The Oldie magazine - July 2022 Issue 415 by The Oldie

32-PAGE OLDIE REVIEW OF BOOKS MARY KILLEN ON FASHION

‘You are as old as you feel’ – HM the Queen July 2022 | £4.95 £3.96 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 415

My Goon Show

Nick Newman on his new play about Spike Milligan

The Railway Children return – Jenny Agutter Our Oxford mothers – Max Hastings, Peter Jay and Ferdinand Mount My secret uncle – Ian Dowding on Ronnie Biggs

Save when you subscribe – and get two free books See page 11

Would you be seen dead in this? page 23

Features 11 Uncle Ronnie Biggs Ian Dowding 14 Spike Milligan’s comeback Nick Newman 16 Language lessons in Ukraine Ada Wordsworth 17 Joy of old phone numbers Ysenda Maxtone Graham 20 Are you well read? John Sutherland 22 Save the morning coat Simon Brocklebank-Fowler 23 Coffins to die for Mark Palmer 24 Botticelli’s pin-up Nigel Goodman 26 Horrible meanies Charlotte Metcalf 27 Poetry gets dramatic Robert Bathurst 28 Female friends Claire Cohen 30 Absent-minded brainboxes Benedict Nightingale 31 The agricultural show must go on Elinor Goodman 32 Oxford mothers, by their sons Max Hastings, Peter Jay and Ferdinand Mount

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

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Botticelli’s muse page 24

Lady friends page 28

10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 13 Olden Life: What were commonplace books? Simon O’Hagan 13 Modern Life: What is namecore? Richard Godwin 18 Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips 35 Small World Jem Clarke 36 Bliss of Bournemouth Barry Humphries 38 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 39 Country Mouse Giles Wood 40 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 41 School Days Sophia Waugh 41 Quite Interesting Things about ... smell John Lloyd 42 God Sister Teresa 42 Funeral Service: Elizabeth Harris Aitken James Hughes-Onslow 43 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 44 Readers’ Letters 46 I Once Met… Lonnie Donegan Jonathan Sale 46 Memory Lane Barrie Rutter 59 Media Matters Stephen Glover 60 History David Horspool 63 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 63 Rant: Rural ‘escape’ Penelope Hicks

89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

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Books 48 Carry On Regardless, by Caroline Frost Roger Lewis 51 The Shortest History of Greece, by James Heneage Paul Cartledge 51 Beryl: In Search of Britain’s Greatest Athlete, by Jeremy Wilson Jim White 53 Elizabeth Taylor’s Kiss and Other Brushes with Hollywood, by David Wood Charles Elton 54 The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, by Edward Chancellor George Trefgarne 57 Left Without a Handkerchief, by Robert O’Byrne Mary Kenny

Arts 64 Film: The Railway Children Return Harry Mount 65 Theatre: The Glass Menagerie William Cook 65 Radio Valerie Grove 66 Television Frances Wilson 67 Music Richard Osborne

68 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 69 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

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

Travel 80 Very Moorish Andalusia Huon Mallalieu 82 Overlooked Britain: Larchill, County Kildare Lucinda Lambton 85 On the Road: Jenny Agutter Louise Flind 86 Taking a Walk: Bowden Hill, Dartmoor Patrick Barkham

Reader Trip Come and stay at the Castello di Mandela p77 Oldie book orders ● Please email bookorders@theoldie.co.uk Advertising For display, contact: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Rafe Thornhill on 020 3859 7093 For classified, contact: Jasper Gibbons 020 3859 7096 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover BBC

The Oldie June 2022 3

The Old Un’s Notes The late, great Lester Piggott was more sociable than some of his obituaries suggested. The historian Lady Antonia Fraser remembers bumping into him with her late husband Harold Pinter. Lady Antonia says, ‘On our way to holiday in Mauritius – a long flight – Harold and I found ourselves on the same plane as Lester Piggott. We made cautious friends (I was a fan). ‘Then, bliss, we were at the same hotel! Several dinners were had together over the next few weeks – all merry and interesting. He was perfectly polite, if not wildly chatty – pleasant company.’ When they left, Lady Antonia asked Harold, ‘Well, what did you think of Lester Piggott?’ ‘Great man. If only he played cricket,’ Pinter told her, referring to his (other) passion in life. One rumour about Lester did turn out to be true. Lady Antonia adds, ‘Harold always paid the bill for dinner – but he enjoyed that and possibly the great man didn’t.’ The Old Un longs to change his name after a chance meeting with his new hero. Enjoying a brief tincture at the bar at the Garrick Club recently, he got into conversation with the charming waiter, from Torre Annunziata, near Naples. His name? Oldi – short for Olderigi, a rare, medieval French word.

The Oldie’s hero – Oldi

Can there be a greater name anywhere on the planet? The Old Un promptly gave Oldi his copy of The Oldie – a match made in heaven.

It won’t surprise you that Winston Churchill appeared in Punch cartoons. But you might not know that he appeared in more than 600 of them, lasting all the way from 1899 to 1988. A new book, Churchill in Punch, by Gary Stiles, reveals them all, from the adulatory to the critical. Pictured (right) is one by Oldie contributor Michael Heath, depicting the moment the artist Graham Sutherland died, in 1980, and was confronted in heaven by Churchill, who loathed the unflattering portrait Sutherland did in 1954. The painting was destroyed

Among this month’s contributors Mary Killen (p18) is The Oldie’s new fashion correspondent. She writes the Dear Mary problem page in the Spectator and appears on Gogglebox with our Country Mouse, Giles Wood, who is on page 39. Robert Bathurst (p27) was in Cold Feet and Downton Abbey. He played Ed Howzer-Black in Toast of London. A National Hunt devotee, he wrote, directed and starred in The Fall, a film about racing. Claire Cohen (p28) writes for the Telegraph, Grazia and the Evening Standard. She presents the Imposters podcast. Her book BFF?: The Truth About Female Friendship is out this summer. Elinor Goodman (p31) was political editor of Channel 4 News. She has worked on the Financial Times and often presents The Week in Westminster on Radio 4. She was on the panel of the Leveson Inquiry.

‘Now, Sutherland, about that painting’

on the orders of Churchill’s wife, Clementine. Mary Kenny’s reference to Deal’s ‘rum residents’ prompted the Old Un to recall two others, the novelist Simon Raven and the louche Carry On stalwart Charles Hawtrey. Raven moved to Deal in 1960 at the insistence of his publisher, Anthony Blond, whose stipend of £15 a week was conditional on Raven’s living at least 50 miles from London – ‘the remittance man’s distance’. Raven liked Deal, a town once infamous for its wreckers. He said the inhabitants were ‘a salty, unregenerate lot with a taste for off-colour jokes, like the one about the famous local adulterer whose coffin turned out to be too small – “He was never happy in his own bed.’’ ’ As Roger Lewis writes on page 49 of this issue, Hawtrey was a very heavy drinker, who used to cruise the local pubs in search of pick-ups from the local barracks. He was outré enough to earn a blue plaque. In 1987, he collapsed at the entry to the Royal Hotel (where Raven would dine most evenings) and was told in hospital that his life The Oldie July 2022 5

Important stories you may have missed Man ‘nearly shot’ in gun drama Sidmouth Herald British success at paper plane throwing contest East Anglian Daily Times

Man hid keys to stolen car up his bottom Press and Journal £15 for published contributions

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‘Please mind the gap between the train timetable and reality’

now depended on both his legs being amputated. He said he would rather die with his boots on – and did so three days later. The Gladstone Umbrella is back! This annual gathering at Gladstone’s Library (bedrooms and bistro attached), in Flintshire, attracts fans of the Grand Old Man and historians, professional and amateur. Visitors get to see the Temple of Peace, Gladstone’s study in Hawarden Castle (rarely open, as the Gladstone family still live there). The last Gladstone Umbrella was held, prepandemic, in 2019. Talks included a comparison of Disraeli’s and Gladstone’s libraries and a lecture on franchise reform. There was a rollicking contribution by Jill Lamberton, Professor of English at Wabash College, Indiana. She told the audience about Gladstone’s youngest daughter, Helen Gladstone, one of the first women students at Cambridge, who was allowed in 1877 to attend Newnham College for one year – and stayed for 20. She became the Vice-Principal. Another riveting contribution was on Gladstone as ‘early adopter’ of new technology: railways (he tried out every new line), telephones and phonographs.

The outing to Gladstone’s study is enthralling. You’ll see the bookshelves built to his design (also used for measuring his children’s heights), his collection of axes for chopping down trees, tankards, statuettes – and a bust of Disraeli. Charades were performed by regular attendees. The topics were gripping – his work with ‘fallen women’, his collision with a cow. The Umbrella’s climax is the brain-stretching Gladstone Quiz. The Gladstone Umbrella is from 15th to 17th July at Gladstone’s Library.

The Old Un’s reference (June issue) to the friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (whose centenary falls on 9th August) reminded a reader of this compliment Amis paid his old chum: ‘I enjoy talking to you more than anyone else because I never feel I am giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly, brutal, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally shameful things that I don’t want anyone to know about; but most of all because I am always on the verge of violent laughter when talking to you…’ Amis was also indebted to Larkin for suggestions he made after reading the rather tame first draft of Lucky Jim. Larkin urged him to ‘sod up the romantic business actively’, meaning that Jim should have a real battle on his hands with regard to Christine, the girl he fancies. He also wanted ‘more faces – “Sex Life in Ancient Rome” and so on’ and less ‘unnatural’ dialogue. ‘This speech makes me twist about with boredom,’ he wrote beside one passage. What a great editor to have!

‘And now you may be asking, “What do I do with all this leftover wine?’’ ’

NEIL SPENCE

This year sees the centenary of the finest exploration book of the 20th century, Apsley CherryGarrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922). Cherry-Garrard (18861959) was a member of Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. He lost his two best friends, Edward Wilson and ‘Birdie’ Bowers, who died on the return journey from the Pole. Cherry-Garrard suffered enormous guilt as a result; he had set out to meet the returning party, but had been forced to turn back before encountering them. He was 24 when he met Wilson, who had already been to Antarctica with Shackleton and was returning with Scott. The meeting fired Cherry-Garrard and, despite having no specialist skills, he secured a place as Wilson’s assistant. During the first winter on the ice, he accompanied Wilson and Bowers to gather penguins’ eggs, an expedition that became the core of the book. The trio endured a five-week hike through the depths of the Antarctic winter, in 24-hour darkness. Their tent was blown away and they experienced unimaginable extremes of cold and deprivation. But the journey is only part of the book. The voyage

from England is described vividly, with great humour, and Cherry-Garrard’s accounts of the day’s routine on board make for fascinating reading. Once they reach Antarctica, the book becomes about companionship and friendship, good humour, bravery under stress and selfless work. It is funny, terrifying, moving and inspirational – a record of an adventure that can never be repeated. Hooray! The Oldie literary lunch has returned after a two-year break enforced by the pandemic. We were at the National Liberal Club, where one of our speakers, Norman Scott, said he had dined several times before – with one Jeremy Thorpe. Thorpe’s portrait is still at the club, said Norman, but ‘it’s kept behind a pillar’. Our other speakers were Andrew Roberts, defending the not so mad George III, and Julia Boyd on A Village in the Third Reich. Norman Scott remembered the night Thorpe tried to have him killed. ‘I drove off that night with Gino Newton in all innocence. He’d said he was protecting me from someone from Canada who wanted to kill me. But the

‘My husband’s disappointed. He didn’t realise the cruise was called Pilates of the Caribbean’

lucky thing was I brought my beautiful dog, Rinka. The bullet that killed her would have killed me. ‘Gino Newton is still on the loose but he changed his name. I discovered that he lived in Surrey. I felt not enough had been done. The police found him and they’ve done nothing about him. ‘There is another man, Dennis Meighan, who wanted to kill me. They’ve both got away with it. He was the first person that Thorpe’s best man, David Holmes, got to assassinate me. But, when he came to find me, he felt out of place with his Cockney accent in a Devon pub and backed out.’ Norman Scott brought along an unusual PR girl – Anne Robinson – for his talk about his book, An Accidental Icon: How I dodged a bullet, spoke truth to power and lived to tell the tale. Anne Robinson has recently stepped down from Countdown – as she says, to make way for an older woman. She claims she’s stopped so she can see more of her grandchildren and visit her New York flat more often. In fact, The Oldie can

reveal that she’s taken up a new job as Norman Scott’s full-time Rottweiler. At the lunch, Anne recalled how she’d first met Norman Scott nearly 50 years ago: ‘I was a young reporter for the Sunday Times when the Jeremy Thorpe story had just begun to bubble. It became the biggest political scandal of the 20th century.’ Anne said of Norman, ‘He is one of my great friends. He’s the most honest person. He has a fantastic memory. He’s waited till now to write his life story. ‘He is the most important equine judge in the country. He qualifies but doesn’t take part in the Horse of the Year Show every year. It might seem that, after the Thorpe case, he disappeared. In the West Country and to horseowners, he certainly didn’t.’ Confronted by the po-faced reaction to jokes made by Ricky Gervais about transgender women, the Old Un recalled this observation made by the novelist Anthony Powell in his Notebook: ‘One of the basic human rights is to make fun of people. It is now threatened.’ Norman Scott with great friend Anne Robinson at the Oldie literary lunch, held at the National Liberal Club

‘Of course he hasn’t called yet – you bit off his head’ The Oldie July 2022 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

My Platinum Jubilee double humiliation I was demoted below Tony Blackburn and outed as an old man

I have known Tony Blackburn for more than half a century. I first met him in the 1960s when he was a disc jockey on Radio Caroline. In the 1970s, we both fancied his wife, the beautiful actress Tessa Wyatt. Just recently, we were teamed up together on my favourite BBC antiques show, Bargain Hunt – and we didn’t do badly. Tony has a keen eye for quality silver. I enjoy his company. He makes me laugh – and not only when he sings. (He got in to the Top 40 with Chop-Chop in 1972.) Tony is fun and he’s funny, but I am sorry to report that our long-standing friendship is at breaking point. The cause? The Platinum Jubilee Pageant. If you stayed the course of the four days of celebration marking our sovereign’s historic 70 years on the throne, you will have seen that its grand finale featured a magnificently eccentric parade along the Mall. It was led by the mounted band of the Household Cavalry and, following the horses, the Gold State Coach, the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery, the Massed Pipes and Drums and the Queen’s Gurkha Engineers. Then came an array of vehicles of every kind, from bicycles to Morris Minors, including seven convertible Jaguars, seven cars with a James Bond connection, seven JCBs (truly) and seven London buses. Each bus was packed, according to the organisers, with ‘personalities’ associated with each of the seven decades of the Queen’s reign. I was asked to be on the 1950s bus. Tony Blackburn was invited to board the 1960s bus. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t bear it. Tony Blackburn is years older than me. He is knocking 80, dammit. I’m barely 74. Naturally, I protested. ‘Why is Mr Blackburn in the 1950s bus?’ I asked. ‘He’s associated with the swinging sixties,’ they said. ‘He’s older than me,’ I bleated. ‘Cliff Richard is on the 1950s bus,’

Prince Charles and Gyles at the Big Lunch

they said, as if to console me. ‘You’ll be with Cliff.’ ‘He’s nearly 90!’ I cried. ‘He’s 81,’ they said calmly and offered my place on the bus to my friend Rustie Lee, the Caribbean chef, who is a year younger than I am. Because I wasn’t on the bus, I could join Clare Balding in the BBC commentary box and I watched the pageant from there. I loved every moment of it – from the start, when Colonel Crispin Lockhart, Silver Stick in Waiting, trotted into view on his charger, Falkand (officers don’t ride horses; they ride chargers) to that glorious moment at the end of the afternoon: the Royal Standard was raised above Buckingham Palace and we realised that the star of the show was going to make a balcony appearance. It was a privilege to be there as Clare’s helper – but daunting. The broadcast was live, unrehearsed and a particular challenge to me because the producer had said, ‘We want you to be yourself.’ My wife (who knows me better than the producer) had counselled, ‘Remember, less is more. A lot of people find you deeply irritating, Gyles. There’s nothing more annoying than having inane burbling going on when actually what the viewer wants is to watch the parade and enjoy the music.’ In retrospect, I can’t remember what I said or when or why. I do recall that, every time I thought of something vaguely pertinent to say, Clare was already

speaking – so I couldn’t. Or as I opened my mouth, whatever it was that had prompted my thought disappeared from view. There’s no point in sharing some entertaining nugget about Boris, the parade commander’s seven-year-old gelding, when Boris has disappeared from the screen and you are now looking at the Band of the Royal Marines. All I can recollect now is the mounting sense of hysteria that developed as the parade passed relentlessly by. At one point, I heard myself slipping into a free-wheeling riff on the joys of Watch with Mother, my favourite TV programme from the early 1950s. This was prompted by seeing Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men bouncing along the Mall. They were accompanying the 1950s bus – and I suddenly remembered that as a child my first romantic stirrings involved Little Weed. Did I mention that, live, on a programme being watched by nine million people? I fear I may have done. When I asked my wife about it later, she wasn’t able to help. She told me she had watched the pageant with the sound turned down. ‘It was wonderful,’ she said. Highlight of the Jubilee weekend? Undoubtedly, Her Majesty taking tea with Paddington Bear. It was beyond charming and the Queen, as an actress, beyond brilliant. Lowlight: seeing on Twitter a photograph of me in my special Jubilee jumper chatting with the Prince of Wales at one of the Big Lunches organised by the Royal Voluntary Service for community champions on the Sunday morning before the pageant. The photo (above) of us appeared in an Australian newspaper and the caption read: ‘Prince Charles meets old man in corgi sweater.’ It was Tony Blackburn who kindly drew it to my attention. Philip: The Final Portrait by Gyles Brandreth is out now The Oldie July 2022 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Dying alone – my second greatest fear

A lonely death is better than a heart attack in my local supermarket matthew norman For those d’un certain âge who live alone, a time comes when the fear that has been murmuring for a while becomes a deafening holler. It concerns mortality, of course, although not the plain fact of it. It’s a little late for that because, while – in the absence of serious disease – the goyim can postpone fretting about death until middle age, the Jew tends to be more precocious. This Jew first became convinced that the end was imminent at 18, on the discovery of a water swelling on the left ankle. As all decent hypochondriacs and some GPs will know, such an oedema could be symptomatic of many things (or nothing). Among these is the congestive heart failure, which I duly self-diagnosed. Eventually, after 12 months of sheer panic, a consultation ended with the doctor declaring that while she was willing to refer me, it would be to a psychiatrist rather than a cardiologist. When I woke up the next day, the swelling had vanished. Forty years on, concerns of the kind are less fanciful. To live as I have is to send an embossed invitation to a myocardial infarction. While we solo dwellers mask such worries as best we can, there are continual reminders about the perils of having no one to call the ambulance. Not that the ambulance would necessarily arrive within a fortnight. But it would be awfully nice, you get to thinking, if there was someone on hand at least to make the request. It could be a minor slip when you’re getting out the bath that does it. What if you went down hard, took a crack to the temple, and were obliged to remain on the floor until the beguiling aroma of decomposing flesh alerted a neighbour? Alternatively, it might be a meaningless twinge in the chest, an arthritic ache in the arm or a dentally sourced pain in the jaw. 10 The Oldie July 2022

In my case, a few days ago, it was none of the above. It was a trip to Morrisons. Out of love and reverence for my late father, in no way will I criticise this supermarket chain. My dad not only held shares in the firm but also spent untold merry hours raiding its Chalk Farm branch for two-for-one offers (returning, on one occasion, with a lifetime’s supply of some herbal remedy for menstrual cramping). Even filial loyalty has its limits, however, and these were sorely if briefly tested on the weekly foray to replenish my mother’s dwindled reserves of blended whisky and other household essentials. As I queued at the checkout, the eye was caught by a sign affixed to a box on the back wall. ‘Please note that this defibrillator is currently out of order due to a global battery shortage,’ it began. ‘Your nearest working defibrillator is located at Camden Town Underground station.’ We’ll come to the sign’s majestic final line in good time. For now, let it be stated that Morrisons must be taken at their word. No doubt some will speculate that the recent takeover has led to the savage cost-cutting one fondly associates with private-equity buy-outs. Glancing at Amazon, others may note that: (a) many such batteries can be delivered in days; and (b) brand-new

‘That boy demolished my castle and redeveloped the area’

defibrillators are equally available, and start at little over a grand. Such cynics will always be with us. Yet rather than wonder whether a company recently valued at over £7bn has the wherewithal to correct this deficit if it so chose, let us instead rejoice at a dazzling display of a quality in even scanter supply than certain batteries. If these last months have left you craving a renaissance of unbridled optimism, behold the management of Morrisons. In a world beset by gloom and despair, God love and spare these blue-sky thinkers. At this point, I should probably insert a caveat. I am not a cardiologist. I’ve never seen a cardiologist, in fact, despite a dodgy ECG that led to an echocardiogram. So I am in no position to state definitively that Morrisons is misguided in its faith that the optimal treatment for cardiac arrest is a brisk walk of almost a mile to a tube station. They might be right; they might be wrong. Until an unknown customer, perhaps Mr L A Zarus, gives it a try, we may never know. Either way, that sign has done wonders for the spirits. For one thing, in an era so sadly shorn of good manners, the politesse of the concluding sentence came as a tonic: ‘Apologies,’ it read, going that extra almost-mile for customer care, ‘for any inconvenience caused.’ And secondly, even though it momentarily heightened it to a holler, it has since quieted the terror outlined above. No longer is dying alone the ultimate fear. Not compared with perishing in aisle three of Morrisons, Chalk Farm Road, with the very last words heard in this life being those of a deputy manager apologising to the newly deceased for the inconvenience.

For 50 years, Ian Dowding’s mother never told him her brother was Ronnie Biggs

My secret uncle

always had this sneaky feeling that my mother had a secret. Something was not quite right, like that annoying piece of the jigsaw you find is missing only when the puzzle is complete. My parents had lived through the Second World War, and their families were affected by both wars – loved ones lost, relationships fractured. My mother was a Londoner and had lived through the Blitz as a teenager with her mother. She had two older brothers who were away in the Navy. Her father, who had fought in the First World War, was a steward on British Rail. My parents met and married soon after the end of the war, and my sister and I were born in 1947 and 1949 respectively. I never met any of my grandparents. Three of them were dead before I was born and my mother lost contact with her father after a falling-out when he remarried – well, that’s what she told us. We visited one of Mother’s older brothers and his family – but on only one occasion I remember. The other brother had emigrated after the war and was living in America. She cut ties with her family one by one. Years later, her brother in America wrote to her, but she didn’t reply. I didn’t think any of this was strange and just assumed the war had caused the fragmentation of the family. My mother lived into her nineties. We got her to move to a bungalow a few doors from us, so we could be close, and I went to see her every day. It was through our chats that I guessed there was a skeleton somewhere in those family cupboards; nothing concrete, just moments when she subtly changed the subject or seemed to be evading something. She died in 2016 and I suspect she believed she was taking the secret with her. I had dabbled into my family’s ancestry but mainly on my father’s side. My son, Alex, went as far as sending off a sample of his DNA. He hoped to find something a bit exotic and exciting in his search. He was disappointed when it came back that he was 55 per cent English, 32 per cent Scandinavian and 13 per cent Celtic.

He then dug up some further research, which he passed on to me. ‘Your mother,’ he wrote, ‘had four brothers: Alfred, Victor, Terence and Ronald. Terence died young and Ronald was born in 1929, four years after your mother.’ I texted him back: ‘Mother had only two older brothers – are you sure you are not on the wrong branch of the family tree? She never mentioned a younger brother.’ Another text came back: ‘Ronald was an actor and carpenter.’ With it was a photograph. I laughed out loud and texted back: ‘Don’t be daft – that’s Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber.’ I got a text back: ‘Are you serious?’ Ronnie Biggs (1929-2013) was one of the gang who held up a mail train in 1963 and stole £2.6 million pounds – the biggest robbery in history at the time. It made headlines around the world, so his face was familiar to me – but not necessarily to my son. It had been a family joke that Mother shared her maiden name with a notorious criminal, but she’d explained it away as a coincidence. Alex was indeed right. Ronnie Biggs was my uncle. That last piece of the jigsaw puzzle had fallen into place. The younger brother had been evacuated during the war – the black sheep of the family, in trouble with the law for minor offences before national infamy arrived in 1963. He became even better known after his escape from prison in 1965 and his subsequent escapades in Brazil, where he avoided capture, before voluntarily returning to jail in Britain in 2001. Was the secret kept as a desperate attempt on my mother’s part at respectability? Did she think it would affect our father’s career or have a negative effect on her children? Whatever the reason, she kept the secret well. Perhaps, though, knowing it could have had a positive effect. I might have avoided some of the bullying at school, when other boys said, ‘My dad’s tougher than your dad.’ I could have topped that with ‘Yeah, but my uncle is Ronnie Biggs.’

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what were commonplace books? Commonplace books were miscellanies in which a writer would gather passages of literature that had caught their eye. They were not quite diaries, journals or anthologies in any themed sense; more a kind of literary playlist reflecting the writer’s enthusiasms and preoccupations – and therefore quite random. To that extent, in their bite-size appeal, commonplace books were way ahead of their time. To scroll through Twitter is to experience something of the commonplace book. Commonplace books go back centuries. In the 17th century, John Milton kept one, published in 1953 as part of an edition of his complete prose works. Coleridge’s Marginalia falls into the category of commonplace books. Later writers associated with commonplace books include Samuel Butler, Arnold Bennett and Franz Kafka. Other Men’s Flowers, an anthology of poems selected by Lord Wavell, was a hit in 1944.

what is namecore? Namecore is a stupid, made-up word which describes the trend of giving stupid, made-up names to stupid, made-up trends. It is, according to the hip magazine The Face, ‘the trend that unifies all trends’. In the not-too-distant past, a trend would come along and stay around long enough for everyone to have some appreciable idea of what it entailed. Romanticism lingered for most of the 19th century. Punk defined the latter half of the 1970s. In our restless century, trends such as ‘cottagecore’, ‘night luxe’ and ‘goblin mode’ will burn brightly on social media for a week or two and then disappear. You can find them on the ever-growing archive on the site Aesthetics Wiki, alongside such micro-phenomena as ‘health goth’, ‘seapunk’, ‘traumacore’ and ‘fairy grunge’.

