the city below? “I thought, Thank Christ I’ve got rid of that, now let’s get home.”’ The mortality rate for bombers was horribly high at 44 per cent, one of the most dangerous parts being pursued by German aircraft on the flight home, but members of the crew had to contain their terror. As Ken Clark told Price: ‘If superiors found out we couldn’t handle it you would disappear from the squadron,’ he says.

In War History Online, Mark Barnes was also absorbed by the account of ‘grinding tension’ and in the Daily Mail, Simon Griffith was left shaken by a book that was ‘sobering and poignant’. In NB Magazine, Paul Burke summed it up: ‘There are many questions about the morality of the bombing campaign and its efficacy but these men demonstrated extraordinary courage that deserves to be remembered.’

Cpl Phil Major ABIPP/MOD

Lawrence Bogle

But the book left AN Wilson cold.

‘Reynolds has done his best, but the book is a dog’s dinner,’ he wrote in his review for the Times. ‘He gives us a résumé of Britain and Europe seen through the eyes of a history teacher and ends up with a critique of Theresa May’s attempt to get through a compromise Brexit deal. What he writes is perfectly fair, but it has all been said a thousand times by the leader writers; no one needs a don from Cambridge to tell us that she made a hash of things.’

Even more dismissive of Reynolds’s claim that Brexit was a ‘national trauma’ was historian Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times. ‘The experience of watching Emily Thornberry and Mark Francois arguing about Brexit is certainly very unpleasant. But perhaps only a Cambridge academic could find it genuinely traumatic.’ Despite the boast on the dust jacket, nothing

Crucible is a work of narrative history which advertises itself as ‘the collective diary of an era’. It is written in the present tense in short, staccato sentences. We meet a Russian political émigré champing at the bit in a Zurich public library, a fellow Russian exile shuffling in off the Bronx streets to eat at his regular Jewish restaurant, an Italian corporal lying wounded in a hospital ward and a ‘mangy Austrian field-runner’ serving with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. Their names – Lenin, Trotsky, Mussolini and Hitler – would have meant nothing to the world at large in 1917.

David Crane in the Literary Review observed that ‘Emmerson’s use of the present tense to track their rise to power brings out... the sheer unpredictability of events, the role of personality and pure chance – a bout of influenza, a bullet two millimetres one way or another – that lay behind the tidier narrative which, with the benefit of hindsight, we label “history”.’ Gerard DeGroot in the Times was both frustrated and admiring – ‘...the reader is thrown raw, wet entrails and left to divine them. It’s unsettling, entertaining, aggravating and intriguing. It’s also completely absurd.’

Peter Conrad in the Guardian picked up on the absurdist strain, pointing out that ‘the fragmented form of Crucible matches its content. “How,” asks the zany dadaist Tristan Tzara, “can one contemplate ordering the chaos of humankind’s infinite, formless variation?”… Emmerson’s book dramatises that variegated chaos,

THE CREW

Biography and Memoir

Simone de Beauvoir with Deidre Bair: a case study of reticence and disclosure

PARISIAN LIVES

SAMUEL BECKETT, SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND ME: A MEMOIR

DEIDRE BAIR Atlantic Books, 368pp, £18.99

In 1971 a young postgraduate student named Deirdre Bair wrote to Samuel Beckett in Paris seeking permission to write his biography. His response was an undertaking not to hinder her.

‘This fascinating memoir of Bair’s years as the biographer of two monstres sacrés [the other being Simone de Beauvoir] reveals the nightmare that unfolded,’ wrote John Walsh in the Sunday Times. ‘From the start, his “friends” treated her as a presumptuous upstart... Meanwhile, Bair and Beckett perform a complex dance around the subjects he’s reluctant to discuss without actually saying so. She feels, she says, “like a marionette whose strings were being pulled”... The “Becketteers”, as she calls the network of backbiting pals, become more badly behaved.’ At the same time, this book ‘is a record of Bair’s awakening feminist conscience... When she resigns from the university where she spent so long pursuing a full professorship, and chooses an independent life as a writer, you feel like cheering.’

Throughout her encounters with both her subjects, wrote Tim Adams in the Observer, Bair ‘retained a reporter’s savvy, as well as an academic’s rigour in getting near the truth’. She ‘conjures the atmosphere of the city in which her two subjects lived – never forgetting her own excitement and trepidation, and 10 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020

frustration at moving between salon and café-tabac in a sometimes comical search for their stories’. Her ‘courtship of De Beauvoir and her circle was no less complex than her battles with the Becketteers’ and her ‘account of their sessions together are a case study in rival strategies of reticence and disclosure’. The book makes voyeurs of us all, wrote Alan Riding in his review for the New York Times: ‘Can this inexperienced young American tame these two monstres sacrés? Will she be hoodwinked by two larger-than-life writers who want to influence, manipulate, control, even censor her – even as, all the while, they appear to co-operate?’

MY PARENTS

AN INTRODUCTION

THIS DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU ALEKSANDAR HEMON Picador, 368pp, £14.99

In 1992 Aleksandar Hemon was a 28-year-old Bosnian on a travelling scholarship in America with a Yugoslav passport when war broke out in his home country. His parents caught the last train out of Sarajevo and, speaking little English, began new lives in Canada. Hemon himself remained in America, where he embarked on a successful literary career, publishing novels, stories and essays in his adopted language. These two volumes of memoir – published together in a tête-bêche edition – offer a composite portrait of Tito’s Yugoslavian project. The essay about

his parents teams with Partisans, Serb collaborators, singing Ukrainians as well as stories about smoking meat and bee-keeping. Now in their 80s, the elder Hemons run an apiary out of their backyard in Ontario – ‘Hemon’s Honey’. The companion volume, This Does Not Belong to You, makes no attempt to deal with the broken history of the author’s birth country.

‘Hemon seems responsible here not to his parents, only to his boyhood self,’ observed Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in the Guardian. There are short vignettes about his earliest memories, his first love, the first time he was beaten up. Anna Aslanyan in the Spectator found some of the vignettes repetitive, and compared the volume unfavourably with an earlier memoir, The Book of My Lives. But William Atkins in the Financial Times took the view that ‘the books of certain authors feel less like discrete artefacts than chapters of a greater book – their life’s work – in which a set of themes, or a world, is revisited again and again, like a dream that expands and deepens night by night’.

SPHINX

THE LIFE OF GLADYS DEACON, DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH

HUGO VICKERS Hodder, 400pp, £25

Hugo Vickers, now a renowned biographer, was only 16 when he first came across a reference to Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, in the diaries of Chips Channon. The young Vickers tracked her down aged 94 in a psychiatric hospital, won her trust, and published her biography in 1979.

Now he has reissued it with new

Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough

Biography and Memoir archival material, and according to the Evening Standard’s Marcus Field, ‘As the tale of a doomed American adventure into the British aristocracy, this revised edition couldn’t be better timed.’

Born in 1881 the daughter of wealthy Americans living in Paris, the young Gladys – a beauty admired by Rodin, Proust, Boldini and Epstein – set her cap at the (married) Duke of Marlborough; even though a botched cosmetic treatment ruined her looks.

She finally bagged him, but the marriage went south. He turfed her out in the 1930s after she threatened him with a revolver at a dinner party – but he died in 1934 before a divorce settlement could be finalised. She spent three decades mouldering

‘The Duke turfed her out after she threatened him with a revolver at a dinner party’ alone in a remote farmhouse, abandoned by the establishment, and ended up in that asylum. ‘Vickers tells Gladys’s tale with brio and wit,’ thought Field, ‘but is nevertheless respectful of a life which could easily be presented as farce. “She paid a high price for her coronet,” he concludes.’

Ysenda Maxtone Graham, writing in the Times, thought Vickers’s claim to have ‘completely rewritten’ the book an overstatement: ‘this is not so much a rewriting as a reheating with fresh seasoning’. But a lot of the new seasoning – including details of the divorce petition – is ‘spicy’. ‘This is a pitiful, jaw-dropping story, brilliantly told.’

LADY IN WAITING

MY EXTRAORDINARY LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF THE CROWN

ANNE GLENCONNER Hodder, 336pp, £20

who would become the fifth Earl of Leicester. She was a maid of honour at the Queen’s coronation, and in 1956 married Lord Glenconner – described by Richard DavenportHines in the Times as a ‘wayward Prince Charming’. She became lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret in 1971, and ‘there is no doubt that Margaret could be inconsiderate and despotic, but Lady Anne remembers the hoots of laughter and bouts of giggles. These chapters are a lesson in how to write with patient loving sympathy, but without any protective fibs, about a difficult friend,’ according to Davenport-Hines.

‘Discretion and honour emerge as the hallmarks of Glenconner’s career as a royal servant, culminating in this book which manages to be both candid and kind,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian. ‘Above all, she demonstrates a remarkable readiness to own up to her own mistakes.’ If only, Hughes concluded, ‘members of the present royal family would follow their admirable servant’s example of honest selfreckoning and personal responsibility’. ‘In the end,’ said Rachel Cooke in the Observer, ‘[Glenconner’s] book isn’t only a record, funny and sometimes dazzling, of a way of life now almost disappeared. It’s an unwitting examination of English repression: both of how it gets you through and of how it can slay you.’

