January 2014

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Ed’s letter…

65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG www.theoldie.co.uk Editor Richard Ingrams Assistant editor Sonali Chapman Sub-editor Deborah Asher Art editor Joe Buckley Commissioning editor Jeremy Lewis Administrator & events Hannah Donovan Advertising sales manager Lisa Martin Senior sales executive Azmi Elkholy Sales executive Jack Watts Publisher James Pembroke At large Richard Beatty Our quiet American David Kowitz Sir Alan John Brown EDITORIAL Tel: 020 7436 8801 Fax: 020 7436 8804 e-mail: editorial@theoldie.co.uk

I AM DELIGHTED to welcome back Patrick Marnham into the Oldie fold with an extract from his new book (see page 28).

Patrick was one of the original backers of The Oldie and a regular contributor from France where he was then living.

Patrick and I share the rare distinction of having stood side by

side in the dock of Number One Court at the Old Bailey in 1976 accused of criminal libel by the fortunately late Sir James Goldsmith.

All this started with the famous Lucan murder now revived in an ITV play which includes actor Alistair Petrie as Goldsmith. I hope to review it in the next issue.

RICHARD INGRAMS LEARNING HOLIDAYS SEE PAGE 38

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46 NOT SUCH A MISFIT

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12 THE RELUCTANT CARER

Director Stephen Frears talks to Melanie McFadyean

Nick Newman at the Honoré Daumier exhibition

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ABC Primary Figure: 45,118 Subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £39.50; Europe £45; USA/Canada £46; Rest of World £55 The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by Wyndeham Group Distributed by COMAG, Tavistock Road, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7QE Tel: 01895 433600 All rights of reproduction are reserved in respect of all articles, drawings, sketches etc. published in The Oldie in all parts of the world. Reproduction or imitation of any of these without the express prior written consent of the publisher is forbidden.

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John McEntee behaving disgracefully...

19 I ONCE MET...

Nick Flowers recalls his encounter with the eccentric astronomer Patrick Moore

Mary Kenny on the difficulties of being a carer

51 BUS STOPS AND QUICKSTEPS Diana Melly’s dance-floor adventures

Bored to death? See page 45

23 MY TYPEWRITER

Ursula Holden looks back on her long relationship with the typewriter

28 MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIES Patrick Marnham visits a bomb museum

COME ON OUR WRITING COURSE How to write for magazines and newspapers SEE PAGE 73

COME TO ONE OF OUR

LITER ARY LUNCHES

CONTENTS

DATES AND DETAILS INSIDE

See page 64

FEATURES & REGULARS 7 12 14 16 17 19 21 23 24 26 26 27 28 30 32 34 35 37 38 41 44 45 45 46 49 50

The Old Un’s Diary The Reluctant Carer Mary Kenny Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu Olden Life Who was... the King of Lampedusa?

Modern Life What is... a sock puppet?

I Once Met... Patrick Moore Whiteboard Jungle Kate Sawyer My Typewriter Ursula Holden House Husbandry Giles Wood God… Melanie McDonagh …Mammon Margaret Dibben Fashion Tamasin Doe The Museum of Curiosities Patrick Marnham Living Hell Jeremy Lewis Dr Stuttaford’s Surgery Gout Shame! John McEntee Pedants’ Revolt Superbyw@ys Webster Beau Jester Nick Newman East of Islington Sam Taylor Bore TV Wilfred De’Ath considers body art Rant Roger Lewis Stephen Frears Interview by Melanie McFadyean Granny Annexe Virginia Ironside Roving Reporter John Sweeney

51 Mr Wonderful Plays a Quickstep Diana Melly 52 Notes from the Sofa Raymond Briggs 53 Mind the Age Gap Lizzie Enfield 55 Land of the Free... John McGarry 56 Send Us Your Txt 56 Ed Reardon’s Month 57 Crop Circles 58 Unwrecked England Candida Lycett Green 60 Readers Write 64 Oldie Literary Lunches 73 Oldie Writing Course 94 Dear Mavis Mavis Nicholson

76 77 78 78 79 80 80 81 82 82 83 87

BOOKS

84 86 86 88

67 Valerie Grove on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore; Michael Barber on Simon Gray; William Keegan on ‘Austerity’; Derek Granger on Laurence Olivier; Elizabeth Grice on Emma Smith’s ‘As Green As Grass’; Mark Ellen on the Beatles; Rachel Redford reviews audiobooks; William Palmer on memory

REVIEWS 75 MUSIC Richard Osborne 76 DVD Jeremy Lewis

AMONG THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS a

NICK FLOWERS

MARY KENNY

DEREK GRANGER

was educated at the progressive schools Frensham Heights and Summerhill. A sound technician with BBC News at Alexandra Palace, he went on to work in films and television. In a departure from sound production he qualified as a signalman for the Mid Hants Railway – his ‘proudest achievement’. See page 19 for his encounter with the eccentric astronomer Patrick Moore.

Feminist, writer and broadcaster, Mary Kenny has been a journalist in Dublin and London for over forty years. Her books include Crown and Shamrock, a study of Ireland’s relations with the British monarchy, and Germany Calling, a biography of William Joyce – Lord Haw Haw. For the last seventeen years she has also been her husband’s carer, a role which she talks about with candour on page 12.

began his career as a journalist (he was the FT’s first theatre and film critic). In 1958 he joined Granada Television where his productions included Brideshead Revisited. He has produced two feature films, and co-produced a number of West End plays including Noël Coward’s The Vortex. He was also Olivier’s literary consultant at the National for three years – see page 70 for his review of Philip Ziegler’s Olivier.

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DIARY

The Old Un’s diary All the news that matters. And some that doesn’t Gathering winter fuel?

British pensioners living in France have been told that their Winter Fuel Payments are to be stopped, while their equivalents in Italy will keep receiving theirs. How could this be? The Department of Work and Pensions said that France’s average winter temperature was considered higher than the warmest area of the UK – south-west England. Italian pensioners were spared because their country was considered colder than the UK’s warmest area.

British expats were understandably bemused.

They examined the raw weather data used by the DWP, provided by the University of East Anglia, which showed that the average winter temperature of France was 5.08C, lower than southwest England’s 5.6C. How had the DWP argued that France’s temperature was higher?

Expat campaigners soon discovered the answer. The DWP had decided to include France’s tropical overseas departments and territories when it worked out its average. Not surprisingly, the inclusion of places such as French Guiana and Martinique pushed the average winter temperature above the British level.

Thirty British OAPs live in the

French ‘Doms’, while 59,600 live in mainland France. Brian Cave of Votes for Expat Brits said, ‘It’s clear that the DWP added in the Doms figures for France, because the university did not include them. I find

somewhat unholy purpose in mind. Writer and poet Bruce Blunt and his composer pal Philip Heseltine (a.k.a Peter Warlock) lived a bohemian lifestyle and were regularly short of funds. Blunt recalled:

The average winter temperature in France is lower than in south-west England. So how had the DWP argued it was higher? that scientifically dishonest and a corruption of the figures to suit their ends.’

Cash for carols It is always a pleasure to hear the beautiful and haunting ‘Bethlehem Down’ sung at a Christmas carol service but we were surprised to discover that it was composed with a

‘In December 1927 we were both extremely hard up, and, in the hope of being able to get suitably drunk at Christmas, conceived the idea of collaborating on another carol which should be published in a daily paper. Walking on a moonlit night between the Plough at Bishop’s Sutton and the

‘What the hell is this?’

Anchor at Ropley, I thought of the words of “Bethlehem Down”. I sent them off to Philip in London, the carol was completed in a few days and published (words and music) in the Daily Telegraph on Christmas Eve. We had an immortal carouse on the proceeds and decided to call ourselves “Carols Consolidated”.’

Safe pair of hands?

The Government seems intent on railroading through the controversial HS2 link from London to Birmingham and beyond. David Cameron recently announced that he expects Australian businessman David Higgins, who has taken over the HS2 project, to keep its costs down for the benefit of the taxpayer.

But Higgins’s record as chief executive of the 2012 Olympics Delivery Authority suggests that this may not be the case. When he got the ODA job he insisted that ‘We can’t afford to waste any money.’ At the time, the official price tag of the games was under £3 billion. Within two years on Higgins’s watch it had more than trebled.

Readers may recall our 2009 warning about the Australian construction giant Lend Lease, of which Higgins was Chief Executive. Lend Lease won January 2014 – THE OLDIE

7

ILLUSTRATION BY HEATH

★ Great Bores of Today ★ No.66 ‘...forty per cent of your heating bill is quite literally going through the roof you might as well burn your money to keep warm it’s all very well having double glazing and an efficient boiler but that’s only half the story what’s the point of lagging pipes and having draught excluders when as we all know heat rises you can see for yourself the gaps in these boards are wide enough to ride a bike through all there is between you and the outside is a few dodgy planks of

wood your roof tiles have seen better days you can see the sky if you look over there the only way to keep a house warm through the winter is to invest in fibreglass thermal insulation I know there’s a government grant assisted scheme but the waiting list is unbelievable I reckon we can do this for about 2K we’ll send you the form just sign it and someone will come next week to measure up...’

No.67

© Fant and Dick

Tips for Meanies

ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN HONEYSETT

It’s hard to imagine a more magnificent substance than coffee, which performs its priest-like task with miraculous reliability, but Meanies hoping to squeeze more value from their cup should conserve the grounds.

Coffee grounds fertilise roses, azaleas, camellias and all acid-loving plants, as well as adding potassium and magnesium to compost. A sprinkle of coffee grounds repels ants and makes a powerful deodoriser for fridge or car. And if you scatter coffee grounds over the ashes in a fireplace, it minimises dust when clearing.

JANE THYNNE

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THE OLDIE – January 2014

the £1 billion contract for the Olympic athletes’ village on condition that they raised £450 million of private funding to build 4,500 units of accommodation. By October 2008 the number of flats was down to 2,800 (although the price tag mysteriously remained at £1 billion) and the flats were built without kitchens or lounges so that extra athletes could be crammed in. They are now being remodelled so they can finally be let.

In May 2009, Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell announced – to Higgins’s and Lend Lease’s delight – that the entire project would be funded by the taxpayer. ‘The public purse will receive substantial returns from sales,’ she added. But when the village was sold (to private developers and a housing association) the public purse lost at least £275 million.

If Higgins adopts the same approach for HS2 we could end up with toytown trains running on a monorail.

Unappealing conduct In February 2012 a group of pensioners won the right to manage their block of retirement flats in Plymouth. But instead of this being a simple process – which is what Parliament intended when it introduced right to manage (RTM) for leaseholders in 2002 – the residents have faced every conceivable legal obstruction and will only finally take charge of their block in February 2014.

Property investor (and rabbi) Israel Moskovitz, bought the freehold of Regent Court four years ago, and appointed Joseph Gurvits, who works from London, 240 miles from Plymouth, as the managing agent. In February 2012 the leaseholders were granted RTM by the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal. Moskovitz appealed

DIARY

JUNE AND GERALD by NAF

Not many dead Important stories you may have missed

and it took until July 2013 for the appeal to be heard.

The President of the appeals tribunal, Sir Keith Lindblom, dismissed his appeal saying ‘There is no sound basis for an appeal in this case.’ Despite this emphatic rejection, Moskovitz then asked the Court of Appeal for leave to appeal. That application was refused in November.

Moskovitz has argued that his legal manoeuvres address ‘wider implications in many areas of law’ and has also attacked the ‘bully-boy directors’ of the RTM company, saying there are leaseholders who feel intimidated and who ‘do not understand why and what they have signed for in the RTM process.’

Betty Chapple, 83, one of the RTM directors, dismisses this as ‘nonsense’. ‘First they said we weren’t up to RTM, now we are bully boys,’ she said. ‘We can’t wait to see the back of them.’

No lording it Checking in at the ungodly hour of 6am in Gatwick’s North Terminal, bleary-eyed passengers were intrigued to see the former Tory minister Kenneth Baker and his wife making their way through security. They were pleased to note that being a former Home Secretary affords you no special treatment with the Gatwick security bods, who

gruffly told him to remove his shoes. Baker was reportedly not amused. He is 79 after all, a fact that his wife was quick to point out to security personnel.

Voice from the grave I am ready to grant that there are several men of great overgrown fortunes still in the City. But who are they? Do they consist of honest merchants and fair adventurers? Or are they composed of usurers, stockjobbers, and managers of greatmoneyed companies who live like drones upon the labour of the industrious hive, and are so far from encouraging trade that they have already dried up some of its most beneficial springs...?

In short, I believe it will appear, upon the least enquiry, that there never was a greater scarcity of money in this town than at present, excepting what is locked up in private coffers, or circulated amongst bankers and brokers in the Funds, which hardly ever comes to trade.

From the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1737 Sent in by David Lambert

Wraiths and rentbooks The Ghosts of Christmas Past are not confined to ancient manor houses. According to a survey conducted by social housing magazine Inside Housing there are ghostly goings-on in council houses and housing association ac-

commodation across the land.

Sixteen housing associations claim to have dealt with a total of 73 tenants’ reports of ghosts and other paranormal activity. All the associations said they took ghostly sightings seriously – several had contacted a priest, exorcist or spiritualist, and some transferred tenants because of the unruly spirits (whether they told incoming tenants about the hauntings is not known).

The survey revealed that it’s not just tenants’ homes that are haunted.

Three housing associations claimed their offices were haunted. Lambeth Council, whose closets are already full of political skeletons, claimed that the town hall was riddled with spooks. And Sheffield Council reported 47 complaints of hauntings in the previous decade, with one family moved on after a housing officer claimed to have witnessed paranormal activity in their flat.

New research on pond snails has revealed that high levels of stress can block memory processes.

Science Daily Nazeing Parish Council has resolved to adopt ringbinder filing of minutes.

Hertfordshire Mercury The England Under-21 football captain Andre Wisdom had to abandon his Porsche when it got stuck in woods outside Derby following a satnav error.

Daily Telegraph The tip of a one-yearold boy’s finger was squashed when it got trapped in a bike chain yesterday.

Bradford Telegraph & Argus Gang of sheep rustlers steal 160 animals from field near Wool.

Bournemouth Echo £25 for published contributions

Scam alert: no. 2 An Oldie reader tell us that a friend of hers, a single woman in her eighties, received a phone call from a man claiming to be from Hammersmith police station.

He said they had caught a man in the Westfield shopping centre trying to buy a watch for £3,200 on a cloned

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9

DIARY

version of her credit card. He also had a clone of her bank debit card. The supposed police officer gave his name, an ID number and a ‘crime number’, plus a number to ring back on. He said the police would send round a courier to collect her real credit and debit cards, and she duly handed them over. The next day the ‘police officer’ contacted her again, asking for her pin numbers, plus the pin number of her M&S savings account card. When she got flustered and couldn’t remember the pin numbers, he put pressure on her to go to her bank right away and withdraw all her cash. The police, he said, would send round a car to collect her from the bank. At this point, our reader happened to arrive at the woman’s house and rang the police and bank. £700 had already been extracted from her bank account.

The Name Game

she spoke at an Oldie Literary Lunch: ‘A man came up to me on loping legs, sat down next to me and said, “I don’t know who the hell you are but you’ve got good legs.”’

To which she replied, ‘Now I know you must be mad!’ The man was Spike Milligan.

What connects these names? (answer page 11) Vivien Sheena HornbyNorthcote Janet Elizabeth Thumwood Doreen Sproson Patricia Kate Lunn Schmiegelow Maureen Rose Olphin Monica May Obee

Filth on the telly Jane Gardam, Kate Adie and Peter Snow made an excellent trio at our November literary lunch. Kate Adie told guests about her new book Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One. In an interview with a fellow journalist she was asked if she had done any research.

Adie detailed her trips to local archives and various libraries – to which the hack replied, ‘Oh dear! You haven’t heard of Google, have you?’

Jane Gardam spoke about Last Friends, the final book

Boom bang-a-bandage Jane Gardam at our November Literary Lunch

in her trilogy centred round Sir Edward Feathers, a judge nicknamed Old Filth (Failed in London Try Hong Kong).

Filth’s very first appearance in print was in a short story Jane Gardam wrote for The Oldie in 1994 (and he reappeared in another story earlier this year).

There was applause when an excited Jane announced that the Filth saga is shortly to be filmed for a BBC television series. She also told the audience about the first time

What were you doing 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70 years ago?

This month’s £50 prize goes to Paula Harmer

20

years ago I had my first interview for a primary headship. It was a school with desperately declining numbers as parents showed their concern by moving to other schools. Set in two crumbling Victorian buildings within an iron-railed perimeter, its head of some twenty-odd years had decided to retire, with a little help from the local authority. Of the twelve teachers then employed, five had to go, and the remaining seven were bruised and battered by the experience of having their skills monitored to decide who would be ‘helped’ into redundancy. There was no doubt that a new head could make a real difference to this floundering school.

On the day of the interview I looked around the school with the other five candidates. Rooms were cluttered, scruffy, lacking resources and badly organised. There was still work on the walls from September – in May – and it was of appalling quality.

In those days candidates all sat in a room together waiting to find out who had been successful. We laughed about how bad the place was and agreed that those who did not get the job would have had a lucky escape. We chatted until we heard footsteps approaching across the echoey hall. The door opened and in came the local authority advisor. He said my name. I had got the job. My first reaction was to look at the other five people sitting alongside me and say, ‘Nobody laugh!’ We all fell about. Even me!

It was a challenge. I filled 99 industrial bin liners and two skips. I dismissed two teachers and three caretakers, employed numerous new teachers, some of whom moved on to promotions, and increased the pupil numbers from 194 to 270. It became a happy school where children and adults liked to be.

The curriculum was rich and the building was well equipped and inviting. I left it very different from how I found it, and it still stands as my greatest achievement.

A diary contributor and cancer patient who has been boring his friends for years by saying that he would rather go out with a bang than a whimper, nearly got his wish in the run-up to Christmas after nurses started to visit his farmhouse twice daily to change his bandages.

They would give him and his wife the old bandages tied in a small plastic bag which the couple would burn on their log fire. One night his wife threw the bag onto the fire and then joined her husband and the two evening-shift nurses in the hallway. Suddenly there was an orange blast and the house reverberated to an impressive explosion.

Amid cries of alarm from the nurses, the couple rushed back to find that the sittingroom door had been blown shut, and a two-foot shard of wood had blasted out of the panelling. The room was billowing with acrid smoke, the window had been blown open, tearing the latch from its fixings, and pieces of burning charcoal and embers littered the floor, walls and furniture.

‘Ooh, haven’t you grown poorer’

10

THE OLDIE – January 2014

DIARY

Accentuate the positive Help is at hand for oldies who find themselves depressed by the daily news diet of war, murder and political backstabbing. Positive News is the world’s first newspaper devoted to exclusively ‘good’ news. Its aim, says editor Seán Dagan Wood, ‘is to inform, inspire and empower readers, while helping create a more balanced and constructive media.’ Readers have reported that positive news items help to shift their mood from despair to hope.

Meanwhile, a new online newspaper, The Positive (the positive.com), takes a similar approach. For example, as we went to press the daily papers were reporting the high number of child deaths in Syria while The Positive carried a cheerier report from Unicef saying that international efforts have saved the lives of 90 million children over the past twenty years through improved sanitation and education. The Positive’s mission statement says, ‘Mainstream news leaves the reader in a state of

fear, worry, doubt and stress.

The Positive aims to leave the reader feeling confident that there are other ways of viewing today’s world issues.’

A good idea or a great way to bury your head in the sand?

REV PAUL FLOWERS

Mavis Batey Mavis Batey

Spitfire pilot. Watching woodpeckers was her joy.

When the lunch bell went, Mavis got up smartly. Our interviewer, ushered to the door, turned to say goodbye.

There was no one there.

Mavis had disappeared by another route. A true White Rabbit moment.

CHUMPFILE

The garden historian and Enigma codebreaker Mavis Batey, who has died at the age of 92, told The Oldie in an interview published in our January 2013 issue that she was intending to write a final book about the ramifications of her secret wartime work at Bletchley Park. ‘I think I’ve got to do spies,’ she said, surrounded by the files and boxes that would be her references. Most of the raw material, though, was in her fierce brain, sharp and farreaching right into old age.

She was proud of the Park’s impenetrable secrecy.

Even her daughters, she said, knew nothing of their parents’ wartime work (her husband, Keith, was a colleague) until the 30-year rule was up.

‘They just thought we were very good at Scrabble and always won.’ Mavis applied the same detective rigour to landscape as to codebreaking.

Her genius lay in making connections. Her last years were spent near Petworth Park, which she had helped to save from ruination. She had a small flat in the wooded grounds of a care home where there were other women war veterans, including a woman

★ Co-op bank fiasco ★ ‘Crystal Methodist’ ★ Computer porn ★ Rent-boy orgies ★ Expenses fiddle ★ Red-faced fattypuff

100% 85% 98% 91% 100% 92%

Shady business Controversy is raging on the internet over a new ‘art form’ called ‘colorization’.

This takes black and white photographs of people or historical events and, with the aid of Photoshop computer wizardry, transforms them into colour shots.

The trend has grown fast.

A Facebook page, History in Color, has 30,000 followers and Time magazine ran a feature commissioning a ‘colorizer’ to produce colour photographs of Abraham Lincoln – see below. There’s no doubt that the colorizers’ work is subtle and clever. But is it desecrating the past or breathing new life into it?

Judge for yourselves.

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This month’s contributors include: Mira Bar-Hillel, John Booth, Elizabeth Grice, Stephen Heath, Sebastian O’Kelly, Nick Parker and Martin Stote The diary is edited by Sarah Shannon. Please send any contributions to her, care of: The Old Un’s Diary, The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG, or email diary@theoldie.co.uk

Abraham Lincoln circa 1863 (left) and colorized by Sanna Dullaway

Name Game answer: They are all Church of England deaconesses

‘It looked like a meteor strike,’ our man tells us. ‘The fireside chair where my wife usually sits had two smouldering holes the size of potatoes burnt into the upholstery.’

They found the cause of this explosion in the hearth – a small aerosol spray used by the nurses to ease the removal of sticking plaster which had accidentally been put in the bandages bag.

‘Three years ago I was given six months to a year to live,’ says our correspondent.

‘I’m still here thanks to the NHS. I’ve had two emergency operations and each time the surgeons saved my life. My wife and I had to laugh at how I had survived all that and then nearly got blown up in my own home.’

January 2014

– THE OLDIE

11

FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE

The Reluctant Carer Seventeen years ago MARY KENNY was looking forward to the next stage of her life – then her husband had a stroke. Now his ‘reluctant carer’, she writes candidly about feeling trapped, resentful and guilty – and the underlying pity which cuts through this complicated mix of emotions But I should return immediately.

The stroke had mildly affected the left side of his body: he’d be given physio, and drugs to reduce his blood pressure. Life resumed, but not altogether as before: his left arm had lost mobility, and he had a slight limp in his left leg.

The following year he decided to leave London and settle in Deal, near Dover. I agreed to move, but I missed London, and I’m not sure it’s a good idea to change location late in life.

O Mary Kenny and her husband Richard West in 2000

F

amily carers are often called ‘saintly’, and some truly are saints. I do my best, but I know that while caring can be done freely and willingly, there can also be anger, resentment, frustration and even a tragic feeling that one’s own life is being eaten away.

A friend of mine cared devotedly for her mother for many years. Towards the end of the mother’s long life, Mavis said: ‘Will there be any time left over for me?’ There wasn’t much. Soon after her mother died, Mavis was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

I have been my husband’s carer for over ten years. And I am coming to realise that perhaps there won’t be time left over for me.

It started in September 1996, when

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THE OLDIE – January 2014

I was at a family wedding in Bordeaux.

I was 52 and Richard – called Dick by family and friends – was 66. He chose not to come along: he wasn’t a great one for formal gatherings. Dick would sooner meet someone he liked in a pub, because a pub gives a man freedom to come and go as he pleases.

In his days as a foreign correspondent, he might be in a London pub one moment, in Vietnam or Papua New Guinea the next. I practised feminist ‘autonomy’ – I’d go anywhere alone, so I couldn’t object to his remaining behind in London.

Then, at Bordeaux, came a telephone message: Dick was ill and had been admitted to hospital. He had suffered a minor stroke: he was ‘comfortable’ and ‘not in danger’.

ver the years Richard’s mobility gradually deteriorated. On holiday in Portugal, I realised how his walking was slowing down: he began to lean on me, physically as well as metaphorically.

I had to help him a little more with everything: he became nervous about stepping into the shower unless I stood by to ensure his safety. He became more apprehensive about his balance, and needed a stick.

Old age is loss: little by little, you let go of what you once had. A stroke creeps over the body in a physical manifestation of that process.

September 2003 marked the beginning of the Falls. As his legs grew weaker, he would lose his balance and fall. At first, he could get on his feet again, and I could help him. I’d stand over him while he picked his way from the living room to the downstairs loo, leaning on the furniture as he went.

There was talk of a stairlift, but the medical advice was that he should go on walking while he could.

I would dread the Thud – the sound when he fell. His response was often admirably patient and stoical. He wouldn’t complain: just lie there trying to get himself up, or wait until I got him up, sometimes helped by our son Patrick.

f o r b ette r , f o r w o r s e

It could take an hour and a mighty number of heaves, and sometimes paramedics had to be summoned.

From 2004 onwards, he could no longer be left alone. Sometimes he asked me not to leave him, and I cancelled trips to London, Dublin and Paris.

It can’t have been easy for Dick – the change from independence to dependency, increasing disability, falling and pain. But the eternal wanderer grew more domesticated, and more uxorious: now we really were entwined in coupledom. He enjoyed reading, watching nature programmes on TV and seeing friends in a local pub.

Then a real decline set in. He went through cycles of grumpiness, though his sense of humour never deserted him, and neither did his English stoicism – ‘Mustn’t grumble’, ‘Don’t make a fuss.’ But he’d sometimes have vehement bursts of anger, directed at me.

This didn’t bother me – what I minded was that I was now responsible for everything, from car maintenance to financial administration. My role in life was now Minding Dick, and it somehow changed my sense of identity.

In November 2005 I wrote in my diary that ‘in 2010 I will be 66: will I still be rising each morning to attend to the caring chores, squeezing journalistic deadlines into the interstices of laundry, service, personal care?’ Then I felt a stab of guilt for being self-centred.

My own health began to deteriorate: I developed a nasty case of psoriasis, I had a permanently upset stomach, and by 2011 I had chest problems.

Does religious faith help? Yes and no. The Psalms are replete with lamentations about dwelling in a vale of tears. Jesus Christ said ‘Take up your Cross and follow me.’ The Buddha’s ruling principle is ‘Life is Suffering.’

Faith helps you to contemplate

suffering and to consider the afflictions of others: mothers with handicapped children, or children who have died: friends struck down in their prime with cancer or chronic illnesses.

Catholic guilt certainly propelled me to do my duty, and reminded me of the sacramental marriage vows: ‘For better, for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.’

painful and difficult: men who had once been domineering were now needy and clinging, asking day and night for the attention of their longsuffering spouses. They had put aside their own lives to dedicate themselves to disabled partners. So many women seemed ready to assume this caring role which, for me, was a struggle.

Dick and I had sometimes spoken

I am now re-living a pattern established when the children were little, when I tried to juggle a working life with home responsibilities – except that now I am 69 By 2010 poor Dick was, literally, on his last legs. The Falls were chronic.

On an Irish holiday, I’d leave him briefly in a hotel bedroom – and return to find him, once more, on the floor. His legs seized up, his withered arm was ever more paralysed. In 2011 there was a final, terrible fall when the paramedics whizzed him off to hospital.

It was decided that he should be placed in residential care. I felt sad – but also relieved that the decision had been taken out of my hands.

I was undergoing investigations for breathlessness, and was diagnosed with a chronic lung condition.

A

lthough I visited Dick daily in the residential home, I felt I was abandoning him. He complained of being ‘dumped’, and would say ‘Get me out of here.’ Feeling guilty, I brought him home for weekends, although Mrs Patel, the proprietor, sought to dissuade me: ‘You’ll wear yourself out caring for him yourself.

Leave the heavy lifting to my staff.’

The care home seemed efficient and the staff – mostly Indian – were patient and kind. But all care homes share the same problem: there is no intellectual stimulation, and neither the time nor the opportunity to create any.

Dick was sometimes patient and accepting, sometimes grouchy and badtempered, sometimes in denial that his legs were now atrophied. He maintained he could still walk if someone would just ‘give me a hand’. When I tried to explain that he was too disabled, he’d say I was ‘part of the conspiracy’.

Occasionally, I would meet other women visiting their elderly and infirm husbands. They all put on a brave face, though they too found the situation

about euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Being a vague Anglican, he was instinctively against it. ‘Asking for trouble,’ he’d say. But by 2011 he was making ironic allusions to mercy killing. ‘What would you like – a cup of coffee? A sherry?’ ‘A glass of hemlock – and a loaded revolver.’

It’s the temptations of euthanasia that disturb me. Would I be tempted if I could give Dick a painless overdose, and be sure that I would neither be found out nor prosecuted? I would, though Catholic guilt would restrain me once again.

Part of the temptation is monetary.

At the care home we paid almost £3,000 a month. Families are expected to be self-funding until they have a minimum amount left. It costs money to keep the infirm and elderly alive.

