March 2014

‘I love The Oldie. I love its devil-may-care attitude’ LIBBY PURVES

32-page Festival Guide

Fungus the Briggsyman – see page 12

see page 66

ON THE PL A NE T TO PERFORM

March 2014

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REVEALED: OLDIES OF THE YEAR

RAYMOND BRIGGS AT 80 DERVLA MURPHY IN HEBRON TUSH TUSH, WHO’S THERE? FATTIES BEWARE HELLO, DOLLY SISTERS

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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 SUBSCRIPTIONS & LITERARY LUNCH BOOKINGS Subscriptions tel: 01795 592 893 e-mail: subscriptions@theoldie.co.uk All subscription queries please write to: Oldie Subs, c/o Dovetail Services 800 Guillat Ave, Kent Science Park, Sittingbourne, Kent ME9 8GU Lunch bookings tel: 01795 592 892 e-mail: oldielunches@servicehelpline.co.uk

ALMOST EVERY survey of old people’s habits is bound, at some stage, to mention a tendency to shout at the radio. It may help to dispel feelings of rage and frustration but it cannot compare with switching the damn thing off. The silence that ensues is

infinitely sweet and satisfying.

However if you keep a pad and pencil handy you could make a note of what it is that caused you to cry out and send it in to our Pedants column. That way you can perform a valuable public service.

RICHARD INGRAMS

FREE! TRAVEL SUPPLEMENT: GO AWAY GB

’s guide to britain through its festiva ls

A 32-page guide to Britain through its festivals, including Roy Hattersley on Buxton and Rosie Boycott on Port Eliot. Discover Elinor Goodman’s unusual days out and Mark Ellen’s eclectic choice of music festivals, plus Richard Osborne’s 2014 classical music guide

CONTENTS

ROY HATTERSLEY

ROSIE BOYCOTT

IN BUXTON

MARK ELLEN ON IN PORT ELIOT ELINOR MUSIC GOODMAN’S DAYS OUT

PLUS A GUIDE TO CORK AND THE DYLAN THOMA S CENTEN ARY

OLDIE BOOKSHOP Tel: 01603 648 140 NEWSSTAND ENQUIRIES e-mail: mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk ADVERTISING For display contact Lisa Martin or Azmi Elkholy on 020 7079 9361or 020 7079 9362 For classified contact Jack Watts on 020 7079 9363 e-mail: advertising@theoldie.co.uk

14 STILL WITH US: RITA TUSHINGHAM BIRTHDAY, BRIGGSY 28 12 HAPPY The Tush talks to Sarah Shannon Russell Davies pays tribute to Raymond Briggs

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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SACRED SHAME CORNUCOPIA 48 ADervla 34 ALauraCOASTAL Murphy in Hebron Gascoigne at the Russell-Cotes Gallery

19 THE ROSTA 20 HOLER

44 LAST TANGO IN MARGATE

Tom Baird remembers life in dry dock as an Arctic Convoy midshipman

23 I ONCE MET...

David Machin recalls an encounter with the former musical theatre star Alice Delysia

Diana Melly goes dancing in the Winter Gardens Ballroom

COME TO OUR OLDIE BRIDGE DAY

DATES AND DETAILS INSIDE

64 BATHTIME

Alyson Hilbourne tests the waters in Shibu Onsen, Japan

See page 66

Cover illustration by David Stoten 003-Contents_306.v1.indd 1

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COME TO ONE OF OUR

LITER ARY LUNCHES DATES AND DETAILS INSIDE

CONTENTS

See page 66

FEATURES & REGULARS 7 12 14 16 17 19 21 23 24 26 26 27 28 31 32 34 37 38 38 40 43 43 44 45 47 48 53 55

55 56 60 62 64 66 66 94

The Old Un’s Diary Happy Birthday, Briggsy Russell Davies Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu Olden Life Who were the Dolly Sisters?

Modern Life What is the 5:2 diet?

How the War was Won Tom Baird Whiteboard Jungle Kate Sawyer I Once Met... Alice Delysia House Husbandry Giles Wood God… Melanie McDonagh …Mammon Margaret Dibben Fashion Tamasin Doe Still With Us... Rita Tushingham Living Hell Jeremy Lewis Dr Stuttaford’s Surgery Can you be healthily obese?

A Coastal Cornucopia The RussellCotes Museum, Bournemouth Superbyw@ys Webster Send Us Your Txt Mind the Age Gap Lizzie Enfield Granny Annexe Virginia Ironside Wilfred De’Ath remembers Colin Wilson Rant Christopher Martin Last Tango in Margate Diana Melly Notes from the Sofa Raymond Briggs Roving Reporter John Sweeney A Sacred Shame Dervla Murphy East of Islington Sam Taylor Ed Reardon’s Month

Pedants’ Revolt Readers Write Unwrecked England Candida Lycett Green Out and About Travel Alyson Hilbourne in Japan Oldie Literary Lunches Oldie Bridge Day Dear Mavis Mavis Nicholson

BOOKS 67 Valerie Grove on Elizabeth Jane Howard’s final novel; Jeremy Lewis on ‘One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper’; Rupert Cornwell on Rose Kennedy; Roy Hattersley on ‘The Great Rivalry: Disraeli and Gladstone’; Paul Bailey on Georges Simenon; Rachel Redford reviews audiobooks;

REVIEWS 73 74 74 75 76 76 77 78 78

MUSIC Richard Osborne GARDENING David Wheeler EXPAT Barry Fantoni MEMORIAL James Hughes-Onslow DVD Lucy Lethbridge WIRELESS Valerie Grove TELEVISION Richard Ingrams FILM Marcus Berkmann THEATRE Paul Bailey

AMONG THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS a

TOM BAIRD

RUSSELL DAVIES

As a teenage midshipman Tom Baird made three trips to and from Murmansk in 1942/3 and was sunk returning from the second. He has now been awarded four medals and an Arctic Star, which he believes is overdoing it since Arctic convoys were no more dangerous than Atlantic convoys and far less dangerous than Malta convoys, each of which earned one campaign medal. On page 19 he recalls life in dry dock at Rosta.

Russell Davies, who writes about author/illustrator Raymond Briggs on page 12, was resident caricaturist on the Times Literary Supplement, has written biographies of the political cartoonist Vicky and the satirical artist Ronald Searle, and edited The Kenneth Williams Diaries. He is currently the questionmaster on Radio 4’s Brain of Britain and the interviewer on Radio 2’s The Art of Artists.

79 80 80 81 83

OLDIE MASTERS Philip Athill CRICKET Michael Leapman HOME FRONT Alice Pitman COOKERY Elisabeth Luard WINE Bill Knott

PLUS 87 88 88 89

CROSSWORDS Antico COMPETITION Tessa Castro SUDOKU CLASSIFIED

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RUPERT CORNWELL joined the Independent when it launched in 1986 as its Moscow correspondent. Before that he was a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times and a Washington bureau editor. He is the author of God’s Banker, a book about Roberto Calvi, the Italian banker found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, and is the half-brother of John le Carré. On page 69 he reviews a new biography of Rose Kennedy.

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March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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DIARY

The Old Un’s diary All the news that matters. And some that doesn’t State of head Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. So Shakespeare’s Henry IV thought. And it appears that Elizabeth II is thinking along the same lines – although for more practical reasons.

The Queen, not generally known for giving in to age or infirmity, is, we can reveal, considering laying aside the Imperial State Crown at the State Opening of Parliament.

Eighty-eight in April, the Queen enjoys good health, but her back gives more trouble than officials let on, and wearing the crown, weighing just over two pounds, along with the heavy ermine-trimmed robe, is now becoming something of a trial.

The image of the crowned monarch has a major impact around the world and senior courtiers have been trying to find a way to manage its disappearance. The Queen will insist on opening Parliament in person for as long as she can, and will be wearing full regalia this May, but next year, probably in June (after the May General Election) may be an opportunity for change.

Although the Blairites trimmed some of the ceremonial of the State Opening in the late Nineties they were thwarted from more radical reform by the Queen herself, so she

will not want to see this used as an opportunity for further dumbing down.

The Imperial State Crown was lightened and lowered for the Coronation and although it has been tinkered with since, it is not possible to lighten it further. The option of a tiny crown à la Victoria was laughed out of the court – the monarch in a simple tiara with the Imperial State Crown carried before her is the idea winning the race. It came to a flunkey contemplating St Edward’s Crown resting on the high altar of Westminster

Abbey during the Coronation thanksgiving service last June.

The next battle will be over who carries it.

Prickly Rose Rupert Cornwell’s review of a new biography of Rose Kennedy (see page 69) reminded us that our agony aunt Mavis Nicholson interviewed the Kennedy matriarch on her Thames TV programme Good Afternoon in the mid-Seventies.

‘She was cantankerous and tired after her flight. She was in her eighties and had a full schedule of interviews before

her,’ Mavis recalls. ‘“You the interviewer?” she asked me.

“Give me your arm and don’t leave me. Just take me to the studio and I don’t want to go to make-up – they can do that where I’ll be sitting. Now tell me, do I look alright?”

Yes, sort of. “Sort of?” she snapped. Well, you have a large blob of marmalade on your skirt, I dared to tell her.

I was shaking in my shoes.

We called wardrobe and they removed it. She stared at me hard and asked was there anything else, madam? You have a ladder up the front of your dark nylons, I stuttered.

“I am not changing them,”

The Oldie of the Year Awards 2014 This year’s winners are: Oldie of the Year Mary Berry, 78 Oldie Campaigner of the Year Sir John Major, 70 Oldie Pin-up of the Year Anne Reid, 78 Oldie Sage of the Year Ronald Blythe, 91 Oldie Heckler of the Year Joan Woolard, 75 The Dorian Gray Award Nicholas Parsons, 90 Wannabe Oldie of the Year Jacob Rees-Mogg, 44 Full coverage of the awards in next month’s issue ‘You keep out of it, Mac – I’m talking to the dog’ March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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she barked. Then we’ll ask the camera man not to do a shot showing your legs. Or keep one crossed over the other for you have pretty legs to show off, I said. She grinned and said there must be a third thing. I leaned towards her, daring to suggest a third thing. I think your dress would be smarter without your cardy on, I said.

“Come and take it off for me,” she said. When I did I saw a name tab on the collar – Rose Fitzgerald! It was her school cardigan. She was still the same size as she had been in high school.’

ILLUSTRATION BY HEATH

Voice from the Grave

Sent in by Jack Critchlow

★ Great Bores of Today ★ No.68 ‘...I’ve always been fascinated by numbers even when I was a kid at school if someone asked a question such as what is the root of 8 when 67 is the total I’d be the first to put his hand up do you realise that if you add up all the numbers from 1 to 20 and multiply the answer by any number between 35 and 47 the answer is always 596 hang on a minute have I got that right? no let me try it another way you think of a number between

Hell’s bells!

one and a thousand all right? now add 696 that is a number that was sacred to the Incas now divide by 2 no I tell a lie let’s start again if you added 12 and 7 which is the cardinal or the ordinal I can never remember you get a million times a thousand million when you double the total and if you divide by 72 you end up with 34,908 to the power of 16 there’s nothing to it once you know how…’

No.68

© Fant and Dick

Tips for Meanies

ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN HONEYSETT

A dead battery tests every Meanie’s credulity. How can we be sure that every drop of power has been squeezed from the thing? One way is to drop the battery from a short distance onto a hard surface. A charged battery will bounce once and fall over but empty ones bounce repeatedly. Even then, sometimes rubbing a battery will revive it because friction warms the chemicals inside, increasing the reaction rate. If you need AA batteries and only have AAA, insert one and wedge a ball of foil against the device’s negative terminal for a stopgap solution.

JANE THYNNE

8

Our Test match cricketers nowadays are becoming histrionic. They should form a dramatic company and produce, say, Macbeth.

Neville Cardus, Manchester Guardian, reporting on England v Australia, 1953.

Never let a journalist up your clock tower. They learned that lesson the hard way at St Paul’s Cathedral in the 1950s.

The hack in question was Picture Post reporter Brian Dowling, who has just died aged 87. In his memoirs he recalled the day he and a photographer colleague were invited by the Verger of St Paul’s Cathedral to witness the Winding of the Clock.

With great ceremony they were admitted to the Clock Room, a small space filled with the workings of the Cathedral’s hour clock, a vast intermeshing of ‘gears, racks and pinions, governors, pawls, flywheels, levers, swivels and springs’. The verger, a proud little fellow, took hold of a crank and started to wind. It was strenuous work. When he finally finished he said, with relief, ‘That’s it for another day.’

Barely were the words

THE OLDIE – March 2014

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DIARY

JUNE AND GERALD by NAF

Not many dead Important stories you may have missed

uttered than a pawl moved, a cogwheel rotated and the whole tower started to shudder as the great bells rang forth the three-quarter hour. When it finally stopped, a heavenly silence resumed.

‘My God,’ said Ray Kleboe, Dowling’s lensman. The verger beamed.

‘And what’s this little bit?’ asked Kleboe, pointing to two tiny paddles, mounted on a spindle.

‘DON’T TOUCH IT!’ screamed the verger. But Kleboe had touched it. The pawl moved, the cogwheel rotated, the gears began to turn and the great flywheel to spin.

‘You stupid bugger,’ said the verger. ‘You’ve bloody gone and struck twelve.’ Whereupon a terrible din began as, indeed, noon was sounded.

When it finally ended, the

furious verger had to rewind the clock all the way, before noon truly arrived. As he wound, he muttered, ‘Bloody hell, BLOODY HELL!’ That day’s Evening Standard carried a headline, ‘Great Tom strikes for double time’.

Not in your backyard Syrie Peters, a grandmother of two who suffers from emphysema, is living a nightmare. It began when a private Islamic School, Apex, received permission from her local council in North East London to open for business in a converted house in a residential street.

The school first got permission in 2008, subject to a condition limiting the number of pupils to 48. It then applied to erect a courtyard extension, including a

five-metre-high brick wall along Mrs Peters’s boundary.

The extension was approved on condition that the courtyard would only be used as a play area for one hour a day.

But the school has ignored these restrictions. The number of pupils has risen to over 100 and the courtyard is in regular – and noisy – use.

Peters thought things would get better when the Local Government Ombudsman upheld her complaint last summer, but late last year Redbridge Council allowed the school to submit an application to approve both their increased pupil numbers and hours of playtime. A council meeting in January to discuss it descended into pandemonium and had to be abandoned with the chairman, Bert Jones, saying he felt ‘intimidated’ by over 100 members of the public, mostly Muslims, who attended the meeting.

Mohammed Asif, chairman of the Federation of Redbridge Muslim Organisations, repeatedly disrupted the meeting, shouting ‘We feel we are being victimised.’

Local MP Mike Gapes said: ‘It is extremely frustrating for local residents that the council seems unwilling or unable to act to enforce its own planning conditions.’

Mrs Peters says the school has been lobbying through the local mosques and that

Swansea town council is considering getting a colour photocopier.

South Wales Evening Post Just why someone threw sausages into a Ludgershall garden remains a mystery.

Andover Advertiser Princess Victoria of Sweden suffers sprained ankle.

Daily Mail It was the start of an eventful year for Greenwich politics with veteran MP Nick Raynsford announcing he would not fight the next election.

Newsshopper.co.uk West Hoathly Parish Council has revealed that a new, lighter, kettle has been found after hirers of the Village Hall complained the existing one was too heavy.

East Grinstead Courier £25 for published contributions

THE OLDIE APP The Oldie is now available in a digital format for iPhone or iPad. See: http://bit.ly/OldieApp Or for Android via Exactly at: http://bit.ly/exactlyandroid March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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many councillors have been told that opposing the expansion plans would jeopardise their prospects in the upcoming council elections. ‘They are being intimidated and are too frightened – or politically correct – to fight back.’

The Name Game What connects these names? (answer p 11) Countess of Rosebery; Jilly Cooper; Cardinal Richelieu; Dusty Springfield; Comte de Chambord; Charles de Mills; James Mason; LD Braithwaite; Ferdinand Pichard; Laura Ford

Up yours As befitted a Great Train Robber and jail escaper, Ronnie Biggs departed this world in vivid gangster style. The January funeral – in the usually sedate environment of Golders Green crematorium – was light years away from those of the great

and the good recorded in The Oldie’s Memorial column.

The mourners were mostly very large men in black suits with tattoos running up their necks. The coffin was draped in the Union and Brazilian flags, representing both the country of Biggs’s birth, incarcerations and death, and the land of his exile. The Rev Dave Tomlinson, chaplain to the train robbers (he also conducted Bruce Reynolds’s funeral last year) gave Biggs a eulogy fit for a saint. Jesus, he said, had little truck with the ‘hoity toity’, but mixed with prostitutes and sinners.

The latter, there in number, murmured approval.

One time dope dealer, Howard ‘Mr Nice’ Marks, intoned Dylan Thomas’s ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ in an echoing Welsh baritone, while actor Steven Berkoff told us

that were it not for Biggs’s disadvantaged start, the robber’s talents would have enabled him to rise far. The floral tributes outside included a two-finger salute in white chrysanthemums – Biggs’s last defiant gesture to the world.

Mourners were led to the wake by the London Dixieland Jazz Band playing ‘Bring Me Sunshine’. There will never be another send-off to match Ronnie’s departure over that final wall.

Longevity league The marathon to become Britain’s oldest oldie saw one of its periodic reshuffles on the winners’ podium when the second oldest, Dorothy Baldwin, died just weeks away from her 112th birthday. Some may feel that Dorothy, from Bulwell, Nottingham, born in February 1902, paid a high price for her longevity. The

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

This month’s £50 prize goes to Ted Newcomen

20

years ago I was waiting in the departure lounge of the rather grandly renamed Cape Town International Airport (formerly D F Malan Airport after the Nazi sympathiser and first Premier of the old apartheid regime).

I noticed a tall, slim, elegantly suited black man standing to one side with two equally well dressed black companions. They were by far the smartest travellers in the entire airport.

Not having owned a television for over a decade it took me a few minutes to realise that he was none other than the famous Nelson Mandela. That very morning I had read in the paper that he was preparing to go to Pretoria for his inauguration as the first black President of the Republic of South Africa.

He was much taller and greyer than I’d imagined and spoke in a hushed whisper to his colleagues.

Close enough to touch this former political prisoner of 28 years I was amazed that there was no

10

apparent bodyguard or indeed any notion of what we generally understand as security.

Not a single white person in the departure lounge seemed to acknowledge or even notice their newly elected leader but various black faces including janitors and other airport staff nodded and murmured words of gratitude and recognition as they passed by.

When boarding was announced we promptly left the lounge and moved in file across the tarmac towards the waiting plane. Coming near the rear of the queue I noticed that Mandela was walking at an unusually slow pace, a habit I later learned he adopted in prison to make the guards go at his chosen pace. Interestingly, not a single fellow passenger (nearly all of them white) overtook him.

Everyone shuffled along behind taking small steps.

That was the last I saw of Nelson Mandela and his entourage as they settled themselves comfortably into business class. I’m still travelling in the cheap seats.

Daily Telegraph recorded that her secret was to drink boiled cabbage water every day of her life. She also endured 24 prime ministers.

Dorothy’s position was taken by 111-year-old Dorothy Peel, born September 1902, a widowed toper from Bridlington, East Yorkshire, who boasts a more enjoyable key to a long life. ‘I drank regularly throughout the day,’ she says.

‘In the morning I had half a pint of sherry, for lunch a gin and tonic and around 7pm a small ginger ale with a bit of whisky. These days I just have a sherry now and again.

‘I decided to pack in smoking when I was 103 because I got bronchitis and the doctor warned me my life was in danger! I used to smoke 20 a day but not any more. I have been tempted to have the odd cig at Christmas or New Year along with pink champagne, which is my favourite drink of all time. I am living proof that a little of what you fancy does you good.’

Into third place moved Florence Pittaway from Birmingham, born in October 1902, who says her secret is hard work and not eating junk food. She served behind a bar until she was in her eighties.

At the time of going to print Britain’s oldest person was miner’s daughter Ethel Lang, from Barnsley, South Yorkshire, born on 27th May 1900. At 113 she is more than two years ahead of her nearest rival. She resisted a care home until she was 105 and enjoyed dancing until she was 107.

Interesting that they all come from north of the Watford Gap. And male readers should note that the top fifteen oldest people in the UK are all women.

So much for the weaker sex...

Scam alert Reader Anthony W Hall received a phone call purportedly from an official

THE OLDIE – March 2014

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DIARY

Lunchtime laughs At our January literary lunch Ian Hislop and Nick Newman took diners on a historical journey through Private Eye’s cartoons, as featured in Private Eye: A Cartoon History, edited by Newman.

The journey began in the Sixties (described by Hislop as ‘Richard’s time… when Private Eye was very prurient and revolting and standards really were very, very low’) with the first cartoon to appear in the Eye, Willie Rushton’s ‘Lloyd George knew my mother’.

Hislop, referring to Newman’s observation that ‘cartoonists have no moral

Oldie Exclusive

Gyles Brandreth ticket offer Gyles Brandreth invites readers to a special performance of his sellout show Looking for Happiness, at the Leicester Square Theatre on Saturday May 10th at 4pm. Tickets are £35 and include a free glass of wine during the interval plus an opportunity to meet Gyles after the show). Book online at www.leicestersquaretheatre.com (type in code ‘Oldie offer’) or call 08448 733 433 (quote ‘Oldie offer’).

compass… the editor has to take the blame’, recalled the Eye’s ‘Grand Old Bi-Polar Duke of York’ cartoon (above) which provoked a great many complaints. The episode proved ‘that our readers will always be funnier than we are,’ he said. ‘I received a letter that said “I suffer from bi-polar condition and when I saw your cartoon I was absolutely disgusted; I looked at it a week later and thought it was really funny.”’

Curse of the Cumbersnatch Chantal Cookson, a tour manager with Oldie sponsor Noble Caledonia, met our memorial columnist James Hughes-Onslow at our January literary lunch.

‘She was full of praise for Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as Sherlock Holmes,’ writes HughesOnslow. ‘This was generous when one considers Chantal’s own dealings with him.

Cumberbatch played her father Lieutenant Jimmy Langley in the 2004 BBC series Dunkirk. Langley lost an arm at Dunkirk and was invalided out of the Coldstream Guards.

He later worked for the French Resistance and MI6 in France, helping agents to escape to England. “My brother Christopher gave Benedict

Cumberbatch my father’s hat badge to wear in the film,” Chantal tells me. “He never received any thanks. This is rather odd because it was a much valued family heirloom.”’

Past its sell-by date?

This year is the 75th anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise. In her new biography of the princess, Lucinda Hawksley reveals an uncanny story told by lady-in-waiting Marjorie Crofton. In her will Princess Louise specified that her gold wedding and engagement rings be removed from her fingers before her cremation so they would not be destroyed by the heat. They were then to be placed in the urn with her ashes and buried with her. But her wishes were ignored and she was still wearing her rings when she was cremated. When the curate examined her ashes he remarked, ‘An extraordinary thing has happened, here are the two rings found intact.

It is a mystery how they survived the heat.’ It’s not just her rings which survived: in 2009 a slice of her wedding cake, baked in 1871, ‘one inch thick and in its original wrapper’, was auctioned. It was suggested that whoever bought it should not eat it.

CHUMPFILE

FRANÇOIS HOLLANDE

★ Crap helmet disguise 99% ★ Froglike phizog 93% ★ ‘Flanby’ nickname 98% ★ One pair of shoes 89% ★ Lecherous tendencies 100% ★ Downfall of France 91%

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This month’s contributors include: Mira Bar-Hillel, Robert Chesshyre, RC Grantly, James Hughes-Onslow, Quentin Letts, Mavis Nicholson, Martin Stote, Alan Thomas, Rebecca Wallersteiner 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 Name Game answer: They have all had roses named after them

regulatory body confirming that nuisance calls to his number would be blocked: no more silent automated calls from Indian call centres and the like. He professed gratitude, thinking that the Telephone Preference Service to which he subscribed was becoming proactive. The caller then asked him to pay the small sum of £1.99 per month. On hearing this his antennae became fully alert and he declined, whereupon the caller quickly ended the conversation.

A scam to extract banking details or a way of extracting extra cash from those plagued by unsolicited calls? We can’t be sure, but our reader’s decision to terminate the call was certainly a wise one.

March 2014

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– THE OLDIE

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27/1/14 19:20:10

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRIGGSY Author, illustrator and Oldie columnist RAYMOND BRIGGS turned eighty in January. RUSSELL DAVIES marks the occasion by looking at his unique contribution to children’s literature and the graphic novel

12

R

aymond ‘I’m not a fan of Christmas’ Briggs has of course become the national standard-bearer for the festive season.

The last Radio Times Christmas cover is credited (in minute print) to the Assistant Director of the animation feature The Snowman and the Snowdog, but it’s Briggs’s Father Christmas just the same. Radio Times might have thought to remind readers that Mr Briggs would be celebrating his 80th birthday on the 18th of January.

It’s unlikely that his Sussex village was disturbed by any noisy celebrations – the Briggs guise as a miserable git was adopted long ago, and officially moving onward into the category of miserable vintage git won’t make a lot of difference. His wardrobe, as before, will come largely from the charity shop, where his avowed attendance has been checked by journalists suspecting a Scrooge-like pose adopted for mythmaking purposes. But no: Mr Briggs really is a habitué of the shirt and jacket racks.

If his general aim is to present himself as sparse, ungenerous and even emotionally starved, there is a large part of his life which denies it, namely his style of drawing. He belongs to a generation otherwise dominated by spiky, nibby draughtsmanship, the legacy of the great Ronald Searle erupting into the the barbed-wire entanglements of Scarfe and Steadman.

But Raymond Briggs’s impulse is all towards roundedness: chunky bodies and spherical heads. It’s a taste that emerges in semi-academic drawings as well as comic art. The Roald Dahl Treasury, for example, groups Dahl’s writings into sections, each one introduced by a ‘straight’ drawing from Briggs, who trained at the Slade.

The most striking of them, attached to a piece called ‘The Biggest Hip Bone Ever’, lavishes on the exhibit in

PHOTO COURTESY OF: ANTHONY DEVLIN/PA ARCHIVE/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES. ALL ILLUSTRATIONS © RAYMOND BRIGGS

THIS PAGE: Raymond Briggs, Hyde Park 2008, and below, extract from Ethel & Ernest: A True Story. FACING PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: pages from Fungus the Bogeyman Plop up Book; illustration from ‘Notes from the Sofa’, Briggs’s Oldie column; illustration from Father Christmas; and ‘The Biggest Hip Bone Ever’ from The Roald Dahl Treasury

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PHOTO COURTESY OF: ANTHONY DEVLIN/PA ARCHIVE/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES. ALL ILLUSTRATIONS © RAYMOND BRIGGS

question a Henry Moore-like devotion to its monumental bulbous smoothness.

Briggs, incidentally, once went to one of Dahl’s birthday parties, and found the writer ‘fairly curmudgeonly’.

Briggs’s own most successful curmudgeon, forty years ago now, was his Father Christmas, a grumbling anti-stereotype regarded with horror by many parents, especially when the saintly grouch was revealed on the lavatory. But Santa’s resemblance

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ne of Briggs’s early aims had been to raise the prevailing standard of writing in children’s books, and Fungus is a remarkably wordy production, often more caption than drawing. So when The Snowman arrived, it offered two reversals of policy: innocent cleanliness in place of the fungoid world, but also wordlessness instead of prolixity. As everyone knows, it’s literally an uplifting piece, and yet a great sadness lurks – less to do with the necessary ‘mortality’ of the Snowman than with the smallness of the suburban world to which the dream must return.

And here, below all the rounded surfaces, is Raymond Briggs’s real subject: the little family into which he was born, the son of a milkman and a domestic servant. Its undisguised emergence came in 1999, with Ethel &

Ernest: A True Story,, his parents’ own progress shown in pained detail. He draws them standing stolidly side by side, doorstep-snapshot style, and we see how optimistic and stoical they are, but also how hapless, and bound for defeat. We have met parts of them already, in Jim and Hilda Bloggs, from Gentleman Jim and the post-Bomb When The Wind Blows (a ‘nuclear family’ if ever there was one). All they really wanted was each other, and a bit of cosiness, and I suspect the same applies to Mr Briggs. When Puffin Books requested his favourite memory, he described coming home from the Army: ‘The warmth and comfort of our little kitchen... Carpets on the floor! Curtains!