Quite a few people to whom I’ve mentioned commonplace books have looked blank. Others have immediately said, ‘Oh, you mean like John Julius Norwich?’ – a reference to the historian’s series A Christmas Cracker: Being a Commonplace Selection, which started off as something he distributed only to friends. A Christmas Cracker was a compilation of favourite things that J J N had come across during the year. A 50th-anniversary edition appeared in

2019 (a year after his death, aged 88), with an introduction by Julian Fellowes. One of the most distinguished commonplace books is W H Auden’s A Certain World: A Commonplace Book, published in 1970, three years before his death. I have a treasured first edition. Auden was a voracious reader of prose and poetry that was by no means all highbrow. He describes the compilation as ‘a sort of autobiography’. And as Auden never wrote an autobiography, A Certain World – which ranges from Goethe to Ogden Nash, via Chekhov, Elizabeth David, Virginia Woolf and countless other writers – is the nearest thing we have. One friend who went up to Cambridge in the 1980s told me her tutor instructed her ‘always to keep a commonplace book’, but I wonder if such advice is still handed out today. Where are the commonplace books of 2022? Perhaps their purpose is served by the plethora of information that comes at us digitally on a daily basis. But as an insight into the mind of a writer, I’m not sure they can be beaten. Any publishers out there interested in reviving the idea? Simon O’Hagan

‘Trends are being coined almost daily,’ said a marketing type interviewed in The Face. She ascribed this to our insatiable desire for ‘newness’, coupled with access ‘to a never-ending vault of nostalgia’ (ie the internet), as well as an innate human desire to label things. Cottagecore, ‘the standout trend of 2020’ (according to Vox) is – or rather was – an aesthetic inspired by ‘idealised versions of the countryside’. Regencycore? That was inspired by the Netflix bodiceripper Bridgerton: ‘So long #CottageCore cardis and flat caps: 2021 is all about feather trims and capped sleeves,’ announced Vogue last year. But that’s all over now. After a ‘vibe shift’, we are into the era of ‘night luxe’, ‘indie sleaze’ and ‘rockstar girlfriend’. According to Seventeen, this is ‘the 21stcentury embodiment of the hedonistic spirit’ and the antidote to the ‘That Girl’ trend of, ooh, eight seconds ago. Fashion is following its own version of Moore’s Law. In 1965, the computer

scientist Gordon Moore observed, quite accurately as it turned out, that computer-processing speeds double roughly every two years. This has had its own effect on trend cycles. Everything sped up with text messages and email; then again with verbal platforms such as Reddit and Twitter. Now visual platforms such as Instagram and TikTok allow incredibly niche things to reach a vast audience with terrifying speed. Everything is happening all at once. We can’t process this much information! But we can orient ourselves with a few funny hashtags. Still, if a trend gets 16 million views on TikTok and then vanishes without trace, is it really a trend? The baroque period lasted for about 150 years and bequeathed us cathedrals, sonatas, paintings. Will ‘vaporwave’, ‘dark academia’ and ‘warmcore’ leave us equivalent monuments? I venture to suggest they will not. Richard Godwin

A mid-17th-century commonplace book

The Oldie July 2022 13

Twenty years after his death, Spike Milligan is forgotten by the young. Nick Newman’s play brings him back to life

My Goon Show

eventy years ago, The Goon Show was divisive. Parents didn’t understand it at all – unlike their children. John Lennon, who turned 12 in 1952, later described it as ‘Hipper than the hippest and madder than Mad’. Today, the reverse is true. Parents are the ones who know the show – their children are in blissful ignorance about the groundbreaking radio comedy. While working on my play Spike, co-written with Ian Hislop, I was amazed to discover that my own children had never heard of Spike Milligan. You know, THE Spike Milligan (1918-2002), bestselling author, poet, revolutionary comic and inspiration for countless comedians from Monty Python to Dawn French. Nope – not a clue. A survey of the offspring of friends revealed that memory fade and ignorance were widespread. Given a random list of comedy stars of the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s – including Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Michael Crawford, Ronnies Barker and Corbett, Victoria Wood, Harry Secombe, Penelope Keith, The Goodies and Monty Python – none under the age of 30 had heard of all of them. Most had heard of just a few – such as John Cleese. Fellow Python Eric Idle fared worse on the recognition front. One friend’s 25-year-old daughter, a star finalist on University Challenge a few years ago, drew a blank at Crawford, Secombe, Wood and Keith. Her father said, guiltily, ‘I feel bad about Victoria Wood.’ Even the children of friends in the comedy business, whom one might expect to be exposed to comedians of yesteryear, were not wholly familiar with the names on offer. Maurice Gran, who together with Laurence Marks has written many comedy hits of the 14 The Oldie July 2022

‘We don’t have anything planned; so nothing can go wrong.’ Milligan at Beaulieu, 1968

last 30 years, including The New Statesman and Birds of a Feather, was not unduly surprised, remarking, ‘My offspring don’t even recognise me.’ A recent YouGov poll revealed that 100 per cent of baby boomers (born 1946-64) had heard of Spike – but that dropped to 60 per cent for millennials (born 1981-96). The same pattern is true for all comedians of that era. It seems that Milligan is typical of the old joke about fame: you start with ‘Who’s Spike Milligan?’ before moving to ‘Get me Spike Milligan’, then ‘Get me the new Spike Milligan’ and finally ‘Who’s Spike Milligan?’ Why is this? Many of the shows featuring these erstwhile stars are available on some platform or other – be it Dave Comedy Gold + 1 or More 4 Extra.

So they haven’t vanished completely into the ether. Is it because we are now just bombarded with so much information that we let go of memories? Perhaps we are all becoming like Homer Simpson, who said, ‘Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain.’ Or perhaps it is because as families we no longer sit together – Royle Family-style – to share our entertainment experience. Simply because the available entertainment options were limited, those aged 50 and above had more in common with their parents, gathering round the wireless to catch hit shows. Like 1950s radio, television back in the 1960s and ’70s was more of an event to be communally enjoyed – so The

TIM GRAHAM / MOTORING PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY / BBC

Above: Three of the Goons – from left, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers, c 1963. Below: Spike with founding Oldie editor Richard Ingrams, 1995. Bottom: with Harry Secombe, 1978

Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show attracted an audience of more than 21 million, while Penelope Keith’s To the Manor Born sitcom reached an astonishing 23 million-plus viewers. Now technology has ensured that, even when gathered together, we tend to inhabit our own worlds – whether it’s playing games, texting friends, watching YouTube clips or streaming alternative TV shows. When there was just one television in the household, and only three channels to watch, the stars inevitably made more impact. Today, all fame is diluted by the sheer quantity of ‘personalities’ promoting themselves – and then the nature of fame itself has changed, being replaced by ‘celebrity’. Celebrities don’t have to be famous for anything other than being famous, and ‘celebrity’ has become an oxymoron like ‘public school’. Putting the word Celebrity before MasterChef is a guarantee that anyone over the age of 50 won’t know who any of the contestants are. The upside of this collective comedic unconsciousness is that it allows writers such as us to delve into the past and remind audiences why some of these performers were considered comic geniuses. Morecambe and Wise, The Goon Show, Tony Hancock, Dad’s Army … all have been successfully restaged in recent years.

It’s not just nostalgia that has seen so many shows successfully recreating comedy routines of yesteryear – in the same way as pop tribute bands. They also introduce them to new, younger audiences unfamiliar with the material. Maurice Gran says that in his touring 1960s jukebox musical, Bringing On Back the Good Times, featuring Kenneth Williams as a character, half the audience love him because they remember the former Carry On star, and the younger half love him because they think he’s a funny fictional character. My own children, I am relieved to say, loved the Goon Show jokes in Spike. When introduced to our show, younger members of the audience responded enthusiastically. One father tweeted, ‘Got something right tonight. I took my 15-year-old to see Spike at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury. 15-year-old says he’d never tire of watching it.’ You can check out how your own offspring respond to the comedy legend when our play Spike begins a national 11-week tour in September – hopefully ensuring that Milligan is Goon but not forgotten. Spike by Nick Newman and Ian Hislop is touring until November The Oldie July 2022 15

My war of words Ada Wordsworth, 23, was studying Russian when the conflict introduced her to the joys of Ukrainian

wo weeks after Russian tanks drove into Kiev, I arrived in Przemyśl, a picturesque town on the Poland-Ukraine border, to work as a translator. Until that point, I spoke no Ukrainian – but I did speak Russian, which I studied as an undergraduate. The first volunteer I met – a kilt-wearing Scot with no knowledge of either language – questioned my coming. ‘The refugees are fleeing Russia,’ he said. ‘Why would they want to speak Russian?’ In fact, the ability to communicate, regardless of whether it is in Russian or in Ukrainian, is the most vital skill you can have in this situation. Still, I had myself been worried about the question. Ukrainian is the only national language of Ukraine. All official documents must be written in Ukrainian. Since 2017, Ukrainian has been the language of instruction in all Ukrainian schools. Despite this, you would be hardpressed to find anyone in the country who does not speak Russian. Ukraine’s greatest living writer, Andrei Kurkov, writes entirely in Russian. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s first language is Russian. Even in Lviv, the de facto capital of the west of the country, people will understand Russian – though generally they would prefer to respond in Ukrainian. I’ve seen people try to compare Ukrainian to Scots, or Welsh. This is a mostly false comparison. Ukraine is the active language spoken by Ukrainians every day. Whether they spend part of their day speaking in Russian, and part in Ukrainian, is a personal choice. While British Celts may want Scots and Welsh to have a meaningful place in their respective nations, this fight has already been fought and won by the people of Ukraine. Putin claims that this war is in order to liberate Russian-speakers in Ukraine. It is an argument he has used before – the annexation of Crimea and initial 16 The Oldie July 2022

Ada Wordsworth (middle) with members of Kharkhiv Aid Office and a Greek Catholic priest, outskirts of Lviv

invasion of the Donbas were under the same pretence. The ultimate irony is that the Russian-speaking parts of the country are where the worst massacres are taking place – almost 82 per cent of Mariupol residents speak Russian as their preferred language. Arriving at Przemyśl station, armed with my knowledge of Russian, I was immediately confronted with Surzhyk – the Ukrainian-Russian mix spoken in the east of the country. Sentences entirely in Russian are sprinkled with Ukrainian words, and vice versa. You quickly pick it up. After seven weeks on the border, my Russian took on a distinctive Surzhyk flavour. After years spent painfully attempting to perfect my Russian grammar to a Moscow standard, I now speak a language that is unrecognisable. Ukrainian words pop up every few sentences, my pronunciation has changed, and there’s something hugely empowering about it. The Ukrainian language is softer, and arguably more beautiful – it’s better suited to poetry and folk song. The Russian and Russian-Ukrainian dialects spoken in Ukraine have fewer hard consonants, and a more singsong flow. The Russian ы (a guttural sound, as though from someone being punched in the stomach) is replaced in Ukraine with an и, more equivalent to an English ‘ee’.

And Г, a hard ‘g’ sound in Russian (as in ‘goat’), is softened in its pronunciation in Ukraine to a ‘kh’ (like the ‘ch’ in ‘loch’). There is something in this softening that matches the Ukrainian national character. In Moscow, I learnt that to smile at someone you do not know will be taken as a sign of either flirtation or insanity. On the Poland-Ukraine border, I learned how to speak Russian with a warm smile. The Ukrainianisation of Putin’s mother tongue would drive him insane. This is not the language of Pushkin and the Petersburg text – it is the language of a young Gogol, fresh from Poltava. Gogol, a Ukrainian, wrote Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka in Surzhyk, even if he is still remembered by most in the West as a Russian. Members of the Kremlin would have us believe that Ukraine is nothing but a ‘little Russia’. Their representation of Ukrainians is of people similar enough to them – other than in their backward, rural ignorance. They would maintain that this melodic and lyrical language is a sign of something lacking in the Ukrainian psyche. The world now knows how wrong this assumption is. That it has taken the massacre of tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians for the world to recognise this – to see that Ukrainian culture is just as rich as any other and is by no means a diminutive of Russia’s – is a tragedy. For my part, I am leaving Russian studies as a field. I will spend the next year continuing to volunteer between Poland and Ukraine with my organisation, the Kharkiv and Przemyśl Project, helping to provide humanitarian aid to those who need it most. After that, I will return to academia, with the hope of pushing forward the promotion of Ukrainian culture, in a Slavonic-studies field that has been, until now, far too focused on Russia. Ada Wordsworth is doing an MA in Russian and Czech at Oxford University

I’ve got your number How romantic old phone numbers were! Ysenda Maxtone Graham still remembers them off by heart, decades after they came to an end

o we all have, in our heads, the sound of our father or mother answering the telephone, very clearly, sometime in the mid-20th century? I do. My father would announce the name of our local telephone exchange followed by the familiar four digits, with a slight upturn as he spoke the final digit – the cue for the person at the other end of the line to declare who he or she was. That was the way telephoneanswering was done. You didn’t just pick up the receiver and say ‘Hello’. That would have been rude. You certainly didn’t announce your own name until the other person had announced his or hers. That would have been over-chummy. My 66-year-old brother-in-law, much to my delight, still answers the telephone in that way – ‘Oxford’ followed by six digits now – and, for that reason, I still know his number by heart. Through our hearing our own and our relatives’ and best friends’ telephone numbers announced like that, and dialling them ourselves over many years, telephone numbers became an embodiment of a person and the house they lived in. It’s for this reason that I still cling to telephone numbers of the past, using them as passwords and burglar-alarm codes. Every time I open the front door or log in to my mobile phone, I reach a hand deep down into childhood. It’s a wonderful excuse to introduce a dose of nostalgia into daily life, and it keeps alive not just a pleasing set of digits, but a whole way of life. A grandmother’s hall with its telephone table and leather address book with well-thumbed alphabetic flaps. The thrill of ringing up a school friend in another county (Bury St Edmunds! The glamour!) during the summer holidays. Dialling home from my thrifty greataunt’s freezing-cold telephone cupboard in Edinburgh, above which there was a small notice: ‘Wouldn’t a postcard do?’

Now that we scroll down our mobile-phone contacts list to the name of the person and press ‘call’, we rarely know our friends’ or even family members’ numbers any more. I asked my 20-year-old son how many phone numbers he knew by heart and the answer was three: his own, our landline and my mobile. He doesn’t associate his friends with collections of digits preceded by the name of a town or village, or its characterful subscriber trunk dialling (STD, introduced in 1958) code, as I do. He thinks it odd that anyone would. Four is a particularly friendly number of digits to know by heart and love. I think we all do – so the four-digit norm for pin codes is fortunate. Anything longer than that becomes tedious and forgettable. Who knows their passport number by heart or their National Insurance number? In the 1980s and ’90s, the old phone numbers were lengthened. In 1990, the London 01 code was replaced by 071 and 081, which in 1995 became 0171 and 0181. Brought up on the card game cribbage, I always liked it if a four-digit telephone number made a good cribbage hand – 4556, for example. I thought it covetable if anyone had the word ‘double’ in their phone number, such as ‘threeone-double-two’. That was vastly preferable to a spiky and chaotic mixture of odd and even numbers, such as 9274. But even those were friendly and approachable compared with today’s characterless five digits followed by six – and I’m still never sure whether to group the final six into two groups of three or three groups of two. I was aware that it was ‘smarter’, in the olden days, to have a three-digit telephone number. It meant you were truly rural. Rather as with addresses (eg Chatsworth, Derbyshire), the shorter the telephone number, the more exalted it was. A castle in Scotland I used to go and

Dial R for romance: the joy of dial-up telephones

stay at was ‘Straiton 239’. I looked it up recently and it’s now a wedding venue. I was delighted, and moved, to see that dear little ‘239’ still nestling at the very end of its now 11-digit number. So the past is not altogether lost. I’m delighted also that whenever you dial a London landline number, the three digits at its beginning keep alive the three letters they used to be, so 229 is BAYswater, going by the letters that were under the numbers on the dial. My grandmother Jan Struther (the creator of Mrs Miniver) wrote a poem called Dialling Tones, illustrated by Ernest Shepard, about how those groups of three letters sent her into various daydreams. If there had been four-digit telephone numbers in Bach’s time, he might have written a fugue on his phone number – just as he did write a fugue on B-A-C-H (in Germany, H can denote the musical note B). Four-digit numbers are lovable things. The sad thing about using old telephone numbers as passcodes, though, is that by definition this has to be a private and secret activity. The numbers are sterilised, as it were, and will not be passed down to the next generation. Ysenda Maxtone Graham is author of The Real Mrs Miniver: The Life of Jan Struther The Oldie July 2022 17

Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips

Keep someone else’s hair on The best wigs make you look 20 years younger

I’ve been thinking about wigs ever since my old friend Anne, a contemporary of Joan Collins, pronounced an explanation for the superstar’s perennial glamour. ‘The reason she always looks so good is that she’s always wearing a wig or, at the very least, a hairpiece. Surely you’ve noticed?’ scolded Anne, whose manner towards the slow-witted can be accusing. ‘You must have noticed. People with big heads are always attractive. ‘Everyone finds children appealing to look at. And their heads are vastly out of proportion to their bodies. It’s Joan’s big head that makes her attractive.’ It’s true. By the age of five, the skull has already grown to over 90 per cent of its adult size. So, goes the theory, when we see an adult with a big head, we have a subliminal impulse to find them attractive. Now I too want a big head. Not least because I suffer from the unhelpful condition of ‘double crown’ – two whorls on top of my head. This means that no matter how much back-combing and clipping-down I do, the hairs – Houdinilike – free themselves immediately and, at a stroke, I lose two inches in height. A hairpiece, I have been told, would ‘play up’. A wig would cover the problem once and for all. Forget about the off-the-peg wigs that can now be bought in every high street for about £30. You look like Barbie and you crackle with static. Many of these hail from the synthetic-wig factory in Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya, a country where half of all domestic staff are suddenly sparing themselves the nuisance of shaving their heads or braiding their hair. Instead they wear a wig to work. The businessman who started the factory has become an overnight millionaire but the wigs, beautifying as they may be in the short term, cannot be washed. A leading beauty from the Scottish Highlands – whose hair fell out 18 The Oldie July 2022

Hair force one: Joan Collins

completely following an emotional incident – has turned the situation to her advantage. She uses real, human-hair wigs, which give her the much soughtafter big head – as well as a constantly changing range of styles and lengths. Although she wears them ironically, and they do not sit that securely, they do enhance her appearance. This Pictish Queen regularly adds to her collection by visiting Trendco in London’s Westbourne Grove. So I made a visit there myself. It was bliss being tampered with by the assistant as he fitted a series of real, human-hair, off-the-peg models onto my head and fussed and fidgeted them into place. Trendco wigs had the right colour and texture, but the nearest match was the wrong length. Nevertheless I looked dramatically better. It was down to the volume and the luxurious, soft and shiny

quality. And the glorious absence of the double crown. Supply-chain shortages meant it would take six weeks to get one the correct length, and I would have to pay £800 up front. I decided to return with a plain-speaking friend to get a second opinion. At the top end – and when a Hollywood studio is paying – most actors, including Dame Joan, patronise a bespoke-wig workshop. It will take accurate measurements of the client’s skull, make a tight-fitting mesh skull cap, and then individually thread through the mesh one strand of hair after the other, knotting each one and being sure to replicate the manner in which real hair grows – in unruly and unpredictable directions. The premier bespoke wig-maker is Owen, King & Turner in Bristol. Here the human hair comes – or came – from St Petersburg, and needs to be long, uncoloured and unpermed. A film star will usually require a 20-denier (as in stockings) mesh. Stage actors and opera singers can get away with 30 denier. On special occasions, a 12-denier mesh is used. One such was needed for the l8th-century wig worn by Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons (1988). The delicacy of the mesh allowed Glenn Close to pull it back into a chignon without revealing the false hairline. I have seen the transformation such a bespoke (washable) wig can achieve when worn by a thin-haired friend, aged 70. Serena acquired the wig when her sister had no further use for it, following the end of chemotherapy. Made by a top perruquier in Paris, it is very slightly too big for its current owner but still it’s as though someone has waved a wand, making her look 25 years younger and very beautiful. If I were her, I would never take it off. But Serena is more modest than me – and would not want to become big-headed.

Professor John Sutherland read 3,000 Victorian novels in ten years – and promptly forgot most of them

I used to be well read

VIDIMAGES

re you well read? The phrase is odd – how can a reader be read? Superficially, a well-read person is someone who’s read a lot. Usually, as with Dylan Thomas’s definition of an alcoholic (someone who drinks more than you do), it means someone who’s read more than you. There are many such, alas. But more of what? There are three types of well-read readers. First is the Literary Historiographer. He or she knows who the ‘We’ are in the poem that opens ‘Hwæt. We Gardena’. Secondly, there’s the Literary Geographer, ‘Voyaging through strange seas of thought’. This person can expatiate, till the reindeer come home, on Iceland’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Halldór Kiljan Laxness and cite comparisons, in fluent Old Norse, from Njáls saga. Thirdly, there’s the Well-Read Reader who’s abreast of the current state of play – and has read the Booker winner before the longlist is announced. I suppose many book-lovers like me try to keep the three balls in the air as best we can. The truth is that even the best-read among us are babes in a boundless wood. You could spend a lifetime on it, said Raymond Williams, and not read the literature published in a month. He said that in the 1970s, I recall; when literary output was a piddle compared with now. In my day I was irritated, in my line of work, by the ‘field specialism’ that had come to tyrannise English Studies at university. The old joke still fits: knowing more and more about less and less until knowing everything about nothing. Forty years ago, in my forties (my ‘prime’, as Miss Jean Brodie would say), I landed a well-paid sinecure, teaching Jane Austen to rocket scientists at the 20 The Oldie July 2022

Andreas Reading by Edvard Munch, oil on board, 1882-83

California Institute of Technology – the institution that puts rovers on Mars. I resolved to read not ‘Victorian novels’, but ‘Victorian fiction’, giving myself ten years. I ploughed through around 3,000 novels in my decade. But, still, I failed utterly. There’s a scene in Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover in which the book-lover, Michael, is tortured to death by two thugs stuffing pages down his throat. I felt a certain kinship on watching that scene five years into my grand project. ‘How, all the same, did you manage to read so many?’ I was asked. I roguishly fired back, ‘Unlike you, I don’t turn over one page at a time.’ It had a kernel of truth. ‘Sutherland is an idle skimmer,’ said one harsh respondent to a review I’d dashed off. I confess to being a skimmer – but I plead not guilty to idleness. There are, generally speaking, two species: those who surf and deep-sea divers. Do you really believe, as myth has it, that Lawrence of Arabia read every book in Jesus College library? No. But he was, the evidence suggests, a world-class literary surfer. Surfing has its uses. Selina Scott once asked the then chair of the Booker panel, Angela Carter, ‘Have you read them all?’ Outrage! But do the maths. Some 140 submissions have to be read (or not) in seven months. You have a ‘day job’, ‘a life’ and, in Carter’s case, your own novel to write. And, in my Booker experience, all that eye-grind for five grand and the lifelong hatred of 139 people you didn’t give the prize to. When it comes to literature, do even the best-read of us ‘read them all’? Good question, Selina. There is a practical risk in living too much in books. You become world-unwise. Tristram Shandy’s father, Walter, is, no question, the best-read character in

George MacDonald wrote a string of fantasy titles, including At the Back of the North Wind (1868)

18th-century fiction. There’s a scene in Book Five of Sterne’s never-ending novel when the maid Susannah, to save herself washing up yet another chamberpot, opens the window for the five-year-old to widdle out of. The sash is broken and the window frame crashes down on Tristram’s little membrum virile. Walter’s reaction to this parental crisis is to rush off to his library to return with a Latin volume with scholarly research on the circumcision practices of the Hebrews. Tristram bleeds on. To be flatteringly labelled ‘well read’ implies that you can recall what you’ve read. Not true. And it’s a good thing. If, like Borges’s Funes the Memorious, you could remember every word, you would end up even more maddened than that poor Argentinian idiot savant. Yet forgetfulness is rarely total. Things ‘stick in the mind’ (lovely phrase). But as trace elements. Every day, I take my dog Frieda past a house that has a blue plaque to the Victorian George MacDonald (1824-1905). There are no details, other than dates but, still, it rings bells. MacDonald, I recall, was famous in his time as the author of the children’s story At the Back of the North Wind (1868).