As our funds were running out, and he often looked miserable, I felt I should bring Dick home. We needed a bigger house to accommodate the paraphernalia required: the medical bed, wheelchair, commode, hoist, orthopaedic chair. With the support (both practical and financial) of our son Patrick, a move was arranged, and in February 2013 I brought Dick to our new home, and became his full-time carer, with daily calls from agency staff.

In many ways, I am now re-living a pattern established when the children were little, when I tried to juggle a working life with home responsibilities – struggling to get deadlines squeezed into the time between caring for Dick, or arranging his care. Except that now I am 69, and – as my cousin Brendan had earlier warned me – ‘it can only get worse’. This responsibility has indeed taken up the last productive years of my life.

☞ continues over the page January 2014 – THE OLDIE

13

fadsfadfsdafdsa

I’m glad I’m a sufficiently accomplished actress to conceal from Dick my frustrations at being cast in the role of his carer. Hypocrisy has its uses. It’s sad he can no longer read, but – as far as this account is concerned – all for the best.

I hoped Dick would be happier at home, and I think he has become more serene. He has stopped asking for a chalice of hemlock or a loaded revolver, though there is the occasional allusion to departing this world. He sometimes smiles, and occasionally even laughs.

We do the things together that we never did in our salad days: listen to music, watch old movies, and I sometimes read aloud to him.

This was not how I planned to spend my fifties and sixties. I thought I would have more time to write, travel, take a degree. In old age, and infirmity, I have learned that marriage is not about ‘autonomy’: freedom and independence always come to an end.

T

he physical side of caring is not the hard bit: the tough part is the absolute tie, and the relentlessness; you can no longer call your life your own.

And yet there have been blessings.

Our younger son Ed and his wife Emma Grove have produced three adorable grandchildren. We have a home help, Ann, who has been kindness itself. Through the experience of disability, we have encountered many good people.

I am a dutiful carer, if a reluctant one: but Dick’s is the greater burden.

• This is an edited version of an essay in Mary Kenny’s collection of memoirs and other pieces, Something of Myself... and Others, published by Liberties Press, Dublin.

‘Hullo – I’m the village green’

14

THE OLDIE – January 2014

EXTREMOPHILES

Profitable Wonders

by James Le Fanu

The insurgency of life LIFE IS A STRUGGLE. For virtually all creatures the everyday challenges of seeking food and shelter while avoiding the attentions of potential predators can appear so daunting it is almost a surprise they survive at all – let alone flourish. But flourish they certainly do. ‘The whole hill was alive. Hundreds of thousands of eyes looked upon us as we intruded,’ wrote the 19th-century German naturalist Alfred Brehm of a visit to a Lapland ‘bird-berg’, the nesting place of guillemots, razorbills and puffins. ‘From every corner and ledge, out of every cleft and burrow they hurried forth... thousands threw themselves into the sea in a throng so dense they seemed to form an almost solid mass. There was such a swarming, whirring, fluttering and flying all about us that we almost lost our senses.’

The most important of the several factors contributing to this abundant insurgency of life is undoubtedly its fecundity. A single cod can produce upwards of six million eggs, an oyster sixty million, and the starfish Luidia two hundred million released from the two thousand ovaries on each of its seven arms. The descendants of a greenfly mating in early May would, if unchecked by the struggle for existence, by the end of the summer outnumber the population of China, while those of the common housefly over the same period would fill a two-storeyed house.

Move down the scale of life to the humble microbe and the numbers become more astronomical still, millions in a drop of water, several billion in a handful of soil. There are sixty trillion cells in the human body but the skin and gut are home to ten times that number of bacteria, the best known of which, Escherichia coli, divides every ten minutes to produce two replicas of itself – thousands of descendants in a single day.

That insurgency is evident too, in a rather different way, in the flourishing of life in the bleakest most inhospitable corners of the earth. ‘There was no vestige of marine life, animals or vegetation,’ wrote James Murray, biologist on Shackleton’s 1907 Antarctica expedition, when surveying the ice-covered sea and funereal coarse black sand on the shores of Cape Royds. Yet over the next two years he identified numerous

never previously described species – threadworms, fleas, water mites, rotifers and rhizopods, and while dredging the water between holes made in the ice he garnered a rich haul of sponges, sea anemones, crustaceans and molluscs.

A further aspect of life insurgency is its tenacity, as gardeners know only too well, in the legions of hungry pestiferous caterpillars and larvae so indestructible they can survive immersion in 70 per cent alcohol for several hours. The anterior half of a bisected wasp will carry on sucking while its posterior half can still sting, and even the fractionated part of a moth can not only respond to stimuli but continues to lay its eggs.

It was always assumed there were limits to that insurgency, imposed by the constraints of excessive heat or cold, acidity or alkalinity – until almost forty years ago, when the biologist Carl Woese described the unique domain of life, the Archaea bacteria, whose defining characteristic was precisely that they prosper in circumstances that are incompatible with, well, ‘life’. These extremophiles, so called because they thrive in physically extreme conditions, were first identified in the hot springs of the Yellowstone National Park whose stench of rotten eggs reflects their high concentration of sulphuric acid. The near boiling temperature of the springs and their acidity should, by rights, melt the protein machinery of the cell and its outer membrane, but Sulfolobus acidocaldarius is undaunted. At the opposite end of the thermal range, species of Archaea grow and replicate deep in the Arctic ice at temperatures of minus 15 degrees centigrade – even though the crystals formed by the freezing of the water within their cells should penetrate and tear open their cell walls.

High salinity should also be incompatible with life, as a high concentration of salt draws the water out of cells by osmosis – yet the Dead Sea, with a salt concentration four times greater than the oceans, is ‘alive’ with numerous types of Archaea, such as Halobacterium sodomense, first discovered in the vicinity of the Biblical site of Sodom.

Extremophiles flourish in hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor and deep beneath the earth’s surface – collectively the most striking of all instances of the ‘insurgency of life’.

KING SYD

Olden life Sydney Cohen and the poster for the original Yiddishlanguage production of The King of Lampedusa

Who was… The King of Lampedusa?

LAMPEDUSA, A SMALL Italian island south of Sicily, has seen tragedy recently.

Hundreds of migrants, fleeing North Africa and other troubled parts and hoping to reach the economic safety of Europe, have drowned as their unseaworthy, overcrowded boats have capsized or foundered.

There was more comedy to events at Lampedusa seventy years ago, despite its being at war.

On 12th June 1943 Syd Cohen was piloting his RAF Swordfish and its two-man crew back to Malta after a search and rescue mission. Fuel was running low. The biplane’s compasses were playing up. Finally he spotted a runway on an island and landed on it.

Unfortunately he had miscalculated. It wasn’t Malta but Lampedusa, an island garrisoned by 4,300 enemy soldiers.

Sydney Cohen was an orphan, brought up in Stoke Newington and living with his sister Lily. He had been working in the tailoring sweatshops of the East End when called up to the

RAF at the age of twenty. Now Flt-Sgt Cohen suspected that for him, the war was over. ‘As we came down on a ropey landing ground we saw a burnt hangar and burnt aircraft around us,’ he said later. ‘An Italian officer wearing a large plumed hat, shorts and high boots led a knot of men to meet us and we put up our hands to surrender, but then we saw they were all waving white sheets shouting “No, no, we surrender.”

The whole island was surrendering to us! It was a bit of a shake-up… The commandant gave me a scrap of paper.

When my plane had been refuelled I took the surrender chit to an American camp in Tunisia.’ A destroyer arrived the following day to accept the surrender.

British newspapers were quick to see the propaganda value of the story.

‘Lampedusa gives in to Sgt Cohen!’ cried the Sunday Pictorial. ‘London tailor’s

‘Martha! How long has this been going on?’

16

THE OLDIE – January 2014

cutter is now King of Lampedusa’ headlined the News Chronicle. And an American writer, S J Charendorf, saw the potential too. His Yiddish musical The King of Lampedusa, quickly written, opened at the Grand Palais Jewish Folk Theatre, in the heart of London’s East End, on 31st December 1943.

At first business was slow, but Charendorf knew about promotion. A visit to the offices of the Daily Express led to a two-page spread, photographs and a rave review headed ‘All the East End flocks to see The King of Lampedusa’ – which it promptly did. Box-office phones rang non-stop with people asking how to get to Commercial Road, E1. The play ran for seven months, with over 200 consecutive performances – ten a week, including three matinées. It was a record run. ‘The acting involved much waving of hands by the Yiddisher boy and by the Italians (who were actually Yiddisher boys too),’ remembers a retired Professor of English and Theatre, taken to the musical as a young lad.

German radio propagandist William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, ranted from Berlin: ‘The Yids at the Grand Palais should not be laughing for much longer at the ridiculous play The King of Lampedusa because they are earmarked for a visit by the Luftwaffe…’ There could not have been a better plug. The BBC had the play translated into English, and cast Sydney Tafler in the leading role.

Syd Cohen got to see himself as hero when he saw the play not in the East End, but on leave in Haifa in 1944. After the war, he had ambitions to be a sheep farmer in Australia but sadly, flying back to be demobbed, he and his plane were lost without trace near Dover on 26th August 1946. Presumably he drowned, like the would-be immigrants off Lampedusa today.

EDWARD MIRZOEFF

R E P U TAT I O N M A N I P U L AT I O N

Modern life

What is… a sock puppet?

As Mark Antony famously commented of Caesar, ‘The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.’ But then Shakespeare didn’t know about sock puppets. Those for whom sock puppets still evoke a tea-time glow of Sooty, Sweep and all their little friends should look away now because like cookies, fishes and so much else on the internet, sock puppets have lost their innocent connotations and acquired a negative, if not sinister, significance.

Sock puppets most recently came to public attention when Wikipedia, the online reference site, admitted having to block two hundred and fifty pseudonymous users who had attempted to change or manipulate entries.

Wikipedia uses 250,000 volunteer ‘editors’ who supposedly guard the authenticity of its entries, yet it detected that some of them were assuming false identities, either to add spin or insert malign content in supposedly neutral entries.

For Wikipedia, the sixth largest website on the internet, public revelation of these sock puppet attacks was a grave threat to its integrity, and it needed to act. Discovering entries which had been tampered with ‘for promotional purposes’ had caused ‘shock and dismay’ said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. ‘It looks like a number of user accounts – perhaps as many as several hundred – may have been paid to write articles on Wikipedia promoting organisations or products and have been violating numerous site policies and guidelines, including prohibitions against sock puppetry and undisclosed conflicts of interest,’ she admitted.

In the UK it was the Independent journalist Johann Hari who became the sock puppet poster boy in 2011 when he

admitted using the name ‘David Rose’ to make several ‘juvenile or malicious’ edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists he had clashed with, as well as editing his own Wikipedia entry in a rosy light.

Wikipedia is, however, far from the only website to come under sock puppet attack. Amazon, too, has suffered a number of embarrassing incidents in which books have been given rave reviews by their own authors under fake names, with negative reviews posted to those authors’ rivals. Simmering outrage at this widespread practice erupted when the historian Orlando Figes was obliged to admit that he had created a sock puppet to review his own books, and slate those of fellow historians Rachel Polonsky and Robert Service – who successfully sued him.

But the Figes experience did not deter others. Last year crime writer R J Ellory, author of A Quiet Belief in Angels, apologised for reviewing his own work as ‘thriller writing of the very highest order’ and himself as ‘one of the most talented authors of today’ whilst in sock puppet guise on Amazon. He was at least repentant. During a fiction writing panel, the English crime writer Stephen Leather cheerfully described how he used several pseudonyms to praise his own books and explained how he would build a ‘network of characters’ across different online platforms to discuss his work, sometimes even entering into conversation with the ‘real’ Leather.

These admissions provoked a certain amount of cynicism in the maelstrom of compulsory self-promotion that is publishing today, but what really stung was Leather’s claim that ‘everyone does it’. The resulting furore led to an open letter from writers including Lee Child, Joanne Harris, Roger McGough,

‘May I ask for an adjournment while we scour the streets for the accused, my lord?’

Tony Parsons and numerous others, condemning sock puppeting and promising never to practise it.

The rigging of the online review system is not confined to books.

The travel site Trip Advisor has been enmeshed in disputes over claims that some of its reviews are motivated by vested interests, as have a number of newspaper online comment spaces. In Hollywood a marketing executive for Sony created a fictional film critic called David Manning of the Connecticut-based Ridgefield Press to provide promising reviews for films like A Knight’s Tale and Mel Gibson’s The Patriot. When ‘David Manning’ was eventually rumbled, Sony was obliged to pay millions in fines to the state of Connecticut.

Now, however, an intriguing obverse to the practice of sock puppetry is gaining ground. A growing number of people are attempting to have their names rendered less rather than more visible on the web. Whilst it’s difficult to maintain total invisibility on the internet – witness Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations – you can now pay to protect your privacy by controlling the amount of negative information about you that appears on search engines like Google. ‘Reputation defence’ is popular with people who prefer, for one reason or another, to avoid the public glare. Companies like reputation.com and RemoveYourName will monitor search results and ensure that negative blogposts, reviews and comments about a company or an individual get relegated well down the Google pages. This can be done both by asking websites to take down information about a client, and through ‘pushing down’ bad content by boosting the positive. Some companies promise to remove negative information from the first two or even three pages of Google, which is far more than most people bother to look at.

The appeal of invisibility is not confined to wealthy companies. Even teenagers, who have habitually embraced the explosion of narcissism that is Facebook, splattering cyberspace with ‘selfies’ and status updates, are turning to social media alternatives like Snapchat, where messages and images disappear after a few seconds, in order to increase their privacy. Posterity lasts a long time, and if you can’t, like Julius Caesar, count on a good eulogy to rehabilitate your reputation, the next best thing is to do it yourself. jane thynne January 2014 – THE OLDIE

17

Patrick Moore Nick Flowers recalls his encounter with the eccentric astronomer at a very thinly attended political meeting... the EC, Heath was also condemned for rejecting Enoch Powell, whom Patrick admired greatly.

As the time for the start of the meeting came and went it became obvious that we would be the only members of the audience. Patrick looked at his watch, sighed and said that as it really wasn’t worth going through the whole palaver of their presentation just for us, would we accept his apologies (of course we did) and would we like him to give us a recital on the village hall piano (of course we would). He gave us a vigorous medley of airs and tunes and rounded off with ‘God Save the Queen’, for which we stood. Throughout all this, I cannot recall Colonel Iremonger saying a word, but he smiled at us and he seemed to be a friendly sort of chap.

We thought that we would give Patrick and the Colonel a hand with wrapping up the easel and cards and putting them back into their car, after which Patrick asked us if we would

As the time for the start of the meeting came and went it became obvious that my wife and I would be the only members of the audience

I

n the late 1970s I lived south of Chichester, not far from Selsey, where the well-known astronomer Patrick Moore had his home. I saw in the local paper that he was forming a new political party, the United Country Party, and that a meeting would be held in the local village hall to introduce its candidate for the forthcoming general election, Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund Iremonger. As this was just down the road from where we lived, my wife and I decided to see what they had to say, so we rolled up and walked into the hall. We found Patrick Moore and the Colonel on the stage preparing the visual display – an easel with some cards on it.

There were rows of benches facing the stage – all unoccupied.

Apart from Patrick Moore, Colonel Iremonger and ourselves, the hall was deserted.

We sat down on the front row of benches and Patrick chatted with us about the policies his party had adopted. The Winter of Discontent with its public sector strikes had prompted the founding of the party, and stricter controls on strikes as well as a more vigorous immigration policy and withdrawal from the European Community were core policies. Jim Callaghan’s Labour Party was roundly excoriated but so were Edward Heath and the Tories. Viewed almost as a traitor for getting us into

be willing to address some envelopes, copying them out of the electoral register. These were for distributing leaflets to voters in the Chichester constituency. Rather rashly we agreed, and we soon found ourselves passing the evenings gradually getting writers’ cramp.

I am sorry to say that the United Country Party did not do very well in the election and I understand that it was absorbed into another political party in 1980.

I will always remember that time we spent in the village hall with the charming Patrick Moore and the shy Colonel Iremonger, witnessing their brief bid for power. Their policies were perhaps not to everybody’s taste but they were both gentlemen and there are few enough of those in politics now.

‘Just tell the joke – forget the mission statement about your commitment to humour’ January 2014 – THE OLDIE

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F

or months now we have been living under the threat of Ofsted. No one outside the profession quite realises how long a shadow Her Majesty’s inspectors throw ahead of themselves.

Last time we were inspected we were deemed ‘outstanding’, and obviously we all hope for the same again. Even the rebels amongst us want to do the very best on the day the Visitors appear. (We talk about them in the same euphemistic way previous generations mentioned menstruation – ‘has the Visitor come yet?’) But now we are weak and weary and Lord knows where the energy will come from when they finally come knocking.

It is absolutely right that we get no warning other than a telephone call the day before. The inspectors should see the school as it is on a day-to-day basis.

Of course we stay up all night the night before planning lessons down to the tiniest detail, but generally speaking it doesn’t make that much difference.

Waiting is also good for us in another way. After so many months even the most disorganised teacher will have every piece of data lined up ready to show the visitors – even though the data required changes from one week to another.

And that’s the problem: too much change, delivered in bite-sized ‘brilliant ideas’ at random times. Last year we sent our children into the GCSEs knowing that the data everyone wanted was the percentage of five A* to C passes, including English and maths. We looked at our results in August based on that (except for those dinosaurs amongst us who looked at the results in terms of the individuals in question). But then suddenly, on our return, we were told

that this was not enough. Children had to have made four levels of progress to be deemed successful. This meant that our pupils were expected to raise their achievement by more than national expectations. You succeed, and then you’re asked to succeed a little bit more.

Hard as we work anyway, we girded our loins just a little tighter and set to try and do even more.

But what has really changed is the way the teachers are judged. An inspector will now come in for only twenty minutes of a lesson, not the whole hour. And the element that he or she is most looking for now is whether every child has made progress in that twenty minutes. In other words, in the course of an hour’s lesson, thirty-odd children must have made three different types of progress, or progressed by three steps. This must be well-nigh impossible. Apart from anything else, how can an outsider judge the understanding and achievement of an unknown child in such a short space of time, never mind that of thirty children?

Last year’s annual review, under the old system, saw me with an ‘outstanding’ for the lesson observed. Hurrah. But not so fast… in July, in the preOfsted frenzy, I was observed again and given a ‘requires improvement’. Terrible. The first time I had been judged on elements of the lesson such as subject knowledge, classroom discipline and the children’s attitude to learning and engagement. The second time I failed because I could not show enough progress – everything else went out of the window.

Now of course I want everyone to move forward. But the real question that then faces us (I was not the only one who did this badly) is how to show this progress. The big error I made was to take an answer from my shining star at the beginning of the twenty minutes. I succeeded in showing her off – to my own downfall. From now on I shall make sure I start by questioning the weakest, and move on to the best students.

In October we were observed again. By playing the game I had raised mine back to a ‘good’. Meanwhile another teacher in a different department was observed twice in one day; in one lesson she was deemed ‘outstanding’, in the other, ‘requires improvement’. Even more effectively than my own downward shift over a couple of months, hers in a couple of hours made a mockery of the whole system.

The night before the observation I dreamed that I stood outside my classroom holding a huge hoop. I made every child (and the inspectors) jump through the hoop on the way into my room, telling them, ‘This is your key learning point for the day. You must jump through hoops to survive.’

You don’t need Freud for that one, do you?

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

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My Typewriter For the young Ursula Holden the typewriter was a source of anxiety.

Over the years it became a friend Illustrated by Peter Bailey

B

strict alphabetical order. A lost card meant lost time and much efore my mother died after a long illness, she aggravation. I was told that somewhere in Germany a young said, ‘You could write, Ursula. I feel it.’

Fraulein was doing the same job as me. I must do better than As a family, we were voracious readers, with her. I pictured a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty in command books in every room. We liked ‘reading teas’ of every situation with ardent suitors at her feet. I was too when no word was spoken – you just heard the clink of cups and the rustle of pages being turned. ashamed to tell my mother of my failures.

Next I was sent to work for a Lieutenant Bott in a small I took a shorthand and typing course when the War began. office with just me and him. He was writing an instruction I went to Clarks College in Guildford where the letters on manual of naval aircraft maintenance. the typewriters were erased from the I had to type from his dictation straight keys. Watching your fingers made no My wastepaper basket soon onto the typewriter. Speed didn’t matter; difference so touch typing was enforced.

Music was played on a gramophone filled with botched efforts. The accuracy did. Lieutenant Bott liked working with slow deliberation. He loved to encourage rhythmic tapping. As a his subject and he loved to talk. He kept consequence the Overture to William Tell Petty Officer looked enraged biscuits and sweets in his desk drawer became repugnant. I don’t much like any to improve our coffee breaks. He liked Rossini now. trying to kick his old naval cap into the wastepaper basket. He Shorthand proved to be my Armageddon. Eventually I poured ink into the office glue pot, making ‘pink paste for pale managed to take down fast dictation accurately but had trouble paymasters’. He wanted to know if I had a boyfriend. I didn’t reading it back. I have forgotten it all now. want him to know that I hadn’t. I preferred to listen rather than I joined the Navy in 1940. Fast and accurate typing was talk – a habit that I have never lost. needed. Fortunately for me, shorthand was rarely used then, My mother became ill, needing a big operation. I asked to but fast typists were in demand. be moved to Guildford. I was posted to Haslemere, staying I was posted to a large naval air base in Lee-on-Solent. there for nearly four years, working in a signal office. With Feeling nervous and homesick, I had little confidence. At many setbacks, I learned to be efficient and was made a first I worked in an office dealing with the deaths of naval Leading Wren, with a blue hook sewn to my jacket sleeve personnel in the Southern Command. Accurate typing was before the War ended. essential, with four carbon copies of each page typed. My If asked what I did during those anti-Hitler years, the short wastepaper basket soon filled with botched efforts. The Petty Officer in charge looked enraged. I was moved to a larger office answer is ‘I typed’.

And what do I do now? The answer is the same. I use the in the same building where typing was not required. Cards containing details of men serving in the area were to be filed in same Adler Tippa that I have used for twenty-odd years.

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

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IGNOBLE THOUGHTS

House Husbandry with Giles Wood In which Mr Wood feels the green-eyed monster snapping at his heels

K

it Bell, bachelor and former bed-blocker at the grottage, has decided to put down roots in the Pewsey Vale.

Unlike me, Kit knows what he wants and he knows how to get it. His decisiveness was much in evidence when he snapped up a thatched hut for himself on the very day it came onto the market.

Sharing much in common with Nigel Havers in The Charmer, Kit’s debonair exterior conceals a steely determination and he has done well to move into a ready-made scene (ours) where he can benefit from the wisdom of the ancients (ours) as far as local knowledge is concerned.

It has naturally made me feel competitive.

His village is four miles away as the crow flies, but his downs are treeless and without hedgerow. They roll in grey monotony to the horizon where provisions can be obtained at a Lidl supermarket.

There is no doubt that our views are better than his.

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Kit’s hovel is smaller than ours but its generously proportioned reception rooms suggest a serial occupancy of yeomen not serfs. I was embittered by the sight of his bread oven, inglenook fireplace and a wealth of beams dating from the seventeenth century which have

I was embittered by his beams – they’ve highlighted how few period features our own cottage enjoys highlighted how few period features our own cottage enjoys.

Traditional rooks cawing in the stag -headed oaks of the nearby rectory and a pocket handkin version of our own wildlife garden, full of weeds ‘for invertebrates’ and ivy complete the picture.

Everyone smiles in Kit’s village and even the teenagers are friendly. This is because it is peopled not by indigeni but by period-home-loving middle-class weekenders.

His induction has gone well.

Neighbours have called to show him the

whereabouts of the secret village ‘shop’.

No more than a tall cupboard within a hedge, you could easily miss it – but inside are eggs, elderflower cordial and kindling, along with an honesty box.

They have invited him to a village applepressing wherein each villager brings his windfalls and has them turned into juice. A working communal apple press is surely a barometer of how functional a village is.

Casting my mind back to our first few days in our own village, I recall the evening when the village street flooded, as it has done with regularity since Canute’s day – or so we found out later.

Unnoticed by us as the light faded, the other villagers were quietly moving their cars to higher ground leaving only one – our Lada estate – with the water lapping the tyres. Mary thinks I am paranoid but I certainly wasn’t imagining the sight of the rest of the village, gathered like a Greek chorus at the other end of our terraced row, casting sly, rubbernecked glances in the direction of the newcomers’ plight!

On another occasion they all watched as we alone in the village patronised an itinerant knife grinder who charged us £15 pounds – a tidy sum in those days – for blunting three perfectly sharp Sabatiers. How they laughed.

Kit, 31, works in London during the week, and gave me a set of keys so I could exploit his bathroom during our own bust boiler crisis. Once inside, everything seemed spookily familiar, even down to the William Morris willow pattern wallpaper samples. A leitmotif of our own decor?

Hang on. Why had he stolen so many Giles Wood oil paintings? ‘He didn’t steal them,’ said Mary. ‘Don’t you remember selling them to him? You gave him a knock-down price.’ No, I don’t. But then I live in the most intensively farmed area of Wiltshire and the neurological effects from crop-spray drift have taken a sorry toll on my memory.

I have advised Kit that the secret to living in Wiltshire is to join the magnates on the early train to London on Monday mornings. You can witness the county’s brain drain as everyone over a certain IQ heads east, leaving the rest of us to examine the two-for-one offers in Spar.

I may not be a high-flyer but I can still spot a two-for-one can of frankfurter ‘sausages’ whose ingredients contain ‘mechanically recovered chicken meat’.

That can’t be right, surely.

a ll i n g ood ti m e

God...

by Melanie McDonagh

Husbands and wives expect to share everything – what’s mine is yours – but one thing they cannot share is the noclaims discount, or bonus, on their car insurance. There is no problem if they own two cars because they can have a policy each. But if they have only one car between them, the insurance has to be in the name of one main driver with the other named as an additional driver, and only the main driver can earn the noclaims discount (NCD) for safe driving.

It does not matter which of them actually does the most driving or who is the better driver. Insurers prefer the policy to be in the name of the main driver but they do not check, and anyway that question is open to misinterpretation – does it mean the one who clocks up most miles or the one who takes most trips? And over the years, the pattern might change, particularly if ill health prevents the main driver from using the car any more.

It becomes a serious problem if the main driver dies. The surviving spouse now has to insure the car in his or her own name but has no NCD to show for decades of careful motoring. It also hits couples who downsize from two cars

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Being a sucker for self-help books – but not to the point of buying them – I picked up from the office pile a book called Wait: The Art and Science of Delay

by Frank Partnoy, and browsed through the press release. The gist is that there are times when faster isn’t better, when procrastination can be a good policy.

Among Mr Partnoy’s bons mots is: ‘Don’t just do something: stand there.’

The run-up to Christmas is precisely the time when people aren’t waiting.

British society engages in the celebration of Christmas way before it’s meant to be happening. In church terms this isn’t Christmas yet; it’s Advent, the time for the arrival of Baby Jesus (and, to be boring, also the Second Coming). As this column never tires of pointing out, Advent has a character all of its own... a waity sort of character. Indeed a couple of generations ago, it had a penitential character: the poet Patrick Kavanagh writes about the dry black bread and sugarless tea of Advent.

My aunt in Ireland recalled that people did indeed give things up in the run-up to Christmas, in contrast to the blowouts, the office parties – the sheer exuberant

excess that characterises it now. Mind you, the Christmas takeover of the shops takes place long before December: I noticed the arrival of Christmas things in M&S at Michaelmas – 29th September – which is something of a record.

to one. Both might have accumulated a maximum NCD but one of them will lose that valuable record after only two years as an additional driver.

Some insurers allow husbands and wives to switch the NCD from the main driver to the other, but you can do this only once. If you give your spouse your NCD, you lose it. If you ever wanted

proof of your good driving and offer a discount (though not technically an NCD).

These are rules which insurers themselves have created. Each company decides how much to charge, whether to give any discounts and who will qualify.

Offering lower premiums in the form of an NCD became popular with customers and is now entrenched in the industry’s charging structure.

But insurance companies are at last starting to think about the needs of their older customers. The insurance broker, the AA, has noticed that a few will now allow additional drivers to earn their own NCD although the trap is that they can use the NCD only when buying a policy from the same company.

Aviva allows surviving spouses to take over the NCD if the main driver dies, provided they are experienced drivers and are already named on the policy. If the two bought a second car, it would duplicate the NCD earned on the first car as an introductory discount.

So if lack of an NCD causes you a problem, look for an insurer with an enlightened approach.

If the main driver dies the surviving spouse has to insure the car in his or her own name but will not have a no-claims discount motor insurance in your own name again, you would have to start building a record from scratch. The only way for both husband and wife to maintain their records is to swap over being main driver every year or two.

You face the same problem when you no longer have a company car insured by your employer, although usually insurers will take your driving record at work as

One result of Christmas starting too early is that it finishes far too early So what should be the policy of those of us who want to turn back the tide?

Well, we’ve obviously had it in terms of the penitential aspect of the season; I may give up milk in my tea, which is what I do in Lent, but that still leaves scope for extensive Christmas parties. The best approach is to think positive. You can of course beat everyone to it by having a children’s party for the feast of St Nicholas – the real Santa – on 6th December or, better still, the night before.