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN

THE QUEEN, THE DRESSER AND THE WARDROBE

ANGELA KELLY HarperCollins, 304pp, £20

Angela Kelly, the daughter of a crane driver and nurse from Walton Merseyside, described her reason for

Angela Kelly: diplomatic

writing about her employer without causing offence, yet without being syrupy.’

Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph, found that the account is ‘unprecedented in its candour about one of the world’s most elusive women – served up by her most trusted servant’. The photographs charm, some of which come from Ms Kelly’s private collection. They illustrate ‘what it is really like to form a “true and lasting connection” with the longest reigning monarch in British history’, and give the project a sense of being ‘much more intimate in its approach’.

Jackie Sedeño, wrote in the Crown Chronicles, that ‘This is without a doubt the closest we will get at a sneak peek inside the process of designing, sourcing and curating the dresses, hats and accessories that comprise the Queen’s wardrobe.’

Though she conceded that Ms Kelly’s words ‘rarely veer from an obsequious undertone’.

The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 11

Barry Jeffery

Hal Shinnie

Lady Glenconner, now aged 87, has produced a ‘candid, witty and stylish memoir’, according to Miranda Seymour in the Financial Times.

Glenconner was born Anne Coke, the first of three sisters, and was a ‘big disappointment’ to the family as there was no direct heir to the man

Lady Glenconner: admirable servant

writing her book; ‘to share the magical and engaging moments that have happened between Her Majesty and myself’. She is Her Majesty’s Personal Advisor and Curator (The Queen’s Jewellery, Insignias and Wardrobe) and In-house Designer.

She is also the first person in history to hold the title. The Queen personally gave Angela Kelly her blessing with the project.

This is an ‘entertaining and beautifully illustrated account of her work’, said Roland White, in the Times. ‘Sometimes the tone of the book comes straight from the pages of Hello!, but overall Kelly has pulled off a remarkable feat of diplomacy:

Biography and Memoir

Joanna Cannon: harrowing memoir

BREAKING & MENDING

A JUNIOR DOCTOR’S STORIES OF COMPASSION AND BURNOUT

JOANNA CANNON Wellcome, 176pp, £12.99

Joanna Cannon is a bestselling novelist. Before that she was a psychiatrist and before that a junior doctor. This is her harrowing memoir of life on the wards. ‘We tell our stories in the hope that someone out there will listen, and we will be understood,’ writes Cannon, and as Katy Guest put it in the Guardian: ‘Breaking & Mending is an account of what nearly broke her when she was a junior NHS doctor.’

The memoir ‘is fundamentally a slim, soulsearching story of unsuitability’

DEAR LIFE

A DOCTOR’S STORY OF LOVE AND LOSS

RACHEL CLARKE Little Brown, 336pp, £16.99

Rachel Clarke is a reporter turned palliative care specialist. She has written about the surprising and gentle vitality of working in a hospice and seeing every day the one absolute certainty of all our lives: that we must die. To it she brings the skills she has learned in both professions. Nicci Gerrard in the Guardian gave the book fulsome praise: ‘Clarke is unerringly good at telling stories and Dear Life is full of them – of the young woman who 24 hours before her death joyfully got married in the hospice and died in her new husband’s arms still dressed in her white chiffon; of the mother who was shown by one of the staff how to wash her 19-year-old son’s dead body; of the distressingly agitated old man who found peace once the double doors had been opened and he had been turned to face the garden.’

Clarke interweaves her experiences with the dying with the death of her beloved father and also her earlier experiences as an A&E doctor ‘amid the stabbed, the shot, the broken-boned, the overdosed, the dog-bitten, the knived, the burned and the impaled’. Cathy Rentzenbrink in the Times found much to admire though she ‘rather itched to take a scalpel to some of the earlier chapters’. Book blogger Linda’s Bookbag was moved: ‘In a hospice there is more of what matters in life – more love, more strength, more kindness, more joy, more tenderness, more grace, more compassion – than you could ever imagine.’

MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY

HOW DOROTHY L SAYERS AND HER OXFORD CIRCLE REMADE THE WORLD FOR WOMEN

MO MOULTON Corsair, 384pp, £20

In 1912 the future crime writer Dorothy L Sayers and a group of her friends at Somerville founded a literary club which they called the Mutual Admiration Society. There were a dozen members but Mo Moulton concentrates on four of them, who remained in close touch through lives which witnessed a feminist revolution in terms of laws changing and horizons opening up.

Moulton argues that her quartet – two writers, a teacher and a midwife – each contributed to this revolution.

Frances Wilson in the Sunday Times wondered how ‘Sayers’s sleuthing hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, improved the lives of women apart from that of his sidekick and eventual bride

Loyalty between the four women ‘did not involve intimacy’

Rachel Clarke: good story-teller

Harriet Vane.’ She also noted that loyalty between the four women ‘did not involve intimacy, and it is unclear how much any of them knew about the courage, conflicts or sacrifices involved in one another’s various domestic arrangements’.

Laura Freeman in the Times complained about the book’s The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 13

Laura Gallant

In the Telegraph, Christie Watson, a former nurse and author of her own memoir of life on the NHS frontline, found the book ‘breathtaking’. ‘She charts her journey from her first job as a doctor, to the emergency department, and finally towards her specialism in psychiatry, where the real miracles occur: “To remain standing under the weight of these illnesses is a sign of the most enormous courage.”’ In the Sunday Times, Lucy Knight was also moved by a ‘well-paced and often beautifully told’ account ‘despite some dramatic episodes that feel unnecessarily formulaic (there is enough genuine

horror in the anecdotes to carry the narrative’s suspense)’.

Melanie Reid in the Times admired Cannon’s ‘ballsiness’ but she was not always convinced by the high-octane drama and agreed with the author’s own conclusion that she was simply not cut out to be a doctor.

‘Truthfully, it is hard to disagree.

Breaking & Mending is fundamentally a slim, soul-searching story of unsuitability. I wearied of Cannon’s emotionalism. She writes lyrically, with a novelist’s verve and colour, but she cannot resist hyperbole and – for me at least – it undermines her account.’

Biography and Memoir ‘academese. Take this: “On one level, their story reveals the generative power of friendships, which create an intimate local space in which we can become something or someone quite different from our assigned social or familial categories.” (Urgh.)’ But she praised as ‘sensitive and enlightening’ Moulton’s discussions of the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, and of Sayers’s changing attitude to ‘inversion’.

Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian admired Moulton’s refusal ‘to heroise these women, heroic as they undoubtedly were at times. But they were also complicated and singular, brimming with the ordinary prejudices of their time.’ But she regretted the author’s ‘sturdily dutiful style’.

make a common problem feel familiar and mysterious.’ Helen Davies in the Sunday Times warned that readers looking for tips would instead ‘find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times’.

Frances Wilson in the Telegraph hailed the memoir as ‘merciless and self-mocking’.

A DAY LIKE TODAY JOHN HUMPHRYS William Collins, 400pp, £20

WILD GAME

MY MOTHER, HER LOVER AND ME

THE SHAPELESS UNEASE

ADRIENNE BRODEUR

A YEAR OF NOT SLEEPING

Chatto & Windus, 237pp, £16.99

SAMANTHA HARVEY Jonathan Cape £12.99

Samantha Harvey is a much-admired fortysomething novelist who slept well until 2016, when she crashed into chronic insomnia. In her memoir she offers possible causes – the death of a cousin, the end of a marriage (not her own), the vote to leave the EU, the noise of traffic in her new home – and describes her attempts with suggested cures: medication, CBD oil, acupuncture, a visit to a CBT sleep clinic, a stress-reduction mindfulness course, dietary supplements, dietary abstinences – the usual suspects.

She describes the feral creature she becomes by night, tearing her hair, prowling her home, howling at the moon. There are frequent changes of register and the prose veers between first and second and third person as Harvey reaches for some perspective on herself which remains as elusive as her quest for sleep. Doctors are unsympathetic – ‘They use the phrase “sleep hygiene”, which suggests that if you can’t sleep then you are somehow unhygienic. A dirty sleeper.’

Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Times characterised the book as part of a vogue for ‘memoirs that meander between personal history, essay, political musings, travelogue and the idiosyncrasies of their (usually female) author’. She suggests that ‘the form, or rather the formlessness, suits Harvey well… she manages to 14 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020

‘spectacularly grumpy. His hates pepper the book.’ Still, she conceded, ‘behind the fluff and grumbles, this is an unparalleled record of contemporary politics at the jaggy end’.

Michael Buerk, reviewing in the Critic, described Humphrys as one of the ‘most wicked and engaging of friends’. So, ‘it would have been fun to see how his passion for the declared truth dealt with some of the gamier episodes of a hyperactive alpha male’s rise to media fame and fortune’. But he admired how Humphrys gave the BBC ‘one-and-ahalf barrels as he closes the studio door behind him’.

John Humphrys: a life in service to facts

John Humphrys, one of the most trusted and respected journalists of our age, has produced his memoir at the age of 76 and after 60 years in the trade. He admits that, ‘I don’t like being defined or told what to do, whoever is in charge’. Grilling politicians, and ‘taking the powerful to task, whether prime ministers or his former employers at the BBC, is in his blood’, said Fiona Sturges in the Guardian. In her view, his memoir ‘mixes engaging snapshots of his early career and analysis of the evolution of broadcasting with diatribes and petty score-settling’.

But his ‘old-man-yells-at-cloud shtick gets wearying’.