Lawrence of Arabia read every book in Jesus College Library – allegedly

I read it, and a lot else by MacDonald, 40 years ago, on my great VictFict voyage – but all I can remember is that the wind appears by night, in the person of an ice maiden (have I got that right?) to a boy called Diamond. His father, I think, is a cabbie whose horse is called (have I got it straight?) Big Diamond. My literary data isn’t neatly stacked, then. MacDonald – or some fragment of him – lies in my mind, a fossil, along with thousands of other books. I feel I was well read once. I really was – see my Companion to Victorian Fiction (second revised edition). I recall it has an entry on the North Wind novel and half a dozen others by MacDonald of which I remember only fragments. You can see forgetfulness (so long as it isn’t that feared ‘symptomatic’ amnesia) as a kind of liberation – who wants to carry all that baggage? I had a well-read friend who suffered a stroke. He recovered, thank heavens. He could remember titles and authors’ names but not the contents that had once thrilled him. He was by nature a glass-half-full kind of fellow. ‘Now,’ he quipped, ‘I can read Virginia Woolf for the first time, for the second time.’ To undertake a second reading of everything you’ve read would make a reader envy Sisyphus and his single rock. I leave the great ossuary of my past reading in peace. A few skeletal remains are remembered, like religious relics. Most are most mercifully buried, forgotten in the great landfill of reading we drag behind us. No need to ‘quit your books’, as Wordsworth put it. They quit us. Good thing, too. It makes space for all those wonderful new things between hard covers coming our way. John Sutherland’s How to Be Well Read is out in July (Cornerstone) The Oldie July 2022 21

Brushing off my tails The morning coat disappeared during the pandemic. Simon Brocklebank-Fowler is starting a fightback, wedding by wedding

he season is under way. The Chelsea Flower Show launched two months of public display before society heads ‘abroad’ for August – to Scottish grouse moors or the straits of the Isle of Wight. But what should you wear to all those occasions? The death of the tie has been declared for the office, promoting it to dress wear for formerly black-tie events such as Tory or grand City dinners. The lounge suit’s poshest daytime cousin – the morning coat – is therefore demoted to the endangered list, struggling to retain its niche even at the swankiest weddings. When I worked in the Foreign Office in the 1980s, senior mandarins still wore morning dress with a short-black-coat option. Ancient days. Still, over the course of my lifetime, the value of investment in this singular outfit only ever goes up, as financiers never say of anything else. Given that a London flat is out of reach for most of us, buy a morning coat now. I will have worn my morning coat five times by the end of this season, about the annual average in my adult lifetime. This coat long outlasted the marriage for which it was bought. No tailor has better earned his payment. What is remarkable about the morning coat is not how anachronistic it has looked since Chamberlain’s Munich photo call, but that it has survived at all. It is the stayer of a gentleman’s wardrobe – for weddings, funerals such as Prince Philip’s last year, Royal Ascot, the Derby and Buckingham Palace garden parties. 22 The Oldie July 2022

Hugh Grant may have passed the garment on to a new generation with his appearance in Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994. One recent Gloucestershire wedding I went to combined morning coats with Top Gun, as penguin-liveried ushers used a helicopter for the honeymoon getaway vehicle. But the sad truth is that COVID has dealt a near death blow to the outfit. For two years of house arrest, the good times did not roll and my morning coat stayed at the back of the wardrobe. At the wedding of a senior groom in Chelsea this spring to a rather younger Swedish bride, a number of British guests turned up in linen suits, some without neckwear, ignoring the footnotes on the invitation. The Nordics, though, were all in black tailcoats. Stockholm is still the capital of the white-tie family reunion. The British excuses for failing to dress up included weight gain, moth attack and ‘I left it in Monaco’. I recently made the mistake of wearing a white linen suit to a wedding in Turin – the dress code was ‘summery’ – only to find the body of men, including a former British prime minister, dressed for a funeral scene in The Godfather in black suits, white shirts and dark ties. My Hugh Grant sparked a morningcoat revival in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

The British excuses for failing to dress up included weight gain and moth attack morning coat would actually have carried the day. It’s a lifetime regret that I didn’t wear it. I did, though, wear it for several recent events: another wedding; two days at Ascot (where it is obligatory in the Royal Enclosure, its last redoubt). I will wear it, too, to discharge my father’s ashes – maybe illegally – into his river in Scotland. At Trooping the Colour at Horse Guards this year, we were advised to wear a morning coat and top hat to salute Her Majesty. I complied. Even so, in prior years, dress has been mixed, including in the VIP stand. Now my morning coat is showing its age, my mender has suggested something new in grey, as sported by an octogenarian former courtier, who told me it had the merit of not looking as if it was rented from Moss Bros. But I am resolute and loyal to my old morning coat, even if it is a little tight these days. There is no surplus left for my ‘easing’ my way into it. I will have to resort to an extreme procedure – ‘panelling’, where extra material is added to the suit. My policy from now on will be to wear the only morning coat I’ve ever owned at all qualifying occasions. The morning coat is the sartorial apex predator, triumphant over all other forms of formal clothing. It is the king of slow fashion and the dress of our civilisation. Simon Brocklebank-Fowler is a former diplomat. He attends a lot of events

Coffins to die for Want to be buried in a fighter plane, a Rolls-Royce or the Orient Express? It’s dead easy, says Mark Palmer

VIC FEARN

rankly, I wouldn’t be seen dead in a coffin shaped like a bottle of the finest claret – although, goodness me, I will have drunk enough of the stuff by the time I sidle up to the great bar in the sky. But plenty of others would. There’s been something of a run on unorthodox coffins and caskets in the last decade or so – and it’s an ongoing trend. This is good news for a company called Crazy Coffins, based in Nottingham, where a team of skilled craftsmen is on hand to produce all manner of bizarre shapes and sizes for the deceased. And it is, more often than not, the deceased (or, rather, the living who one day will be deceased) rather than the family of no-longer-with-us ‘loved ones’ – as Matt Hancock repeatedly called them in the grisly early days of the pandemic – who order and pay for an idiosyncratic ‘burial chamber,’ as they are known in the trade. ‘One man wanted his final resting place to look like the Orient Express train and he was involved in the process all the way,’ says Ursula Williams from Crazy Coffins. ‘He even went as far as tracking down the exact same upholstery fabric used in the first-class carriages. He got quite possessive about it.’ It brings to mind Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel The Loved One (1948), about those who arrive at the Whispering Glades Memorial Park in California. There, as one critic put it, ‘within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday’. In one passage, Waugh writes, ‘Mr Schultz, you’re jealous of Whispering Glades.’ ‘And why wouldn’t I be, seeing all that dough going on relations they’ve hated all their lives, while the pets who’ve loved them and stood by them, never asked no questions, never complained, rich or poor, sickness or health, get buried anyhow like animals?’

When it comes to ‘all that dough’, Crazy Coffins charges anything from £1,500 to £5,000 for a bespoke box. Price is determined by how close to a body shape a customer’s chosen design is and how quickly you need it. A narrowboat design requires considerably less work than a Second World War de Havilland Mosquito fighter plane or a Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce (all of which went through Crazy Coffins books). In the case of the Mosquito, the wings were detachable so that the coffin could make it safely into the crematorium’s incinerator. ‘Let’s face it – most traditional coffins are horribly tacky,’ says Deborah Smith, from the National Association of Funeral Directors. ‘Something personal or relating to the deceased can lift the whole occasion.’ Ms Smith’s own mother has already made known her preference. She’s going for a cardboard casket (the main difference between coffins and caskets is that the latter are rectangular and the top lifts off rather than being on hinges) and wants her five grandchildren to draw or write anything on it that comes to mind. This is increasingly popular. So, too, are coffins with little wooden hearts stuck to them, the idea being that members of the congregation peel them off at the end of the service to take home as a memento. Similarly, some people like the coffin to be dressed in a photo montage or painted in such a way that it looks like a piece of art. ‘The biggest change in recent years has been the switch to more environmentallyfriendly coffins,’ says Alan Tucker, CEO of the Funeral Furnishing Manufacturers Association, whose members include coffin-makers, professional funeral celebrants and refrigeration specialists.

One for the road – made by Crazy Coffins

But this is a contentious issue. While there are several companies that grow their own willow for use in coffins, these tend to be expensive, upwards of £800. You can get a so-called eco-friendly model for less, but these tend to be special offers imported from overseas. So their sustainability credentials are not quite as impressive as they might seem, once you factor in transporting them halfway round the world. A bog-standard coffin is usually made from chipboard with a veneer finish. Then it’s a case of choosing various accessories, such as handles and a plaque. You can often pick up one of these for as little as £600 – my local funeral parlour in Fulham has one called The Simplicity on sale for £390. At the other end of the scale, Coffins Direct currently has a casket priced at £23,000. Made of metal and sprayed with gold paint, it’s called Golden Heaven. I’m more taken by the range supplied by Bellacouche, based in Devon – in particular, the Oseberg Cradle coffin with soft, wool interiors and hemp handles. There’s no lid; instead, the body is covered by a thick felt shroud. The whole confection costs around £1,200. ‘It has a gentler presence, beckoning us to touch and connect with our loss,’ says the Bellacouche website. I enjoyed watching a Bellacouche video about how its alternative coffins are made. I especially admire the company for not resorting to any sales lines about ‘thinking outside the box’. The Oldie July 2022 23

Nigel Goodman unmasks the real model for the artist’s masterpieces

Botticelli’s pin-up The Birth of Venus On the left are Zephyr, god of the warm west wind, and his wife, Chloris, from whom fall pink rose blooms. In the middle is Venus. On the right of the picture is the Attendant Hour figure. It is a profile portrait of Caterina Sforza – with her long, cascading, golden hair, a yellow Sforza knot on her sleeve, the Sforza emblem of an olive-branch garland and a white dress embroidered with cornflowers, an emblem she shares with Chiron (see Minerva and the Centaur).

igel Goodman has made a new identification of Botticelli’s famed golden-ringleted beauty, who appears in so many of his greatest paintings. For over a century, she was thought to be la bella Simonetta – Simonetta Vespucci (1453-26th April 1476), the Genoese wife of Marco Vespucci of Florence. Nigel Goodman argues that she is in fact Caterina Sforza, daughter of the Duke of Milan. Botticelli’s paintings of her were commissioned not in Florence, as is often said, but in Rome from 1481 to 1485. Caterina’s third husband was Girolamo Riario, nephew of Sixtus IV, who commissioned the Sistine Chapel frescoes from Botticelli – using Caterina as a model (pictured, opposite page). Caterina Sforza then was the model 24 The Oldie July 2022

for the Three Graces in Primavera, for Minerva in Minerva and the Centaur, for Venus in Venus and Mars and for the Attendant to Venus in The Birth of Venus. She also appears in the Frankfurt portrait. Her characteristics are her long, golden hair, either in loose tresses cascading down her back or made up into an elaborate coif; a high forehead with the distinctive Sforza curls; high, arched eyebrows; an oval face with an impeccable white complexion; and a firm chin. She was regarded as one of the great beauties of her day. Two of the portraits in this article have the golden knots of the Sforzas on their sleeves. All have the coiffure, jewellery and facial characteristics that are recognisably hers. All have the predominant red and white colours of the Sforza family. In three of these portraits, she faces to

the right in the ‘heraldic dexter’ position normally occupied by a male. Caterina emerges from this new study as one of the most outstanding Renaissance women, who commissioned many paintings. She was the leading lady in Rome from 1477 to 1484, and was Regent in Forli from 1488 to 1500. Caterina developed gardens wherever she lived, and initiated the cultivation of citrus fruit in Tuscany after retiring there in 1501. She was related to many of the leading families in Italy and had contact with many of the leading artists of her day. Her best-known saying was ‘I bend my knee to no man unless I so choose.’ Her descendants ruled Tuscany for 200 years, from 1537. Botticelli and Caterina: A new interpretation by Nigel Goodman is out now (First, £20)

The Frankfurt portrait Caterina wears a huge head brooch with an enormous pink pearl. Caterina is almost always found wearing the pearls she clearly loved in real life. She also loved the most expensive clothing fabrics: byssus or sea silk, the transparent material worn by the Three Graces; and kermes, the dyed red silk of the cloaks of Venus and Mercury in Primavera (which are edged in pearls and patterned in gold thread).

Venus and Mars – the goddess of love and the god of war As Venus in Venus and Mars, Caterina wears a brooch with a large queen-conch pink pearl surrounded by eight perfectly round white pearls. Images of Caterina in the Sistine wall frescoes in Rome also show her wearing this same piece of jewellery. In one fresco (below right), Botticelli depicts her as the shepherdess with Moses at the well, where she has a line of expensive pink pearls along her hair parting. The resemblance of Venus to the Sistine Chapel portraits of Caterina is clear.

Above: in the Sistine Chapel, Events in the Life of Moses shows Caterina as a shepherdess. Her face echoes that of the first Grace (far left) in Primavera

Primavera (Spring) – an allegory for Spring All three Graces in the picture are images of Caterina. As the lefthand Grace in Primavera, Caterina is wearing an oak-leaf brooch (associated with the Rovere family, into which she married) with four huge pearls and a large ruby. As the third Grace, she also has an oak-leaf brooch. Caterina is often shown wearing expensive jewels, especially pink or white pearls. The heads of the second and third Graces look like the Botticelli’s depiction of Caterina in Healing of the Leper, a Sistine Chapel fresco.

Minerva and the Centaur This painting is a homage to two great mythological figures associated with healing. Caterina had a lifelong interest in homeopathic medicine. She compiled one of the best 15th-century accounts of homeopathic treatments and cosmetics, called Gli Experimenti. Minerva Medica was also a healing god (and the patron goddess of doctors). In the picture, with that likeness to Caterina, she comes to comfort Chiron, who is dying of a poisoned hoof and cannot cure himself. He becomes a constellation in the sky. The pretty blue cornflower, Centaurea, is named after him. Caterina identified closely with him. The white dress of Flora in Primavera is partly covered with cornflowers, and the white dress of the Attendant to Venus in The Birth of Venus is completely covered in cornflowers. You can further identify Minerva as Caterina because she has the golden-knot motif of the Sforza family stitched to her dress. The Oldie July 2022 25

No stinge benefits Do you dry used tea bags on the radiator? Or give your guests cheap booze? Then you’re an incurable meanie. By Charlotte Metcalf

he day I received a £540 energy bill, I met a friend for a drink. It was my turn to pay, and I watched reproachfully as she cheerfully ordered a second glass of wine. The shock of that bill was making me downright stingy – we can all be prone to parsimony when feeling the pinch. The Oldie’s extremely generous editor admits to arriving at a party during his first term at Oxford with a half-drunk bottle of cooking sherry, rather than eking out his pitiful student allowance to cover a cheap bottle of wine. A friend took him aside and pointed out that this was socially unacceptable, and he never did it again. True stinginess bears very little relation to poverty. I have sat at more than one table headed by an immensely wealthy patriarch sipping from a fine bottle of claret while serving guests supermarket plonk. And we all know the well-heeled person who is always the last to arrive at a pub, to avoid buying a round. One man I know dries tea bags on the radiator for a second dunking. Yesterday, I heard about a millionairess who saved up Sunday-supplement coupons for modest discounts on her groceries. Then there are those who keep a beady-eyed count. ‘You smoked three of mine last week,’ someone will say, cadging yet another cigarette at a party – or ‘I bought two bottles of wine when I came to stay,’ as they arrive empty-handed. One summer, our family hosted my daughter’s friend for a week, and then gave the parents a lavish dinner at our house. When we all met again at a restaurant, a calculator was whisked out the moment the bill came, to determine our exact contribution with tight-fisted precision. We scorn rather than fear meanness because it’s not evil enough to count as a red-blooded sin. It’s just a nasty, 26 The Oldie July 2022

mean-spirited little vice – a boil rather than a malignant tumour. Nevertheless, it can render the individual positively repulsive, and stinges can be both nasty and downright cruel. In Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn, a philandering husband tries to woo his wife back by taking her on a romantic trip. Brilliantly encapsulating a stinge’s failure to rise to the necessary conciliatory gesture, the husband pays for his own plane ticket and waits for his wife to produce her credit card for hers. Stinges are bafflingly unaware of how easily people spot their blatant tactics to evade coughing up. A bachelor, with a kind invitation to a country-house Christmas, was asked to bring the pudding. Knowing there were at least a dozen people for lunch, he arrived with a small, marked-down, supermarket one. No splendid Fortnum & Mason pudding in a ceramic bowl. Not even Heston Blumenthal’s clementine-spiced concoction. Just a shabby bargainbasement offering, redolent of thoughtlessness and miserly spirit. It didn’t even occur to this Scrooge how his hostess would respond to this gift. Another friend invited a couple to stay at his Italian villa. The husband avoided forking out on easyJet or Ryanair, to drive in a budget hire car, thereby allowing far less moneyspending time at the villa. He had to leave early, but rather than allowing his family to stay and make their way back

A calculator was whisked out the moment the bill came

later by plane, he insisted they accompany him in the cheaper car. He then drove slowly, freewheeling as much as he could, to avoid having to fill up with petrol. He’d paid the hire-car company for the ‘return car empty’ option and didn’t want to give them back their car with a single drop of unleaded in it. The stinginess condition can take months – or years – to rectify. One woman acquaintance of mine complained bitterly to her therapist about her husband’s penny-pinching. The therapist shrugged and said, ‘Your husband’s stinginess will only increase. After the age of 60, it’s a terminal condition.’ Stinges feel entitled and hard done by; they are hellbent on taking as much back from the world as they can in revenge. A grand and wealthy friend summoned me to lunch at an expensive restaurant to discuss publicising his work. He clearly thought I’d be so honoured to lunch with him that he split the bill – and then balked at the modest quote I submitted for the work involved. At the recent memorial service for celebrated journalist Katharine Whitehorn, I read out a piece she wrote for Punch in the 1960s, praising excess. ‘Moderation is the suburbia of the mind,’ she scoffed, before going on to define true friends as those who ‘look after you with quite unreasonable kindness’. The others will give you a bed – but only for a night or two. They will lend money only if you can pay it back – and will lend books but not a car. ‘Give me the extremists any day,’ she says, and who could disagree? The riddle is: what do stinges imagine they stand to gain and why do they not recognise how despised they are? If you’re prepared to splash out on a stamp, send your answers on a postcard, please.

Poetry in motion They all laughed at Robert Bathurst when he turned Christopher Reid’s poems into a play. Now it’s coming to the Edinburgh Festival

’ve spent the last ten years living inside the head of a poet. I’m a discreet lodger. Christopher Reid (born 1949) is hardly aware of the arrangement. I occupy only the part of his mind that, between 2005 and 2008, was composing two of his masterworks, A Scattering and The Song of Lunch. I have spent the past ten years trying out, developing and presenting a theatre adaptation of these books. The show, called Love, Loss & Chianti, heads to Edinburgh in August. It is staged with two actors and cartoon animation. When I mention to anyone in Britain that I’m putting poetry on stage, I get the same darting, fearful smile. In America, it’s different. While in Chicago, I did a try-out of the show in an art gallery and it was an easy sell. The prospect of verse on stage didn’t seem to frighten them. By contrast, one of the great movers and shakers of the poetry world in this country advised me not to use ‘the P word’ in my marketing. ‘It’s a roomemptier,’ she said. It’s time to be more ambitious. Rock lyrics, Kate Tempest, Hamilton, Six… Many of us have verse swinging about in our heads and the spoken word can connect just as vividly without a bass track. Reid’s verse is immediate, humane, witty, achingly emotional and at times very funny. He’s a peach to perform; his capturing of the apposite word, phrase and image is a constant source of pleasure. The audience are never left trailing behind the sense of what he’s describing, and while the language is dazzling it is never obscure. The challenge has been to create a staged event with material that could also be done as a simple recital. It needs to earn its place in theatre. It’s going to sound good – that’s a given. But the richness of language must be matched with a spectacular setting, which also serves and never distracts from the words.

Two-hander: Rebecca Johnson & Robert

Charles Peattie is the co-creator of the Alex cartoon strip in the Daily Telegraph. In 2007-8, I toured the world on stage as Alex in Charles’s one-man play, interacting with 13 screens of his animated characters. He’s an extraordinary artist and has created the animated setting for Love, Loss & Chianti. The first part, A Scattering, has an abstract quality, and for the second, The Song of Lunch, he’s given us a beautiful, fluid, figurative, haunting design. Reid spent three years writing A Scattering. He takes us through the period of the final illness of his wife, Lucinda Gane, her death and his enforced solitude – and then reaches some measure of resolution. With A Scattering unpublished, he immediately embarked on The Song of Lunch, intending it to be a light farcical diversion about a romantic reconciliation in Soho that goes wrong. The two pieces intertwine and the farce becomes bitter. Reid said that his hero in The Song of Lunch ‘would turn out to be, like Orpheus in pursuit of his dead wife Eurydice, on a quest doomed to fail’. When A Scattering was eventually published, in 2009, it caused a sensation, winning the Costa Book of the Year Award, the overall prize beating every other category, a rare triumph for a book of verse.

In Edinburgh this summer, we’re running the two pieces together for the first time. We go straight from the grief of one into the farce of the other, because that is the speed at which Reid created them. Rebecca Johnson plays both Reid’s wife Lucinda and the ex-lover in the fictional Soho encounter, during which she comments on a book of poems her former boyfriend wrote about her. She dismantles the work, his character and talent, which Reid acknowledges is his fearful nightmare of how Lucinda might have reacted to A Scattering. Why has all this taken ten years? Christopher gave me the go-ahead in 2012 and, in between other commitments, I have been putting my shoulder behind it: getting blanked by state-funded theatres, obtaining support from the Arts Council and the Jerwood Foundation, grabbing opportunities to try out the material in pubs, clubs, a church, an orangery and the art gallery. I offered it to Chichester for their summer season and they instead gave me two weeks in the dead of winter, allowing us most of the box-office revenue. To their surprise, we sold out. We presented a run of both pieces at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, in March 2020, with virally awful timing. So here we go again. It remains an unlikely event, but only in the sense that there aren’t many, if any, theatrical two-handers in verse, with cartoon animation, currently doing the rounds. The P word holds no fears; living in Christopher’s head for the past few years has given me the gift of language with which to approach grief, a deeper appreciation of poetry and the yearning for a long lunch. Christopher Reid’s Love, Loss & Chianti is at the Assembly Rooms Music Hall, Edinburgh, 3rd to 28th August The Oldie July 2022 27

A guide to lady friends Jilly Cooper’s advice on keeping up with female pals? Treat them like tennis balls. By Claire Cohen

illy Cooper recently gave me a precious insight into her writing process. ‘Trust in the unexpected,’ she said cheerily. I scribbled it on a Post-it note and stuck it to my computer screen, hoping it might temporarily grant me even one per cent of her literary prowess as I embarked on my own first book. Jilly’s message could apply to almost every aspect of my Friends reunited: Thelma & Louise (1991) subject: female friendship. From our earliest days in the them. As another Oxford professor put it playground, our connections with other of men, ‘So long as the other person is girls consume our waking thoughts. We capable of holding a pint glass to their spend our days trying to make friends lips, that’s good enough.’ and devote time to second-guessing their Female friendships often change every move. Whether they think we’re shape as life progresses. It’s something best friends or prefer Sally in Form 5. If few of us are prepared for – having been, we’ll be invited to their birthday party. I believe, sold a myth in our younger Before romantic relationships, years that best friends are for ever and childhood friendships are the most genuine friendships are those that are emotionally fraught and rewarding conflict-free and perfect, without a hint connections outside our families – and of the ‘mean girls’ cliché. they can continue that way throughout The truth is messier. As life’s our lives, particularly for women. milestones creep up on us – job changes, Dr Anna Machin, an evolutionary moves, falling in love, children, illness, anthropologist at the University of divorce and death – friendship gaps open Oxford who has studied female up, as our circumstances are no longer friendship, says that, for an increasing aligned. We can drift. The expectations number of women, friendships are our we have of one another (that your friends ‘survival-critical relationships’. In other might be busy much of the time, but will words, whether we marry and have be there when the proverbial hits the fan) families or not, it’s our female friends can be tested and come up short. who will offer the security, support and I interviewed women whose childhood influence over the big decisions that are friends hadn’t been there for them when central to our lives. a parent died, or when their husband More than that, Dr Machin reported walked out; or who had cut them off after her ‘surprise’ at her unexpected a few cross words. discovery: women get more emotionally Life is a tough ride. Which makes intimate, can more easily be the old friends in our lives even themselves and have more in common more precious. with their female friends than with male Maintaining a platonic bond with romantic partners. another person for a decade, two, three … The same doesn’t – in general – tend it’s a serious achievement we don’t really to be true of friendships between men. take the time to acknowledge. They often don’t seek friendships in the We should. While the other loving way women do, she explained, as that relationships in our lives tend to be emotional connection with someone of bound by blood ties or legal documents, the same gender just isn’t so important to our friendships are entirely conditional. 28 The Oldie July 2022

Every time you pick up the phone, write a card or make a date, you’re making an active choice to keep that person in your life through little else but loyalty, respect, enjoyment and mutual support. It’s one of life’s great joys. And with friends you’ve had since childhood, university, your first flatshare or first job? It’s all the more remarkable how they can endure. ‘You just pick them up again like a tennis ball and have lovely fun with them,’ as Jilly told me. Provided, that is, those old friends uphold their end of the bargain. Many of us have had a long-term friendship turn sour because one party struggles not to keep the other in a box. It can be galling when the pal who told you, aged 18, they would never marry does just that and abandons you to the single life – and there are many other examples as we get older. It feels like a betrayal, or means we continue to see an old friend out of duty when their company leaves us feeling drained – a possible sign of a ‘toxic’ friendship dynamic. The good news is it’s never too late to make new friends, rekindle friendships following those ‘gaps’ or even make ‘old friends’. Helge Rubinstein, 91, told me about her 70-year friendship with Shirley Williams. She said she had made ‘old friends’ later in life with people who were acquaintances years before. They suddenly took on a more important role as her close friends sadly died. Helge said, ‘I’m making not new friends, but old friends. People I knew and might have had dinners with, but didn’t know well, have become friends. And that’s a weird, but rather nice process.’ And I’m not sure there’s a stronger endorsement for the unexpected nature of female friendship than that. BFF?: The Truth About Female Friendship by Claire Cohen is out now (Bantam Press, £16.99)

Vaguely clever From Einstein to Coleridge, brainboxes have been absent-minded, says a forgetful Benedict Nightingale

t was quite a coup for our little church in the Sussex village of Ticehurst. Edith Vogel, a renowned pianist, had generously come down from London to give a recital in aid of the restoration of the roof. She was well into a Beethoven sonata which was being recorded for eventual transmission on the BBC when another noise reverberated: a long, unstoppable ring. I was shocked. Who could be so thoughtless, so philistine – such an acoustic vandal? Then an awful realisation dawned. The ringing was coming from my jacket. I had, as I often do, mislaid my watch and shoved my little alarm clock into a pocket as a substitute. Unfortunately, it had failed to distinguish 8pm from 8am. Naturally, I tried at once to stop the noise, but in my panic put both hands into the pocket, where they got stuck. For a few painful moments, I couldn’t get either them or the clock out. I must have looked pretty odd, apparently fighting with my clothes while sounding like the bells of St Clement’s. There were reproachful looks – and there would have been reproachful comments if I hadn’t scarpered when Miss Vogel came to a majestic close. I wasn’t 70 or 80 at the time. I was 17. Nowadays, people tend to see absentmindedness as worrying evidence of approaching or ensconced dementia. That’s far from making convincing clinical sense. Was Adam Smith demented when, egg in hand, he observed his watch bubbling away in a saucepan of boiling water? Or 30 The Oldie July 2022