But one result of Christmas starting far too early is that it finishes far too early –

the Christmas sales start before Christmas week, which is handy if you buy presents in the sales, but not really in the spirit of the season, which should be a crescendo of festivity, culminating on the Twelfth Day of Christmas. In Paris it’s simply not allowed to have premature Christmas sales. So the really revolutionary thing to do is to insist on celebrating all twelve days of Christmas starting on Christmas Eve and really going for it for the Epiphany on 6th January, when the three kings arrive at Bethlehem. (Though, confusingly, Twelfth Night is properly commemorated on the vigil of the feast, the night of 5th January.)

I think you may find that people rather welcome an extension of the festive season. And at least in London there are enough patisseries selling galettes des rois – the almond tarts with a bean inside, decorated with a cardboard crown – to give the celebration of the Epiphany a kind of Continental cachet, even though it’s no more French than it is English.

I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t enjoy celebrating Twelfth Night, the Feast of Fools, with party games. Go for it!

...and

mammon

by Margaret Dibben Got a complaint about a financial •institution?

Perhaps Margaret Dibben can help. Write to Mammon, The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG or email mammon@theoldie.co.uk

Fashion With Tamasin Doe Sales talk DEPENDING ON WHEN you read this, Christmas 2013 is either a party waiting to happen or a retailer’s multi-millionpound advertising campaign past its sell-by date. Whichever, the January sales will be seeping onto the high street from early December and the likelihood is that you’ll be able to buy a decent New Year’s outfit for a snip long before you need it.

The internet and this kind of sales creep ought to have made a memory of the Boxing Day shopping madness – a million sales shoppers from the provinces descending on the capital to strip it of bargains. The idea of queuing at dawn for the chance to buy white china seconds at Harrods now seems quaint to say the least. Yet our 24/7 thirst for bargains, fuelled by the recession, has made The First Day of the Sales an even greater draw. Last year there were thirty per cent more shoppers in the West End than the year before. If you find yourself trampled underfoot on the escalator at Selfridges by a thousand tourists from Shanghai you will be feeling at least part of the reason why – the British sales season has become an event worth trotting the globe to attend.

The biggest draw for international shoppers is the lure of Louis Vuitton for a knockdown price, but at a domestic level the motive for leaving the warm festive bed on a cold winter’s morning tends to be more practical. One of the arguments for shopping early and hard in the Christmas sales is the fact that most big-ticket items – coats, beefy handbags, boots – are winter buys.

While any of these things can be bought cheaply throughout the season at Primark, the practised pound-stretcher will always buy once and well rather than throw good money after bad every season. Oldies seem to be particularly good at grasping this concept, youngies less so. To be fair, even if it represents a huge saving it takes an experienced shopper to make that investment. It also asks us to care less about the season’s flights of fancy and focus instead on grey cashmere.

A friend who has spent twenty years maturely acquiring such delights in the sales recently emailed me to ask what she should be looking for. My answer to her was as follows: ● Black leather boots High, low, zipped, laced, slip-on, buckled, long or short. Any combination of the above will be available to snap up this year. It is a bumper season for the humble black boot and there really is a pair to suit everyone. Buy two pairs if you can. ● A quilted jacket We rarely get years such as this when there is a glut of really useful short winter jackets – or padded anoraks, as they used to be known. Ideal for wearing when the oil runs out in January and the tankers are mired in snow until February.

Perfect for snowboarding too, of course. ● A maxi evening gown Every formal party has been transformed into the set of Strictly Come Dancing, courtesy of the overwhelming number of long gowns around. Their availability will only last as long as the programme, though, which is heading into its tenth year – ancient history in light entertainment terms. They haven’t been so widely available since Anthea Redfern twirled on Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game in the 1970s. Since Strictly may be the last blockbuster show he hosts, I’d be inclined to stock up now.

The Museum of

CURIOSITIES On a trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico, PATRICK MARNHAM resisted the urge to see the International Rattlesnake Museum and instead paid a visit to the National Atomic Museum

I

remembered the National Atomic Museum from a previous visit. There used to be a rather ramshackle B-29 Superfortress parked outside, the plane that dropped the Bomb. There were information plaques dotted around the site. The B-29 was a ‘Hemisphere Defense Weapon’ ordered by the War Department in February 1940. It was a wonder of the aerial world, and could carry 16,000 pounds of bombs at 400mph over 2,700 miles. Its specification was based on the latest information gathered from ‘the bitter air war going on over Britain and Europe’. B-29 No.1 took off from Boeing Field, Seattle, on 21st September 1942. Five months later, the chief test pilot and his ten-man crew were killed testing B-29 No.2. ‘The tragic accident was caused by an engine fire, a problem that would haunt the B-29 throughout its career.’ I was struck by the use of the verb ‘haunt’. These planes killed many hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians. And the crews were ‘haunted’ by fear of an engine fire. As I read this, a dove that had been sitting on the

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plane’s black nose-glass fluttered over to the propeller shaft of No.3 engine and then hopped inside the engine assembly.

The plane’s bomb doors were open and one could look up into the bomb bay from which ‘the gimmick’ had been released over Nagasaki.

What is striking about the National Atomic Museum is its exuberance. The B-29 has become part of the American nation’s heroic myth. When Senator Joe McCarthy wanted to gain a little military credibility he would mention that he was an ex-tail gunner in a B-29, in sole charge of a single 20mm cannon.

This is the plane that flew in raids over 460 strong – in one of which 80,000 people were killed by high explosives in a single night. The museum takes its tone from one of the exhibits, a front-page report in the New York Daily News of 7th August 1945: ‘ATOM BOMB ROCKS JAPS – Packs the wallop of 2000 fully-loaded B-29s: “More On Way” Truman warns.’ In the visitors’ book someone has written, ‘Bombs are fun. Let’s drop more.’

THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS

A section of the museum is devoted to the rise and fall of Communism, another section is headed ‘Justification for the Bomb’. ‘In 1940 the Germans were ready to build their first sub-critical uranium pile… by 1941 they were winning the race for the atom bomb. They had a heavywater plant, high-grade uranium… and the greatest chemical engineering industry in the world.’ There are lots of bombs on show, including the casings of Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Younger visitors, about the same age as Dr Strangelove’s grandson, sometimes attempt to climb up onto the bombs.

On one visit I was shown round by a laid-back air force vet who had been stationed in Germany during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. At the end of the tour he risked an unexpected confidence. ‘I was in the missile control room at the time of Cuba so I know that at one point we were two seconds from launch. I was ready to go ahead then. But knowing what I do today, I’d probably kick the shit out of the console.’ In the gift shop a very helpful lady thanked me for supporting the museum and explained that the silver earrings that were scale models of Little Boy and Fat Man were still on sale but kept behind the counter, following complaints from Japanese visitors. She assured me that these little bombs were the work of Native American Navajo silversmiths. As I left I noticed another section with the thoughtful title ‘The Challenge of Nuclear Stewardship’.

T

oday the B-29 has been joined on the tarmac outside the museum by an array of even more terrible machines.

They stand neatly parked in chronological order, each more fearsome than its fearsome predecessor, each name – Matador, Mace, Titan, Thor – more threatening than the last.

Lined up on the edge of the airfield, they look like a giant’s box of broken toys. A fellow visitor identified himself as a retired critical-mass physicist. He was a large man with a friendly manner and we began to talk. He said that he was a committed Christian who had spent his entire career working on nuclear weapons. ‘I truly believe they were given to us by God,’ he said.

‘That was the only thing the Russians were scared of. That’s why we won the Cold War.’ Somewhere beneath us, buried deep in the ground, the United States government has situated its storage chambers for the national collection of derelict nuclear warheads. About a week after my conversation with the Christian bomb-scientist, I read a report in the Albuquerque Journal about the incidence of drunken behaviour among US nuclearweapons couriers who work out of Kirtland Air Force Base.

These men are trained by the Office of Secure Transportation.

There are lots of bombs on show, including the casings of Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki They are heavily armed and they are employed to drive nuclear weapons, warheads and plutonium around the country in highsecurity trucks. According to the report there had been sixteen alcohol-related incidents among the nuclear-guard force during the previous three years. It seemed that there was a tendency for

Main picture: A Terrier missile launcher in front of the museum Above, from top: the B-29 Superfortress; a Mark-17 thermonuclear bomb; ‘The Fat Man’ bomb – the type that destroyed Nagasaki Inset pictures: trinkets from the museum gift shop

the guards to park their loaded trucks overnight, go to a bar, have a hell of a good time, get drunk and start a fight. But not to worry, next morning they and their warheads were back on the road.

The message of the National Atomic Museum is that the wartime atomic bomb was good news and remains a continuing source of national pride; it is the museum of the military justification of the use of the bomb. Every word the wartime press carried about the military operations was authorised by censors. And yet the morning after Hiroshima – a city destroyed in fractions of a second, ostensibly to persuade the Japanese to surrender – President Truman, who later claimed that the atomic bombing missions were ‘an operational choice left to area commanders’, was warning that there were ‘More on the Way’.

Extract taken from Snake Dance: Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky

by Patrick Marnham (Chatto, £18.99 HB) January 2014 – THE OLDIE

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Jeremy Lewis

LIVING HELL

Gripes and grumbles from The Oldie’s resident sage

S

having one’s head to conceal premature baldness is understandable if misguided – baldness is a natural if wind-swept state of being, widely associated with an enviable virility – but the shaved head per se has a sinister, dehumanising quality, suggesting that the wearer sees himself as cold-blooded, robotic and inscrutable. Hairstyles, like clothes, are visual shorthands, touchingly indicative of how we like to present ourselves to the world at large. Whether dashing or grotesque, elegant or repellent, waist-length or crew-cut, they are part of our personalities; whereas a shaven head – like nudity, or the niqab – has an anti-social element, in that it reduces the extent to which we can ‘read’ its proprietor.

And whatever happened to the ‘corrugated’ look, as worn

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in the Fifties by Hugh Gaitskell and Benjamin Britten? I have always assumed that Gaitskell’s hair scuppered his dreams of becoming Prime Minister, while Benj’s crinkles almost certainly influenced my views on his music. And what about the widow’s peak, once sported by such dapper coves as Dennis Price, Cary Grant and Allen Lane, but now a fading memory?

Y

et another scheme has been launched to revitalise Battersea Power Station, out of action since 1983 and a husk of its former self: ingredients include a roof garden, viewing platforms on the rebuilt chimneys, luxury penthouses costing £30 million apiece and the inevitable shopping mall.

It was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, and is said to include art deco work, but why this crazed obsession with the old

I have always assumed that Gaitskell’s corrugated hair scuppered his dreams of becoming Prime Minister monstrosity, no doubt referred to as a national ‘icon’? If one has to save defunct power stations, how much better to recycle, as planned, the Lots Road version, an elegant Edwardian construction a mile or so upstream on the other side of the Thames. I’ve been aware of Battersea Power Station since 1947, when my parents moved into a flat on the south side of Battersea Park, and we occasionally took the 137 bus to Chelsea Bridge and points north, but long familiarity has failed to induce waves of affectionate nostalgia. Bring on the wrecking balls, say I. PS: Another of Scott’s power stations was converted into the Tate Modern: given the stuff on display, a mixed blessing.

I

used to enjoy listening to Radio 3 while shaving and eating my Grape-Nuts, but whereas until a year or two back the Breakfast programme consisted of some old boy putting on gramophone records of classical music, with occasional breaks for the news, the modern version is blighted by endless talk.

Long-winded and self-important members of the public are not only encouraged to phone in with their views on particular pieces of music, but to text or email their thoughts on the most fatuous matters, few of which have anything to do with music: on 5th November, for example, the hapless Sara Mohr-Pietsch urged us to reveal how we liked to celebrate Guy Fawkes night, so unleashing a tidal wave of bores. Silence at the back of the class should be the order of the day.

JEREMY LEWIS ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID STOTEN

T

he pop singer Morrissey’s Autobiography shot to the top of the bestseller lists after Penguin agreed to publish it as a Penguin Classic, and its gratified creator found himself rubbing shoulders with Montaigne and Machiavelli. Although the book received some good reviews, I instinctively sided with those who found it pretentious and long-winded. But my real grouse was with Penguin for so casually debasing the coinage, albeit in a highly profitable way. In an unexpected reversal of roles, the liberal-minded Independent accused Penguin of wrecking ‘overnight the reputation of a global brand’ in order to ‘kowtow to the whims of a petulant pop icon’, whereas the Telegraph saw the offence given as part of the joke, admired the author for pulling off an ‘audacious literary heist’, and praised his ‘beautifully measured prose style’.

Allen Lane would not have been amused. He had left school at sixteen, and had founded Penguin Books in 1935 to make the best books available to the general public for the price of a packet of fags. He was in the high-minded but seemingly defunct tradition of educational self-improvement embodied in the Workers’ Educational Association, the wartime Army Bureau of Current Affairs, and the Open University; and, shrewd businessman as he was, he always refused to take Penguin down-market. After his death in 1970, Pelican Books bit the dust, and Pevsner’s Buildings of England series was disposed of: as a publishing conglomerate, Penguin is no different to HarperCollins or Hachette or Random House, with whom it has recently merged, in that it happily publishes both bilge and classy goods (best embodied in the Allen Lane imprint, the most impressive publishing list in London). But Penguin Classics, founded in 1946 and the quintessence of what Lane himself stood for, was what differentiated it from its rivals – until Morrissey came along.

Dr Stuttaford’s surgery Your medical queries answered by our resident doctor

No laughing matter Coping with gout A 74-year-old potter with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia has recently completed four courses of chemotherapy. His leukaemia is now in remission and so with a relatively light heart he has returned to his studio to throw a few more pots. Soon after returning to his wheel he experienced agonising pain in both shoulders. Routine blood tests demonstrated an acceptable white cell count but a raised serum uric acid and a slightly abnormal kidney function test. He had gout. He asks if he should he be taking anti-gout treatment. What else can he do about it?

Gout is a fascinating condition that should never be belittled. No joke about eighteenth-century squires drinking too much port and eating too many pheasants will amuse someone who has woken up to find a big toe – the most common joint to be affected by gout – hideously swollen with bright red, shiny skin that is so tender that the touch of the bedclothes is agony, and even hobbling is excruciating.

Gout often affects people who have a family history of it, but it may remain hidden until uncovered by an unsuitable lifestyle, stress or, in a few cases, disease.

These diseases include blood malignancies, such as leukaemia and lymphomas, but also common, non-life threatening conditions like psoriasis. Gouty attacks may also follow chemotherapy or abnormal kidney function.

Gout is more common in those who are overweight, especially if they also have generous waist and neck measurements, high blood pressure and/or incipient diabetes. All these features increase the tendency to develop gout as well as being associated with the metabolic syndrome. Gout is more common in men than women and the older the person the more vulnerable they are.

Our reader’s case is unusual in that the first joints to be affected were his shoulders. Typically, gout initially attacks

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one of the smaller joints of the lower limbs, feet and legs rather than arms and hands, but it can affect any joint, large or small.

Gout is the consequence of irritant monosodium urate crystals forming in the synovial fluid in a joint. These vexatious crystals are deposited in the joint fluids once blood levels of urates become too high. In pseudogout, a less common type of gout, the crystals that cause joint inflammation are of calcium pyrophosphate. Pseudogout is more likely to affect older patients and in some unlucky souls both types of gout may coexist.

Frequently the first symptom of gout is no more than rather painful foot joints in the early morning. Sooner or later the cause of these niggly aches and pains is revealed when one day the patient wakes to find a grossly inflamed big toe.

Once diagnosis is confirmed, first-aid treatment with NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) or steroid tablets is prescribed.

I was an occasional gout sufferer for years until one morning I woke with such an acute attack that I wondered

‘Then the little bastards went and made a house out of brick!’

how I would walk across the hall to the lectern where, after lunch, I was due to speak. Fortunately, I always carried a powerful NSAID with me for just such an emergency. I dragged myself painfully from bedroom to kitchen and swallowed an Arcoxia tablet. Five hours later I was able to walk cheerfully to the lectern. I had learnt my lesson. I now take a dose of allopurinol daily and have commendable blood levels of urates with no sign of or symptom of gout. It’s better to take allopurinol than to rely on occasional high doses or regular use of NSAIDs – the possible serious side effects of NSAIDs in the elderly, even in those as young as 65, are under-recognised.

Heavy drinking, especially of beer and spirits but also, surprisingly, of large quantities of pure fruit juice, especially orange juice, is likely to precipitate an attack in those vulnerable to gout. Too many helpings of fatty foods can uncover a gouty tendency as can large helpings of pheasant, other game, liver, kidney, beef, venison and shellfish (including scallops, mussels and prawns). Fish, not only herring, sardines and tuna but also such delicacies as salmon, trout and, notoriously, anchovies, can be culprits.

Most of these foods contain high levels of purines, the source of the urates. All these culinary delights may be enjoyed in moderation provided the diner is symptom-free.

Dehydration from drinking too little, sweating too much or taking diuretics (‘water pills’) may bring on an attack of gout as may, amazingly, a low-dose aspirin tablet. Someone who starves all day, has low fluid intake other than a few after-work stiff drinks, followed by a steak with a rich sauce once home, is likely to suffer. Our reader should see his doctor and, like anyone else, shouldn’t change established treatment without doing so. Leaving gout untreated is a sure recipe for developing serious osteoarthritis and possibly high blood pressure and heart attacks.

f o r g i v e m e , f athe r . . .

Shame!

Hard-boiled Fleet Street hack john Mcentee looks back – with uncharacteristic contrition – on the tasteless tactic he used to get close to the Pope...

Illustrated by martin honeySETT

T

he current pontiff, Francis, is fast-forwarding Pope John Paul II to sainthood. I only hope when he gets his halo the Polish pope won’t equip himself with a celestial thunderbolt and strike me dead.

If he is in Heaven he will now know that on a balmy September afternoon in 1979 I committed the heinous sin of pretending to be an invalid in order to attend a Mass he celebrated in the Basilica of the Marian Shrine at Knock in County Mayo, some twenty miles from the Atlantic coast.

A year after his election in Rome, His Holiness was in the midst of his historic visit to Ireland (where he fruitlessly begged ‘on my knees’ for the IRA to stop its killing spree).

I had been dispatched to Knock by the late lamented Irish Press newspaper to cover John Paul’s visit to the sick at the place apparently visited by the Virgin Mary in the nineteenth century. In Ireland’s answer to Lourdes, thousands had gathered for this once-in-a-lifetime event. The surrounding countryside was covered with tents and campervans to accommodate the vast number of pilgrims who had slept there overnight in anticipation of a sighting of John Paul.

Only the more severely ill and wheelchair-bound faithful were to be granted access to the Basilica for the Mass, where the chief celebrant would be the Pope. While the head of the Roman Catholic Church was delayed in nearby Galway by the soon-to-be-disgraced Bishop Eamon Casey at a joyful Mass for the youth of Ireland, I set about ensuring my presence at the Knock Mass.

In a bar outside the village I acquired a surplus wheelchair, a rug and a chauffeur

34

THE OLDIE – January 2014

for £20. Bargaining over where my new-found friend would berth me for the service cost me four pints of Guinness.

Needless to say I had also consumed a similar amount while bartering.

Safely anchored before the Mass I felt the first shiver of self-doubt as I surveyed my immediate neighbours. To my right was a child propped up on the pillow of a hospital bed and festooned with a drip and other life-supporting equipment. To my left was a frail, porcelain-faced elderly lady slumped in sleep in her wheelchair.

Other wheelchairs were corralled around the base of the circular raised altar.

Behind me there were rows and rows of healthier Mass-goers.

A battalion of curates flitted about the Basilica. There was also a formidable phalanx of Handmaids of the Lord, a collection of burly purple-faced women of a certain age clearly recruited from local golf clubs and bridge schools.

As the Holy Father’s helicopter could be heard mechanically clucking overhead these women moved in unison through the Basilica until they had taken up pole position at the foot of the altar, forming an impenetrable circle of invincibility which obscured the view of all the

. . . F O R I H AV E S I N N E D

P E D A N T S ’ R E V O LT WHY DO politicians – and, I regret to say, many journos – refer to ‘drawing a line in the sand’ to imply opposition to a course of events that is not to be tolerated? Don’t they realise that a line in the sand will be obliterated at the next high tide?

MICHAEL DAVISON ‘Come in, come in... I’ve just been working on a new drum solo’

sick, including myself.

The priest in charge of Knock, Monsignor Horan, took to the stage, or rather the altar, and declared: ‘Will the Handmaids of the Lord move back please so that the sick can see his Holiness when he arrives?’ They didn’t budge an inch. Some even defiantly folded their arms. With a nod from Monsignor

There was a formidable phalanx of Handmaids of the Lord, burly purple-faced women recruited from golf clubs and bridge schools Horan a battalion of curates in black soutanes moved in and began waving their hands at the women, urging them to move back. A few did so, but the curates had to resort to pushing and shoving. Grudgingly the Handmaids surrendered the area around the altar to allow the sick – and me – sight of John Paul’s arrival.

I

t was an impressive sight. The charismatic Pontiff, dressed all in white, bounded up the steps to the altar, clasped both hands triumphantly over his head, and boomed ‘People of Ireland, I love you.’

He was two hours late, but no one seemed to care – apart, perhaps, from the thousands outside who were denied sight of him in his Popemobile tour through adjoining hills and fields, which was cancelled because of failing light.

As the Mass proceeded, the halfgallon of porter I had consumed while

negotiating for my wheelchair began to take its toll. My bladder filled. I squirmed in the wheelchair. I became light-headed.

Sweat appeared above my upper lip.

I was in pain. If I hadn’t been unwell before the Pontiff arrived I was now.

Then at last the closing Sign of Peace. I tried to shake hands with my sleeping companion on one side and the comatose child in the bed to my other side. They were oblivious. Then this rockstar-like Pope was down among the beds and crutches and wheelchairs, clutching hands, embracing children and blessing anyone who caught his eye. I felt my hand being squeezed. It was Christ’s Vicar on Earth shaking my hand as he gazed down at me. ‘Bless you, my son,’ his deep voice boomed. Then he was gone. The heavens didn’t open to reveal a celestial choir (but my bladder nearly did).

It was impossible not to be struck by the power and vitality of the man. (This was before he was almost fatally shot in St Peter’s Square less than two years later.) He was so vital. For a moment I forgot my urgent need to relieve myself.

But an earlier twinge had grown into full-blown guilt and shame. What on earth was I doing masquerading as an invalid amid the largest collection of genuinely sick people ever gathered in one spot in Irish history, all there to be touched physically or emotionally by this very special Pope?

I waited until the Basilica had emptied, waving away Handmaids and helpers who wished to wheel me out into the sunshine. A furtive glance left and right confirmed the coast was clear.

I stood up, shed my rug and walked awkwardly out of the Basilica in search of the nearest public convenience.

WHERE DOES ‘authored by’ come from?

Surely authors write, so why not ‘written by’?

PETER WALTER WHY FINISH a sentence, or sometimes start with, ‘to be honest’, indicating that everything else said is untrue?

DAVID FLYNN WILL THE CURRENT trend to pronounce the letter H as haitch be taken to a logical conclusion by pronouncing L, M and N as lel, mem and nen? And at what stage in linguistic history did it become the custom for politicians and other broadcasters to pronounce the indefinite article a to rhyme, in all circumstances, with say?

MICHAEL SMITH ‘MUST-HAVE’ – a marketing and fashion phrase, said almost as one word, meaning essential. ‘Ticks all the boxes’, meaning suitable. ‘Presents with’ – a piece of medical, usually hospital, jargon, as in ‘The patient presented with a bad headache’ – why not ‘had’?

MICHAEL PONTING ‘AND YOU KNOW WHAT?’ and ‘Here’s the thing’: portentous examples of media speak that are creeping in to the argot.

The former is inelegant and intrusive; the latter is an equally pretentious if less obtrusive way of highlighting something the speaker is about to reveal. There’s an element of savouring one’s own sense of self-importance in both cases.

RICHARD ROBERTSON Email infuriating jargon, tired clichés and other bugbears to editorial@theoldie.co.uk with ‘Pedant’ in the subject line, fax to 020 7436 8804 or post to Oldie Pedants, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG January 2014 – THE OLDIE

35

THINKING OUTSIDE THE GOOGLE-BOX

Searching questions Superbyways: your guide to digital life, by Webster IF YOU ARE NOT careful it’s easy to start thinking that Google and the internet are the same thing; in fact many people already do. Of course they’re a big part of it and you can’t deny their success. They have just rejected plans for a new London headquarters as being too small – it was 2.4 acres in King’s Cross with a running track, swimming pool and half an acre of bicycle park. Not bad for a company started in a garage fifteen years ago.

Most of us trust Google as a gatekeeper to the internet. We all tend to open Google, and work from there, but it’s far from being the only game in town, and unless you know how to manage it, you are not getting the full picture.

Search engines work by using complex mathematics; you tell them what you are looking for, and they decide what to show you based on an equation that takes into account a huge range of factors. These criteria are secret, partly to avoid snake-oil salesmen creating sites that manipulate the rules simply to get to the top of the list.

The search engines use all the information at their disposal, including all they know about you, to guess exactly what it is that you want. Much of the time they get it right, or close enough.

None of this is sinister, but as one of my favourite commentators puts it: ‘Google doesn’t want you to search, it wants to tell you.’ In other words, Google

knows best. Add to that the fact that you can only use their best services if you sign up for an account with them (thus allowing Google to collect data on you), and you begin to see how much they want to be not only the conduit, but the arbiter of what you see.

But what if the thing you are really looking for is on page 23 of their results?

You’d never find it, so you really need to be able to refine the answers, and weed out the red herrings. It is possible to do this with Google, but it’s much more difficult these days because they keep hiding the tools.

Once upon a time, there was an ‘Advanced Search’ link on the main page which allowed you to filter the results lots of ways: by language, source, date, excluding certain words, and so on. You could also limit searches to the UK, which saved a lot of time. Nowadays all that is hidden, but still there, just. At the bottom of the main Google page you’ll find, in faint print, the word ‘Settings’. Click on that and all sorts of clever options appear, including the old Advanced Search. It’s well worth having a go with it, especially the instruction to ignore entries that include certain words: that can focus your search very effectively.

Even more useful, however, is to get to know some of the more specialist search engines. 123people.co.uk, for example, is

Webster’s webwatch For Webster’s latest top tips, visit his blog at www.theoldie.co.uk www.nationalarchives.gov.uk The National Archives website has been hugely improved, and it is now much easier to find your way around the 20 million records kept there. It’s not just for ancestor hunting; there are over 1,000 years of government and legal records. play.lso.co.uk An interactive website that allows you to sit right in the London Symphony Orchestra for a performance, or you can learn all about each instrument by clicking on the map.

Masterclass videos, too.

Ask web ster I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.webstersblog.co.uk/ask or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk for finding people (look yourself up – you might be surprised); infomine.ucr.edu is aimed at the university research world; everystockphoto.com will help you find pictures you can use for free; vintageadbrowser.com has over 100,000 vintage advertisements for you (why?).

Blekko.com works like Google but with a different database and puts the results into sensible groups; blinkx.com finds videos for you; bing.com/news spots news stories; wolframalpha.com is a wonderful source of objective data and calculations – it answers the question, rather than just offering links.

Using Google alone is like asking a librarian to recommend a book; you will usually get you what you want, but think what you might find if you took the time to hunt through the shelves?

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

37

T H E A R T O F S AT I R E

Beau

JESTER

NICK NEWMAN was impressed by an exhibition at the Royal Academy of the selected works of the French caricaturist, painter and sculptor Honoré Daumier

D

escribed by Baudelaire as one of the most important men ‘in the whole of modern art’ Honoré Daumier has had a profound influence on political cartoonists and illustrators – as testified by the likes of Gerald Scarfe and Quentin Blake. It is fifty years since an exhibition of his work was last held in Britain, and now the Royal Academy has assembled a collection of some 130 pieces.

Daumier’s oeuvre ranged from political cartoons to painting and sculpture, and the RA’s collection is impressive, arranged largely chronologically. Although I was familiar with his political work, I was surprised by the breadth of his canon and his depictions of Parisian life.

They precede Spitting Image by 150 years, yet are as powerful as the very best work of Fluck and Law We begin with a painting of the artist at work by Corot, dated 1864. It gives little away – except that, with his back turned, it hints at Daumier’s reputed shyness. Turn the clock back some thirty years and we have his landmark 1831 cartoon ‘Gargantua’, which brazenly mocks King Louis Philippe’s excess, depicting impoverished subjects toiling to fill his open mouth with money. Published when Daumier was just 23, it’s worthy of James Gillray. Daumier drew King Louis in the style created by his mentor, the satirist, cartoonist and editor Charles Philipon – in the shape of a pear. It soon went pear-shaped for Daumier as the cartoon earned him a six-month spell in prison, for ‘incitement to hatred and contempt for the King’s government’.

Subsequent political cartoons were less overtly offensive and more allegorical. Perhaps he was mindful of the possible consequences. But there’s still much to admire, as he drew and painted right up to his death in 1879. In 1857 he drew the Minister of Commerce and Agriculture, Louis Joseph Buffet, as a pop-eyed narcissus, gazing at his reflection while an ignored fruity maiden in a cave looks on. In 1872 he drew a lithograph depicting the corpse of Monarchy in a coffin with the caption ‘Meanwhile they keep on insisting that she has never been better’.