The women in pretty clothes. A cloth on the table. China cups and saucers. A comfortable bed. Food you could eat and no one shouting at me.’ Not too much to expect for your birthday.

to their own wheezing, fallible grandpas was precisely what children loved. Emboldened by the success of this brassed-off benefactor, Briggs progressed to Fungus the Bogeyman, an inexhaustible wallower in beastly secretions. This time the principle of roundedness extended even to the depiction of a plump bicycle – a prophetic design, this, since many bikes today are indeed constructed from oddly fattened pipework.

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fadsfadfsdafdsa

W H AT L I E S B E N E AT H

Profitable Wonders

by James Le Fanu

The intelligence of plants

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ife gratifyingly remains full of surprises to challenge our understanding of how things are – and few more so in recent years than the recognition that daffodils, cabbages, oak trees and all the other several hundred thousand types of plants must possess an ‘intelligence’, an awareness of the world around them and the ability to purposefully influence it to their advantage. They may appear insensate and immobile but are capable, in their way, of not only seeing, breathing, smelling and (perhaps) hearing, but also responding to the assault of predators and foraging for minerals and nutrients – all without the benefit of those hallmark organs of consciousness and voluntary action, the brain and nervous system.

Indeed, on reflection, the characteristic feature of plants, their fixity, requires them to be, if anything, more finely tuned and responsive to their immediate environment for, unlike birds and animals, they cannot adapt to changing circumstances, seek food and shelter or find a mate by the simple expedient of moving from one place to another. ‘An elm tree needs to know if its neighbour is shading it from the sun to find its own way to grow towards the light,’ observes botanist Daniel Chamovitz. ‘A Douglas fir has to know if winds are shaking its branches so it can grow a stronger trunk. Cherry trees need to know when to flower.’

For plants, constrained by their immobility, the acquisition and interpretation of these forms of knowledge is mediated by a heightened sensitivity to a comprehensive range (at least sixteen) of physical and biological ‘signals’ – including light, wind, water and gravity, the gases oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air, the concentration of half a dozen different minerals in the soil, competition from neighbouring plants and predation by herbivores and parasites.

To start with, plants are avaricious for light, their main source of food. Its impact on the chlorophyll in their leaves transforms – through the process of photosynthesis – the carbon dioxide in the air and water absorbed through their roots into the complex building blocks that will become (as it were) their flesh and blood. Place a seedling between two dim sources of light differing so slightly as to be only just distinguishable by ordinary photometric methods and it will promptly bend towards the marginally more intense.

That avariciousness is reflected in their many different types of photoreceptors. We humans and animals have just two, the rods and cones in the retina at the back of the eye, but plants have no less than eleven, attuned variously to light at the blue and red end of the spectrum, to dim light, bright light and its duration, which together determine how vigorously they grow and in which direction, and when they germinate, flower and shed their leaves.

Thus the sequential flowering of plants throughout the year is mainly due to their astonishing ability, known as photoperiodism, to keep track of the period (or amount) of

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light to which they are exposed throughout the day. The iris and barley are ‘long day’ plants, flowering in the summer, whereas chrysanthemums and soya beans do so only in the autumn when the days are shortening – though this can be postponed indefinitely by extending the duration of their exposure to light by artificial means.

Plants respond to touch in diverse ways. In climbers such as vines and beans, time lapse photography shows them searching intentionally for a support to wrap themselves around – their tendrils throwing themselves at a metal pole like a fishing rod over and over again, extending themselves a few more inches at every cast till contact is made.

That responsiveness to touch is also apparent in the profound influence of the mechanical effect of wind on the size and shape of trees, as seen in the typically stunted, slanted growth of trunks and branches on windswept hillsides.

Responsiveness to smell is more difficult to demonstrate though it is well documented that the ethylene secreted in copious amounts by a ripening apple will prompt those on neighbouring branches to ripen in synchrony. Similarly, leaves under assault from aphids release volatile chemicals that are (somehow) detectable by the healthy, which respond by producing ‘defensive’ phenolic and tannic compounds that render them unpalatable.

This sensory awareness of plants is paralleled by the seemingly purposive activity of their foraging roots. As Anthony Trewavas, Professor of Botany at Edinburgh University, observes, they can detect ‘humidity and mineral gradients in the soil, change their branching patterns radically when resource-rich patches are encountered and take deliberate avoidance action to prevent contact with those other species’. Taken together, such attributes constitute, as Professor Trewavas maintains, ‘a novel form of intelligence’ whose appreciation enormously expands our intellectual horizons of what might be possible.

THE OLDIE – March 2014

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do u b le v i s io n

Olden life

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF REX/Everett Collection

Who were… the Dolly sisters?

Gordon Selfridge was enormously proud of his vast emporium in Oxford Street. How proud he would be of the present basement café named after two of his mistresses, we can only guess.

Yansci Deutsch (later Jenny) and her twin sister Roszika (Rose) were born in Budapest in 1892, and by the time they were eight were charging friends to watch them dance. Twenty years later, already famous in New York as the Dolly Sisters, they were the rage of London, each Selfridge’s mistress, showing off the two tortoises he had presented to them, the shells ornamented with a quartet of blue diamonds.

Uncannily alike, they started their stage career as twelve-year-old emigrants performing illegally in New York beer halls. Then, in vaudeville, they were pronounced ‘cute as dolls’ by a choreographer – hence their stage name.

As eighteen-year-olds they were spotted

by Florenz Ziegfeld for his famous Follies: ‘You don’t do much, but you’re cute,’ he said, and was soon paying them $350 a week. They weren’t remarkable dancers and, unlike some of their rivals, never relied on taking their clothes off to attract male audiences. But they were extremely beautiful and their stage costumes were stunning – they were ‘worth the price of admission just to look at’. They eventually had five husbands between them – Rosie’s first was Jean Schwartz, a songwriter fourteen years older than her, and Jenny’s, Harry Fox, a successful comedian.

They were brought to London in 1920 by ‘the British Ziegfeld’, Charles Cochran, to star in one of his revues.

One might not rush now to buy tickets for an act entitled ‘The Dollies and their Collies’ involving the twins and a team of performing dogs, but their reputation

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Twinset and pearls: the Dolly Sisters in 1929

had gone before them, and the younger royal princes were at the first night.

Presumably they told their elder brother about the girls, because it was soon rumoured that the Prince of Wales was courting them – as was King Alfonso of Spain, who was often seen entering the apartment they shared, invariably clad in his white polo breeches. ‘We became greatly attached to him,’ Jenny said – as they did to the millionaire tea tycoon Sir Thomas Lipton.

But it was Gordon Selfridge who became their most constant companion and admirer. He was almost forty years their senior, but he and Jenny, in particular, became almost inseparable.

Both girls were addicted to gambling, and Jenny is said to have won eleven million dollars in one evening. Selfridge would sit behind her at the baccarat table, handing thousand-dollar notes to her as required. It was said that the enormous sums he spent on her were a major contribution to his losing control of his company. Meanwhile, Rosie married a tobacco heir notable for his enormous girth: his bride commented that he was ‘all pure gold’.

They made several films, starting with The Million Dollar Dollies in 1918.

But it was their live performances which were famous, even if their routines seem to have grown a little eccentric: in one Paris revue they appeared as twin Little Bo-Peeps, then became Austrian Schuhplattlers and, finally, Latin

American salsa dancers. In Christmas 1927 they appeared in Cannes in a cottonwool snow scene with a stuffed reindeer.

The end for the Dolly Sisters came in 1933 when Jenny was involved in a motor accident which left her horribly disfigured. She recovered to make a last unsuccessful marriage; the couture shop she had opened in Paris failed, and there seems to have been a rift in her relationship with Rosie, who had also married again – to a New York department-store magnate. Depressed and alone, Jenny hanged herself in 1941 in a rented Hollywood apartment.

Rosie lived to see their life portrayed in the 1945 musical The Dolly Sisters, with herself and Jenny played by Betty Grable and June Haver. After the death of her husband she attempted suicide, but survived, and died of a heart attack in 1970. The film is their major memorial – if one discounts the basement café at Selfridges, where one can lift a flat white to the memory of Rosie and Jenny. derek parker

‘You’re in his favourite spot’

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m o n s te r m u n c he r s

Modern life

What is… the 5:2 diet?

I have been a fully paid-up member of the dieting classes since I embarked on the first of many happy diets at prep school. After an orgy of eating competitions with my boon companion ‘Nappy’ Knapman, I had become too spherical to wobble round the rugby pitch. Thanks to a yellow pocket book entitled Count Your Calories, I lost eighteen pounds in six months, and went on to captain an unbeaten rugby team.

I had learnt two valuable lessons: first, that yo-yo dieting is terrific fun, and second, people have an enormous fondness and even jealous admiration for us fatties. In his book Fattypuffs and Thinifers André Maurois wrote a panegyric to us. ‘They were never cross, and they never said unkind things about one another. They were scarcely ever unhappy. Nearly all day long, they laughed and played and made jokes, and most of their conversations were about food.’ Daniel Lambert, one of the first show fatties, weighed in at fifty-two stone eleven pounds. He was so loved that he was given an annuity of £50 for life in 1805. It is a sad indictment of our obesity-obsessed times that Stamford Museum has recently removed Lambert’s waistcoat, which could hold seven men, from public view.

Since my first diet I have scoffed at thinifers who watch what they consume 100 per cent of the time, while I devour everything in front of me for most of the year, and then fast to get myself back to fighting weight. The diets we fattypuffs dream of are those which make fasting most bearable. The carbs-free Atkins, which permitted a cooked breakfast every morning and all the cheese one can devour, was heaven-sent. Four years ago, thanks to LighterLife, I lost two stone ten pounds – the weight of my three-year-old niece – in seven weeks. Of course there are side effects – halitosis (Atkins) and severe

hair loss (LighterLife) – but what brave soldier hasn’t a few battle scars to show?

There’s a misconception among puritanical thinifers that we dieters are deluded into believing diets work. Of course they don’t. We know they won’t lead to the Elysian fields of ‘Permanent Weight Loss’, which bean-counting thinifers believe is the goal of any rightminded person. But what eludes thinifers is that the last thing we want is for them to work: we simply want to create enough room for another spectacular binge. We crave the mediaeval fasting and feasting, the excitement of wobbling up and down the holes of our belts, the attention and well-meaning but wasted encouragement (‘You’ve lost weight’). Then, back to the sheer joy of having thirds and an elicit sausage roll – on the way back from lunch.

At World Diet HQ they’ve come up with the 5:2 diet – a gluttons’ charter.

It’s pure genius: whereas before, after a month of carousing, I would endure three-week purges of celery and grapefruit, 5:2 has shortened the normal month-long feasting/fasting cycle to an exhilarating seven-day episode which one can repeat again and again throughout the year – apart from the festival of light that is December (and late November).

For two days a week I have become an ascetic, living off under 600 self-righteous

calories. It’s best to draw attention to oneself on these days: amaze your friends with your self-control, tut at them when they eat a bag of crisps. Thinifers mistakenly believe I have seen the error of my waist, and are dismayed that they are being beaten at their own game.

Meanwhile, lay down firm plans for your five days ‘when you can eat normally’. In week one of my new life choice, I went to the British Oyster Championships, hosted by our very own wine correspondent. After an aperitif of fifteen of our finest bivalves, I moved on to a six-course lunch of crab, sole, grouse, beef, pudding and cheese. I then feasted on a dinner of salmon, quail and more cheese. All in one guilt-free day.

Over the last five weeks, I haven’t lost an ounce – but I have lived the life of Falstaff while not gaining one. A new era dawns.

JAMES PEMBROKE

Illustration from André Maurois’ Fattypuffs and Thinifers

March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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T H E R O S TA T W E N T Y H O L E R

war How the

was won

Left: the Rosta Twenty Holer photographed by the author’s shipmate at the time, Midshipman Annett, with his Brownie camera. The shed is in the foreground showing a large piece of ice that has narrowly missed bombardment...

VICE ADMIRAL SIR THOMAS BAIRD recalls how, as a young Arctic Convoy Midshipman, he was privy to a critical morale-boosting exercise...

C

orrespondence on Arctic Convoys in recent editions of The Oldie made me wonder whether there are still any readers who experienced the lavatorial arrangements at the dry dock at Rosta, on the Kola Inlet near Murmansk.

Ships’ lavatories, known in the Navy as ‘heads’, discharged directly into the sea which made their use in a ship in dry dock inappropriate. Consequently in all UK dockyards shoreside ‘heads’ were available close to dockside.

Having been torpedoed on PQ13, my ship HMS Trinidad entered Rosta dry dock for repairs on 7th April 1942, a day on which it was my turn to be Commander’s doggie. As soon as the ship had settled down, the Commander announced he was going to inspect the shoreside heads and that I was to find Chipnikov, the Russian Liaison Officer, to come with us.

It transpired that there weren’t any heads, but a temporary arrangement had been made to satisfy HMS Oribi earlier in the year. This consisted of a wooden shed on piles overhanging the water’s edge. Inside were two boards, knee high, each with ten loo-size holes over a drop of some eight foot into the Kola Inlet.

Sanitarily it was unbeatable as there was a perpetual northerly flow to take all excrement down the Kola Inlet into the Barents Sea. The Commander was anything but happy at the complete lack of privacy and the effect on discipline of officers, senior ratings and junior sailors sharing an open lavatory which in any case was inadequate for 750 people.

‘We shall need canvas screening. Fetch me the Bo’s’n, Mid, and the Shipwright Officer.’

Luckily the Bo’s’n’s canvas store had escaped damage from the torpedo, and when I returned with him, the Commander’s mental arithmetic had been at work on how to allocate separate seatage for some 50 officers, 50 CPOs and POs and 650 sailors.

‘First, I want a screen down the middle from roof to floor to separate the ten holes on the left from the ten on the right, each with a separate entrance. The ten on the left will be for junior ratings, with the ten on the right allocated as follows: the first five to CPOs and POs, the next four to officers and the one at the end to the Captain. Lateral screening is required to separate

these three allocations. Meanwhile, the chippies are to make 20 wooden boxes to take the squares of Admiralty brown paper.’

We then returned to the ship to compose a Commander’s Temporary Memorandum entitled ‘Use of Shoreside Heads’ which was to have a full distribution. Meanwhile the Captain had graciously offered to share his hole with the three Commanders, the PMO (Principal Medical Officer) and the Padre.

PQ13 had been our second Arctic convoy and a good deal of comradeship had been generated amongst the ship’s Company in the seven months since commissioning. This, plus the British sailor’s ability to turn any difficulty into a new form of sport, ensured that the Commander’s arrangements were endured during our five weeks in the dry dock. The view of the water between one’s legs took in practically the whole of the discharge area of what was soon to be known as the ‘Rosta Twenty Holer’, and at that time of the year this included large pieces of ice sailing slowly underneath. As a gamekeeper’s son said to his neighbour: ‘Hold it, Geordie, that’s your bird.’

Targeting pieces of ice soon became a competitive sport, greeted with shouts of applause or derision together with witty but unprintable comments.

Sadly the good patching work by the Russian welders (mostly weldresses) only lasted until 15th May when the ship was set on fire by German bombers and eventually sank.

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t may interest readers of my vintage to see some official statistics of the Arctic convoys which were passed to me a few years ago: • 40 Outward 811 merchant ships: 717 arrived safely; 94 lost or returned to port • 37 return 717 merchant ships: 37 lost • 4 million tons of cargo carried which included 5,000 tanks; 7,000 aircraft • Loss to Royal Navy 2 cruisers; 6 destroyers; 2 sloops; 1 frigate; 2 corvettes; 4 minesweepers; 1 trawler; 1 Polish submarine March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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LA RE N TREE

Whiteboard jungle KAte Sawyer Back to school

Illustrated by PETER BAILEY

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very six to eight weeks we get a holiday.

In the state sector half-term breaks last a week, and other holidays (apart from the summer) a fortnight. We – children and adults alike – leave the school with cheery smiles and a spring in our steps. Coming back is not the same.

Some teachers work very hard in the holidays, there is no doubt about that. I have to admit I am not one of them.

My rule is simple – I don’t give homework over the holidays (except sometimes some reading) and I don’t expect to have to do any myself. I make sure the lessons for the first couple of days are prepared, and I aim to have my marking up to date at the end of every half term. I then go home and use the holiday as – well, as holiday.

On returning, as a matter of courtesy I ask the children how their holidays went. And this is when the story becomes rather sad. I continue to be flabbergasted at how many of the children pull faces and say their holidays were ‘boring’. Why? I ask, brow furrowed in maternal concern. ‘Oh I just sat indoors and played on my Xbox/PlayStation,’ they say.

Now, the town in which I teach is an old market town of decent size. But even those who live on large estates (I don’t mean estates like Downton and Blenheim, obviously) are within easy reach of water, fields and parks. They have skateboards and rollerblades, trees and each other. They even, dare I say it, have libraries. Young people are of course prone to boredom, it is part of their very essence, but nothing depresses me more than the cry of ‘I’m bored!’ If there really is nothing better to do, help your mother

It is not the children who wake up in the night feeling sick at the thought of returning but their loyal teachers

problems – or worse, of the latest targets you have to meet.

But a few days before la rentrée the anxieties begin. How am I going to show progress in twenty minutes? How are we going to make X willing to work and Y willing to speak up? What if Ofsted comes in (still waiting)? What if Ofsted doesn’t come in? How much longer will they keep bullying us about it? Till the end of time? And then the nightmares: the lessons taught naked, the classes lost, the being put in front of a physics class, the Head as fairytale witch, the change of geography which leaves you searching for your classroom…

The children return to their core social scene with no responsibility. We return with their little lives in our hands, with The Man on our backs and Gove at our heels. It’s no wonder that it is we, not the children, who go whining back, creeping like snails unwillingly to school.

in the kitchen and chat to her, for the love of God. (If your mother ever gets into a kitchen, of course.)

But the long and short of it all is that the children actually look forward to going back to school more than we do. It is not they who wake up in the night feeling sick at the thought of returning, but us. It is not they who have nightmares and cold sweats in the days running up to the beginning of term, but their loyal teachers.

The third day of the holidays is the best. The day when you wake up at the normal time, and have the luxury of remembering you’re safe and going back to sleep. The day when your mind really begins to empty of the children and their March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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Alice Delysia

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF: Planet News Archive/SSPL/Getty Images

david machin looks back on his encounters with the former musical theatre star with delight – and embarrassment

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here can’t be many people left who saw Delysia on stage before the last war, but there must be a few who remember her when she toured the war zones as a member of ENSA. Born in Paris in 1889, she became a chorus girl at 14 and appeared in shows in Paris, London and New York. She was spotted by the impresario C B Cochran and in 1914 she was given a leading role in the first of his lavish West End revues. The show attracted the attention of the Lord Chamberlain in his role as theatrical censor because of a scene in which Delysia stripped, albeit in darkness, but is best remembered for her singing the unofficial recruiting song ‘Oh We Don’t Want to Lose You but We Think You Ought to Go’, wrapped in a Union Jack.

Between the wars she appeared in musical successes in London and on Broadway and made her first film. The young Noël Coward wrote his first hit song ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ for her; she was incensed when Coward suggested Gertrude Lawrence should sing it in New York, and called him ‘a sheet and a bougairr’. (Her heavily accented English was part of her attraction for British audiences.)

After the Second World War she retired and married as her third husband René Kolb-Bernard, a cousin of de Gaulle’s, whose minor diplomatic postings included Consul in the Canary Islands. My father and stepmother lived there and they

became friends in the early 1960s. I was then working for William Heinemann. My father told me that she was thinking of writing her memoirs, and I tentatively mentioned this at an editorial meeting. To my surprise the senior people round the table, including the hard-headed MD, Charles Pick, came over all sentimental and encouraged me to pursue the possibility.

The book would have to be ghosted and somebody suggested the semi-retired theatre critic Alan ‘Jock’ Dent. Heinemann paid for him to go to Las Palmas and get things under way.

But the longer he stayed there, the more worrying my father’s reports became. The necessary ‘chemistry’ between Delysia and Jock was missing – he was far from being a ‘ladies’ man’ – and she seemed nervous about recounting the more intimate episodes in her life, including an affair with a Russian Grand Duke, which would fuel a publisher’s publicity campaign.

Jock came back with little to show. In the hope that a return to the scene of her triumphs might loosen her memories, it was decided to invite Delysia to join him in London. She agreed, and our publicity manager, Bill Holden, and I were told to keep in touch with her between her sessions with Jock.

During her glory days before the war Delysia had been generous in her support, financial and otherwise, of ambitious young chefs and waiters from the Continent who now owned or managed some of the best-known restaurants. They showed their gratitude by offering her and companions of her choice lunch and dinner at their expense.

So it was that I found myself at the end of an excellent lunch in the Caprice discussing favourite songs with her. Suddenly she leant across the table and at the top of her still ringing voice sang me the chorus of Gershwin’s ‘Oh, Do it Again’. I have never felt such a mixture of delight and embarrassment.

On another occasion she took Bill and me to lunch in Leoni’s Quo Vadis in Soho. As we left she spotted a nearby basement strip club, then a relative innovation on the London scene. ‘Come on,’ she cried, ‘I have heard about your streep clubs,’ and she plunged down the steps, paid the ten shillings a head entrance, and led us into a shabby room, with a scattering of single men watching a sad-looking young woman gyrating on a small stage to recorded music.

After about ten minutes Delysia, whose figure was now matronly, rose to her feet and exclaimed, ‘I could do better than that.’ Bill and I looked at each other with horror since she was quite capable of matching deeds to words. To our relief she swept towards the exit, but all the way back to the office in the taxi she berated us for the poor standard of striptease on offer.

The memoirs never materialised, and I could but regret the marvellous launch party Bill would have organised. She spent her old age in Brighton and died there just short of her ninetieth birthday. You can still listen to some of her most popular songs on the digital music service Spotify.

March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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P R O Z A C N AT I O N

Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514)

House Husbandry with Giles Wood In which Mr Wood resists his wife’s attempts to medicalise his marital lapses

I

n the early days of marriage I well remember Mary and her coven discussing the aberrant behaviour of their menfolk. Invariably the conclusion would be reached: ‘He’s obviously just a complete bastard.’

Today’s coven seems to take a more liberal/lefty stance towards marital crimes, with a willingness to view them from a medical perspective. Often the perpetrator is recast as a victim.

Hence my own appearance in the GP’s surgery following a genuine misunderstanding, during my wife’s absence at a writer’s retreat, which led to my taking her entire collection of shoes to the shoe recycling unit.

When Mary returned from the retreat and queried the whereabouts of her shoe mountain, I was unnerved by the chilling calm with which she took the news. Clearly I had crossed some marital Rubicon, yet as I eavesdropped on her phone calls to the coven, I realised that my crime was being medicalised.

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It was Virginia who suggested inadequate blood flow to the brain, or a malfunctioning carotid artery. This, on the grounds that ‘some of the time’ my behaviour is considered ‘normal’.

Another friend, Marigold, on hearing that I ‘refused to socialise’, had taken to wearing a T K Maxx striped dressing-gown over my clothes by day, and was ‘trying to annoy the village’ by leaving an ugly floor mat draped over the gate to my field, diagnosed that I was suffering from ‘entry-level depression’.

In the surgery the GP listened to the carotid artery through her stethoscope and pronounced it fit for purpose.

‘But what else could explain his throwing out forty perfectly good pairs of shoes?’ pleaded Mary.

In my defence, I explained to the doctor that because of the proximity of the distended shoe sack to the back door, I had assumed it was on its way to the dump.

‘Everything in a cottage the size of the one we live in is near a door,’ glowered Mary.

‘But why were the shoes downstairs in the first place?’

I challenged.

The doctor glanced at her watch as Mary described how she had taken advantage of a fine day to throw a tarpaulin on the lawn, there to sort her shoe mountain.

Having funnelled the paired shoes into one oilskin laundry sack she was mindful of my edict that only I am allowed to carry heavy weights (the last time she did her back in she was unproductive for six months). In my own absence, she had left the sack for me to carry upstairs, and headed for her retreat.

On my return I took the stuff to the dump.

I

t took just two half-hour appointments with two different lady GPs to secure a supply of citalopram, an antidepressant drug of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor variety, but I hesitated to start the course since side-effects can include ‘trembling and anxiety, thoughts of harming or killing yourself, irregular muscle movement in the facial area and decreased sex drive’.

Am I depressed? I am reading The Myth of the Chemical Cure, a damning critique of psychiatric drug treatments by Joanna Moncrieff, and I couldn’t help noticing that the GP who prescribed my antidepressants seemed on the brink of tears herself.

For ‘entry-level depression’ read ‘vegetative withdrawal’, an only natural disinclination to socialise in winter – although Mary has commented that I seem to have seasonal affective disorder in summer as well.

There must be something wrong with me, however, and, if not depression, decrees the wisdom of Mary’s crowds, then I may be ‘toxic’. In the spirit of cooperation, I agreed to visit a naturopath in Holland Park. Her verdict? I was indeed ‘full of toxins’. And the treatment? Daily coffee enemas.

Obviously I refused to cooperate. It was then that my old mate Cyril weighed in.

‘Giles is not depressed,’ he pronounced. ‘He’s not toxic. He’s just stupid, and you can’t medicate against stupidity.’

Mary seems to have accepted this verdict and I am prepared to go along with it and agree that yes, it was stupidity which caused the mistake.

It is a small price to pay to save the marriage and avoid the chemical cosh.

THE OLDIE – March 2014

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27/1/14 11:44:03

the d a r k b o x

God...

by Melanie McDonagh

A quiet night in, alone at his home in France, has cost Clive Barnes over £300 he was not expecting. It started after his wife had gone back to the UK to visit her mother. He downed a few beers, he says, and started to watch porn on the internet. He made what he assumed was a one-off payment to the website using his MBNA credit card but he then discovered that he was continuing to pay £10.50 a month. He contacted MBNA to stop the payments but the bank told him he couldn’t, that only the porn website could stop the bills so he should speak to them. The problem is that Clive can’t remember the name of the website. It does not even appear on his credit card statements because the transactions go through an external payment service.

Clive learned that he had signed a continuous payment authority (CPA) which allows companies to take varying amounts from bank accounts, through both credit cards and debit cards, without getting customers’ agreement each time.

This sounds like a direct debit, but CPAs are different.

With direct debits, any mistakes are covered by the banks’ direct debit guar-

26

On Christmas Eve I went to confession. I’ll just drop in and out, I thought. But when I went into the church I saw a double row of people waiting in front of the three confession boxes. And those rows of would-be penitents were, by all accounts, refilled from ten in the morning until noon.

Most were people in their forties, fifties or older but some were younger. It wasn’t what I’d been expecting; rather, this was what I remembered from my childhood.

Maybe it’s the Pope Francis effect.

Anyway, I went in, made my confession, and left. And as happens every time, I felt a palpable sense of relief, of lightness. It doesn’t last, but it’s real. You can attribute it to the effect of articulating things to another person or to sacramental grace or to the relief of getting a disagreeable ordeal over.

Whatever; it works.

So when the books editor at work offered me a new book on confession, The Dark Box (Profile Books) by John Cornwell (whom I am glad to know), I jumped at it. In it he discusses the nature and history of the sacrament,

and his take on what’s wrong with it. He feels that confession is psychologically dubious and at worst a means whereby bad priests can manipulate vulnerable children. He was, as a junior seminarian, sexually propositioned by a priest during an informal confession; he walked out.

That experience has coloured his view that confession was part of the dynamic of power underlying the clerical sex abuse scandals.

He also thinks that if the sacrament is to survive, the practice of individual confession should be replaced by a general absolution, whereby an entire congregation can have their sins absolved without telling their sins. He approves of the replacement of the dark box with the modern practice of sitting next to the priest in front of the church or in a nice bright room.

Well, each to his own, but that last is a practice I detest, and so do most of my friends who still go to confession.

There’s a sense of anonymity in the confession box which we like. Indeed, one elderly priest friend was so appalled when I once said I would make my

antee. With standing orders, customers have total control over the amounts they pay. But with CPAs, sometimes called recurring payments, it certainly used to be the case that, once you had signed an authority, only the retailer could cancel it.