Beethoven, when he angrily demanded the bill for meals he hadn’t eaten or even ordered? Far from it. He had yet to compose his later symphonies and string quartets. Paradoxically, absent-mindedness may be a sign of high and active intelligence. I’m not making any claims for myself here – my proudest intellectual feat is that I scored 94 per cent in a Greek translation paper at AS level 65 years ago. That can’t compare with the achievements of Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein or even the clergyman and minor Romantic poet William Bowles – who once inscribed ‘From the author’ in a copy of a Bible he gave to a parishioner. He was also observed by his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge desperately looking for a sock for his bare foot, unaware he’d put two on the other one. Charles Lamb claimed to have run into Coleridge, who grabbed him by a button, closed his eyes and talked and talked – and was still talking when Lamb returned ages later to find him holding the button, which had come off. Thomas Edison once joined a queue to pay his taxes, but was so absorbed with his ideas for a new invention that when he arrived at the window he couldn’t remember his own name. Einstein, whose absent-mindedness was legendary, was arrested as a potential assassin in Brussels after wandering lost and bedraggled into a slum area and asking an innkeeper how to contact the Belgian king, who had genuinely invited him to visit. As for me, well, my friend Charles Spencer, the former Telegraph theatre critic, says I Muddle-headed: Albert Einstein and (below) Thomas Edison

once very solicitously introduced him to his own son. I have my theories about the vague but bright. Their minds often slither unknowingly forward, so that they are thinking of Y while they still are in the process of doing X. Ronald Duncan, well known as a dramatist in the 1940s, was pondering the lecture he was to give in Cambridge when, told by an inspector at the gate to go ‘straight on’ to his train, he walked off the end of the platform and along the tracks until a platelayer asked him where he was going. ‘To Cambridge,’ he replied irritably. ‘Wouldn’t a train be quicker?’ came the reply. No theory can explain some of the more celebrated vague heroes, such as W A Spooner (1844-1930), Warden of New College, Oxford, after whom the spoonerism was named. He was said to have asked an undergraduate if it was he or his brother who had been killed in the Great War. And he told an acquaintance, ‘I know your name but can’t think of your face.’ You know the old practice of pouring salt onto spilled wine? Well, Spooner reversed it, carefully pouring wine on spilled salt and creating a grainy red puddle. Some famous spoonerisms are apocryphal – it’s unlikely that he once proposed a loyal toast to ‘the queer old dean’ – but there was something topsy-turvy about his undeniably excellent mind. And who was the famous essayist who wrote to a friend, ‘On rising this morning, I carefully washed my boots in hot water, blackened my face, poured coffee on my sardines and put my hat on the fire to boil’? * I think his name began with C or maybe G. But he could have been, er, um, many of us. * Answer: G K Chesterton

The shows must go on After 250 years, the traditional agricultural show is under threat. Elinor Goodman loves everything about them

NORMAN THELWELL

ccording to Google, there are two kinds of donkey show. One involves bestiality and glamorous women on stage. The other involves competitions between donkey-owners, clad in sensible tweeds, for the best-turned-out donkey. My favourite in the latter category is the Heckington Show (on 30th July). Heckington, just outside Lincoln, is home to the largest village show in England. Alongside the heavy horses, show ponies and livestock, common to most agricultural shows, there are other classes which have lost their place at other shows – such as rabbits. Agricultural shows are wholesome places with a strong whiff of tradition. Passion is just as likely to be about procreating the best in breed, or cultivating the best vegetables, as anything Jilly Cooper featured in Riders. I first saw a donkey class in the sixties at the Cranleigh Show – now sadly, after the pandemic, unlikely to return. Riding a Thelwellian riding-school pony, I remember gazing up at the two impossibly glamorous Dimbleby brothers, riding horses that looked down their noses at mine. I loved the parade of livestock winners, and the different worlds on show in the various tents: gardeners presiding over huge vegetables, every variety of chicken and spotlessly clean pigs. You can still see all that now at the best shows, such as Ashbourne in Derbyshire, Turriff in Aberdeenshire and North Devon, to name just a few in August. Ashbourne was started by the Shire Horse Society in the 19th century, and still has the most wonderful heavy-horse competition. The horses’ tack, brasses and coats shine like guardsman’s boots, their feathers whitened with a mixture of talcum powder and very fine sawdust. At some shows, such as the New Forest, heavy horses compete under saddles, too. They end their individual shows with a thundering gallop round

Show pony – by Norman Thelwell

the ring, echoing the days of mounted knights, shaking the ground. Occasionally, an animal runs off, but part of the preparation involves teaching cattle, sheep and even pigs to walk round a ring. Between classes, they are housed in tents, where the public crowd around them. One of the main purposes is to show people from outside farming what the countryside is about. Bulls with huge testicles doze, seemingly oblivious to the beautifully turned-out cows. Below the constant lowing and belching of animals, their owners talk about rising feed and fertiliser prices, and wonder how long they will be able to afford the cost of showing – even though winning can increase the value of their stock. For the actual competitions, the exhibitors – some as young as seven – put on white overalls like so many advertisements for Persil. The judges and officials often wear tweeds and bowlers. They look as if they have been inherited from their grandparents, as indeed they may have been: these shows

have been part of the rural landscape for generations. The Brecon County Show, in early August, claims to be the oldest in Britain, ‘if not the world’. It was founded in 1759 by a group of gentlemen who wanted to improve the quality of farming. The organisers recently had a cup returned to them from Australia by someone whose ancestor had won it in 1871 for the best turnip field. In some ways, these shows seem nostalgic for a bucolic past. Still, if you want to see how farming has changed, look at the state-of-the-art machinery on sale. As the numbers employed in agriculture have fallen, shows have had to appeal to a much wider audience. Today they sell themselves as ‘family days out, where town and country meet’. Acres are now covered with pop-up shops that have nothing to do with farming. Dancing diggers and motorcycle stunt rides now roar round the rings where military displays used to take place. Some traditionalists don’t like the increased commercialism. But after two years without shows because of the pandemic, they’ve got to rebuild their numbers to survive. The Association of Show and Agricultural Organisations is cautiously optimistic on the basis of the shows so far. The public has returned, but the number of trade stands for agricultural equipment and cars is down because of manufacturing shortages. Some shows, such as the Monmouthshire and the Surrey County, won’t be returning this year. Smaller shows too worry about the impact of higher fuel prices. The Northern Donkey Society was, at the time of going to press, waiting to see whether to go ahead with its breed show at Moreton Morrell in Warwickshire on 20th August. If it doesn’t, there will be some very disappointed donkey-owners, all dressed up with nowhere to go. The Oldie July 2022 31

Ninety years after three young women started at Oxford, their sons pay tribute to them. By Ferdinand Mount, Peter Jay and Max Hastings

My alma mater Ferdinand Mount, writer and journalist, is author of Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes and Kiss Myself Goodbye: the Many Lives of Aunt Munca. He remembers his mother, Julia Mount, née Pakenham (1913-56), sister of the prison reformer Lord Longford. She married Robin Mount, a writer and amateur jockey.

SOMERVILLE COLLEGE, OXFORD

y mother laughed when she was described as Junoesque because she knew perfectly well that what people meant was ‘fat’. Like all her siblings except her eldest sister, Pansy, she was large-boned and not naturally graceful. ‘Pakenhams have no spring’ was one of her pronouncements about her family. ‘Pakenhams are too odd to get into Parliament’ was another. So far both claims have proved correct. The novelist Barbara Pym was at Somerville with her, and wrote in her diary for 27th January 1934, ‘In the afternoon I went shopping by myself. I saw Julia Pakenham looking superb in a turquoise blue frock and new halo hat. She was wearing a fur coat, so one couldn’t see how fat she was.’ I like to think of my mother swinging along the High Street or more probably the Cornmarket where the clothes shops were, dolled up in her turquoise frock and halo hat with her fur coat flapping (otherwise how could Barbara Pym have seen the frock?). In 1934, Barbara Pym, then aged 21, began to write a novel featuring her sister, Hilary, and herself as spinsters in their fifties – an odd project and oddly prescient, for they were to live together 32 The Oldie July 2022

spinsterly most of their lives except for the period when Hilary was married. The novel, not published until 1950, was called Some Tame Gazelle, and is the only one of her novels whose characters are drawn directly from life. My mother features as Lady Clara Boulding. I hoped that Barbara Pym’s sharp eye would tell me something about my mother at the age of 21. But the book turns out to be a sprightly spoof. The two sisters, Harriet and Belinda, spend their time knitting their own underwear and swooning over the local clergymen, while Lady Clara has only a walk-on part as a stately widow who finds solace in opening the village garden party. I am sure my mother would not have minded, had she lived to read Barbara Pym’s diaries. I would like to ask her what she thought of Barbara who in her photographs looks not totally unlike my mother (or perhaps that is just the period look, the way the hair flops, the cut of the jacket) but that too is not possible. I have a photograph of the 1934 New College Commemoration Ball, where my mother is trying the fur-coat strategy again. Although the ball is being held in high summer, on 22nd June, there she is in the front row with a dark fur cape thrown round her shoulders. None of the other 50 girls in the picture is wearing anything of the sort – so it is clearly not the fashion. My mother is sitting in a characteristic half-turned posture with her eyes shying away from the camera. I am not sure whether she is genuinely nervous or half-flirting with the lens. Next to her is a young man in spectacles who appears almost equally ill at ease. He is dark, a little plump, owlish, certainly not handsome, and looks as if

he would much rather be somewhere else. This impression, like my mother’s shy look perhaps, is misleading. Isaiah Berlin loves parties and gossip and intrigue and is already a legend for these qualities as well as for his intellectual brilliance. After taking my mother out, he sends her little notes datelined ‘All Souls 2am’, going over the events of the evening and embroidering the points of interest. The dateline suggests that he cannot get to sleep for thinking of her, but he does not actually say anything of the sort because he is shy with girls and adopts a certain formality of address – addressing them as Miss so-and-so, partly as a joke and partly as a kind of protection. My mother is just taking her finals at the time, and to her chagrin is placed

along with the dregs in the third class. Isaiah, or Shaya as everyone calls him then, writes to her in a state of high indignation: 49 Hollycroft Avenue, Hampstead NW3 August 1st Dear Lady J (you don’t, I hope, mind this slightly Regency style of address?) I want principally to express my horror, amazement and sympathetic indignation at the act of the PPE examiners. I approached Mr Sumner, whom I met shortly after seeing the Times, and succeeded in giving him a very considerable sense of guilt: he admitted that were he to have had his time again he w’d have acted differently perhaps, and pleaded weakly that the

enormous brilliance of a certain Hitch, of Worcester College, I am told, blinded him to your merits... Peter Jay, journalist, economist and former British Ambassador to America, recalls his mother, Peggy Jay, née Garnett (1913–2008). A Labour councillor in London and President of the Heath and Old Hampstead Society, she did much to save Hampstead Heath and its nearby buildings. She married Douglas Jay, a Labour Cabinet Minister. My mother was very much at home in Oxford, with grandparents living at 56 Banbury Road, now the university careers office. For her, Oxford meant, as her

1931 Freshers’ photo, Somerville College, Oxford Circled, from left: Lady Julia Pakenham (later Mount); Peggy Garnett (later Jay); Anne Scott-James (later Hastings)

The Oldie July 2022 33

memoir records it, ‘candle-lit dinners, walks in bluebell woods and long conversations over cocoa…’, from which two serious concerns emerged: a Diploma in Economics and Politics; and, in her first year, joining the Labour Party. Oxford also reunited her with her Hampstead next-door neighbour and boyfriend, to whom she became engaged by Christmas, my father, Douglas Jay; and to whose contemporaries she quickly became attached – Goronwy Rees, A L Rowse, Dick Crossman, Adam von Trott, Herbert and Jenifer Hart and Isaiah Berlin – as well as her close friends at Somerville. Of Julia Pakenham (also pictured), she wrote, ‘Her stable character and clear mind gave [me] great strength and comfort.’ She was at Oxford between the 1929 great crash on Wall Street, the genesis of the Great Depression of the 1930s and Hitler’s coming to power in Berlin in 1933 – anxious times. My mother attended the ‘King and Country’ debate at the Oxford Union in 1933, sitting on an exterior windowsill, armed with a kitchen knife, though for what purpose is unknown – hardly a pacifist gesture. Those who voted not to fight for king and country were not indicating that they would not fight against Nazism, if that were necessary. I went with my mother to visit Julia Pakenham on Salisbury Plain in about 1941; and, like all who knew her, I was, though still a child, utterly bewitched by her stunning beauty. I did not meet Anne Scott-James until the 1970s, introduced by her Berkshire neighbour, Richard Ingrams, The Oldie’s founding editor, my friend from Oxford. She had recently married the matchless cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, and kept a most exquisite garden surrounding her country cottage. He cannot be excused of raging – or, as he was prone to say, ‘roaring’ – homophobia. Yet I cannot but treasure his memory for what is still my favourite cartoon of the dreadful 20 years of the two Harolds (1956-76 – Macmillan and Wilson): cynical, posed, treacherous, effective only in winning elections as shamefully and shamelessly as possible. Cue beatific choirboys with angelic expressions, singing: All things bright and beautiful All creatures great and small, That clever Harold Wilson Has double-crossed them all. 34 The Oldie July 2022

Max Hastings, historian and former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard, remembers his mother, the journalist and writer Anne Scott-James (1913-2009). She married the journalist Macdonald Hastings. She looks so keen and jolly. And, in striking contrast to most of her fellow freshers, fashion-conscious in her tweed suit. Anne had arrived at Oxford as a scholarship girl from St Paul’s, where she was happy and a tennis star. She was thrilled to escape from the thraldom at home in Notting Hill – 12 Chepstow Place was not then the smart residence it has become today. She found her stern, austere father, a literary critic who wrote as R A ScottJames, oppressively Victorian. He himself had been an undergraduate at Corpus, and promised his daughter all manner of academic delights at Somerville – nothing was said about the social side, save the promise of reading parties with dons. Thus it was that, in that early Oxford photo, in contrast to the seriousness and even severity of most of the girls around her, she looks smiley and full of hope. She joined the Bach choir, and prospered academically. She completed two years with a First in Honour Mods. To the end of her life, she cherished a passion for both Latin and Greek, and in her nineties returned to reading Virgil and Homer, to preserve an unfailing mental acuity. Her enduring regret about her education, both at school and at university, was that she was taught absolutely nothing of science, which remained a closed book to her. Socially, however, Oxford was another story. Though strikingly good-looking, she was six feet tall, which daunted many if not most of her fellow undergraduates of both sexes. She had a sharp wit that did not give universal pleasure: she formed a lifelong habit of calling a spade a spade, when she might have made more friendships by calling it something else. She was fiercely impatient of college rules and curfews, which required climbing the walls after even an evening visit to the cinema. When a guest on Desert Island Discs in the 1980s, she proudly asserted that if other girls of her Oxford generation stayed away from sex, she had plenty of it … and was cross when that passage was deleted from the broadcast version. Yet relationships proved more elusive. She herself wrote, ‘Oxford was a good place for female swots with their minds

concentrated on their degrees, and doubtless for lesbians, although I never consciously met any. It was a tolerable place for the few who broke all the rules and had a heady mixed social life. ‘For the others’ – obviously including herself – ‘it could be a lonely world, with every twinge of melancholy aggravated by the rain-washed spires, tolling bells and miasmas from the river.’ She was bemused and dismayed to discover that, among many male undergraduates of her day, friendships with one another were more usual than with girls. She quoted with disgust the remark of Compton Mackenzie’s priggish hero Michael Fane in Sinister Street: ‘The whole point of Oxford is that there are no girls.’ The two men to whom she felt most attracted were George Steer, later famous as the Times correspondent who exposed the destruction of Guernica to the world, and the doomed Hitler bomb-plotter Adam von Trott. Neither, she ruefully admitted, showed the smallest reciprocal interest in her. In her second year, she had a passionate affair with a Balliol undergraduate which atrophied when he went down. She rejected one proposal of marriage from ‘a spotty young historian’ and a second from a Rugby blue whom she dismissed with a scornful mirth ‘which makes me shudder with remorse to remember’. When she began to study philosophy to complete the Greats course, she became utterly disaffected: ‘I am a worldly person, loving people and places and art, but never happy wandering about in a haze of abstract ideas.’ In June 1933, craving London, she quit Oxford and took a temporary job in Harrods’ toy department. Thereafter, she achieved a stellar career first as a fashion journalist on Vogue, then as editor of Harper’s Bazaar and a newspaper columnist. Until her death in 2009, aged 96, she never admitted regret about leaving Oxford, and indeed was flattered to be received at Somerville as a distinguished visitor. Her one lasting friend from the college was Sally Graves, who ended her career as a political scientist as Principal of Lady Margaret Hall. The chief advantage to me, as her son, of Anne’s premature departure from Oxford was that she was unable to say much when, in 1965, I followed her example and quit University College after my first year. Do as the parents do – not as they say.

Small World

Oh God! I’m now Mother’s fake doctor GPs are in short supply in Cleethorpes – so I’m filling the gap jem clarke

STEVE WAY

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents… The great medical migration has begun. My parents and I have lost an entire GP practice and their dentist at the same time. Thankfully, my parents’ ailments are nothing compared with my own comprehensive list of conditions. Mother unkindly says they all fall under the medical sub-heading ‘born in the sixties’ (or Spineless entitledus, to give it its Latin classification). So I had to help my parents get new-doctor ready. I explained to them I was going to ‘role-play’ being their new doctor. ‘It’s the nearest he’ll ever get,’ Mother said with venom. ‘I had such hope for you. I knew you’d never make a fireman. With your little legs, you couldn’t slide down a straw. But I could see you as something medical; not operating or anything, but maybe nodding in the background as someone more sure-footed did the diagnosis. ‘Can you remember how much he loved that medical thing we got him for his sixth birthday?’ ‘Fuzzy-felt hospital,’ I said. I never forgot a present in a hurry. Father was uncertain about the whole thing: ‘Role-play? Isn’t that a bit modern and discothequey?’ ‘It’s not a bloody private-dungeon thing. It’s a technique I learnt from the accumulative years I’ve spent in Job Club.’ I coughed purposefully and proceeded with an air of obliged disinterest. ‘Mrs Clarke, take a seat. What seems to be the problem?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t sound much like a doctor. Sounds more like a receptionist. Could you try it again – but do an accent, maybe?’ ‘Mother, I can’t do an accent,’ I said. I tried again, with a voice I concocted from a little left of Dundee: ‘Och, what

seems tah be the problem you’s been hah-vin?’ ‘Oh, that’s more like it – I can’t understand a word of it!’ she said gleefully. ‘It’s my legs. They’re painful at night and I can’t get as far as the damned shed. Leave this one gardening on his own, and we’ll have triffids by teatime.’ I scratched my chin and explained, ‘At this point, Dr McEnema – that’s the name of the doctor – would examine your leg. But obviously, as mother and son, we won’t be having any physical contact – ever. So just imagine I’ve manipulated your joints.’ ‘What happened to the Irish accent?’ Mother said sadly. ‘It was Scottish.’ I sighed the sigh of the endlessly disappointing son. It had the same resonance as a Tibetan singing bowl but 100 years sadder. ‘Thought it was Welsh,’ said Father. ‘Listen,’ I snapped. ‘Och, och, och. I’m writing a prescription for some codeine. If nae effect, come back tah me.’ ‘Oh, thank you very much. Good day’ – Mother looked across at me, realising she couldn’t get the final word out – ‘… doctor?’ ‘Yes, I’m the doctor. Scottish accent

equals doctor; normal accent equals …’ I scrambled for the right word. ‘Disappointment?’ said Mother. ‘Right! Role-play over,’ I said firmly. ‘What have we learnt?’ ‘Dundee’s in Wales,’ Father muttered. ‘Mother, you’re not after pain relief. You want an explanation as to why your mobility is less than it was, and a referral to a specialist.’ ‘Oh, but I like codeine,’ she said. ‘It can really “pop”.’ ‘Enough of your drugs obsession,’ I cried. I rose to my feet in fury, slamming the table in rhythm with my key words for emphasis. ‘Seriously, if you don’t prepare, this doctor will have you spun round and out of his room in seconds – with nothing but a Mr Bump sticking plaster and a Little Chef lolly!’ ‘Well, no disrespect, Jem,’ Mother said, ‘but we’re sat here all civilised and healthy. You’re all elevated, red-faced and ranting about cartoon characters.’ She folded her arms, which is currently almost impossible, so I knew she was serious. ‘Would you like us to pretend to be your doctor?’ asked Father, only half-joking. The Oldie July 2022 35

Bliss of Bournemouth Thank God! Britain’s best gallery has been left untouched by the vandals of the art world. By Barry Humphries

RUSSELL-COTES ART GALLERY / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

he Savoy Hotel in Bournemouth was one of the chief delights of a recent tour. It pretends to be in Miami – without the cockroaches – and it I was by far the best I stayed at, and with the youngest and most cheerful staff. After breakfast (served, not foraged), I climbed the cliff path to the RussellCotes Art Gallery, a Victorian gem next door to the venerable Royal Bath Hotel. The Russell-Cotes is my favourite art gallery in Britain, filled with treasures. The John Brett picture of a shipwreck is a masterpiece, and War Profiteers by Christopher Nevinson was a huge surprise; surely his best picture. The character of the collection has not been vitiated by the modish philistinism to be found in other museums across the country. Birmingham’s famous collection of Pre-Raphaelite masters is ‘temporarily not on show’ – which was probably what visitors to German museums in the thirties were told when they couldn’t find Chagall, Munch, Kokoschka or their friends on the gallery walls. A frightened-looking attendant told me a couple of Pre-Raphaelites might reappear during their forthcoming Colonialism blockbuster. Meanwhile, Rex Whistler’s beautiful tearoom at Tate Britain has been shut down for ever by some committee of woke ignoramuses. It’s a disquieting thought that art’s most ruthless enemies may live in museums.

War Profiteers (1917) by Christopher Nevinson 36 The Oldie July 2022

If you are to receive the Order of Merit, you have to be a British subject. Now I have lived in England for about 50 years but never applied for citizenship. So I was advised to do so. That accomplished, I then thought I should get a passport. So I had my

I believe that an old friend and senior Australian diplomat might offer me a plausible explanation. Sir Les Patterson, the iconic Australian statesman, frequently suffers from the ‘missing finger’ syndrome. Several of his senior research assistants (names withheld) claim to have known its whereabouts.

Christmas Morning by John Brett (1831-1902) shows the sinking of SS London in 1866

WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE / ALAMY

picture taken at Snappy Snaps and sent off the application forms. There was a four-month delay before I decided to chase it up. Silence. More time passed before I asked a mate at Australia House to sniff around. After much sleuthing, it emerged that the authorities thought my photos weren’t recent enough. They had looked at my age, and then at the Snappy Snaps snap, and observed a dramatic inconsistency. I had to start the process again, this time deliberately ageing myself, blacking out a few teeth, planting my scalp with grizzled extensions and, with the help of Vaseline, smearing my chin with simulated drool. In what seemed like days, my new passport arrived, embellished with a photograph accurately proclaiming my age. The expected honorific has yet to be announced. It is not generally known that I have a military history which has already endeared me to Her Majesty. I was once a private in the Melbourne University Rifles. Although we national servicemen did not serve abroad, I distinguished myself by designing the mise-en-scène for the camp concert. I was thereby excused from irksome training, parades, bayonet practice, grenade-chucking, manoeuvres and constipation. The camp was in the most arid and inhospitable region in my home state of Victoria. It was called Puckapunyal, an

aboriginal word meaning ‘where waters might have met’. Recently my old regiment got in touch: would I like to give a talk and share a few reminiscences at their annual dinner? They went on to apologise that there was no fee, but asked: was there something I might like as a memento of the occasion? I replied simply, ‘Rank.’ Might they offer me a complimentary military title? I wasn’t too greedy or vainglorious. ‘Brigadier, if possible,’ I modestly suggested. The invitation was withdrawn. I was chagrined because I had already imagined the words of Luigi Cagnin, the maître d’ at the Ritz: ‘Show Brigadier Humphries to his table.’ In my efforts to resemble my passport photo, I have reconciled myself to late middle age. That obliges me to accept the small physical inconveniences of advancing years. The latest is a condition called ‘trigger finger’. A few weeks ago, I woke to find an important finger on my right hand was not where it should have been – it was missing.

A disquieting thought – art’s most ruthless enemies may live in museums

Is WOW! slowly fading from our vocabulary? I now rarely hear kiddies using that recently pervasive expression of astonishment. Vogue usages tend to filter down to the nursery before dying out. At the end of the seventies, I heard a five-year-old answer a question with ‘Absolutely’ and I knew that irritating and Sloaney alternative to ‘Yes’ was on its way to the etymological skip. ‘Perfect’ is still a persistent little bugger, and ‘I’ll double-check with my colleague’ will last as long as England. Speaking of England, I have never felt more patriotic. The ‘Platinum Possum’, as a garish music-hall artiste has disrespectfully addressed the monarch, still appears on the balcony of her disappointing-looking townhouse, as decency, service and love of country slide into anachronism. In Australia, the new Labor [sic] government is set to reintroduce that old chestnut the Republic to a population who buy double the usual amount of periodicals if their covers are embellished with an image of the Queen. Should this dismal manoeuvre ever succeed, there will be a scramble for the role of President. No doubt Julian Assange, Crocodile Dundee and Ashleigh Barty will coyly put up their hands. Even a repentant Rolf Harris. Naturally I am available for the post if they really want diversity. Stranded in a taxi at Marble Arch the other day, I was relieved to see that that foolish green lump, the Mound, has been excised. I’d love to have been at all those lunches when city elders decided it was a good idea to dwarf Marble Arch with a sort of barrow to bring wonderment into the lives of Oxford Street shoppers. And what a miserable tatterdemalion mob they are, shuffling down miles of frock shops in their black rags and backpacks. Who buys nice clothes? Certainly nobody in Bond Street or Oxford Street. I have found an artful way of driving from Hampstead to the Garrick Club without once crossing Oxford Street. It’s a picturesque detour and it takes only three hours. The Oldie July 2022 37

Town Mouse

How the Westway was done tom hodgkinson

Motorways and flyovers don’t generally get much love – even less so when they’re plonked in the middle of a city. Concrete flyovers and the giant stilts that hold them up speak of the triumph of utility over beauty. William Morris would have sobbed had he lived to witness the destruction of green fields to make way for Spaghetti Junction. It’s strange, then, that the four-lane A40 flyover in west London, known as the Westway, is held in great affection by the residents of Portobello Road and its environs, over which it soars. Every day, I cycle along the Great Western Road Canal, the road’s utilitarian predecessor, and gaze up at the lovely curve of the concrete above me as it moves from Westbourne Park into Paddington. My office sits directly beneath the Westway. Far from feeling oppressed by it, I find it thrilling and even beautiful. Against all odds, the Westway has become a beneficial addition to the local community. That’s thanks to the activities of a group of hippies and local activists in the 1970s who ensured the 23 acres beneath it were put to positive use. So it was that a road that sliced through a community was turned into an asset. Things did not start well, as I read in the journalist Tom Vague’s excellent work on the Westway. It was a hapless Michael Heseltine, then Transport Secretary, who was the focus of a local rebellion when the Westway opened. As the local paper, the Kensington Post, reported in July 1970: ‘Angry demonstrations greeted Mr Michael Heseltine, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport, on Tuesday when he came to open the Westway – the £30-million Western Avenue motorway extension which slashes North Kensington in two.’ One local said that the five-year 38 The Oldie July 2022

construction period had been ‘hell on earth’. Two hundred demonstrators turned up, with banners saying ‘You can’t fly over human lives’ and ‘Stop the noise and ugliness’. Heseltine felt their pain: ‘You cannot but have sympathy for these people.’ In 1971, local residents turned their rage into practical action and formed a trust to oversee the development of the spaces underneath the flyover. The trust was permeated with the anarchistic values of the local Notting Hill radicals. Its first director, Anthony Perry, had worked at Pinewood Studios in the

sixties. He now oversaw a successful campaign to give the land to the people. He had a new area called Portobello Green opened. Hawkwind played several free gigs there, declaring, ‘Let us ride together on orgasmic engines to the stars.’ The area even hosted the London office of the new Glastonbury Festival, brainchild of posh hippies Andrew Kerr and Arabella Churchill, Winston’s granddaughter. The trust was also instrumental in organising the first Notting Hill Carnival, which took place in 1971. Thanks to local resident Leslie Palmer, later given an MBE, the carnival cast off its hippie roots and became a festival of black music. Adventure playgrounds, gig venues, laundries, playgroups and community centres were built. A second-handclothes market was instigated. Artist Emily Young had the idea of creating murals: ‘Under the motorway was just dead cats. People dumped rubbish and nobody cleared it. My idea was to have big, archetypal figures and a continuing landscape of hills and green fields to bring a sense of space and freedom to the concrete bays.’ Today Emily is still here: she rents a studio in the same block as me – Great Western Studios. The Westway was given an injection of gritty urban glamour in 1976 when it got a name-check in the great Clash song London’s Burning: they praised the Westway, calling it ‘a great traffic system’. The band’s Mick Jones had lived on the 18th floor of the tower block Wilmcote House on Harrow Road, which overlooked the Westway. The Westway was just one part of a more elaborate city-centre motorwaynetwork plan, known as the Ringway. This was designed in 1964, but most of it – thankfully – was never built. It was finally abandoned as a lost cause in 1973 by the Labour government. The plans show an enormous flyover roundabout in Chelsea, with extensions to Harlesden in one direction and over the river to Wandsworth in another. The area under the Westway thrives today. The second-hand-clothes market is still there. There are skateparks and community centres. And the area, though enormously gentrified, retains the radical character and vibes injected into it by the hippies and the West Indian immigrants in the 1970s. And it’s all thanks to a concrete flyover and its alchemical transition from a thing of great ugliness into a beautiful monument to grassroots ingenuity.