38 46THETHE OLDIE OLDIE – January D]]]]] 2014

Daumier was a brilliant caricaturist, so it was natural that he worked for Philipon’s magazine La Caricature, and his renditions of the French government of the day are masterly – particularly since they are in 3D. The RA has a handful of his wonderful tiny busts on display – exquisite casts from the clay originals in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Compare Daumier’s bust of the Minister for Worship, Mr Barthe, with his lithograph hanging nearby. Fat, jowly, greasy – you know that you are in the presence of a politician. They precede Spitting Image by 150 years, yet are as powerful as the very best work of Fluck and Law. Naturally, being a cartoonist, Daumier was eventually sacked. In 1860 his old friend, now Le Charivari editor, Charles Philipon dispensed with his services, deciding readers were bored with his work, although he was reinstated three years later when Philipon died. Luckily, Daumier had other strings to his bow – such as his paintings of everyday Parisian life.

In 1846 he married and moved to the working-class Ile St Louis, from where he observed laundrywomen lugging clothes

PHOTOS COURTESY OF: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

the a rt of s at i re

along the quay, a man carrying a sack and an organ-grinder.

Later, he painted a third-class railway carriage, as always from memory – and while these works are poles apart from his political cartoons, they are no less powerful or evocative. His cartoonist’s eye was also very firmly fixed on the art world, which he relentlessly teased in lithographs and paintings: despite his paintings being exhibited in the Paris Salon, he mocked it. A lithograph shows the Salon staring at pictures while ignoring a statue coming to life – highlighting the reduced status of sculpture at the time.

Finally, blighted by his poor eyesight, Daumier’s work became bleary but no less passionate, and his art was appreciated far beyond his modest dreams. Van Gogh painted ‘after Daumier’. Degas owned 750 of his prints, five drawings

and a painting. Berets off to the RA for this reminder of his abiding genius. One can only speculate how Daumier, a staunch republican, would have felt seeing his work displayed in the ROYAL Academy.

Daumier (1808–1879): Visions of Paris is at the Royal Academy until 26th January 2014 See www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/daumier/ or ring 020 7300 8000 for more information Opposite page, top: detail from Counsel for the Defence (c.1862– 1865); bottom: Félix Barthe (1883). This page, above: The Thirdclass Railway Carriage (1862–64); below, left: ‘Gargantua’ (1831); below, right: The Laundress (1861–63)

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

39

East of Islington

The unusual life of Sam Taylor and friends

The queen must retire Living up to a stereotype can be such hard work...

I

s it possible to de-gay yourself? It was a question that Dolly Trolley had been asking himself (and anyone else who would listen) for some time. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t like being gay, it was just the expense, not to mention the effort. There were the clothes – the terror of being ‘off-trend’. The coiffure. The beauty treatments. The back-waxing.

The cost of downloading YouTube videos of Barbra Streisand onto his phone while on holiday. And the pets. No gay man was complete without at least one pet – he’d been in at the very beginning of the labradoodle craze and was now caught in a whirlwind of doggy one-upmanship.

But he really was exhausted. Decades of keeping up appearances had taken their toll. Besides, as he hadn’t had a boyfriend in ten years perhaps he had been ‘de-gayed’ and no one had bothered to tell him. Maybe he could just quietly go back into his vast closet and flog off some of his more alluring Prada numbers to reduce his credit card bill.

Leon, his personal trainer (very gay), said that he simply didn’t believe it was possible. Did it mean that Dolly Trolley was intending to get fat ? (Horror.) Or stop tinting his hair and buy a onesie?

If so, then he really should know that he couldn’t continue to have him as a client.

‘I’m sorry, darling, but you really are going to have to pull yourself together.

I just don’t have an exercise programme for the de-gayed.’

Dolly Trolley could see that it wasn’t going to be easy, but since his enforced retirement (no one wants cabin crew over forty, apparently) he hadn’t even seen the point of working so hard on his mince. There was a time when he had consistently held the record for queeniest ‘doors to manual’ lunges in the industry.

But those days were gone.

All his old Trolley pals had moved out of London and settled into bungalows laid out like gay retirement landing strips

along the East Coast. He had decided to buck that trend and move to East of Islington – the gay mothership. And for a time it had all worked perfectly, as his hairdresser kept assuring him.

Not anymore. He simply couldn’t be bothered. Unfortunately there were others to consider. The gay bridge club, for instance. Such a radical decision would impact dramatically on their weekly foursomes. His girlfriends. No one wanted their walker to de-gay. What would be the point? They might as well be on a proper date and that would involve a much less attentive straight man – or worse, no man.

Then there was his mother. When Dolly Trolley first ‘came out’ there had been a high degree of consternation in the drawing rooms of Surrey. As he was an only child, she had struggled with the idea that she would never be a

grandmother. Or even a mother-in-law.

True, there had been some romances in the beginning that had a hint of David and Elton about them, but, as Dolly Trolley now knew, love is fickle and his mother never did get to buy that special hat.

She had rallied, however, and soon realised that you were no one if you didn’t have a gay son. Musicals, cruises, whole afternoons spent waltzing around Peter Jones arm in arm. What mother could wish for a more devoted son? She was the envy of her friends, so the news that Dolly Trolley was planning to de-gay himself was just not acceptable. It was a life-changing decision. Was he sure?

Think of the consequences. What would people say? How would she face the neighbours?

She blamed herself. ‘When I said you’d grow out it,’ she wailed, ‘I didn’t mean it.’

January 2014 – THE OLDIE 41

BORE TV 24 – 31 December 2013

BORE TV (See Digital Channel 356)

This week’s highlights 24th–31st December 2013 NEW SERIES

✤ AND SO TO BID BBC Four, Boxing Day, 6:05pm Antique furniture experts Bob Walling and Andy Bent scour the auction rooms of Devon to find the perfect four-poster bed and try to outbid each other in getting the best bargain. (R,S,HD)

✤ THE RUBBISH PROGRAMME Channel 5, Christmas Day, 8pm

✤ WHO WANTS TO BE IN SNOW BUSINESS? ITV2, Christmas Day, 8pm

The team visits the Doncaster home of retired social worker Yasser Lipman whose two-storey house is filled with wheelie bins crammed with hundreds of copies of Radio Times. (R,S,HD)

Edgy stand-up Jimmy Carr fronts this seasonal game show where families compete to build the biggest snowman against the clock. The prize is a week in Oslo. (R,S,HD)

✤ POSTMAN PATRICIA BBC Three, New Year’s Eve, 11:30am

✤ WHO DID YOU SAY YOU ARE? Channel 4, December 29th, 7:30pm

In 2012 Dublin postman Patrick Gorman had a sex change operation. Back at work, Patricia encounters a number of problems resuming relationships with colleagues, not all of whom are sympathetic. (R,S,HD)

Fiona has a B&B in the Orkneys. She suffers acute memory difficulties which seriously affect the day-to-day running of the house. These include guests arriving to find they have no room or that they are double booked. Kishwar Bahi investigates. (R,S,HD)

✤ WE MUST BE NOMAD ITV 4, December 28th, 5:00pm Julian and Diana spent a year travelling in the Gobi Desert with a tribe of nomads. They are now attempting to re-live their experience in a home-made yurt in the Isle of Man. This week, their camel, Urtak, gives birth to a baby boy.

(Episode 3 of 9.) (R,S,HD)

PICK OF THE WEEK ✤ MEERKAT HOSPITAL BBC One, December 27th, 9pm Idi is still having trouble with his injured left leg and Dr Samgrass thinks he may have to amputate. And Arifa’s babies are two weeks overdue and she is being tube-fed. Presenter Dashni Warrender. (R,S,HD)

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THE OLDIE – January 2014

✤ CELEBRITY CHRISTMAS CARDS BBC Two, Christmas Eve, 9pm Caroline Flack is invited by a number of celebrities to see who has sent them Christmas cards.

Her hosts include Charles Saatchi, Stephen Fry, Bradley Wiggins and Anna Ford. (R,S,HD)

rant

ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE WAY

Will WILFRED DE’ATH subject his perfect body to the tattooist’s art?

A TATTOO PARLOUR has opened right next door. The owner, an Australian, a very pleasant fellow, tells me there are two main reasons why people get themselves ‘inked’: to mark or commemorate an event or person who has significance for them; and to cover up a part of their body they don’t like. (One out of four Britons now boasts a tattoo.)

I doubt that I shall ever succumb to this extraordinary fad but, if I ever do, here is a list of my significant heroes: 1. Pope John Paul II, to whom I owe my Roman Catholic faith. (I met him twice, in Rome and London.) I don’t think much of his two successors.

2. General Charles de Gaulle. The French hate to appear grateful to anybody but to de Gaulle they owe the revival of their national (and economic) self-esteem during the post-war years. He was a very great leader and, in my opinion, a far greater man than Churchill, a shifty, drunken warmonger.

3. The editor of this publication.

Richard Ingrams is not a particularly good writer, but he is an editor of genius. To him I owe the restoration of my fortunes of recent years. I even get asked for my autograph these days, especially by other passengers on the cross-Channel ferries.

(They will never ask for it themselves: ‘It’s for my Mum and Dad,’ they say.)

4. I may as well add a self-portrait to these inky illustrations. I do not consider myself a great man (no, really) but anybody who has survived as many vicissitudes as I have and still remains standing must have some element of greatness…

There is no part of my body I don’t like.

(My bare feet are my strongest feature, funnily enough – they have lured many an unsuspecting girl to bed and subsequent disaster.) But I think I know where I will have an inky, multi-coloured portrait of my current girlfriend Kadija, an exotic FrenchMoroccan girl, tattooed...

Kadija and I have been going out since last summer and have yet to have a cross word. My only worry is that Kadija may wish to have my name tattooed on her beautiful body in which case, she tells me, her father would kill her. These strict Muslims!

My other fear is that she may get a tattoo on her left ankle which, in France at any rate, is code for lesbianism. Another French girlfriend got tattooed on that ankle quite innocently and wondered why women kept ‘hitting on’ her: ‘Mais, moi, j’aime les garçons!’ she told me indignantly.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM PLANT

The Illustrated Man

I CAN’T STAND literary festivals and refuse to attend them. I don’t see that just because one is a writer one is also necessarily a performer. I myself am an immense disappointment. For some reason, people expect Sir Toby Belch or Sir John Falstaff. Then in shuffles this nondescript meek and mumbling shy little man who wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

Indeed, the most wonderful writers can be dreary old sticks when met in the flesh. S J Perelman was monosyllabic. Keith Waterhouse used to maintain (somewhat churlishly) that making jokes in public was ‘like giving away five pound notes’, so he stayed at home.

I went to Hay-on-Wye once to see my namesake Norman Lewis. He was embarrassing – deaf and practically senile. The interviewer was a silly fruit called Felipe Fernández-Armesto. The announcement of his name was the first and last laugh we had all afternoon. When Felipe Fernández-Armesto asked Lewis a longish question, there’d be a very long pause, culminating eventually in: ‘Eh?’ We squirmed. And what a bunch we were. Lots of walking sticks and hip replacements, plastic knees and motorised wheelchairs. The audiences at literary festivals are widows and widowers, always dressed in layers of tweed and Aquascutum, who are being given a nice afternoon out by their daughters-in-law. They are not interested in books or in literature. They want to catch sight of Melvyn Bragg or P D James.

Question time is always a trial. I once did my bit, giving a talk about Laurence Olivier. Comments were invited from the floor. After the customary long pause, a hand eventually went up at the back. ‘Yes?’ I asked eagerly. ‘Mr Lewis,’ said this chap. ‘I was at school with your mother and father.’

But nothing quite beats a question this year at Cheltenham. After Jeremy Paxman had talked for an hour about the First World War to an appreciative crowd, a hand shot aloft. ‘Mr Paxman,’ cried a lady.

‘Do you intend keeping your beard?’

ROGER LEWIS

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

45

STEPHEN FREARS

Not such a misfit

S

tephen Frears makes an art form of looking as if he doesn’t fit in and couldn’t care less. He looks like a raddled, handsome French or Italian roué who has been up all night. His is the worse-for-wear look, and it suits him. Yet despite his refusal to play the part of smart top film director, I suspect he fits in whenever and wherever he wants to.

As you might expect, the cinema

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THE OLDIE – January 2014

played a big part in his childhood.

There was nothing to do in wartime Leicester so his mother took him to the pictures – there were forty cinemas in the town then. ‘I remember having to be taken out of Pinocchio because it was too frightening – I must have been three. She would also take me to slightly unsuitable films. There wasn’t much sex and violence in those days, but I remember seeing Anthony Asquith’s The Way to the Stars, written by Terence

Rattigan. It’s about sex – quite innocent sex – and love and death getting mixed up with other bits of life, in this case the RAF during the war. As a child, alone with my mother, I must have found this picture of adulthood heady and glamorous. More interesting than my childhood. One rather seedy cinema, the Floral Hall, was next door to the circus – you could hear the elephants trumpeting during films. Then when I went to boarding school [Gresham’s],

PHOTOgraph by MELANIE McFADYEAN

With hits including My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons and Philomena, stephen frears is one of our most versatile directors. He talks to Melanie McFadyean about his Leicester childhood and his journey to the top

STEPHEN FREARS

they showed two films every weekend.’

I asked Frears about being alone with his mother, his older brothers having been sent to school and his father away at the war. His mother comes up in conversation quite often. She was a hysteric, he says, a Mrs Thatcher. He is unfair to her, and of course she loved him very much, maybe too much, he says. Curiously, his mother never told him she was Jewish – he found out when he married Mary-Kay Wilmers, his first wife. At his grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, she said she was glad he had married a Jewish woman and the story came out. Frears isn’t sure what impact this revelation has had, except possibly, he says, ‘it might make sense of some notion of not fitting in.’

After Frears’s father returned from the war the family moved to Nottingham.

His father trained as a doctor, while his mother worked as an almoner, a hospital social worker, he explains, adding that she often took him to the YWCA where he played with the women in the kitchen.

When Frears left home he went to Cambridge to study law. He found the world beyond the family confines intimidating; other students seemed so rich and clever.

Law bored him. If Frears is frightened of anything it is boredom. He’s not a man who will retire. ‘If I stopped working I’d die. The idea, as it were, of playing golf is horrific. I don’t like having nothing to do, I’m hopeless at that. When you find a film you want to make, you think, oh good I’m going to be thinking about this for the next year, how interesting, so everything becomes purposeful.’

Maybe that fear of boredom is what stops him repeating himself. The films are strikingly different, comic, light, dark, political, turning their gaze on subjects as different as modern Britain’s ill treatment of immigrants (Dirty Pretty Things) to the jokey rendition of love, sex and writer’s ego in Posy Simmonds’s Tamara Drewe. My Beautiful Laundrette, The Grifters, Gumshoe, Mrs Henderson Presents, Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight – all so different.

H

is latest film, Philomena, a tragic story in which he takes on some of the greatest cruelties perpetrated by the Catholic church, is shot through with humour. It’s based on the book by Martin Sixsmith about Philomena Lee, a girl who becomes

pregnant in 1950s rural Ireland, endures terrible cruelty at the hands of the nuns with whom, in disgrace, she is left to have her baby, and sees him taken away three years later. Co-written by Steve Coogan (who plays Martin Sixsmith) and Jeff Pope, Philomena has received rave reviews and has won several awards, including best screenplay at the 2013 Venice Film Festival.

Judi Dench, who plays the title part, is brilliant, as ever, and beautiful. There is no attempt to disguise her age. When I asked him what it is he likes about older actresses, with whom he often works, he replied: ‘Speak to my mother’ and ‘I don’t know, ask an analyst. In China they said you only make films about old women.’ Most directors are interested in younger women but he is at ease with his own generation. ‘You could be one of those horrible Hollywood sleazes who ogles 25-year-olds in short skirts,’ I say.

‘Sounds like heaven,’ he replies. ‘It’s probably what I’ve always wanted to be and failed miserably.’

If Frears is frightened of anything it’s boredom – maybe that’s what stops him repeating himself

W

hen we met Frears had just finished Philomena. I asked him if he was pleased with it.

‘You can’t ask me questions like that!’

‘What’s next?’

‘I’m not going to tell you.’

‘Has it got an old lady in it?’

‘No. That’s the problem.’

Frears’s career began when he met director Lindsay Anderson by whom, he says, he was ‘absolutely gobsmacked’.

He went to work with him at the Royal Court in his mid-twenties, and while there he met Karel Reisz, who invited him to work on the set of Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment. ‘I’d never been on a film set before. I was a pupil to Karel, an apprentice. From Karel I was passed on to Albert Finney to work with him on Charlie Bubbles. Albert had to be taught how to direct a film and I sat in on the lessons. Then I worked for Albert’s company Memorial Enterprises and I made The Burning, a short story about apartheid, filmed in Tangier. It was such a good story and had very good actors. It ended up as a B-feature with Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black. I was thrilled.’

Meeting Reisz offered new dimensions to life: ‘When I met Karel it was as though I started again. As though until then I hadn’t made a very good job of it. It was like being taught how to live. His life was glamorous in the ordinary sense and also intellectually. There was always something very interesting going on round the table – it wasn’t like that when I was a child.

I was invited into this very interesting world which was Jewish and intellectual and glamorous and really good fun, and Karel was the most wonderful man, very humane. I saw him the day he died. I couldn’t have used the word love before I met Karel, I wasn’t brought up to love people, a ridiculous idea.’

Frears has thousands of friends. But he says he hasn’t always. ‘For a long time I scarcely had friends. Perhaps because I wasn’t very nice. You’re so crippled by ambition, jealousy and stupidity. It’s humiliating to think about it.’

It was in part the success of My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, which changed him. He accepted who he was, saying self-deprecatingly, ‘I realised I was a middle-aged man with four children.’

A

nd what of these later middle years? Anything to be said for them? Wisdom etc? ‘It’s vile. You ache and sleep badly. I go to Pilates in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Your children drive you mad. I have four children [two from his first marriage to Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the LRB, and two with Anne Rothenstein, a wonderful painter whom he has been with for forty years] and two grandchildren in Brooklyn aged two and six months. If you are a congenital worrier you worry about them.’

Frears, the congenital worrier – not that you’d know it – has been in therapy for many years and, while being open, has a way of deflecting anything too probing.

Is he introspective?

‘What does that mean?’ he replies, a shade testily.

‘Do you go into the cupboards in your head and dwell on every little thing?’

‘I have a psychotherapist who does that for me.’ He chuckles, thinks for a moment.

‘The whole thing has come as a big surprise.’

‘Which whole thing?’

‘My life being so interesting. I’m so lucky,’ he says. ‘I can’t see much beyond that.’

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

47

Virginia Ironside Jury service? No thanks

On and on it went, chapter after chapter of misery. The only problem was: he was guilty. At least Fiona and I thought he was. In those days we believed the police.

We went back to our brown-painted jury room to discuss it. Fiona and I were in the minority but there were two other people who agreed with us and two more don’t knows. Slowly their number fell.

Fiona and I went for lunch together – the other jurors making the sign of the cross and spitting as we passed – and had a sad sandwich on high stools in a steamy café round the corner. By the time we returned we were the only two ‘guilty’ voters left. We were just about to troop back in with a majority verdict when the foreman, an extremely bright taxi-driver called Jim, stopped. He appeared to be doing calculations in his head.

‘I’m not so sure we’re right,’ he said.

We all sat down again while he drew diagrams on a piece of paper.

‘Now look,’ he said. ‘If our man wasn’t driving, as he said he wasn’t, who was?

There were six people in the car, three at the back and three at the front. One of them had a broken leg, so couldn’t drive and one, according to our man and the police, had got off at a service station.

Another one was taken on board entering on the passenger side – so he must be ruled out – and one of the men in the

back needed to go to the toilet. But when they returned to the car, our man couldn’t have been in the back because if Man A was lying, then Man B wasn’t on his way to Kent, as he’d said, and if he wasn’t lying, then how could Man C have got from the toilet to the passenger side of the back seat in three minutes? Divide the whole thing by seven, multiply by two, take away Man D and what do we have? Our man was driving! So he must be guilty!’

Well, it wasn’t quite like that, of course, but similar. Slowly the non-guilty sayers were persuaded and, apart from a couple of grumpy women who said even if he was guilty they wanted him to get off, we reached a majority verdict of ‘guilty’.

It turned out that the guy had a criminal record as long as your arm, including one for dangerous driving in which he’d seriously injured a pedestrian, and we all strongly suspected there was no son and no mother.

Fiona and I felt strangely miserable.

Just the act of passing judgement was an onerous and sad task.

So since then, when I’ve next been asked, I’ve got out of it. Second time because I was a single mother and last time because of the cataract op and the fact that my insides are held together by pieces of string.

I say again. It’s someone else’s turn.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR ROBINS

R

ecently I was called up for jury service. And was I cross. Now I know it’s part of a democratic legal process, but I’ve been called up three times. Yes, three times. And I know several people of my age who’ve never been called up at all!

What gets me is, if you’ve done jury service once, why can’t you be given a break until everyone else has been used up? Because as far as I remember it, it was pretty unbearable.

We potential jurors were ushered into a smoke-filled waiting room in a Willesden court. And there we waited, hour upon hour, until we were called. It was like a hospital waiting room, all of us filled with anticipatory dread, eyeing each other suspiciously and wondering if we could bear to be stuck in a room together for days, or perhaps even weeks.

When we were finally called I found myself among a surly group I pegged as fuzz-hating strangers, all of whom had me pegged as some kind of middleaged Sloane Ranger. There was only one other person like me, a woman from Knightsbridge called Fiona.

The case featured a guy who’d been accused of driving when banned. We heard that he was an impoverished single parent of a disabled child. His dementiaridden mother relied on him totally and he’d been out of work for weeks since the charge. Driving was his occupation.

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

49

John Sweeney

R o v i n g R e p o rt er

The line in the sand The first Westerner to reveal the horrors of the North Korean regime was a Venezuelan Communist writing in 1979 In September 1967 the secret police came for Ali Lameda, a Venezuelan Communist working as a translator in Pyongyang. His girlfriend, Elvira, was left alone, forbidden to leave the city.

Ali found himself in a damp, cold cell seven feet long by three wide, and the long, endless nightmare began.

‘Confess,’ they said.

‘Confess what?’

‘You know what there is to confess.

Talk.’

‘But if it is you who are accusing me, you tell me.’

The sounds of the prison were bleak beyond the saying of it. People coughing up blood, random howls, screams. ‘You can soon learn to distinguish whether a man is crying from fear or pain or from madness.’

When Ali was released one year later, he had lost more than four stone. He was covered in sores which were seeping blood. After two months under house arrest, they told him that he would be free to leave the country, but that Elvira had to go first. He was allowed to see her off at the airport and returned to pack his bags. They were playing with him.

At five o’clock in the evening, the police returned, more brutal than before.

He asked why they were arresting him for a second time. ‘You know why,’ they told him. Ali concluded they had installed a microphone in their apartment and recorded his conversations with Elvira. ‘What did they expect me to say to her when I returned from a year’s detention in such a bad physical condition?’

His trial was a joke. Like his interrogators, the judges demanded that he confess his guilt. The tribunal did not make any specific accusations – there were no formal charges – but the accused had to accuse himself before the tribunal.

The tribunal retired for five minutes

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and came back, granting Ali’s defence brief his wish: two decades with forced labour. Ali was handcuffed to the bars of a Black Maria for three hours. The temperature outside was way below freezing. Opposite him in the van, sitting on a chair, was a guard who spent the journey loading and unloading his gun.

Outside, the howling of wolves.

The mountain country of North Korea in winter is cold beyond belief.

Temperatures regularly drop below -20C. Ali was dumped into a filthy cell where he slept on the bare floor with no blanket or mattress. He stayed there, constantly handcuffed, fearing his wrists would break with the strain.

After three weeks, he was taken to the main camp and placed in a cell which had no heating apart from for five minutes at night when a pipe burbled with hot water.

The windows were iced up. His feet froze, and stayed frozen for six weeks. His toes became hideously swollen, all his toenails fell out and he could only hobble because of the sores and ulcers on his feet.

The cold, the filth, the hunger and the

loneliness were beyond words. Barefoot, afflicted by lice, diarrhoea and fevers, knowing nothing of what was happening outside the bars that imprisoned him, Ali found himself living a Kafkaesque story. To survive, he wrote poetry inside his head and recalled Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’.

I never saw sad men who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue We prisoners called the sky Worst of all, Ali feared that no one in the outside world had any idea where he was. It was a 1960s version of the oubliette, the mediaeval torture in which prisoners were dropped into a hole and forgotten.

Once, he came across a French prisoner who said that he was a journalist who lived at 2, Rue D’Alembert, Paris, that his name was ‘Pierre…’ But the stranger had spoken too much, and the guard smashed his rifle butt into him, so the surname remains unknown. In Paris, I knocked on the door of the building. No one knew of a Pierre who had vanished forty years ago.

Ali’s poem ‘Pieta’, recalled from memory because to write it down would have been the death of him, told the truth: Life, in the abstract, in its great coach –

how nice; But amidst vomit and outrage the real

thing triumphs, It flows, sewage and decay …

I suffer moons, hungers, cruel Christs of

pus …

I give in bone the explanation of this, my

misfortune.

Ali died on 30th November 1995. But he reported about his time in the North Korean gulag for Amnesty in 1979. It is a line in the sand – the first account by a Westerner, and a Communist to boot, of the true nature of the regime.

• John Sweeney’s North Korea Undercover is published by Bantam Press, £20 HB

Mr Wonderful plays a quickstep diana melly continues her adventures as a ballroom dancer Illustrated by Peter BAILEY

W

hy am I standing at the bus stop with a bandaged leg, wearing sunglasses, in a queue of women, and all of us waiting for a man?

Well I’m not waiting for the 52, I’m in Battersea Town Hall with Raymond, my dance partner, and ‘bus stop’ is the name of the next dance.

We ladies all queue up on one side of the dance floor and as each man approaches he takes the lady at the front of the queue, whizzes her round the floor and then leaves her at the back of the queue.

The ladies all ask about my bandage. I explain that on the way here with Raymond, I stepped off the train and fell down the gap between the train and the platform. The men all ask about the sunglasses. One says, ‘Are you in disguise?’ ‘No, I just forgot to take them off.’

One man seems to be doing a waltz, although Mr Wonderful is definitely playing a quickstep – ‘Zing went the strings of my heart’. Another tall, flashy dancer is trying to make me do a running spin turn. Although I go to a regular class each week where I’m partnered by Raymond and taught by Rafal, a beautiful Polish man who has the movement and grace of Nureyev, I explain I’ve only learnt the spin turn without the running bit. Mr Flashy ignores me and has only himself to blame when I fall over his feet and we crash into another couple.

I’m extremely relieved when the bus stop is over and I’m back at the table. ‘Why didn’t you tell me I still had my sunglasses on?’ I ask Raymond. ‘I thought you might have pink eye,’ he replies. He gets up and brings me back a cup of tea with two sugars. ‘For the shock,’ he says. He’d seen me disappear onto the line at the station and had been more frightened than I was. And, being rather squeamish, had looked away when the station’s first aid man had tipped Dettol

onto my leg wound and mopped up the blood. He also gives me his bit of cake. Seeing he has a very sweet tooth, this is more than generous.

A man I recognise from the last tea dance comes very very slowly towards me. Last time we danced (well, not exactly danced, just moved sedately round the floor) he told me that he was eighty-two last birthday and that his mother looks after him. Either his mother was sixteen when she gave birth or he has mild dementia.

I’m quite comfortable with dementia. My husband George had vascular dementia for the last two years of his life and had many fantasies. One was that he had been asked to act Jesus Christ in a new Hollywood blockbuster. Another was that Manny Shinwell, an important member of Attlee’s postwar Labour government and dead for twenty-five years, was building several workmen’s cottages in our garden.

Peter and I have finished our stately shuffle and Mr Wonderful has announced a slow foxtrot – ‘I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China’. ‘Face your fears,’ says Raymond leading me on to the floor. ‘And please try to remember some of what Rafal taught you at the last lesson.’ Rafal is full of imaginative instructions. ‘Take longer steps, your legs start from under your armpits. Release you weight. And lift your arms from your elbows, we don’t need your shoulders, and imagine you are going to hug a large oak tree, extend your neck away from your partner, you have a lovely long neck, so use it.’

I rather hoped Raymond was listening. It’s very hard to extract a compliment from him.

By the time we’ve danced the last waltz – ‘Beware my foolish heart’ – I’m beginning to feel the effects of my fall: my knee hurts and my side aches. But as I admire the Stoics I don’t complain, and limp up Lavender Hill to the station. The train is full but a young Asian man gives me his seat.

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

51

Notes from the sofa Criminal brains!

Written and illustrated by Raymond Briggs

A

ll kids go scrumping.

Well, all boys do, or did in the olden dayes.

There was an alleyway beside the NFS fire station with a laden apple tree hanging over it. Very easy, even for ten-year-olds, to reach up and grab.

Quite harmless, traditional childhood naughtiness – but nevertheless it was theft.

A slightly deeper level of theft came when John Collie, one of our chums, led us to an alleyway at the top of Alverstone Avenue. We gave him a bunk-up and he reached over the fence and grabbed a bunch of beautiful black grapes.

Unfortunately this was just opposite the kitchen door. It burst open and a woman stormed out with a face like thunder, screaming at us. Collie dropped down and we all ran round the corner and up another alleyway where we devoured the grapes. A great treat in wartime. Theft again – but slightly more serious.

A solitary crime of my own was never completed. One evening I was turning

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into our road when the street lamps came on. I looked up at the bulb and thought I’d chuck a stone at it. (Heaven knows why.) I picked up a large, flinty stone and drew back my arm – and at that very moment a bobby came round the corner. He gave me a straight look, no one else was around, and I froze in mid-throw. Then I wiggled my arm up and down, stamped about as if exercising, and ran off.