But, even four years later, not all bank staff have caught up with this change, to the extent that the Financial Conduct Authority recently reminded banks that they must cancel CPAs at customers’ requests. A year ago, the Office of Fair Trading told companies using CPAs that they must make it clear to customers how to cancel the instructions.

When Mammon contacted MBNA with this information, it promised that no more money would go out of Clive’s account to the porn site. That is fine as far as it goes, but three years ago it had wrongly told him he could not cancel the payments and he has continued paying unnecessarily ever since.

MBNA then agreed to refund all the money he has paid since January 2011 when he first complained – £367.50 – although it called this a goodwill gesture claiming that the right to cancel was not in place at that time. Mammon disagrees, but MBNA insists it did not implement the new rules until December 2011.

Anyone stuck with an unwanted CPA should contact their bank and, if the bank will not budge, complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Continuous payment authorities are also attractive to fraudsters CPAs are commonly used by insurance companies to collect premiums, for vehicle breakdown services, gym memberships, online dating, mobile phone services and magazine subscriptions. They are also attractive to fraudsters who want to trap people into paying for something they do not want, and many people have been caught by online firms selling miracle beauty products and dodgy drugs.

In November 2009 the law changed to give customers the power to instruct their banks or credit card issuers to cancel CPAs. You no longer need speak to the retailer first, or at all, although it is advisable to let them know what you have done.

THE OLDIE – March 2014

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27/1/14 11:51:45

...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 Beyond beige JOLLY SPRING coats are one of the great losses to the fashion spectrum. They once plugged the gap between woollen tweeds and a light summer cardigan, but the spring coat is now a rare harbinger of the warmer months to come. The reason for this is the success of the trench coat. It prevails as the only light coat available to most, although its style is necessarily masculine and capable, with its buttons, ties and straps. Usually offered in every shade of buff, the trench coat is an excellent item of clothing – but it shouldn’t be the only option.

The styles I’m lamenting here are the edge-to-edge and tailored coats in prints or fresh, springtime colours. I have always got around this gaping hole by wearing vintage ones. One, a brightly patterned duster coat by Horrockses c.1958, has been admired since I started wearing it twenty-five years ago. The fact that it has lasted so long commends both its quality and its design. And it often begins the conversation that always ends with the question ‘Why can’t we find spring coats anywhere?’

As March approaches, there are a few colourful offerings to be found if you rummage through the beige macs.

It’s too simplistic to pin this on the improving economic climate, although the profusion of optimistic colour predicted for us on the summer catwalks suggests that things could be looking up.

Boden has a few cheerful coats. The ‘Kensington’ coat (£129) comes in a particularly zingy piccalilli shade and the carnation pink ‘Mayfair’ (£149) is created from weighty, textured cotton that looks and feels like something Hardy Amies would have recognised as a decent spring fabric. If you can fit into a size 16 or below and your style is slightly adventurous, the coats at Topshop are worth seeking out. In particular its Boutique range focuses on smarter, elegant shapes and it is never afraid to use exciting colour and fabric.

One of our modern obsessions is the idea that everything, including us, needs to be a rational multi-tasker. In

terms of fashion this tends to make a shopper shy of making bold choices. In turn, retailers are wary of investing much beyond the universal palette of beige/ navy/black. The fear that an interesting colour prevents a garment from being versatile is unfounded, however. Colour may require a little thought, but I have never encountered a truly stylish person who regards colour as challenging rather than life-affirming. The most limiting aspect to a garment is usually its fussy details (back to that trench coat hardware) – a simple cut is always at the heart of a versatile style.

The best spring coats bring together that longed-for colour and a playful element through print or cut rather than an overworked design. They can also be worn with jeans or an elegant dress. The limiting reality of maintaining a formal wardrobe means that we need to make the most of every buy. Another reason why the spring coat deserves not to be a dodo is that it enables us to stride into the budding world wearing a riot of pastels if we choose to do so.

Maybe you’re lucky enough to have a good spring coat in your wardrobe, in which case I’d unearth it and press it back into service – especially if it combines colour and print. I can guarantee it will be a conversation piece, and it may even put a smile on someone’s face.

A smile-inducing duster coat

March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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ILLUSTRATION BY TAMASIN DOE

confession to him in the room in which we were sitting – simply for the sake of convenience – that he held up his hand next to his face to mimic the grille in the confessional (with another friend, he held up a tennis racquet). Nor can I relate to the conflation of confession with general spiritual guidance, which Mr Cornwell seems to approve: there’s something more to confession than a nice chat. By preference I seek out priests I don’t know, which is what happens in Westminster Cathedral, where there’s a daily queue of penitents who like it precisely because the priest doesn’t know them. Shallow, perhaps.

As Mr Cornwell says, the practice of confession was radically altered in 1910 when Catholics were admonished to go to confession weekly rather than once a year, which remains their obligation. He’s right that routine, frequent confession can result in the shopping-list approach, which is tiresome for both parties. But the practice of bad confessions doesn’t undermine the benefits of good ones; sometimes the dark box can be a place of transformation.

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27/1/14 11:52:09

Still With Us

Rita Tushingham Following her debut in Tony Richardson’s groundbreaking 1961 film A Taste of Honey, Rita Tushingham became one of the most famous faces of Sixties cinema.

We should see more of her now, says sarah shannon

I

n 1961 Rita Tushingham was a teenager fresh from convent school with a backstage job at the Liverpool Rep. Then she spotted a newspaper advertisement inviting women to apply for the lead in a film version of Shelagh Delaney’s groundbreaking play, A Taste of Honey.

Rita replied to the advert and was plucked from several thousand applicants for the role. The film marked a turning point in cinema history – and in Rita’s life. It told the story of schoolgirl Jo who seeks affection in the arms of a black sailor. She becomes pregnant and finds herself living with a gay friend. Compare that with the chocolate-box Doris Day movies that Hollywood rolled off its production lines in the early Sixties and it becomes clear why A Taste of Honey caused a stir. Several countries banned it for its ‘immoral’ subject matter. But for every critic it appalled, another was spellbound, and Rita won both a Bafta and a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer. With her brown bob, heavy fringe and huge soulful eyes, Rita fast became one of the faces of the Sixties, a linchpin of the new wave of kitchen sink dramas.

Now 71, Rita lives in a beautiful riverside development in London, a world away from the squats and squalor of her early films. She waves me into her home with a cheery hello. The Scouse accent is only just detectable after many decades away from her home town. A blonde bob has replaced the brown one but her eyes shine out just as they did when she first appeared on film as an eighteen-year-old. She talks about her Taste of Honey auditions with director Tony Richardson: ‘He saw something in me. Thank God for him, otherwise it might never have happened for me.’

It’s strange to think that this was Rita’s first film. She holds her own against Dora Bryan, who plays her drunken and libidinous mother, and Robert Stephens, playing her mother’s new lover. How did she do it? ‘I didn’t think of the camera. I wasn’t intimidated by it. I love the camera and I think because of that I let it in. Some people might be amazing on stage but it’s strange – the camera doesn’t get anything from them.’ She also possessed a youthful insouciance that made her oblivious to the importance of this role to her future. ‘Ignorance is a wonderful thing. You do things when you’re young. Like kids that drive at eighty miles an hour. You just do it without realising what it means.’

Before filming began, Tony Richardson and John Osborne introduced Rita to London by way of the Royal Court Theatre, where she appeared in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s Jacobean tragedy The Changeling alongside Mary Ure and Robert Shaw. She doesn’t recall being starstruck. ‘Having worked with actors backstage at the Liverpool Rep, I knew what

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THE OLDIE – March 2014

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educ ati n g rita

Right: with Murray Melvin in A Taste Of Honey, 1961 Below: with Alec Guinness in Dr Zhivago, 1965

I

n 1965 Rita had a part in a very different sort of film, playing the daughter of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago. She remembers Lean’s intensity: ‘He was very exacting. Sometimes he would sit for hours thinking about what he wanted.’ She found light relief on the set with her co-star Alec Guinness. They went for long walks together in the boiling heat of their Spanish location.

‘In the end, I’d say, “I can’t go any further” and Alec would say, “I hoped you were going to say that because I certainly wasn’t going to give in.”’ Guinness also gave the young actress sound

advice. ‘I’d say, “Tomorrow’s our big scene,” and he’d say, “Every scene is a big scene.”’ After a decade of constant filming, interrupted by the birth of her two daughters, Rita entered the Seventies and found that work ground to a standstill. ‘I thought that the Sixties was just what life was like. But then I realised going into the Seventies how difficult it was to get projects made. Money wasn’t readily available anymore.’ But Rita is a grafter. She went off to Italy and France to make films and spent years in Canada too.

Alec Guinness gave the young Tushingham sound advice. ‘I’d say tomorrow’s our big scene, and he’d say every scene is a big scene’ These days she views the tricky path of an older actress with equanimity. ‘Of course there are always up-and-coming people.

When you get older there are fewer roles, anyway.’

Doesn’t the recent wave of oldie-friendly films like Philomena, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet give her hope that filmmakers are waking up to the potential of an older audience?

‘They’re not going to write a lot of roles for my age group. And if they do there’s a lot of people that are able to play them,’ she shrugs. ‘It’s all part of the game. There are times when you’re doing things and times when you’re not. You have to accept that.

Tomorrow it’s only a phone call and something new is happening.’

In the meantime, Rita helps out looking after her beloved grandchildren who live just around the corner, and has plans for a children’s book. She finds it infuriating that people assume that as an actor she should always be working. ‘How many 71-yearolds do you ask “What are you working on at the moment?”’ Yet she readily admits that she’ll never retire. Unfazed by her age, she enjoys the wisdom that experience brings. ‘It doesn’t mean that you don’t still get frightened or stressed, but you can draw on what you know to deal with those moments.’

As Rita Tushingham, a warm, intelligent and talented actress, bids me farewell I find myself sending a silent prayer to the god of casting agents. Look beyond Helen Mirren and Judi Dench. For goodness sake, somebody pick up the phone.

Bring back the Tush.

March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF: Michael Kellner AND REX/Moviestore Collection

they were like, warts and all. They’re just doing their job.’

A no-nonsense attitude to stardom came in handy in those heady days of the early Sixties. London buzzed with talent. One of the first people Rita met there was Francis Bacon when, as a struggling artist, he had his studio in Paul Danquah’s Battersea flat (Danquah was the actor who played Rita’s sailor lover).

‘I knew him all his life, He was so nice to me,’ she says.

She met bands, and actors from Liz Taylor to Harold Lloyd.

‘They weren’t your best friend or anything, but I met them all.’

The Sixties definitely swung for Rita. ‘We came out of a black and white period after the war. It was a struggle and suddenly little bits of colour started to burst on the scene. Not just in acting, but in music, in dance. There was a great freedom and everyone embraced that.’

But some aspects of that lifestyle did not appeal to the young actress. ‘I have never drunk or smoked. Everyone was doing whatever they were doing but I would just get high on people… and I would always remember what they’d said the next morning!’

After A Taste of Honey Rita starred in more innovative drama, from Girl With Green Eyes to The Leather Boys, which again touched on homosexual themes, to Smashing Time, written by George Melly, a satire which sent up Sixties celebrities. Today Smashing Time seems both uncannily prescient of our celebrity-obsessed age and a very funny satire of the Sixties, but it was poorly received. ‘It was all very tongue in cheek, but people didn’t get that at the time,’ Rita recalls.

And were those days as fame-hungry as our own? ‘Now we have reality shows where people get chewed up and spat out again. Then there’s all this tweeting. When people tweet that they are going for fish and chips, who’s interested? You can’t reveal everything otherwise what do you reflect on when you’re alone?’

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27/1/14 11:55:45

Jeremy Lewis

LIVING HELL

Gripes and grumbles from The Oldie’s resident sage (boy scouts, Salvation Army bandsmen, old-style nuns) or informal (literary gents in battered corduroy suits or farmers in rugged tweeds): they add a dash of colour and variety to life at a time when T-shirts and trainers prevail; and they make it easier for both the wearers and those with whom they deal to interact with one another, and to play the parts assigned to them in life.

All jobs involve acting to some extent, in that more often than not we have to feign wrath, delight, indignation, surprise and amusement: how much easier this is if we’re dressed for the part. And, rightly or wrongly, most of us would rather entrust our savings to a bank manager (should such people still exist) who looked like Captain Mainwaring in a black jacket and chalkstriped trousers than to a character who discussed our overdrafts in knee-length shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.

I

’m thrilled to learn that offal is making a comeback. As a child in the late Forties and early Fifties I grew up on a diet of brains, tripe, sweetbreads and kidneys, and I loved every mouthful (with the possible exception of heart, which is rather bland and dull). But offal dropped out of favour in the Seventies: brains were dealt a fatal blow by the BSE

T

he other day I glimpsed the Supreme Court in action on telly, and what a dreary bunch of men in suits they seemed to be, with not a wig or a scarlet sash between them, let alone a flowing purple gown as worn by the bad-tempered judges in Rumpole of the Bailey. Surely they could make a bit more of an effort? Uniforms have two great virtues, whether they be formal

‘Then he said those three little words – “You’ve lost weight”’

alarms, and are now confined to cat and dog food, and although tripe and onions (vastly superior to tripes à la mode de Caen) could sometimes be tracked down in the crustier West End clubs, it was usually greeted with facial squirmings and cries of ‘Ugh…’ Both my daughters are excellent cooks, but neither of them will touch the stuff. Brains have probably had it, in this country at least, but if tripe and sweetbreads become the quintessence of fashion, they may have to think again.

M

uch as I still enjoy it – this morning’s high point consisted of a doubtless exhausted presenter referring to ‘Radox the Priest’ – I can’t resist grumbling, once again, about Radio 3. Grouse number one has to do with their current passion for film music. A couple of months ago Breakfast listeners were treated to an A to Z of film music, with successive mornings given over to a different letter of the alphabet.

It quickly became apparent that, with a few obvious exceptions – Prokofiev’s music for Eisenstein, the Harry Lime theme, Bernard Herrmann’s score for North by Northwest, the Bugs Bunny song – most film music is as secondrate as the films it was written for, and makes no sense whatsoever when heard on its own. Poor old Erich Korngold may have been an infant prodigy in early twentieth-century Vienna, but the stuff he wrote for Hollywood is best forgotten.

The other irritant is a passion for rather horrible choral music. I’m all for a blast of Handel, Bach and Haydn, but all too often we’re subjected to dirges composed by a cabal of Estonians headed by Arvo Pärt, or discordant screechings which suggest that the choir has trodden barefoot on a scattering of upturned drawing pins, or been rammed from behind with a red-hot poker, as per Edward II. March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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JEREMY LEWIS ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID STOTEN

I

can’t remember many telly programmes getting such rhapsodic reviews as the three recent instalments of Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr Watson – totally undeserved, as it happens. The first two series were enjoyable enough in an ultra-trendy, Dr Who-like way, with lots of zooming noises as the camera and the characters hurtled from one part of London to another at the speed of light: however hard to follow, the episodes were selfcontained and exciting, and Holmes was up against a pleasingly sinister Moriarty.

Rave reviews have obviously turned the heads of producers and scriptwriters alike. The new series was intolerably smug, self-referential and self-indulgent: most of the numbingly tedious first episode was given over to trying to explain how, at the end of the last series, Holmes had feigned jumping to his death from the roof of Barts Hospital, the second to an interminable speech given

by Holmes at Dr Watson’s wedding.

The drama was almost non-existent, and quickly petered out when it feebly flickered into life. I couldn’t face the concluding episode, but it prompted an ecstatic response, as often as not in the news pages of the papers. Thank goodness Jeremy Brett’s incomparable Holmes is endlessly recycled on afternoon telly.

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27/1/14 11:56:59

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

The myth of the healthy fattypuff Is obesity necessarily bad for you?

An overweight reader from Dorset asks if obesity can be benign. Is there any such state as being healthily obese?

The champagne drunk at Christmas parties as well as the turkey, parsnips, roast potatoes and puddings eaten at family gatherings have erased many a hard-earned silhouette achieved by weeks of stringent dieting last year. Christmas excesses would have been long forgotten were it not for bathroom scales, which, months later, remind gourmands every morning of their earlier gluttony.

Does it matter? Surely the doctor’s pills protect someone from the consequences of a few extra pounds. Not always, disappointingly, for healthy obesity is rare.

Some lucky people are surprisingly svelte despite an indifference to standard dietary advice, whereas others are unlucky enough to be obese despite eating sparingly. Some are overweight because they eat with abandon and have persuaded themselves that they are obese but healthy and needn’t give a damn about the bathroom scales. A growing number of the over-indulgent are convinced that their statins, hypotensive agents, mini-aspirins and, if their blood sugar is on the high side, hypoglycaemic tablets to control blood sugar, will deter the grim reaper. But while medication may delay the obese person’s confrontation with him they should remember that not many octogenarians are ‘healthily obese’.

To achieve a healthy old age, obese people have to navigate the hazards of high blood pressure, heart disease, renal failure, diabetes, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis and possibly a greater chance of developing some malignancies. Good preventive medicine is an excellent pilot for this journey, but even the best pilot can’t guarantee a safe harbour.

Recent studies have confirmed that optimism over ‘healthy obesity’ is too often misplaced. Dr Ravi Retnakaran of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto has investigated the medical history of 60,000 people. His

32

study showed that obesity when younger can remain a negative factor in predicting health in middle age and beyond, even when it has been detected, corrected and effectively treated. Encouragingly, there is also evidence from this study that in formerly obese patients, correct treatment with medication and change of lifestyle greatly improve a patient’s chances of making old bones. Modern medicine has contributed hugely to an ever increasing lifespan. However it won’t ensure that all previously or currently obese people will escape the well-known complications of obesity.

Scales and a tape measure are excellent devices for assessing the risk that flab occasions. Thankfully there is no pressing need to master the confusing formula for assessing BMI (body mass index). BMI was introduced by a Belgian mathematician and sociologist in the early 19th century to assess someone’s build by dividing their weight in kilograms with the square of their height in metres, and it has confused the general public ever since.

It has now been shown that patients can achieve quicker, easier and equally valuable statistics by measuring their

waistband with a tape measure and their weight on the bathroom scales. This is especially true in older people where changes in their metabolism, muscle mass, bone density and height can give a distorted picture if they rely on the BMI. Beside every bathroom scales there should be a tape measure. Use it once a week to measure the abdomen at its greatest girth. Even laissez faire doctors suggest that a man’s should be under 40 inches – less than the girth of his bottom.

A woman’s should be under 34 inches.

Dr David Katz of Yale University has recently published a paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine that suggests that even if obese people appear healthy it is an illusion. Excess weight may later result in fatty livers that interfere with a patient’s metabolism. These metabolic changes can contribute to high blood sugar levels, increased insulin resistance in the tissues and hence diabetes, or other troubles with the pancreas.

Apparently ‘healthy obesity’ may also account, directly or indirectly, for an increased vulnerability to heart attacks, strokes and high blood pressure. Dr Katz also reminds us that as well as taking medical treatment and losing weight, patients with obesity need to review their whole lifestyle. I usually recommend that everyone capable of it should take 40 minutes a day of brisk but not violent exercise. We should all, when involved in sedentary work, move around regularly and take a wander every half hour or so. Rest is as important as exercise. Six to eight hours sleep a night is ideal but more than ten hours of sleep a night is, paradoxically, a risk factor. I have always maintained that alcohol in moderation is usually beneficial and now happily many well conducted studies have come to the same conclusion.

Overweight patients need to reduce their waistline and collar size and take the pills prescribed by their doctors. Even so, doctors and patients should remain vigilant about possible health hazards.

THE OLDIE – March 2014

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27/1/14 11:58:04

A Coastal cornucopia

J

ust because he’d given the town an art gallery didn’t mean he was a millionaire, Merton Russell-Cotes told the people of Bournemouth in 1908. On the contrary, it was impossible for any man who spent his money collecting art treasures to become a millionaire – and Merton’s appetite for collecting was insatiable.

The Bournemouth hotelier, traveller and collector had built East Cliff Hall, now the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, as a present for his wife Annie, whose appetite for collecting ‘very rare and valuable curios’ on their travels equalled his. When it came to curios, Annie Russell-Cotes thought big: a Maori war canoe and a daimyo Buddhist shrine were her idea of tourist souvenirs. The couple had returned from Japan in 1885 with a hundred cases, the Buddhist shrine only making it through customs after the intervention of friends in high places.

Russell-Cotes knew the value of friends in high places and collected them as assiduously as pictures. As the youngest son of a Staffordshire manufacturer who had died intestate, he started with nothing, but he made a pile out of Bournemouth’s Royal Bath Hotel by furnishing it with art from his collection and attracting a celebrity clientele. Oscar Wilde and the Prince of Wales both stayed there, Henry Irving was a regular guest and Sarah Bernhardt reportedly ‘went into raptures’ over a sculpture of Japanese wrestlers, revealing an unlikely knowledge of sumo. Better still, the Empress Eugénie nearly fainted after spotting a cabinet from her former boudoir at Saint-Cloud among the hotel furnishings. Ungallantly, Merton did not return it. It remains on show in the museum along with the shrine, the canoe and an astonishing miscellany of objects.

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IMAGES COURTESY OF © Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth

Laura Gascoigne continues her occasional series on regional galleries with the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, housed in an exuberantly eccentric villa perched on Bournemouth’s East Cliff

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ON THE BEACH

Facing page, clockwise from top left: Merton and Annie RussellCotes at the Royal Bath Hotel before their move to East Cliff Hall in 1901; East Cliff Hall, the museum’s eccentric home; view of the Ladies from the main hall This page, top: Louis Bosworth Hurt’s Caledonia Stern and Wild; below: John Liston Byam Shaw’s Jezebel (1896)

S

easide towns all have their share of batty buildings, but nothing quite prepares one for the battiness of East Cliff Hall. Merton’s original concept was to combine ‘the Renaissance with Italian and old Scottish baronial’, and the result is what Bramante might have come up with if commissioned to design Balmoral-on-Sea. That’s just the outside. Inside, the architect John Frederick Fogerty faced the formidable task of reconciling Elizabethan inglenooks with Moorish alcoves and Florentine palazzo doors with strips of Parthenon frieze.

East Cliff Hall was the ancestral pile Merton never had, and he decorated it with appropriate pictures – among the usual Victorian nudes and children one notices a preponderance of cows and sheep. Louis Bosworth Hurt’s Highland cattle were particular favourites, as Annie was Scottish. He ‘did not think much credit was due to any gentleman who acquired art treasures by commissioning a dealer’ and prided himself on making his own artistic choices, not all of which have stood the test of time. The job lot of vast canvases by Edwin Long RA, for which he built a special gallery extension in 1916, has proved resistant to the revival in taste for Victorian art, mainly because – alone among Victorian artists – Long is absolutely useless at titillation. His three-metre-wide Cecil B DeMille spectacular, Anno Domini, shows the Holy Family returning from Egypt past temples, pyramids, a palm grove, an African souvenir vendor hawking tat idols and a bevy of bare-breasted tambourinebashing bacchantes, to whose charms Joseph is apparently both deaf and blind. Things would have been different, one feels, had the bacchantes been painted by John Byam Shaw, whose Jezebel hangs opposite.

Finished in the final year of Queen Victoria’s reign, East Cliff Hall is the last gasp of Victorian seaside architecture, magically bottled. Even the majolica-tiled Ladies off the main hall is a museum piece virtually untouched since Lillie Langtry used it, its plumbing a testament to the undiminished power of Victorian sanitary engineering. When you pull the chain on the ‘Charlotte’ Staffordshire cistern dated 1889, the flush produces a roar like Niagara Falls.

GALLERY INFORMATION Open 10.00am to 5.00pm Tuesday to Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays. (Closed Good Friday and Christmas Day.) Admission is free from 1st October until 31st March.

Charges apply from 1st April to 30th September Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, East Cliff Promenade, Bournemouth BH1 3AA Telephone +44 (0)1202 451858 www.russell-cotes.bournemouth.gov.uk A special exhibition, De Morgans and the Sea, opens on 1st April

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SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

Adapt and survive Superbyways: your guide to digital life, by Webster WHEN TWO OR THREE newspaper writers get together, especially if they are over 50, there tends to be a lot of glum talk about how the internet is killing their industry. Sales of printed newspapers are declining, the senior writers are being laid off – the evil web is leaving nowhere for the poor scribbler to earn his crust.

What is actually happening is that we are simply returning to normal: the internet has removed the monopoly that newspapers had become used to, and their ability to make easy money has gone with it. Tough, but it comes to all industries eventually.

There is actually more writing published nowadays than ever before, but most of it is published on the internet and earns writers very little, if anything – a successful independent website might generate just enough to support a couple of people, but no more.

As so often, I find that we’ve been here before. Students of the history of newspapers will recognise the pattern.

I’ve been reading the recollections of a young journalist in the 1930s; he started on the grand-sounding Leeds Guardian, but he doubled the staff numbers by joining; when he moved to the much bigger Driffield Times, he was half the staff there as well – two men wrote it all.

They loved the work and didn’t expect much in return. ‘Even successful journal-

ists in those days couldn’t afford a car,’ he wrote, but his father, a builders’ merchant, could. This placed us journalists at a pretty humble level, and the internet is sending us back there. Not a bad thing to happen, from time to time, to any trade or profession; it teaches humility (it’s about time it happened to lawyers).

The plain fact is that the internet is bringing journalism back to where it was a hundred years ago. The interim period, (wealthy proprietors, well-paid writers, high advertising rates) was simply an aberration.

In 1930, if you owned a print works, owning a newspaper was one way of bringing in regular work for your presses, and as newspapers were the only route to the news, they sold well enough.

There were hundreds, if not thousands, of very local newspapers reporting very local events; they were profitable, but only just – seldom supporting more than a couple of ill-paid writers. These long-dead two-man papers now have an internet descendant, the special interest news website; they exist in their thousands and are growing in number. Often run by just one or two people, they may generate some income from advertising, and may sell some products and receive a commission – but except for a few successes (Guido Fawkes, moneysavingexpert.com, Huffington Post) the vast majority exist

Webster’s webwatch For Webster’s latest top tips, visit his blog at www.theoldie.co.uk www.bl.uk/voices-of-science Part of the British Library site – videos and audio clips documenting the development of British technology and engineering from 1940.

Among many, listen to Conway Berners-Lee, father of Sir Tim, inventor of the internet. www.gerontius.net Run by two musical brothers for choral music enthusiasts, this allows you to find choirs to join and choral concerts to attend. It is also a good forum for asking advice from other choirs, sharing scores and much more.

Ask Webst er

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 mainly as exercises in survival, or simply to promote the writers.

But people always like local news, so here’s my idea for someone’s next big internet fortune: build up a chain of very local news websites, working just as the local weekly paper did in the Thirties, with high editorial standards (accuracy and good writing) but simply reporting local news: local magistrates’ cases, recent wills, local sports, business and politics.

Encourage locals to submit as much as they like, eg reports of school matches or fetes. Keep costs low by centralising the publishing mechanism (on the internet it doesn’t matter where you are). Become the local site of record and you’ll quickly grab lots of local advertising.

No writer would get rich, but they’d survive – and, as Dr Johnson said, ‘the purpose of a writer is to be read’.

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27/1/14 12:06:46

P U T T H AT I N Y O U R P I P E . . .

SEND US YOUR TXT

Lizzie Enfield ‘WHAT DO you want for your birthday?’ my father asks my daughter.

‘You won’t want to give her what she wants,’ I intervene, before my middle child has a chance to answer.

‘Whatever it is, she can have it.’ Dad clearly relishes the chance to undermine what little authority I have.

‘She wants a pipe. Ha!’ I think I have trumped him. My daughter is going to be 14. What self-respecting granddad would give his teenage granddaughter a pipe?

‘Ah, very well, you shall have one,’ he replies. ‘I remember when I was six I wanted this set of very long clay pipes, like you see native Americans smoking.’

‘I don’t suppose you got them,’ I begin, but I am wrong again.

‘Yes, I did,’ Dad says. ‘My mother said I was too young to smoke tobacco but she let me smoke tea in them. I seem to remember it was very hot but that may have been because I was not used to smoking tobacco in the first place.’