Country Mouse

Listen to Farmer Giles: small is beautiful giles wood

Organic farming has come in for a clobbering in the press. Even a right royal clobbering – the Prince of Wales is in the sights of the chemical-farming lobby. The Prince has been tarred with the same brush and mocked alongside another organic idealist – the President of Sri Lanka. Gotabaya Rajapaksa came to power in 2019. Influenced by the island’s chattering classes, he vowed to transform his country into the world’s first fully organic-farming nation. He brought in an immediate ban on all artificial fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. The experiment has failed, triggering the devastation of the previously booming Sri Lankan economy. To my mind, the mistake was not in the laudable attempt to embrace sustainable farming, but in pulling the rug on the unsustainable chemical or conventional modern version overnight. It’s like someone coming off antidepressants abruptly, without using the hyperbolic tapering method to let the body adapt in its own time. There is ‘muck and mystery’ involved in organic growing, as E F Schumacher first observed in Small Is Beautiful. To put it baldly, there simply wasn’t enough pre-existing muck on the island to allow the experiment to proceed successfully. Muck (compost and manure) cannot be conjured from gas and air. As for the ‘mystery’ – that was missing, too. The old men had died and with them the forgotten art of organic husbandry. Sri Lanka’s two million farmers had become addicted to cheap artificial fertilisers and the high yields that ensue. Many farmers in this country are also on the treadmill of chemical dependency. Townies who relocate to the ‘countryside’ in search of peace and fresh air should be aware that if they’re living next to a sprayed monoculture, they will become unpaid lab rats.

At the moment, we are harvesting the soil as if we were harvesting eggs from a chicken or milk from a cow and we never fed that chicken or that cow. I accept that the self-supporting, mixed family farm is more than endangered; it is on its knees. Farmers of all creeds are in unison: ‘The days of cheap food are over.’ We could, of course, abandon farming altogether, in a fit of George Monbiotitis and exchange farmed food for the likes of protein pancakes fashioned from bacteria. Since the yuck factor may take decades to overcome, however, the rest of us still ‘fancy’ normal food. So if organic farming is to be scaled up, it will have to be heavily subsidised, as farmers are in Switzerland. But, after the Sri Lankan debacle, the money from our government is even less likely to be forthcoming for such subsidies, as opponents will constantly hark back to this nationwide failure. The greatest hope would come in the form of the miniaturisation of farming.

Anyone can spot the contrast between the productivity of farmers’ great fields that produce one crop – and even that of doubtful value – and that of the typical vegetable garden of the ordinary member of the public. As the Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies first observed, minute cultivation returns a hundredfold. The miniaturisation of farming, in the manner of the Ancient Greeks and Chinese, may well be the way forward. A modern proponent of miniaturisation is John Jeavons, author of the bestselling How to Grow More Vegetables (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land with Less Water Than You Can Imagine. The Californian practises biointensive, sustainable mini-farming. By focusing on ‘blowing life’ back into the soil, he was able to build up 500 years’ worth of topsoil in as little as eight years. What he suggested is that practitioners of mini-farming start with a ‘one-bed unit’, five feet wide by 25 feet long. He writes, ‘In ten minutes a day, you learn how to grow all the crops you will ever need to know in order to grow all your food to eat and all the compost.’ I take the current media attacks on any member of the Green Blob personally. Attack one of us – attack us all. Incidentally, has anyone else noted that organic detractors seem to have something of the night about them? But I will continue with my Davidand-Goliath struggle to support the organic vision of agriculture as espoused by the Prince of Wales, Lawrence D Hills and Bob Flowerdew. After all, it is one of the few ways still open for me to signal virtue.

‘It’s all we’ve got’ The Oldie July 2022 39

Postcards from the Edge

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen!

TOBY MORISON

The Danes have taken back control – without leaving the EU. By Mary Kenny

One thing that’s difficult to find in Denmark, I noticed on a recent visit to Copenhagen, is an EU flag. The red-and-white Danish flag (said to be the world’s oldest) is displayed everywhere, and Ukrainian flags are plentiful. But no sight of the blue and gold stars of the European Union. ‘EU flags are very rare – they play no role in the national narrative,’ said a senior parliamentary adviser, Nicolai Svejgaard Poulsen, at Borgen (the Christiansborg Palace from where the Danish government operates). ‘Danes have never been big fans of the EU. We don’t feel that emotionally attached.’ Danes are practical about the relationship: carry out the trade and use the benefits to the best advantage, but retain national independence where possible. They don’t use the euro, and a recent referendum on joining the EU’s defence policy elicited a strong debate about opposing it (though two-thirds voted to join, mainly because of Ukraine). Denmark has also managed to control its immigration policy. The immigration minister, Kaare Dybvad Bek, though from the Social Democrat Party, is considered a hardliner. I asked him if there was any way of extending invitations to Afghan women oppressed by the Taliban. ‘It’s complicated,’ he replied doubtfully, which I took to be a ‘no’. The Danes pity the problems of Sweden, where an over-liberal approach to immigration has led to lack of integration and to riots. Denmark seems to have achieved a sense of ‘taking back control’, without actually leaving the EU. Smart. As we see from the TV drama Borgen – currently in its fourth series on Netflix – Copenhagen has its own, lively political culture. Denmark also has a link with Deal, our seaside Kentish town. John Dalgleish Donaldson, a Scottish-born retired maths professor, is a Deal resident. His daughter is the delightful Princess Mary, Crown 40 The Oldie July 2022

Sally Rooney’s characters are often spoilt, entitled and nauseatingly narcissistic. But at least she portrays a bourgeois world I can recognise, where people drink white wine and use phrases like ‘epistemic rearticulation’ and ‘operant discursive practices’ in their college essays. Yes, this is real life in Dublin 4!

Princess, and future Queen of the Kingdom of Denmark, who has won national popularity by speaking Danish fluently. Sally Rooney is probably the most successful and possibly the most significant living Irish writer. In her novels such as Conversations with Friends – recently transferred to the TV screen – she represents a modern generation. She also explains today’s younger people to oldies. I am quite pleased with Ms Rooney’s success, even if I balk at some of her political positions. She has declared herself a Marxist and, being anti-Israeli, unkindly disallowed her latest novel to be translated into Hebrew. Rooney’s key achievement, in my view, is that she has rescued the Irish literary genre from the pig-in-the-parlour, shure-and-begorrah, Gawd-help-usaren’t-we-awful lamentations that have long been a flavour of Irish writing. The misery memoir – deftly pioneered by Frank McCourt with Angela’s Ashes – has been the seedbed for Irish contemporary fiction, usually embellished with alcoholism, child abuse and violence. Thankfully, this baton has now been passed to Scotland, where multi-awardwinning Douglas Stuart now leads the category, with his pitiful Glasgow childhood and coming-of-age sorrows.

If visitors arrive at your house, do you offer them something to eat? According to a hilarious cultural map devised by the website Lovers of Geography, the English and the Welsh are unlikely to offer visitors food, while the Scots and the Irish usually do so. A tiny red spot in Ireland is the exception: at the border counties of Cavan and Monaghan, food is not on the menu. The no-food rule extends over the Baltic and Scandinavian lands, as well as north-east France, some of the Low Countries and Germany. But in Iberia, Italy, the southern and western part of France, Italy, Greece, Turkey and most of Eastern Europe, hospitality in the form of spontaneous food and drink is the norm. If you arrive at someone’s home, they share whatever they have. I remember travelling in trains in France and Italy when the peasant routinely offered you a swig of his wine bottle, as well as a morsel of his often delicious nosh. These surveys may not be forensically exact. There have been protestations that in many parts of England, particularly the north, meals – or at least snacks – are usually offered. Surprise has also been expressed that the Edinburgh tradition of saying to a visitor ‘You’ll have had your tea?’ (popularised by radio comedy) did not feature in a Scottish red spot. The Irish have a phrase for hosts who don’t offer food and drink during a visit: ‘He didn’t ask me if I had a mouth on me.’ Cavan, marked as less foodie-hospitable, has always had a reputation for tightness. ’Tis said of the Cavan man, ‘He could peel an orange in his pocket’!

Sophia Waugh: School Days

The key to growing up? Books ‘Twelve years in school and it all comes down to me writing about some beef between a scorpion and a bloke whose name I can’t even read.’ So said one of my Year 11s about his first English exam. Put like that, the point he makes is a fair one. They were writing about Steinbeck’s The Pearl and, all right, what’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her? Why should he care about a scorpion making its way down a rope towards a sleeping baby? But he had missed the point. Too often the students ask ‘why?’. Why do they have to read Shakespeare? Why do they study poetry? This is more teenager whine than serious existentialist questioning but, still, let’s try to answer the question. Ofsted is asking that question, too. The inspectors are going to have to be shown how each particular discipline might enhance pupils’ careers or job prospects. Ofsted is joining the ranks of whining teenagers by asking this question. Surely they can’t make a subject compulsory up to the age of 16 and then turn round and ask the point of it – can they? Of course they can; they can do exactly what they want and we will have to run around them like spaniels who hear the word ‘walk’, trying desperately to please them. Our school was rated ‘Good’ in the last two inspections, which usually means

four years before the next one. Because of the lockdowns, we are now overdue by a year, which means the real grown-ups (ie the Senior Leadership Team) think of little other than the impending visit. To this end, the Head of Department was asked to give a justification for our subject. We rolled our eyes and then I trotted out the following: ‘A good grounding in English is the sine qua non of a successful adulthood. ‘Every single career, whether vocational, academic, creative or practical, needs workers who can communicate, understand and ponder. English teaches all those skills implicitly as well as explicitly. English literature uses texts from the canon, not only to develop and hone the skills vital to a successful life and career, but also to develop empathy and imagination. These

are also valuable in adult life to anyone dealing with others in the workplace.’ I put in ‘sine qua non’ in the hope of getting an irritated rise (I didn’t). But does it actually answer my pupil’s question about the beef with a scorpion? No. With only a week to go before these pupils leave for pastures new, I suddenly didn’t care whether or not he wanted to think about a scorpion. I didn’t want to hear his views about studying poetry, Shakespeare or anything else. This pupil is confident he’s going to be a bestselling writer, yet he will not use paragraphs as he thinks they are not necessary. His sentences are rarely complete, although his vocabulary is quite interesting. This pupil comes to lessons but does little work; never comes to a revision class; always has a reason why he’s right and I’m wrong. At this point in the year, I feel no urge to justify the curriculum, my existence or my love of my subject to any recalcitrant student or bumptious Ofsted inspector. Instead, I turn to my Year 10s, whose eyes light up at the thought of a day trip to the Jane Austen Centre in Bath. They earnestly ask me what they should read next. Their cup of joy runneth over when I tell them there is no ‘should’ about it. Just read – and it doesn’t matter if it’s about a scorpion, a sailor or a horse, as long as you love it.

Quite Interesting Things about … smell Perfume smells strongest immediately before a storm. According to astronauts, space smells like ‘seared steak, hot metal and welding fumes’. Salmon can smell the waters they were born in. The master perfumer in a fragrance company is called the Nose. As well as perfume, Noses create the aroma

of dishwasher tablets, kitty litter, rubbish bags and car interiors. The first known European perfume was called the Queen of Hungary’s Water. The world’s most expensive perfume is Clive Christian No 1 Passant Guardant. It costs £143,000 for 30ml and comes in a flask studded with 2,000 diamonds.

The world’s first synthetic perfume smelled of newmown grass. A tiger’s urine smells strongly of buttered popcorn. Jaguars cannot resist the smell of Calvin Klein’s Obsession For Men. Hogweed is so called because it smells like pigs. King Henry IV of France smelled strongly of goat. Deer hate the smell of lavender, mothballs and

tobacco. Fleas loathe the smell of garlic. Ants and mosquitoes can’t stand the smell of tomatoes. Americans who are disgusted by the smell of body odour, sweat and bad breath are more likely to vote for Donald Trump. JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia The Oldie July 2022 41

sister teresa

Don’t fear death – it’s like going home I have been reading The Gift of Peace, by the late Cardinal of Chicago Joseph Bernardin (1928-1996). He was a man very much to be admired for his forbearance and fortitude, first when falsely accused of sexually assaulting a seminarian, and secondly in the face of terminal pancreatic cancer. He died very publicly because he saw his death as part of his ministry, and he allowed his illness to take its course rather than undergo treatment. About 20 years before his death, he realised how vital it was for him to give an hour a day to no one but God. He did this by getting up early in the morning, irrespective of what the rest of the day might involve. He kept to this, even though he hated early rising. Nearing the end of his life, he realised that when one is feeling very ill, one is in fact unable to pray. So he stressed the importance of praying when you’re well. When you can’t, you can’t; the danger is that when you can, you don’t. Bernardin’s pastoral vocation was to

Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, 1996

serve his flock. In his case, this involved a large diocese, a great deal of administration and fundraising. Long before he became so very ill himself, he spent much time and effort to ensure health care was improved for all those who needed it. Most of us work on a very much smaller scale, but we too are asked to serve, not at a diocesan level, but by

looking after those around us. This is what growth in the Christian life is all about. If this sounds like a pious cliché, I offer no apologies, because there is no other way of expressing one of the most fundamental truths of our existence. We need to check small details. This does not mean being so pernickety that we are unable to see the wood for the trees. It means smiling back when someone smiles at us, rather than looking the other way or just about rising to a grimace that’s no better than the parody of a smile. It means remembering we have volunteered to take on a minor chore for someone else. Being unreliable is to be negligent. And that in its turn can be criminal. The ultimate chore is death itself. I am not qualified to talk about death, but Bernardin was. He experienced a great deal of pain and an all-pervasive fatigue at the end of his life, yet he refused to see death as an enemy or a threat. He saw it as going home: something that is much easier said than done.

Funeral Service

Elizabeth Harris Aitken (1936-2022) The actress, interior decorator and socialite Elizabeth Harris Aitken was remembered at St Matthew’s, Westminster, at a funeral service presided over by her husband, the Rev Jonathan Aitken. Aitken said that when she had asked him to take the service, he said he would be too upset. She had told him this was nonsense because he was a politician like her father, Lord Ogmore, a Welsh Labour MP in Clement Attlee’s Cabinet, and he loved the sound of his own voice. She had been married previously to Aitken’s cousin Peter Aitken and to the film stars Rex Harrison and Richard Harris. Her three sons by Harris, director Damian Harris and actors Jared Harris and Jamie Harris, paid joint tribute. All 42 The Oldie July 2022

three of them stood together at the lectern, singing Let’s Face the Music and Dance. They recalled how their mother was in the last year of women presented at court, the last of those aspiring actresses known as Rank Starlets and the last to act in the golden years of Hollywood. She had been at RADA with Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney and Alan Bates and went on to act in rep, but ultimately let the careers of her famous husbands come before her own. In their tribute, the three sons said, ‘Dad [Richard Harris] got the flashy part. She left that to him. Could she have done that? Oh yes. She knew how to dazzle, to blind, to charm, to burn bright.’

The Harrises remembered, too, the moment last year when Jonathan Aitken was severely ill and said to their mother, ‘My darling, I’m afraid the very next time you see me may well be at my funeral.’ Elizabeth thought for a second and said, ‘I know just what to wear.’ Her sons remembered her turning up at sports day, ‘dressed like Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC’. This made her very popular with the other boys, as did her backing Rex Harrison’s Rolls-Royce into the science building. She took out an entire corner, meaning chemistry classes were cancelled. Damian Harris finished the tribute by reading from Elizabeth’s autobiography, Love, Honour and Dismay. JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Keep on taking the

tablets

Only five of my nine daily pills are absolutely crucial theodore dalrymple

I have seen the future – and it is old age. The number of those more than 65 years old is growing, both absolutely and relatively. I can hardly disguise from myself any longer the fact that I joined this number some time ago, although true or real old age recedes like a mirage in the desert as one moves towards it. I used to mock (only in the privacy of my mind, of course) those who took pills for breakfast, but now I myself am of that company and have my little weekly dosette as an aid to my fallible memory. I really should not omit five of the nine tablets. Omission of the other four, if continued, would not manifest itself for several days or even weeks, if at all. England’s most senior doctor, Professor Sir Steven Powis, the NHS medical director, recently said doctors mustn’t dole out ‘a pill for every ill’, leaving millions to take drugs they do not need and do them no good. A paper in the journal Age and Ageing draws attention to what might at first seem a trivial problem, but can in fact be of some practical significance: the packaging of medication. The paper was ‘merely’ qualitative: the researchers asked the subjects of the research for their experiences. This kind of research is not highly regarded as it is considered not scientific enough but ultimatelythe effect on someone’s experience is important in all medical research. The researchers asked 15 elderly Swedes, aged between seven years younger and 16 years older than me, to record any difficulties they might have with taking their medication correctly that were caused by the way that medication was presented to them. They were taking up to 15 different medications each. One respondent said, referring to the difficulty of taking so many pills, ‘You have to be healthy to be sick… You must not have even a touch of stroke.’ Since polypharmacy – the taking of

five or more medications – is common among the elderly, and taking the wrong dose is easy and hazardous, everything reasonable should be done to help ensure that patients take the right doses. It may well be that many of the drugs the elderly take are unnecessary or harmful in the first place. What is called the prescribing cascade is a well-known phenomenon: drugs are prescribed to counteract the side effects of another drug, which in turn was prescribed to counteract the side effects of yet another drug. And what is the ‘correct’ dose of a drug that is unnecessary? I was once working in a hospital when a junior doctor wrote in the notes of a patient who had swallowed bleach with suicidal intent, ‘Has taken an overdose of bleach.’ I asked the junior doctor what he thought the correct dose of bleach was – in those days, President Trump had not yet pronounced on this matter. The patients preferred bottles to

blister packs, which they found awkward. Not all types of bottle were created equal, however. The patients particularly disliked the so-called childproof bottles, with which they wrestled arthritically, pressing down and twisting the tops at the same time. They dealt with this by keeping the bottle open, which rather negated its childproofing quality. Patients also disliked the bottles from which a plastic strip had to be torn off before the lid would open. Often, they would use pliers or other instruments to get at their pills. Being creatures of habit, patients did not like changes to the appearance of their medication. For example, they were given a new pill of a drug that contained the same quantity of the active substance as the old but was different in size or colour. It was confusing. All in all, then, it is easier to keep on taking pills than to keep on taking the right pills.

The Oldie July 2022 43

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

My Elizabethan poetry SIR: The Old Un’s memories of the Elizabethan magazine (May issue) brought a blush to my cheeks. In the early 1960s, my class at school was given the challenge of writing a parody of a well-known poem. Being short of time and inspiration, I remembered one published in the Elizabethan and stole a few verses, which I now discover were probably written by a (then) future newspaper editor or playwright. To my horror, the teacher regarded my efforts as good enough for the school magazine, where my plagiarism was promptly spotted by another avid reader of the Elizabethan. Cue subsequent shame and mumbled excuses. I still have on my bookshelf today a copy of Under the Sun (Constable Young Books, 1964), an anthology including material from the Elizabethan – and, fortunately for my blushes, no parodies of poems. Kind regards, David Lashbrooke, Looe, Cornwall

It’s great up north SIR: Patrick Barkham makes his chosen walks positively seductive, and for that reason I wish I didn’t live so far from most of his chosen locations. I have handed on all but the last four issues of The Oldie – all of which featured walks in the south – and I wonder if he would consider a venture further north from time to time – a sort of ecological levelling-up – even though he is Norfolk-born and probably lives south of Watford. I will continue to enjoy his writing and look forward to being within motoring distance of one of his walks, so that I too can walk the walk. David Holme, Accrington, Lancashire

Book for Barry Humphries SIR: In his article in the June issue, Barry Humphries laments the impossibility of finding a copy of Love’s Memorial by Theodore Wratislaw. Can you inform him that at least five copies are for sale on eBay? I appreciate 44 The Oldie July 2022

that they may not the exact edition or binding that he seeks. Tony Clewes, Walsall, West Midlands

What side does she dress? SIR: Around 45 years ago I bought my first set of motorcycle leathers. There were no ladies’ suits back then. The trousers clearly assumed I dressed to the right. Mind you, at least there were plenty of pockets. Yours faithfully, Cynthia Milton, Thatcham, Berkshire

Hats off to Joseph Connolly SIR: I doff my cap to the excellent and amusing article, by Joseph Connolly, ‘Want to get a head? Get a hat’. Yours sincerely, Roger Bickerstaffe, Bexleyheath, Kent

Top hats SIR: Joseph Connolly (June issue) celebrates the revival of the men’s hat. The near demise of the men’s hat has deprived us of a great deal of non-verbal etiquette. Taking the hat off may be a greeting or a mark of respect. We remove the hat in the Church of England but must wear one in a synagogue. The hat is useful as a symbol: it can be waved or thrown in the air in celebration,

or simply removed as a hearse passes by. It’s also useful for swatting a wasp, fanning a person who has fainted or hiding behind for a sotto voce conversation. Picking up a hat or putting it down may signal exasperation or impatience or just an intention to leave. The hat is the last thing we put on when leaving home, and the first thing we take off when entering a house. Your host or hostess taking it is an indication of welcome. Every man needs a winter hat to protect against rain and a straw hat for protection against sun damage. Seán Enright, West Deeping, Lincolnshire

Tommy Trinder tucks in SIR: Anyone wishing to discover more about British Restaurants (Bryce Evans, June issue) would profit from watching a ten-minute short film in which the ineffable Tommy Trinder takes his girlfriend (the lovely Jean Colin) and her family to the Byrom, a British Restaurant in Liverpool. The film, available on YouTube, was made in 1941 and intended to show the public that all over Britain, despite the exigencies of war, good healthy food could be had in pleasant surroundings at low prices, eg meat and two veg – 6d; pudding – 2d.