Why do kids do these things?

Just devilment, I suppose. But it was odd doing it whilst alone. No wonder I became life-long self-employed.

There was another glass-smashing criminal prank when we were walking home from the Common and had wandered into a wood beside the road, where we found ourselves in the spacious grounds of a huge house. It was obviously unoccupied and looked as if it had been empty for some time.

There were very large windows at the top of a wide flight of steps and suddenly, one of us – not me – threw a stone at

the windows. There came an enormous crash and clattering as glass fell onto the balcony. Quite exciting. So we all started doing it, hurling stone after stone amidst the cacophony of shattering glass. Eventually, we got bored and wandered off, back to the road. There we came across a group of a dozen or more people gathered together listening to the racket and talking about it. We joined this group and listened dutifully. ‘All gone quiet now,’ one of them said. We wandered off casually, trying not to run, but bursting with laughter.

Our next country mansion crime came when we found what may have been Wimbledon Park House, also deserted. Under a tree in the garden were two magnificent ancient Rolls-Royces, open-topped, with huge headlamps and bonnets about three yards long. We climbed up a tree very close to the house and got onto the roof where we soon found a way in. Down in the basement was a room lined with glass-fronted wooden cabinets, each one containing

a single bird’s egg. I also found a large, hard ball about the size of a football, and we kicked it through the streets all the way home. I then discovered it was a coconut, with a tiny point at one end and a hole in the top. For years I used it as a money box for saving sixpences. It was hard as iron.

Much luckier was my friend, Pfeff, who found an elaborate invitation to the Lord Mayor of London’s Banquet, addressed to Count Crosskeyswiascmski (that’s what it sounded like anyway).

As we were leaving, a fierce old lady, dressed in black (possibly housekeeper to the Count, who was probably long gone) suddenly came charging towards us, brandishing a stick above her head.

‘Criminal brains!’ she shrieked in a ferocious foreign accent. ‘Criminal brains!’ We fled, feeling quite scared.

Y

et another break-in came when we found the golf club by the lake. It was boarded up, not because of being bombed, but because it was out of use and needed to be protected against vandals such as us.

We soon got in and found some long, black metal cases in the billiard room.

They were all padlocked, but we took them as they were and busted off the padlocks in an alleyway. Then out slid these beautiful cues with inlaid handles of ebony and ivory. We charged around on a bombsite using them as pretend spears.

Then a bloke in shirtsleeves and braces came out of his back gate and stood smoking, and watching us. He beckoned to us and we went over like lambs. ‘Where did you get those cues?’ he asked. Someone said: ‘We found them up the woods.’ ‘I’m a police officer,’ he said. ‘Wait there.’ He then went indoors, probably to phone. Again, we obeyed and just stood there. (Unthinkable today.

Why didn’t we just bunk off?)

Soon a Black Maria driven by a uniformed sergeant together with two plain-clothes officers arrived. They took us up to the wood near the golf club, and by questioning us separately soon found our stories didn’t match. We were lying.

I’ll never forget the long pause when they both stood there, silently smoking...

At last one said: ‘Shall we run ’em in?’

Another long pause... ‘Nah,’ said the other, ‘Let’s leave it.’ They drove us home in the Black Maria and a plain-clothes cop led me to the front door, his hand on my shoulder. When she opened the door, my poor Mum nearly died.

Lizzie Enfield I AM WRITING THIS column to annoy my father. I’m sitting at my desk and I hear the postman coming up the steps of our house and pushing mail through the door. I’m drinking a cup of tea but, really, not a lot else is happening and a column in which not a lot happens tends towards the dull.

But I’m employing a particular bugbear of my father’s, a bugbear which, if Philip Pullman and Dad are representative, is common amongst oldies. It supposedly lends a more immediate effect to writing, makes the reader feel more involved, but as far my father and Philip Pullman are concerned, it’s alienating and offputting.

I’m talking about the use of the historical present. Clearly there are millions who like books written in the historical present because Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and plenty of others which have been on the Booker shortlist use it (or have used it, depending on your preference).

But my father is not one of them.

‘Thomas Cromwell is dead,’ he says.

‘That’s about as far as the historical present gets you with that subject.’

He didn’t get very far with Wolf Hall, mostly because he could not accept that ‘Henry VIII is on the throne’, ‘Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor’, or that every time Thomas Cromwell opens his mouth he ‘says’ things.

No, he doesn’t buy that. Henry was on the throne, Wolsey was his advisor and any words coming from Cromwell’s mouth were said.

When The Oldie conducted a straw poll on the merits of Wolf Hall a while back, most of those canvassed were lukewarm about it. I wonder (present, not historical present) if this is why?

It’s not a new literary device. Charlotte Brontë used it in Jane Eyre – but only at the end of the book, when Jane finally returns to Thornfield after an absence of many years, after the rest of the story has already been told in the past tense. Dickens also employed it, but not all the time. John Updike, Raymond Carver and a host of other illustrious names have followed suit. There is clearly an appetite for it, but it seems to

be like Marmite – you either love it or hate it.

Philip Pullman likens it (or Philip Pullman has likened it) to the use of handheld cameras in cinema, a device which is also supposed to impart a sense of immediacy, as if the film is being shot as you watch it.

That too has both fans and detractors.

I hate it, mostly because all those Bourne films make me slightly queasy. The whole of the row I was sitting in when I went to see Cloverfield a few years ago had to get up and leave twenty minutes into the film.

I thought at first we’d all been to the same fish restaurant for dinner beforehand, but no. It was way the screen moved, trying to con us into thinking that everything was happening so fast that no one had time to think about keeping the camera steady or to cut out the worst of the wobbly bits, that made us feel sick.

But we all knew what we were watching was in the past, just as Dad knows that Cromwell died over 450 years ago. No point in trying to make him believe it’s happening as he reads. That just irritates him.

A friend tells me that in America news broadcasters have begun using the historical present in their reports, saying things like ‘so and so is arrested for assault and they swab his cheek as part of the arrest process...’

That seems odd, because even in court reporting, where the instructions are that it must be fair, accurate and contemporaneous, by the time the reporter is out of the courtroom and on the steps of the courthouse it might be contemporaneous but it’s still in the past – the judge ‘said’, never ‘says’.

So getting back to my starting point…

I am visiting my parents. Over lunch it emerges that my father particularly dislikes the use of the historical present. He pours scorn on it as we tuck into a dinner of roast lamb. He knows full well I am writing this several weeks after the event and that this column is published some time after that.

It annoys him as he reads it. I achieve my childish goal. I apologise, Dad, but I enjoy trying it on for size.

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

53

FACE-OFF

Land of the free...

Travellers abroad are often advised to respect the local culture.

For John McGarry that was a step too far Illustrated by Roger Fereday

A

ll my life I’ve been early for appointments, but recently I made the mistake of arriving at Baltimore Airport with a full five hours to spare before my flight to London. My sister (who was also my chauffeur) insisted on getting there so early because she preferred to drive back to her home in the middle of Pennsylvania before dusk – a problem common to us oldies.

Prepared for a long wait, I had equipped myself with non-institutional sandwiches, a bottle of lemonade (to be consumed before entering security) and a fat paperback. After our tearful goodbye hug I settled down on a bench in the middle of the concourse, and my book soon took me to a different world.

Looking up, I became aware of being surrounded by flag-waving citizens together with a small gathering of medalled ‘veterans’. Then a military band struck up ‘Stars and Stripes’ and everyone stood up, with most of the men saluting.

All except me.

And the army goes rolling along, Proud of all we have done, Fighting till the battle’s won And the army goes rolling along...

Standing beside me was a Military Policeman with a machine gun. It appeared that the gun’s safety catch was off. Out of the corner of his mouth he half whispered, ‘Stand up.’

‘No thanks, I’m British,’ I replied.

(I usually say ‘European’ – a pointless remark, little understood by my American hosts.) ‘And in any case, I’m a pacifist,’ I added. Glaring at me, he whispered, more loudly this time, ‘Then I will have to arrest you.’

I stared back at him, maintaining my stubborn resistance (by now a stiff-upper-lip British silence) and

remained seated. The mutual stare-down continued until eventually the perspiring law-enforcer wandered off.

I carried on reading.

I still wonder why he didn’t arrest me...

O

n the subject of guns, a couple of days before the airport incident, and in the pursuit of truth, I wandered into a shop selling firearms and enquired about the price of an eight-shot machine pistol. How many ‘shells’ could be purchased? I asked. The reply was ‘Only a hundred,’ but – after a pause – ‘you can have another hundred tomorrow.’ (Except if the next day were a Sunday, in which case I would have to wait till Monday.)

No purchase took place.

Standing beside me was a Military Policeman with a machine gun. It appeared that the safety catch was off. ‘Stand up,’ he whispered I remained seated, focusing attention on my book with increasing intensity, for the decibel level had been turned up.

Also, flag-waving seemed obligatory.

Suddenly, in came a ‘troop’ of smartly dressed Pennsylvanian Rangers, marching six abreast, and the soldiers began to sing.

First to fight for the right, And to build the Nation’s might, January 2014 – THE OLDIE

55

ED REARDON’S

MONTH

Broadsides from the Bard of Berkhamsted

I HAVE NO WISH to make a nuisance of myself on the London Underground, especially since the restraining order prohibiting me from going nearer than twenty yards to a platform vending machine after several late-night assaults in the past. Assaults which I still maintain were completely justified in view of fingers torn to ribbons by recalcitrant tin trays and bent Returned Coins slots, injuries caused by a vain quest for either an exorbitantly priced bar of Whole Nut or my money back.

Nevertheless I recently found myself blocking the left-hand side of an escalator while jotting down the exact wording of the latest outbreak of facetiousness on a theatrical poster. This was advertising Miranda Hart’s My, What I Call, Live Show. Mine is surely not the only flesh made to crawl by this sort of thing. Other recent excrescences include Peter Kay’s Mum Wants a Bungalow Tour and the sainted Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters. I suspect the origins of this false modesty combined with in-jokery can be laid at the door of my Lord Lloyd Webber and his ‘Really Useful Company’, but as far as Ed Reardon is concerned it also bespeaks lack of confidence and subconscious acknowledgement of mediocrity. After all, Oklahoma! had no need of being advertised with the suffix ‘Somewhere You’ve Probably Never Heard Of’, or Titus Andronicus rebranded as ‘The Great Roman Bake-Off’.

WATCHING CHANNEL 4 Racing on a Saturday has awakened memories of ‘Wouldn’t it be great if all towns were like Milton Keynes’, an advertising campaign showing how our lives would be improved if we relocated to this haven of sun-dappled copses and wooden bridges crossing streams bursting with

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THE OLDIE – January 2014

fish, and not a mini-roundabout in sight.

Now Dubai, the programme’s sponsor, is playing the same game, painting a civilised picture of art galleries and bustling coffee shops. Unlikely ever to have the wherewithal to travel to this earthly paradise I’m unable to vouch for the accuracy of these images, but I imagine it won’t be long before we’re being further courted with scenes of an old maid cycling through the mist along the sand as the muezzin calls her to evensong. Almost as questionable are the middle-aged grey-haired actors who populate other commercials on Saturday afternoon, such as the building society advisor who assumes a concerned yet encouraging face when some hapless couple come in out of the rain to seek a mortgage; or the furniture store salesman who not only doesn’t mind another couple putting their feet up on the bed but smilingly assures them they’ll be able to get their half-price maroon leather three-piece suite (with one of those drink-spilling leg-rests that jumps up when you least expect it) delivered in time for Christmas. Has anybody ever met one of these people in real life?

BESIDES THE ANNUAL lifting of the thirty-year embargo on Cabinet papers and the like, I suggest life would be improved by imposing one on outdated sayings or references. For example, the 1984 film This is Spinal Tap was admirable in most respects, except that it led to ‘Turned up to eleven’ being applied by lazy journalists to everything from football crowd noise to the rubicund shade of David Cameron’s face. For 2015, how about ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this’ from 1985’s EastEnders and the last refuge of the desperate dialogue writer ever since.

SEND US YOUR TXT Got something to say?

Text your comment, followed by your name and where you live to

07563 969088

● A big thank you to the delivery man who left a card saying I was out when he called.

Mary, Alnwick ● Whatever happened to bowler hats? Has the EU banned them?

Sidney, Tring ● People talk about having a biro but how many know it was named after the inventor, a Hungarian called Biro?

Catrin, Caterham ● I suppose Catrin will be telling us next that the loo was invented by a Dutchman called Loo. Tom, Upton Park ● Why is it you can’t find a shop that sells balsawood? When I was a kid making model planes you could get it anywhere.

David, Penrith ● Then you should move to Great Yarmouth, David. Our local craft shop sells balsawood in mixed bags. Last month I made a 7-inch Lancaster Bomber.

Ian, Great Yarmouth ● Great Yarmouth is a dump. I went there last year on a walking tour of Norfolk. Nothing but fish and chip shops and a boring pier.

Imran, Norbury ● Great news! Blackadder’s coming back. But why not Mr Bean?

Barry, Chester ● For sale: Eating Out in Hong Kong, 1967.

Mint condition. £29.99 o.n.o.

Greg, Morpeth ● The best cure for a hangover is garlic crushed in tomato juice and a teaspoonful of vinegar. You can also rub it on flea bites.

Carol, High Barnet

CIRCLE TIME

TOP OF THE CROPS This year’s batch of crop circles, photographed from the air by LUCY PRINGLE

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Hackpen Hill, near Broad Hinton, Wiltshire, reported 15th July; Stonehenge, near Amesbury, Wiltshire, reported 1st August; Chute Causeway, near Tidcombe, Wiltshire, reported 10th August • Lucy Pringle’s 2014 crop circle calendar is available for £15 including UK p&p. Telephone 01730 263 454 to order.

For more information and overseas prices, visit www.lucypringle.co.uk

Come to the 2014 Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival With Tickets for top events and time to explore the ‘Town of Books’ from the Green Dragon Hotel, Hereford

Green Dragon Hotel

The Hay-on-Wye Festival is the most sought-after literary event, not only for audiences but also for writers, comedians, musicians, past presidents and prime ministers. The greatest names gather together on the outskirts of this attractive small town, set against the hills of the Brecon Beacons National Park, to share new visions of the literary world at an event that is always buzzing with ideas.

This weekend break includes two days at the Festival with tickets for six literary events and the opportunity to attend other talks and activities. (At this stage we cannot be precise as to who will be taking part, but we will purchase tickets for the highlights.)

To ensure there is enough time to enjoy Hay

(known as Book Town, as it includes no less than 40 bookshops) and attend the lectures, there will be an early dinner on both evenings at the Swan Hotel in the centre of Hay. You will stay at the comfortable historic Green Dragon Hotel adjacent to the cathedral in Hereford, chosen for its proximity to Hay, its good rail access and easy parking. It has a large lounge and bar area and all rooms have en-suite facilities.

SATURDAY 24th and SUNDAY 25th MAY: A coach will take you to the Festival. There is a regular shuttle bus between the Festival Showground and Hay so you can explore the town before an early set-menu dinner on both evenings; the coach will then return you to Hereford. For those who book evening lectures independently, there is normally a scheduled bus service that returns to Hereford later in the evening.

FRIDAY 23rd MAY: Check in from 3pm. You could spend the afternoon visiting Hereford’s magnificent cathedral with its fine Norman and Early English architecture and mediaeval Mappa Mundi. Welcome drinks reception before dinner in local restaurant.

MONDAY 26th MAY: Check out and departure.

Price per person £495 No single supplements for single rooms £30 supplement for sole use in double room Non-refundable deposit £120 per person

PHOTO © FINN BEALES

j 23rd – 26th May 2014 (3 nights) i

TOUR INCLUDES: Welcome drink and evening reception ● Three nights’ bed and breakfast and one dinner in Hereford ● Two dinners in Swan Hotel Hay ● ● Tickets for six literary events ● Coaching and tour representative Detailed itinerary and programme of lectures will be sent as soon as these are available – they are not normally finalised until the end of March.

TO RESERVE YOUR PLACE, PLEASE CONTACT: January 2014 – THE OLDIE Heritage Touring, Flaxmans, West Tytherley, Nr Salisbury, SP5 1NR Tel: 01794 342 249 email: tours@heritagetouring.co.uk Fax: 01794 340 495 www.heritagetouring.co.uk

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Unwrecked England Swarkestone, Derbyshire

F

rom the northern bank the bridge at Swarkestone stretches south for almost a mile across the mighty River Trent and then on a causeway over the wide marshy meadows beyond. Most of its seventeen arches are mediaeval but the span across the river had to be replaced in the eighteenth century following flood damage. It’s the longest stone bridge in England, and as it was, for centuries, the only Midlands crossing of the Trent, it was of vital strategic importance. At the Battle of Swarkestone Bridge in January 1643 the Royalists finally lost their hold on it when outnumbered by the Parliamentarians, led by the infamous plunderer John Gell of Hopton. A century later Swarkestone was the most southerly point reached by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army during his advance on London.

The village straggles along Woodshop Lane set with pretty red-brick cottages, the half-timbered ‘Crows Nest’ (now a private house) and a comforting former coaching inn called The Crewe and Harpur Arms, complete with old stable block behind. Bay windows look out across sloping lawns to the river and a perfect view of the bridge. Just across the road a footpath leads downstream beside the Trent to St James’s Church – virtually rebuilt in the 1870s by F J Robinson.

The local grandees’ chapel remains within it and contains alabaster monuments to Richard Harpur, who first bought the Swarkestone estate from the Rolleston family in the 1550s, and to his son John. It was Richard who built a magnificent Elizabethan mansion just beyond the church. Both father and son accrued vast acreage in south Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and the house, with its forty-five rooms, huge cellars, gatehouse and dovecote, befitted their county standing.

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Today only the ghost of the Harpurs’ pile remains in the grounds of a busy working farm. Red cattle graze in among its ruinous, ivied walls and eerie doorways, and stone mantelpieces hover at first-floor level. Although the house was repaired after suffering damage in the Civil War, the direct Harpur line ran out by the end of the seventeenth century and Swarkestone passed to a great uncle whose family preferred to make nearby Calke Abbey the hub of the Harpur acres. Most of the abandoned house was demolished for spoil in 1750.

But, standing a little apart, one remnant of the mansion’s former splendour remains intact – a beautiful garden pavilion.

Long after they had left Swarkestone the Harpurs took care to preserve its masonry, perhaps as a symbol of family pride. It looks towards the river over a large walled enclosure called the Cuttle and was completed in 1632 by Richard Shepherd, a local mason, who charged £111 12s 4d, with a bit extra for the leaded domes. Almost certainly designed by John Smythson (who had already enriched Bolsover Castle with the latest architectural fashions) it has been variously called the Balcony, the Stand, the Grandstand, the Summer House and Bowl Alley House, and historians speculate about its past uses. Because I first saw it on a poster for the 1968 album Beggars Banquet, with the Rolling Stones cavorting in front of it, I prefer to imagine it was a banqueting house. They were all the rage in the 1630s – places where you retired after large meals for conversation, sweetmeats, gambling and drink (there’s a cellar beneath).

The hauntingly romantic air which hangs over Swarkestone, with its historic bridge and Harpur vestiges, is unforgettable.

• Swarkestone Pavilion was restored and is now owned by the Landmark Trust (www.landmarktrust.org.uk). It sleeps two.

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF THE LANDMARK TRUST

Candida Lycett Green

Readers write Don’t let the facts get in the way

SIR: As well as forgetting to mention that the e-fits had to be prised away from the McCanns, the Crimewatch Madeleine McCann programme you reviewed last month was also guilty of completely misrepresenting the way the case had originally been investigated by the Portuguese police.

One of its central themes was that, until Redwood’s ‘revelatory breakthrough’, the investigation had always worked on the assumption that the abduction had taken place at around 9.15. This is wrong – the Portuguese police, almost from the start, had worked on the logical basis that if the child had been taken it was between around 9.00pm when her father last saw her, and 10.00pm when her mother reported her missing – in other words, Redwood’s ‘new’ timeline. Redwood would have known this because it’s made quite clear in several key reports on the investigation. Even if he hadn’t, the Crimewatch production team should have cross-checked his claim with these important source documents.

The reason for this misrepresentation is unclear. My guess is that Crimewatch didn’t much care, since the overriding objective was hyping the drama and allowing Redwood and his ‘elite’ team to be presented as the heroic British saviours of an investigation that had been seriously mishandled by bungling foreign cops.

The McCann orthodoxy still exercises a massive stranglehold over the way in which the case is reported in the UK. I’d almost despaired of finding anything written about it by a journalist capable of independent thought. I’m so glad I was wrong.

Kate Francis, Bristol

London in 1985, she tried to evade responsibility for ignoring allegations of sexual abuse of children in the borough.

In 2003, following Hodge’s appointment

by Tony Blair as Minister for Children, one of the abuse victims, Demetrious Panton, accused her of being ultimately responsible. She, in turn, in a letter to Panton, accused him of being ‘extremely disturbed’. He passed that letter to the media who, under the instruction of Hodge, were judicially restrained from publishing it, though Ms Hodge was eventually forced to publicly apologise.

Alan Bunting, via email

Hodge’s dodge

Tasteless toon

SIR: In your December Diary you refer approvingly to the chair of the Public Accounts Committee Margaret Hodge branding Lucy Adams a liar. For those of us with longish memories, pots and kettles come to mind in considering Ms Hodge’s own reputation as a public servant.

As leader of Islington Council in

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THE OLDIE – January 2014

‘What a view! You’ve got a great room here, Fred’

SIR: No doubt you and other members of your staff found the cartoon published on page 17 of issue 303 uproariously funny. Perhaps ex-social worker, Barbara MacArthur (page 42, same issue) was also amused?

It would be interesting to see the justification of the cartoonist for this

cutting-edge piece of social comment and also your views on your reasons for publishing this exceedingly distasteful item. That is, of course, if you have the courage to do so.

Keith Robinson, Camelford

The cartoon that caused offence

Breakfast included?

SIR: I’m glad Fiona Pitt-Kethley enjoyed The Train in Spain (books reviews,

December Oldie), but she unaccountably made a mistake in thinking that a website comment that I quoted in passing applied to a hotel. ‘The situation is good and the rooms are in order,’ it said. ‘I went with a dark, podgy Romanian girl. I wouldn’t recommend it.’

That was a user comment on the Club Los Rosales, off the A92N. It is a brothel, not a hotel. These joyless places are quite legal in Spain, but please don’t expect overnight accommodation.

Christopher Howse, London SW1

FAT T Y PU FFS

Joyce’s voice

SIR: If Jeremy Lewis is going to criticise Joyce DiDonato’s singing at the Last Night of the Proms (Living Hell, December Oldie), he should not display his ignorance by saying that it comprised ‘trills and swoops’ when she sang ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. There was not a trill in sight – I heard it live on the BBC and have listened to it since on YouTube – and as for the swoops, she never swooped once. Mr Lewis obviously doesn’t know the difference between a swoop and a portamento, which is musically totally acceptable, even if not as fashionable as it was, whether it be opera or ‘popular’ singing, as he calls it.

I do agree that most opera singers don’t do a good job with such songs – like Joyce, another exception to this is Barbara Hendricks – but knowing that Joyce sang that song from the heart, as it was the last song she sang to her beloved father before he died, I doubt very much that she felt ‘pleased with herself’ as he so nastily puts it.

This is one of the really great singers of the day – don’t do her down where she doesn’t deserve it.

Diana Grayland, Madrid, Spain

Forever greedy?

SIR: I chortled at the bit in ‘Forever Young’ (December Oldie) where Mr Parsons says, ‘I enjoyed every job I had.

The money became secondary.’ When he came to the Ledbury Poetry Festival a year or two back he kept on whingeing about his fee.

Peter Wyton, via email

A vicar writes

SIR: Wilfred De’Ath, in his piece about Existentialism (November Oldie), asserts ‘Camus always maintained that one had the right to commit suicide if one found life absurd’. Camus did no such thing.

His book, The Myth of Sisyphus, opens

with the words, ‘There is only one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide’, by which he means whether life is worth living, whether it has any meaning.

Camus goes on to expound his belief that life is ‘absurd’, and it is absurd, not because it is meaningless, but because in fact we experience it as both meaningful and meaningless. The only honest (authentic) response to this is to live within the tension between the two.

Hence the titles of two earlier essays, ‘Entre Oui et Non’, and ‘L’Envers et L’Endroit’. Camus concludes that suicide is not a valid option because it ‘eludes the absurd’: i.e. it denies one side of the meaningful/meaningless paradox.

(Rev) Alan Robson, Trimingham, Norfolk

Lighting-up time

Fiona fans’ fury

Cold lands, warm heart

SIR: Ever since we first came across a copy of The Oldie (at the dentist’s) we have been regular subscribers, but we were so enraged by Richard Ingrams’s TV column in the November issue, in which he made such derogatory remarks about that excellent and charming presenter Fiona Bruce, that my husband declared he was no longer going to subscribe to ‘that rag’.

How sad is that?

M Davies, Twickenham

One satisfied customer

SIR: ‘Favourite Magazine’ The postman brings me The Oldie I like it very much And now that I am eighty-five It helps me stay in touch.

The cartoons make me laugh Some articles make me cry I hope it keeps on coming Until the day I die.

Rex Moreton, Newport

SIR: I was saddened to see James Le Fanu crediting Thomas Edison with the invention of the light bulb (November issue). Joseph Swan (1828–1914) experimented for many years from the 1850s to perfect a filament in a glass bulb made incandescent by electricity.

His first public demonstration was in December 1878 and he patented it in 1880, a year before Edison’s US patent.

His house in Gateshead was the first in the world to be lit by lightbulbs, and the world’s first electric light illumination in a public building was for a lecture Swan gave in 1880.

Paul Clark, Battle, Sussex PS I won’t be cancelling my subscription.

SIR: David Wright’s letter (November issue) about the statue in Iceland commemorating Arctic Convoy PQ7 reminds me of another little-known statue in a remote region of Norway; it too is dedicated to failure.

I was visiting a village on the railway line from Oslo to Bergen. At the highest point on the journey there is a small station called Hardanger, which takes its name from the glacier which descends from that point. In a clearing in the snow in the middle of the small square outside the railway station my attention was drawn to a life-sized statue of a man clad as if on an arctic exploration. Its bronze plaque identified the man as Robert Falcon Scott, and explained that he and his team spent the winter before their disastrous journey to the South Pole training on the Hardanger Glacier.

Scott and his team arrived at the Pole only to discover that Amundsen – a Norwegian – had beaten them there

☞ continues over the page January 2014 – THE OLDIE

61

by a matter of days. How typical of the generous-hearted Norwegians to raise a statue to the memory of the Englishman who lost his race with their man.

Mike Duddridge, via email

Fake flappers

SIR: In your autumn Oldie Review of Books your review of Judith Mackrell’s book Flappers was accompanied by a picture (see below) implying that it was an original photo from the Roaring Twenties. In fact this was a Press handout for the hit Twenties pastiche musical The Boy Friend that ran for over three years at Wyndham’s Theatre in the mid 1950s. I should know because I am the enthusiastic girl kicking up her heels second from the left.

I’m glad to say I’m still going strong and can still perform a mean Charleston!

Denise Hirst, Massa Carrara, Italy

Ten years older

SIR: Reading about ‘The Beard and Moustache Movement’ in the October Oldie brought to mind my father who, on starting a new job in the 1920s, was told to grow a moustache as he looked far too young to be a commercial traveller. This he did and it stayed with him for the rest of his life. He died aged 65 in 1970.

Pam Duckett, Wetherby, Yorks

The Stowe ghosts

SIR: I feel I should put you, and Peter Lewis, right as regards ‘The Stowe Ghosts’ (Oldie Christmas Gift Guide, November issue). I was at Stowe School, in its earlier days (1932–1937); for its 10th birthday (1933) when the then Prince of Wales came to give a speech; and while J F Roxburgh was the headmaster. Contrary to what your article says, Roxburgh was not ashamed to tell his ghost story to the 6th Form and other senior boys. His story differs in several points from Peter Lewis’s one.

Roxburgh always left the school chapel after a service, out first and alone.

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He then walked along the path at the south of the house, which, as your article says, leads to his quarters, beyond the front steps at the ground level. On this occasion, well ahead of him, walking beside the balustrade at the South Front, he was surprised to see a man and a woman. He wondered what they were doing, and quickened his pace (the grounds were not open to the public in those days). By the time he reached the bottom of the steps, they had reached nearly the top of the steps. A few moments later they suddenly disappeared! He was so shocked that he leapt off the far side of the steps into his little garden below.

I gathered that Roxburgh had never seen a ghost before. I had not heard of anyone else seeing these ghosts or other ghosts in the grounds, only murmurs.

E S Chapman (yes, I am 95), Hook, Hants

A rum ruse

SIR: Re the excellent November ‘Olden Life’ on the naval rum ration (the tot): at about 95 per cent proof, the spirit was pretty lethal and the measure for senior rates about three times that of a pub one. I am sure many livers suffered. There was always some grog left over and we had to ensure that it was ditched, usually via the upper deck scuppers (drains). Smart operators would cunningly place a suitable container under the cover, discreetly recovering the spoils until the ruse was detected.

Captain A J Oglesby, London SW18

Fanackerpanwatch

SIR: Fred Fanackerpan (December letters) was the subject of a Gracie Fields song. It’s possible that the lyrics were based on the rhyming Lancashire ‘Fanny Ann Fanackerpan’. My Dublin-born mother used Dublin English words such a ‘delph’ for crockery and the wonderful ‘sleeveen’: a sly, untrustworthy type.