My daughter, for all her eccentric wanting of a pipe as a fashion accessory, had no intention of smoking anything in it and is slightly appalled that her granddad was smoking tea by the age of six.

He’d moved on to tobacco by his twenties and stayed on it for at least another twenty years, a fact which the generation which has grown up with ‘anti-smoking lessons’ on the national curriculum finds bizarrely outrageous.

We recently watched the TV drama Lucan.

‘Why did he kill the nanny?’ asked one of the children.

‘Because he thought she was his wife,’ replied my husband.

They questioned this no further. Killing your wife, to them, seemed rather more acceptable than the heinous crime Lady Lucan had committed.

‘She smoked cigarettes indoors with her arms around her children,’ my offspring wailed.

‘Everyone used to do that,’ I said.

They claim to be horrified, but my daughter still wants a pipe and once she has one...

It’s a bit like a teetotaller asking for a new set of wine glasses. You’ve got the receptacle; surely it’s only a matter of time before you are

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tempted to use it for its intended purpose?

I have to admit to a certain nostalgia for roomfuls of grandparents sitting around emptying, filling and cleaning their pipes, and when they’d done with all of that, actually smoking them. There was something appealing about the ritual of it all, which was so much more enticing than simply lighting up a cigarette, and seemed to induce greater thoughtfulness too.

They weren’t just smoking, even the cigarette smokers: they were having a tobacco-craving-induced pause for thoughtfulness. I wonder if the smoking ban has led to an increase in rash decisions?

Gandalf, Bertrand Russell, President Ford, Einstein, Harold Wilson – they all puffed pipes and gave us things to stuff in ours and smoke along the way.

Without a pipe there would have been no theory of relativity, no Holmesian threepipe problems, no surrealist ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ painting.

Harold Wilson was probably the most famous British pipe smoker and took great delight in unpacking his pipe paraphernalia, especially during live TV interviews. It gave him time to think, something many contemporary smokers still value.

‘If I make a decision without first having a cigarette, it’s often a bad one,’ says one of my few friends who still smokes.

Yes, we all know it kills, but maybe thousands of lives would have been saved in Iraq, for example, if Blair had paused to fill his pipe before deciding to go to war. Maybe if he’d gone through the whole Wilson ritual, by the time he’d finished, the WMD argument might have seemed a bit flaky.

I’ve never smoked but I used to envy the smokers in the office their ten minutes’ thinking time before reaching a decision about anything of importance. All the quitters complain that while there are plenty of nicotine substitutes, there is no good substitute for the pause for reflection offered by a fag break.

‘An e-cigarette has no natural conclusion,’ complains a recent switcher.

‘I need an egg-timer to go with it.’

And when I outline some of the above to him, he nods wisely. ‘I was never addicted to smoking,’ he says. ‘I was addicted to thinking.’

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

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● New Year honours: still no Dame Esther Rantzen. Shame on you, Mr Cameron.

Esther, Esher ● Why anyone thinks Esther Rantzen should be made a Dame beggars belief. Dame Edna gets my vote. Come on Cameron. Make it official..

Imran, Norwood ● Thanks to the kind lady who held the door open for me at the bus station.

Maurice, Eastbourne ● A big thank you to the young woman who pointed out I had put my tin of tuna into her trolley by mistake at Waitrose last Friday.

Joan, Sanderstead ● Our local electrician is a Mr Lightbulb.

Uncanny!

Anselm, St Ives ● You got it wrong, Anselm. It’s like Mr Potato who owns the fish and chip shop in our high street. It’s just made up.

Vic, Doncaster ● No it isn’t, Vic. I live near a Mr Lightbulb, only he is a plumber.

Doris, Truro. ● Lightbulb is a Dutch name. Originally it was Liechtbalb. They were famous for making cake stands.

Linda, Ilford ● For sale: complete set of ‘Hector’s House’ (videos). Missing episodes 17–23. £79.99.

Betty, Hereford ● I have just noticed the sell-by date on a walnut cake I just purchased is April 21st, the Queen’s birthday.

Sandra, Eltham

THE OLDIE – March 2014

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Virginia Ironside Pumping Ironside

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some kind of horrible act of abuse, about which my grandchildren’s grandchildren will say: ‘You mean they put dogs on chains? And they left them in a house and went out, when the poor animals never knew if their owners were ever coming back or not? So cruel!’

So I joined a gym. As you may have gathered, I am not a gym person. I come from a family in which taking care of your body or, indeed, considering yourself in any way at all, was considered extremely low-grade. Showing tears, love, self-pity, compassion or taking to your bed if you felt rotten were all things that were done on the sly and in private. After John Amery (known as Jack), a Fascist traitor who had been an unhinged pupil at my great-aunt’s school, had been sentenced to death, my great-aunt, on the day of his hanging, looked at the clock and, seeing it was midday, commented to my father: ‘Well, Jack’s gone. Would you pass me an orange?’

So instead of feeling a glow of self-satisfaction when I leave the gym, gasping and sweating, I come away not only feeling ill with exercise but pervaded with a dreadful sense of guilt. I can almost see my great aunt pursing her lips and suggesting that, next time, I might prefer to sit down and read a good book on Gothic architecture.

The only plus is that the machines at

the gym all have tellies incorporated into their screens – the ones which show you how long you’ve been on the machine, your heartbeat and so on. And although most of the time there’s nothing to watch except shows about antiques, quizzes, old Westerns or people making over their houses, I did manage to catch one gem that drew me back to the gym each week. Keith Floyd’s cooking programmes were repeated and I fell in love. It’s quite fun falling in love with a dead person, because you can never be disappointed or betrayed. Many people have told me what an impossibly unpleasant person Keith could be. But all I see is the darling in him. And even though here I am, gasping and puffing and, no doubt, looking terrible and feeling wretchedly guilty, here’s good old Keith, in his impeccable linen suit, his bow tie immaculately tied, looking me in the eyes over a sliver of marinated veal, winking and flirting and sipping and laughing.

Unfortunately the series is over and I’m now lumbered with a terrible panel of fat old cooks in jerseys and jeans, all joshing and being blokish over coarse slabs of beef and making jokes about sprouts (surely one of the more delicious vegetables, no? I’m sure Keith would have loved them).

I have a feeling that at this rate the fitness jag is soon going to go the way of all jags. Goodbye Keith and back to Waitrose for my weekly exercise fix.

• Virginia’s one-woman show Growing Old Disgracefully is on in Swindon in March and in Deal in April. See www.virginiaironside.org for details.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR ROBINS

I

’ve never seen the point of exercising deliberately. I’ve always thought that the exercise I take is quite enough already – staggering up and down the stairs looking for my car keys, then walking up and down the street looking for my car, stomping round aisle after aisle at Waitrose, and then lifting the heavy shopping back into the house. And that’s not counting the bending down to search for dropped hairpins or reaching up to rehook the shower curtain.

When a doctor asked me recently if I ever got out of breath when I ran for the bus, I heard myself replying, in the style popularised by Lady Bracknell: ‘Run? For a bus?’

But for some reason recently the drip-drip-drip of newspaper articles and medical advice got to me. Everywhere I turned there was yet another person suggesting I walked for twenty minutes each day (sorry, walked ‘briskly’), or got out of breath at least once a week, or engaged in some kind of physical activity – that is, if I didn’t want to fall off my perch in a couple of years. So I realised the only answer was either to get a dog or join a gym.

Now I know there are some people who love dogs. Some people who are turned on by the thumping tail, the panting tongue, the adoring eyes. But to be honest, I’ve always found dogs rather pitiful. I feel sad seeing them waiting to be attached to their chains. I wince hearing them being ordered to their baskets: ‘BASKET!’ I feel I’m witnessing

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rant

ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE WAY

WILFRED DE’ATH reminisces about his writer friend Colin Wilson, who died last year aged 82 COLIN WILSON died on the same day as Nelson Mandela (5th December 2013) and so did not receive the press attention he deserved. He was quite used to this, since his literary reputation had been in steep decline since the first, explosive publication of The Outsider in 1956. He kept the show on the road with innumerable pot-boilers, books on existentialism, the occult, indifferent detective fiction, etc, but things were never the same again after the literary establishment turned their collective backs on him.

I was doing National Service when the book came out, but I devoured it eagerly during my first term at Oxford (1957) and so acquired a nodding acquaintance with Nietszche, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Hemingway and Kafka along with important figures like Van Gogh, Nijinsky and Lawrence of Arabia.

I used to pepper my weekly essays with references to these writers, much to the bemusement of my English tutors who had never heard of them.

Colin and I finally met up in 1966 and remained friends for 45 years until he had a stroke in 2012. In the Seventies and Eighties I would spend whole weeks on his bungalow estate in Gorran Haven, Cornwall, where Colin had the largest collection of books and records I have ever seen. In the evenings, posh wine would be served before and with an excellent meal cooked by his long-

suffering second wife, Joy. At about 2am, one would go to bed, somewhat blurry, often accompanied by a long-haired ‘hippy’ girl of the type Colin seemed to attract and whose favours he would willingly bestow on his many friends once he had enjoyed them himself. After a week or so of this, one would return to London with a terrible hangover.

I was deeply fond of Colin and admired his erudition, but he was not an easy person to be friends with. In the afternoon he would take one for long cliff-top walks and if he sensed that you suffered from vertigo (which I do) would walk you as close to the edge as he could. There is a story, which I believe, that he once watched a ship sinking with all hands in Carlyon Bay and, instead of calling for help, went home and played Beethoven on his gramophone.

If you were unwise enough to take an attractive girl-friend along on one of these visits, Colin would invariably attempt to seduce her, usually successfully. Joy would sit tight-lipped through all this.

The stupid tabloid press labelled Colin an ‘Angry Young Man’ along with Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Osborne, John Wain et al. But he was nothing of the sort. He was an amiable, highly eccentric figure, only ‘angry’ when his dinner was late in arriving or his publisher had failed to come up with a massive advance. I miss him dreadfully.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM PLANT

Debauches with a fellow outsider

I RETIRED LAST YEAR when we moved back from France to Scotland, where we were greeted by a sheaf of letters from Scottish Power extolling the advantages of paying our energy bills by direct debit.

We were told we ‘owed them’ £290 for June – based on estimated readings.

A few days later further letters arrived alleging that we now ‘owed them’ some £580 for the first two months.

When we rang them up (premium rate phone line) they conceded that the actual sum owing had been re-calculated at roughly £70. When we gave them a current meter reading, a helpful callcentre operator conceded that no money was owing and the account was in credit.

Meanwhile an aggressive little note from TV Licensing noted that our address is listed on their records as unlicensed.

We were therefore almost certainly breaking the law. An unscheduled visit from their local snooper would follow shortly, and they would be pleased to prosecute us, with a fine and a criminal record to follow. I wrote a little note to their website and had a courteous reply from their call-centre operative, since when I have received two further letters on consecutive days with different signatures.

One says that the bailiffs will be coming shortly. The other merely holds out the prospect of a visit in the coming days.

We won’t be able to pay any of these threatened fines: we’ve been waiting for weeks for a promised cheque-book from the Bank of Scotland (delay explained by the manager as ‘outsourcing the printing’, over which she has no control). Meanwhile NatWest told me to come back in a week for a bank card. When I went it wasn’t there.

I used to think French banks were bad...

CHRISTOPHER MARTIN

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RADIO NIGHTS

brown fabric cover over the speaker with a glistening gold-coloured thread running through it. There’s a tuning wheel on one side of the glass indicator panel showing the stations – Hilversum, Brussels, Prague, Luxembourg... Along the base of the panel are several chunky cream-coloured cube-shaped buttons, each about the size of a marshmallow.

But will there be an en suite? There is!

My room is small but spotless; there are three hangers in the wardrobe, a TV and a bedside light. The latter doesn’t seem to work but after dancing till ten that is hardly going to matter.

F

Last tango in

Margate DIANA MELLY and her dancing partner Raymond head off to the East Kent coast for a twirl around the Winter Gardens Ballroom Illustrated by Peter Bailey

I

’m a performance poet,’ says the receptionist at the Margate hotel.

‘This is my website.’ He scribbles the address down on a bit of scrap paper.

‘Perhaps we could have the keys to our rooms and look at it later?’

I don’t want to be rude but I’m quite anxious to see my room and find out if it has an en suite. I’ve arrived in Margate with Raymond my dance partner – well, teacher really – for an evening dance at

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the Winter Gardens Ballroom. Raymond has found us this hotel which is only £27 a night, so it’s on the cards that the nearest loo will be down a passage. Back in the Sixties, when I went on tour with George, I don’t think en suites existed in the sort of hotels that jazz musicians stayed in.

But that was when I was in my twenties and didn’t have to get up in the night.

In the reception area is a very large radio from the Forties. It’s finished in light walnut veneer and has a beige-

or some reason Raymond wants to go for a paddle – but I need lunch. Margate has fish and chips or pizza to offer. We settle for fish and chips, which I haven’t had since they were wrapped in the Sunday Dispatch.

Raymond goes the whole hog and has sliced white bread and butter with his and a mug of strong tea. We stop at the Turner gallery where there is a rather disappointing exhibition and then Raymond goes for his paddle with the bottoms of his trousers rolled. I feel I’ve missed a photo opportunity there.

After a bracing walk along the seafront past Frank’s Night Club (closed and boarded up), tenpin bowling (open and packed) and numerous pawn shops also doing good business, Raymond (‘call me old fashioned’) takes my arm and we cross the road for tea and cakes in a dainty tea shop. I consider broaching the subject of our ‘issue’ with the Argentine tango. It was either an issue or a problem, I’m not quite sure of the difference; I don’t think it was a row but I did call him a pig.

It happened last week at my regular tango lesson. There are six of us learning and six professional partners, of whom Raymond is one. Usually I dance with Raymond, but that night when I completely failed to notice him offering me the back of his knee for a gancho, he became impatient with me and so I called him a pig. At that point our instructor said we could change partners, so Raymond seized the opportunity to dump me.

Hoping the chocolate cake has worked its magic on Raymond’s sweet tooth, I begin. ‘Raymond, I could write some lines saying “I must not call my teacher a pig”, or I could just say sorry.’

‘If being lippy,’ he replies ‘does anything at all to improve your tango, so be it.’

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B

ack at the hotel I change into my skinny black Jasper Conran jeans and a grey silk top covered in sequins. From the outside, the Winter Gardens Ballroom looks a little sad, but inside it’s dazzling. It was built at a cost of £26,000 in 1911 and decorated in the neo-Grecian style. In the early 1920s performers like Carrie Tubb, Harry Dearth, Pavlova and Melba were engaged to play in the elegant concert hall. During the war it acted as a receiving station for some of the 46,000 troops who landed at Margate from Dunkirk. After the war Laurel & Hardy and Vera Lynn appeared there; and in the Sixties so did George and the Beatles.

In the ballroom there is a large revolving glitter ball competing with my sequin top for the bling effect; there’s a bar and a bay window with a 180 degree view of the sea. Lots of familiar faces from other tea dances have come: there’s the couple we call Cuddles because even in the jive they stay wrapped round each other, a young girl I call Druggy because she told Raymond that she flies to and from Mexico once a month, and a man I call Uppy because he gives off an upperclass vibe. I was quite wrong about him – we chatted at the bar and I realised he came straight from Essex, but unlike me hadn’t been given elocution lessons.

It’s last waltz time – ‘Tennessee Waltz’, a sad song about a girl whose best friend goes off with her lover. I identified with that pathetic creature before I’d even kissed a boy.

Back at the hotel the ancient night porter who lets us in has got the old radio on; the light it gives off is like that from a real living-room fire. The familiar medium-wave sound, muffled and complete with buzzes and clicks as it fades in and out, is friendly and reassuring. And it’s playing ‘After You’ve Gone’, one of my favourites. I rather wished it was George singing. That would have been perfect.

‘Where’s the exit solution?’

Notes from the sofa Stollidges and all that

by Raymond Briggs One of the few good things about old age is that you still have a foothold in another world – the world of your youth. This is now so far away and so extraordinary that younger people can scarcely believe it ever existed, particularly if it happened in a place they now know well.

My neighbour, Tom, a retired farmer soon to be ninety years old, has lived here all his life. He was born in our local pub, in 1925, one of nine brothers and sisters. His father ran the pub part-time as he was mainly a farmer. The beer was in wooden barrels with wooden taps and these stood on low wooden stools, which Tom says were called ‘stollidges’.

(Can’t find it in the OED, so possibly a dialect word?) This made the taps difficult to get at, as they were at knee level. His father got fed up with this, so he bought a garden watering can, filled it from a barrel and used it to pour the beer into the glasses.

Today, it is a smart ‘gastro-pub’ with candle-lit tables, menus and wine lists.

Wine is in old-fashioned glass bottles with not a watering can in sight.

There was no electricity, no gas, and no running water, let alone hot water. Outside was a well, with the usual lever pump and a bucket. Lighting was by oil lamps.

There was no heating apart from the coalfired kitchen range and open fires.

Tom’s mother did not buy her flour in paper bags from shops, she bought it in quarter-hundredweight sacks.

There was no heating at all in the bedrooms, but as the children slept three to a bed, they all survived. Baths were taken in a tin bath which was kept outside hanging on the wall, so there was no need for a ‘bathroom’. The lavatory was

at the far end of the ‘garden’, and you usually had to find your way to it through some peacefully grazing cows.

Today, it is a paved garden terrace with flowering shrubs, dining tables and waitresses flitting about.

In the front of the pub was a flint wall with rings set in it. This was where any passing cavalry, dropping in for a pint, would tether their horses.

Horses were an essential part of farming at that time. Tom’s father, farming since 1921, only got his first tractor in 1938. Before then, everything was done by horses. The four in the picture were called Traveller, Jack, Prince and Darling, and they still had two horses working in 1953.

Beer was fourpence a pint (old pence, yoof – 240 to the pound) and ten fags were fourpence. One old boy used to come in regularly, put a tanner down on the bar, get his ten fags for fourpence and half a pint of beer for tuppence.

Obviously, there was no telly, no phones, no mobiles, no computers, no internet and no car. However, they did get a wireless set in the mid-Thirties.

This was powered by a huge, glass, acid-filled battery and once a week a man came up from a shop in the village to take the empty battery away to charge it.

This cost fourpence. As no one else had a wireless, neighbours would crowd in on Christmas Day to hear the King’s Speech.

PS: We have a Czech person staying with us at the moment (foreign, of course, but well-behaved and quite nice). She says they have ‘stollidges’ in her language – small, heavy wooden stools. But being foreign, they spell it wrong: STOLICKY. Even so, it’s better than the OED, who can’t spell it at all.

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s od the lot o f y o u

John Sweeney

Roving Report er

Winter of discontent Vlad’s vanity Olympics come at a high cost to villagers nearby We roll up to a checkpoint in Russia’s Deep South where three soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs strut their stuff on a green bluff overlooking the cold blue river that flows from the Caucasus down to the Black Sea. The checkpoint squats halfway through the village of Akhshtyr to the east of Sochi, where Vladimir Putin’s Olympic games are to be held.

It’s a nowhere kind of place, not special, but it was never quite as ugly as it is now.

Higher up is a massive quarry, where rock for cement for the Olympics has been hewed, and now the big hole in the ground is to be a landfill dump. Lorries thunder through the checkpoint all the livelong day, engines roaring as they inch past our car, but we can’t move.

The soldiers are FSB – the new name for the old KGB – and the lead grunt barks at me in Russian that we cannot pass.

But to do our job, we must. Local people complain that a brand new motorway/rail link has completely cut off the village from the good road to Sochi. A promised access road has not been built, so everyone, including schoolkids, must run across the motorway or drive an extra hour down a muddy track. The road/ rail link cost £6 billion, so the joke is it would have been cheaper to pave it with Louis Vuitton handbags. To talk to the villagers – to do our job – we’ve got to get through the checkpoint.

I look the FSB grunt in the eye and say: ‘President Putin promised the IOC [International Olympic Committee] that journalists would be welcome in Sochi.’

My colleague Nick Sturdee translates and a look of unease clouds the FSB grunt’s face: he’s young, blond and he’s got a big gun. But nor does he want to fall out with some stranger who quotes the President… He demands passports and questions our status: ‘How do we know you are journalists?’ We don’t have Russian press passes. That’s because although we sent in applications three weeks ago, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow does not have ink to print our photographs.

The FSB man may not have known much of the Church of Scientology before. He does now. (I’d like to thank the Church for making me infamous on the internet: it’s ever so useful half-way up a mountain in the Caucasus.)

One of the villagers gave me a card. It belonged to Robert Roxburgh of the IOC, who had been to this very spot. I phoned him, got an answering machine, but told it of our plight. After a lot of argy-bargy, they allowed us to walk through the checkpoint, but they kept our passports.

On the edge of a field, our interviewees gathered: an old babushka (grandma) with bright gold teeth; a granddad, probably Armenian; and Ilya, an ex-soldier with a weakness for country and western music.

To amuse him, I sang the opening bars of ‘You took a fine time to leave me, Lucille’.

What was striking was that all three were happy to be filmed and really stuck it to the authorities. They told us that to get to school, across the icy torrent in the dark, kids must now scramble across a terrifyingly rickety wooden footbridge with missing slats. They complained that the quarry, owned by Russian Railways, which is run by a chum of Putin, should never have been built in a national park.

The traffic is dangerous, and one local man has been killed. They complained, too, that their water wells have died because of the quarry and that the pipe

for a new pump, specially built in 2010, was smashed by the roadworks – so they are without fresh water. I tried to work one of the fancy new pumps. Not a drop.

We finished filming the villagers, knowing that we had plenty to ask the mayor of Sochi a couple of days later to get the authorities’ side of the story. But on our return a fresh FSB officer had arrived, and we were given paperwork and asked to sign it. The paperwork said that we admitted entering ‘the border zone’ – a bureaucratic infringement. To get our passports back, all we had to do was sign.

No deal. We had done nothing wrong, had complied with the FSB’s suggestion that we explore the village on foot, and had not been warned about the possible breach of the law. After all, Robert Roxburgh had been to this very spot – no breach of the law for the IOC. Someone from the IOC phoned, advising us to sign the paperwork. Not helpful. Eventually, one of the FSB chaps suggested we could write: ‘I refuse to sign’ – and then sign that qualification.

With that absurdity done, we were free to go about our lawful business.

Ilya phoned us later that night. The FSB had looked relieved as we left. But, he said, when German TV drove up to the checkpoint an hour later, ‘You should have seen their faces.’

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DERVLA MURPHY found Hebron on the West Bank a ghost town, left desolate since the 1994 Goldstein massacre at a mosque in the Tomb of the Patriarchs

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lowly I ascended a long flight of wide granite steps leading to the Ibrahimi mosque, trailing my right hand along Herod’s wall – 20 metres high, some of its blocks measuring 7.5. x 1.4 metres. Inevitably I remembered Dr Baruch Goldstein who on another cold, foggy February morning drove from Kiryat Arba and walked up these steps wearing

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his IDF uniform, armed with a rifle. God wanted him to kill as many Muslims as possible while they were kneeling within the Haram al-Ibrahimi saying their Friday prayers.

A few days earlier, in February 2009, I had crossed the ‘border’ under a low grey sky into Hebron’s H2 sector.

Here at Bab al-Zawiya in al-Khalil (Hebron in Arabic) the besieged Old

City begins, now resembling a war zone (which it too often is) rather than a commercial and residential district (which it once was). Side streets are barricaded by tangles of razor wire, by metal gates six metres high, by concrete blocks three metres square. Look up and you see on high roofs soldiers and guns and sandbags, and Israeli flags and radio antennae sprouting

PHOTO COURTESY OF: © EITAN SIMANOR, RYAN RODRICK BEILER AND ALAMY

A SACRED SHAME

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ANCIENT HISTORY

from Mamluk domes. At street level all is quiet; only settler and security force vehicles are allowed – and a few Palestinian cars with special permits obtained after prolonged hassles.

Since the 1994 massacre carried out

by Dr Goldstein – an American Jewish settler who opened fire in the mosque in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 Palestinians and wounding more than 125 – more than half the Old City’s shops have been closed and sealed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and its resident population has declined from 30,000 to 10,000. Traditionally, this souk was one of the West Bank’s busiest, employing thousands. Why was a Palestinian city punished because a Brooklyn-born religious maniac murdered 29 Palestinians?

slightly apprehensive. A would-be tourist guide, he hoped to convert this longempty house into a backpackers’ hostel.

But would I now find it too primitive? He couldn’t know that by Balata standards (the Palestinian refugee camp) it seemed five-star. Hisham was congenial and, I discovered, very knowledgeable. On his brief daily visits to check on my welfare, he drip-fed me fascinating bits of local lore.

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isham’s was one of many homes attacked by Israeli settlers during the Eighties and early Nineties. Most of the neighbouring houses are now empty, and one had been half-demolished by settlers in retaliation for the owner’s refusal to sell. A large sheet of corrugated iron hung loose from a freestanding

More than half the Old City’s shops have been closed and sealed by the IDF. Traditionally, this souk was one of the West Bank’s busiest, employing thousands At the entrance to the medieval souk I turned left up a short, steep, narrow street of 18th-century three-storey terraced houses, the pre-settler homes of prosperous extended families – Palestinian merchants, doctors, lawyers and government officials. My landlord, Hisham, was waiting for me, looking ABOVE: The tomb of Baruch Goldstein on Israel’s West Bank BELOW: Israeli forces chase Palestinians in clashes after a protest against the closure of the Shuhada Street to Palestinians, Hebron, February 2013

gable end, and when the wind rose its clattering sounded like protests reverberating through this otherwise silent street. If I leaned out of my ironbarred window I could see – within 100 yards – three separate army posts guarding the bright new settlement buildings that tower above al-Khalil’s ancient souk. In this top-floor, highceilinged flat only the reception room and the kitchen were electrified. After dark, as I made my way around by torchlight, I fancied happy families had lived here; the ghosts were amiable.

Hisham borrowed a rusty one-bar electric fire which crackled ominously when plugged in and did nothing appreciable to raise the temperature. All day the sky remained low and dark, the wind icy, the thunder loud, the hail showers frequent.

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he wind was still icy when I set off at sunrise for al-Haram al-Ibrahimi/the Tomb of the Patriarchs, to Jews and Muslims one of the most sacred places in Palestine, the burial ground for Abraham and Sarah, and other Hebrew patriarchs and their wives. No archaeological artefact has been found to indicate that this particular place was holy before Herod built a magnificent structure here in the first century BC to honour Abraham

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ANCIENT HISTORY

PHOTO COURTESY OF: © Ryan Rodrick Beiler, www.BibleLandPictures.com AND Alamy

LEFT: Israeli soldiers occupy a Palestinian rooftop during a protest in Hebron BELOW: The minbar (pulpit) in the al-Ibrahimi mosque in the Tomb of the Patriarchs

et al. But that’s irrelevant: Genesis guarantees the link between the general Hebron area and the patriarchs.

For fifteen minutes I walked through the silent souk, past scores of shuttered shops, meeting no one. At that hour, before the Goldstein massacre, those covered passageways and open alleys would have been as bustling as Nablus’s casbah. Poor Hebron! A few hours later some shops would open but even at its busiest the old souk is now two-thirds ‘in abeyance’, as one mournful carpet merchant put it.

All exits are aggressively militarised.

I found myself confronting thick metal bars blocking a graceful archway overlooked from on high by electronic gadgets. I squeezed into a covered passageway where I pushed slowly through a heavy, ceiling-high turnstile admitting me to another short, covered passageway lined with shops – their doors welded shut. Beside the next iron grill a soldier in a sentry-box on stilts bent down to take my passport. Eleven other conscripts lounged nearby, all wearing woolly balaclavas and scarves and gloves but looking cold and extra bad-tempered.

After making it through the final checkpoint, I reached the entrance of the al-Ibrahimi mosque, remembering Dr Baruch Goldstein. In the vast twilit vestibule a smiling youth pigeon-holed my boots and whispered, ‘Welcome!

Welcome!’ – followed by what sounded like a brief Arabic prayer. Then I entered the empty mosque – where something very odd happened. All thoughts of Goldstein and his immense significance evaporated, as did the anger engendered

by Hebron’s tragedy – which can feel like the Palestinians’ tragedy in concentrated form. A strangeness overwhelmed me: suddenly I seemed to have been transferred to another plane. But by what? Maybe nothing more than this mosque’s densely complicated history.