The bigger idea mooted was that anyone could start such a restaurant, with free council and government support for sites and equipment. You had only to ask. The grub looks good enough, all things considered. Mr Trinder’s gags and gurning are rather harder to swallow. Mark Revelle, Southill, Bedfordshire

by a stay in a superb hotel – in the Relais & Chateaux group. Yours, mostly contentedly, Dr Andrew Bamji, Rye, East Sussex

Driving lessons

’s missing years SIR: Wilfrid de Freitas, writing from Montreal, pointed out in Readers’ Letters (June issue) that the birthday-cake illustration on the front cover of the ‘The Oldie turns 30!’ March issue shows only 19 visible candles. There may be a couple obscured by the Old Un’s left leg, so I think we can say that the great Gerald Scarfe suggests 21 – but the answer to the shortfall is surely that the Old Un displaced a number in jumping on to (or out from?) the cake. I hope this clears up this controversy, which I suspect is exercising the minds of many. Like Wilfrid, I should get out more. All the best, Geoffrey Williams, Stroud, Gloucestershire

The case for Bomber Harris SIR: I was troubled by Malcolm Willgress’s letter (June issue) about ‘Bomber’ Harris and the fact that he is ‘perplexed’ that his statue is still standing, despite the fact that it is frequently defaced and vandalised. Yet, my gut feeling about the bombing from both sides in the Second World War is that Germans started it and got it back with interest. (‘They have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind.’) The statue should remain. One abhors the loss of lives, both military and civilian, during that war, but at the risk of my being accused of ‘whataboutism’, what about the bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Plymouth, Coventry (the list could go on and on) and the dreadful indiscriminate bombing by V-1 and V-2 missiles, which could have been armed with nuclear warheads had German research been more advanced? Only a strategic decision to devote vital resources to the D-Day landings and prosecution of the war on land restricted Harris’s bombing offensive. And Harris was right! Bombing would end the war, as horrendously demonstrated by the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yours faithfully, Joe Hayward, Stanmore, Middlesex

‘He’s logging in’

The missing Stones SIR: I have just read Rachel Johnson’s article comparing the Stones and the Beatles (June issue). She writes that all that is left of the Beatles are ‘Macca’ and Ringo, whereas the Stones are still performing. Perhaps this is because the Rolling Stones are like Trigger’s broom. There are only two of the original line-up left in the Stones: Jagger and Richards. Stephen McKenna, Rushden, Northants

My hotel bugbears SIR: Jeremy Wayne (‘How not to run a hotel’, June issue) has pre-empted my blog on this subject – in particular his comment about lighting systems that require a degree to work out – but he has left some things out. The beds can be too high, so you can’t get in. Reading lights are too low, and too dim, so you can’t read in bed. The too-small TV is neatly positioned in a corner, so you get neck pain trying to watch it. The bed may be king size but there’s only one chair. The bathroom basin mirror is set back behind the enormous vanity unit, so you need binoculars to shave (remember that if the mirror is two feet away, your reflection is four feet distant). The shaving mirror has to be held, so you have a difficult balancing act transferring mirror and razor from hand to hand. There’s a mirror behind the WC, so men have to watch themselves pee. There’s a mirror in front of the WC, so everyone has to watch themselves. The bath is too deep so you cannot get out. The shower soaks you from every direction until you have worked out the controls – and if it’s a wet-room type, water goes everywhere, which also means that if there’s a beautiful marble tiled floor you will slip and fall over. I was prompted to make these jottings

SIR: In ‘Are you a good driver?’ (June issue), Alan Judd skirts around what is necessary in that regard. In essence, a good driver is one who drives with consideration for all other road-users. This takes into account the vulnerability of others such as pedestrians and cyclists; also, the needs of others such as large lorries needing a wide turning circle and reduction of speed on a rising incline, or buses needing to stop and pull out after stopping. Neither of the two drivers he describes is good by this definition. The overly cautious driver creates frustration in those around him or her and should, perhaps, stick to public transport. The Spitfire driver will, hopefully, lose their licence before they kill someone and finish in jail. Mr Judd is precisely correct when he closes by writing that we should take an interest in driving and heed what we and others are doing. Best wishes, Andrew Sanderson, Tudhoe Village, Spennymoor, County Durham

How to hang a Union Flag SIR: Aged four, I was a year younger than Gyles Brandreth (Diary, June issue) when I too viewed the Coronation first-hand. Tightly packed on an office balcony overlooking Northumberland Avenue, I now regret that my only lasting memory of the event was eating cherries from a brown paper bag and throwing the stones on the heads of the unfortunate crowds below. I am sure that, unlike at the recent Jubilee celebrations, we were not surrounded by so many Union Flags flying upside down. This is not something that has concerned me only since I’ve become an oldie; I admit to causing considerable embarrassment to my family for many years. I find it hard not to point out to all who will listen, from bemused shop girls to uncomprehending hoteliers – none of whom outwardly ever shows any signs of distress – the error of their ways. I well remember as a Boy Scout at my prep school in the 1950s being taught ‘broad white stripe uppermost nearest the hoist’. Would that more in the country learned this at an early age. David Greig, Tiverton, Devon The Oldie July 2022 45

I Once Met

Lonnie Donegan I met Lonnie Donegan (1931-2002), the King of Skiffle, in his agent’s Olympia office in 1998. He told me his total sales had now reached the ten-million mark. And counting. ‘My role was to listen to Mr A and sing it to Mr C,’ he explained. Mr A stood for the archetypal American blues player. Mr C was the British record-buyer. Mr Donegan himself was, of course, Mr B. He used an intriguing image: ‘It was like a snake eating its own tail.’ He meant that much of his material had begun as folk music in this country before migrating to the New World. Now he was bringing it back to Britain. In 1955, he had the first of his 30 hits, Rock Island Line. It originally featured on an LP by Chris Barber’s trad band. It was then released as a single in the old, highly breakable 78rpm format, and spent 25 weeks in the charts, reaching the Top Ten in the USA. It kickstarted the craze for the DIY music known as skiffle. Pick a Bale of Cotton in 1962 was his last hit. The pop-pickers were picking new pop stars. It didn’t help Lonnie’s career that, as he told me ruefully, ‘There was nowhere for me to play.’ The old variety theatres

The King of Skiffle: Lonnie Donegan c 1958

were closing their curtains, and audiences at 2,000-seater venues wanted more than a guitarist singing the blues; they wanted an all-round entertainer. Showing that he wasn’t just a 30-hit wonder, he got a new act together: ‘It was a choice between doing nothing and doing the cabaret circuit.’ He alleged, ‘I tried the Engelbert Humperdinck touch,’ but he was being a bit hard on himself: things hadn’t got that bad. He went on to play Las Vegas. Even as we spoke, his career was on a roll again and he would continue rocking until his death in 2002. He was working

with Ringo Starr, Elton John and Van Morrison. ‘I’ve just finished a new album, Rock Island Line Rocks On,’ he added. Grizzled and approaching his 67th birthday, he seemed dwarfed by the large acoustic guitar on which he was tentatively strumming as I walked into his agent’s office. Yet, the week after our meeting, I was able to applaud the Skipper of Skiffle on a reunion tour with Chris Barber. He belted out one of the old numbers which I still have on the first record I ever bought, Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O. Jonathan Sale

Dizzy with Nureyev in New York

In 1976, I flew to New York as a cast member of the RSC’s Henry V, for a three-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. NYC had a ‘bad’ reputation back then, and we had been warned to avoid places such as Eighth Avenue around 42nd street. Nevertheless, we decided to stay at the then infamous Chelsea Hotel (which has just reopened after a renovation) on West 23rd Street. We were there for 21 days. The height of decadence was a quick glimpse of the actor 46 The Oldie July 2022

Michael J Pollard, stoned and The bell for the second half quietly humming in the foyer had me rushing to the water one morning. Danger and fountain for a quick drink – thrills? Bugger all! and to bump heads with As we entered our Rudolf Nureyev, visiting watering hole attached to a Russian group on show in the hotel, El Quijote, we were the same building. ‘Ah, greeted with the line ‘Here’s Shakespeare’ and other such da bums from Brooklyn.’ We quick inanities passed were quite the stars of the between us before I jogged bar after the play had received glowing notices. At the interval on the final day’s matinée, I was chatting to Trevor Peacock (playing Fluellen) in the backstage corridor used as a greenroom. Trevor suddenly shouted, ‘Dizzy!’ – and there indeed was Dizzy Gillespie on a coffee break prior to his evening concert. We took him on stage and chatted jazz and Shakespeare in heady combinations. Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolf Nureyev

back to Agincourt to complete the rout of the French. My memory was refreshed on their deaths, as they died on the same day, 6th January 1993. Private Eye’s resident poet, E J Thribb, aged 17 and a half – the creation of Barry Fantoni – recorded their deaths in his In Memoriam poem: So Farewell then … Dizzy Gillespie Famous Jazz Trumpeter. You were known for your Bulging Cheeks. Rudolf Nureyev, So were you. By Barrie Rutter, Halifax, West Yorkshire, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Books Carry on laughing Roger Lewis salutes a new history of the comedy series – a shrewd, funny, realistic reflection of austere, post-war Britain

here are few more reliable pleasures in life than settling back to watch a Carry On – the bouncy music; the lurid, cheap cinematography and shoddy editing (continuity mistakes abound); the bawdy Talbot Rothwell dialogue we know by heart: ‘I do not object to jiggery but I do take exception to pokery.’ Most of all, there’s the joy of the overqualified cast – Kenneth Williams worked with Orson Welles, Jim Dale was at the National with Olivier, and Charles Hawtrey was directed by Hitchcock – whom we greet as old and familiar friends. I saw Carry On Abroad recently and was enchanted anew by the sequence where they board the holiday coach. Hawtrey, asked if he knows whether there’ll be any crumpet, says innocently, ‘Oh, I don’t think they’ll be giving us any tea.’ As Caroline Frost argues, in her loving tribute to what she calls ‘a golden moment in cinema’, the tawdriness of the Carry On series is a distinct part of the appeal – the single takes, with errors left in; zero rehearsal; dire locations, fooling nobody. Frensham Ponds, Surrey, was the Spanish Main, Chobham Common was the Wild West, Camber Sands represented the Sahara, Beddgelert was the North-West Frontier, and Kew Gardens was a jungle clearing. 48 The Oldie July 2022

Sometimes they ventured as far as Windsor or Maidenhead. This was in the ’60s and early ’70s, but the shabby atmosphere is postwar and reactionary rather than progressive and modern. The Carry Ons capture Britain before mass immigration – Kenny Lynch appears briefly as a bus conductor, and that’s it for multiculturalism. You almost expect to see the characters emerge from their suburban houses brandishing ration books. As Frost says, a Carry On street is where ‘women in headscarves pushed prams’ and breadwinners like Sid James sneak out for a pint and a flutter. Nostalgia, therefore, even if a false nostalgia, is part of the series’ ‘comfort, charm and appeal’ – though, by the tenets of any neo-puritanical 21st-century ethos, it is easy to sneer at and outright condemn the films for their ‘display of sexism, racism, class snobbery’ and any other shibboleth. Frost commendably defends the Carry Ons on all charges, making the point that ill-intent is always foiled; the pompous are humbled; worms turn. She is excellent on the ways the camp characters – Hawtrey and Williams predominantly, but also Frankie Howerd – delighted in their seeming effeteness, ‘poking fun at traditional masculine stereotypes’, a courageous stance then.

Frost is likewise first-class in her discussion of the women’s roles. Hattie Jacques always triumphs, June Whitfield was a surprisingly sultry authority figure, and there was much more to Barbara Windsor than her boobs. ‘We often overlook how independent her characters were; young women who knew their own minds,’ she says, even as Sid James’s tongue hung out with lust. It was a breakthrough in world history, equivalent to landing on the moon or discovering gravity, when her bra flew off. ‘I don’t think Miss Windsor’s right boob is going to corrupt the nation,’ stated the censor. Maybe not the nation, but my childhood abruptly ended when I saw Carry On Camping at Bedwas Workmen’s Hall in 1969. I wonder whether there were similar pubertal effects in South America, where it was called I Want a Nudist Girlfriend, or in Spain, where it was entitled Control Yourself, Hiker. I was proud to become a friend of Bar in her later years. Her decline with Alzheimer’s was a tragedy. The series mocked British institutions – army, schools, police, hospitals: ‘It’s matron’s round’ – ‘Mine’s a pint.’ Especially hospitals, where nobody is actually ill. A phantom pregnancy and bunions are about the limit, as what

GARY WING

really counted was the chance for jokes about bodily functions, laxatives and birth-control pills. Pregnancy was good for a giggle, as it implied intercourse had occurred at some juncture, always a shock to the British – and then only within the shackles of holy wedlock, with lots of shameful blushing. The progression of a wife is always the same in these comedies. She goes from pretty bride (Angela Douglas, Valerie Leon) to battle-axe almost overnight, when she might be played by Joan Sims or Patsy Rowlands. Terrible camping trips, rained-off holidays and unfinished hotels in the Balearics, beauty pageants in Brighton: in the Carry Ons, leisure and entertainment are never high stakes, disappointment the norm, and, for all their occasional airs, the characters are not grand. They are, says Frost, ‘nonaspirant working-class folk. They were grafters, and the working-class audiences particularly could relate to them, as they could sense the origins.’ There is a paradoxical reality to everything, and content, like form, is deliberately threadbare, having its origins in tatty music hall, provincial pantomime and seaside picture postcards. The quintessential setting for all this is the lavatory factory in Carry On at Your Convenience, where the works outing to the seaside sees the cast at their most joyous. ‘Let’s all go on the pier,’ says Kenneth Williams, ‘and have a winkle.’ Hawtrey is so plastered they put him in the coach’s boot. Sid James and Barbara Windsor hare about on go-carts. I was interested to hear Frost describe people’s experiences of the war, as if this gave them, as survivors, a sense of the ridiculous, a determination not to take things seriously ever again. Gerald Thomas, the director, had landed on the D-Day beaches in Normandy. Talbot Rothwell and Peter

Butterworth were prisoners of war. Kenneth Williams served in the Far East. Everyone had known what it was like ‘facing a deadly enemy, finding comradeship in peril’. Barbara Windsor endured air raids. I can’t help viewing Peter Rogers, the producer, as an adversary, abusing his power. Frost is very even-handed, saying it mustn’t be forgotten that Rogers did create and nurture the series, dedicating his career to all 30 of the films, from Carry On Sergeant in 1958 to the misspelt Carry On Emmannuelle in 1978. But he was vile and rapacious, never promoting people, refusing to pay anyone more than the basic rate – and giving the actresses even less, until the Equal Pay Act insisted on adjustments. Studio doors were locked at lunchtime, in case the crew charged overtime. ‘People think I’m rich and retired,’ said Joan Sims, ‘but I’m still trying to scrape a living.’ Leslie Phillips ‘walked away from the series due to the lack of funds coming his way’. Jim Dale moved to America. When Hawtrey requested a star on his dressing-room door, he was sacked and replaced by Lance Percival. There were no premières or press screenings, as they would have meant Rogers putting his hand in his pocket to pay for drinks and canapés. No one was allowed a percentage of the profits or a repeat fee – and Rogers, who lived to be 95, lived in a mansion once owned by Dirk Bogarde. Seeing him arrive at the studios in a new Rolls, Barbara Windsor said, ‘He’s got his arse in the marmalade.’ Bar did become a dame, but the others fared badly. The ‘deeply troubled’ Kenneth Williams, schizophrenically torn between being an intellectual hermit and behaving as a raging, volatile clown, died by suicide, aged 62. Hattie Jacques was dead at 58 from the effects of morbid obesity. As Frost correctly says, her ‘intelligence shines through’ in all her roles, yet at the finish she couldn’t be

insured. Hawtrey became a bonkers drunkard in Deal, a menace to Royal Marine bandsmen. Joan Sims, lonely and shy in private, found herself typecast as old bags. The grizzled Sid James dropped dead on stage, aged only 62. ‘They’re all me,’ he said of his characters, ‘just with different hats on.’ Six-foot-seven Bernard Bresslaw died in his dressing room at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, aged 59. Peter Butterworth died while in panto in Coventry. He was 63. Frost doesn’t persist in dwelling on any curse or sadness. She wants us to remember the hilarity and ribaldry, which was very much of its time, as she thoughtfully delineates. No sane person would want to resurrect the Carry Ons today, though Rogers kept an office at Pinewood until 2008 and either he or a minion ‘had a telephone conversation with Burt Reynolds once’. Other artistes who Rogers thought could replace the originals were David Jason, Shane Richie, Danniella Westbrook and Vinnie Jones. I think we can all be rightfully glad the series fizzled out when it did. While I am on the subject, may I commend the newly published Kenneth Williams Scrapbook, superbly compiled and edited by Adam Endacott (Fantom Publishing, £15.99) – priceless stills, posters, programmes, letters and other bits of memorabilia. There’s an introduction by Tim Rice and another contribution from Christopher Biggins. Williams was a tricky customer. ‘He’s very thin and talks a lot about wanking,’ people were warned in advance. Carry On Regardless by Caroline Frost, White Owl/Pen & Sword, £20 Roger Lewis is the author of The Man Who Was Private Widdle, a biography of Charles Hawtrey The Oldie July 2022 49

Alpha to Omega

Beryl the peril

PAUL CARTLEDGE

JIM WHITE

The Shortest History of Greece By James Heneage Old Street Publishing £8.99

Beryl: In Search of Britain’s Greatest Athlete By Jeremy Wilson

‘Renaissance Man’ is a rather tired cliché. But James Heneage – founder of a chain of bookshops (Ottakar’s, now Waterstones), co-founder of a major history festival (Chalke Valley), and published author of five set-in-Greece historical novels – has earned the accolade far more than most. To me – a historian of ancient Sparta and honorary citizen of (modern) Sparta – the laconic is the expressive mode of choice. So a title that includes ‘shortest’, ‘history’ and ‘Greece’ is music to my ears. Heneage’s Shortest History is divided into four parts, topped and tailed with a foreword and an afterword. Chronographically speaking, we are taken in four broad sweeps from Bronze Age beginnings to the capture of Constantinople by Mehmet II and his Ottoman Turks in 1453. From there, we move to the rise of the modern Greek state out of enlightenment and revolution in about 1830. Thence, under the rubric of ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Idea’, to the horrendous Nazi occupation and directly consequential civil war of 1946-49. And, finally, from 1949 to the present – though to label that ‘Democracy Debased’ is perhaps true only in significant part. Heneage is not slow to nail his occidentalist colours to the Hellenic mast: ‘The West owes its civilisation to the Greeks.’ Of course, ‘civilisation’ is a word of Latin derivation, and it was the Romans who gave the Hellenes their moniker of ‘Greeks’ (originally a term of derogation and diminishment). But slave-descended court poet Horace surely got it right. Conquered Greece did indeed take its fierce victor captive, speaking in high-cultural terms. And it’s chiefly through the Romans and their Renaissance avatars that we Westerners are, as fellow poet Shelley put it in 1822, ‘all Greeks’. Heneage’s Shortest History has many well-chosen features that make it visually attractive (listing of the image credits requires over two pages), as well as a pleasure to handle and read. Highlights include the regularly spaced ‘box’ features on such personalities and topics as Epaminondas (Walter Raleigh’s favourite ancient Greek hero, as he is mine);

Things have changed somewhat in the world of competitive cycling. Especially for women. I remember seeing Victoria Pendleton getting into race mode in the velodrome ahead of her gold-medal winning ride at the 2012 London Olympics. At the trackside, she was lying on a bench, listening to motivational tunes on her headphones, when a member of Team GB’s support staff approached her with a banana, which she duly ate. And here’s the thing: in the effort to ensure she expend her energy solely on the race, it was already peeled. For Beryl Burton (1937-96), there were no peeled bananas. According to Jeremy Wilson’s wonderful biography of the woman he terms Britain’s greatest athlete, race preparation was invariably book-ended by housework. She would complete a marathon eight-hour training session, tearing round the roads of Yorkshire, and then head home and do three hours of ironing. Yet, in the days before women were allowed to compete at the Olympics, she won every honour available to her, taking the world cycling championship on seven occasions and the British title a unique 25 times. She remains the only woman ever to have bettered a man’s record when, in 1967, she rode 277¼ miles in 12 hours. Had she been born 20 years later and been able, like Pendleton, to compete at the Olympics, she would have collected a cabinetful of gold medals, been elevated to a damehood and earned a small fortune in commercial endorsements. But she wasn’t. So modest was the return on her genius that when she died, in 1996 at the age of just 59, of a fatal heart attack while out on a training ride, she was working as a domestic cleaner. What a story Wilson has uncovered. His title is not misleading: Burton was simply extraordinary. With no support, without the backing of sports science, alone and unschooled, she dominated her sport for a generation on her own terms. Lynx-eyed in her determination, she overcame every obstacle placed in front of her to such a degree that, Wilson is right to suggest, no one in the history of sport can have worked with quite the self-sacrificing single-mindedness she did.

Profile Books £20

‘You made the cat-flap too big, didn’t you’

plague (more than one, across the ages); the Jews of Thessaloniki (practically wiped out during the Nazi occupation); and American scholar Milman Parry (the Homeric oralformulaic-poetry-interpreter). Particularly lively is the account of the Byzantine Greek ‘Middle Ages’, appropriately enough from the pen of the author of the fictional Mistra Chronicles series. Flashes of humour obtrude throughout. General Ioannis Metaxas, reminiscent in appearance of Captain Mainwaring, is one for the devotees of Dad’s Army. Likewise, his dubbing of the Turkokratia (Ottoman Turkish occupation) ‘The Longest Sleep’ raises a wry smile. Opinions will differ, but ‘None of this is to say that the [Parthenon] Marbles should stay in the British Museum’ earned a rousing ‘Hear, hear’ at least from this reader. The writer Tom Holland has hailed James Heneage’s short but compendious book as containing ‘all of Greek history’ from Alpha to Omega, from Socrates to Syriza. Had he been writing today, the author would surely have had to augment his thoughtful afterword of September 2021 with rueful or horrified reference to the tragedy of Ukraine, along the southern shore of which live – or lived – many people of Greek descent and culture. That’s perhaps slightly hyperbolic. So too the publisher’s series slogan, ‘Read in a day. Remember for a lifetime.’ What’s indubitable is that, at £8.99, The Shortest History of Greece is a snip and a steal. Clever old Odysseus would surely approve. Paul Anthony Cartledge was the A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University

The Oldie July 2022 51

Indeed, she relinquished everything for her sport, including her wider self. Because of this, we can be sure after reading her life story, Beryl Burton was not a nice person. However hard Wilson tries to conjure up an understanding of her manner, he can find few who encountered her who can recall her as anything other than an irascible, selfobsessed bully. Take her relationship with her husband, Charlie, who had given up his own ambitions on a bike to assist her assault on the cycling world. Charlie was always there beside her. According to Wilson, he would single-handedly undertake all the tasks these days performed by a 65-strong support team for Britain’s Olympians. He was mechanic and masseur, physiologist and psychologist, data analyst and driver. And Burton would routinely belittle him, loudly and publicly blaming him for every setback. So vile was her noisy abuse, other riders would try to steer clear in the dressing room. No kinder to her opponents, she was renowned for her poisonous verbal put-downs. And when her own daughter, Denise, beat her into second place in the 1976 national championship, her reaction was, frankly, ugly. She refused to shake hands on the winner’s podium, the photograph of the moment showing her displaying all the maternal pride of a modern-day Medea. Wilson quotes the recollections of a fellow competitor, Pam Hodson, who tried to console Beryl as she lay, in despair at defeat, beating her fists on the floor of the dressing room that day. ‘ “It was impossible – she was like a baby,” says Hodson. “I said to her, ‘You should have been leading Denise out, never mind trying to beat her.’ ” ’ And how did Beryl respond? ‘She just said, “I ride to win.” ’ This was the point about Burton. Wilson’s meticulous research uncovers a woman of thermonuclear levels of competitiveness. Her life was defined solely by winning. Driven, he reckons, by the lifelong need to compensate for the breakdown she suffered after failing the 11-plus, until the moment she fell off her bike for the last time in a Harrogate street, she never stopped punishing herself – and anyone else she encountered – in pursuit of victory. This book confirms what we have long suspected about our sporting heroes: nice guys (and gals) never finish first. Jim White is The Oldie’s sports correspondent

Burton, Taylor and me CHARLES ELTON Elizabeth Taylor’s Kiss and Other Brushes with Hollywood By David Wood The Book Guild £9.99 The touched-by-fame memoir tends to be of one of two varieties. There’s the star as monster, as in Joan Crawford’s daughter’s vicious Mommie Dearest. Then there’s the star as moreor-less like you and me except for some beguiling eccentricities, as in Stanley Kubrick and Me, written by his longterm chauffeur. Inevitably, the former is more compelling than the latter. The actor David Wood’s charming account of his 50 years in showbusiness offers some of both. Presenting himself as a stranger in the strange land of fame, the star of if… (1968) is endearingly naive for someone who has had a successful acting career, as well as being a pioneer of children’s theatre. He presents himself as a humble supplicant: ‘I never dreamed of stardom or imagined myself writing for the glamorous world of Tinseltown’ – a word that turns up irritatingly often in showbiz memoirs. One of the constants in the book is that he sees the good in all the monsters and near-monsters and all of them appear to like him, even though they are difficult with everyone else. The first of his brushes is with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who make a pro-bono appearance in a student production of Doctor Faustus at Oxford, when Wood is an undergraduate there in 1966. The young cast rehearse the show without the stars, whose busy schedules

mean they are parachuted into the production at the last moment. The pair are so grand yet gracious that Wood is instantly smitten. Taylor tries out some of her priceless jewellery on his girlfriend (‘Elizabeth wasn’t showing off her possessions; rather enjoying a dressing-up game’). She makes sandwiches for the cast and Wood reports that, after an unfortunate upset stomach, Taylor tells him his girlfriend is ‘puking in the john. I’ve cleaned her up.’ He construes this as an example of a goddess who is refreshingly down to earth. But it reads more as if, after mastering her non-speaking part as Helen of Troy, she is simply moving on to another role. In the end, the reviews of Doctor Faustus are ‘mixed’ as we discover from the 15 examples Wood exhaustively quotes. Inevitably, the Taylor/Burton caravan moves on, leaving a promise to fund rehearsal rooms from the profits of the film version of Doctor Faustus. As ever, getting money out of the rich is a tortuous journey. When there are no profits, Burton says he will bankroll the project himself but, as Wood says in his characteristically unjudgemental way, ‘The trouble was he didn’t have the cash.’ In 1972, Wood falls under the spell of Shelley Winters with whom he appears in a television play, The Vamp. He plays a nerdy, slightly camp film fan who finds himself alone in a hotel room with a terrifying faded movie star. Wood attributes his success in getting the part to his buying a sprig of heather from a Gypsy. Winters soon becomes a nightmare, with a reliance on prescription pills, an inability to learn her lines and a propensity for falling asleep during shooting. ‘Shelley was always kind

‘Trust me – it ain’t worth it’ The Oldie July 2022 53

to me,’ Wood says, although she wasn’t to anyone else. She stayed relentlessly in monster mode. It was beyond her capabilities as an actress to play a docile sandwich-maker, as Elizabeth Taylor had. In 1975, he returns to the stage, playing Bingo Little in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s disastrous musical Jeeves. He describes the hell of being in Bristol trying to get the show in shape before London. The American writer, Larry Gelbart, said of the hell of putting on regional theatre, ‘If Hitler is still alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.’ Too long, badly designed and with the actors floundering, the show limps into London and is eviscerated by the critics. Wood attributes the show’s problems to the fact that the creative team did not like to criticise one another’s work because everyone was too ‘nice’ – not a word normally used by anyone working on a Lloyd Webber show. The rest of the book is a slightly unconvincing celebration of the charm of the star. Christopher Plummer is ‘friendly and co-operative’. Anthony Perkins, too, is ‘extremely friendly’. Peter Firth is ‘pure magic’. ‘Everybody’ loves Roger Moore. Hayley Mills is ‘always friendly, interested and supportive’. You get the feeling that if Wood had worked with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, he would have found them both charming and professional. In his ‘dreamlike wander through wonderland’, Wood defines upbeat and positive in a world that normally lacks those attributes, and that is his charm – Candide in Tinseltown. Charles Elton is author of Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision (Abrams Press)

‘I don’t understand people who say children should be seen and not heard – why would anybody want to see them?’ 54 The Oldie July 2022