Melanie Reid, in the Times, shared Sturges’s view; Humphrys is a ‘flawed, curmudgeonly Welsh superhero’. The superhero has been ‘relentless in pursuit of baddies, those dissembling politicians, those wielders of power. He has led a strikingly ascetic life, rising at 3.30 am for decades, self-denying worldly pleasures; a life in service to facts.’

But in his memoir Humphrys can be

Humphreys is a ‘flawed, curmudgeonly Welsh superhero’

In 1980, 14-year-old Adrienne Brodeur was woken at her home in Cape Cod by her mother Malabar, a monstrously self-absorbed cookery writer, who wanted to confide that she’d just had an ecstatic encounter with a man called Ben Souther. From that moment on, Adrienne was her mother’s tacit fixer, facilitating her affair with Souther and thus becoming the enabler of her betrayal of her beloved stepfather. The knot was further tangled when she herself married Ben Souther’s son.

In the Guardian, Elizabeth Lowry was dismayed by the apparent passivity of Adrienne’s account. ‘Wild Game could have been a deadly weapon: instead it’s a supremely civilised, and so necessarily tame, attempt at making sense of the horror at the heart of this particular mother-daughter relationship.’ And Rachel Cooke in the Observer thought it ‘not as gripping as I felt it should be’. She particularly disliked the ‘travel writerly descriptions’ which made it ‘a memoir as it might appear in Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, varnished rather than visceral, more complacent than searching.’

But in the New York Times, Emily Rapp simply loved it: ‘The book is so gorgeously written and deeply insightful, and with a line of narrative tension that never slacks, from the first page to the last, that it’s one you’ll likely read in a single, delicious sitting.’

Entertainment ‘Her writing style is as kooky and digestible as Bill Bryson’s,’ Annesley commented, remarking on ‘her genius as a raconteur’.

‘Between the Stops is like browsing through a well-stocked museum of curiosities with a wise and kind guide; it’s part celebration, part confession, part call to arms and wholly entertaining,’ Merritt concluded. ‘Don’t read it on the bus though – it will make you miss your stop.’

BETWEEN THE STOPS

THE VIEW OF MY LIFE FROM THE TOP OF THE NUMBER 12 BUS

SANDI TOKSVIG Virago, 432pp, £20

Toksvig’s ‘enduring self-doubt extends to a get-out clause in the book’s foreword, in which she suggests the reader “change seats now” if they think her book is not for them. “Life is too short to read a book that upsets you”,’ Jackie Annesley quoted in the Sunday Times. ‘Ignore her self-effacement,’ Annesley continued, ‘Hop on this bus, grab a seat up top and prepare yourself for a fun-filled, fact-packed, memorable ride.’

‘The celebrity memoir is a format that requires constant reinvention,’ Stephanie Merritt wrote in the Guardian. ‘Toksvig, who balks at the idea of “celebrity”, has found a fittingly idiosyncratic vehicle for her reflections on her life and career.

Quite literally: it’s the number 12 bus, which winds through London from her family home in Dulwich to her professional home of Broadcasting House at Oxford Circus.’

‘It’s part celebration, part confession, part call to arms and wholly entertaining’

Debbie Toksvig

‘No one who has heard Toksvig speak will be surprised to find a bedrock of compassion and righteous anger underpinning the book,’ Merritt continued, but ‘there are plenty of funny stories too.’ And as Annesley noted, ‘multiple household names illuminate her stories’.

16 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020

enigma. He lived all his life in the house in Knotty Ash Liverpool in which he was born, never even having it rewired. As Collard put it: ‘He was thoughtful, eccentric, guardedly candid in interviews and immediately likeable but also, it seems, entirely unknowable.’

THE CONTENDER

THE STORY OF MARLON BRANDO

WILLIAM J MANN

HAPPINESS AND TEARS

HarperCollins, 718pp, £22

LOUIS BARFE

‘Very few great actors made so many inconsequential films – or found themselves in so many implausible and ugly situations,’ declared the distinguished film critic David Thomson in the London Review of Books. Compared to Peter Manso’s 1994 biography, which was based on 750 interviews and ran to 1,118 pages, as Thomson pointed out, Mann’s ‘modest work (718 pages) draws on fewer interviews, not that it lacks flavour or credibility when it comes

THE KEN DODD STORY Head of Zeus, 336pp, £20

Sir Ken Dodd was the last of the vaudevillians. As Alexander Larman put it in the Critic: ‘By his tickle stick shall ye know him. In the annals of 20th-century comedy, there was no other figure quite like Kenneth Arthur Dodd, a man whose persona went hand in glove with his inimitable appearance. A great shock of hair sticking up as if he had received a potent electric shock; two enormous, protruding, buck teeth, comic and vaguely sinister at the same time; and, of course, his tickling stick, forever held priapically aloft.’

Louis Barfe’s biography of a strange comic genius was praised by critics. In the Spectator Patrick Skene Catling called it ‘industrially thorough’. Dodd’s career ended with his death in 2018, aged 90. His deathbed marriage to fiancée Anne after a 40-year engagement (his first engagement lasted 24 years) avoided 40 per cent inheritance tax. For the famously tax-averse Dodd, it was, as Skene Catling observed, the ‘ultimate tickle’.

In the Times, Roger Lewis recalled seeing Dodd live: ‘I did think he was something of a joke machine, but one that wasn’t likely to run out of inspiration.’ In his 80s, he was still touring. Wrote Lewis, ‘Audiences could be trapped in the theatre for five hours at a stretch. “I’m not like television, missus,” he’d warn. “You can’t switch me off.” He said the usherettes would hand out will forms.’ David Collard in the TLS also saw him. ‘When he finally let us all go (“Tatty-bye everybody! Tattybyyyye!”) we staggered from the building like liberated hostages.’

But Dodd was, in the end, an

to what friends, lovers, colleagues and onlookers remember’. Thomson liked the way the book moves ‘back and forth in time, dumping strict chronology for feeling and insight’.

For example, Mann uses two incidents several years apart ‘to explore Brando’s unceasing sexual adventurism, and his habit of seeking parental figures and then abandoning them. There was a natural promiscuity to him, like an actor who wondered if he might play all the roles. That takes us into the heart of things: why he acted, whom he sought to please, and how his prowess clashed with his manicdepressive roundabout.’

Roger Lewis, in the Daily Mail,

Entertainment was having none of this. ‘This is one of those psychologically claustrophobic biographies where each and every instance of adult behaviour, the obstinacies and vituperation, is immediately traced back to childhood trauma, which axiomatically include bad parenting, hopeless schooling (undiagnosed dyslexia – of course) and an injured knee.’ Not an admirer of Brando as an actor (‘his apparent realism was seldom realistic...there was a lot of artifice and stylisation’), he found Mann’s book exasperating: ‘Why are movie biographies often so dire? This zigzag opus is hard to follow. Some films are dealt with in obsessive detail, others go unmentioned – there is hardly anything on Apocalypse Now. Mann’s chronology is confused to such an extent that I wondered whether a compositor had randomly shuffled the manuscript pages in a fit.’

HOME WORK

A MEMOIR OF MY HOLLYWOOD YEARS

Music, in which an aerial camera swoops in from above over verdant alpine scenery to reveal Andrews’s Maria, the shot was captured from a helicopter, and every time it completed a take and rose up to return to its original position, the downdraft from the engine flung Andrews to the ground.’

Sarah Crompton, reviewing Home Work for the Times, emphasised Andrews’s reticence. ‘Perhaps because the book is co-written with her adored daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, and perhaps because of temperament, Andrews tends to skate on the surface of things. She records, but she does not dig.’ Even so, she is ‘brutally self-critical about her failings as a daughter, a sister and a mother, and there are long passages where she agonises about her problems keeping her family together when her stepchildren are unhappy, her brother is struggling with a drug problem and nannies keep leaving her and her adopted children in the lurch.’

FACE IT DEBBIE HARRY HarperCollins, 352pp, £20

‘Unlike many Hollywood memoirs these days,’ Home Work ‘doesn’t contain any shocking or titillating revelations’, wrote Patrick J Kiger in the Los Angeles Times. ‘Instead, the 84-year-old British-born actress and singer comes across pretty much as the Julie Andrews that we admire on the screen – graceful, elegant and wholesome, but not particularly complicated or troubled.’ This is ‘the story of an ordinary person blessed with extraordinary gifts, including a soaring, angelic soprano voice, whose big struggle was to maintain that normalcy in a Hollywood rife with exploitation and excess’. Nonetheless, Kiger praised her ‘refreshing unpretentiousness and gentle sense of bemusement at her life’s adventures’.

Sophie Gilbert, who interviewed Andrews for the Atlantic, found the book to be ‘a dance between candour and diplomacy, as Andrews navigates the imperative of honesty with the courteousness that seems to be her governing instinct... For most of us, Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp are pleasures, diaphanous cultural entities, but for Andrews, they were jobs – demanding, exhausting work...

For the opening scene of The Sound of

With an introduction from Chris Stein, Blondie’s guitarist and Harry’s erstwhile lover, the bulk of the book is based on interviews the 1980s rock diva gave to music writer Sylvie Simmons. ‘The direct style makes for a lively, candid but often exasperatingly unreflective read,’ declared Graeme Thomson, in the Mail on Sunday’s Event Magazine, who wished Harry had ‘dug deeper’.