Were Dr Ó Muirithe still contributing he might explain that sleeveen probably originates from the Irish slibhin.

Aidan Turner-Bishop, Preston

Sidelined scientists

SIR: I can add a name to Dr Maskell’s list of sidelined scientists (October letters) and one that I guess she is familiar with, namely Patrick Steptoe. He was the gynaecologist who, with Robert Edwards, a geneticist, pioneered IVF treatment. During his lifetime he had some recognition – an FRS and, I think, a CBE – but that was all. Some years later, Edwards got a Nobel Prize but

hardly any mention was made of Patrick Steptoe at that time. It was Steptoe who was the originator of IVF, not Edwards, although the latter did, of course, play a very significant role in the development of this treatment.

David Hills, Oxford

One-upmanship

SIR: It’s good to learn that Stephen Potter’s book on gamesmanship has been re-published (The Oldie Review of Books, winter 2013). Back in the 1950s, when I was editing a company newspaper for 20,000 steelworkers, I talked to him about a suggestion that had been put to me that he might write a monthly humorous column for it. After kicking the idea around with him for half an hour or so, I told him that I didn’t think it would work. ‘In my view,’ I added, ‘steelworkers don’t have your sense of humour. I sometimes feel, in fact, that different types of humour present far greater social barriers than we realise.’

‘Good heavens,’ Potter replied, with an absolutely serious face. ‘That’s a most profound remark. May I quote you in my next book?’

To this day I don’t know whether Potter one-upped me or I one uppedhim. His biographer Alan Jenkins, to whom I related the conversation many years later, was of the opinion that I had won. But I still have my doubts.

Bryan Samain, Halesworth, Suffolk

A nutter writes

SIR: Now, did I get it right? Does Richard Ingram’s [sic] really believe that some letters sent in by some readers are ‘nutters’?

Is it just because he happens not to agree with their life view? For example: you’re a nutter if you believe that cows cause TB and not badgers. Or that the theory of evolution is a ragbag of lies.

Or that the Americans landed a crew of astronauts on the Moon using the likes of an Amstrad computer and a landing craft that had about the same mechanical integrity of a rubber balloon. Or, as I suspect he also believes, that those people who are opposed to the disgusting practice of vivisection are, of course, all nutters too? It wasn’t that long ago that a few far-sighted people who had the audacity to believe that man could fly in a machine were also called nutters.

It seems that Mr Ingram’s [sic again] is carrying on the tradition.

Ray J Howes, Weymouth, Dorset

In association with

Literary Lunches AT SIMPSON’S-IN-THE-STRAND TUESDAY 11TH FebrUARY 2014

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‘It contains wonderful passages of purest Leigh Fermor’ – Jan Morris, Mail on Sunday

MARGARET MACMILLAN The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War Why did Europe walk into a war during a period of sustained peace? Historian Margaret MacMillan’s new book explores the road to the catastrophic conflict which killed millions and shook economies and empires to pieces. ‘A masterful explanation’ – Amanda Foreman

RACHEL COOKE Her Brilliant Career This collection of ‘brief lives’ covers ten of the Fifties’ most remarkable women, including Muriel and Betty Box from the film industry, the modernist architect Alison Smithson and cookery writer Patience Gray. ‘A glass-clinking celebration’ – The Guardian

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DOUGLAS HURD Disraeli or The Two Lives Former Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd’s new book looks at Disraeli the man versus the politician. Disraeli was a gambler and a dandy but also a devoted servant and favourite Prime Minister of the Queen, a dichotomy which characterised his political career. ‘Gripping, succinct, lethal and always entertaining’ – Matthew Parris, The Times

CHRISTOPHER MATTHEW The Man Who Dropped the Le Creuset On His Toe and Other Bourgeois Mishaps Christopher Matthew follows up the huge success of Now We Are Sixty with a collection of mordant, witty, cautionary verses about the British bourgeoisie and its foibles and failings.

THIRD SPEAKER TO BE CONFIRMED

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★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★ JOHN JULIUS NORWICH Darling Monster When John Julius was ten years old he was evacuated to Canada to escape the Blitz. Darling Monster is a collection of Lady Diana Cooper’s letters to her young son. ‘This book is a rich fruitcake, stuffed with delicious and surprising plums’ – Jane Ridley, Literary Review

PRINCESS MICHAEL OF KENT The Queen of Four Kingdoms Princess Michael of Kent’s latest book is a novel based on the true story of Yolande of Aragon’s marriage to the Duke of Anjou, a marriage which formed an alliance between the warring kingdoms.

PETER LEWIS Rogues’ Gallery Rogues’ Gallery is a journey through the past halfcentury, charting the ups and downs of leading writers and actors, thinkers, entertainers, gurus, politicians and public non-conformists. ‘A jewel of a book, frequently hilarious and constantly surprising’ – Mail on Sunday

ldie Literary Lunches TO BOOK CALL THE LITERARY LUNCH HOTLINE ON 01795 592 892 OR EMAIL: oldielunches@servicehelpline.co.uk TICKET PRICE: £62 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks ★ Fish and vegetarian options available upon advance request ★ Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1 pm

2014 DATES

May 20th ★ June 24th ★ July 22nd August 19th ★ September 9th ★ October 14th November 11th ★ December 9th ★ December 16th

The Oldie is proud to publish two new books for Christmas Book of Cartoons:

CHANGE OF DATE FOR SPEAKER

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TO ORDER call 01795 592 893

‘Another great thing about cruising the fjords – you’re not likely to meet Somali pirates’ January 2014 – THE OLDIE

65

B O O K S Changing places VALERIE GROVE

One Leg Too Few: The Adventures of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore

by William Cook Preface £25 Oldie price £21.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

‘I knew a man,’ says Pete, ‘who found a rare barking toad in his Y-fronts.’ Dud: ‘Was it the Barking and Romford toad?’

Pete: ‘It’s not called the barking toad because it lives in Barking. It’s called the barking toad because it goes woof.’

This is in the same vein as the ‘worst job I ever had’ sketch about Jayne Mansfield and the lobsters. It was a rare laugh in Derek and Clive Ad Nauseam, the last album recorded by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. On the third day of recording, Dudley failed to show, so that was that. Finis. William Cook gives an account of this debacle in Chapter One, preparing the reader for the sadly inevitable end.

whose monotonous drone provided the prototype of E L Wisty. Their pandar was John Bassett, who assembled the Oxbridge quartet of Cook, Moore, Bennett and Miller for the Edinburgh Fringe in 1960: a crucial moment in the history of satire, paralleled by the 1961 creation of Private Eye. Peter’s mad flights of fancy had already been exposed in the Michael Codron revue Pieces of Eight. His sketches were singled out by critics, unlike Pinter’s. One defined him as ‘the sort of writer that hunts for haddocks’ eyes among the heather bright’ – an astute reference to Peter’s hero Lewis Carroll. And he in fact wrote the ‘One

Leg Too Few’ sketch for another Codron revue and performed it with Kenneth Williams. But only with club-footed Dudley did it become a classic, surviving endless repetition (true test of humour), thanks to Dud’s corpsing as he hopped around the stage.

Author Cook makes the point that we loved Peter and Dudley because we could see they loved each other. Theirs was like a marriage between an equally gifted couple, the corpsing a sign of their telepathy and interdependence. And it all went horribly, publicly, viciously wrong as Dudley became a Hollywood star and Peter sulked in Hampstead, and (fatally) drank, later reduced to appearing in forgettable movies and in TV tributes to the superstar Dudley. He had not realised that his need for Dud was greater than Dud’s need for him. Their last joint work was The Hound of the Baskervilles, ‘one of the worst movies ever made’. Derek and Clive Ad Nauseam was their requiem.

☞ continues over the page

ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT GEARY

It all went horribly wrong as Dudley became a Hollywood star and Peter sulked and drank. He’d not realised that his need for Dud was greater than Dud’s for him The trajectory of their success is familiar, but still exhilarating to read. Dudley, the angelic boy chorister, was redeemed from his Dagenham background by his musical genius (he could play a complex Bach fugue at sight) which won him an organ scholarship to Magdalen, Oxford.

Pampered Peter sailed into Footlights at Cambridge from his public school, Radley, where he encountered a butler named Arthur Boylett January 2014 – THE OLDIE 67

BOOKS

Peter’s wife Judy speaks of their sibling rivalry, each wanting to possess whatever the other had, down to lampshades. Peter told Vanity Fair (for its profile of Dudley) that Dudley’s home with his wife Brogan was ‘like Munchkinland’. Their choice of wives (seven in all – Gillian Lynne tried to tell the priapic Dudley to steer clear of statuesque, heartless women) reflected flawed attitudes to women. When his first wife Wendy left him, Peter kicked her downstairs. His behaviour was almost always forgiven. Even when he walked off stage in the middle of his cabaret at a Private Eye anniversary party, there was a general shrug of acceptance.

William Cook’s riveting book really ends on page 479. But in gratitude to informants such as Barry Humphries, Nicholas Garland etc, he appends two hundred pages of research interviews, conducted in Hello!-style in ‘idyllic’ ‘sunny’ ‘charming’ homes, embellishing the reminiscences from the previous five hundred pages. Chris Langham, fellow alcoholic, is acute about Peter. Otherwise the most perceptive insights are from Mavis Nicholson’s two interviews with the pair, in 1973 and 1989, by which time Mavis saw that they had switched places and Peter was now Dudley’s stooge.

Then, when melancholia struck, Dudley had his salvation in music: when he could no longer play, he died.

POETS’ CORNER ‘Water’

by Philip Larkin

If I were called in To construct a religion I should make use of water.

Going to church Would entail a fording To dry, different clothes; My litany would employ Images of sousing, A furious devout drench, And I should raise in the east A glass of water Where any-angled light Would congregate endlessly.

Chosen by John Lloyd 68

THE OLDIE – January 2014

Gray’s anatomy MICHAEL BARBER

The Complete Smoking Diaries

by Simon Gray Granta £25 Oldie price £21.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

ONCE UPON A time the playwright Simon Gray (1936–2008) had the ball at his feet: a tenured job as a lecturer, plus the money and fame that came from box-office hits like Butley, Quartermaine’s Terms and Close of Play. But look what’s become of him thirty years later: ‘a chainsmoking, alcoholic, teetotal wreck’ who owns nothing but the contents of his study, goes to bed when most of us wake up, and is addicted to black coffee and dark chocolate.

Well, diarists can’t afford to be squeamish, particularly about themselves, and we must be grateful that as well as the belching, farting and dribbling that Gray owns up to, there is also his compulsive scribbling. His biro and yellow legal pads are as essential to him as the packets of fags that no amount of finger-wagging can persuade him to give up. In fact fingerwagging only encourages him to keep puffing. He deplores the way governments interfere with people, supposedly for their own good. It’s wrong, he thinks, to use the term ‘nanny state’ in this context, because ‘nannies also make you feel safe, or should do’, whereas all governments accomplish with their endless regulation is to make people feel more and more neurotic.

That said, Gray did listen to his liver when in 1997, during a boozy lunch with his chum Alan Bates, it downed tools. Unlike most of his plays, these diaries were fuelled by Diet Coke and chocolate, not scotch and champagne.

Justly described by Richard Eyre in his introduction as ‘dramatic soliloquies’, they are a mixture of memoir, confession, rumination, gossip and rant. He is good on home truths. At one point he concludes that since life never repeats itself exactly you can learn nothing from experience, because the difference makes all the difference. And what could be more rueful than this admission: ‘I’ve never needed cigarettes more than when getting the news that I’m dying from them.’

A strong whiff of memento mori is apparent from page 3 (there are about 850 in all), when Gray’s friend and neighbour, Harold Pinter, announces he

has cancer. Ironically, given the amount of space he devotes to Pinter and his condition, Gray would predecease him by a few months. Another recurrent theme is his love for his saintly wife Victoria, who is good at picking up the pieces.

It is odd though that Gray says so little about his children by his previous wife, an omission that may be overlooked by some readers because Richard Eyre’s introduction, though heartfelt, is short on detail. Of course Wikipedia, like Auden’s ‘shilling life’, will give you all the facts, but since this big fat book also lacks an index, a little bit more background would not have gone amiss.

Simon Gray

Gray is at his best when one thing leads not just to another, but another and another and another. For instance when Alan Yentob takes his number he doubts whether he’ll call back because no matter how many people take his number the only calls he gets back are from doubleglazing companies, ‘which is better I suppose than the sort of stuff I’ve been getting through the email – offers of penisexpanding drugs, vastly superior to Viagra, they claim, delivering an erection within minutes and sustaining it for four days.

But how would one cope with a four-day erection? One would have to get a whole new wardrobe of loose garments, or stay in one’s home… though perhaps I could go to the Garrick Club. Could they blackball you for strutting about with an erection?’

Which reminds me that Gray includes a painfully honest account of losing his virginity at the ripe old age of twenty-five.

Indeed the only time his courage fails him is when he can’t bring himself to explain how someone so broke – thanks to fecklessness and extravagance, plus Lloyd’s and other scams – can live so stylishly. Could it be because Victoria was née Rothschild? Only she can tell us now.

BOOKS

Killer cure WILLIAM KEEGAN

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea

by Mark Blyth OUP £16.99 Oldie price £14.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

The 2007–08 economic crisis, the aftermath of which is still with us, was the product of a financial system run riot.

This system, in turn, was developed by ‘free marketeers’ and neo-liberals who assumed the reins of both economic policy and academic economics after the perceived ‘failure’ of Keynesian economics in the 1970s.

In the end the financial system had to be saved by the very Keynesian approach which believers in the wisdom of deregulated financial markets had rejected. Yet the ultimate irony was that after that brief spell in 2008–09 when the group of twenty (G20) leading market economies and their central banks ‘saved the world’, all the blame for the crash was successfully loaded onto the believers in government intervention who had actually rescued the system.

By far the greater part of the increase in public sector borrowing and levels of debt – usually expressed as a rising percentage of gross domestic product – was the consequence of the crash not the cause.

The debt rose partly as a result of the many billions of dollars, euros and pounds that had to be injected directly into the financial system, and partly as a result of the lost output and tax revenue attributable directly and indirectly to the crisis. For example, as I write, even after official statistics indicating, at last, the beginnings of an economic recovery in the UK, GDP is still some three per cent below its pre-crisis level, and some 17 per cent below what its level might have been

‘I’m thinking of shaving my head for charity’

‘Actually the evangelical membership has multiplied since the advent of the bouncy church’

given the historical average growth rate in this country of around 2.5 per cent a year.

The combination of tax cuts, higher public expenditure and easier monetary policy (low interest rates and injections of financial liquidity) was known as ‘the stimulus’. The G20 summit in London was the high spot of Gordon Brown’s otherwise tarnished premiership. But, as Mark Blyth demonstrates in this refreshingly lucid attack on ‘austerity economics’, with Brown on the way out, the June 2010 G20 meeting in Toronto saw world leaders go back on an earlier commitment to maintain the public spending stimulus until, in the words of the Financial Times, ‘the recovery was firmly entrenched’. Egged on by the pre-Keynesian influences of German policymakers and the European Central Bank, we saw the birth of the oxymoronic policy known as ‘Expansionary Fiscal Consolidation’.

As Blyth reminds us, the new Chancellor George Osborne, in a breathtakingly cynical political manoeuvre, ‘made repeated comparisons to the fiscal situation in Greece: “You can see in Greece an example of a country that didn’t face up to its problems, and that is the fate I want to avoid.”’

Blyth observes that ‘What were essentially private-sector debt problems were rechristened as the “the Debt” generated by “out of control” public spending. Yet only Greece was in any meaningful sense profligate.’ He argues that ‘bailing [out the banks] led to debt.

Debt led to crisis. Crisis led to austerity.’

There is much else in this book, including as good an explanation as you will find of the meanings of all those recherché terms in which the so-called financial ‘industry’ describes its so-called ‘products’.

I cannot recommend Mr Blyth’s book enough.

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

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BOOKS

The master’s voice DEREK GRANGER

Olivier

by Philip Ziegler MacLehose Press £25

ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT GEARY

Oldie price £21.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

Early in Philip Ziegler’s biography fourletter epithets hurled at Laurence Harvey reflect the authentic sound of Olivier in a rage. His voice rings loud in this finely crafted study – appealing, majestic, rancorous, mordant, often comical, sometimes sweetly seductive – in a way no previous biography of Olivier has quite managed.

When it was first mooted that Ziegler was taking on Olivier there were reservations. How would this distinguished biographer of the great and good cope with the raffish hurlyburly of the stage? In fact his detachment enables him to approach the world of theatre with the forensic relish of an anthropologist who has alighted on a particularly exotic tribe. The distance in time also works in his favour. It is now almost a decade since the last full-dress biography, six years since Olivier’s centenary and twenty-four years since his death. Such was his colossal reputation that no approach seemed possible unless tinged with awe. He had dominated the English stage for nearly half a century.

His greatest performances – Richard III, Henry V and Hamlet – have become part of theatrical folklore, just as his great film roles are part of cinema history.

Ziegler pays them their due, but what makes this biography remarkable is its vivid sense of the man himself. Here I must declare an interest. As Olivier’s failed first authorised biographer I had kept a fair amount of research material, which I handed over to Ziegler. Even more important are the fifty hours of taped conversation with Mark Amory, originally selected to co-author Olivier’s Confessions of an Actor.

They provide the authentic voice of Olivier – unbuttoned, confessional, sardonic and shot through with startling candour.

Ziegler’s narrative runs briskly through all the key events, both private and public, of Olivier’s life, but the story is so packed with little nuggets of anecdotal evidence and Olivier’s own commentary that it seems

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to unfold from inside Olivier’s frenetic and often tortured experience – from the Strindbergian agony of his life with Vivien Leigh and his brutal ousting from the Old Vic management after he had delivered some of the greatest seasons in theatrical memory to his rancorous confrontations with the National Theatre board and the bitter rows over his eventual departure.

After working for him at the National I joined him as his co-producer in the mid-Seventies to televise six great plays from the modern repertoire. He had recently developed a rare muscular disease and had decided to rehabilitate himself through strenuous work.

During this period I got to know him well, staying with him in his Sussex home and travelling with him to America. Olivier had an abundant gift for intimacy, and he was often wildly funny in his dark, sardonic fashion.

‘Just look at me, Boysie,’ he muttered, clambering naked out of his swimming pool, ‘to think I was once a Hollywood sex symbol.’ We talked about everything – love, sex, sexuality, his marriages, his passion for disguises, his fanatically detailed preparation for every new part and the arduous physical training he undertook for each new role. He was in many ways coarse-grained and, for someone so closely identified with Shakespeare, unpoetic: ‘Prospero? What on earth could I do with that boring

‘Gotta go home – the wife is throwing things out’

old conjuror?’ Prone to fierce attacks of jealousy, he never allowed anyone to stand in his light. ‘I can find much brutality in myself when I have to,’ he told me. He could be coldly cutting, or shrivel you with his bull of Bashan roar. He was also capable of great acts of personal sweetness. ‘You’re such a fucking little snob,’ he once chided me in New York. ‘All you want are Broadway stars and hostesses.’ On my birthday he asked me to his suite for a drink. I heard a loud hubbub coming through the door and as he opened it I realised he’d gathered every famous face in the city.

‘There, see what I do for you, Boysie.’

Ziegler has caught well a quirky, complex, difficult man without diminishing his huge achievements.

From this sometimes irreverent perspective, Olivier’s genius seems all the more heroic.

BOOKS

Having a blast Elizabeth Grice

As Green as Grass: Growing Up Before, During and After the Second World War

by Emma Smith Bloomsbury £16.99 Oldie price 14.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

Getting into scrapes is Emma Smith’s forte. She builds this delightful book on her youthful tendency to run into trouble, to extricate herself with the utmost brio and then to draw from it some life lessons that you suspect she will never learn.

Newly employed as a dogsbody with a documentary film company in postwar London, she becomes infatuated with her boss, Ralph (‘Bunny’) Keene, and dazzled by the famous writers he has on his books – though not so dazzled as Bunny himself. Laurie Lee, a compulsive skirt-chaser, is one. Philip Toynbee another. Bunny has come to regard his presentable, pliant young assistant as a mandatory girlfriend, someone handy to occupy the space created by the break-up of his second marriage. But Toynbee also believes she could lift his marital gloom and attempts to seduce her with an earnest discussion of the novels of Thomas Hardy.

The ensuing ‘date’, where the eager ingénue finds Toynbee slumped in an alcoholic fog on a barstool, unable to remember who she is, is a sharp study in disillusionment. Seeing this little tragedy unfold, the nightclub’s owner steps in to comfort the girl but he is a rotter, too, and mocks her cruelly over dinner. Weeping hysterically, she collides again with Toynbee who this time lurches after her down Shaftesbury Avenue and into an Underground station begging for ‘jus’ a corner, tha’s all’ to spend the night.

Although Bunny rides to the rescue in this particular double-debacle (‘It’s your own fault, you silly girl. You really are as green as grass. Didn’t I warn you?’) he is soon to be the casualty of her new-found ability to decide what’s good for her.

Like a lot of half-educated girls thrown into stop-gap jobs during the war, Smith has an exhilarating gift for making the best of things and passing dismal experiences off as a

A ward sister leads the daily prayers for staff and patients at the London Hospital, 1953. Taken from Bert Hardy’s Britain by Colin Wilkinson, a centenary tribute to the Picture Post photographer’s work (Bluecoat Press, £19.99) Available from waterstones.com for £19.99 including free UK p&p

huge blast. She is a born opportunist.

These were the days when you answered advertisements for dodgy job opportunities with no qualifications except keenness and a helpful dose of naiveté. Some of her exploits make today’s student gap years seem tame.

I shook with amusement at her account of signing up to crew a yacht to the Greek islands as a way of kickstarting her imagination for a new book.

The owner sensibly proposes a practice run from Cowes to Cherbourg but his ‘yacht’ turns out to be a toy sailing boat called Winkle in which they attempt a Channel crossing at night in a storm.

Neither the owner nor his ancient crew person knows anything about sailing. It is left to Smith, whose only waterborne experience is on canals, to take the tiller and point the pitching vessel towards France with the matchless advice: ‘If we seem in danger of being run down by one of the big steamers whose paths we are cutting across I am to shine the torch on to the mainsail.’

This memoir reprises Smith’s gutsy account of her time as a novice ‘boater’, delivering coal and steel on the Grand Union Canal between Limehouse

and Birmingham – the subject of her prizewinning book Maidens’ Trip in 1948. It follows her to India after the war, with Laurie Lee as scriptwriter, to make an educational film about tea planting, and eventually to Paris where she writes her first novel, sitting barefoot on the cobblestones beside the Seine with a portable typewriter on her knees.

The photographer Robert Doisneau happens to wander by (allegedly without disturbing or rearranging his sitter) and lo! the following day, she is the centrefold of Paris Match.

Emma Smith was born Elspeth Hallsmith, a name that fits her far better than the one she adopted for her brief film career. In 2008, at the age of 85, she published The Great Western Beach, a sweet-tasting memoir of her Cornish childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. Now, at 90, another funny-sad evocation of times past. I would not like to bet it will be her last.

Blundering about at its shadowy heart there is her half-mad father, a pitiable but dangerous figure seen through the eyes of a child. If ever she gives him her adult attention, it would make a gripping tale.

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

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BOOKS

Audiobooks

Come together

RACHEL REDFORD

MARK ELLEN

Marina

The Beatles – All These Years Volume One: Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

Carlos Ruiz Zafón Read by Daniel Weyman Orion, download available,

Little, Brown £30 Oldie price £25.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

unabridged, 7hrs 30m, £16.99

Without explanation, 15-year-old Oscar disappears from his Barcelona boarding school for seven days. This ‘Gothic tale for all’ from the author of the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind is Oscar’s story: his chance friendship with Marina and her artist father in their once-glorious house, and his dangerous and mystical exploration with the secretive Marina of past mysteries in the enchanted city where ‘time and memory, history and fiction merged’. A captivating narration.

Inspector Ghote Caught in the Meshes H R F Keating Read by Sam Dastor Audiogo, download from www.audible.co.uk, unabridged, 7hrs 22m, £15. 99

Inspector Ghote is caught in the meshes of Indian police investigation in his valiant pursuit of the truth behind the murder of an important American visitor shot dead whilst travelling between Bombay and Poona. The victim’s brother appears to be hiding information, and after he and Ghote narrowly escape assassination, they become the targets of dangerous men.

The rich sense of place enhanced by a cracking narration is a real joy.

A Literary Christmas Read by Juliet Stevenson and Simon Callow

WE KNOW how it ends – but we don’t know precisely how it started. There are agonising moments in this chronology where the boys destined to become the Beatles are in the same place but haven’t yet actually met. The teenage Ringo Starr chats up girls at a fairground within a few feet of Paul McCartney. You want to reach into the book and introduce them to hurry the whole process along.

After the endless catalogue of scrapes, fights, fallings-out, defections, sackings and failures, you can’t wait for all the loose ends to fuse together. You become fixated with the notion of fate – that if any one of countless key events hadn’t happened, the group might never have existed or might have lacked the otherworldly ingredient that gave birth to their records. What if they’d carried on with their original manager, the one who booked them on a 440-mile return trip to Aldershot to perform to a sum total of eighteen people? What if McCartney had never gone to the Woolton village fete and seen John Lennon in a skiffle group? What if they’d never found George Martin?

What if it had been George Harrison, not early bassist Stu Sutcliffe, who had died from head injuries after the band were beaten up by jealous thugs in 1961?

Tune In is the first part of a trilogy Mark Lewisohn began in 2005 which will take thirteen years to complete (to be followed, of course, by Turn On and Drop

Out). This brick-like 830-page episode ends in ’62 with the band about to release their first single, and it couldn’t paint a more vivid and meticulous picture of their fractious but devoted dynamic and the rise of rock and roll and its whiff – in fact powerful stench – of danger. Bouncers in Hamburg clubs are armed with tear-gas guns, truncheons and knuckle-dusters, and the scent of Liverpool’s Cavern Club is a steaming compost of sweat, smoke, soup, hot dogs, disinfectant, overflowing toilets and rotting fruit in the warehouse next door. Amid this chaos are traces of the pre-war music that helps forge their styles: alongside Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry songs, they still play ‘Over The Rainbow’ and ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’. Old world echoes are all around them, Paul baulking at the idea of learning the bass as he considers it ‘the fat guy’s instrument’.

The pace is so unhurried that, for the first time, you get a sense of how the Beatles saw the world and not just how the world saw the Beatles. John’s contempt for authority is sparked by discovering it was a drunk, off-duty policeman that killed his mother in a road accident, a powerful bond with the motherless Paul. It’s touching to learn that the fourteen-year-old George was then consumed by the anxious conviction that his Mum might now die too.

Above all you marvel at their selfconfidence. The four of them abandon school, college, exams, jobs and every offered opportunity in the unshifting, single-minded belief that they have the talent to be ‘bigger than Elvis’.

Paul considers posting one of his early compositions to Frank Sinatra in case he might like to record it. Asked years later about his battles with teachers, John had a typically sharp perspective: ‘They asked what you wanted be. Nobody said that I already was, and we already are.’

British Library, CD/download from www.bl.uk/shop 2hrs 20m, £12.99

There are 40 poems, short stories and extracts from novels and diaries in this beautifully presented cornucopia.

Christmas cheer is represented with the Cratchit family’s goose, and Mole hearing the red-scarfed, carol-singing field mice. Donne and Rossetti immortalise the Holy Nativity, John Evelyn records the Thames ice fair, and there’s Christmas in India and in the workhouse. Included too is Christmas in wartime, epitomised by W H Davies’s ‘holly berries made of lead’.

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THE THEOLDIE OLDIE– –October January2013 2014

‘Do you remember the good old days when we could understand the commercials?’

BOOKS

Temps perdu WILLIAM PALMER

The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, Time and Ageing

by Douwe Draaisma Yale University Press £16.99 £13.99 from waterstones.com including free UK p&p

YOU ARE 70 years old. You lie awake in the small hours and remember in humiliating detail a failed love affair of fifty years ago. When you get up you receive a phone call. A friend reminds you that you are meeting for lunch in a few hours. You had forgotten this entirely.

The two types of memory involved here are ‘retrospective’ and ‘prospective’.

The first deals with remembering what we have done in the past and the second

‘He was chucked out of UKIP for smoking e-cigarettes’

with what we have to do in future. Not unnaturally, as we get older there is a lot more past than future locked in our brain cells. Our failure to remember things in the immediate past or near future may be part of the aversion we have to looking too closely ahead. As the elderly Mr Lorry says in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, ‘My heart is touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep.’

Draaisma explains the many varieties of what he calls the ‘reminiscence effect’.

He points out that our life expectancy gives us considerably more leisure time after retirement than in any previous era. In other words, people used to work extremely hard and then die fairly soon after stopping. Now we have twenty or so years of old age in which to examine our pasts; not always the pleasantest of activities. Nostalgia for the past and the life we led there does not always produce a warm Proustian glow. Even before

the advent of modern psychology, the dwelling on their loss by those separated by war or exile from their homelands was regarded as a physical illness that could cause debilitating melancholy, madness and suicide.