Like all the Holy Land’s places of

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pilgrimage, the Haram al-Ibrahimi is an exciting cultural ragbag. Herodian stonework, chunks of the Emperor Justinian’s church incorporated into an early Umayyad mosque – itself added to by Ayyubids, before the Crusaders turned it into a church and contributed the stained-glass window above the main entrance and the soaring central arches.

The Ottomans added and subtracted bits and pieces – nothing of much consequence, certainly nothing to rival the marquetry minbar (pulpit) created for the Ascalon mosque in 1091 and exactly a century later moved to Hebron on Saladin’s instructions. During all my visits to Haram al-Ibrahimi I found myself repeatedly drawn back to the minbar.

In 1994 the Haram was divided into ‘mosque’ and ‘synagogue’ and the connecting doors are kept permanently locked, a necessary but sad precaution.

Everyone can see, through bars, the makebelieve tombs of Abraham and Sarah, 14th-century Mamluk cenotaphs resembling decorated tents. The IDF prevent Jews and people with Jewish surnames from entering the mosque. They also maintain a depot, at the far side of the building, where settlers must leave their weapons before entering the synagogue.

For over an hour I was alone in that extraordinary space, its tranquillity so mysteriously unblemished. Then the first local worshippers appeared, soon followed by groups of debating madrassa students and visiting pilgrims led by imams. The welcoming youth, who had remained tactfully in the background while I was alone, identified the arrivals in broken English. Mosques are not reserved for prayer and religious ceremonies; many also serve as multipurpose social centres.

All exits are aggressively militarised. I found myself confronting thick metal bars blocking a graceful archway overlooked from on high by electronic gadgets

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he settlers’ territory semisurrounds Haram al-Ibrahimi and, after a close scrutiny of IDs, foreigners are allowed through the barrier. By chance, this being the Sabbath, I had a close-up view of scores returning from their synagogue. Some were in (very large) family groups, some walked alone, still reading half-aloud from prayer books. Most men carried heavy weapons and wore the selfdesigned uniform of those vigilante units which occasionally clash with the IDF if the latter seem ‘over-protective’ towards Palestinians (a rare circumstance). In general Hebron’s settlers are US-born, with a soupçon of newish immigrants from France. I feigned friendliness: big smile, jolly ‘Good morning!’ Most pretended not to see me though we were within touching distance. Some looked briefly at me with hate in their eyes.

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East of Islington

The unusual life of Sam Taylor and friends

I cancan, can you?

Mrs Boomy’s dancing calamity was well documented by her loving husband

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ince emigrating to the Pyrenees, Matt Boomy (the man who lost everything in the 1980s except his Stonyhurst accent) has changed. Some of the alterations have been beyond his control – the bald patch wasn’t planned, for instance. But many were self-inflicted. The new Poirot-style moustache set against the mustardcoloured ‘casual’ trousers. Or the penchant for dousing himself in cologne. Even the new handbag-sized dog. In short, it was a whole new Matt Boomy.

He and Mrs Boomy had also developed a new group of friends and taken up some radical outside interests. Most notably, cancan lessons. Or, to be more precise, Mrs Boomy had taken up cancan lessons. Monsieur Boomy (as he now signed himself) was more of a committed spectator. ‘There’s nothing wrong with a girl in fishnets,’ he explained in one of his rare round robin emails to those left behind in the old country. However, there was everything wrong with the accompanying photograph of his fortysomething wife in what appeared to be a Cabaret-style pose, but nobody could accuse her of not being game.

Their new social circle was culled less from the honest soil-toiling farmers who apparently made up most of their domain, and more from the other economic refugees who had sold their small flats in London in order to buy vast, drafty barns and petits manoirs in the middle of nowhere. Theirs was a life given over to thirty-mile round trips to the supermarché to stock up on vats of cheap wine that were glugged down during the domestic row on the return journey. Driving while under the influence of a strong red appeared to be the norm. In fact, almost everything in Matt Boomy’s new life seemed to be conducted while under the influence. And that included Mrs Boomy’s cancan.

Quite how serious the break was in her arm wasn’t made completely clear by

his round robin, but he did post helpful blow-by-blow phone grabs of her rather dramatic fall from grace. It appeared they were having a party to, umm, celebrate the success of their last party. Indeed, parties were a weekly occurrence among those with nothing else to do.

Mrs Boomy had seemingly taken offence at a remark by one of their guests and, not shy of utilising her skill base, she had attempted to cancan him. Being from Scotland, he had already lost his front teeth once and had no intention of losing them again, so he grabbed her leg in self-defence. The ensuing backflip was a cancan manoeuvre like no other and is well on its way to being a YouTube hit.

Mercifully the levels of alcohol in her system were so great that she didn’t feel a thing and was able to rejoin the other high-kicking enthusiasts for a

final round on the dance floor. The next morning she looked a little worse for wear (an image again helpfully captured by her devoted husband) and so they decided to take her to the local hospital.

Quite why they went by motorbike is unclear, but Mrs Boomy’s attempts to ride pillion while holding on with one arm and dangling the balloon-sized other one was impressive. Or so the doctor thought. Would they mind sitting on the bike so he could take an Instagram picture? he asked when he discovered how they had reached A&E. He would set the arm as soon as he had the photo. ‘Think it of it as a preliminary to the X-ray,’ he said. Mrs Boomy was happy to strike a pose. Would he like to see her cancan? she wondered. The doctor said that was very kind, but he wasn’t allowed to get personally involved with the patients.

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ED REARDON’S

MONTH

Broadsides from the Bard of Berkhamsted As told to ANDREW NICKOLDS

OPENING THE NEWSPAPERS has become a much more dangerous operation in recent months. Not just because of hitting oneself in the face with the stick at the library, or finding something wet and unappealing stuck between the pages of a Metro discarded on the train; these are occupational hazards for the freelance writer. No, it’s discovering the obituaries, in ever-increasing numbers, of genuine ‘celebrities’ we can ill afford to lose.

Joan Fontaine came as a particular blow, bringing to an end the long-lasting feud with her sister Olivia de Havilland.

Sibling rivalry is always entertaining and makes for good ‘copy’, be it Joan and Olivia, their literary doppelgangers Margaret Drabble and A S Byatt, or indeed Marion Jefferson and her twin sister Joyce, the latter invented by me for a projected episode of Tenko, in which Joyce arrives with a bar of soap and a toothbrush and sets her cap (or snood) at Burt Kwouk’s susceptible camp commandant. Sadly the storyline was deemed to be a touch too Tennessee Williams – not that this name would have meant anything to the producers – for the pre-watershed television audience.

BUT I MAINLY TREASURE the memory of Joan Fontaine for her performance in Rebecca, and I regularly scour the TV listings for daytime showings (I do possess a DVD of the film, given away in one of the aforementioned newspapers, but somehow being able to watch it at will isn’t the same thing; fellow writers will understand). I try never to miss the scene where the second Mrs de Winter is shown the morning room, complete with cosy log fire, and the desk where she’s expected to do her letters after breakfast, after which ‘Robert

will take them to the post’. Setting aside for a moment my cynical laugh accompanying the comparison with now (one haphazard collection every other day if you’re lucky), I still tingle with the thought that this is how the life literary ought to be. I did in fact have a not dissimilar room in my house in North London and each morning – before the chatelaine banished me to Berkhamsted – would settle to dealing with the day’s mail, though latterly it boiled down to mildly flirtatious exchanges with ‘Alison Dale’, the woman fronting the Damart catalogue – the source of my thermal gloves, which I’m still wearing as I type this. I never did discover whether Alison was as fictitious as Manderley.

I IMAGINE Rebecca is due a ‘reboot’ along the lines of Death Comes To Pemberley and Sherlock which made last Christmas particularly emetic for lovers of the original literature. And indeed I see from the publishers’ 2014 lists that Middlemarch and Northanger Abbey are the next hapless candidates for an asinine update, which means they too are destined to be ‘perfect holiday fare’ on television. Why stop there? Why not plunder the contemporary canon and turn Harry Potter and Bridget Jones into murder mysteries (after all, most authors I know would have happily bumped off their creations years ago, an abundance of creative energy is going to waste out there).

And what’s Hitler done wrong?

I note incidentally that his original title for Mein Kampf was ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice’ until his publishers talked him into the more feel-good option. So, TV bosses, look no further than Ed Reardon as the ideal man for the adaptation.

P E D A N T S ’ R E V O LT ON PM (BBC Radio 4, 11 December 2013), Eddie Mair reported that Nelson Mandela ‘laid’ in procession, and went on to say that he ‘will lay’ in state. Has he (Mair, not Mandela) never heard of the verb ‘to lie’, past tense ‘lay’, future tense ‘will lie’?

JEAN WINES RE FINANCIAL services being referred to as ‘products’ (letter from Peter Watts, Pedants’ Revolt, February Oldie) – hear, hear! Mr Watts, let’s also put a stop to the use of ‘misselling’ in relation to the PPI scandal: the correct term is ‘theft’.

MIKE GROSS EVERY DAY we are subjected to the phrase ‘in terms of...’ employed lazily by all from the Prime Minister to sports commentators. In the Daily Telegraph of 10th December there was a short piece quoting the Labour MP Simon Danczuk in which he used the phrase no less than three times in the space of seven short lines. The full quote was: ‘“We still need a breakthrough, I think, in terms of the Asian community,” he said. “I think there has been some denial in terms of this being a problem and I’ve seen that over the last couple of years there’s been a tendency not to want to speak about it in terms of ethnicity,” he added.’

Need I say more?

JEREMY SHAW A SMALL selection of current bugbears: ‘Retail shop’: what other sort of shop is there?

‘Next station stop’: what’s wrong with ‘next stop’?

‘Personal belongings’: what other sorts of belongings are there?

‘Locally sourced ingredients’: all well and good, but not if the resulting dishes are inedible.

A pub in my town offers ‘locally sourced salads’. Since it’s right next door to Tesco, I think one is entitled to raise an eyebrow.

MIKE PETTY 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 March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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Readers write The poet pedagogue

SIR: Virginia Ironside did a fine job reviewing James Andrew Taylor’s biography of the poet Vernon Scannell (February Oldie). However, an important aspect of his life was not mentioned. He was a very good teacher, in marked contrast to the Bohemian and sometimes violent side of his life. I had the good fortune of attending one of his courses at fellow poet Ted Hughes’s old home at Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, which Hughes donated to the Arvon Foundation for residential courses. I spent a weekend under Vernon Scannell’s tutorship and learned much from him. Had he so wished he could easily have made teaching his career.

Incidentally, he was not the only member of the English Dept at Leeds University to enjoy boxing. I followed suit in the early 1950s, not long after he left Leeds.

John Waddington-Feather, by email

Not McFrankenstein after all?

SIR: I believe your correspondent Martin Day’s memory is playing tricks with him in recalling the ‘Thunder and Lightning Man’ as hailing from north of the border (Readers Write, February Oldie).

I suspect he is referring to Andrew Crosse (1784–1855), a British amateur scientist who was born and also died at Fyne Court, Broomfield, Somerset.

Inheriting the family estates at the age of 21, Crosse became a gentleman scientist. While much of his experimentation related to such mundane subjects as loudspeakers, magnetism and telegraphy, he achieved notoriety when he informed friends that some insects had appeared in one of his electro-crystallisation experiments.

While Crosse never claimed that he had created the insects (assuming that they were insect eggs embedded in his samples) the news was carried sensationally in the local press and later in national papers. As a result, Crosse was sent death threats and accused of blasphemy – and local farmers, blaming his works for crop failure, paid for an exorcism on the nearby hills.

Even today in some Quantock villages

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electricity is viewed with suspicion.

Bob Frost, Deal, Kent

Birds of hell...

SIR: I was encouraged to see Richard Ingrams’s reference to ‘the alarming [my emphasis] spread of red kites’ (Television, January Oldie).

Red kites, we are repeatedly informed by the RSPB and others, rarely if ever attack live animals, save perhaps a small snake or rodent loved only by its mother – on the contrary, they perform a useful service by clearing a countryside which would otherwise, they imply, be carpeted with dead rodents and birds.

Anyone minded to swallow this nonsense should spend a few hours in the Chilterns.

There, the recently introduced red kites, finding

that local wildlife has no natural defence, have thrived to the point that there simply aren’t enough dead animals to feed on, and have take to attacking live ones.

A lake near my home is, in spring, a scene of daily carnage – ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ is putting it mildly It is poignant beyond belief to see a mother duck proudly lead her brood of eight or ten to water for the first time, knowing that before nightfall only four will remain, and by morning perhaps only one.

Predators have to eat too, of course, and they also have cubs or chicks to feed.

What is objectionable here is that we humans have disturbed the balance of nature and have let loose killers against whom our native fauna have developed no defence.

Peter Farren, Chalgrove, Oxford The red kite

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...or birds of paradise?

SIR: I write to wonder whatever provoked Richard Ingrams to find the spread of red kites ‘alarming’ – this view seems to me to be about as bonkers as his description of Chris Packham. Where is his evidence that red kites ‘might’ be responsible for the disappearance of kestrels?

Red kites were indeed reintroduced to Britain, having been eliminated by man, and have spread remarkably quickly, partly thanks to their fans in the Chilterns feeding them with chicken legs. Normally they are carrion eaters, scouring the countryside for dead rats and suchlike. Alarming? Sinister? Quite useful, I would say.

David Haydock (birdwatcher), Douai, France

Bruce’s bog standards

SIR: Referring to our esteemed Editor’s TV column in the November issue, and the letter from Mrs Davies in the January issue, in which she and her husband take umbrage at his derogatory remarks about Fiona Bruce, I wish to whole-heartedly applaud his sentiments, and relate a small tale.

We were stewarding at a recent recording of the Antiques Roadshow at Gregynog Hall, and I went to use the ladies’ loo situated on the ground floor of this old building. Although the door could be locked from the inside, there was no ‘engaged’ or ‘vacant’ displayed, so I turned the handle. It was locked and couldn’t be opened, and there was a shout from the occupant. After much rustling noise, it was finally flung open and Ms Bruce exited, making neither eye contact nor comment to the – by now – growing queue of ladies.

Not once during the day did she interact with anybody unless on camera, and she was seen tucked away inside, repelling all with the frosty aura surrounding her.

I have never liked her, and also found her interview with HRH The Duke of Edinburgh to be excruciatingly embarrassing. Why she is seen so often is a mystery, and when she is reading the news, I now never look at the screen!

Mrs Jane E Jarvis, Arddleen, Wales

In a lathe lather

SIR: I wonder if some reader has a small 116-inch between centres, 2–3-inch swing, model-makers lathe. I will pay a reasonable price. Small types are costly but I need one to do small jobs for friends.

James McNabb, Stoke Newington, London

FAT T Y PU FFS

Radio gaga

SIR: Jeremy Lewis (Living Hell, January Oldie) is quite right about Radio 3. In the mornings the programmes are completely ruined by constant interruptions every fifteen minutes for news and headlines from the newspapers. It has also been spoilt by presenters asking presenters from other programmes what they will be playing, juvenile quizzes where the questions are repeated ad nauseam and listeners who got the answers right having their names read out (riveting!), unnecessary chats with celebrities and the puerile weekly ‘charts’.

Let us return to more adult programming without phone-ins, where the main focus is on the music and not personalities.

Otherwise we may just as well listen to commercial radio with its advertising breaks – or is that what Radio 3 is trying to copy?

Leonard Payne, Hastings, Sussex

No context, no point

SIR: Kate Sawyer’s comments about school inspectors (January Oldie) make chilling reading. It’s a good job not many young aspirant teachers read your journal. Looking back on my years as a beak I guess that, had I been faced with their box-ticking procedures, I would have failed every lesson.

For a teacher or a whole school to vacillate between ‘outstanding’ and ‘requires improvement’ is difficult to square

against the whole picture of what is really going on in that community. Perhaps, after a thorough investigation, one might accept a ‘good, in spite of...’ or a ‘good because of…’ since both these judgments would indicate that the inspectors had been wise enough to look at the whole context in which those teachers worked.

Do let us be aware of the conditions under which many teachers today have to work. Of course the teaching quality of every lesson is important. But could not those inspectors, when ticking their boxes, not also look at social background, parental support, employment prospects and school budgets? Without knowing the whole picture what worth can we put on their all-too-superficial scores?

Maurice Dybeck, Warden of Sawtry Village College 1963–1984, Kirkby Lonsdale

Easy as 123

SIR: I wonder if any of your readers can remember a Church Alphabet which the Archdeacon told us in the Thirties? I can only recall one couplet: E is the eagle whence lessons are heard And F are the females who polish the bird ...but all the rest escapes me now.

J C M Hepple, Richmond

Memories of Mayer

SIR: I was interested to read Donald Trelford’s recollections about Sir Robert Mayer (February Oldie). In 1959 I began work as a junior secretary in Sir Robert’s private office at 22 Blomfield Street, EC2.

His habit was to travel to the office on the Central Line from Oxford Circus to Liverpool Street. I, too, am a worker, he said.

It was in October 1960 that he suffered the first of two heart attacks – when he was 81. Lady Mayer brought him out of hospital saying he would

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recover more quickly at home. The private nurse didn’t last long. A few days after her departure the doctor paid an unannounced visit and found both Mayers in the drawing room entertaining guests at a small gathering to celebrate his survival. He was sent back to bed!

Days later he was dictating his plans for the next year and beyond.

He followed good advice given to him by his father – you will gain more pleasure from life as a gifted amateur musician than as a struggling professional. Lucky for our young people that he did, for he spent a huge amount of the fortune he made here promoting their musical education through the Robert Mayer Concerts for Children, and Youth and Music. He continued to enjoy music all his life and numbered scores of eminent performers and composers as close friends.

Margaret Tothill, by email

Every cloud...

SIR: When Richard Ingrams referred to the disappearance of Lord Lucan (Television, February Oldie) it reminded me of the connection to another event of the same era, the ‘drowning’ of John Stonehouse.

When Lucan disappeared on 8th November 1974 it prompted a national and international search for him.

Twelve days later John Stonehouse, MP for Walsall North, disappeared from the beach of the Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami, having gone for a swim, and was assumed to have drowned. However, it transpired that Stonehouse, having dressed in clothes stashed further along the beach and travelling under the name of J A Markham, Export/Import Consultant, a deceased constituent whose identity he had stolen, had flown to Melbourne, Australia.

When ‘J A Markham’ arrived in Melbourne the authorities were on the look out for Lucan and, suspecting Markham, they kept him under observation. During the next few weeks considerable sums of money were transferred between bank accounts in the names of J A Markham and a Donald Muldoon, another of Stonehouse’s deceased constituents whose identity he had stolen. A keeneyed bank employee took note of these suspicious transfers, reported them to the police, and ‘Markham’ was arrested on Christmas Eve 1974.

It is mere conjecture of course but if Lord Lucan had not disappeared, J A Markham, alias John Stonehouse,

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may not have come under suspicion in Melbourne, and Stonehouse may have escaped prison.

Winston Hathaway, Stoke-on-Trent

day, but nowadays was really only liked by middle-aged men. How patronising and condescending!

Bill Norman, Nottingham

Saved by the Post-it

Irena Sendler’s missed Nobel

SIR: Thank goodness for Post-its. They cover, very nicely, the angry Desperate Dan visage of the likes of Jeremy Lewis (Living Hell), although his articles are usually worth reading. Do other readers feel distracted from the articles when an angrylooking face is placed atop of one? Or even old faces like the Editor’s, Mr Ingrams.

Myra Walder, Switzerland

A Noggin fan writes

SIR: I really enjoyed the Oldie article about Peter Firmin (Still With Us, February Oldie). Noggin the Nog was always my favourite series from the Postgate/ Firmin partnership, and the wonderfully evocative music that went with it.

So I was appalled to see Noggin disappear from children’s television, especially when rubbish like Teletubbies and Noddy took its place.

I heard a BBC director Noggin the Nog interviewed on the radio trying to justify this lamentable decision by saying that Noggin was all right for its

SIR: Your comment at the end of the article about Irena Sendler (Old Un’s Diary, December Oldie) to the effect that Yad Vashem ‘scuppered the nomination’ is simply untrue. While Yad Vashem has not actively nominated the Righteous Among the Nations as a group, nor been in touch with the Nobel Prize committee, we do believe that they deserve, collectively, to receive the Nobel Prize. We have never suggested that Yad Vashem should receive the prize in their stead.

It is not Yad Vashem’s policy to nominate specific individuals for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Iris Rosenberg, spokesperson Yad Vashem, Israel

It’s all sumo to us...

SIR: Alyson Hilbourne’s disappointment with sumo wrestling and wrestlers was predictable (Expat, February Oldie). Sumo matches are short, brutal and eventually boring. May I recommend visiting the Kodokan judo dojo or Kyoto University judo club dojo, where she and her companions would find skill, excitement, and elegance in matches between judoka.

V A Robinson, Cambridge (retired judoka)

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Minster Lovell, Oxfordshire Candida Lycett Green

O

xfordshire is the place for vanished magnificence,’ says John Piper’s 1938 Shell Guide to that county.

But of all its forgotten or deserted manor houses, Minster Lovell’s is the most romantic. When he visited, Piper found cattle grazing among the vast, spread-eagled ruins on the banks of the Windrush. He dreaded the day when the Office of Works would fence it off and mow the grass, making it ‘not only unnecessarily tidy but unnecessarily educative’. They did – but English Heritage, who are in charge of the ruins today, maintain them in a quiet and uninvasive way.

We went in midwinter when the river was in spate, flooding the meadows all around, and a white frost hung in the graveyard of St Kenelm’s cruciform church. South of the vaulted crossing an alabaster knight lying stiffly with his hands in prayer commemorates William Lovell, wh0 became one of the richest

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men in England. From the 1430s onwards he not only rebuilt the church, but transformed his ancestral home hard by into one of the grandest in the country.

His grandson Francis, trusted friend of Richard III, was a lifelong supporter of the doomed Yorkist cause. After Richard’s demise at Bosworth he backed a brief attempt to put Lambert Simnel on the throne and was eventually defeated by Henry VII at the battle of Stoke in 1487.

Some say he was killed there, some that he escaped. Local legend suggests that he spent his remaining years hidden in a secret chamber of his house at Minster Lovell. Five hundred years on, the Lovell legacy survives in the beauty of the ruined great house, the tithe barn, dovecote, outbuildings and mediaeval farmhouse.

The village itself is set apart. Some of the thatched and stone-tiled cottages have the kempt air of being second homes, and the Swan pub is picturepostcard perfect: old Minster Lovell is the proverbial dream of a Cotswold village. But at the top of the hill, past

the Victorian school, Methodist chapel and across the main road, a more workmanlike dream of new Minster Lovell unfurls. It was built by the radical, Chartist and social reformer Feargus O’Connor, whose elder brother Francis became a General in Simón Bolívar’s Army of Liberation in South America.

Feargus had campaigned with Cobbett against the Poor Laws, founded the radical Northern Star newspaper and in the 184os formed the National Land Company through public subscription with a view to creating rural housing for the urban poor. Here at ‘Charterville’ he bought around 300 acres in 1847 and within a year had built 81 neat onestorey houses, each set in the middle of two-, three- or four-acre allotments and each with a built-in bookcase, pigsty, fowl house, stable and yard. They were balloted for by North Country factory workers, the land was ploughed at the cost of the company, and thirty pounds given to each occupier as working capital towards becoming self-sufficient.

The experiment was a bit of a failure.

The government declared the ballot illegal and the town dwellers had no agricultural experience. O’Connor was eventually committed to a lunatic asylum, dying penniless in 1855 – but the people’s faith in him never dwindled, and 50,000 attended his funeral at Kensal Green Cemetery.

His brave stab at utopia in Minster Lovell thrives today as a vibrant community.

Though modern bungalows have replaced two thirds of the original houses, the layout and allocation of land on the Charterville Allotments remains the same.

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF © English Heritage

Unwrecked England

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Out and About Hidden gems in the Scottish capital and the accommodation revolution Edinburgh: an insider’s guide

‘I support Toby Sculthorp’s nominating Edinburgh as one of the World’s Worst Dumps (February Oldie) on account of its tartan tat shops, unwanted trams and hideous Scottish Parliament building,’ writes Edinburghian John Samson.

‘We locals, however, know some antidotes. To dispel images of ginger wigs in Royal Mile emporia, seek out the glorious Signet Library (adjacent to St Giles’ Cathedral). Its Gran Caffè serves afternoon tea amidst soul-soothing soaring pillars and shelves of legal tomes. From the fourth-floor restaurant in Debenhams on Princes Street one cannot see the tram line. Instead, vast picture windows afford a superb view of Edinburgh Castle and historic white-

Afternoon tea in the Signet Library

walled houses in Ramsay Garden. The “Shortbread Senate” looks so awful that it is an incentive to go anywhere else in the vicinity. Hence I discovered the Scottish Poetry Library in Crichton’s Close (free, but check opening times) – a haven which also stimulates.’

• www.thesignetlibrary.co.uk www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk

What is Airbnb?

If you’ve never heard of Airbnb then you’re missing out on a quiet revolution in the way that people book their holidays. Airbnb (airbed and breakfast) is an accommodation website that allows private individuals to let their unoccupied living space – from a spare bedroom to a second home – to paying guests. Its popularity is phenomenal. By the end of 2013 four million people had used Airbnb. At the last count, 150,000

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people a night were using rooms on the site whose list includes 300,000 spare bedrooms, 500 castles, 200 tree houses and 1,400 boats.

First-time users might be nervous.

What if you end up in a psychopath’s spare room? Or, as an owner, what if your place is trashed by some lads on a stag do? The site seeks to reassure both parties. Owners and renters have to confirm their identity through a series of checks. And a full system of reviews, a bit like those on the Tripadvisor website, gives feedback on the accommodation.

Successful letting can be a cash cow. New Yorker Evylen Badia recently told the New York Post, ‘I worked for a company that declared bankruptcy before paying me, but I knew I’d be safe financially because I had guests arriving. I’m grateful every single day because of Airbnb.’ For hosts like Evylen, there’s a lot riding on making guests welcome and receiving good feedback.

As for the hosts, Airbnb recognised the risks and set up a 24-hour hotline to help them with troublesome guests and a $50,000 damage guarantee.

What is it that makes Airbnb so popular? In a word – cost. A quick glance at its February listings in New York and you will discover a sumptuous twobedroom home in Manhattan’s Chelsea district for £119 a night. Or a private room in a loft in Brooklyn for £43 a night.

If you prefer to book a hotel, the distinctly ordinary Holiday Inn in midtown would cost you £98 a night for its smallest bedroom. Another benefit is that most hosts provide guests with insider tips on where to eat and what to see. But what really clinches the deal? You can boil your own egg in the morning.

• www.airbnb.co.uk Sarah Shannon

Bizarre holiday of the month

Oldie reader Ted Newcomen has written to us about a private game reserve with luxury hotel and spa in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where holidaymakers can, it is claimed, sample the shanty

town experience. According to the Emoya Luxury Hotel and Spa website, ‘Millions of people are living in informal settlements across South Africa. These settlements consist of thousands of houses also referred to as Shacks, Shantys or Makhukhus. A Shanty usually consists of old corrugated iron sheets or any other waterproof material which is constructed in such a way to form a small “house” or shelter where they make a normal living. A paraffin lamp, candles, a battery operated radio, an outside toilet (also referred to as a long drop) and a drum where they make fire for cooking is normally part of this lifestyle. Now you can experience staying in a Shanty within the safe environment of a private game reserve. This is the only Shanty Town in the world equipped with under-floor heating and wireless internet access!’

The shacks, which sleep four, are just under fifty quid a night. They don’t say if you have to pay extra for disease, robbery, rape or necklacing.

• www.emoya.co.za

Shanty town without tears

Readers’ contributions wanted Send your travel tips or stories by post to Out and About, The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG, by fax to 020 7436 8804, or by email to editorial@theoldie.co.uk with ‘Out and About’ in the subject line.

Maximum 300 words £50 paid for all contributions printed

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Relaxing in a hot spring bath is an integral part of Japanese culture.