Debbie Harry: allows no room for shock, sadness or vulnerability The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 17

©Chris Stein

JULIE ANDREWS Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 352pp, £20

‘In the Eighties Stein almost dies from a rare autoimmune disorder, and Harry writes movingly about his agonising recovery and the toll it took.

They break up on the day Andy Warhol dies, though again she doesn’t disclose the reasons. She is similarly opaque on the disintegration of Blondie in the Eighties, and her bankruptcy.’

Most reviewers agreed about Harry’s reticence. ‘Harry writes with a certain cool, at times a Warholian blankness,’ said Suzanne Moore in the New Statesman. ‘Occasionally she is slightly ditzy... Then every so often she pulls out a sentence of absolute self-knowledge... What drives her is not clear as she is a reluctant memoirist. Her honesty about sex and drugs is a relief. Unusually for a sex symbol, she actually likes sex. Her observations on heroin are acute: some people, she writes, take drugs not to feel more but to feel less.’

The Guardian’s Fiona Sturges noted ‘the somewhat detached tone of this memoir’: ‘Whether reflecting on her fruitless search for her birth parents, or the New Jersey exboyfriend who stalked her and threatened her with a gun, or the close shave with a man who offered her a lift, and whom she believes to have been the serial killer Ted Bundy, Harry allows no room for shock, sadness or vulnerability... It’s a shame that Harry passes up the chance to dig deeper into her experiences of objectification and the nature of fame, but more disappointing is that we learn so little about her interior life, and how she really thinks and feels.’

Forgotten authors WILLIAM COOK wonders whether it’s time for a renewed interest in the ‘bit-too-nice’ travel and thriller writer Hammond Innes Whatever happened to Hammond Innes? When I was a schoolboy his name loomed large in all good bookshops (and quite a lot of bad ones) but now, half a lifetime later, his byline has virtually disappeared.

His thrillers are still in print, but he’s vanished from the high street and the books pages of the posher papers, even though he’s just as good as loads of thriller writers who are still in vogue. So why has he fallen out of favour?

Innes was as much a travel writer as a thriller writer. Although his novels are about men of action, the locations take centre stage. From the late 1940s to the early 70s, he averaged a book a year. His routine rarely changed. He’d spend six months in some remote and perilous location (the Empty Quarter of Arabia, the frozen wastes of Labrador, the Australian Outback, a Norwegian whaling station…), then six months back in his beloved Suffolk, turning this odyssey into fiction. He was fascinated by extreme environments, where men are tested to their limits: deserts, mountains, glaciers... Ostensibly, his rugged characters are battling against each other. Actually, their main battle is against the elements: snowstorms, sandstorms, hurricanes…

His stories also followed a tried and tested pattern. A likeable, classless everyman, usually in early middle age, frequently divorced or bereaved, stumbles into a wild and unfamiliar world where he uncovers a plot to commit some kind of fraud.

Along the way he meets a demure but damaged woman (always attractive but never beautiful) with whom he falls in love. Before he can bring the baddies to justice, a tornado or a blizzard or a volcanic eruption intervenes. With the help of an erratic maverick (often an old soak) he survives this ordeal, collars the crooks and wins the girl.

Innes was born in 1913 in Sussex, of Scottish stock. His father was a banker. He was an only child. He was educated at Cranbrook School, where he enjoyed Geography as much as English. He didn’t go to university.

Instead he became a financial journalist, which gave him some useful background for his plots, and

honed his erudite and effective prose.

He published a few potboilers in the Thirties, then served as an antiaircraft gunner in the Battle of Britain, which inspired his lively wartime novel, Attack Alarm.

After the war he moved to Suffolk with his wife, the actress and writer Dorothy Lang. From then on he wrote full time. Dorothy was his muse and soulmate. They travelled together by land and sea. They remained inseparable until she died in 1989. They had no children, and in his later years Innes became increasingly committed to ecology, planting millions of trees as far afield as Canada and Australia. He died in 1998.

‘Hammond Innes was marketed as a middlebrow writer, a purveyor of mass entertainment rather than proper literature’ The thing that distinguishes his writing is his meticulous research, and his dramatic descriptions of the natural world – especially bad weather and harsh terrain. A keen, accomplished sailor, his best books are about the sea. His seafaring titles (The Wreck of the Mary Deare, Maddon’s Rock, Atlantic Fury…) bear comparison with CS Forester

and Erskine Childers. Sir Francis Chichester praised his seamanship.

He’s been likened to Nevile Shute and even Conrad. Daphne du Maurier was a fan.

So why isn’t he revered, like those other masters of the form? Partly because, despite rave reviews from high class critics like VS Pritchett and Cyril Connolly, he was marketed as a middlebrow writer, a purveyor of mass entertainment rather than proper literature. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and it certainly did his sales no harm, but it meant he was forgotten while more ‘serious’ (ie, less entertaining) writers were remembered.

Another reason is, since we’re all so well-travelled nowadays, the adventures he describes have lost some of their old allure. When I first devoured these books in the late 1970s, in my mid-teens, I’d never even been abroad, and nor had many of my peers. For my generation these intrepid journeys were the stuff of fantasy. For my children’s generation they’re no big deal. ‘Very little is known or has been written about the Maldives due to the difficulties of getting there,’ he writes, in the preface to The Strode Venturer, published in 1965. If only a novelist or travel writer could say the same today.

But the biggest problem was, he was simply a bit too nice for modern times. His heroes are impeccably well-behaved and his heroines usually keep their clothes on (on the rare occasions when they don’t, he always leaves us at the bedroom door). Even his villains are relatively respectable. This was fine in the 1950s and 60s, but in the 1970s and 80s his wholesome tales began to feel old-fashioned. Yet what goes around comes around, and now these timeless yarns seem far less dated than the violent thrillers that replaced them. Now that every conceivable depravity is commonplace, there’s renewed pleasure in reading well-made stories by a writer whose bravery and decency shines on every page.

The Wreck of the Mary Deare, Maddon’s Rock and other works are published in paperback by Vintage Classics.

The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 19

Current affairs ‘Blake is particularly adept at drawing characters and her story has a gaudy cast’

BETWEEN TWO FIRES TRUTH, AMBITION AND COMPROMISE IN PUTIN’S RUSSIA

JOSHUA YAFFA Granta, 368pp, £20

kremlin.ru

The American journalist Joshua Yaffa has worked in Moscow for the past seven years and is now a correspondent for the New Yorker.

Guardian reviewer Oliver Bullough described Yaffa’s book as a ‘rich and detailed examination of how Putinism works, about the compromises required by individuals who want to get ahead, and the capricious nature of the system Putin inherited then moulded in his own image... Perhaps Yaffa’s most striking achievement is that every compromise he describes is completely understandable, yet cumulatively their effect is disastrous.

The plural of compromise turns out to be corruption. This is a measured, clever, well-researched and superbly written work.’

Life in Russia has to be lived ‘mezhdu dvukh ogney’ or ‘between two fires’. In other words, explained Roger Boyes in the Times, ‘to give yourself room for personal initiative you have to accept that you’re stuck in the middle of two opposing forces bigger than yourself’. Boyes welcomed 20 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020

President Putin: no call to dislodge him

Yaffa’s approach of ‘long, unforced interviews with his subjects, which reveal how power is exercised, bent and manipulated in daily life’.

Such subjects include a Chechen human rights activist, a Crimean zookeeper, a Bolshoi ballet director, and the head of Channel One, Konstantin Ernst, who, in Boyes’s judgement, ‘wants to be treated as a sophisticate yet comes over as a crude nihilist’. Yaffa sees in the complicity of such individuals ‘an explanation for why there is no call to dislodge’ Putin.

Noting his ‘good eye for colourful detail’, Tony Wood in the Financial Times, found that ‘Yaffa skilfully weaves together perceptive descriptions of flesh-and-blood people with a balanced evocation of the wider political and historical context.’

FROM RUSSIA WITH BLOOD

Herald. ‘There will be those who cavil that not much new has been brought to the table in the published book...

But Blake’s triumph is that she can pull an extraordinary tale of larceny on a grand scale, corruption of unprecedented levels and serial murder into a brisk, comprehensible narrative. She is particularly adept at drawing characters and her story has a gaudy cast. The most conspicuous can be colourful and reckless or are dedicated and honest. They share a common fate. They end up dead.

They are poisoned by radioactive material, choked on dog leads, shot outside their homes or found impaled on railings outside a bijou London residence.’

Roger Boyes, reviewing the book for the Times, felt that Blake ‘has to stretch a little to make the case that the Kremlin is behind every Russian hit job in the home counties’.

Nonetheless, it is clear that the ‘GRU military intelligence, which recruits freely from the ranks of Spetsnaz special forces veterans, has plenty of trained killers in its ranks. And the development of toxins as useful secret weapons – disguising provenance, masking murder as death by natural causes – has added to the threat. By embracing hybrid warfare in all its dimensions, Russia has opened the way for the broad use of murder squads abroad.

It won’t always be possible to demonstrate that Putin is holding a smoking gun, and that is precisely the point: he is the master of credible deniability.’