High interest rate GEORGE TREFGARNE The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest By Edward Chancellor Allen Lane £25 For those who work in finance or markets, the most important price – the biggest number of all – is the interest rate the United States Federal Government pays to borrow. Currently about 3 per cent, it was depressed to a record low during COVID, but was five times that level in living memory, soon after the Iranian Revolution in 1980. The reason this number is so important is that it is the risk-free rate, the interest charged to lend out money you are guaranteed to get back, because the US Government does not default. It is consequently used to price every other financial asset. From there, the cost of borrowing money flows into the real economy and influences the returns we can expect on our own wealth. Or at least that is the theory. Until the First World War, British Government debt – or gilts – fulfilled the same purpose, and in many cases it still does. Welcome to the world of interest rates – a magical realm to outsiders but one that in reality is based on some very basic principles, arising through centuries of evolving custom and practice which come close to reflecting human nature. Edward Chancellor has decoded this apparently arcane and dry world with an erudite history of borrowing and interest. He has always had one foot in Fleet Street and the other in Lombard Street – he is an ex-journalist, nephew of former Oldie and Spectator editor Alexander Chancellor, and he was also analyst for an asset manager called GAM. He manages to be both erudite and readable and to make an argument with style. His argument culminates in an allegation. By repeatedly lowering interest rates and then using quantitative easing to print money and buy bonds, central banks have driven the cost of borrowing to unnaturally low levels, thereby distorting the price of pretty well everything else by making it impossible to value risk properly. They have inflated an ‘everything bubble’. Chancellor sees hard times coming. He certainly believes central banks are responsible for a period of slow growth and high inflation. We should listen to

him, given his track record as a writer – although I think it might be going a bit far to say ‘he foresaw almost everything’ in the financial crisis, as Charles Moore does in the blurb. The earliest records of interest being charged are in clay tablets from Mesopotamia. One, dated approximately 2400 BC, records the loan of a year’s supply of barley by Amarazem of Urnu to a blacksmith, a shepherd, a priest and their associates. Others took as collateral houses, slaves and even wives. Interest was charged at about 30 per cent and typically paid in the commodity in question, such as silver, wheat or barley. Growing up alongside interest was the crime of usury – or charging excessive interest, a social norm in just about every society and religion. This started early, with Aristotle, who said money was principally a means of exchange, not earning interest – a theme echoed by Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians. This ancient thesis contains a flaw: it does not value time. The advantage a borrower receives is not just a means of exchange, but the use of something now. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Money is also a store of value and the lender is selling time. In the 14th century, Thomas of Cobham correctly understood this but said this made usury even worse, because time belonged to God. The proliferation of banking in the Renaissance meant there was something very fundamental for the Church to concede: the secularisation of time. Italian merchants, in particular, were highly skilled at evading usury laws with euphemisms: fees, profit shares, understated loans, rewards and rents. Thus developed one of the most significant innovations in the history of finance, according to the eminent financial historian William Goetzmann: the charging of interest to incentivise lending. Chancellor documents how, again and again, over the last 600 years this process has been distorted by state interventions, panics, manias, crashes, wars, diseases, natural disasters and the simple madness of crowds. He reserves his most forensic analysis for the current generation of central bankers – people such as Mark Carney, formerly of the Bank of England. He believes they have not only made a mistake by artificially suppressing interest rates, but shown unpardonable arrogance in their attempt to control society though manipulating the

price of money and, hence, time. He may well be right. George Trefgarne worked on the City pages of the Daily Telegraph

Lost Irish treasures MARY KENNY Left Without a Handkerchief By Robert O’Byrne

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in their first film together, Flying Down to Rio (1933). From Ballroom: A People’s History of Dancing by Hilary French (Reaktion, £18)

Lilliput Press £16 The Irish Free State was established in 1922. But the depredations of the Civil War dragged on during 1923 – a terrible year – as the defeated Republicans, who had lost both the war and the electoral vote, took their vengeance. Up to 300 country houses, stately homes and castles were burned out, as the old Ascendancy was targeted – not just for having been associated with British rule but, in many cases, for having joined the new Irish administration as senators. The Free State saw it as a conciliatory – we would say ‘inclusive’ – gesture to bring former southern Unionists and Protestants into the new Senate. But this riled the Republicans even more, and the sinister spectre of masked men appearing by night with a can of petrol, a box of matches and orders to vacate an old home within ten minutes was repeated throughout the land. Up in flames went Marlfield in County Tipperary, home of the Bagwell family. The châtelaine, Louise Bagwell, was given minutes to dress and leave, writing that they ‘hadn’t even a handkerchief’. The family home of Michael Morris, Lord Killanin, in Spiddal, County Galway, met with a similar fate: the family was Catholic, but that didn’t save their Hiberno-Romanesque manor. Old Lord Killanin was heartbroken, and went into ‘exile’ in Hampshire, feeling he could never return to Ireland. Among the many treasures destroyed were a Bible with a long inscription from Cardinal Newman and a hereditary gold collar once worn by the Chief Justice of Ireland. Lord Lansdowne, who had lavished such devotion on his Kerry estate, Derreen, that even his wife thought his attentions excessive, was the object of repeated attacks and, aged 77, saw his beloved house set ablaze and its contents plundered. Lansdowne had been the leader of the Unionists in the House of Lords, which had repeatedly stymied Irish Home Rule. So perhaps he was an obvious target, and yet it was a bitter blow. Then, after the local Catholic clergy began preaching that theft was a mortal

sin, many objects were surreptitiously returned. In another redemptive note, Derreen would eventually be rebuilt and the current heirs now occupy the property, to which visitors are welcome. But the litany of lost great houses and their priceless contents is lamentable. Kilboy was home to the Prittie family, known to be popular, and good landlords. Desart Court in County Kilkenny went, although the Countess of Desart, herself Jewish, was a supporter of the Gaelic League and a generous philanthropist. Sir John Keane’s Cappoquin in County Waterford was on the list, although he protested pugnaciously and later proved to be an effective Senator, repeatedly criticising literary censorship. He too rebuilt Cappoquin and the family still inhabits it. Others gone for ever include Bingham Castle, County Mayo, Artfert, County Kerry, Clonyn Castle, County Westmeath, Mitchelstown Castle, County Cork, and many more. Poor Sir Horace Plunkett, who had worked so conscientiously for Irish agricultural reform, saw his home in County Dublin, Kilteragh, attacked, and he too left Ireland in desolation. As Robert O’Byrne writes in his peerlessly knowledgeable and absorbing book, the motives for this terrible onslaught were complex: some resentments went back

centuries to a class war to ‘destroy the Ascendancy’. Some were reprisals after the dreaded Black and Tans. Some arose from local conflicts over issues such as fishing rights. Sometimes the objective was requisitioning guns. And sometimes there was that curious Irish mixture of the bellicose with the courteous. The Earl of Mayo said the masked men who arrived at his family seat, Palmerstown in County Kildare, were ‘excessively polite’, and told him, ‘My Lord, we are not going to shoot you, but we have orders to burn the building.’ The writer Molly Keane’s parents were provided with armchairs in the garden to watch the flaming proceedings. The Free State, especially under the stewardship of Kevin O’Higgins, pledged to bring ‘the rule of law’ to Ireland, yet it was slow, and indeed, meagre in settling compensation claims. Admittedly, the country was poor, and took 50 years to recover from these Troubles. Kilboy was one of the houses rebuilt, but the family struggled to maintain the estate. Eventually it was sold and then bought by Tony Ryan, founder of Ryanair, whose son Shane now lives in it. A new ascendancy claims its inheritance. Mary Kenny is author of Crown and Shamrock: Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy The Oldie July 2022 57

Media Matters

The strange decline of Piers Morgan Despite huge backing, his TalkTV show has been eclipsed by GB News stephen glover Anyone who has been involved in a media launch knows the exhilaration. The early issues of a new publication or the appearance of a television channel attract enormous interest. And then the precipitous decline begins. The figures fall day by day and go on falling. Eventually, if you are lucky, the downward trajectory ceases, and a gradual recovery begins. There may be a future for the new venture, but more money will almost certainly be needed. In the past year, two right-leaning news channels have appeared, GB News and TalkTV. That is extremely unusual since such launches require bags of cash, besides a cool nerve and great expertise. Is there a big enough audience out there for the new concerns to be financially viable? As far as GB News goes, the omens are improving, though the channel is not yet safe. I’m afraid to say that things are looking less rosy for TalkTV, which is backed by the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch. In fact, GB News broke every rule in the book by having a shambolic launch. Andrew Neil, chairman and lead presenter, departed swiftly, appalled by the amateurishness of the channel, as well as by the stridency of its views. Under new management, GB News’s daily audience bottomed out in July last year, a month after the launch, and remained pretty constant (which is to say low) until December. Then, in January 2022, it began to rise quite strongly. TalkTV’s launch in April was by comparison slick and professional. A great deal of money was spent on promoting its star, Piers Morgan, who beamed at us from hundreds of billboards and buses. But the channel’s modest audience has shrunk, and is now generally lower than that of GB News.

Morgan in particular hasn’t had the pulling power Murdoch must have hoped for, and Morgan himself surely expected. (Before the launch, he grandiosely suggested that his battle for free speech was comparable to Nelson Mandela’s struggle against apartheid.) On some evenings, he has attracted as few as 24,000 viewers, which is derisory, and many fewer than the average audience of GB News’s Nigel Farage or Dan Wootton. If you put me on a desert island, and offered me either TalkTV or GB News, I would choose the former, though I would probably spend more time looking for coconuts. I rather like Piers Morgan. His diatribes against wokeness can be amusing. But we can’t escape the fact that he’s not cutting the mustard. Even with the benefit of another burst of promotion, his diminished audience would be unlikely to grow much. His defence – namely, that people who watch his programme online aren’t being captured by the official figures – is unconvincing. Piers Morgan Uncensored is first and foremost a television show and as such it is not succeeding. His only consolation may be that TalkTV’s other programmes are doing even worse. Most of us probably accept Morgan’s premise that wokery is irritating and free speech sacrosanct, but we don’t necessarily want it shoved down our throats every evening. In the absence of proper reporting, and with guests playing second fiddle to a bombastic Piers, the programme seems to be running – or trudging – on the same spot. By contrast, the more varied rightwing offerings of GB News are compelling for some, even if they constitute a small minority. How will it end? Not in humiliation for Piers Morgan, I hope, since he is an

engaging broadcaster who has been asked – admittedly with the eager acquiescence of his not inconsiderable ego – to attempt too much. Rupert Murdoch won’t like to be seen to fail, and he has more than enough money to keep TalkTV going for as long as he wants. Nonetheless, different though the two channels are, an ultimate union between them is probably the logical outcome. When oldies think of the Daily Telegraph, they may conceive of a handsome broadsheet newspaper with a fine masthead. The newspaper’s management sees things differently. Since December 2019, the Telegraph Media Group has stopped issuing sales figures for its print edition. At that time, the circulation stood at 318,000. I should be surprised if now it were much above 200,000. Meanwhile, the company proudly discloses its digital subscriptions, which are soaring. In its latest financial report, it claims 740,000 sales, and reiterates its ambition to secure one million digital subscriptions by the end of 2023. This seems realistic. Within five years, the Telegraph will be almost entirely a digital newspaper, which is of course cheaper to readers than a print version. The company is also likely to be handsomely profitable. Although it is discounting digital subscriptions to boost numbers, its 2021 pre-tax profit increased significantly to £29.6 million. In other words, the Telegraph Media Group appears to have navigated the internet revolution much more successfully than seemed likely a decade ago. Remember the sages who declared that readers in sufficient numbers would never pay to read newspapers on the internet? The Oldie July 2022 59

History

The Armada victory – the truth

A new book tells the real story, from Drake’s bowls to the Protestant wind david horspool So many myths and stories have attached themselves to the Spanish Armada, like barnacles to the hull of a galley, that we feel we know it almost by association. The whole tale may be hazy in our minds, but there are flashes. The Armada is a portrait of Elizabeth I, decked out in pearls and bows, seated in splendour in front of a graphic recreation of the Spanish fleet’s destruction. It is Sir Francis Drake, taking time to ‘finish his game of bowls’ on Plymouth Hoe when the enemy ships have been sighted. It is ‘cumbersome’ Spanish galleons outfaced by nimble English craft. It is a medal: ‘Flavit et dissipati sunt’ – ‘He blew and they were scattered’. It is the Queen again, rallying her people: ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’ Some of these impressions are closer to reality than others, though all could do with a bit of nuance and context. But for a British reader they amount to one thing: the Armada as a turning-point in our island story, the moment when imperial Catholic Spain dropped the baton, and imperial Protestant England (Britain came later) picked it up. That is not quite how today’s historians see it. Later this year, a revised version will be released of the standard modern account of the campaign, by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, first published for the 400th anniversary in 1998. It is likely that much of the revision will be the product of marine archaeology, as the remains of Philip II’s fleet have continued to turn up off the shores of western Ireland and Scotland. How might the overall picture look? Bigger, for a start. It is easy to think of the Armada as a one-off: a reaction or overreaction to the raiding of Elizabeth’s privateers on Spanish galleons in the New 60 The Oldie July 2022

World. Once it was seen off, England could take her rightful place as the leading European seafaring nation. But the Armada has a longer prelude and a longer tail than that. It is in part the story of a slow breakdown in relations. Spain had been a long-term ally of the English, a natural bulwark against the traditional foe, France. The man who presided over the ‘Enterprise of England’ and ordered the Armada, Philip II, had, after all, been married to England’s Queen, Mary. As King consort, he had even been responsible for revitalising Henry VIII’s navy. Some of the ships he had built then faced his fleet in 1588. Religion was part of the reason the two realms came to blows. Philip’s enterprise was blessed by the Pope, though the canny Sixtus V promised money only if the Spanish actually landed in England. But religion meant politics in the 16th century, too. Elizabeth’s government’s support for the rebellious Protestant Dutch subjects of the Spanish crown, offered partly through religious solidarity, was the most vexing issue. That conflict also dictated the course of the Armada itself. The fleet that sailed past Cornwall and anchored off Calais was a transport convoy, fully equipped and tasked with escorting the army of the Duke of Parma from Flanders, where its experienced troops were waiting to fight against a new Protestant enemy. As for the long tail, the Armada was far from the end of hostilities between Spain and England. Fought mostly in Ireland, the Anglo-Spanish wars carried on after 1588, inherited by Philip III and James I, finally concluding in 1604. More Spanish fleets set sail, though all were stymied by bad weather.

‘Heart and stomach of a king’: Elizabeth I at Tilbury, 1588

The defeat of the Armada itself (if we discount Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s argument that as most of it got home, it wasn’t defeated) happened along some of the lines of the myth. That’s partly because the Protestant English rightly gave most of the credit to the wind. Ultimately, it was adverse weather that did for the Spanish fleet, but only after Drake’s fireships had forced them to cut their anchors off Calais and sail away from their rendezvous with the Duke of Parma. The English force outnumbered the Spanish, and harried it as it sailed east, but didn’t actually deliver a fatal blow with their broadsides. The Dutch, meanwhile, made sure the Duke of Parma couldn’t launch his own barges, blockading him from their ports. When the Armada cut loose, it could only sail north to get home. So the Armada was not a plucky underdog triumph, but a combination of the failure of an overcomplicated plan, good naval strategy on the part of the English and Dutch, and the luck of the weather. Nor was it really a turningpoint: Britain’s imperial might lay far off, and Spain’s continued for many years. But, as a myth, it is unsurpassable. Queen Elizabeth may have been addressing a rather ragtag collection of poorly armed soldiers, and in Tilbury, Essex, where no landing was expected. But her words embodied a defiant, growingly confident nation. She predicted ‘a famous victory’, and she got one. It was just that the fame proved more important than the victory. Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England’s Deliverance in 1588 by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker (Yale, £30)

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

The best conversation piece

TOM PLANT

In September 1935, that most perceptive observer of the British national character Graham Laidler, better known as Pont, published a cartoon titled Absence of the gift of conversation. It showed 17 people in evening dress sitting down at dinner, overlooked by three footmen. One waiter helps a woman busy with her tatting. Another proffers a novel called The Lost Corpse. A third attends a man enjoying his soup behind a newspaper. Four other members of the party are also reading. A morose man is playing patience. A more cheerful figure is retying his tie. A woman draws on the tablecloth, while nearby an extrovert is doing a party trick that involves balancing two glasses and a spoon on the end of his nose. The woman next to him is thrilled, but two places away an unimpressed diner seeks a target at which to flick the morsel on his fork. In the background, unnoticed, an entertainer in a tasselled hat appears to be slicing a sausage with a scimitar. Only one guest talks to his neighbour. Have things changed since the 1930s? Well, footmen are scarcer. Whether Pont would find the chatter at a 21st-century dinner party to be more fun or more fluent is harder to assess. I used to think pre-war dinners were boring because in ‘polite society’ it was rude to talk about food – or politics, religion, work or anything else of interest. Pont suggests they were boring simply because the

Rural ‘escape’ Why does everyone talk about ‘escaping to the country’? Those of us who choose to live in towns and cities are irritated by the suggestion that we are prisoners longing to ‘escape’ to the country. What arrogance! I live in central London and did so while I and my husband happily raised our four children. When my

British had no gift for conversation. As far as their descendants are concerned, I’d put it differently. Although conversation today may be no more sparkling, I attribute that to an absence of learning, not of inheriting a gift. Conversation is an art, and arts can, to some extent, be taught and learnt. A good conversation does not have to be carried on in a grand house or a banqueting hall. It can be in a kitchen, on a train, at a bus stop or wherever people run into each other. But all good conversations have some common features. The first is a respect for etiquette: the rules of the encounter, which are based on courtesy. So the good conversationalist is a listener as much as a talker. She does not hog the conversation. Perhaps she is older, better travelled or better connected than the person she’s talking to, but she does not show it. She does not bang on with endless anecdotes, particularly those that reflect well upon herself. Nor does she tell one funny story after another. It’s not that anecdotes and funny stories must never be told. Raconteurs can be amusing. But a conversation involves at least two people: indeed, the Latin word conversare, from which ‘conversation’ derives, means to ‘turn round’. So the guests at a dinner party of more than six people should start the meal by noticing whether their hostess talks to

husband died, I had no intention of moving. After 50-odd years in central London, we had many friends nearby. I love it when I bump into a friend and one of us will say, ‘Let’s have a cuppa.’ We’ll head into the nearest coffee shop, sit there in comfort and chatter. Not so easy in the country, if there is no café in your village. Sadly, towards the end of his life, my husband had health problems which meant visits to a major hospital. Ten minutes in a taxi delivered us straight there. But what happens when one is unexpectedly kept in a country hospital? Does one’s partner drive for hours back and forth to visit the patient,

the person on her right or the one on her left, and then every alternate person follows suit. When the host turns, everyone else turns too. In this way, no one is left to toy with their food in silence; and no one is condemned to suffer a boring neighbour for more than half the meal. The brilliant conversationalist will probe her interlocutor gently to discover a topic of mutual interest, and will then amuse him without dominating the chat. He in turn, however inadequate he may feel, should knock the ball back over the net, and thus keep the game going. Then the rules are simple. Don’t, unless asked, talk about yourself. Don’t cap other people’s stories. Don’t talk about the brilliance of your children. Argue, by all means, but not dogmatically and not about facts – a pointless pursuit. Can this be done by everyone? Probably not. Isaiah Berlin could be forgiven for commanding a larger than fair share of the conversation, thanks to his charm. Maurice Bowra too could get away with his stories because they were so entertaining. But it is telling that P G Wodehouse was never at all funny in conversation. Fortunately, others are, and the best will have other qualities. They will see each of the guests they sat next to go home feeling that he or she was the most intelligent and amusing person in the room. Pont, of course, would know better.

or stay in a nearby B&B or hotel? And if so, who cares for the pets left at home? Obviously, life for countrydwellers has a plus side. More space, fine views, maybe a garden, and country lanes for walking the dog – but it simply wasn’t our choice.

SMALL DELIGHTS Peeling the top from a yoghurt to find that no yoghurt has stuck to it. STEPHEN DEAN, IPSWICH Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

It’s not just in real life that the country is preferred to the town. In Aesop’s Fables, the Country Mouse is the one who triumphs. Although the Town Mouse enjoys better food, it has to face the threat of the cat. It’s all very charming but also very predictable. Londoners today don’t fear danger from cats – we might have to dodge large red buses, but that’s a different problem. So I remain a Town Mouse and not a Country Mouse. Of course country life suits many people, but why should they smugly show a sense of superiority towards those who prefer town life? PENELOPE HICKS The Oldie July 2022 63

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT THE RAILWAY CHILDREN RETURN (U) Why do people persist in making sequels to really good films? They’re bound to be worse than the original. Why not make a sequel to the rubbish ones that you could only possibly make better? The Railway Children Return is a perfect example. Why make the poor devils return at all? They must be exhausted after all those remakes. Lovely Jenny Agutter (the best thing in this dire new version) first played Bobbie Waterbury, with her immortal red petticoat, in the TV miniseries of The Railway Children in 1968; then again in the sublime 1970 film. She played Bobbie Waterbury’s mother in the TV movie version in 2000. And, of course, all of them are inspired by E Nesbit’s original 1905 book.

And Jenny Agutter (interviewed in this issue on page 87) is back – now a grandmother because the action has moved to WWII and the original Railway Children have grown up. The new Railway Children are London evacuees from the Blitz. That could have been a clever plot device – enlivening the Edwardian story by updating it while keeping it in pleasing retro 1940s aspic. The aspic is fine, in fact. There are pretty shots of West Yorkshire, in the shape of Oakworth Station, the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth and the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, all used so charmingly in the 1970 film. In a clever little touch, it turns out that Bobbie was a suffragette in her youth. But the meat in the aspic is rotten. Director Morgan Matthews and writer Danny Brocklehurst leech off the fame of the book and the iconic film but then go for cheap laughs at the expense of the poignant innocence of the original.

Not Yorkshire gold: Jenny Agutter (far right) and Sheridan Smith (third from left) 64 The Oldie July 2022

At one point, a London evacuee child on the train heading for Yorkshire says he’s ‘touching cloth’. The scene has no wit or relevance to the plot – all it’s saying is that this new version is crass and vulgar in a failed attempt to be edgy. In the book, the father of the Railway Children is wrongly jailed for spying. The children help free him – and also look after a Russian exile persecuted by the Tsar. This new version has the father killed in the war – and the children prove their kindness by sheltering a black GI being persecuted by white American soldiers. It’s a perfectly good shift of the original plot. But it’s so ploddingly acted and directed that it all seems like tedious virtuesignalling. The original film glowed with heart-warming goodness – innocent virtue rather than the cynically contrived variety. There are a few bright spots. Tom Courtenay, as an avuncular old boy helping out the children, shows what a good actor he is. He takes hackneyed lines and bits of Churchill speeches and makes them sweet and believable. Sheridan Smith, as Bobbie’s warwidow daughter, displays her rare gift for acting women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She’s particularly good at the agonising break in the voice of someone failing to hold back the tears. But, still, it’s never explained why she, a working-class girl from Yorkshire, should be the daughter of posh Jenny Agutter with her cut-glass accent. The script is little more than straightforward plot exposition. If that’s the case, the plot must at least be pacy. But the scenes are long and boring and do little except deliver that plot. Tensioninducing music is frantically introduced – but it induces no tension. It’s all written at a child’s level – but it’s far too dull to engage the interest of any child. A good idea – and a top cast – wasted. Out on 15th July

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK THE GLASS MENAGERIE Duke of York’s Theatre, London ‘Time is the longest distance between two places,’ observes the narrator of The Glass Menagerie. Yet 78 years since its Broadway debut, Tennessee Williams’s breakthrough play remains as vibrant and urgent as ever. It’s set in St Louis, Missouri, in the 1930s, but its themes are eternal and universal: the unbridgeable gap between the lives we lead and the lives we dream of; the love that binds families together and tears them apart. The plot owes a lot to Williams’s own life, yet it could have been written by Chekhov or Ibsen. Amanda Wingfield is an abandoned mother who wants a better future for her children, Tom and Laura. She wants Tom to get a good job and she wants Laura to find a husband. But Tom is a restless drifter and Laura is a reclusive cripple, and it’s clear to everyone – apart from Amanda – that neither of them can ever fulfil her conventional maternal ambitions. By the way, Williams’s Christian name was Thomas; his schizophrenic sister was lobotomised. A lesser playwright would have had the three of them at one another’s throats, but what makes this such a great play is that these characters are driven to disaster by their love for one another. Amanda, Tom and Laura all want the best for one another, yet Amanda’s love for her children merely stifles them. Tom and Laura are far too sensitive for this rough old world, incapable of making themselves or their suffocating mother happy. It’s a mesmeric drama, guaranteed to move and enthral you. Even this flawed production is more rewarding than a flawless production of a lesser play. The big name in this heartfelt but imperfect show is Hollywood star Amy Adams, making her West End debut as Amanda. Highly acclaimed for her onscreen work (two Golden Globes, six Oscar nominations), she conveys the complexities of her tragic character with immense subtlety and poise, but her portrayal is one of small details rather than large gestures. I was in the eighth row of the stalls, a lot closer than most of the audience, and I kept wishing I was even closer. Her delicate interpretation was exquisitely observed, and to me it felt more suited to screen than stage. By the time you read this, her

Tennessee in Missouri: Lizzie Annis, Victor Alli and Amy Adams in The Glass Menagerie

performance may well have become a lot broader (even the best performers often take time to grow into a play). A more fundamental issue is her age. She’s 47, technically old enough to play a woman with two children in their twenties – but 47 in the 1930s is more like 57 today, and it’s telling that many women who’ve played Amanda have been even older. Katharine Hepburn was 64 when she played the part onscreen. Brenda Blethyn was 62 when she performed the role onstage. Adams, on the other hand, could easily pass for 37, or even 27. At times, she seems more like Laura’s elder sister than her mother, which diminishes the tragedy of the drama. Amanda is a woman with no future, her children are her only hope and, by the end of the play, she can see her hopes for them will never be realised. Amanda has nothing left to live for. Amy Adams, conversely, looks like a woman who’s young enough to start again. It’s still a fine performance – but she’ll give an even better one in ten or 15 years. The narrator is Amanda’s son, Tom, looking back on his younger self from the wistful vantage point of middle age. More often than not, these roles are played by the same actor. Here they’re split between two actors, Tom GlynnCarney and Paul Hilton. Glynn-Carney is a gutsy, charismatic Tom and Hilton is a hypnotic narrator, but I’d rather see the same actor playing both parts. Dividing up the role dilutes the strange magic of the play.

However, these critical quibbles pale into insignificance beside the stand-out performance in this production, a portrayal of searing sensitivity and vulnerability by Lizzie Annis as the crippled Laura. Why had I never seen her before? After the show, I looked up her CV in the programme and was amazed to find it was only a few lines long: ‘Lizzie trained at the Oxford School of Drama. Upcoming work includes The Witcher: Blood Origin for Netflix. Lizzie has cerebral palsy, and this is her professional stage debut.’