Expat ALYSON HILBOURNE took a trip from her home in Yokohama to test the waters of Shibu Onsen 64

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALYSON HILBOURNE

BATH TIME

TRAVE L TALES

ta k i n g the p l u n g e

I

had nine baths in an hour and a half. My fingers and toes were wrinkled and my skin boiled to the colour of fresh liver. But I was promised a cure for eczema, gout, neuralgia, ‘organic disease’ and several other complaints I didn’t know I had.

We were visiting Shibu Onsen, the onsen town eighteen miles from the city of Nagano. Onsens are hot spring baths, an integral part of Japanese culture, and a benefit – possibly the only benefit – of being a country sitting on the world’s most active fault line.

We stayed at one of the many ryokan – Japanese style inns – in the small town. The inn had its own smart onsen but the fun is to visit the nine public onsens and try out their healing powers. The town has been around for hundreds of years and at least one powerful lord used the hot springs to cure his men after long battles.

We had travelled to Shibu Onsen by Shinkansen (bullet train) to Nagano and then a local train. It was a relaxing journey which didn’t leave us feeling at all battle-weary, but we were still keen to try the waters. So we put on the yukata, a casual cotton kimono, and geta, traditional wooden clogs, provided by our ryokan.

On the way out we bought a souvenir towel from reception. These are printed with the names of the onsens and can be stamped with the special inked blocks kept on a small shelf outside each bathhouse. It is

supposed to be lucky and encourage good fortune if you visit, and get stamps from, all nine.

In broken English, the hotel manager indicated to me that I had my yukata incorrectly fastened. It should be worn with the left side over the right, not as I had it – which I learned later is the usual way of dressing a corpse. The hotel lobby was no place to redress the problem so I pulled my haori (a short, thicker kimono) tighter.

M

y husband and I wobbled off down the path to the first bathhouse. Wearing geta is like walking on stilts. The flat pieces of wood with two bars underneath made a satisfying clatter on the paved streets but tended to tip forward abruptly. It was easy to see why Japanese women shuffle with short paces, and we were soon looking for the bathhouse that dealt with twisted ankles.

The manager told me that I had my yukata incorrectly fastened. It should be worn with the left side over the right, not as I had it, which is the usual way of dressing a corpse Our ryokan provided guests with a key to all the public onsens. To prevent people accidentally walking off with it, it was attached to a piece of wood the size of a floorboard. There was no hiding where we were going – but everyone we met was similarly dressed,

Facing page: off to the baths in Shibu Onsen Below: Japanese macaque in a hot spring bath at the Jigokudani Monkey Park

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Alyson Hilbourne

and clutching towel and key.

The bathhouses were small and simple. They were divided into men’s and women’s sides, split with a wooden screen, which allowed for a shouted conversation between the two. There was an outer room for undressing, since you enter the bath naked.

Etiquette demands you wash before getting into the water as the hot tub itself is only for relaxing.

The water was exceptionally hot with steam rising from it, hence my pink, rather scrubbed appearance after so many hot washes. One of the baths had a strong sulphurous smell and several had very cloudy water.

We clip-clopped our way round the narrow streets as the sun set and the town basked in the glow of two coloured street lamps. The sound of running water accompanied us and steam swirled from the drain grills.

It was ethereal and beautiful.

F

urther up the valley, half an hour on foot or ten minutes by bus or taxi, is a different onsen. This one is strictly reserved for Japanese macaques – snow monkeys. The following morning, at the Jigokudani Monkey Park, we watched the monkeys sitting in their own man-made hot spring, grooming each other, oblivious to the tourists pressing cameras into their faces.

Nearby, the rest of the troop hung about the river, picking over rocks for food, climbing the cliffs and fighting amongst themselves. A hot pipe that carried water over the river was a favourite spot for some monkeys who stretched out on it to warm themselves up after scratching for food in the snow. Another enterprising couple of macaques had settled themselves on top of the vending machine, ready to pounce on tourists’ purchases.

The monkeys appeared quite content in their onsen. Their pink faces were enhanced by the hot water – and remarkably similar to my own ninebath skin tone.

• Jigokudani Monkey Park website: www.jigokudani-yaenkoen.co.jp March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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27/1/14 13:06:56

Bridge Day

Tutored by Andrew Robson OBE

Literary Lunches AT SIMPSON’S-IN-THE-STRAND In association with

on Wednesday 2nd April 2014 at the East India Club, 16 St James’s Square, London SW1 In association with

TUESDAY 20TH MAY 2014

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★ MARY BERRY Recipe for Life This year’s Oldie of the Year and one of the nation’s bestloved cookery writers and presenters will talk about her passion for food that became her life’s work.

MARY BEARD Confronting the Classics Professor Beard’s Confronting the Classics proves that the classics are alive and kicking and well worth studying.

‘Witty and erudite’ – Sunday Times

SIMON JENKINS England’s 100 Best Views

LIMITED TO 40 PEOPLE

Guardian journalist and best-selling writer Simon Jenkins will transport Oldie readers to some of England’s most sublime scenery.

COME AND IMPROVE your bridge skills with Britain’s leading bridge player and teacher, who will guide you through a series of set deals.

We cannot accommodate beginners – the day is aimed at social players rather than serious ones. You can book as a four, pair or an individual, and we’ll endeavour to match you up with like-minded others.

No need to bring cards/scorers. Just arrive by 10am for a day of illumination and fun.

★★TIMETABLE★★ 10.00 – 10.15 10.15 – 12.30 12.30 – 14.00 14.00 – 16.00

Arrival and coffee in the Rugby Room Tutored play session led by Andrew in the Rugby Room Three-course lunch with wine in the Clive Room Tutored play session led by Andrew in the Rugby Room

TUESDAY 24TH JUNE 2014

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★ TRISTRAM HUNT Ten Cities That Made An Empire The Shadow Education Secretary will talk about the lives and structures of the cities which shaped the British Empire.

JOHN BANVILLE The Infinities The Booker prize-winner’s novel The Infinities is set in Ireland in a house called Arden. Its main characters are the two Adams: one old and dying and the other young but ineffectual.

Third speaker to be announced

SOLD OUT

TUESDAY 8TH APRIL 2014 ★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

DOUGLAS HURD Disraeli or The Two Lives Disraeli was a gambler and a dandy but also a devoted servant and favourite of the Queen, a dichotomy which characterised his political career. ‘Gripping’ – Matthew Parris, The Times

CHRISTOPHER MATTHEW The Man Who Dropped the Le Creuset on His Toe and Other Bourgeois Mishaps A collection of mordant and witty cautionary verses about the British bourgeoisie and its foibles and failings.

ROGER BANNISTER Twin Tracks: The Autobiography Sir Roger’s frank memoir tells the story of his sporting achievements and his life as a distinguished neurologist.

BOOKINGS AND ENQUIRIES Price: £115 per person including all tuition, morning coffee, three-course lunch and wine Please contact Hannah Donovan on 020 7436 8801 or email readerevents@theoldie.co.uk TO PAY: either call Hannah with your credit card details or send a cheque (made payable to Oldie Publications Ltd) to: Hannah Donovan, The Oldie, 65 Newman St, London W1T 3EG Please state clearly whether you are a single, pair or four.

066-Lit Lunches_Bridge Ad 306 v1.indd 63

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

July 22nd ★ August 19th ★ September 9th October 14th ★ November 11th ★ December 9th ★ December 16th

27/1/14 18:33:45

B OO K S Fifth – and final VALERIE GROVE

All Change: The Fifth Volume in the Cazalet Chronicles

by Elizabeth Jane Howard Macmillan £18.99

ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT GEARY

Oldie price £16.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

They don’t publish novels like this any more; but then novelists aged 90 are rare too. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who died in January, shortly after its publication, rescued Martin Amis from a street urchin’s destiny by giving him Pride and Prejudice to read. She tells in her memoir Slipstream how she later asked his advice: should she write a Jane Austen update, or a long saga of English life? Amis said, ‘Do that one.’

The resulting Cazalet Chronicles have been televised and broadcast.

Volume five has several dramas: forbidden love, terminal illness, sibling rivalry, disputes over property. Hearing the Chronicles on radio last year in 45 episodes, it was hard keeping tabs on names and voices, but the book has a family tree, a résumé, and helpful chapter headings: Hugh and Jemima. Villy and Miss Milliment.

The Brothers and Mr Twine.

It opens at Home Place in Sussex in June 1956. The matriarch, ‘The Duchy’, breathes her last, having just recalled the name of her favourite tree, the mimosa.

The reaction of Miss Sidney, her lesbian daughter’s lover, known as ‘Sid’, is relief: at last she and Rachel will be able to live together.

Ah, the 1950s. Toad-in-the-hole at home, or sole Véronique at Wheeler’s.

Smoke-stained parchment lampshades, Lyons’ Corner House with nippies, and Donald Campbell breaking his water speed records. It’s only eleven years since the end of the war, when Home Place housed German refugees.

The Cazalet brothers’ inherited timber company, importing exotic hardwoods – pyinkado, Andaman padauk – is in trouble. The next generation can’t be trusted; Teddy, in charge of the Southampton wharf, is distracted by an Irish barmaid, then by a spoilt deb. Mr Twine the accountant advises shedding the costly London office, then heads home to Crouch End, pausing to see the

new bubble car at the Motor Show.

Whatever happens, the family’s politeness is unshakeable. ‘Oh darling, that would be angelic of you!’ cries Roland’s mother, at his plan to visit the senile old governess. ‘Goody goody gumdrops,’ says a child offered steak and kidney pudding. Seven-year-old Georgie argues with impeccable grammar, ‘There’s no point in my going to school.’

When Juliet tells her mother that she and her half-brother are in love, she adds: ‘You will keep it a wonderful secret, won’t you? And I promise to tidy my room.’

Even Christmas morning is civilised.

The Cazalets recall that the Duchy’s mother gave her servants the same present every year: a bar of Wright’s Coal Tar soap and a handkerchief with their initials in crossstitch. Now even Georgie’s pet white rat, Rivers, gets a tiny Christmas stocking. Jemima Leaf has no problem getting her children, ‘the Leaflets’, to write their Christmas thank-you letters.

So family life has many delights. There seems to be little grit in the Cazalets’ oyster. But wait: ‘There was a brief silence during which they all disliked one another.’ Infidelity is discovered. A final night is spent with the lover dying of cancer. A husband in his sixties feels dizzy, and looks at his wife ‘with frightened eyes’.

(She calms him but ‘did not feel calm at all’.)

We glimpse the still secretive gay world. And although Clary – who is probably closest to EJH herself – apologises for being ‘a rotten wife’ because her husband is home and she hasn’t yet got the children to bed, ‘or done the potatoes

☞ continues over the page March 2014 – THE OLDIE 67

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BOOKS

or the cabbage’, she also confesses to housewifely rage. ‘I get ratty sometimes and want to scream. It’s the going-on-ness of family life, you know – all the meals and washing clothes, clearing up...’

Then Clary writes a successful play and falls for its leading man, who eyes her ‘with anxious distaste’ when she tells him her husband is jealous and dangerous. At such moments Howard shows how acutely she observes nuances of behaviour.

All Change is like a warm bath in the recent past. An effortless pleasure – except for its 570-page hardback weight, making heavy bedtime reading.

POETS’ CORNER During Wind and Rain

by Thomas Hardy

chosen by Simon Hoggart They sing their dearest songs – He, she, all of them – yea, Treble and tenor and bass, And one to play; With the candles mooning each face...

Ah, no; the years O! How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss – Elders and juniors – aye, Making the pathways neat And the garden gay; And they build a shady seat…

Ah, no; the years, the years; See the white storm-birds wing across!

They are blithely breakfasting all – Men and maidens – yea, Under the summer tree, With a glimpse of the bay, While pet fowl come to the knee…

Ah, no; the years O! And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

They change to a high new house, He, she, all of them – aye, Clocks and carpets and chairs On the lawn all day, And brightest things that are theirs…

Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

Simon Hoggart chose this poem in hospital, shortly before his death on 5th January 2014

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Epistles JEREMY LEWIS

One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper edited by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman OUP £25 Oldie price £21.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

HUGH TREVOR-ROPER once admitted that, as far as he was concerned, ‘the physical circulation of the blood is kept going by furious battles on every front’, and in this magnificent collection of letters dating from the war years until shortly before his death in 2003 he lays into ‘impertinent adversaries’ with wit and gusto. Those under siege include his fellow dons (‘a selfish, small-minded, life-diminishing’ crew of ‘envious, pretentious, purblind, complacent pedants’), his former colleagues in MI6 (‘better intelligence is to be obtained from intelligent people studying public evidence than from less intelligent people studying secret evidence’) and his old enemy A L Rowse, of whom he wrote that ‘the olive branch is no sooner extended than it is snatched from one’s hand and swatted in one’s face’.

As a child Trevor-Roper was taught that displays of affection were ‘not only improper but ridiculous’, and he readily admitted that he had a ‘terrible, almost physical difficulty in expressing emotion’.

Though widely regarded as a daunting figure, he comes across in his letters as an affectionate if dilatory correspondent, who combined a sense of his own worth with modesty, self-deprecation and an engaging readiness to listen to and sort out other people’s problems. A love letter to his future wife, Xandra, the daughter of Field Marshal Haig, is both frank and touching: he warns her that his heart is ‘rather a complicated object, like a sea urchin, prickly outside and untempting within’. And in one of many letters to his stepson, James Howard-Johnston, he urges him not to be frightened by life, and ‘if in doubt, if in depression, if in anxiety, to say so without fear’.

Whereas Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s confidante and a colleague at Christ Church, lacked ‘all those human interests and weaknesses which make people interesting to other people’, TrevorRoper was the antithesis of the narrow

academic. As a boy he had a passion for nature, which he retained all his life; as a boisterous young don, he liked nothing better than hunting and carousing; like Isaiah Berlin he was criticised by less talented contemporaries for frittering away his gifts on essays rather than the longpromised, never completed magnum opus, but ‘I am interested in too many things, and I write so slowly, so painfully slowly, that by the time I have written a chapter, I have got interested in something else’.

The best letter in the book deals with a subject very close to his heart. TrevorRoper was, with Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of the great prose stylists of our times, and like George Orwell – whose ‘Politics and the English Language’ he greatly admired – he regarded good writing as a ‘moral question’. ‘All the great crimes of our time have been palliated, perhaps made possible by jargon,’ he tells us. ‘Slipshod language, opaque meaningless metaphors, not only excuse the mind from the rigours of thought, they protect the conscience from the sense of responsibility.’

Trevor-Roper’s last years were blighted by his rushed and much regretted endorsement of the forged Hitler diaries, and his unwise decision to leave Oxford to become the Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, a nest of precious, right-wing dons. He loathed life in his ‘fenland prison house’, and Peterhouse proved to be ‘a dank, sunken cavity in which the surviving animals are not huge, roaming dinosaurs and airborne pterodactyls but immobile molluscs and torpid gastropods’. He ended his days, improbably, in a house in Didcot (‘not a very literary town’). He went blind, and kindly friends came over from Oxford to read the books he could no longer see. He would have been delighted to know that his letters, unlike those of his friend Richard Cobb, have been impeccably edited.

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BOOKS

Trivial pursuits Rupert Cornwell

Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch

by Barbara A Perry W W Norton £20 Oldie price £17 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

ON PAPER, Rose Kennedy should be a gift for a biographer. By the time she died, in 1995 at the age of 104, she had been around almost half as long as the American Republic. She was the Queen Mother of America’s closest approximation to a royal family. Her nine children included a US president, two senators and an ambassador. Barbara Perry moreover had access to 300 boxes of hitherto unpublished papers, released by the Kennedy Library only seven years ago.

Alas, Rose does not measure up to the billing. She might have been issue of that rambunctious clan, the Boston Irish, but she’s just not very interesting; less so than her father, the ebullient and silvertongued John ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, the city’s first Irish-Catholic mayor; less so than her offspring, and far less so than her husband. That last point is cruelly underlined by David Nasaw’s riveting, infinitely superior 2012 biography of Joseph P Kennedy, The Patriarch.

In part, the fault is not the author’s. Rose gave little away. Despite spending most of her life on a very public stage, she was a very private person, devoutest of Catholics, who vouchsafed her innermost feelings not to her diaries but only to God. Never, for instance, do we learn what she really thought of her husband’s womanising.

Rose, we are routinely told, was the glue that held this handsome, ambitious and fiercely competitive family together.

But her influence on events is rarely discernible. Much of the time Joe was away, tending to his financial, cinematic and adulterous interests. Nonetheless, he made the family decisions that mattered, even in what is normally a mother’s particular preserve, the health of her children.

It was Joe who had a lobotomy performed in 1941 on their mentally retarded daughter, Rosemary. The operation, one of the first of its kind, failed and Rosemary was institutionalised, a tragedy unmentionable for two decades within the family and without. And it was Joe who decided on the medical treatment of their sickly and frail second son, Jack,

Virgin and Child, St Mary’s Church, Hound, Hampshire.

Designed, made and painted by Patrick Reyntiens in 1958–59.

From Patrick Reyntiens: Catalogue of Stained Glass by Libby Horner (Sansom £60) Available to order online from www.bookdepository.co.uk for £48.64 including free delivery

the future president. In each case, writes Perry, Rose ‘relinquished matters to her husband… she simply let Joe co-ordinate Jack’s and Rosemary’s medical care and education.’ Some matriarch.

Instead, putting a relentlessly brave face on things, she made do with life’s more trivial aspects. She tolerated Joe’s infidelities, knowing that divorce was forbidden by her church. She adored travel and meeting celebrities. She revelled in her role as an ambassador’s wife in London. She loved shopping for clothes.

She was obsessive about her figure to the point of near-anorexia, and no detail of running a household was too small for her.

‘Poor little thing,’ remembered her glamorous daughter-in-law Jackie in a posthumously released interview from 1964, ‘running around to see if she had enough placemats in Palm Beach, should she send the ones from Bronxville or

had she put the London ones in storage?

Her little mind went to pieces.’ Rose of course had ample reason to go to pieces.

Ultimately, Perry’s book is just a canter around the well-trodden Kennedy course.

But even Rose’s discretion and blandness cannot banish our fascination with a reallife American epic, embracing soaring triumphs and shattering tragedy, not just public but also more private – from Rosemary’s retardation to the wartime death of the eldest son Joe Jr, and the loss of his beautiful, headstrong sister Kathleen (‘Kick’) in a 1948 plane accident.

Each time, it seems, Rose revives herself with a trip to her favourite couturier. Nonetheless, you must admire her resilience. As Bobby remarked after JFK’s assassination, had she stopped at four children, she would have been left effectively with none. But in childbearing as in life, she did her duty. She just kept going.

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BOOKS

Mr Chalk and Mr Cheese ROY HATTERSLEY

The Great Rivalry: Gladstone and Disraeli

by Dick Leonard I B Tauris, £22.50 Oldie price £19.75 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli were, by common consent, the two dominant figures in nineteenth-century British politics.

No other prime ministers have provoked such passion, stimulated such controversy or inspired such a wealth of biographical analysis. Most books about them are vast. Robert Blake’s Disraeli occupied 870 pages; Roy Jenkins’s Gladstone 768. Dick Leonard – in a remarkable demonstration of self confidence – has compressed his joint study of the two men into barely two hundred. And, against all the odds, he has succeeded in producing a book which is admirably informative, sufficiently controversial to claim some originality and a pleasure to read.

Biographers of long-dead politicians are rarely objective about their subjects, and my one major complaint is that Leonard is far too sympathetic towards Disraeli, a prime minister who achieved very little apart from the construction of a string of epigrams which may make him the star of literary anthologies but do not establish his place in the pantheon of great statesmen. He twice achieved office by opposing policies – free trade and electoral reform – which, once in power, he adopted. Leonard excuses these betrayals of promises and principles on the grounds that Disraeli ‘looked upon himself as an artist and thus absolved from following the rules of conduct which applied to ordinary mortals’.

Perhaps, but judged against the criteria which he regarded as appropriate only to lesser beings, he was a charlatan.

Gladstone, on the other hand, was immortalised by the Punch cartoon captioned ‘Had he been a worse man, he would have been a better politician’. Leonard is right to say that after the defeat of his first Home Rule Bill, ‘Liberals who had stayed, nevertheless blamed him for the recklessness with which he had split the party.’ But conscience did not allow anything else. Gladstone regarded the condition of Ireland as a moral issue.

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‘Not now, Henderson – that will have to wait until “Any Other Business”’

And he determined to bring lasting peace by a combination of social reform (the Land Acts), political concession (a measure of self-government) and the suppression of terror (the Coercion Acts).

He was self-righteous to a fault, but at least he was a consistent in his belief in the ethical imperative. Gladstone is the one prime minister in British history to resign office on a matter of principle.

The prologue to The Great Rivalry describes the night of 16th–17th December 1852, the last of the four days the House of Commons devoted to discussing the budget which had been introduced by Benjamin Disraeli.

‘Outside the House, a tremendous thunderstorm was raging with repeated flashes of lightning illuminating the gloomy chamber through its high Gothic windows.’ Inside, Gladstone – defying the rules of order and the instruction Face-off: Gladstone (left) and Disraeli

of the Deputy Speaker – made a second speech in the debate. It first attacked and comprehensively demolished the budget proposals. Then it attacked and comprehensively demolished the conduct and character of the Chancellor.

The budget proposals were defeated.

Leonard argues that it was on that night that the great rivalry was born, and it created an antagonism so intense that Gladstone ‘feared that he would be accused of humbug’ if he attended Disraeli’s funeral. But if the budget debate of 1852 had never happened, the two great paladins of Victorian politics – one loved and one hated by the old Queen – would still have lived in perpetual animosity. Every page of The Great Rivalry confirms that their antipathy was the result of fundamental differences in every aspect of their lives – character as well as conscience, background, lifestyle and ambition.

Perhaps, like Leonard, we should admire Disraeli’s colourful character and rejoice that a man with such unorthodox habits should rise so far. But politics is about what is done, not what is said, and Gladstone excelled in carrying through major pieces of legislation. His only major failure – admittedly a catastrophe for the Liberal Party, Gladstone and the whole of the United Kingdom – was Ireland. But then, as Leonard shrewdly points out, Gladstone was more at home in government, Disraeli in opposition.

And that illustrates the difference in quality which divides the two men.

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BOOKS

In praise of Simenon PAUL BAILEY

Pietr the Latvian The Late Monsieur Gallet The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

by Georges Simenon Penguin £6.99 each Oldie price £5.99 each (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

‘INSIDE EVERY wrongdoer and crook there lives a human being,’ observes Georges Simenon in the very first of his Inspector Maigret novels, Pietr the Latvian, which was published in 1930.

It’s a simple enough observation, but it could be said to represent everything its author believed in. The people who populate his thirty or so Maigret books, which Penguin will be reissuing in new translations over the next three years, do not in any way resemble the apologies for characters to be encountered in the works of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and others. They are real, often distressingly so, clinging on to the fantasies that help them to endure each passing day. Simenon has the gift of bringing them to instant, recognisable fictional life. He does not differentiate between the nice and the nasty. In fact, kindness is demonstrated in Simenon’s fiction by men and women who are forced into duplicitous crime in order to make things easier for their loved ones. Each of these early novels ends on a contemplative dying fall, of the kind that devotees of the genre would have found unsatisfactory in the 1930s. There is no tidying-up of the complicated plot and there isn’t a hint of redemption. The messiness of everyday existence is allowed to continue on its unremitting course.

As a young man, desperate for money, Simenon gave the already established Colette some of his stories to read. She was ruthless with her advice. ‘If you have a beautiful sentence, cut it,’ she told him, sensing that his bleak view of the world had no time or place for what is known as ‘fine writing’. He understood what she was saying, and never indulged in purple passages again. Writing for its own sake held no appeal for this writer of genius who limited himself to a vocabulary of 2,000 words, all of which are in common use. Penguin have done him the honour of contracting fine translators to render his work into acceptable English – David Bellos for Pietr the Latvian, Anthea Bell

for The Late Monsieur Gallet and Linda Coverdale for The Hanged Man of SaintPholien. Since Simenon was not snooty in regard to clichés, which he employs in the knowledge that they constitute an essential part of quotidian speech, Bellos, Bell and Coverdale have no shame in resorting to such contemporary horrors as ‘the bottom line’, ‘no problem’ and the one that is constantly on the lips of politicians: ‘at the end of the day’. These aren’t sacred texts, as Simenon would have been quick to acknowledge. They are, and were intended to be, accessible.

He liked the idea of someone relatively unlettered picking up one of Maigret’s adventures and relishing its subtle reflections on human behaviour.

Inspector Maigret is physically big and obviously of proletarian stock, as he is reminded when he overhears a comment made by an overdressed and bejewelled woman in the lobby of the Hotel Majestic in Pietr the Latvian. He is frequently grumpy and crusty, but long acquaintance with criminals has not diminished his humaneness but rather strengthened it. He is capable of (always unspoken) pity, as demonstrated in the final pages of both The Late Monsieur Gallet and The Hanged Man of SaintPholien. He appreciates the misery of those drawn towards crime – the sense of sexual inadequacy and shame that motivates an otherwise ordinary man or woman to vengeful murder, for example. He is particularly astute about immigrants from Eastern Europe who are trying to cope with a new language and a new culture whilst retaining an iota of national pride. He understands displacement. Poor Emile Gallet has been deprived of his name, his wealth and his dignity, and only in death is he free to exhibit the affection circumstances denied him while he was living.

Audiobooks RACHEL REDFORD

One Night in Winter Simon Sebag Montefiore Read by Simon Slater Random House, 14hrs 17m, download from www.audible.co.uk £20.99

The author has used his knowledge of the Stalinist era to create this spellbinding and haunting story in which many of the characters are real historical figures. It starts when pupils at prestigious School 801 stage a Pushkin-style duel – but someone had loaded the pistols and the prank ends in death. The fall-out from this incident, involving lies, imprisonment, spying, deaths and clandestine love affairs, absorbs the listener right up to the story’s tragic yet inspiring finale.

The Art of Deception A J Cross Read by Anna Bentinck Orion, 15hrs 33mins, unabridged, download from www.audible.co.uk £21.87

Kate Hanson, like the author, is a forensic pathologist. Working on the case of good-hearted student Nathan, whose body is unearthed 20 years after his murder, Kate and her team uncover a web of explosive secrets centred on Nathan’s professor and his beautiful, mentally unstable daughter. To prevent yet more deaths, she has to work fast to untangle what has been hidden by so many for so long. Gripping narration, even if one of the team’s Birmingham accent is overdone.

The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen Read by Anton Lesser Naxos AudioBooks, 79minutes, £8.99

‘...then just as I was getting my vanity under control I won Monk of the Year’

These 49 poems show what Owen intended: the pity and truth of war.

‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ re-works the story of Abraham and Isaac. Owen’s ‘old man’ refuses to slay the ‘Ram of Pride’ and instead kills ‘his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one’. All are enhanced by the infinitely sympathetic reading, but the force of anger beneath the understatement makes this one, for me, the most memorable.

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REVIEWS

MUSIC

richard osborne

‘So will you be hearing any music while you’re in Vienna?’ my friend enquired over dinner. We had reached the cheese and Sauternes stage and he was being mischievous. He knew very well that we were flying to Vienna for just one event, the Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Day concert in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein.

The tickets, gifted to Mrs Music by a colleague who had come up trumps in the annual ballot, were for the first of the three performances. In an earlier age this would have been called the Generalprobe, the ‘Open Rehearsal’, though the only people rehearsing during the performance on 30th December were the television crews.

Austrian Television has long set the gold standard where the filming of classical music is concerned and this concert, beamed to fifty million people in ninety countries, is a massive earner for the orchestra and for the city of Vienna. Why bid for the Olympics when every New Year’s Day you have this level of global reach?

Daniel Barenboim conducted. At the beginning of the year which marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, what better person for the Philharmonic to engage than a musician whose own West-Eastern Divan Orchestra actively embodies the idea of reconciliation between warring dynasties and tribes?

What the Philharmonic hadn’t bargained for was Barenboim’s refusal to conduct the Radetzky March, the encore with which the concert traditionally ends.