CATCH AND KILL

PUTIN’S RUTHLESS KILLING CAMPAIGN AND SECRET WAR ON THE WEST

LIES, SPIES AND A CONSPIRACY TO PROTECT PREDATORS

HEIDI BLAKE

RONAN FARROW

William Collins, 352pp, £20

Fleet, 464pp, £20

‘Heidi Blake and her colleagues at BuzzFeed have produced the most damning indictment on Vladimir Putin and the Russia he rules,’ wrote Hugh MacDonald in the Glasgow

Catch and Kill is ‘a rip-roaring account of the years spent chasing the Weinstein story and its spin-offs.

It’s a deep dive into the world of US media, Hollywood pay-outs, Donald

Current affairs Trump’s eccentric ways, spies and spineless editors,’ wrote Harriet Alexander in the Daily Telegraph.

This ‘page-turner... is dripping with jaw-dropping revelations and moments of astonishing pathos...

Farrow is a skilled storyteller, and the pacey book is absolutely – ironically – made for film.’

Rachel Cooke, in the Guardian, wondered why Weinstein got away with it for so long. ‘Why did no one speak out? Why did nothing concrete ever stick? Ronan Farrow’s extraordinary Catch and Kill, in which he masterfully tells the story of his quest to reveal Weinstein’s repugnant activities to the world, doesn’t merely answer these questions. It makes them come to seem complacent, even profoundly stupid...

‘As some American critics have already observed, Farrow’s narrative has the pace of a thriller.’ Were it fiction, ‘the collusion at its heart would be too much: you would dismiss it as airport pulp. Here is a conspiracy so deeply embedded and far-reaching that even as I write, those alleged to be involved not only remain in their jobs... they have pugnaciously denied all wrongdoing in the matter of the reporting of Weinstein’s behaviour.’

In her review for the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai, explained that the book gets its title from the practice of purchasing a story in order to bury it that was sometimes adopted by the publisher of the National Enquirer. ‘What Farrow suggests is that NBC News, which employed him at the time, did something with the Weinstein story that wasn’t entirely dissimilar.

Instead of hush money, Farrow says, NBC officials used the institutional levers at their disposal to shut down his work on Weinstein – from intermittent discouragement to elaborate stonewalling to a legal review that turned out to be both labyrinthine and absurd.’

For Sunday Times reviewer Jonathan Dean, ‘humour is the impressive and, indeed, surprising quality found in this meticulous account of how Farrow helped bring down Harvey Weinstein in 2017. The journalist and son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen writes his story like a thriller, with added snark, which actually makes the book enjoyable.’

MINDF*CK

INSIDE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA’S PLOT TO BREAK THE WORLD

CHRISTOPHER WYLIE Profile, 288pp, £20

Christopher Wylie is the twentysomething Canadian data analyst turned whistleblower who appeared in a series of news conferences in 2018 about the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. Most remember him as ‘the vegan with the pink hair’. In Mindf*ck Wylie fleshes out the story with an account of his childhood outsider sensibility, his teenage work first for the Obama campaign and then for the Liberal party in Canada, his move to

Christopher Wylie, pink-haired vegan

London, where he was studying for a doctorate in fashion trend forecasting, and where he was recruited by SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, founded by Old Etonian Alexander Nix. Wylie tells how the second company was created with money from an American billionaire and the involvement of Steve Bannon. He describes how he and ‘Steve from America’ initially bonded over their shared obsession with culture. But the bonding didn’t last and Wylie left SCL in 2014 – ‘Nix was a monster…

Bannon was also a monster. And soon enough, were I to stay, I worried that I would become a monster, too.’

After the surprise result of the 2016 referendum Wylie resolved to expose his old colleagues, and his collaboration with Carole Cadwalladr on the Observer was the result.

In the Guardian John Naughton found Mindf*ck ‘an invaluable primer on psychological warfare and behaviour modification’. Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times complained that some of Wylie’s

pronouncements are ‘schematic and jarring… but there’s often insight in the unexpected connections he draws’, while Alastair Mabbott in the Herald was persuaded that ‘the closure of Cambridge Analytica marked only the end of the beginning’.

THE MERITOCRACY TRAP DANIEL MARKOVITS Allen Lane, 464pp, £25

Of all the people you’d expect to launch a broadside against meritocracy, the Guido Calabrese Professor Of Law at Yale University would not be the obvious first choice.

When Daniel Markovits attacked meritocracy in a 2015 commencement address there as ‘a gilded cage that imprisons the elite and leaves the rest feeling excluded and undervalued’, wrote Toby Young in the Spectator, it was ‘a kind of heresy’. In this book Markovits develops the argument. ‘The Meritocracy Trap is an entertaining read, full of useful facts, and contains some penetrating insights into the shortcomings of what amounts to a secular religion, not just in America but across the West.’

Writing in the Times, Emma Duncan called meritocracy ‘shorthand for a system of allocating power and wealth based on achievement rather than inheritance’: ‘In this compelling and convincing analysis of the way power and wealth are allocated, he argues that meritocracy, far from being a means of raising brilliant hardworking people from humble backgrounds, is the most effective way for the elite to entrench its privilege that has yet been devised.’

‘Yes, we get it,’ John Staddon grumbled in Quillette though. ‘We are told many, many times that the middle class is dying, and meritocracy is to blame. We get it. A shorter book, with a less redundant text and fewer, more focused references, would have been a great improvement.’ He further faulted the book for its tentative approach to solutions: ‘[Markovits’s] recommendations are as modest as his theory is all-embracing.’ Young concurred, wondering if Markovits’s ‘anaemic proposals’ for redress ‘will be enough to slay the beast’.

Meritocracy is bad, in other words – but we may be stuck with it.

The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 21

Book collecting JOSEPH CONNOLLY on how buying a bookshop fuelled his passion for modern first editions Precisely 45 years ago, I bought The Flask Bookshop in Hampstead from a kindly white-haired old couple who had run the place since before the War. Actually, they weren’t quite the couple that everyone assumed them to be: the one who wore the trousers was Peggy, the shrewd and knowledgeable sister to Jasper, her very sweet and homosexual brother who could (and did) quote quite endlessly and seamlessly from any of the poets from Shakespeare to Ezra Pound (particularly relishing Keats and Byron). By this time (1975) I was very keen on modern English literature and attracted by the idea of first editions, the chief reason I acquired the bookshop being to fund my own collection (that was the idea, at least, but for rather too long I ended up funding little more than the rent and rates).

‘Modern first editions’ is rather a broad term which at the time was largely interpreted as 20th century – though in the eyes of the elite of the generally rather patrician antiquarian booksellers (with the sole and notable exception of Bertram Rota) some authors were more equal than others.

Those deemed collectable were wholly established, highly literary and more or less all pre-war: hence, no novelists since Greene and Waugh, no poets after Auden and Eliot. Now I liked all of these, and did my best to gather what my very slim budget would allow, but I was also taken with many of the more recent writers – Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and William Golding, among many more. These authors were acknowledged, but not seriously collected, which I thought strange – and nor really were poets and playwrights such as Ted Hughes, Heaney, Plath, Larkin, Pinter, Osborne and Stoppard. Odd, no? But the writers the establishment were wholly dismissive of were any that were regarded as ‘commercial’ – ie, the most loved and popular authors of the time: Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and quite a few others.

The plus side of all this was that impoverished collectors such as myself could wander into any secondhand bookshop (oh Lord –

Joseph Connolly in his bookshop just before it closed in 1988

there were thousands of the glorious things) and take their pick. Seldom was any differentiation made between first editions and subsequent impressions – nor even whether the book retained its dust-wrapper … so I scooped them up. I was eager to explore the bibliographies of all these neglected authors, but none existed. Values too were notional – and so, with the zeal and confidence of a young enthusiast, I wrote a book called Collecting Modern First Editions – very attractively produced in 1977 by Studio Vista with lovely colour plates, all the books photographed from my own collection (for where else could one go?). So here for the first time were not just the 20th-century giants – Joyce, Beckett, Auden, Eliot, Greene, Waugh, Orwell, Huxley, Woolf and very many more – but also the more fun side of things: Wodehouse mainly, along with such as Christie, Fleming, Ayckbourn, and personal favourites such as Geoffrey

‘Impoverished collectors such as myself could wander into any secondhand bookshop and take their pick’

Willans and Ronald Searle (who are great, as any fule kno). I particularly stressed the importance and beauty of the dust-wrapper, which was often seen as an optional extra, and rather vulgar in the bookcase: so many were ritually thrown away.

My book was something of a pioneering work, and it did seem to strike a chord, running to many subsequent editions over the years. I had a stab at valuing every single book – often guesswork, as of course for the more recent works there were no precedents. Apart from the well-established greats, prices ranged from £3 up to a dizzying £25 or so – although these prices soon were to rise quite sharply (partly, I suppose, because of this brand new reference work).

There was a weekly cheaply produced trade paper called The Clique – exclusively for bona fide antiquarian and secondhand booksellers – where you could advertise for books wanted and for sale at a penny a line. Before the cat was out of the bag, I said I was willing to buy all the modern authors I have mentioned, if in fine condition, and listed dozens of them each week. I was inundated: word got round in the trade that there was this loony in Hampstead (where else?) who was actually paying good money for all these piles of 1950s and 1960s books that they had been unable to shift. I remember I bought a mint first edition of Lord of the Flies for the dealer’s asking price of £8, along with loads of Wodehouse. With the exceptions of the tricky first three in the series, you could buy all the James Bond books for two or three pounds each. I think there was a point when I was the only Bond collector in the country – strange to think of it now.