There is some good news. The loss of short-term memory that can terrify us with thoughts of impending Alzheimer’s is an altogether more benign and general phenomenon. The mislaid specs, the appointment noted dutifully in the diary and then missed because we forget to look in the diary, the grasping for a name when we meet someone we know well, all these are only to be expected in old age, says our kindly author. He is very caustic about what he calls the ‘forgetfulness market’: all those courses or drugs advertised to improve memory.

As he says, memory is not an identifiable muscular structure that can be developed, but it can be kept active by intellectual stimulation; a ninety-six-year-old Polish neighbour recently asked me to get him a Latin primer so that he could refresh his knowledge of verb conjugations.

Early memories seem to exist in a sort of ‘permastore... inaccessible and frozen’ until some association releases them.

Too good a memory may be a curse. In ‘Funes, His Memory’, a story by Jorge Luis Borges, poor Funes remembers everything; each day’s events and sights in the minutest detail. His ‘real’ life is completely displaced by his recall of it.

But perhaps in all of us, the whole of our lives are there in the permastore, and only some merciful function enables us to select, play and edit, sometimes falsely.

An early memory is of going fishing with my grandfather when I was four. I saw a kingfisher for the first time and see bird and river vividly now. But a doubt comes: am I conflating two separate episodes into one?

This witty and profound book examines all these matters and follows on from the same author’s excellent Why Life Speeds Up As You Grow Older. Memory is often painful, but none of us are quite as bad as we remember. We hope.

STRICTLY LIMITED TO 22 PEOPLE The East India Club, St James’s Square

How to Write for Magazines and Newspapers Wednesday 12th March 2014 The Hogarth Room, East India Club, 16 St James’s Square, London SW1 THE OLDIE, unique in its policy of encouraging readers and nonprofessionals to write for the magazine, has reassembled a crack team of experienced Jeremy Lewis journalists and editors who will take you through exercises in the various aspects of writing for magazines and newspapers, under the leadership of Jeremy Lewis. There will also be a free-for-all questionand-answer session chaired by the editor, Richard Ingrams. ★★ TIMETABLE ★★ 9.15 Coffee 9.30 Welcome by Jeremy Lewis 9.45–11.15 Workshop One: Melanie McFadyean on interviewing 11.15 Tea/coffee break 11.30–1pm Workshop Two: Mark Ellen on how to write a review 1–1.45 Buffet lunch 1.45–2.30 Question-and-Answer Session with Richard Ingrams, Jeremy Lewis, and Rebecca de Saintonge of LifeLines Press 2.30–4pm Workshop Three: Rosie Boycott on travel Rosie will show you how to create a story out of a holiday or expedition, as well as how to approach editors 4–4.15 Tea/coffee break 4.15–5.45 Workshop Four: Jeremy Lewis on ‘Do’s and Don’ts’ How to avoid common mistakes and pitfalls which could deter editors

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Please make cheques payable to Oldie Publications Ltd. If you have any queries, please call Hannah Donovan on 020 7436 8801 or write to her at: The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG

REVIEWS

MUSIC

richard osborne

The BBC’s recent ‘Sound of Cinema’ season was something of a mixed bag. The talks were fascinating but no one seems to have told the planners that even the best film music can be a terrible bore once it’s been taken out of context. Radio 4’s High Noon quickly became Radio 3’s Waterloo.

Sadly few latter-day film composers are much cop when it comes to writing real music. Hollywood’s current musical godfather is Hans Zimmer, whose ominously named ‘Remote Control Productions’, with its fleets of synthesisers and assistant composers, is a far cry from the old Hollywood, where men like Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Franz Waxman and Miklós Rósza ruled the roost.

The leading musical cinéaste in post-war Europe was Nino Rota. He too was a real composer, as a large number of extremely happy people discovered in Wexford this October when the annual opera festival staged his uproarious take on Labiche’s classic farce The Italian Straw Hat. Rota, who died in 1979 at the age of 67, is probably best remembered for that remarkable dying fall of a melody that permeates his score for Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. As Elgar said of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, a tune like that comes to a composer once in a lifetime.

There are serious-

minded musicians who still haven’t forgiven Rota for using Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony in Senso, Luchino Visconti’s prequel to The Leopard, for which Rota also wrote the music. But that’s by the way. He also enjoyed successful collaborations with Francis Ford Coppola (the first two Godfather films) and Federico Fellini, for whom Rota’s music became part of the directorial vision, much as Bernard Herrmann’s did for Alfred Hitchcock.

Rota grew up in a well-to-do Milanese family whose musical soirées were attended by the likes of Puccini, Leoncavallo, Stravinsky, Ravel – and Toscanini, who recommended Rota to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where Menotti and Samuel Barber were also pupils.

René Clair had made a well-liked silent film of The Italian Straw Hat in 1927 and two years later Jacques Ibert wrote some uproarious theatre music for the play, later anthologised as his Divertissement. But it was probably Fernandel’s (not very funny) 1944 film which reignited Rota’s interest in the piece. Renamed The Florentine Straw Hat, the opera was drafted in 1944–45. Since Rota was already busy with film commissions, he shoved the uncompleted manuscript into a drawer and later had difficulty locating it when – in an episode worthy of the opera itself – his friend Simone Cuccia unexpectedly announced that the opera would have its

prima at Palermo’s Teatro Massimo in April 1955. The Italians have been crying with laughter over the piece ever since.

The plot is one long glorious chase, as the bridegroom Fadinard careers round Paris on his wedding day, followed by a bevy of bemused and progressively bedraggled wedding guests, in search of a replacement straw hat for the one his horse has eaten whilst its owner, the lovely Anaide, was having it away in a wood with her brutish lover. What makes this farsa musicale such a treat musically is the sense not of Rota parodying or purloining the music of Donizetti, Rossini, Offenbach, Verdi, Mascagni and Puccini but of his taking their art to a newer and happier place.

The opera plays for a couple of hours.

With a joke – musical or otherwise – roughly every 20 seconds, it’s comedy in the Ken Dodd league. ‘Incontinently facetious’ was how one critic described it.

Yet there are moments of beauty too. Had the opera been written in 1905 rather than 1945, Fadinard’s arietta ‘Come un piccolo fior d’aprile’ would have been in Caruso’s repertory and (they’ll tell you in Wexford) Count John McCormack’s. My only regret is that RCA’s memorable 1975 complete recording – conducted by Rota himself, with Ugo Benelli as Fadinard – is no longer in print.

The Wexford production was a delight. Designed by Lorenzo Cutùli and directed by Andrea Cigni, it relocated the action to 1950s Paris. As Alexandra Wilson pointed out in her splendid programme essay, the 1950s are very much ‘in’ at the moment, a taste for Fifties retro and ‘the cosy childhood memories of a baby-boomer generation’ being two of the principal reasons.

I happily plead guilty to both.

I should add that Chandos has a number of Rota’s orchestral and instrumental works in its catalogue.

I particularly enjoyed the CD which includes his Concerto Soirée for piano and orchestra and the witty and warmhearted Divertimento Concertante which he wrote for the great Italian double-bass player Franco Petracchi in 1973.

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

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REVIEWS

DVD

jeremy lewis Rumpole of the Bailey 15-disc set, 37.5 hours

Photo courtesy Evening Standard/Getty Images

Horace Rumpole (Leo McKern) right, with his creator John Mortimer QC Stocky and pot-bellied, with an empurpled nose, bushy sideburns, a cheroot permanently dangling from his bottom lip and a battered black trilby clamped to his head, Horace Rumpole is far removed from the suave, impeccably groomed barristers of popular imagination. A recipient of paltry legal aid fees, he refuses to prosecute, urges his clients never to plead guilty, and claims that a knowledge of blood stains, typewriter keys and the foibles of human nature has stood him in far better stead than poring over legal textbooks; and every evening, after a long day in the Old Bailey or the Uxbridge Magistrates Court, he treats himself to several large glasses of Château Thames Embankment in Pomeroy’s Wine Bar before heading home from the Temple to his mansion flat in the Gloucester Road to face an unamused Mrs Rumpole, referred to sotto voce as She Who Must Be Obeyed.

The first series of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey was broadcast in 1976, and it proved so popular that it ran to a further six series, eventually expiring in 1992 after 44 episodes of fifty minutes each. Played to perfection by the gravelvoiced Australian actor Leo McKern, Rumpole invariably sides with the underdog, and specialises in defending minor South London villains. His colleagues deeply disapprove of the petty criminals and seedy private detectives

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who visit him in 3 Equity Court, concentrating instead on lucrative civil actions: Rumpole valiantly resists their attempts to forcibly retire him, and to streamline the activities of chambers via time and motion studies and a smoking ban. As far as Rumpole is concerned, the enemy consists of the various judges before whom he appears, all of whom he treats with a derision verging on contempt of court; ‘Soapy Sam’ Ballard (Peter Blythe), the unctuous head of chambers, who succeeds the more affable Guthrie Featherstone (Peter Bowles); and Claude Erskine-Brown, an ambitious silly ass and passionate Wagnerian, brilliantly played by Julian Curry, whose dashing wife Philly (Patricia Hodge) easily outruns him in the legal rat race. Altogether more sympathetic is Uncle Tom (Richard Murdoch), who hasn’t had a brief for as long as anyone can remember, but turns up every day in a black jacket and chalkstriped trousers to practice his putting in the clerks’ room, much to the irritation of the modernisers.

Unlike his snobbish and overbearing wife Hilda (Peggy Thorpe-Bates, followed

by Marion Mathie), Rumpole is a wonderfully witty and sympathetic figure: much given to quoting from QuillerCouch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, he both embodies and champions human frailty in an increasingly uncongenial world of political correctness and monetary criteria. Never a man to be considered for silk, he remains – in his own words – an unrepentant ‘Old Bailey hack’, whose greatest triumph was the Penge Bungalows murder case, back in the 1950s; but – to the delight of his many admirers – he always wins out in the end, outwitting judges, the prosecution and, most importantly of all, She Who Must Be Obeyed.

• To order for £29.99 + £1.50 UK p&p call 0844 376 0009 quoting The Oldie

‘My Christmas wish list 2013 is now available to download, and can also be accessed via my website’

W IR E L E SS VALERIE GROVE

A history of carols is coming: time to sign off on 2013. A vintage year culminating in a tsunami of muchhyped anniversaries. Fifty years since Dr Who, Profumo, deaths of C S Lewis and JFK; and Britten’s centenary. The Dallas anniversary prompted a revealing Book of the Week (JFK’s letters, beautifully read by Colin Stinton and others) and a superb new play, Air Force One, by Christopher Lee. Martin Jarvis directed this reconstruction of the flight from Dallas to Washington on the afternoon of 22nd November, Jackie clad in bloodstains and LBJ insisting on being sworn in (‘Someone get a goddam bible!

A bible, for chrissake.’) They could find only Jack’s missal – which had to do, it was a bible ‘near as dammit’. Fantastic performances from Stacy Keach as LBJ, Glenne Headly doing Jackie’s breathy little-girl voice, and Jennifer Bassey as the eerily controlled Rose Kennedy, telephoning to tell LBJ that it was all right: ‘You loved Jack,’ she said soothingly, ‘and he loved you’: absolute nonsense, but such was the matriarch Rose’s upbringing that the pretence of politesse was what mattered, in even the most horrific circumstance.

By dying an hour after Kennedy, C S Lewis – also known as Jack – may have been eclipsed in the obituary stakes in 1963, but he was comprehensively revived on Radio 4, with Simon Russell Beale reading The Screwtape Letters (‘that unique sui generis book, valuable to the human race for ever,’ said Lewis’s evangelical Christian stepson) as Book of the Week, and a play about Lewis’s friendship with Tolkien, plus a revival of a 2009 production of Shadowlands with Martin Jarvis (again) as ‘Jack’. There was also coverage of the new memorial stone installed in – inappropriately – Poets’ Corner. I like to think of C S Lewis fetching up beside Eliot in the Abbey.

Lewis once commented, apropos modern poetry: ‘I’ve never seen an evening like a patient etherised upon a table.’

REVIEWS

TELEVISION RICHARD INGRAMS

Any commentator hoping for a quiet life should avoid writing about Israel, Scientologists and badgers. But a quiet life has never been my priority and I was expecting flak when in October I castigated Chris Packham, presenter of the BBC’s Autumnwatch programme, for his tweets on the badger cull controversy: ‘Brutalist thugs, liars and frauds will destroy our wildlife and dishonour our nations’s reputation,’ he tweeted. ‘When night falls and the setts of southern England stir their gentle folk will be needlessly slaughtered.’

It seems I was not alone in considering this OTT coming from a BBC man and in view of the Corporation’s wellknown claim to be impartial on political issues. Tory MP Simon Hart wrote to complain to the BBC DG Lord Hall who passed the buck to one Tim Scoones, an executive producer of the BBC’s Natural History team who replied that there is ‘a voluntary code of conduct’ and that the timing of matey’s inflammatory tweets was ‘not in the spirit of this voluntary code’ – but, NB, only the timing, not the actual tweets.

Packham himself was unrepentant and announced that his opinions on the cull are ‘based on a pragmatic and objective consideration of the current

science concerning its efficacy’. What’s more he vowed ‘to continue to make my views known when I feel it is appropriate to do so’. In other words people like me and Simon Hart MP can get stuffed.

My own gripe is not so much that Chris Packham is biased – that’s a complaint that will be made about any good journalist – but that like a lot of those who concern themselves with animal rights he is more than a little bit barmy.

It is not only badgers that command his respect and admiration. He has recently spoken up for the urban fox, describing it as ‘one of the world’s most beautiful animals’, unjustly accused of savagery. ‘We

Chris Packham – bonkers or what?

will look at how we can live harmoniously with them,’ he urged, while pointing out that attacks by dogs were much more common – possibly something to do with that fact that to date there are a great many more dogs about than there are foxes (though this could change).

While extolling harmonious relationships with foxes, Packham is keen for us also to become friends with the kestrel, which is in decline (possibly because of the alarming spread of red kites, thanks to the support of the RSPB, of which Chris is a vice-president). Put a tea chest in a tree, he says. It will make a nice nesting place for homeless hawks.

‘The dog seems to know we’re going away on holiday and doesn’t want us to leave without him...’

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Photo courtesy REX/Albanpix Ltd

Death has been stalking us. A recovered Andrew Marr came back to Start the Week and welcomed Sir John Tavener who, having spoken about his frail health (‘Life is a creeping tragedy – that’s why one must be cheerful,’ he said) died the very next day; a posthumous yet lively-sounding Sir David Frost was heard in his last broadcast, on John Lloyd’s Museum of Curiosity, proposing his own Nixon interviews; Woman’s Hour exhumed the ineffably superior tones of Lady Rhondda from the archives, recounting how she survived the sinking Lusitania in 1915 (‘I unhooked my skirt so that it should not impede me in the watah’); and an Archive Hour on the British stiff upper lip gave us in swift succession the voices of Baden-Powell, H G Wells, J B Priestley, Churchill and Attlee. Also David Starkey: ‘On Diana’s death, the great British stiff upper lip became permanently tremulous.’

Jim Naughtie went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to analyse Lincoln’s address. Radio 4 dwells so much in the past because listeners prefer it, I believe; they are not duped by speculation or self-deluding political illusions about spurious progress and future ‘growth’.

Thank heavens for Andrew Dilnot’s History of Britain in Numbers, an excellent daily fifteen minutes’ worth, sturdily rooted in reality: e.g. four out of ten Boer War recruits were ‘dentally unfit’ – i.e. too toothless to load muskets or chew rations.

Suggested resolution for 2014: a ban on simpering. Even John Humphrys does it, on Thursdays, when Melvyn trips in to give a long-winded precis of what’s on In Our Time at 9am: Lord Bragg invariably contrives some tortured, satirical link between the Today programme and (fill in space: Pocahontas, the Roman empire etc). Humphrys finds Melvyn’s wit so hilarious he can hardly speak for paroxysms of guffaws. Painful. J P Devlin on Saturday Live was reduced to a jelly

by Joan Collins as she showed him the pictures of camels she has collected. La Collins had nothing to say about these pictures except that they were of camels and she had bought them! or been given them! This reminded me of a 1962 parody of Jackie K giving a tour of the paintings hanging in the White House.

‘Well, there’s this one here... and this little bitty one over there... and a very big one here...’

REVIEWS

FILM

MARCUS BERKMANN

Stephen Frears’s Philomena (12A) takes an old and very familiar tale and makes something of it that is fresh and new and surprisingly moving.

Judi Dench plays an Irish woman in her sixties who, half a century before, had given birth to a child out of wedlock and been sent to work in the Magdalene

Judi Dench and Steve Coogan in Philomena

Laundries. Brutal, beetle-eyed nuns allowed her to see her son for just one hour a day, until one afternoon an American couple drove up and took him away. She has told no one, but on what would have been the boy’s fiftieth birthday she shows a photo of him, aged maybe two, to her daughter (Anna Maxwell Martin). Could they find the boy? Would he still be alive? A series of slightly unlikely plot developments, which we nonetheless have to believe because this is based on a true story, brings Steve Coogan into the equation, playing Martin Sixsmith, the former BBC man turned Labour spin doctor turned unemployed former Labour spin doctor who is thinking of writing a book about Russian history. Against all his instincts he is drawn into writing this ‘human interest’ story for a female Fleet Street executive who strides through her office on high heels barking orders into mobile phones.

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It is a curious irony, noticed by everyone, that the press-averse Coogan should be playing a journalist; it’s less surprising that he should play him as a cynical metropolitan smarty-pants with a permanent sneer. If we were going to be kind, we would say that this serves the narrative arc, that Sixsmith must find some redemption through Philomena’s story. As always with Coogan, though, there’s something a little bit Alan Partridge about him, which is fine in an Alan Partridge film, not necessarily so good elsewhere.

But these are minor complaints, for this is Judi Dench’s film. Coogan also co-wrote the script and gives her all the best lines. Her Philomena is stubborn, kind, cleverer than she looks, somehow both a bit batty and very clear-sighted – a real person. Frears knows exactly what to do: just point the camera at her for long takes and let her take the weight of the story. It occurs to me now that Dench has become a proper film star, and she has done it in her sixties and seventies. Only Ian McKellen, at a pinch, has done this before, but he rarely gets to carry a film as she does here. Any traces of unwanted sentimentality are dissipated by her fierce integrity, the wit of the script and Frears’s steady hand. I might have wiped my eyes once or twice, and blown my nose like a foghorn once or twice more.

It was quite an afternoon, because immediately afterwards I saw Gravity (12A).

You have to see this on the hugest screen possible and in 3D. Director Alfonso Cuarón’s main inspirations are clearly 2001 and possibly Solaris. This is space at its most beautiful and terrifying. The visuals are extraordinary and the story as streamlined as it’s possible to be. Will Sandra Bullock survive? It’s squirmon-the-edge-of-the-seat stuff, utterly believable and all over in 91 minutes. For the first time in 45 years I can now safely say that I don’t want to be an astronaut when I grow up.

THEATRE PAUL BAILEY

Whenever I see Barry Humphries dolled up as Dame Edna Everage, I think back to the morning in 1982 when I met Mary Whitehouse for the only time.

I had written a book about the brothelkeeper Cynthia Payne, who catered for the sexual needs of elderly gentlemen in a semi-detached Edwardian house in a leafy avenue in Streatham, and had been invited to BBC Television Centre to discuss my findings with an overexcited Frank Bough, then only famous for his taste in knitwear. The scourge of all things carnal turned up during our unashamedly jolly conversation and castigated me for living off immoral earnings. I responded politely, but her crusading zeal ruled out simple matters like courtesy. Although her voice was shrill, it was her spectacles that really intimidated me. They seemed to occupy half her face, as they do Dame Edna’s. As fashion accessories go, they were terrifying.

Barry Humphries’ Farewell Tour, entitled Eat, Pray, Laugh! has opened in Britain at the London Palladium.

The show begins with Sir Leslie Colin Patterson, the Australian Ambassador (Emeritus) to the Court of St James, revealing that he is now a Celebrity Chef in his home country. Down Under’s answer to Nigella Lawson is a cook with pronounced gastric problems, to put it tastefully. He is especially prone to ‘trouser coughs’, which necessitate his making several visits to an outside lavatory at the back of the stage. The sounds of Sir Les’s intestinal strife increase in volume as the sketch proceeds, while four attractive young men and women – a song-and-dance act called the Condiments – keep their eyes on the meatballs Sir Les is supposed to be preparing on the barbie. On those occasions when Sir Les isn’t temporarily indisposed, he lets the audience in on his latest gladiatorial achievements in the bedroom. It seems that Rebekah Brooks is one of his conquests. ‘You go back a long way, Les,’ she tells him, with admiration.

REVIEWS

Sir Les’s brother, Father Gerard, a defrocked priest with pederastic inclinations, makes his debut here. He is immediately attracted to the boy from Bali sitting at the piano. When Gerard offers the child some barley sugar, his electronic tag flashes into life. This is one of the great moments in an evening of sustained and sublime bad taste. After Gerard, the sentimental musings of the ghost from the Melbourne suburbs, Sandy Stone, take us back into a world that is relatively tasteful. Sandy’s horror at the way his wife is being cared for in a twilight home is expressed with a sharpness one doesn’t usually associate with this otherwise maudlin character.

The second half belongs entirely to Dame Edna. Her arrival – like that of Cleopatra or the Queen of Sheba – is

OLDIE MASTERS

A Guide to Neglected Artists No. 150 Thomas Kerrich (1748–1828)

‘Oh no! I’ve accessed the dark web!’

prefaced by a video depicting the highs and lows of her extraordinary life.

Tragedy struck early in her marriage when her first child was stolen by a dingo. More sadness ensued when her mortally ill husband’s life support was turned off accidentally. Not surprisingly, her mission has been to make the world a happier place. To that end she went on a peace mission to Osama bin Laden and had herself photographed next to him wearing a burka that comes up to her glasses. These days she’s into New Age marriages, which she presides over with – how best to describe it? – flair.

Sitting in the stalls on press night, surrounded by a large number of the capital’s gays, I remembered how Judy Garland was in the habit of making this vast theatre her home. I saw Jack Benny there, too. Barry Humphries merits being mentioned alongside them, for he possesses their gift to keep an audience enthralled and surprised for nearly three hours.

William Boycott, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge Red, white and black chalks on tan paper, 370 x 283mm.

Signed, inscribed and dated 12th June 1781.

The son of a Norfolk parson, Kerrich was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Between 1771 and 1775 he travelled on the Continent and may have known the Fuseli circle in Rome – his 1774 self-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery certainly suggests this possibility.

On his return he settled in Cambridge as a Fellow of Magdalene, and became known as an antiquary, collector and artist. In addition to his portraits, notable for their characterisation, Kerrich’s output included studies of clouds and human anatomy.

From Abbott and Holder, 30 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH Telephone: 020 7637 3981 Fax: 020 7631 0575 Email: gallery@abbottandholder.co.uk Website: www.abbottandholder.co.uk

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REVIEWS

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER

Witch hazel flowers in the author’s garden

What is there in a northern European garden to get excited about in January?

Heavens! I’ve only got six hundred words.

Before going outside, though, let’s see what’s indoors, on windowsills and ledges. In colder parts of this house – which is a joke, it’s all ‘brass monkeys’ here – there are pots of cyclamen, including C. intaminatum (which began its winter-long succession of tiny white flowers in October), daffodils in every hue from bridal white to Bird’s custard and, supremely, hyacinths, broadcasting overpowering perfume the moment the mercury hoicks itself above zero. I also have pots of little evergreen azaleas, picked up at less than half price when the florist reckoned there’d be no market for them after the festivities. Most are white-flowered and destined for the woodland garden when they’ve finished blooming in the house – their natural longevity ensuring many years of joy.

I’m troubled by the massive waste of so-called house plants after Christmas, discarded the moment flowers fade.

When I lived impecuniously in London I regularly trawled urban skips at New Year, once scooping up a hoard of prize ornamentals, transforming the already overcrowded floral conditions of my tiny bedsit to the likes of a nineteenthcentury barnacled clipper returning from the East with its cargo of botanical

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loot. My landlord’s garden looked pretty impressive by the time I moved on.

Unless deemed too small or too fussy to survive outside, all my pot-grown bulbs eventually get released into the garden. For anyone without a plot of their own I recommend the rewarding latewinter task of finding friends who can provide feral freedom for any plants that have served their domestic internment.

Some bulbs make reverse journeys.

By digging clumps of snowdrops from the garden (not from the wild, please) and potting them up with moss and a few stones to help keep the surface soil moist you can mimic a little bit of untamed nature. We’re blessed with proverbial sheets of the common snowdrop, providing umpteen opportunities for me to make little gifts for gardenless chums. Small offerings of such familiar wildlings are always more greatly appreciated than any bunch of expensive hothouse exotica.

Our January garden does, however, ripple with favoured plants that have never blinked under the glare of a TV screen. My collection of witch hazels are annually triumphant: their yellow, red and rusty maroon flowers braving the coldest weather, revealing sometimes a threadlike petal upon a snow-clotted branch – a glimpse of outrageous Victorian stocking beneath an avalanche of petticoats. Hellebores seem more precocious every year, with some that are expected to flower in the run up to Easter teasing me with upturned saucers of colourful delight at the year’s lowest ebb.

It’s not all about flowers though.

Shrubs and small trees can dazzle with stripes and striations of handsome bark.

Himalayan birches score highly in our garden, with anything from ghostly white to mahogany-red peeling trunks topping the January ratings. The mottled cinnamon- and honey-coloured bark of a mature stuartia looks especially good after rain – like the marbling seen on London planes, but smoother, classier.

The winter garden is also about shapes and patterns and sounds: crazed ice on the pond, arrowhead avian footprints over fresh snow, melting icicles pinging on a tin can, the rattle of desiccated foliage on the beech hedge...

And if the gardener is not obsessively tidy there’s the splendour of bronzed and blackened seedheads rimed with crystal frost against the clipped yew’s geometric lines, and little piles of old leaves sheltering hibernating fauna.

E X P AT

john moore

Chiang Mai, Thailand Not one to spurn the chance of a little extra cash, I nevertheless viewed this particular proposition with misgivings. It originated from two women (menfolk are naturally excluded when settling delicate matters) living in an inaccessible hill-tribe village on the Burmese border bereft of amenities like schools, clinics, shops, running water or electricity. Having established that I used the internet, they came straight to the point. Would I, in return for a negotiable commission, help sell their daughters’ virginity online? Leaking roofs needed repair before the rainy season; the army had uprooted the poppies, so income had dried up.

Traditionally, tribes often entrusted the task of deflowering to one of the village elders. The march of progress, however, had trampled on this practice and mothers were not slow to spot the commercial potential of what their daughters were so keen to give away free. The experience, they argued, was bound to be unpleasant, so why not use it to benefit the girls’ families? Pleading lack of business acumen and explaining unconvincingly that this was not the type of assignment working in the Foreign Office had qualified me for, I feebly declined.

To atone for my unhelpfulness, I arranged for two girls aged eighteen to

‘I’m sure it’s just a phase’

REVIEWS

pursue their education in Chiang Mai, urging them to be studious so as to get good jobs later. They lasted two terms then upped sticks and followed friends into the seedier establishments of the capital. Ala parted with her innocence with a Bangkok businessman who promised 100,000 baht but post factum coughed up a measly 1,000, disputing the authenticity of the product. Alima confessed that the bird had already flown the cage and that she was romantically entangled with an older man from the same tribe who had a shop in Chiang Mai. Unfortunately, although unrelated, the two shared the same surname so a liaison was taboo. Alima’s father remained deaf to her entreaties, citing the need to preserve tribal traditions. So she took off for the fleshpots of Malaysia with Ala in hot pursuit.

Ala’s first two months’ takings were stolen; then the establishment was raided by the police and she was incarcerated in an insalubrious jail. The family consulted a village elder who peered at the entrails of an unfortunate sow and declared that she would be freed in six months as she ‘served two masters’.

Notwithstanding, I called an old friend, a lawyer in KL, who, after daily harassment of the authorities, browbeat the Malaysian justice system into submission.

She was released from prison after four months, only to be re-arrested immediately by the immigration department and banged up for a further two months in an equally disagreeable detention centre. Her mother lost five kilos but Ala declared that prison was no worse than school. After a brief visit home she changed her name, got a new passport and returned to the same house of ill repute.

Before long two new roofs appeared in the village, Alima’s father roared into town on his spanking new pickup, her mother’s silver belt sparkled at the New Year celebrations and Ala’s workshy brother did death-defying wheelies on his Dirt-Devil motorbike. Both girls return periodically bearing gifts of fake iPhones as well as exorbitantly priced skinwhitening creams and miracle pills to cure everything from old age to insanity.

The handful of young women in the village who still scratch a meagre living from their daily backbreaking drudgery in inclement fields (and whose roofs probably still leak), regard them with resigned envy. And I, sadly, got no commission.

M E MO R I A L

james hughes-onslow

JOHN AMIS (1922–2013)

AS John Amis’s partner for the last six years of his life, Isla Baring had a major role in organising his memorial service in St Paul’s, Knightsbridge. The service, described as a Concert in Celebration, included works by Handel, Mozart, Britten and Grainger, performed by the Faust Ensemble conducted by Mark Austin. We also heard recordings of John Amis with his old friends Steve Race and Donald Swann. The tragedy was that Amis – broadcaster, music critic, wit and Oldie contributor – was not there to enjoy it, to comment on it, to play one of his instruments or maybe even to sing.