The orchestra played and the audience clapped – rather uncertainly, it has to

be said – whilst Barenboim clambered round the stage shaking hands with the players. One player refused his hand, a gesture that’s generated a good deal of comment in the blogosphere by folk who appear not to understand that it was Barenboim who was doing the discourtesy.

The Radetzky March is no hymn to militarism. As Heinrich Jacob wrote many years ago, there was a world of difference between Prussian virility and Austrian virility, between military seriousness and military exuberance.

Written by the father of the Strauss dynasty during the military and civil miasma that was the year 1848, the

What better person to conduct than Barenboim, whose West-Eastern Divan Orchestra embodies the idea of reconciliation?

Radetzky March is a tribute to the old dispensation. Johann’s sons were republicans but Johann the Elder was not. He clung to the old monarchical values of which the 82-year-old General Radetzky remained a much-loved symbol. It’s no coincidence that that unforgettable tale of the dissolution of old Austria, Joseph Roth’s fictional masterpiece The Radetzky March, takes the work as its title.

This minor discourtesy apart, Barenboim led a wonderfully crafted programme in which the undertow of melancholy that’s so characteristic of Austrian music was more than usually

‘Say something’

present. There was true delight at the very outset in an enchanting pot-pourri of themes from Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène but the mood was soon altered by Josef Strauss’s ‘Olive Branch’ waltz, music written in the wake of Austria’s defeat at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866 after a futile internecine dispute with Prussia.

Musicians, Austrian musicians in particular, tend to see Josef – frail of health, emotionally complex and dead at the age of 42 – as musically the most profound member of the Strauss dynasty.

Interestingly, Barenboim’s programme gave Josef and Johann equal billing; indeed, in the more ‘popular’ second half, six items were by Josef and only four by Johann.

Which is not to say that Johann is incapable of touching the musical depths.

Also included in the programme was his waltz ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen’.

The title is taken from Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, the hymn to the brotherhood of man which Beethoven uses for the finale of his Ninth Symphony. Not that there’s anything remotely Beethovenian about this haunting slow waltz which Strauss dedicated to his good friend and longstanding admirer Johannes Brahms. ‘Unfortunately not by me,’ Brahms famously said of the Blue Danube. During the performance on 30th December Barenboim had a certain amount of fun with Strauss’s most famous composition, but on New Year’s Day itself melancholy grandeur was once again the prevailing mood.

You can acquire the 2014 concert in all manner of formats from Sony Classical. The very reasonably priced de luxe CDs come complete with the concert’s scholarly and beautifully produced 86-page programme book, which is well worth having.

On 28th June the Vienna Philharmonic will mark the hundredth anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand with a broadcast concert live from Sarajevo. It will end with La Valse, Ravel’s waltz-requiem for a vanished age.

Like all great musicians, Ravel knew that there’s more to the Viennese waltz than the naysayers realise.

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REVIEWS

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER

Grape hyacinths: the spring is sprung

My mother adored grape hyacinths, seeing them as spring’s unmistakable starting gun. Like so many other gardeners, though, she was downcast by the mass of tufty grass-like foliage left in their wake, especially in a small garden or, indeed, a window box, where every square inch must account well of itself.

The trick, therefore, is to grow them in grass – in the lawn itself if you can face the odd shaggy hummock on your billiard table – or in those less manicured parts of the garden where lingering leaves go largely unnoticed.

Long-lived botanist John Parkinson (1567–1650) saw the grape hyacinths’ clustered blue florets as ‘little bells or stars… little bottles or pearls, both white and blue, sky-coloured…’ They are truly hyacinth-like, but why the ‘grape’? I turn to my cherished American gardening scribe Elizabeth Lawrence (1904–85), ‘a traditional southerner’, for an answer: ‘Those of the common Muscari botryoides,’ she says in The Little Bulbs, her informed and delightfully chatty book of 1957, ‘give the genus its English name because they look like a minute bunch of blue grapes’ – botryoides being the botanical Greek for, you guessed it, ‘like a bunch of grapes’. (And while we’re in the language lab, ‘muscari’ is from the Greek muschos, referring to the flowers’ musk-like scent.)

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Towards the end of her life I led my mother away from the common grape hyacinth (and its cousin, M. armeniacum – also frequently described as ‘vigorous’) to some of the better behaved kinds, and to those of a much softer blue, to white ones, bi-coloured ones and to one that isn’t blue at all.

Her favourite, and it remains one of mine, was Muscari latifolium, with dark purple-blue (fertile) flowers crowned by pale sky-blue (sterile) ones. (Oh, and you might as well know that latifolium means ‘broad leafed’, and the joy is there aren’t many of them on this species.)

The joker in the pack though is Muscari macrocarpum (meaning ‘big-seeded’ – end of botany lesson), said to smell of bananas, a trait that’s escaped my nostrils in a long gardening life. But it is yellow, with its topmost bunch of florets the colour of a two-day-old purplish-brown bruise – or spilt iodine.

The best form is available under the cultivar name of ‘Golden Fragrance’.

If you see any of these in pots in the florists’ shops it’s worth bagging a few and popping them into the garden after enjoying their flowers indoors for a while. Failing that, bulbs are widely available in August and September; moreover, they’re inexpensive, easily grown and long lasting.

Among the relative rarities of this surprisingly diverse genus is Muscari aucheri, native to grassy uplands on the far side of Anatolia and bearing just two to three leaves per bulb. It’s named after one Pierre Martin Remy AucherEloy who, as a young man in the early nineteenth century, kept a bookshop in Blois but who later settled in Istanbul, whence he busied himself plant-hunting in Asia Minor, Cyprus, Egypt, Persia, Syria… His little grape hyacinth is a treasure: short (about four inches high) with bright blue lower flowers paling almost to white at the top. It’s fathered several specials, among them ‘Ocean Magic’, ‘Mount Hood’ and ‘Dark Eyes’ – all desirable.

Muscari comosum, the tassle hyacinth, is a commoner around the Mediterranean. It’s less showy than some of the others and a tad taller. Anna Pavord describes the variety ‘Plumosum’ as ‘dotty’, having purplish blue flowers on ‘purple-tinged stalks weaving and interweaving to give the effect of a piece of knitting, unravelling fast’. And ‘dottiness’, she reminds us, ‘is always to be encouraged’. Hear, hear!

E X P AT

barry fantoni

Calais, France last year I wrote about Lucky, a Romanian who made a meagre living by biking around Calais collecting metal and selling it to the recycling plant. He went out in all weathers, picking up everything from discarded fridges to tin cans.

But his precarious living came to an end when the plant moved to a more modern building 30 kilometres out of town. An hour’s bike ride with half a ton of metal on the trailer was out of the question, even for someone as tough as Lucky. The last time I saw him, he and his family were standing in the snow beside Rodin’s famous sculpture of the Burghers, their few belongings packed into plastic bags.

In the months that followed Lucky and his wife were nowhere to be seen.

Philippe, the patron of the bistro across the road, who sometimes fed Lucky and his family when scrap metal was scarce, thought he had moved to the edge of town. Philippe was my only point of contact, but then his bistro went bust and he too vanished.

Lucky’s disappearance and the bistro going under are linked. Calais remains France’s second most economically unstable town. It is easy to see why when you look at the way modern France is run. Her politics are based on a model fifty years out of date, and the 400 people who run France are all from the same

‘I told you to put your nail scissors in the hold bag!’

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elite school. France is the vieux garçon network run riot.

The upshot of having dull men in charge is that the spirit of the entrepreneur is repressed. Instead of investing in new projects requiring a degree of risk, the French throw up their arms, grunt disapproval, light another cigarette and sign on for unemployment benefit.

Philippe found a job cooking for two hundred OAPs in Boulogne. He has a job. In Calais, four in ten don’t.

When I first moved here I had a choice of fifteen bistros, cafés, bars and restaurants within a short walk. Now there are less than half that number.

Three closed in a week during the summer. Calais once relied on tourists passing through. Cars off the ferries drove through the town centre. Ten years ago they built a ring road. Now nothing passes through.

In 2008 a sixty-unit shopping mall was built in the heart of Calais. It was hailed as the flagship of a resurgent town. It was going reasonably well until, inexplicably, they built Cité Europe, a shopping mall ten times bigger at the end of the ring road. Now the Quatre Boulevards is empty and its units have moved to Cité Europe, where hundreds of booze trippers and coach parties spend their money. It has plenty of places to eat and drink so there is no need to visit the town except to take photos of one another standing in front of the Burghers.

In spite of the seemingly irreversible economic depression, Mayor Natacha Bouchart, an ambitious fifty-something with her heart set on a plum job in Paris, is rebuilding the art school (30 students and no diploma status) on the old Monoprix site. The cost is €30 million.

She has needlessly repaved the Place d’Armes, complete with a huge statue of Charles de Gaulle and his wife, Yvonne, who was born in Calais – at a cost of €45 million. Next year she is renovating the railway station’s facade for a measly €13 million.

But the spirit of free enterprise is not dead. Last week I came across Lucky on a motor bike. He was wearing a crash helmet and a big smile, and had a revamped trailer piled high with scrap.

He had found the motor bike in the garage of a house that was being pulled down. It was very old and seemingly beyond repair. But Lucky fixed it and can now search for metal anywhere he wants.

His family share a small flat with his cousin, and life for once is not so hard.

M E M O R I AL

james hughes-onslow

Lord Plunket (1925–2013)

WHEN Nelson Mandela died, floral tributes from all over the world were placed at the feet of his statue on the south-west corner of Parliament Square.

What the mourners may not have realised was that there had been a large gathering of white people from southern Africa earlier that day at St Margaret’s Westminster, directly opposite the Mandela statue’s outstretched arms.

Tory MP Sir Peter Bottomley, chief eulogist at Lord Plunket’s thanksgiving service at the Speaker’s Church, told me later: ‘I think Mandela would have admired Robin if he had known him as an enlightened landowner in Southern Rhodesia who fought for the rights of black people.’

Bottomley told friends how the Plunkets, who were married in St Margaret’s in 1951, emigrated to Southern Rhodesia in 1957 and spent 56 years developing the family forestry estate, Rathmore. ‘The lines “Polish up your patent leather, black and white must live together” epitomised their approach when they went to pioneer timber growing,’ said Bottomley. ‘Robin wanted a non-racial country. He worked to add Africans to the voting lists. He developed

employment. Together they built and rebuilt Rathmore where his ashes will soon be.’

Bottomley recalled that Plunket spoke in the House of Lords calling for strong measures to bring down Ian Smith’s illegal regime, and had been personally thanked by Robert Mugabe for gifts of food and books for Nationalist prisoners which the President had himself received.

He also referred to the Plunket family’s service to the nation and to God. ‘Lord Plunket was descended from a long line of distinguished Irishmen including the Blessed St Oliver Plunket.

The first Lord Plunket was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. The second Baron was a bishop, the fourth an archbishop and the fifth a governor general.

No pressure on you, Tyrone,’ said Bottomley, referring to Robin’s nephew, the new 9th Baron Plunket.

Tyrone Plunket read from 1 Corinthians 13: ‘I may speak in tongues of men or of angels but, if I am without love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal.’

Lord Elton read from Matthew 5: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’

Hymns included a Russian one with a Swedish folk melody: ‘O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder’, George Matheson’s ‘O love that wilt not let me go’, and John Ellerton’s ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended’. The choir sang Psalm 121: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills’ and ‘I would be true, for there are those that trust me’, Howard Arnold Walter’s setting of the ‘Londonderry Air’.

‘Robin would expect me to conclude with words familiar to all in his other beloved country,’ said Bottomley. ‘God bless Africa, guard her children, guide her leaders and grant her peace.’

‘We’re improving the service to our passengers – you’ll be informed of fare increases even more quickly in the future’ March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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Photo courtesy of: Andrew Parsons/PA Wire/Press Association Images

REVIEWS

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REVIEWS

DVD

lucy lethbridge Rising Damp: The Complete Collection Granada Ventures, 12 hours 50 minutes

To order for £15.99 including free UK p&p call 0844 376 0009 quoting The Oldie

From left: Richard Beckinsale, Leonard Rossiter and Don Warrington in Rising Damp

Up there with The Good Life, Eric Chappell’s Rising Damp is among the best and funniest of the sitcoms of the 1970s.

It also plumbed depths of loneliness and failure that were very far from the cosy suburban capers of Tom and Barbara Good, but it did so hilariously: epic delusion has never been more perfectly embodied than in Leonard Rossiter’s Rigsby, the venal, suspicious, ridiculous yet lovelorn landlord who is the main character.

Set in a northern town, in a dingy boarding house held together by shiny lincrusta wallpaper in the shadow of a gasworks and an abattoir, Rising Damp is about misfits and losers – and over the course of the four series how we grow to love them. Rigsby is prejudiced, deceitful and mean, yet nourishes dreams of the finer things: of membership of Rotary and the golf club; of the love of his genteel tenant Miss Jones. The spinsterly Miss Jones in turn longs for passion, but would prefer it to come from the sophisticated African prince, Philip, in the upstairs bedsit. Philip’s room-mate Alan, a dopey medical student, is as sexobsessed as Rigsby and just as thwarted.

Other lodgers occasionally join these four core characters: Spooner the foul-mouthed and violent wrestler; an unsuccessful rep actor called Hilary (wonderfully camped up by Peter Bowles);

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Seymour a smooth-talking con-man; an erotic dancer with a pet python; a suicidal bankrupt; an evangelical theology student; and, memorably, for one episode, Avis Bunnage as Rigsby’s terrifying estranged wife Veronica, who arrives from Cleethorpes to torment him. Yet it is the dynamic between those central four, two of them battered misfits from a war generation and the other two belonging to a new world, that makes the drama work so convincingly. Frances de la Tour (Miss Jones) left briefly during Series 2 and Richard Beckinsale (Alan) couldn’t take part in Series 4 – and it doesn’t feel quite the same without them.

Rising Damp had its first outing in 1974 and it has the flavour of a period piece now – though the humour, because it relies on character rather than wisecracks, has not dated. Among the running gags are Alan’s long hair and his newly acquired earring; package holidays in Spain; and sex before marriage. The laughter relies at least to some degree on the viewer’s recognition of what constitutes respectability for Rigsby and Miss Jones. So curates still make calls, unmarried couples don’t share rooms in boarding houses, homosexuals are ‘not as other men’ and fathers insist on shotgun weddings.

But the drama belongs to Leonard Rossiter in his threadbare cardigan, defiant against a world he is sure is trying to squeeze something out of him. Rigsby is deplorable: he is small-minded, selfaggrandising and petty. He pretends to a heroic war (‘after Anzio every day’s a bonus’) and he believes he is worldly-wise when in fact he is agonisingly gullible.

His racism is made ridiculous by the fact that Philip, urbane, educated and witty, is everything that he would like to be. Yet the brilliance of both Chappell’s writing and Rossiter’s acting makes us root for Rigsby: at the heart of all four series is a washed-up man’s search for love – and through all the longings and misunderstandings we long for him to find it.

‘It seems a shame not to smother him when he’s sleeping’

WIRELESS valerie grove

On a dank dark Saturday in January, it was that deadish time, the Afternoon Drama slot. Usually some classic. But on this day, from Salford, came a reading by Jeremy Irons of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets.

After a preamble by a Catholic Liberal peer, a Catholic convert poet and an academic (David Alton, Michael Symmons Roberts, Gail McDonald) Irons began. The impact was immediate.

No fewer than three friends emailed to ask, was I listening? ‘It’s thrilling,’ one said. ‘Mesmerising,’ said another. I too was transfixed, following the text in a first (1944) edition of Four Quartets, bought for £8 at the Dartington literary festival, when I had to wrestle it out of the hands of rival purchaser Ben Okri. ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future...’

Despite the familiarity it all sounded fresh, full of surprises. Volumes have been written about the symbolism of the Four Quartets, but thanks to Irons’s restrained and almost colourless delivery, the effect was hypnotic, whether or not you recognised the refrains from Murder in the Cathedral, or Dame Julian of Norwich. I suppose meditations about death and ageing were bound to strike the ears of my contemporaries, and me.

‘Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age. / To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort’ – is a brilliant passage in ‘Little Gidding’, including a useful reference to ‘the conscious impotence of rage / At human folly’. It was the late Josephine Hart, with her genius for luring thesps to the British Library to give readings of poems, who first matched Irons with Eliot years ago: Valerie Eliot was present, and declared that Irons had ‘got it’. Perhaps her endorsement helped Irons to be fearless of the text. I later listened on-line to Eliot’s own reading of his masterpiece, distractingly 1940s in pronunciation of course (‘tord’ for ‘toward’ etc). I prefer Irons. Will it be available in perpetuity?

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REVIEWS

TELEVISION RICHARD INGRAMS

The genuine Sherlock Holmes, not the new Benedict Cumberbatch one rightly deplored by Jeremy Lewis on page 31, was so vividly described by Conan Doyle that many readers were left with the conviction that he was a real person, and even went in search of his house at 221B Baker Street. I was reminded of this reading David Suchet’s recent memoir Poirot and Me. In it he describes shooting a Poirot film in Hastings and walking off the set for a break still wearing costume and make-up. In a back street he is accosted by an old lady wheeling a shopping trolley who asks anxiously ‘There hasn’t been any trouble, has there? There hasn’t been a murder or anything?’ Suchet/ Poirot reassures her ‘Mes vacances, madame. I am here on holiday.’

I cannot think of any actor who has put so much time and effort into a role as Suchet has devoted to Poirot, which is what makes his memoir such a riveting read. His final page includes a handwritten facsimile listing 93 of Poirot’s characteristics he has noted from reading Agatha Christie.

They include ‘Dislikes marmalade… likes people… often disconcertingly silent… will always brush his hat “tenderly” before leaving his flat...’

Ever faithful to Agatha Christie’s original, Suchet fiercely resisted all attempts by various producers to send up Poirot as had been done in previous films.

Albert Finney in the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express made himself ridiculous with a hairnet and even a moustache net. Suchet records that he did not smile once in his version, in keeping with his concept of Poirot as a moralist with a strong religious faith combined with ‘an infinite reservoir of empathy for his fellow human beings’.

With this interpretation went obsessive concern to get the mannerisms right. Thanks to a tip from Laurence Olivier, he spent hours practising walking with a coin clenched between his buttocks in order to reproduce Poirot’s mincing gait, and ordered up BBC recordings of Belgians talking so that his accent would be specifically Belgian – not French. In the process he merged so closely with the character, with whom he already shared a neurotic concern with tidiness and symmetry that, insofar as was possible, he turned himself into Poirot, feeling lost and disoriented when it all came to an end in 2013 after 25 years of intermittent film-making.

Those of us whose ‘little grey cells’ may be showing depressing signs of wear and tear may sometimes find it hard to follow the intricacies of an Agatha Christie plot. What made the TV films – seventy of them in toto – compulsive viewing was Suchet’s riveting impersonation of Poirot. We will continue to get new Sherlocks, but no actor is likely to take on Poirot again now that we have seen him so brilliantly and convincingly brought to life by an outstanding actor.

ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL SMITH

I know listeners will wish to hear it again, more than seven days hence, when those dispiriting words ‘No longer available’ will go up on screen.

(Hence the importance of Radio 4 Extra. Before going to see that excellent, intelligent film The Railway Man, I listened to the timely repeat on 4 Extra of Eric Lomax’s book – abridged by David Jackson Young, with an absolutely pitchperfect reading by Alec Heggie – vivid, authoritative, gripping.)

When Simon Hoggart, my dear friend these 49 years, died in January, Radio 4 paid him the kind of tributes that would have astonished him, even interrupting the PM programme with snatches from his parliamentary sketches: ‘John Prescott has had it up to here with the English language. Frankly, he couldn’t care less if he never meets it again; it’s brought him nothing but grief.’ On Nicholas Soames: ‘You could tow him out to a village fete and charge children 50p to bounce on him.’ My own favourite, apart from the oft-quoted ‘Mr Brown said he was sorry but he looked as full of contrition as a frog is full of toothpaste’, was his observation that seeing John Major trying to run a government was ‘like watching Edward Scissorhands fashioning balloon animals’.

It’s BBC Audio Drama Awards time.

I’ve just enjoyed a revival (on stage) of a 1992 Radio 3 play by Perry Pontac, Hamlet Part II. In a foreword to Codpieces, the Pontac collection published by Oberon Books, Alan Bennett called his Shakespeare parodies ‘a well-kept secret on BBC radio for far too long’. The joke in Hamlet Part II is that an envoy returns from a foreign posting to Elsinore and inquires at the Court how everyone is – how is young Hamlet?

‘Hamlet, my lord... is dead.’ ‘What?

Hamlet dead?

Alas! but how came Hamlet thus to die?’

‘Young Hamlet died in duelling, gentle sir.

He fought the young Laertes, also dead.’

And so on, through the old king, the dear queen, Claudius, Ophelia, old Polonius... Along with other Pontac prequels and sequels – Prince Lear and Fatal Loins (Romeo and Juliet twenty years on) – it was performed in a rehearsed reading at the Park Theatre in North London by an impressive cast – Samuel West, Gemma Jones, Philip Voss, Hattie Morahan and Maureen Lipman, who assembled and directed it: a triumph.

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FILM

MARCUS BERKMANN

Apparently David O Russell’s film American Hustle (15) was ‘inspired’ by the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s, when the FBI used a con-artist to bring down some dirty congressmen. The con-artist here is Christian Bale, who has piled on the pounds and installed a fake comic comb-over on top of his full head of hair, because there simply aren’t any fat and bald middle-aged actors who could have played the role. I think we need to believe that Amy Adams could have found him attractive, and unless Bale had been under all that, she couldn’t have done.

‘The guilty verdict caused you stress – we’ll go for compensation’

He and she are a double act, fleecing small-timers and making a good living, until caught by FBI agent Bradley Cooper.

He offers to let them go and leave them alone if they help him with a couple of cases. So a scheme is constructed to bring down Jeremy Renner, a politician who is willing to cut a few corners to get the job done. Are you following all this?

Not if you’re in the cinema you’re not, because Russell is one of those directors who doesn’t believe in dialogue unless it’s mumbled through a pillow in another room down the hall. Except when people are shouting, and then at least two of them shout at once, so you can’t hear what they are saying, only that they are shouting.

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American Hustle has a nice pastiche1970s groove, which we enjoy more than we believe – two of the characters even go to a disco and dance like Travolta under a mirrorball. The clothes are amusingly ludicrous and the wallpaper is the stuff of nightmares. But as a whole the film is a mess. The actors, upstanding men and women all of them, improvised a lot of their dialogue, which provides a few wonderful moments but also gives a loose and baggy feel to something that should be as tight as a drum. I read somewhere that David O Russell says he’s more interested in character than in plot. But who are these people? Most of them are performances rather than living beings, and one or two are hairstyles before anything. The resolution of the story is rushed and perfunctory, which is a bit poor after two and a quarter hours’ screentime. That this self-absorbed shaggy dog story is regarded as a leading Oscar contender I find hard to fathom.

Last Vegas (12A) takes four oldsters – Michael Douglas, Kevin Kline, Morgan Freeman and Robert De Niro – and sends them to Nevada’s legendary hellhole for a belated stag weekend.

In other words, this is The Hangover remade for an older audience. Cue lots of jokes about being old, countless shots of women with enormous breasts being leered at and the traditional soppy redemptive ending in which Everyone Learns Something. The shame of it is that there’s a decent film lurking behind all the crassness, if only the director had felt like making it. Kline, who is never in enough films, demonstrates his great talent as a light comedian, Mary Steenburgen supplies sound good sense as a suitably mature love interest, and even Michael Douglas isn’t bad, despite his disconcerting resemblance to Lord Archer, a slightly peeved walnut with inhumanly white teeth.

Michael Douglas impersonating a walnut

T H E A TRE PAUL BAILEY

I discovered Ivan Turgenev in the summer of 1954 at the age of 17. I remember borrowing his novel Rudin from the great public library on Battersea’s Lavender Hill and being immediately entranced by its combination of comedy and melancholy.

In the following weeks I read all his fiction. I realise now that some of the translations must have been pretty ropey, but it didn’t matter at the time, since they transported a working-class Londoner into an unfamiliar culture made up of vast country estates occupied by people who were profligate with their emotions and much else besides. The characters in Fathers and Sons and A Sportsman’s Sketches had a life beyond the elegant framework in which Turgenev did his best to contain them.

In the 1980s, I travelled with a group of fellow writers to the Oryol province in Russia where my hero had been born and raised. We had lunch in a municipal building a few miles from his birthplace.

The occasion was much like a scene from one of his stories, with our Russian hosts toasting us and we toasting them with what we mistakenly believed was raspberry cordial. There must have been fifty toasts that day. It wasn’t until we were in the coach taking us to Spasskoye, the Turgenev family estate, that we realised we were drunk. Spasskoye and its gardens are beautifully preserved, despite the fact that the house was burnt to the ground. It was restored by order of Soviet bureaucrats – the same men and women who were responsible for the preservation of the properties of Ivan Bunin and Rachmaninov, both of whom were outspoken in their loathing of Communism. Turgenev, who was predicting the coming Revolution as early as the 1860s, must be laughing somewhere.

Fortune’s Fool was written in 1848, long before the more famous and more often performed A Month in the Country.

Lucy Bailey’s lively and inventive production at the Old Vic boasts two

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exceptional performances. Iain Glen, as Kuzovkin, the fortune’s fool or hanger-on, has to bide his time before revealing the thwarted dignity hidden from the world behind a carapace of drunken self-pity. Glen achieves the transition from maudlin scrounger to noble failure with consummate skill. His voice seems to take on a neglected confidence as he lifts himself out of the quagmire of despair into which he had been steadily sinking. His tormentor, the flamboyant and smug landowner Tropatchov, who is as wealthy as Kuzovkin is impoverished, rises to heights of obnoxiousness as the sorry drama unfolds. Richard McCabe is wickedly funny in a role he relishes playing. He invests him with a slightly camp voice that becomes thunderous and hateful when anyone dares to cross him.

He chortles as he splashes champagne in

every direction but his glass, while the serfs, who have seen him behave in this manner all too often, look on impassively or with expressions of assumed mirth.

McCabe was last seen in the West End as a tetchy and worried Harold Wilson in Peter Morgan’s contrived vehicle for Helen Mirren, The Audience. He was good, but he gave little indication of the brilliance he displays at the Old Vic. Everything he does is perfect, and perfectly timed. The great Alistair Sim would have been delighted with the ease with which McCabe makes the audience laugh helplessly.

Mike Poulton, who has lovingly adapted Fortune’s Fool, is aware of the play’s shortcomings. It’s a piece that only functions when Tropatchov is humiliating Kuzovkin in front of the peasants, who aren’t given much to

do. Nevertheless, as obviously flawed as it is, it does dig deeply into what we have come to know as the Russian soul.

The second act is farcical and tragic by turns, that wonderful mixture that is so accurate a depiction of human life. In a touching programme note, Poulton laments the general ignorance of lost masterpieces and goes on to express something like horror that the young have no knowledge of the literary treasures in their midst. I was reminded of my trips to Lavender Hill Public Library in the departed days when boys and girls from penny-pinching families were given the precious gift of literature for nothing. Estate agents’ offices, supermarkets and charity shops have replaced those unique temples of learning, of which we, as a nation, were so justifiably proud.

OLDIE MASTERS

A Guide to Neglected Artists No. 152 Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924) The Himalayas: Snowy Peaks beyond Rarung on the Sutledge looking to Chinese Tartary (1869) Watercolour. Signed, inscribed and dated. 16x25 inches

Gordon-Cumming’s aristocratic Scottish childhood was filled with interesting people – Louis Agassiz, the glaciologist who proved the existence of the Ice Age; Edwin Landseer; one brother in Canada, another a big game hunter.

At first an offer to visit India with relatives did not seem appealing – ‘No one dreamt of going to India unless they were obliged to do so’ – but she set sail in November 1868 and from then on there was no stopping her.

After ‘Camp Life in the Himalayas’ appeared as an article in 1869, there were repeated visits to India, Ceylon, Fiji, Australia, China and California. Written between 1876 and 1904, her travel books, illustrated with her watercolours, record not only a huge amount of unforgiving detail but also the extraordinary life of ‘a tall plain woman… no tact, very pushing’ whose aim was ‘to wander about the world and see things and paint them’.