I suppose it was just one of those happy instances of being in the right place at the right time, and being possessed of oddball inclinations.

People told me constantly (professionals, mainly) that here was a bubble that would surely burst… but 40 years on, this particular bubble does seem to be remarkably resilient. And in reply to the endlessly asked question: yes, I did actually read all my first editions … just rather carefully.

The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 23

Fiction

IN LOVE WITH GEORGE ELIOT KATHY O’SHAUGHNESSY Scribe, 400pp, £16.99

MISS AUSTEN GILL HORNBY Century, 392pp, £12.99

National Portrait Gallery

Two female giants of the canon, Jane Austen and George Eliot, have recently been the subject of biographical fictions. Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s In Love with George Eliot weaves real documentary material – letters and diaries – through imagined scenes of the novelist’s life, beginning with her arrival in London in 1851 and ending with her death in 1880 a few months after her marriage to the much younger Johnnie Cross.

O’Shaughnessy does not so much depart from the biographical version as animate it. The relationship with George Henry Lewes is as sustaining as the facts suggest, that with Johnnie as odd and uneasy. The ghostly figure of Edith Simcox, Eliot’s feminist stalker, also trips through the story, which is framed by a modern love triangle involving three North London Eliot scholars.

Lucy Lethbridge in the Financial Times wrote that the novelist herself remains ‘oracular but essentially unknowable: she has an inner life 24 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020

George Eliot at 30 by D’Albert Durade

that is intellectually rich but emotionally fragile. She is thinskinned, agonisingly self-conscious... and enjoys moments of unedifying triumph over friends who can’t keep up intellectually.’ Sophie Ratcliffe in the Telegraph was grateful to O’Shaughnessy for ‘reminding us what an underrated erotic writer Eliot is. One of her gifts is that she can capture other people’s bodies.’

The modern story pleased Ratcliffe less – the ‘academics seem stuck in a bad Eighties theoretical time warp’.

But Violet Hudson in the Literary Review, while praising the novel as astute and skilful, wanted more of the North London academics, feeling they brought the plot into ‘what feels

‘The novelist does not so much depart from the biographical version as animate it’ like glorious technicolour after the unremittingly bleak Victorian scenes’.

Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen takes an opposite approach. Instead of animating the life with the evidence we have, she has written a fictional account of Cassandra Austen’s

destruction of correspondence by and about Jane. Much of the action is set in a rectory in Berkshire where Hornby now lives and where Cassandra Austen’s short-lived fiancé Tom Fowles was born. Hornby imagines Cassandra returning to Kintbury Rectory in her 60s, ostensibly to comfort the bereaved daughter of the recently deceased rector, but in fact to retrieve an important cache of letters. Reading the letters leads Cassandra to recall lost scenes of her youth, and a not quite familiar picture emerges of an intermittently depressive Jane and a Cassandra who has chosen her spinsterhood rather than have it thrust upon her.

Paula Bryne in the Times pointed out that ‘Jane Austen was one of the first novelists to depict pairs of sisters as heroines: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet. Undoubtedly, Jane’s most important relationship was with her sister.’ She praised Hornby’s invention of ‘a new romantic twist, which ought to be equally satisfying to those readers who know their Austen family history and those who don’t’. Stephanie Merritt in the Guardian wrote that it was ‘testament to Hornby’s skill... that I had to turn to the author’s note at the back to check how many of the letters included here were invented’. But while most reviewers were agreed in thinking Hornby had written a sympathetic character in Cassandra Austen, Brian Martin in the Spectator appeared to have read a different novel in which the resourceful and autonomous Cassandra emerges as ‘an obsessed, manipulative old woman... a figure to be pitied for her lot in life’.

GRANDMOTHERS SALLEY VICKERS Viking, 304pp, £16.99

The chief protagonists of Salley Vickers’s new novel are three elderly ladies. Ian Critchley described them for readers of the Literary Review: ‘Nan Appleby is a published poet, writing under the pseudonym AG Nunne. Minna Dyer is determined to read Proust, having already worked her way through the great Russian writers (“She was no judge, but Tolstoy she reckoned could do with some editing”). Meanwhile, the

Fiction well-off Blanche Carrington decides to take a trip to Paris, where she becomes transfixed by da Vinci’s painting in the Louvre of St Anne with her daughter Mary and her grandson Jesus.’

Hannah Beckerman noted in the Guardian that ‘at the beginning of Vickers’s new novel, one of her characters says: “All ways of life have a cost.” For the main characters in Grandmothers, the cost appears to be the same: a sense that their value as grandmothers is underappreciated.’ Beckerman couldn’t get on board with the project: ‘One assumes Vickers wants us to sympathise with her grandmothers, but their behaviour fails to elicit sympathy and she offers insufficient distinction between their predicaments for the reader to engage with.’ And in the Sunday Times, Lucy Atkins was similarly underwhelmed, finding the novel too ‘cosy’ and ‘rose-tinted’: But the blogger More About Books disagreed: ‘It’s a beautiful, gentle read. I was engaged with the characters and eager to read on, losing myself in their respective stories. There were a few “issues” thrown in but there wasn’t any deep or troubling content.’

INDEPENDENCE SQUARE AD MILLER Harvill Secker, 221pp, £14.99

AD Miller, former Moscow correspondent of the Economist and author of the Booker-shortlisted Snowdrops, visits for his latest novel the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

The main protagonist is a washed-up, disgraced British diplomat called Simon Davey and is set between the

present day and 2004. In the Spectator David Patrikarakos described how Davey ‘one day on the Tube, sees the cause (so he believes) of his downfall. She is a woman called Olesya whom he met years earlier during the Orange Revolution’.

Patrikarakos enjoyed Independence Square, ‘a thriller, a political novel and a statement on our times’. And Jeremy Duns in the Times was also full of praise: ‘AD Miller recreates the heady days of the Orange Revolution in evocative detail.’

In the Financial Times, however, Adam LeBor thought the novel’s construction unsatisfactory. ‘Its motor is the reader’s hunger to find out how Davey’s life, once so gilded, could crash so badly. But we already know nothing ends well; not Davey’s

‘AD Miller recreates the heady days of the Orange Revolution in evocative detail’ career, not Olesya’s idealism, not the Orange Revolution. After a while this triple whammy of negatives slows the story down. The ending wobbles as Davey seems set to follow a particular track; an event unfolds from which there is almost no point of return, then abruptly reverses.’

And Anthony Quinn in the Guardian thought it was perhaps ‘a pity that the story’s climax is a long philosophical argument on the benefits of self interest...You sense at this stage the journalist in Miller

Central Kiev, Ukraine, where the Orange Revolution took place in 2004-5

muscling out the novelist, offering a mini-lecture on realpolitik to bring us up to date on the sick soul of Europe.’

THE COCKROACH IAN MCEWAN Vintage, 112pp, £7.99

Ian McEwan’s re-imagining of Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a Brexit parable got a tepid response from reviewers. McEwan’s cockroach wakes up to find he is a human prime minister whose cabinet is composed of ministers who are secretly cockroaches.

Fintan O’Toole in the Observer was better disposed than most, opining that ‘McEwan’s comic parable at least provides some relief from a political farce that has long gone beyond a joke’. But Phillip Hensher thought it a dud, not least because the author was not up to speed on political procedures: ‘If the novelist is asking his reader to believe one huge impossible thing, it’s reckless to pile minor implausibilities on top.’ In the New Statesman Leo Robson was defeated: ‘As you move through the book, it becomes less clear what it has to do with either Kafka or Brexit.’

Johanna Thomas-Corr was left unmoved in the Times: ‘Beneath the splashy concept what is there?

Bewildered disbelief; condescending outrage; mirthful detachment.’ And in the Evening Standard, David Sexton thought it ‘a feeble attempt to make a joke of what is no joke’.

‘McEwan has constructed a fable to please all those who find it incomprehensible that anyone could support Brexit. For all his glorious fluency, he can’t emphasise with such people himself. So he has designated them cockroaches. That’s what the Hutus called the Tutsis (“invenzi”) to dehumanise them.’ It’s an idea that falls, as Sam Leith in the Guardian observed, ‘in the heat rather than light department.’

The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 25

Miscellaneous had no such reservations, calling the book ‘an utter delight, rousing, infectiously impassioned and inspiring of pride’.

NOVEL HOUSES

TWENTY FAMOUS FICTIONAL DWELLINGS

CHRISTINA HARDYMENT Bodleian Library, 250pp, £25

A CHEESEMONGER’S HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES NED PALMER Profile, 384pp, £16.99

Ned Palmer loves cheese. A former jazz pianist turned cheesemonger, wrote Bee Wilson in the Guardian, he has produced a ‘delightful and informative romp through centuries of British cheesemaking’. In Palmer’s account, she said, ‘we are once again in an era of miraculous resurgence for British cheese. In the UK, there are perhaps 700 varieties, “from soft cheeses like the fresh and delicate goat’s milk Perroche to full-on, funky washed-rinds like the aptly named Renegade Monk”.’

The Times’s John Walsh revelled in the detail. ‘The British began making cheese when they stopped hunter-gathering and took up farming around 4000BC,’ he reported, though that in later times ‘the pinnacle of Roman cheese cookery was “the placenta”, a two-foot pastry enclosing 14lb of indifferent mousetrap’. Moreover

Rook-racked, turreted, ivy-clad, the famous houses of fiction tend to hugger mugger not minimalism. In the Guardian, Kathryn Hughes, reviewing Christina Hardyment’s ‘sparkling mini-essays’ on fictional homes, wondered if this was something to do with them being ‘dragged up from the twistiest parts of the unconscious’.