Isla Baring had also laid on a musical feast at the funeral in Aldeburgh in August, at which Humphrey Burton told the congregation that Amis wasn’t called up for military service because he was completely deaf in one ear. ‘Bearing in mind that disability, it is quite astonishing what John Amis achieved in the world of music over the next seventy-plus years,’ said Burton, recalling that when Michael Tippett was sent to prison as a conscientious objector Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears performed in Wormwood Scrubs, with Tippett and Amis turning the pages. ‘He found himself in perfect accord with the cartoonist, tuba player and witty panellist Gerard Hoffnung,’ said Burton. ‘Amis helped organise the Hoffnung Festivals at the Royal Festival

Hall – surrealistic shows in which Amadeus played vacuum cleaners.’

‘Amis the speaker, the mimic, the inspired story-teller, the rich fount of gossip, was probably better known than the critic,’ said David Cairns in a eulogy at the memorial service. ‘The success and fame of the radio programme My Music, with Frank Muir, Denis Norden, Ian Wallace and Steve Race – a galaxy in which John Amis shone as brightly as any of them – made him an institution.’

Gavin Henderson spoke of Amis’s time at the first Edinburgh Festival in 1947 with Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Bing and William Glock and how this led to the start of the Summer School of Music at Dartington. ‘The conductors who cut their teeth on the Summer School choir included Colin Davis, Andrew Davis, Mark Elder, Simon Rattle and Richard Hickox,’ said Henderson. ‘The amateurs could come and be coached by remarkable professionals in a society that was devoid of hierarchy or top table.

Today we hear much from the political and cultural bureaucrats about the participation in the arts. The Summer School as shaped by John Amis was the epitome of such an ideal – and has been doing it ever since.’

Amis gathered a team of young helpers, said Henderson. ‘One of the earliest was John’s old school friend Donald Swann, who brought with him Michael Flanders. One week it was felt that some sort of light-hearted late-night cabaret would be welcome, and so it was indeed at the instigation of John Amis that such an evening was concocted “at the drop of a hat”. The rest is history.’

Isla Baring announced that a John Amis Award for young Australian musicians would be launched under the auspices of the Tait Memorial Trust, of which she is chairman.

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REVIEWS

cricket

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY: GETTY IMAGES

michael leapman

Hubris? Nemesis? Probably both. In the extensive advance coverage of the Ashes, most British commentators and players predicted that the Aussies were so disorganised and riven with strife that to crush them at Brisbane the starstudded visitors had to do no more than turn up. In the event that was all they did – and their abysmal performance in the 381-run defeat in the first Test signals that they had made the fatal error of believing their own hype.

Ever since England’s victory in the summer series – nowhere near as clear-cut as the 3-0 score suggested – we had been told that the current Aussie squad was a bunch of no-hopers. Not only did their captain, Michael Clarke, lack tactical nous, but their quickest bowler, Mitchell Johnson, suffered from an unspecified ‘mental fragility’ that would almost certainly render him ineffective. With cruel irony it was Johnson’s lightning-fast bouncers that exposed the fragility of Jonathan Trott, once England’s most prolific batsman, who abandoned the tour straight after the match. He is said to have been suffering from stress for some time, and his humiliation at the crease was clearly the last straw. Johnson’s nine wickets, together with his heroic batting performance that shored up Australia’s faltering first innings, made him a shoo-in for Man of the Match.

At the time of writing there are four more games to go, and it would be premature for the host side to assume that the series is in the bag. Hubris and nemesis are indiscriminate scourges. In the 1954–5 Ashes tour, England, led by Len Hutton, lost the first Test at Brisbane by an innings and 154 runs, yet went on to win the series 3-1. But if Alastair Cook and his men want to emulate that feat they will need some swift tactical reorientation, letting go one or two players who have been automatic choices for England for too long.

Clarke and his team have sussed out Graeme Swann so effectively that our

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former demon off-spinner took only two wickets at Brisbane while conceding 215 runs. He should be replaced by Monty Panesar, who has, by all accounts, seen off his own mental demons. And time must surely be up for Matt Prior, who has been dismissed first ball twice in his last four Test innings, scored four runs in this match and averaged just 19 in last summer’s series. His place behind the stumps should be taken by Jonny Bairstow, an equally effective wicketkeeper who is in any case likely to replace Trott in the batting line-up, leaving room for an extra run-scorer. Both Swann and Prior, though, are firmly established members of the dressing-room politburo.

Can Cook and his management team summon up the courage to dislodge them?

Back on form: Mitchell Johnson taking Stuart Broad’s wicket

Finally, can the debacle be blamed on the catering? The most thoughtprovoking story to emerge from the overheated pre-match coverage was not the ritual exchange of playground insults but the leak of the exacting demands of Chris Rosimus, England’s ‘performance nutritionist’. His 82-page document, likely to induce stress in even the most versatile pavilion chefs, stipulates that the food they provide to our fastidious players has to be selected from 194 listed dishes. They include Cajun grilled tofu kebabs; blueberry and polenta muffins made with protein-based Maximuscle; quinoa with roasted butternut squash, apricot and parsley – and much else in the same rarefied vein.

When I began watching Test matches in the Len Hutton era I imagined that when the players trooped off for lunch they were served crusty pork pie and pickles, followed by strawberries and cream, with a slice of home-made Victoria sponge for tea and maybe a glass of brown ale at close of play. The first step towards our rehabilitation must surely be to ditch the faddy food and sit the lads down to a proper meal.

H OME F RO N T ALICE PITMAN

‘Have you never seen Green For Danger?

Set in a hospital very like this one. Very good film. Trevor Howard and Sally Gray as the nurse. Nobody remembers her now. She was very glamorous.’ There was a slight pause. ‘None of the nurses in here look like Sally Gray.’

The Aged P’s mention of the 1940s film in which a patient is bumped off during an operation took place while she was laid up in her local NHS hospital, where I had taken her 36 hours previously after she developed severe abdominal pains. After a horrendous four-hour wait in A&E, there followed a series of tests, scans and X-rays before the decision was made to operate. She signed the consent form, disappointed that no one had remarked on her great age (88). ‘They just write it down without comment. It’s rather annoying.’

Green for Danger had featured an attack by a V1 flying bomb, which made her reminisce about my father and the time they had nearly taken a hit from Adolf in a train at Waterloo station. ‘Bob cried “To the floor! To the floor!” and threw himself to the ground. I didn’t want to get my ATS uniform dirty, so I remained seated and got the giggles.’ It was typical of the Aged P to keep us entertained as she waited for her operation.

Eventually, a porter came and perfunctorily wheeled her to theatre. Mr Home Front and I followed down an interminably long corridor, the Aged P issuing instructions over her shoulder about what we were to do if she didn’t make it. Her will was in her knicker drawer. She wanted to be buried, not cremated. ‘I want the worms to eat me!’ she exclaimed with reckless candour (a couple waiting for the lift looked horrified). ‘Don’t waste money on an expensive coffin. One of those cheap wicker ones will do. Oh, and no church service. I’m 99 per cent certain God doesn’t exist. In fact, scrap the funeral altogether. I don’t want one…’ ‘It’s not up to you!’ said Mr Home Front, his stiff

REVIEWS

upper lip betraying a quiver of emotion.

She spent the next five weeks in the intensive care unit, initially connected to every form of life support going. The windowless hell-hole was staffed by Filipino nurses (gentle and caring) and home-grown ones (on the whole decent, though one or two seemed lacking in common sense and compassion). One perpetually unsmiling nurse seemed to regard our mother as an affront for not getting better quickly. Why do such people enter the profession in the first place?

During those dreadful days we were frequently told that the she would almost certainly not survive. She’d run the equivalent of two marathons, the surgeon told us. Her age was against her. But her Rasputin-like physical endurance proved them wrong. Even when she got pneumonia she refused to go gentle into that good night. One weekend we were summoned to say our final goodbyes, only to be ushered into a side room and told by baffled yet admiring medics that she was proving unexpectedly robust.

‘Your mother is a formidable woman,’ remarked one doctor.

Following a second operation for a tracheostomy, she was eventually transferred to a surgical ward. Over the next three weeks she underwent further physical torment and occasional periods of neglect (more the fault of bad management than anything else). On the day of her departure the nurses lined up to say goodbye. She had been their favourite patient, they told her. It was no wonder. She had remained gracious throughout her long incarceration, making them laugh, even when acutely down in the dumps and in pain.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD

The twelve days of Christmas, as every Oldie reader knows, run from midnight on the Eve to Epiphany, a protracted festive season which continues to be observed by the inhabitants of Provence, among whom I spent many a merry Yuletide with my family in the days when my children had not yet acquired children of their own.

The problem of catering for family and friends over the holiday is partly solved by the tradition of providing a kind of open larder, les treize desserts. These twelve different fruits and nuts, set out in little dishes round a specially baked cake or tart to symbolise Christ, are arranged on a side table and constantly renewed throughout the Christmas period.

The choice varies from village to village and household to household.

In the hills of the Vaucluse, where harvesting comes late, the choice is muscat grapes picked before frost and hung on a beam in a current of air; yellow pears, poires William, which retain their juiciness when the stalks are dipped in scarlet sealing-wax; pommes reinettes, yellow-fleshed apples which smell like roses; and freshly made quince paste.

The four orders of begging monks, les mendients, are represented by raisins for the Dominicans, wrinkled figs for the Franciscans, almonds for the brownand-cream Carmelites, and walnuts or hazelnuts for the Augustines. All that’s left in the larder is – in theory at least – given to the poor.

Dried fruits and nuts are symbols of renewal in all belief systems. The underlying message – take care of the earth and the earth will take care of you – is as undeniable now as it was when every Provençal household lit the Yule log at midnight on the Eve to warm the Christmas hearth.

Provençale bûche de Noël This is the Yule log in its modern form, since everyone now has central heating.

Serves 6 to 8.

• 4 eggs • 4 oz caster sugar • 4 oz plain flour • 2 tablespoons warm water • ½ pint double cream • 1 lb can sweetened chestnut purée or 2 lb fresh chestnuts • 2–3 tablespoons cocoa powder • 2 squares black chocolate Whisk the eggs till light and fluffy in the food mixer, then whisk in the sugar spoonful by spoonful until airy, pale and looking like soft meringue. This takes twice as long as you think. Fold in the flour and water, turning it well in.

Line a Swiss roll tin with buttered greaseproof paper. Put in the cake mixture, tipping it into the corners.

Bake at 190C/375F/Gas5 for 15–20 minutes until firm to the finger and shrunk a little from the sides. Lay a piece of greaseproof paper on the table and sprinkle with caster sugar. Tip the cake onto this, and roll it up while still warm.

Wrap in greaseproof paper and leave to cool.

Whip the cream till stiff. If using homemade chestnut purée, sweeten with icing sugar. Fold in a spoonful of the whipped cream to loosen the purée, then fold in the rest of the cream along with enough cocoa powder to turn it log-brown.

Unwrap the roll and spread with about a third of the chestnut cream. Roll up again into a log shape and cover with the rest of the chestnut cream, roughing the surface with a fork to look like bark.

This is the stage at which the bûche can be frozen.

To finish, slice the ends diagonally to give you two triangular pieces, exposing the pale inside so that the cake looks like a sawn-off log, and stick the triangles back on the log to look like lopped-off branches. Dust with icing sugar and grated chocolate. A plastic robin and a sprig of holly add Anglo-gaiety.

Chestnut purée To prepare a pound of purée with fresh chestnuts, scald 2 lbs fresh unskinned nuts in boiling water, slash the skins, spread in a baking tray and roast for 15 minutes at 350F/180C/Gas4. Peel and cook in enough water to cover till perfectly soft (15–20 minutes). Push through a mouli-légumes or use the processor to make a softish purée.

Alternatively, to prepare with dried chestnuts, pre-soak 6 oz dried nuts, then boil till tender (they’ll need at least 30 minutes).

January 2014 – THE OLDIE

83

Genius crossword 304 by Antico Each of thirty clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer’s letters including one extra letter. The extras spell a quotation from a work presented sixty years ago this month, and the name of its setting. Each of six clues consists of definitions of two words of different lengths; in each case, the longer word is treated as indicated by a word in the quotation to create the shorter word, which is the answer to be entered in the grid.

Numbers in brackets refer to lengths of entries. Two unclued entries are names for the first half of a hyphenated word in the quotation; two unclued entries are defined by its second half. Other unclued entries are the work’s title and its author’s name. One unclued entry consists of three words, and two consist of two words each.

Across

8 Extra storeys built (3) 9 Planned stern attempt (5) 10 Small sum you assess (3) 11 Discern rascally approaches (5) 16 Hold party (2) 18 Icy pledge invoked (5) 21 Moment fanatics seize (3) 22 Bonus rewarding conduct (3) 23 Total estate available for rent (2,3) 25 Join brisk antelope (5) 26 Raced round about (2) 27 Horrid when budget halves quantity of pounds (13) 30 Take courage from design in amulet (5) 31 Fertility goddess scoffed (3) 33 Aquarium bore red mollusc (5) 35 Not authentic apple (3) 36 Cheeky temptress lay still (5) 37 Pleas reduce some campaigns (8)

Down

1 Disturb mug by hugely deceptive behaviour (10) 2 Wall enclosing field (3) 3 Quiet area dew made wet (7) 4 Uncertainties of science (3) 5 Broken system of perception (7) 6 Player in band slightly waving (11) 7 Loyal servant relaxed (4) 8 Resist first mate (4) 14 Perfect euphoria lad experienced (5) 15 Ball brothers throw (3) 20 Surpassed in looking exposed (5) 23 Acolyte can enjoy occupation (7) 24 Siege raised before (3) 25 Trying to use no grit (7) 28 Applaud original way (4) 29 Birds partially opened flowers (4) 32 Spike over bait (3) 34 Dark yellow dirt (3)

Entries to: ‘Crossword 304’ by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG), email (editorial@theoldie.co.uk) or fax (020 7436 8804) by 24th January 2014. First prize is the latest edition of the Chambers Dictionary and a cheque for £25. Two runners-up will receive cheques for £15.

Name...................................................................................................................

Address............................................................................................................... .............................................................................................................................

Moron crossword 304 Across

1 Tavern (3) 3 Fraction (5) 6 Curve (3) 8 Conceited person (7) 9 Assign (5) 10 Collection of articles

kept for marriage (6,6) 11 Underwear (6) 13 Band to hold up a stocking (6) 17 Melted cheese on toast (5,7) 20 Cost (5) 21 Involve (7) 22 Sardonic (3) 23 Ambition (5) 24 Expected (3)

Down

1 Drinks (7) 2 Time from sunset

to sunrise (5)

3 Clover (7) 4 Salt (6) 5 Play (5) 6 Complaint (7) 7 Feline mammal (3) 12 Facility (7) 14 Word formed from

initial letters (7)

15 Entourage (7) 16 Source of

wisdom (6) 18 Use up (5) 19 Money (5) 20 Seat (3)

Moron 302 solution Across: 1 Brew, 4 Ha-ha [Brouhaha], 9 Tapir, 10 Lie-in, 11 Feed, 12 Disc, 13 Rites, 14 Arrow, 15 Listener, 17 Per, 18 Ply, 19 Magazine, 21 Limbo, 23 Oscar, 27 Robe, 28 Lair, 29 Sight, 30 Album, 31 Hall, 32 Mark. Down: 1 Buff, 2 Eternity, 3 Wadi, 4 Hide, 5 Arisen, 6 Alcatraz, 7 Heir, 8 Answer, 16 Tamworth, 17 Panorama, 18 Polish, 20 Global, 22 Mega, 24 Sell, 25 Alum, 26 Trek.

84

THE OLDIE – January 2014

Genius 302 – solution

Eight unclued entries were titles of films starring BURT LANCASTER, born on 2nd November 1913.

Prizewinners First prize: Anne Brooks, Oxford Runners-up: Dr Anne Hillman, Troutbeck Bridge, Cumbria; Brian Dean, Loxwood, West Sussex

PLUMBING THE DEPTHS

The Oldie Competition

by Tessa Castro

IN COMPETITION NO 170 you were invited to outdo Theo Marzials, said to have written the worst poem ever.

Marzials ended his days in a room in a Devon farmhouse. Beside the bed, occupied day and night, stood a saucer of sliced beetroot, the smell of which mingled with the fumes of chlorodyne, the smoke of an oil lamp and the steam of a perpetually simmering stockpot.

Many entries made me laugh aloud, but few were truly dreadful. Indeed, as Marzials showed, thoroughgoing bathos can bring sublimity. That was the risk competitors ran. Brian Wells began with an impossible rhyme scheme: ‘Last Feb, I, Seb, a pleb, low ebb, / pulled deb, U, reb celeb, on web.’ It guaranteed a fascination that would not allow it to reach the depths.

Gillian Ewing’s narrator mourned her run-over dog, which looked as though ‘that pillock Damien Hirst / Was trying to shock us more than ever / By finding something new to sever. / Plus all that dirty fur and bones / Spread on the road mixed up with stones.’ You see? It becomes interesting and we want to read on. Not bad enough.

Commiserations to these, and congratulations to those below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus Chambers Biographical Dictionary going to Mae Scanlan, who created a line of classic dreadfulness: ‘An awesome compost gift’.

O sad, sad, sad the autumn leaves That fall from Mother Tree, Who stands there, rigidly, and grieves As they drop; one, two, three.

SUD|OLD|KU Each row, column and box must contain the numbers 1 to 9.

Each number can only appear once in a row, column or box.

(Solution next month.)

Last month’s solution:

A sudden gust dislodges more, Which slowly earthward drift.

They pile up fast on Nature’s floor, An awesome compost gift.

So many shapes that once were green, That now have lost their pigment!

Those gems that no more will be seen, Except within a figment Of my recall. I cannot stop This terrible ordeal.

They keep it up – they drop and flop, But oh, the woe I feel!

Mae Scanlan I used to have a pretty little cat I called her Pussy-Willow.

She liked to sleep by the fire on a mat or sometimes on a pillow.

Her fur was long and really silky-soft.

In the back door she had her own cat-flap.

I’d brush her well and oft and oft she’d sit upon my lap.

She liked to hunt in the back garden and chase the birds what fluttered.

She killed little mice without begging their pardon.

What came next had me really gutted.

Of my poem this verse it is the last.

It tells of a really really sad disaster.

My little Pussy-Willow could run really fast but my motor car was faster.

Pamela Trudie Hodge

When I was quite young, life was happy and gay For we all had a job we could do.

I’d bus to the office and type, every day, Which most of my best friends did too.

I wrote cheerful verses and no one would scoff, In fact, old ladies liked me a lot.

Two wars came and went, but I couldn’t switch off However depressing things got.

Beware reputations that glisten and glow In the bright silver moonlight of dreams.

A manic depressive is lurking below.

The joy is far less than it seems.

For I am stuck fast in this metrical trap Which I rattle all day and all night And most poets think it is terrible crap And often I think they are right.

Jean Hayes Oh shall I live or shall I die?

Was it all truth? Was it a lie?

Oh dear! Life’s drear yet dear.

Tick tock.

Sometimes I crawl and sometimes fly.

At times I’m low. At others high.

Oh dear! Life’s drear yet dear.

Tick tock.

Lie in the ditch or see the sky?

Shall I be happy? Cease to try?

Oh dear! Life’s drear yet dear.

Tick tock.

Why is man born? To wait to die?

While I debate, life passes by.

Oh dear! Life’s drear yet dear.

Tick tock.

Dorothy Pope COMPETITION NO 172 In 2013 there was much unseemly interest in the new word ‘twerk’. Without limiting yourself to low meanings, please provide a snappy new definition and a sentence exemplifying the new meaning for each of these words: booly, jaunce, tytyfer, maumy, pronk, looper, raffinose, hendship. Maximum 160 words.

Entries to ‘Competition No 172’ by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG), fax (020 7436 8804) or email (comps@theoldie.co.uk) by 10 January 2014.

86

THE OLDIE – January 2014

WINE

Bill Knott on wine This month’s Waitrose case includes two bottles of a serious Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Oldie readers can order it for £88 with free UK delivery – saving £33.28 on the RRP of £121.28

A

t this time of year a couple of decades ago, pubs, restaurants and wine bars all over the country would have had the same legend screaming from posters and billboards: ‘Le Beaujolais Nouveau Est Arrivé!’ The hyperbole would be further augmented by newspaper tales of extraordinary efforts to deliver this raw fluid as early as possible, traditionally on the third Thursday in November.

Over subsequent vintages, the fuss died down, as anyone with a modicum of taste decided they preferred, on balance, something – if not exactly vieux – a little less brash. Sailing past the hills of Beaujolais on the splendid Oldie cruise along the Rhône and the Saône recently, however, I was reminded of my own little twist on the Beaujolais race.

It was 1996, and I was working for a long-defunct food and drink magazine, Eat Soup. The English wine industry was just starting to find its feet, and I thought it would be a jolly good wheeze to take some English wine to Beaujolais, driving through the night to reach the pretty town of Beaujeu by morning.

We borrowed a Rolls-Royce Silver Spur and persuaded Hackett to kit us out in traditional British gear: a bowler hat and pinstriped suit for the editor, a pair of tweed plus-fours and a hunting jacket for me. We picked up a couple of cases of England’s finest from Lamberhurst Vineyard in Kent, sped through the newly opened Eurotunnel, and made it to Beaujeu by 10am; had we thought about it, we might have guessed that the whole town would be sleeping off a collective hangover. Occasionally, a bedroom window would open as someone bellowed abuse at the roadworkers and their pneumatic drills, but otherwise nobody stirred.

Undaunted, we

offered our wine to the ouvriers: they liked it, especially as it was free. ‘C’est pas mal, ça!’ exclaimed one of them, visibly shocked. ‘C’est comme un vin de la Loire!’

The local café owner, meanwhile, was getting a little upset at the loss of trade we had engendered, forcing us to adjourn to his place and placate him by ordering lunch and – naturellement – a few bottles from his well-stocked cellar.

Eventually, the town’s mayor emerged, bleary-eyed and dressed in a shabby blue tracksuit. He thought it was all terrifically amusing and, hangover forgotten, drained several glasses without complaint.

It snowed heavily that night, delaying our return to London by a thoroughly blissful couple of days; when we did finally make it back towards Calais, our progress was thwarted, typically, by a bunch of striking French lorry drivers. On seeing the Rolls-Royce, however – ‘Oh! Ce voiture... que c’est magnifique!’ – the trucks magically parted, and we sailed through the blockade like the Royal Yacht.

Beaujolais’s profile may be lower these days, but its quality has improved beyond measure. With the exception of a few of the ten Beaujolais crus – the relatively posh stuff: look for Côte de Brouilly, Moulin-à-Vent, Chénas and Morgon – it should be drunk while still young, when its raspberry-scented fruit is still fresh and lively. Its lack of tannin also means that it takes to chilling rather well.

Two bottles of Waitrose’s own brand Beaujolais feature in this month’s case, as do a couple of reds from the Rhône: perfect drinking for when la nouvelle année sera arrivée.

Waitrose Beaujolais 2012, Georges Duboeuf, France, RRP £6.69 Simple, deliciously fresh and fruity wine, perfect for drinking on its own, or perhaps – as I did – with sausage and mash, saving a splash of it for the onion gravy.

Châteauneuf-du-Pape Blason du Rhône 2011, France, RRP £20.99 This month’s most serious offering:

«The Oldie takes no commission on this offer to ensure that our readers get the best deal«

proper, hefty Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but – belying its 14.5% alcohol – surprisingly soft and complex, with pleasant hints of spice. A wine for a special dinner.

Domaine des Trois Pierres 2012, Boulard, Costières de Nîmes, France, RRP £7.49 The same grapes as Châteauneuf-duPape (Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre) but from the other side of Avignon and the opposite bank of the Rhône: juicy, spicy, ripe, straightforward red.

Vermentino di Sardegna 2012, Lucean Le Stelle, Italy, RRP £8.99 Sardinia is making some splendidly refreshing whites these days, and this is one: sappy and juicy, but still dry. Perfect with a big bowl of mussels.

Chenin Blanc 2012, Brown Brothers, Victoria, Australia, RRP £7.99 New World Chenin Blanc seems to be getting better: witness this example, from one of Australia’s oldest family-owned wineries. Ripe melon-like fruit balanced by nice refreshing acidity.

Viña Esmeralda 2012, Torres, Catalunya, Spain, RRP £8.29 One of my favourite and most reliable aromatic whites: floral-scented, made mostly from Moscatel, with a dash of Gewürztraminer. Drink it properly chilled with something spicy.

HOW TO ORDER Order online at www.waitrosedirect.com (enter ‘Oldie’ in search box : NB this is offer ‘Oldie issue 304’).

Or call 0800 188 881 (quoting ‘Oldie issue 304’).

Lines open 8am–10pm Monday to Friday, 8am–9pm Saturday, 9am–7pm Sunday.

Delivery is free to all UK postcodes, but orders for delivery to the Highlands, Islands and some parts of Northern Ireland cannot be made online. To order for these areas, please call 08456 100 304, 9am–5.30pm Monday to Friday.

NB offer closes 21st January

October 2013 –– THE THE OLDIE OLDIE January 2014

81 87

Dear Mavis…

Mavis Nicholson

Christmas with the grandchildren: happiness and harmony or hell on earth?

DEAR MAVIS,

Every year my husband and I spend Christmas with my son, his wife and my two grandchildren at their house in Kent. I should look forward to spending time with them – but each year I absolutely dread it, and the build-up of anxiety is terrible. There is a lot of tension in the house – nobody really gets on with anybody else, the children are spoiled, and there are squabbles and awkward silences, and all sorts of strains. Plus my son insists on our watching the children’s ‘special show’ every Christmas Eve, and it goes on for far too long. Do you think I should pluck up the courage this year to say we’d rather not come? I must say it would also be a great relief to my husband.

SUE, BRISTOL

MY FIRST REACTION was to wonder whether you’ve left it too late to duck out this year. Would it not be better to wait until next year and break it to them earlier?

But if you’re willing to tell a white lie you can try saying: look I know it’s late, but we’re whacked and we’d like to stay at home this year and just chill out, and not spoil your fun with our feebleness. We’re sorry, but it will be too much for us. But they may offer to pick you up and help you pack – then you’ll be trapped!

If you are desperate, you could appeal to the romantic side of things. Ring your son and say: Sweetheart, Dad secretly wanted to have me to himself for one Christmas and he’s gone and booked a small cruise so we won’t be able to come.

(You might as well go the whole hog while you are at it, and treat yourself to a lovely break!) And has it occurred to you that your son and family might (secretly) jump for joy at the news, as perhaps they’d like Christmas on their own, too?

Have you tried to confront them about their bad Christmas manners? I’m not sure how you’d do this – any ideas, readers ?

DEAR MAVIS, I have just finished reading Hilary Devey’s inspirational autobiography Bold As Brass (Macmillan, 2012), part of 94

THE OLDIE – January 2014

which deals with her battle to cure her son of drug addiction. In it she mentions the successful treatment her son received from Dr Amal Beaini, a consultant psychiatrist at Detox 5 in Yorkshire.

T. PARR

T. PARR’S letter follows on from the letter I referred to in my November column from a grandmother asking me for help regarding her grandson, whom she discovered was taking drugs. She’d started to notice money missing from her wallet, put two and two together and confronted him. He denied it – but not for long. He broke down and said he was desperate and the habit had got a hold on him.

So, dear Gran, since he has confided in you he must want a ‘cure’. I’ve found things out, and you can choose what to do with them. His GP might offer to treat him, or might suggest he goes to a local drug specialist service. If your grandson doesn’t want to go to his GP, then he could still contact a local specialist drug centre himself. You can receive information as to who to contact on the FRANK drugs advice helpline: telephone 0300 123 6600 (www.talktofrank.com).

An adviser will suggest several options.

There are several voluntary and private drug treatment organisations, residential rehab centres etc, including the one referred to by T. Parr.

Your grandson has admitted his addiction, but for readers who might have suspicions, here are some signs to watch out for: bloodshot eyes; pupils

larger or smaller than usual; changes in appetite or sleep patterns; deterioration in appearance; unusual smells on breath or clothing; tremors or slurred speech; sudden mood swings; angry outbursts; hyperactivity; agitation; lethargy; fearfulness; anxiety; paranoia.

All the very best, Gran. And if you need support, then you too can ring the FRANK helpline on the number above.

DEAR MAVIS, What an odious person Roger of Rochester (October column) must be! I have seldom been more angry than when I read ‘My friend is not going to see any inheritance’. Oldies paid for his upkeep and education. It’s up to him to shift for himself now. Any inheritance is a bonus, not a right.

BARBARA BEMBRIDGE PS: people who count on inheritances should remember that it’s never too late to leave almost everything to charity...

I AGREE THAT an inheritance is a bonus, not a right: the world owes me a living is a dangerous sentiment. But for most people a legacy is secondary compared to the grief they are suffering at their loss.

When my sister died and left my brother and me her money I was too done in about her lonely life as an alcoholic to care about the lolly. There had been a question of how capable she was of signing her will, and I remember asking her before she signed that I had recalled her declaring she was leaving everything to a dogs’ home and the Samaritans. Sylvia answered ‘Nonsense.

I gave a lot of my time for years to the Samaritans and you and Graham have been the only ones who helped me when I reached rock bottom – it’s all yours.’ If I am honest, I was shaking in my shoes when I reminded her! And I will admit I did say Whew! under my breath after she answered. And yes, I did send a donation to the Samaritans.

Write to Dear Mavis,

The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG or email: dearmavis@theoldie.co.uk