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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c ri c k e t

PHOTO COURTESY OF: REX/Philip Brown

michael leapman

In the second of the one-day internationals on England’s nightmare Australian tour, Alastair Cook’s maladroit handling of his bowlers in the final overs turned near-certain victory into defeat. Afterwards, the chastened skipper commented: ‘This captaincy lark can be stressful.’ Two days later, after yet another heavy loss, he conceded that he might relinquish the burden when the series ended. By the time you read this he may already have done so.

As drubbing has followed drubbing, his leadership has been subject to relentless criticism. This is a bit harsh, seeing that he came into the series with an unparalleled record as skipper: only one defeat in 16 Tests and 29 victories in 48 one-day internationals. But his critics suggest that he lacks the killer instinct and is slow to abandon plans conceived in the dressing-room when they prove ineffective. Some of his bowlers, notably the arrogant Stuart Broad – front runner to inherit Cook’s mantle – are given to changing the field without consulting him.

All through the winter he has been taken to task by the pundits, many of whom have themselves captained England’s Test side with less success.

The insufferable Geoff Boycott, with his tedious repertoire of shrill, whingeing platitudes and wrong-headed certainties (he repeatedly maintained that Ben Stokes, the one success of the Test series, was out of his depth batting at number six) captained England in just four matches and won only one. Ian Botham’s time at the helm stretched to 12 games, with not a victory among them. Bob Willis won seven from 18, Mike Atherton 13 from 54, Nasser Hussein 17 from 45 and the dashing David Gower a mere five from 32. The two most successful, apart from Cook, were his immediate predecessor, Andrew Strauss (24 from 50) and Michael Vaughan (26 from 51).

High-profile defections from the team did not help Cook’s cause. In early January, when the scale of the debacle was

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becoming apparent, I was in south-east Asia when I chanced upon an Australian TV reality show called Cricket Superstar. Its format is akin to The Apprentice. Fifteen promising young cricketers are confined to the same house for several weeks and subjected to high-pressure tests of their cricketing and general social skills, with one eliminated each week.

It seemed that a macabre true-life version of that contest was being played out in England’s dressing-room. The first superstar to be eliminated, straight after the opening match, was Jonathan Trott, a victim of stress. Two heavy defeats later Graeme Swann jumped overboard from the sinking ship. Then Steve Finn followed him home, having apparently lost the will to bowl when a new law was introduced, penalising his peculiar habit of knocking over the stumps in his delivery stride. Ashley Giles, who coaches the one-day side, explained: ‘We feel the best place for [Finn] to be is out of the performance environment.’

If that was an ironic reference to the England dressing-room, many of Finn’s team-mates must have felt that they too would be better out of it. The future of Kevin Pietersen is once more under discussion. Although his talent is not in question, reports suggest that he would score low in Cricket Superstar’s social skills tests, and that he and Cook are essentially not on speaking terms.

Off the field, Cook is clearly unable to exert authority over the wilder characters in the side, whose behaviour reached its nadir after the Oval Test last August, when three of them, including Broad and Pietersen, urinated on the wicket during a booze-fuelled celebration of their Ashes victory. A lame official apology characterised that jape as ‘a simple error of judgment’. Since then it has been downhill all the way for England’s incontinent superstars. As they settled back in their business-class seats for the flight home, the survivors of the long ordeal must have rued the many errors of judgment

Geoffrey Boycott: insufferable?

HOME F R ONT ALICE PITMAN

It came as no great surprise to find that my old school, Bonner Hill Comprehensive for Girls, registered zero ‘likes’ on Facebook. It really was a dump.

I have no fond memories of the place whatsoever. The headmistress was quite mad (she once came in with odd shoes on), the teachers piss-poor (excluding Mrs Baker who taught history, and a kindly art supply teacher who once let me paint the Beatles instead of a still life of a cone). The academic standard was so low that only about three girls in the entire school were allowed to take O Levels, while the rest of us were left with CSEs (the thick person’s qualification of its day). Quite a few took the third option of getting up the duff and leaving.

This was the grim 1970s when Martin Webster from the National Front was frequently seen outside the school gates with his thugs recruiting for the party.

Needless to say, there were quite a few takers. I was horrified recently to find that Brenda, my only schoolfriend from that unhappy era, whom I last saw when I was nineteen, had taken to posting BNP slogans on her Facebook page. It made me recall how her ex-police dad Ron was also a racist, once telling me in a pleasedsounding voice how his German shepherd dog King growled at black people.

When I started at Bonner Hill my estuary-accented peers were initially hostile because I spoke like an E Nesbit child and not like a character from EastEnders. I know the TV soap came some years later, but most girls at this tough comprehensive spoke – and in many cases looked – just like hard-faced Bianca Jackson. I was bullied relentlessly by the Pin Girls, two terrifying Bianca Jackson lookalikes whose idea of a good time was to chase me round the playground until I was too breathless to run, at which point one would sit on top of me while the other set about stabbing me with a pin like a latter-day female Flashman.

As with other clichéd school ‘outsiders’ I eventually earned the respect of my

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classmates – though never quite winning over the Pin Girls – with my ability to mimic the staff. One of my specialities was Mrs Hewitt, a sadistic French teacher who, somewhat oddly for the 1970s, styled her wardrobe and weirdly immaculate hair on Jackie Kennedy circa 1963. Her special brand of public humiliation was to rifle some adolescent girl’s handbag (usually the shyest, most self-conscious member of the class) before jeeringly producing tampons and other intimate items, which she would hold up for the merriment of the rest of class.

Bonner Hill was demolished in the 1980s, like the home of some particularly atrocious serial killer. At around the same time they also knocked down the old VP wine factory across the road whose pungent vinegary fumes used to waft over the playground, giving our nasty bottle-green uniforms a faint odour of the park-bench wino. When the Aged P was in Kingston Hospital last year I had to pass the site of my old school all the time. It is now a housing estate, but I would still avert my eyes on principle.

The strange thing about the whole debacle of my non-education was why my stepfather – who was education correspondent for the Observer at the time and must therefore have been in the know – ever thought it was a good idea to deposit his stepdaughter in the worst failing state school in the South East. I can only conclude that, like the Pin Girls, he didn’t like me very much either. When I eventually come to write my misery memoir, A Girl Called Pit, I shall recount the time he asked me into his study and told me with a crushing absence of affection that I was not bright enough to go to university. ‘The best thing for you is to become a shorthand typist. You’ll always get a job as a secretary.’ Well, he was right there. Although given the choice between three years swanning around like Zuleika Dobson and filing made-up expenses at the BBC, I know which one I would have made.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD

Forget the salted-caramel frosting, ditch the double-choc cupcakes. If the British do cakes, the Dutch do cookies.

Nothing fancy – the Dutch are a serious people. The skill is in the basics, as demonstrated by Guyana-born historian Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra in Windmills in my Oven (second-hand only, though you’ll find her in print with Pavilion).

Baking, says Gaitri, is the heart and soul of the Dutch way of life. There are cakes, breads and cookies for every occasion, most of them generously spiced with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves, the result of Holland’s long trading association with the East Indies.

Boterkoek, butter cake, is the universal standby, the Dutch equivalent of the Victoria sponge; speculaas, the Christmas shortbread, is now an everyday treat. The recipe for pepernoten was tested by Gaitri’s five-year-old daughter and her classmates.

Boterkoek A soft, pale, buttery shortcake to dip into a delicious glassful in the company of your best-beloved on Valentine’s or any other day. Serves 4 to 6.

• 150g caster sugar • 250g plain flour • ¼ teaspoon salt • 1 teaspoon lemon zest • 200g unsalted butter, softened • 1 egg yolk • forked-up egg to glaze Mix the caster sugar, flour, salt and lemon zest in a bowl. Add the softened butter and egg yolk and knead until well mixed. Shape into a ball, pop in a plastic bag and leave in the fridge overnight.

Next day, allow the dough to come up to room temperature and preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas4. Butter and line the base of a 24cm round baking tin, and dust with flour. Knead the dough briefly, shape it into a ball, flatten it out and press it into the cake tin, using your hand to smooth it out as evenly as possible.

Brush the top with egg.

Bake for 20–25 minutes until just

done. It shouldn’t be crisp or hard and will still be soft when it comes out of the oven. Leave to cool a little in the tin, then turn out onto a baking rack to cool completely. Stored in a cool place in an airtight tin it will keep for at least a week.

Freeze if you want to store for longer.

Cut into small squares to serve. Possible additions to the dough are diced crystallised ginger and chopped walnuts.

Speculaas The secret, says Gaitri’s mother-in-law, is a great deal of excellent Dutch butter.

Makes about 6 dozen little cookies.

• 250g all-purpose flour • 175g chilled butter, cubed • 200g soft dark brown sugar • pinch salt • ½ teaspoon baking powder • 4 teaspoons mixed spice • 1 egg, forked to blend • 75g flaked almonds Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas4.

Rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips to a texture of fine breadcrumbs.

Add the sugar, salt, baking powder and spices and mix well. Add the egg and knead lightly to a smooth dough (you may need a little cold water). Press the dough evenly onto a well-buttered 25x30cm baking sheet. Scatter with the almonds.

Bake for about 30 minutes. Leave to cool a little on the baking sheet. Cut into squares and transfer to a baking rack.

Store in an airtight tin.

Pepernoten Make sure the little balls are even in size so they all cook at the same rate.

Yields 128 little cookies.

• 100g unsalted butter, softened • 125g soft dark brown sugar • 250g plain flour • ¼ teaspoon salt • 4 teaspoons mixed spice • 2 tablespoons molasses or black treacle • 4 tablespoons milk Beat the butter and sugar until smooth. Add the other ingredients and knead well. Shape into a ball, cover with clingfilm and chill for about half an hour.

Preheat the oven to180C/350F/Gas4.

Divide the dough into quarters, divide each quarter in half, then divide each half into 16 pieces to give you 128 little hazelnut-sized pieces. Roll these into little balls and space them evenly on two baking sheets. Bake one sheet at a time for 17–20 minutes till firm and cooked through. Transfer to a baking rack.

They’ll harden as they cool.

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WINE

Bill Knott on wine This month’s mixed case from Waitrose is offered to Oldie readers for £92 including UK delivery – a saving of £33.88 on the RRP of £125.88

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n the first edition of Hugh Johnson’s World Atlas of Wine, published in 1971, there is a small box on page 227, in the chapter about Australia.

It illustrates the wine regions of New Zealand: clusters of vineyards around Auckland and Hawkes Bay. There is nothing at all in the South Island, and a note that 80 per cent of the country’s grapes were destined for fortified wines.

The most recent edition devotes a lavish eight pages to New Zealand wine: it is a remarkable transformation, from 3,000 acres under vine in 1971 to nearly 85,000 acres today. Internationally, New Zealand is now known not just for its trademark Sauvignon Blanc but, increasingly, for excellent Pinot Noir, Syrah, Riesling, and even Cabernet Franc.

The Kiwi style of Sauvignon Blanc, with its typical, piercing notes of everything from gooseberries and passionfruit to freshly-mown grass and cat’s pee, is what one might call a Marmite wine: you either love it or hate it. It is certainly a far cry from a lemony Sancerre or a flinty Pouilly-Fumé. The Pinot Noirs, however, seem to find almost universal favour: the best of them offer fruity elegance at much more reasonable prices than their Burgundian counterparts.

About ten years ago, I was invited to Cloudy Bay, the winery that did most to promote New Zealand wines around the world. Cloudy Bay is in the Marlborough wine region, at the northern tip of the South Island, close to the Marlborough Sounds, where, after a typically laid-back tour of the winery, we boarded a rather swanky catamaran and went sailing.

The term ‘booze cruise’ has never been more accurately applied. I had made it my mission to try the entire Cloudy Bay range while afloat, but I had also promised to cook lunch. To this

end, Matt, one of Cloudy Bay’s young winemakers, climbed into a wetsuit, dived down to the ocean floor and plucked fifty wrigglingly fresh scallops for me to open and deal with.

Some went into a ceviche, with lime juice and ginger; some I seared and served with a mash made from kumara (the local sweet potato), chilli, feta, mint and more lime juice; and some I poached in a glass or so of Pelorus, Cloudy Bay’s excellent fizz, the rest of the bottle consumed by the chef. It was one of the most enjoyable lunches I can’t really remember.

Should the wines from Cloudy Bay be a little beyond your budget (and I know how you feel), never fear: there are plenty of good Kiwi wines that regularly feature in offers from supermarkets and wine merchants. Majestic and Waitrose list various wines from both The Ned and Wither Hills: I have yet to taste a bad bottle from either winery.

Or you might splash out on this month’s case, offered in conjunction with Waitrose, which features a splendid Pinot Noir from Nelson, just west of Marlborough.

There is also a Spanish white that I think might appeal to Sauvignon Blanc fans, an earthily delicious Cabernet Franc from the Loire, a ripe and spicy red from the Rhône, some delicate bubbles from northern Italy, and a white Mâcon from an excellent vintage. As a dozen ways of softening the rigours of February, I heartily commend them.

Nelson Bay Pinot Noir 2011, Nelson, New Zealand, RRP £11.49 Smooth, supple Pinot Noir, bursting with redcurrant fruit and a touch of oak: good on its own, or perhaps with a pork chop and some leafy greens.

«The Oldie takes no commission on this offer to ensure that our readers get the best deal«

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Viré-Clessé ‘Les Grandes Plantes’ 2011, Cave de Viré, Burgundy, RRP £9.49 The Mâconnais talk very favourably of the 2011 vintage, as I discovered on a recent visit: ripe, upfront, almost tropical fruit and an ineffably smooth finish.

Prosecco Brut NV, Villa Vincenta, Italy, RRP £11.99 Splendid fizz to drink on its own, or with a special afternoon tea: perhaps with salmon sandwiches and some of Mrs Luard’s chewy little pepernoten (recipe on page 81).

Saumur Champigny 2011, La Croix de Chaintres, Loire, RRP £11.99 Richly scented Cabernet Franc, mediumbodied, delicately spicy, with a nice long finish. Perfect with roast lamb.

Verdejo 2012 ‘Libra’, Rueda, Spain, RRP £7.99 Crisp, unoaked white with herbal aromas and plenty of peachy fruit, all kept in check by pleasantly rasping, lemon-like acidity.

A big bowl of clams would suit it admirably.

Cairanne 2011, Réserve des Hospitaliers, Côtes du Rhône Villages, RRP £9.99 Grenache and Syrah, cherries and spice: high-class Côtes du Rhône, a marvellous wine to drink with anything rib-stickingly wintery.

HOW TO ORDER Order online at www.waitrosedirect.com (enter ‘Oldie’ in search box).

NB this is offer ‘Oldie issue 306’.

Or call 0800 188 881 (quoting ‘Oldie issue 306’).

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 3rd March March 2014 – THE OLDIE

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Genius crossword 306 by Antico Each of eleven clues comprises a definition of the answer to be entered in the grid, and a word from which one letter must be removed and replaced by one letter to produce the entry. Removed letters spell, in clue order, a person’s name. Squares occupied by the replacing letters should be shaded in, to reveal the name the person adopted fifty years ago. In each of eleven clues, the cryptic indication omits reference to one letter of the answer; squares occupied by these letters should be shaded in, to reveal a nickname of the same person.

Across

1 Surrounded by acid (4) 3 Ruler back in bravura style (4) 6 Part excluding right eye (4) 9 Shattering timber holding setting concrete (10) 10 Echo set off thus (4) 11 Unseated without provision for warmth (8) 13 Left rotten rat in a while (5) 15 Anger father, not son (3) 17 Give publicity to sir (3) 19 Carried on losing weight, getting on (4) 20 Head of government securing large prize (4) 22 Note craze without depth (2) 23 Scripture turned against (2) 24 Builds a barrier across dais (4) 25 Fair call for help and love (2-2) 27 Fit each year in retirement (3) 28 Man and wife split (3) 30 Suite hit with force (5) 32 Whole thing stopped by resistance (8) 35 Boss crushing creatures (4) 37 Nuns for instance averse to moving south (10) 38 Pale face (4) 39 Certain about following our team around (4) 40 When to accept new workers? (4)

Down

1 Silver screens feature yearning (6) 2 Fibre damaged tiles (5) 4 Wrong search party (7) 5 Outburst in road entertained (7) 6 Visible across time (5) 7 Stage set up (3) 8 Sulphur in alien experiment (4) 12 Solar deity crowned with gold halo? (4) 14 Stream runs badly (4) 16 Blushing over old fashion again (4) 18 Lives disrupted by loud conditions (3) 19 Plant only lacking name (4) 20 Put work under pressure (3) 21 Voice sailor raised on steamer (4) 23 Reserve, one entered by unknown vehicle (4) 25 Shelves bundles of things tied together (7) 26 Feel uncomfortably hot sweater (7) 29 Force second lock (6) 31 Island uses rocky matter (5) 33 Wear out tyre (4) 34 Sticky substance in bare sink (5) 36 Leaders in office advised to guard against eggs (3)

Entries to: ‘Crossword 306’ by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG), email (editorial@theoldie.co.uk) or fax (020 7436 8804) by 21st March 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............................................................................................................... ............................................................................................................................. ............................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................

Genius 304 – solution

Moron crossword 306 Across

1 Filament (4) 3 Prospect (4) 6 Consumed (3) 9 Lancastrian emblem (3,4) 10 Suffer (5) 11 Title (12) 13 Overcome (6) 15 Agree (6) 17 Influential member (7,5) 20 Caribbean nation (5) 21 Cushioned seat (7) 22 Stimulus (3) 23 Different (4) 24 Large-headed nail (4)

Down

1 Ready money (4,4) 2 Phonetic alphabet code word (5) 4 Fridge compartment (6) 5 Fancifulness (12) 6 Impute (7) 7 Acquire (4) 8 Musical rhythm (8,4) 12 Fated (8) 14 Most direct route (7) 16 Blocks of metal (6) 18 Range (5) 19 Stylish (4)

Moron 304 solution Across: 1 Inn, 3 Third, 6 Arc [In the dark], 8 Bighead, 9 Allot, 10 Bottom drawer, 11 Smalls, 13 Garter, 17 Welsh rarebit, 20 Price, 21 Concern, 22 Wry, 23 Dream, 24 Due. Down: 1 Imbibes, 2 Night, 3 Trefoil, 4 Iodide, 5 Drama, 6 Ailment, 7 Cat, 12 Amenity, 14 Acronym, 15 Retinue, 16 Oracle, 18 Spend, 19 Bread, 20 Pew.

UNDER MILK WOOD by DYLAN THOMAS was first broadcast on 25th January 1954.

Extra letters in clues gave the quotation ‘starless and bible-black’ and the setting Llareggub. Words to be made starless were Astarte, costard, Starbuck, outstared, bustards and mustard; and the components of bible-black defined Holy Writ and Scriptures, and sable and ebony.

Prizewinners: First prize: Dr J E Strong, Holywood Runners-up: Glynn Downton, Maidstone; L Cox, Turriff

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CALL MY BLUFF

The Oldie Competition

by Tessa Castro

IN COMPETITION NO 172, you were invited to consider the unpleasant word of 2013, twerk, and supply meanings, not necessarily low ones, for eight other words, and exemplifications of them.

Goodness, I laughed. The entries were not in sackloads, but they were entertaining.

The words in question were real ones. Here are their true meanings. Booly: a temporary fold used by wandering Irish drovers. Jaunce: to prance as a horse. Tytyfer: the name of some small bird. Maumy: mellow, soft and insipid, mild, humid. Pronk: fool, an idiot, an ineffectual or effeminate person. Looper: the larva of any geometrid moth. Raffinose: a sugar consisting of galactose, glucose, and fructose units. Hendship: courtesy, kindness.

Congratulations to those below who win £5 for each definition printed, with the bonus Chambers Biographical Dictionary going to Paul Elmhirst.

Booly: a trans-sexual bovine. ‘That ain’t no cow, nor bull neither, that’s a booly.’

Jaunce: The movement of a lady’s bosom when in a hurry. ‘Is that a jauncey lass or are those fighting cubs?’

Tytyfer: Australian cricket slang for the vicious bouncer. ‘Give him a bloody tytyfer, Mitchie.’

Maumy: the Geordie name for a swollen bleeding nose. ‘Why aye, d’ye wan a maumy neb ye wee bastard?’

Raffinose: said of an ageing roué who (mistakenly) considers himself still attractive to women. ‘Take your creepy hands off me, you raffinose reprobate.’

Hendship: the camaraderie of a hen night bender. ‘Hendship’s, like, not minding the

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:

dribble of vomit when Tracey falls asleep on my shoulder on the way home.’

Paul Elmhirst

and Richard Ingrams, Gerald specialises in the raffinose.’

Adrian Fry

Booly: describes a crowd unimpressed by a performance. ‘They went all booly on me last night.’

Jaunce: a fashionably dingy shade of yellow paint. ‘I suggest Jaunce for the walls and Slug Sweat on the ceiling.’

Looper: family code for someone who leaves the ‘bathroom’ disordered. ‘If Smithers wants the lav, offer him the one by the stables; he’s a dreadful looper.’

Pronk: the button on a toaster for ejecting toast quickly. ‘Darling, pronk the toast before we’re deafened by the fire alarm.’

Hendship: a society of eleven members only.

‘John’s been elected to the raffia-work hendship: we’re terribly thrilled.’

Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead

Booly: the spare tyre above a pot belly.

‘To shake your booly means to wobble this section whilst striving to keep the belly still.’

Jaunce: a cooking term for squeezing a lemon provocatively. ‘To jaunce like Nigella.’

Tytyfer: to stroke a hat. ‘She had an overwhelming urge to tytyfer the beret.’

Pronk: acronym for public relations office narcissistic know-all. ‘When he said he was a spin doctor she knew he was a pronk.’

Looper: teenage-speak for a ‘dad’ dancer. ‘Look at him. What a looper.’

Fay Dickinson

Jaunce: loud, camp costume favoured by antique dealers. ‘Sell it in full jaunce and you’ll be able to charge 25 per cent more for the Welsh dresser.’

Tytyfer: humiliating hat forced on prep school pupils suffering from a stammer. ‘Two years they had him wearing a tytyfer at Stowe; now he’s Immigration spokesman for Ukip.’

Maumy: the consistency of cheap white bread after it has been chewed several times. ‘Get the bread nice and maumy and the ducks will eat it.’

Looper: bore whose conversation invariably loops back to where it started. ‘Sorry I’m late; the committee included that dreadful old looper Henderson.’

Raffinose: sculptors’ term for a lived-in face.

‘Having sculpted W H Auden, Jeffrey Bernard

Booly: lachrymose because unwell. ‘I’m feeling booly, I must be getting man flu.’

Maumy: splodgy, soft and fat. ‘After six kids Beverly’s got really maumy.’

Looper: n. one who peers under the doors of public toilets. ‘Look out there’s a looper on the loose.’

Mary Hodges Booly: a lint ball. ‘I had to pick off the boolies on my sweater before I went out to the party.’

Elizabeth Brassington Booly: prolonged whingeing noise. ‘He’s a lovely toddler, but all that booly drives us mad.’

Judith Young Looper: dribbler (football). ‘The winger pulled out all the tricks from his looper’s locker.’

Keith Boughey Jaunce: a yawn of jaw-breaking potential ‘Downton’s become such a jaunce Miles has stopped watching.’

Maumy: the moist, unbaked central section often found in home-baked cakes. ‘I bought Mrs Huggins’s fruit cake at the fête and it was nearly all maumy.’

D A Prince COMPETITION NO 174 I’ve noticed that the American series called Breaking Bad employs the same kind of suspense that Hitchcock used. Please write a poem called Suspense, either light or serious, on any subject that fits. Maximum 16 lines.

Entries to ‘Competition No 174’ by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG), fax (020 7436 8804) or email (comps@theoldie.co.uk) by 7th March 2014.

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Dear Mavis…

Mavis Nicholson

Widows and ingrates

OVER THE YEARS I’ve received letters about coping on your own from people whose partners have died. I have just read a tiny book, Tips From Widows by Jan Robinson, and it’s a big help. It’s about before he dies; when he dies; the months after he dies; the years after he dies. Practical and emotional tips are dealt with succinctly.

Its wisdom grows on you and you end up reading it with a smile on your face and a little pride in your heart. You are trying to survive as a widow, and this little number arms you with new ammunition to do that a bit better. I wish it had been available when my husband Geoff died thirteen years ago.

The book suggests walking every day.

I remember my mother, after Dad died, saying she found herself going out every morning for a walk and it got her going, as she put it. If you don’t go for a walk, get out. Meet a friend for coffee – anything to stop you focusing only on your loss.

When you are indoors always have the radio or telly on for company, the book says.

I found that too much – it was somehow too intrusive. But there was a sort of small pleasure in being able to entirely please yourself with what you were watching or listening to. A hint of a kind of freedom, even though it was a freedom you’d dump without a moment’s hesitation if you could.

The book tells us not be offended by other people’s reactions. They’re often gauche because they want to comfort you and end up saying the first thing that comes into their heads like ‘I know how you feel, my dog died yesterday.’ Another one, which I remembered experiencing was ‘I know what you are going through, and I have to warn you, it gets far worse.’

There are some excellent practical tips about bank accounts etc, and a motto: ‘You are not alone – you have yourself’.

As Joanna Lumley writes in the foreword, ‘It is like a quiet wise friend, full of comfort and practical counsel when your world has collapsed or changed out of all recognition. It is like a crib sheet of how to cope, and is as helpful to friends of widows as to the widows themselves.’

• Available for £10 including UK p&p from www.tipsfromwidows.co.uk

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DEAR MAVIS,

What an odious person Barbara Bembridge must be!

(January column.) I have seldom been more angry than when I read ‘people who count on inheritances should remember that it’s never too late to leave almost everything to charity.’ She must really hate her children if she makes threats of that kind and doesn’t want to do all she can to help them. If the Samaritans need charitable donations, it’ll be because they are run off their feet saving the offspring of the likes of Barbara Bembridge from wanting to commit suicide.

Those born between 1930 and 1950 are the luckiest generation in history: too young to have fought in the war; grammar schools and university grants available; good jobs for life with whopping index-linked pensions; cheap houses now worth a bomb; the NHS to fall back on when poorly. Look at today’s young: student debt; no jobs except unpaid ‘work experience’; no hope of getting a mortgage without a massive deposit first; the need for both husband and wife to work to make ends meet. The very least oldies can do is help provide for children and grandchildren, not squat smugly on everything for decades and then leave what’s left after the Alzheimer’s care to cats’ and dogs’ homes.

There should be a law against it.

ROGER OF ROCHESTER

DEAR ROGER. How could you have thought she hated her children from what she was saying? That young people shouldn’t take an inheritance for granted is fair advice. But your points about today’s

oldies being lucky were worth making and you rightly point out that our youngsters are up against it. However, I remember it being a huge struggle for my parents to afford a place of their own. In the Thirties and Forties we lived (like plenty of other families) in my grandparents’ three-bedroomed house – seven of us – with no hot water, an outside loo and a tin bath. And we were by no means the only family who lived like this. But I was as you described: scholarship, grammar school, uni, got a mortgage etc. Fat chance for this generation, you’re right.

DEAR MAVIS, Sue’s letter about not wanting to spend Christmas with her son and his family (January issue) reminded me of when I was having difficulties regarding my son’s behaviour to me. He had become arrogant and bullying. I confided in my mum who said ‘You can love your children, you can care about your children, but you do not have to like them.’

This gave me the courage to state some ground rules, namely respect. Don’t be afraid to upset their feelings when they appear to have none. Remember: it takes 42 muscles to frown, 28 to smile. And only four to extend your arm and smack them in the mouth.

LOTTIE THIS WAS discussed more last Christmas than ever before. Are people more outspoken about their needs?

Has Christmas lost its magic? Do older people find the rituals too claustrophobic when they are not in charge of things?

The next step might be to say to yourself that you can only do what you like if you spend special occasions on your own. I can’t see it personally, but plenty more people than I imagined apparently do.

NEXT MONTH: More letters on deafness – it seems to be a problem for many more of you than I’d anticipated.

Write to Dear Mavis, ‘Daddy isn’t angry, dear, he’d just like to know where you sent his drone’

The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG or email: dearmavis@theoldie.co.uk

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