Manderley, Howards End, the Castle of Otranto … most reviewers agreed that Hardyment’s selection wasn’t particularly original but most of them enjoyed settling down on the familiar fictional sofa. As Laura Freeman in the Times put it: ‘Curl up beside your own Lytel Fire-place and imagine yourself among the comforts of the Shire. In The Hobbit (1937), when the homebody Bilbo Baggins is saved from certain death at the hands of the goblins, the eagle who rescues him asks: “What is finer than flying?”

Tolkien writes: “Bilbo would have liked to say: ‘A warm bath and late breakfast on the lawn afterwards’; but he thought it better to say nothing at all.”’ Hughes reflected that ‘In truth, Hardyment has not found much new to say about these literary homes but, like an excellent housekeeper, she rearranges and polishes up the furniture in such a

way that you find yourself inclined to linger.’

In the New York Times, Miranda Seymour even managed to bring in Brexit: ‘Perhaps Hardyment’s decision to focus almost exclusively on Britain is meant to highlight a fearful island’s crawl toward ever greater insularity.’

SHORT LIFE IN A STRANGE WORLD

BIRTH TO DEATH IN 42 PANELS

TOBY FERRIS Fourth Estate, 336pp, £20

Toby Ferris’s book is the record of what, reviewing it in the Sunday Times, John Carey called ‘the last in a series of crackpot projects’: the author decided, at the age of 42, to go and see each of the 42 surviving paintings by the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Though not an expert on the painter, Carey says, Ferris has ‘read the experts and absorbed their knowledge’, and scrutinised the paintings closely, ‘sometimes through binoculars’.

‘Only about half the book is about Bruegel,’ Carey complained. ‘The other half […] belongs to Ferris’s life away from the pictures. At first the two halves interact. The earliest picture he visits is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and it reminds him how he once saw a friend fall from the sky in a paragliding accident. It reminds him, too, of his father’s wartime experiences. Joining up aged 18, he flew in rickety, obsolescent biplanes to attack German battleships. But as the book progresses the two halves come bewilderingly apart.’

A ‘delightful romp through centuries of British cheesemaking’ ‘goat’s cheese, applied to the afflicted area, was thought to be good for hot, itchy eyes, headaches and diseases of the feet’. Palmer’s research, he said, ‘is phenomenal’, though he warned he ‘tends to assume that his readers have a level of fascination with the arcana of cheesemaking similar to his own. His pages reek with recondite terms.’

The Spectator’s Stephanie Sy-Quia 26 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020

‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’: from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

Miscellaneous The personal sections digress, covering everything from entropy theory to 18th-century French naval officers. ‘Whatever next, the despairing reader wonders? As the subject matter becomes more bizarre the language grows increasingly pretentious.’

The Spectator’s Honor Clerk had mixed feelings about Ferris’s digressive book, which she called ‘intricately plotted’ and ‘by turns stimulating, moving and sometimes mildly pretentious’. It was, finally, ‘compelling in any case’: ‘Ferris is also good at making us look with a new eye at familiar paintings and readers can ask for nothing more of an art book.

WHY WOMEN READ FICTION

THE STORIES OF OUR LIVES

HELEN TAYLOR OUP, 304pp, £14.99

Professor Helen Taylor based her book on 400 completed questionnaires and numerous interviews but many reviewers felt that although there were many interesting sidelights shone on the subject of ‘why women read fiction’, the book hadn’t quite got to the nub of the matter. But on the other hand, most of the reviewers hadn’t got to the nub either.

In the Sunday Times, Daisy Goodwin thought women feel ‘guilty’ about reading and wondered why.

‘Taylor suggest that the idea of women reading fiction has always produced unease in a patriarchal world .’ In a feature in the Guardian, Johanna Thomas Corr continued the theme of subversion. ‘The responses [to Taylor’s questionnaires] are striking in their violence and intensity, in the sin and guilt associated with reading, as well as the defiance.’

In the Evening Standard, Susannah Butter pointed out that ‘it is women who keep fiction in business – sales for fiction books are 63 per cent female, 37 per cent male’.

Butter thought it more of ‘a sweeping account than an in-depth analysis.

She could do with losing a few quotes about the joy of fiction, which verge on the sort of thing you’d find in a twee greetings card. I’d rather read a novel than 500 women’s thoughts on the joy of reading.’

Children’s books EMILY BEARN on books for all ages Rebellion – and yet the charm of this story lies in the gentleness with which its moral is conveyed.

Any child who thinks old age is dull should read Duncan Versus the Googleys by Kate Milner (Pushkin, 224 pp, £7.99). Set in the grisly retirement home Arthritis Hall, this roller coaster of a crime story sees children attempting to outwit a gang of octogenarian criminal masterminds. And in The Boy Who Fooled the World (Scholastic, 300pp, £6.99), the bestselling Lisa Thompson tells the story of a young boy whose life is Exploring depression: Out of a Dark Winter’s Night turned upside down when an unwitting lie catapults him to precarious fame in £5.99), tailored for readers aged one the art world. Thompson skilfully to four. (‘Ebenezer Scrooge found weaves serious themes into a Christmas a bore, “Bah humbug to all deceptively simple narrative. of it!” the old man would roar.’) And In historical fiction, A Cake for this spring, babies can start on Jane the Gestapo by Jacqueline King Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Zuntold, 256pp, £7.99) is set on (Familius, 16pp, £9.99), in a special Jersey during WW2, and follows a edition with pullout flaps. Elsewhere group of children plotting to defeat in picture books, mental health and their German occupiers. This is a the environment have been dominant touching and suspenseful story that themes. Out of a Dark Winter’s will whet appetites for classics such Night (Thames & Hudson, 40pp, as Carrie’s War. For those in search £11.95) by the artist Flora McDonnell of a more contemporary plot, is an exploration of depression, told Nothing Ever Happens Here through the eyes of a young child: (Usborne, 272pp, £6.99) by Sarah ‘Day has to end and give way to Hagger-Holt is the story of a night./Surely something can be done provincial schoolgirl who finds to put this right?’. McDonnell herself thrust into the limelight when describes the book as her her father comes out as a woman. autobiography: ‘A journey since In non-fiction, as with picture childhood to harness the sun and books, the environment has stop the darkness of the night.’ On a dominated, with titles such as less poetic note, Why do I Feel Questions and Answers about Like This? (Thames & Hudson, 32 Plastic (Usborne, 14pp, £9.99) and pp, £8.95) by Shinsuke Yoshitake Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically follows a child’s train of thought as Great Women Who Saved the she walks home in a bad mood.

Planet (Bloomsbury, 32pp, £6.99) ‘There are lots of people in the world among a slew of new spring titles. But that I like. But there are some people the surprise bestseller is David that I don’t like at ALL,’ the heroine Attenborough (Frances Lincoln, huffs, in a sentiment likely to 32pp, £9.99) by Maria Sanchez resonate with readers of any age. And Vegara, the first child’s biography of The Last Tree (Pavilion, 32 pp, our seemingly indestructible £6.99) by Emily Haworth-Booth tells broadcaster. ‘When he visited the story of children trying to save a Antarctica, he was introduced to all forest from developers. (‘Soon it the members of a penguin family,’ we seemed that the more wood they are told, in a text that condenses took, the more they needed.’) The Attenborough’s first 93-years of life author is an activist with the into a refreshingly brisk read. famously zealous Extinction Forget Maisy Mouse. Ambitious babies are making an early start on Homer and Dickens thanks to the latest craze for classical board books.

The essential pre-school reading list now includes The Odyssey (Gibbs, 22pp, £6.99) and A Christmas Carol (Campbell Books, 10pp,

The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020 27

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Russian literature CHARLES KEEN on the best book he’s ever read Having finished its 855 pages, seem to summarise his own I shut the book, and uttered, approach to revolution. quite involuntarily, ‘That was Elsewhere he writes: the best book I’ve ever read.’

‘Human history is not the Then I read it a second time… battle of good struggling to I’m 83, and I learnt to read at overcome evil. It is a battle three, and I’ve never said that fought by a great evil before – not even when, at struggling to crush a small seven, I finished Black Beauty kernel of human kindness...’ for the third time. It was a gut Perhaps it is his philosophy reaction, not the result of a that appeals to an detailed comparison with octogenarian like me. I could runners up, like Bleak House become a revolutionary on or the Iliad. I felt ‘purged with those terms. More, it is, as pity and terror’, and conscious with any book, the sheer of having been conducted quality of the writing. The Vasily Grossman: finding beauty in bombed-out cities personally through some of writing conveys the intensity prevailing mood of resignation. The the ghastliest events in of his own feelings, shared young men go off to the front, European history. with his protagonists. It extends to expecting to be killed. Their mothers Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate the love passages, which are really hunger after them, but get on with the begins with the siege of Stalingrad in about love, not voyeurism. And it business of living in their evacuee 1942, and ends with the repulse of the excels in the descriptive passages, quarters. The men go to work, hoping German armies and lifting of the which lend beauty to parched steppes not to be denounced or sacked. siege. For every event recorded, the and bombed-out cities.

Vasily Grossman, a revolutionary author occupies the mind and spirit of Grossman loves the Russian in spirit, is disenchanted with individual participants, so one is landscape, as he loves its citizens. He totalitarianism. ‘The simple wish for living their lives with them through loves Russia, and his book dwells on people to live freely and happily and plot and sub-plot. The damage the ‘kernel of human kindness’, comfortably, for society to be ordered inflicted by the two contestants, which, throughout his life, has been freely and justly – this simple desire fascism and communism, on the lives under fierce assault from the ‘great determined the lives of many of the and the integrity of their adherents is evil’ of state oppression. most remarkable revolutionary baldly stated, and we get a bird’s eye If I’m spared, I’ll read the book a thinkers and fighters... And there were view of a world which had lost its third time. Then I can compare it with many other important Soviet figures… moral compass.

Black Beauty. who were guided until their last days We live life in the front line, in by an equally clear, childishly pure homes under siege and air raids, in Life and Fate is published in sense of purpose...’ Those words, from lives of deprivation. We join a line-up paperback by Vintage Classics; another of his books (Stalingrad), for the gas chamber. There is a Stalingrad by Harvill Secker

Paperbacks David Nott is a general and vascular consultant surgeon with the NHS but he also works in war zones, first volunteering in 1993 in a Sarajevo hospital during the Balkans conflict.

War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line (Picador, 320pp, £9.99) is his account of ‘25 years dispensing life-saving treatment in some of the most dangerous places in the world’, explained Fiona Sturges in the Guardian. ‘Now in his sixties, [Nott] dashes around the globe to embrace danger in conflict and disaster zones,’ wrote Ian Birrell in the Times. ‘His stories of courage and compassion in the face of seemingly certain death are breathtaking,’ confirmed Sturges.

‘This is not a book for the fainthearted,’ said Christie Watson in the 30 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2020

Telegraph. ‘There is so much horror...’ But she thought the book ‘a triumph: a love letter to surgery, and to helping others in extremis’ – and a reminder that ‘ordinary people can do extraordinary things’.

The Amritsar massacre took place in April 1919 when General Dyer ordered British Indian Army troops to fire into a crowd of unarmed Indian civilians in the Punjab, killing at least 400 people. ‘Indian fury at the slaughter extended well beyond the nascent independence movement, and the relationship between the rulers and ruled lurched into what became an unstoppable decline,’ explained Ian Jack in the Guardian. In Westminster, some 20

years later, Udham Singh shot dead Sir Michael O’Dwyer, former lieutenant governor of the Punjab and the instigator of the massacre, fulfilling a vow to avenge the dead.

The broadcaster Anita Anand has turned ‘her meticulous investigative journalism to tracking the life of the formerly shadowy Singh’ in The Patient Assassin (Simon & Schuster, 384pp, £9.99), wrote Rachel Holmes in the Telegraph. ‘It is an engaging story that reads satisfyingly more like a shadowworld conspiracy thriller than the exhaustively researched piece of reconstruction that it is.’ Anand has made ‘this little-told story into a page turner’, agreed Mihir Bose in the Irish Times.

The digital Oldie

William Wordsworth at 250 The Oldie’s Ferdie Rous talks to author and journalist Frances Wilson, about Wordsworth’s idyllic home in the Lake District, his remarkably intense relationship with his sister, Dorothy, and why he was known as the pedestrian poet https://bit.ly/2vugASn Ed West: ‘All conservatives are pessimists’ Ferdie Rous talks to Ed West about why all conservatives are pessimists and why men are guided by women in politics. https://bit.ly/33tBm18

A brief history of self-isolation We’ve been self-isolating for millennia, says Sam Llewellyn, and we managed – even without Netflix https://bit.ly/3a1Tceb

My Oxford Blues As Oxford threatens to remove Homer and Virgil from the classics course, classics don John Davie laments a tragic decline in rigour, language skills and essay-writing, disguised by rampant grade inflation https://bit.ly/3b8nQT0 Private Eye poet pays tribute to Wilfred De’Ath In a moving poem, Private Eye’s teenage poet E J Thribb remembers The Oldie’s Gentleman of the Road https://bit.ly/2UjuP4L Che O’Guevara’s Irish roots The revolutionary ended up on an Irish stamp thanks to his chance meeting with a 16-year-old barman in a County Clare hotel in 1962. John McEntee talks to that barman, creator of the iconic poster, to celebrate St Patrick’s Day https://bit.ly/33pAtGX The Oldie Spring 2020

Does Homer really matter?

Ferdie Rous speaks to Oldie editor Harry Mount and James Pembroke, The Oldie’s publisher, about Oxford University’s plans to drop Homer from their classics syllabus. https://bit.ly/2xLZYX3 50 years on Fleet Street – Mary Kenny Mary Kenny, one of the founders of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, talks to The Oldie’s Ferdie Rous about her 50years on Fleet Street, gender and Ireland’s Brexit moment https://bit.ly/38V0I9e

Oldie cartoon predicts the discovery of a 20,000-year-old mammoth fridge Stone Age man kept his mammoth lunch frozen for maximum freshness, scientists have discovered – and it was all predicted in this Oldie cartoon https://bit.ly/2ITdESs Belgravia is more than a TV series.

It is one of Britain’s great contributions to urban planning Nikolaus Pevsner, the great German architectural historian, thought Belgravia’s garden squares were Britain’s great contribution to global architectural history, says Harry Mount https://bit.ly/3a0Ivsf Thinking inside the box As oldies are encouraged to stay at home and watch Netflix because of coronavirus, Miriam Gross says the streaming network produces greater art than cinema and theatre https://bit.ly/2U1Ehel

Goodbye to Berlin – and the Cabaret years As renowned Berlin nightclub Griessmuehle closes down, Dea Birkett remembers the city’s glorious heyday https://bit.ly/2x2Eq8i

Coronavirus empties London – it’s like the 1970s Harry Mount bikes round London and finds it empty https://bit.ly/38ZwqCb

Oldies won’t panic – they’ve been through the war For all the horrors of the coronavirus, older people remain calm because they’ve seen worse, says Hunter Davies https://bit.ly/2IUFg9P

Beware the Ides of March! Julius Caesar and his dying words – in Greek Caesar was murdered on 15th March in 44BC. His last words weren’t ‘Et tu, Brute?’, explains Harry Mount https://bit.ly/3a1T4v0

The Pharaoh of West Yorkshire John Marshall’s Victorian factory in Leeds had the biggest room on earth and a grass roof grazed by sheep. Now it might be used for a northern outlet of the British Library, writes Lucinda Lambton https://bit.ly/2WuAic1

Greek and Roman myths – the greatest stories ever told A marvellous new Titian show at the National Gallery, reopening soon, draws entirely on the Greek and Roman myths. By Harry Mount https://bit.ly/3b4dxzn

The digital Oldie

Back on the fags Formerly reformed smoker Ferdie Rous is back on the fags – and he hates them https://bit.ly/39Yx9Fe RIP Michel Roux (1941-2020) Michel Roux, the chef and restaurateur extraordinaire, has died.

Fellow chef Rowley Leigh remembers learning his trade under the watchful eyes of Roux and his brothers https://bit.ly/33svfKl Relaxing in la zona rossa in coronavirus-bound Bologna On holiday in Bologna, Inigo Barker discovers Italy split between sheer panic and devotion to la dolce vita https://bit.ly/3a0IXXv

Just say non to more Parisian bicycles Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, wants to introduce more bikes to the city. Tom Hodgkinson warns us against them https://bit.ly/3d7HQXS

Fat Britain gets a pat on the back The BBC’s new documentary about obesity, Miriam’s Big Fat Adventure, promises little more than cliché and claptrap, says Ferdie Rous https://bit.ly/2Wnxayr

Too immature for prison?

The Scottish Sentencing Council has said that criminals under the age of 25 should not got to prison. Theodore Dalrymple objects https://bit.ly/2QskbHQ

Cicero approves of Genesis The pop group Genesis are reforming, all at the age of 69. Cicero, an expert on old age, would have approved https://bit.ly/2vuqi7i

Happy 100th birthday, Ronald Searle!

The greatest cartoonist of the 20th century, Ronald Searle (1920-2011), was born 100 years ago. Harry Mount remembers, with joy, interviewing him for his 90th birthday https://bit.ly/2x3QcPK

RIP Rosie the Riveter Rosalind Walter, one of the inspirations for the famous wartime character, has died, aged 95. What a gal, says Dea Birkett https://bit.ly/3a1WWML

A child’s memories of occupied Jersey As the 75th anniversary of VE Day approaches, Joan Watts remembers the tough days of the German occupation of the Channel Island https://bit.ly/33zrAuw The only way forwards is backwards Mary Killen and Giles Wood, from Gogglebox, love watching old films on Talking Pictures TV – as do veteran journalists Sir Peregrine Worsthorne and Paul Johnson. Gyles Brandreth agrees

Keep the ladies for ladies!

The House of Lords is debating whether to restrict at least half of public loos to women only. Michael Leapman salutes the measure https://bit.ly/3bago9Z The treasures of Sutton Hoo The Staffordshire Hoard of extraordinary Anglo-Saxon finds will be on show at Sutton Hoo from May. But who’s buried there? asks David Horspool https://bit.ly/2IUU5t9

https://bit.ly/3b044sW

The Oldie Spring 2020