RADIO VALERIE GROVE This summer’s best image was Paddington Bear taking tea with the Queen: a good joke and a light-hearted moment, when HM’s face wore her most genuine smile. The jubilation of 2022 was visual – TV-orientated. The expressions on royal faces reflected amusement or cynicism; eg at the cavortings in the Mall or Boris’s reading from Philippians 4:8. The radio listener could only imagine the curling lips. How could a picture-free medium compete? Yet, in an oblique way, it did. Seventy years ago, BBC radio was still the only mass medium following events such as the lying-in-state of George VI, covered by Richard Dimbleby. Today, evading banal vox-pop sentiment, radio offered nostalgic alternatives to that pop smorgasbord, the Platinum Party at The Oldie July 2022 65

BBC

the Palace (featuring ‘the absolutely brilliant Jax Jones’ – poor royals!). On Radio 4 Extra’s Desert Island Discs Revisited, listeners could again enjoy Princess Margaret, cast away by deferential Roy Plomley in 1981. That story of her in a traffic jam, drumming on the dashboard to Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons, had lingered in the memory. But, oddly, her cut-glass RRP (royal received pronunciation) no longer sounded so extreme. ‘Wasn’t Buckingham Palace a daunting place to live in?’ ‘Ay nay, Beckingham Pellis is a vair cazy hice.’ That’s how I’d recalled it – but I was wrong. She actually said ‘cosy house’ quite clearly. And she did not say ‘Ears’ (as Craig Brown has it, hilariously, throughout his Ma’am Darling book). She said ‘Yes’! Her admirable lady-in-waiting (and a maid-of-honour at the Coronation), Anne Glenconner, was on Radio 3’s Private Passions the same day. Ninety this July, she has beautiful diction, voicing noble sentiments, strong and resolute in the face of adversity. On hearing that Lady Glenconner wanted Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius at her funeral, Princess Margaret protested, ‘You can’t have that – it was written by a Roman Catholic’ (ie Cardinal Newman). She also chose I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls from Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl, adding, ‘Of course, Holkham Hall [her childhood home] has the most beautiful marble hall in Great Britain.’ She told Michael Berkeley about her husband’s will excluding her – which turned her into an author – and spoke valiantly about her two dead sons and the one who survived, disabled, after five years in a coma. Verdi’s Requiem had helped. William Sieghart’s excellent A Poet for Elizabeth reflected on HM’s seven laureates. John Masefield, appointed in 1930, was a voice from a distant age. Cecil Day-Lewis was never awarded his place in Poets’ Corner. I have here two of the 720 bottles of sherry given to Ted Hughes (the relict of Dryden’s butt of sack) with Hughes’s self-designed ‘Laureate’s Choice’ labels, bought at auction. Alas, Hughes’s daughter warned me the contents were ‘undrinkable then, and will be disgusting now’. Of the four poets laureate since 1968, John Betjeman remains the one lodged in the nation’s heart. Betjeman’s granddaughter Imogen Lycett-Green read from In a Bath Teashop – ‘She such a very ordinary little woman; he such a thumping crook.’ A first-class programme, crafted by Anna Horsbrugh-Porter. 66 The Oldie July 2022

The Woman’s Hour special Our Greatest Queens got six lady historians to propose a queen or an empress apiece. Lady Antonia Fraser – another great dame turning 90 this summer, whose voice remains distinctive – spoke for courageous Marie-Antoinette. She also analysed how, in 1950, when ‘the monarchy was held in no great respect’, Elizabeth II ‘constructed herself into an ideal queen: a servant of the people for whom duty was the watchword’. And Robert Lacey’s Encounters with Elizabeth, helped by Ingrid Seward, caught some of HM’s more amusing moments. When someone’s mobile phone rang during a speech, the Queen said, ‘Oh dear. I hope it wasn’t somebody important.’

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON I have been observing the mating rituals of female millennials, with the aim of explaining to Oldie-readers the current understanding of, to quote Prince Charles, ‘whatever love means’. Everything I Know About Love (BBC1) began as a bestselling memoir by the Sunday Times agony aunt Dolly Alderton, who then loosely adapted it for this seven-part series. It is billed as a ‘Sex and the City for millennials which covers bad dates and squalid flat-shares, heartaches and humiliations, and, most importantly, unbreakable female friendships’. It’s about 24-year-old Maggie (Emma Appleton) and her childhood best friend Birdy (Bel Powley). They move to Camden Town with two other girls from ‘uni’. Maggie, based on Alderton, is ‘fun’

and tall, while Birdy is sensible and small. Birdy is also, it’s important to stress, utterly charming and Bel Powley, with her huge honest eyes, singlehandedly carries the show because no one else can act. Propelled by the pleasure principle, the flatmates drink vodka shots, get dressed up, dance for joy in their bedrooms, walk down the middle of the road linking arms, drink cocktails, go clubbing on weeknights, hug, snort cocaine, practise dance routines, play drinking games, crowd onto the sofa to watch a reality-TV show called Heirs and Graces (based on Made in Chelsea) and reflect on the progress of their lives. Once, when she is home alone, Maggie dances around wearing nothing but a thong. The ‘squalid flat share’ is in fact a brand-new house where each girl has her own double bed and Maggie has enough wardrobe space for her vast collection of sixties-style coats, hats, knee-high boots and miniskirts. I couldn’t find the promised ‘heartaches’ and ‘humiliations’. Instead, Maggie gets everything she wants without disturbing so much as a hair on her lovely head. First, she falls for a musician called Street whom she meets on a train. She trusts in fate that they will meet again and she duly runs into him in the local pub. Then her landlady, who turns out to be the director of Heirs and Graces, offers Maggie a position as the show’s story producer. Where was the story producer in Everything I Know? The narrative is less of an arc than a plateau. Maggie goes out with Street until she dumps him, and Birdy meets an Australian called Nathan. In one episode, Maggie doesn’t drink. In

Footloose: Maggie (Emma Appleton) in Everything I Know About Love

Ed McLachlan

another, she drinks for two days and two nights solid. By the final episode, she has proved that she knows nothing whatever about love – except that she doesn’t want a threesome with a strange man and his next-door neighbour; and that you can’t have both a best friend and a boyfriend. It has to be one or the other, and boys come first. The ‘unbreakable female friendships’ end up as broken as a pile of smashed plates. So baffled was I by the shallowness of all this that I watched the whole thing again to check that I hadn’t missed the millennial wisdom. But no. A feeble attempt to cash in on the success of Fleabag and Girls, Everything I Know has nothing whatever to report – other than that 20-somethings are as self-absorbed as they always were and always will be. Meanwhile, things are hotting up on Love Island (ITV3). Unperturbed by the suicide of two former contestants and the presenter, Caroline Flack, the knocking shop is into its eighth season. Five girls in itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny high-thigh bikinis and five guys with abs, pecs and arms covered in tats look for love in a Big Brother-style house in Mallorca. ‘I feel like my head’s literally split in half,’

Tasha confides to the camera. ‘It’s like AAGGHH! Andrew is giving me good energy, Kurt seems sweet, Liam is 100 per cent and I’m getting great vibes from Davide. But I’m not getting much graft.’ Grafting, in the Island lexicon, means working hard to get the attention of your love interest. Similarly, ‘melt’ is used as a noun, meaning pathetic, and to ‘get pied’ is to be rejected. My money’s on Gemma, who does dressage for a living, coupling up with Davide, the Italian stallion who wears mirror sunglasses in bed. They’ve had a deep conversation and agreed that attraction is important in a relationship. Which is probably all we need to know about love.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE VAUGHAN WILLIAMS TURNS 150 One hundred and fifty years have passed since Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in the village of Down Ampney in Gloucestershire. The anniversary is on 12th October, but for a while now we’ve been hearing rather more of his music than usual. A principal driver has been the RVW Trust, the charity the great man set up to

further the interests of British music other than his own. Since the copyright on his work expires in 2028, the trust is rightly using the anniversary to help firm up its future finances. ‘All that is traditional in music speaks to this fine English composer of what is eternal in man.’ So wrote a distinguished Italian musician on Vaughan Williams’s 60th birthday in 1932. Later, in that fine but nowadays sadly scarce volume Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion, Wilfrid Mellers gave us the idea of Vaughan Williams the ‘double man’ – the composer in whom an agnostic social conscience sat side by side with a profound religious sensibility; the 20th-century Londoner whose true spiritual home lay in the rural landscapes of pre-industrial England. I suspect he was born double. His father was an Oxford-educated Anglican priest, his mother a Wedgwood with close ties to the Darwin family. ‘The Bible says that God made the world in six days,’ his recently widowed mother reassured the seven-year-old Ralph. ‘Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer, but we needn’t worry; it’s equally wonderful either way.’ Not that the world turned out to be all that wonderful for Vaughan Williams. A long and problematic first marriage and service in the Great War (voluntary, since he was beyond the age of recruitment) as a wagon orderly in the Army Medical Corps saw to that. What sustained him through many a darkening year was faith in his cultural heritage and a belief in the power of that heritage to bind and heal. No English composer, with the near exception of Benjamin Britten, has been more steeped in the literature and religion of his country. For Vaughan Williams, that meant English folk song and the rituals and liturgy of the English church, alongside the creative genius of artists from Tallis and Shakespeare to Housman and John Nash, via such seminal figures as Bunyan, Palmer, Hardy and two favoured cultural outliers, Walt Whitman and William Blake. It was Blake’s illustrations for the Book of Job, as preserved in the matchless prose of the King James Bible, that inspired what for me remains the most ‘representative’ of all Vaughan Williams’s musical achievements, his Job: A Masque for Dancing, first staged in London in 1931. Radio 3 chose May as its anniversary month, centred on a richly informative 20-episode edition of Composer of the Week. More is promised for the autumn. That said, there’s no particular place for Vaughan Williams in this year’s BBC Proms, an organisation and a The Oldie July 2022 67

pacem, by turns terrifying and reassuring, with what many consider to be the finest of all preserved accounts of the Fifth Symphony, given under the composer’s direction at a Prom on 3rd September 1952. It used to be said that Vaughan Williams was no conductor. Yet the beat was clear, he trusted his musicians, and the presence – ah, that indefinable thing! – was immense.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON ROCKING THE PALACE

PA IMAGES / ALAMY

Reputation ascending: Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

festival with which he was lengthily and intimately connected. Aside from the Tallis Fantasia and the ever-ascending Lark, there are just two works of substance, one of which, the Fourth Symphony, finds itself bizarrely yoked to another Fourth Symphony. Not the Sibelius, a piece that greatly influenced Vaughan Williams, but the curious one-movement concoction Michael Tippett dished up for the virtuosi of Solti’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1977. It’s a concert (on 19th July) without context – not untypical of our agendadriven age, in which musically informed programme-making appears to be a vanishing art. Vaughan Williams’s Fourth is an anger-fuelled though by no means defeatist work that sits in a line of evolving but typically unpredictable inter-war masterpieces – which runs from the one-act opera Riders to the Sea and Job, through the Fourth Symphony and the fiercely beautiful, partly Whitman-inspired, anti-war cantata Dona nobis pacem, to the great harvest home that is the Fifth Symphony. With what force an anniversary concert made up of those last three pieces would have resonated this summer! But if the programme-makers can’t oblige, the gramophone can, with three of Vaughan Williams’s own most compelling recordings, all realised with BBC musicians. First, there’s his electrifying 1937 HMV studio version of the Fourth Symphony made with Boult’s newly forged BBC Symphony Orchestra. Now a Naxos CD, it remains a classic of the gramophone. Then we can turn to a well-recorded Somm CD that couples the 1936 BBC broadcast première of Dona nobis 68 The Oldie July 2022

This year, you can’t escape a brokendown 75-year-old who transits airports in a wheelchair, clad in Gucci pyjamas, novelty specs and a mask. He’s everywhere, all at once. He starred at the Party in the Palace but as a pre-recorded hologram where he ‘wowed the crowd’ (copyright all tabloids) as he ‘tickled the ivories’ (ditto) in a red-and-gilt state room at Buckingham Palace. He played Your Song, which brought a fond tear to Prince William’s eye in the bleachers – this was the song Ellie Goulding sang at his wedding. He was not there in person because the Windsor-based pensioner in question was too busy to appear IRL (in real life). He is performing at Wembley and in Hyde Park in a frantic cavalcade of dates this summer, and then going on an overseas tour. I went to Hyde Park to catch him in late June, having gleaned from a niche website what time he would start playing and how long the show would be (a bladder-busting two hours 22 minutes) – and also how overdue:

some people bought their tickets more than two years ago. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour was delayed first by COVID and then by orthopaedic surgery. By now, you will have guessed of whom I speak, the global rock giant who is more hip operation than hip, to misquote Emma Soames – she boasted, when she was the editor, that Saga Magazine was ‘more hip than hip operation’. Yes, Rocketman is so prominent when it comes to all state and main occasions that he should hold a Royal Warrant. He is such a national treasure that a castaway on Love Island name-checked him in the very first episode of the summer series, even if only to confess that he thought that Elton John was a gay couple, consisting of two blokes, one called Elt and one called John. Incidentally, my father always assumed Ant & Dec, the ubiquitous Geordie presenters of I’m a Celebrity, were one man called Anton Deck until he met them both in the jungle. At the concert I saw, Elton played 23 songs, each one a belter. Opening with Bennie and the Jets, I’m Still Standing and Crocodile Rock, he moved on to three encores to serenade London: Your Song, again, and, of course – saving the best till last – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Unlike those of other singers of his vintage (Macca), Elton’s voice has lost none of its body and soul. Not that Prince Charles would notice. A little bird tells me that at ‘pop concerts’ he always wears earplugs. The Prince was said to be thrilled about the hologram appearance (as the music was quieter) and I’m guessing he was also pretty relieved Surelton didn’t play Candle in the Wind.

Rocket Man hits Buckingham Palace: Elton John at the Platinum Jubilee

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU

Left: Space Popular at the Portal Galleries

SPACE POPULAR: THE PORTAL GALLERIES Sir John Soane’s Museum to 25th September THE HUMOUR OF HEATH ROBINSON Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner to 14th September Once I took a white witch to the Soane Museum for her first visit. She pointed out all sorts of esoteric signs and symbols in the decorations. I think they were more likely to be allusions to Soane’s enthusiastic involvement with Freemasonry than evidence that he had been a member of a coven. In either case, it makes his eponymous museum a very suitable setting for the just-opened virtual-reality show about portals between worlds. His creation of the house made much use of such conceits, particularly the opening walls of paintings and use of mirrors. When one starts to consider the subject, it is surprising how much of story-telling, from Orpheus to Harry Potter by way of the Morte d’Arthur, hinges – excuse me – on finding and passing portals. A handful of the most obvious includes Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, George MacDonald’s The Lost Princess and Lilith, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, C S Lewis’s Narnia stories, Tolkien passim, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, The Wizard of Oz and Doctor Who. Then there is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which is constructed of portals, some of which Pullman’s The Subtle Knife cuts open as it might a textile. That subtle knife is relevant, as the show’s curators, Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, speak of their portals as being like textiles to be sliced open. Enjoyment is the whole point of Heath Robinson, the 150th anniversary of whose birth fell on 31st March this year. His eponymous museum is showing a selection of his cartoons across a range of subjects to represent his output from 1905 to 1945. The hallmark of his humour is the way his characters go about their ludicrous business with such profound seriousness.

A selection of Heath Robinson cartoons

Above: ‘A public demonstration for the benefit of professional rugby players by those interested in the inculcation of gentler methods in the game’ Below right: ‘Deceiving the invader as to the state of the tide’

Until 2nd July, there is also a Heath Robinson selling show at the Chris Beetles Gallery (www.chrisbeetles.com) The Oldie July 2022 69

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER GARDENER’S INJURY TIME Outside work has been a tad underpowered for the past few months, not least because of my partner’s hernia operation in early April. Not one to do things by half, Simon turned out to have two hernias – one on the left side, one on the right (yes, we called them Keir and Boris, and they caused agony in equal measure). He elected to have repair surgery for both on the same day. The prescribed post-hernia-op recuperation period is between six and eight weeks. During that time, rest is essential and the lifting of anything other than a mug of tea or a crafty roll-up is verboten. Within a month though, I caught him eyeing up the lawn mower. So I hid the petrol can and ear-defenders, which proved only to increase his sense of ‘challenge’. The operation, performed at a private hospital, has so far proved enormously successful and the expense (less than £3,000) and a waiting time of just three months from diagnosis to knife – against the local NHS waiting time of three years – have paid off. Twinges of pain remain occasionally felt (Keir causes most angst – I speak apolitically), while a hitherto daily soundtrack of groans and gripes has largely diminished. The petrol can and ear-defenders are back where they belong. The sound of the mower purring in the far-off orchard is music to my 76-year-old ears. Throughout injury time, we have had the now-indispensable help of a day-a-week gardener, Daniel. Thirtyish, tall, muscular, knowledgeable and obliging, he turns up punctually every Friday morning and it takes much persuasion on my part to pull him aside

for even a ten-minute coffee break. He’s worth his guineas. An elderly friend, alas recently departed, added considerably to the anxiety caused by a terminal illness by watching the decline of her garden due to her ailing strength. She was an energetic and diligent gardener for most of her 80 years. She was proud that her beautiful garden was crafted – and maintained – by her own hands, and hers alone. Foolishly, in my opinion, because she was well able to pay for some muscle, she held off employing some help, fearing it would be too pricey or, worse, not carried out as she would like. Thankfully, she relented a couple of months before her death, and watching a capable young man nursing her beds and borders brought her unexpected pleasure and peace of mind in those final weeks. With a smile, I hand over a small wodge of used tenners at the end of Daniel’s eight-hour day, wishing only that I could afford to engage him more frequently. It isn’t, however, his manpower alone that I value. He has good ideas of his own and contributes sagely to the way we are cultivating and developing our new-found 12 acres. And I like the way he’ll say if there’s a chore he can’t handle successfully or, without risking serious injury, expect to perform safely. Having moved to south-west Wales just 11 months ago, we are yet to see what surprises our garden has in store for July. Recent delights have been the flowering of a 20-foot bay tree, the bountiful blossoming of numerous wild-cherry trees and the appearance of early purple orchids in the boundary hedgerows. We hope to mark our first anniversary with modest satisfaction (and the imminent arrival of an ambitious shipment of spring-flowering bulbs). Let Daniel’s presence prevail and may my own reserves continue to contribute

usefully. As for Keir and Boris, it looks like goodbye to both of them. David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD CHERRIES In April, when the large cherry tree here was clothed in more white blossom than in previous years, I was reminded of the lines from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. By the beginning of June, lots of pale green fruit had formed which, if one assumes it’s an acid Morello cherry, can be used for making puddings and jam. They are usually too sour to be eaten raw. Sweet cherries used to be grown mainly in orchards in southern England, but recent breeding in Canada has brought varieties that may be grown in smaller gardens and in cooler conditions. A few varieties of sweet cherry are self-fertile, such as Stella and Sweetheart, but most need to be pollinated by a

The cherry: from the loveliest of trees The Oldie July 2022 71

compatible variety, which may be a Morello. Most cherries nowadays are grafted on to Colt rootstock, producing trees of about 15 feet in height and spread, but which can be restricted as bushes or fan-trained against a wall or fence. Containerised trees may be planted at any time, bare-root trees between November and early spring. It is important to choose a site for maximum sun, to stake freestanding trees and to net them against birds when fruit is about to appear. So long as pollinating insects can get at the flowers, netting is also advised in a cold spring to protect the blossom. Large pebbles placed around the base of the trees will generate warmth in the sun and help the fruit to set. Of the many varieties of sweet cherry, most will ripen in late July or August and should then be pruned. Summer Sun – despite its name – is suited to cooler, sunless summers and more exposed areas. A dark red cherry, eaten fresh from the stalk, is one of the joys of summer, though one may doubt the words of the song – life is rather more than just a bowl of cherries.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD COMFORTING DUMPLINGS

ELISABETH LUARD

Love, grief, gardening and redemption through cooking are the thrust of Ella Risbridger’s stylish new culinary storybook, The Year of Miracles (Bloomsbury). As with its predecessor, Midnight Chicken, the recipes are the warp and woof of the narrative, but it’s the storytelling that makes her the most original cookery writer of the decade. Read it for the quality of the writing, as much as for the leisurely exploration of the recipes. While sriracha dipping sauce, miso mayo and chaat-flavoured butter might be only to be expected from a 30-year-old south-east Londoner, the author (you’ll find her all over the internet) explores more familiar

72 The Oldie July 2022

territory. Classic revisitings include a carefully measured airing-cupboard loaf baked in a Le Creuset casserole. Elisa Cunningham’s delightful illustration brings memories of boeuf bourguignon as made by Elizabeth David. Here she is on Chinese dumplings, my kind of comfort food. You don’t have to do the fancy fingerwork, but it’s fun. Pork-and-prawn dumplings The process of dumpling-stuffing is repetitive, soothing and best undertaken in company. Practice makes perfect. If you prefer to prepare ahead, freeze the dumplings and cook straight from the freezer. Vary the filling as you please. Makes 40-50 dumplings, enough for 4 normal people. For the wrappers 180g plain flour Pinch of salt 80-100ml boiling water For the filling 6 spring onions, very finely chopped 25g chives, very finely chopped 100g raw prawns, very finely chopped 1 tbsp grated ginger 2 big garlic cloves, grated 400g pork mince (20 per cent fat – fat is flavour!) 2½ tbsps Shaoxing rice wine (or dry sherry) 1 tbsp sesame oil 1 tbsp light soy sauce Big pinch of salt 1 tbsp white pepper To finish A little more flour and some sesame oil for frying To make the wrappers, mix the flour with the salt in a big bowl and add the boiling water slowly, mixing with a fork. Knead by hand for 10 minutes, or use a mixer for 6-8 minutes, till a pressed-in finger leaves a dent that bounces back a little. Roll into a log about 15cm long. Cover and leave to rest for an hour or so. Mix all the filling ingredients together thoroughly. Lightly flour two large baking sheets. Slice off a piece of the dough as thick as a 20p coin, pat into a ball and roll out into a paper-thin disk about the diameter of a coffee mug. Place a teaspoonful of the filling in the middle (fig 1), run a wet finger round the rim, then fold the disk in half and pinch the semicircles together at the top (fig 2). Without moving the semicircle closest to you, fold the other half in towards the centre point, working first one side and then the other, then pinch the pleats closed (fig 3). Repeat the pleating on the

other side, still keeping the near side flat (fig 4). Aim for six pleats in all (14 is possible). Lift the dumpling onto a floured baking sheet. Continue till all are done. Ella likes to steam her dumplings in a bamboo steamer, allowing about 8 minutes, till the raw filling is firm. I prefer potstickers: heat a little sesame oil in a non-stick frying pan, add the dumplings and a big splash of water, cover and bubble gently for about 7 minutes till the water has completely evaporated and the dumpling bottoms are crispy and brown. Eat straight away, with a dipping sauce: my favourite is vinegar and matchsticked ginger.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE GO ALFRESCO! The best restaurant in London? Lisboeta, Nuno Mendes’s new restaurant in Charlotte Street, which offers the best Portuguese food outside Iberia. Order small plates of the empada, amberjack, beef tartare, confit cod and pork – transcendent dishes served by the very best waitress. And follow my example and take someone with a tiny appetite. Talking of unusual dinner companions, have you ever wondered who eats those nondescript and unenticing dishes on menus? Simple: the French. I know this because I needed a Marianne to try out Bellanger, in Islington, with me. Sure enough, she scoured a menu of delights, eschewing British favourites such as confit canard, and plumped for the endive salad followed by the soufflé Suisse, a lump of goat’s cheese in a puddle of eggy cheese. She was thrilled. On our return match elsewhere, she ordered a goat’s-cheese salad not just for the starter but also for the main course – and some gluten-free bread made of recycled cardboard and discarded bird seed. It’s what the French do: pigeonlike, they sweep up all the boring food we Brits avoid. Restaurateurs adore them. My reason for going to Bellanger was to try it out for my list of restaurants with alfresco dining. The better items on the menu are fine; the shock was that we were surrounded by the most starstudded tables since The Ivy circa 1992. On that damp Tuesday night, we were encircled by Trevor Nunn, Sandi Toksvig, Charles Dance and Lord Falconer. At four different tables. Even Marianne stopped ruminating on her 14th endive leaf. London is sadly not awash with outside terraces, but there are pockets of Café Society: Dean Street, Charlotte Street and Shepherd Market, where I go

to the Lebanese Al Hamra, have plenty of pavement life. For a bargain, head to the Bleeding Heart Bistro in Farringdon for their menu of French classics. If visiting the British Museum, ask for one of Café Deco’s seven tables, on their patio in Store Street. The name belies the menu of expertly-made Italian dishes, including their agretti and an excellent puntarelle alla Romana. I had a generous pork chop with cannellini beans and cicoria. I went there after seeing Boiling Point, which appears to have encouraged my son to go into the restaurant trade. The Times claims there are 164,000 vacancies in hospitality from which he can choose. A stroll down Regent’s Canal, starting at Camden Lock, is a joyful way of building up an appetite for dinner at canalside Summerhouse, in Blomfield Road. Beg for a table at the water’s edge and share a bass. My Dorset fisherman friend Will has cured me of saying sea bass and sea bream. ‘Of course it’s from the bloody sea!’ A good point well made, as the late Oldie editor Alexander Chancellor used to say. If Summerhouse is full, head back to the scarlet hulk that is Feng Shang Princess for some classic generic Chinese dishes. And if the weather collapses, book a table in the flower-strewn bower at Clos Maggiore. Normally a haven for plutocrats, it’s offering a three-course summer menu for £39.50, including a glass of giggles. I had their citrus-cured salmon and wild-mushroom-and-truffle risotto. Unless you’re an American film star who has recently won a libel action, avoid their famous door-stopper of a wine list and have a half-carafe of sommelierselected wine for just £15. Both the white and the red were excellent. And if inflation is biting, just take a French friend and order them two portions of spinach. They’ll be aux anges.

DRINK BILL KNOTT IN THE PINK It is almost 20 years since the scorching summer of 2003. That was the year Britain discovered a penchant for rosé. Now our thirst for something pink and chilly seems unquenchable. Back then, off-licence shelves paraded rosés in all shades, from the palest salmon to the most lurid bubble-gum pink. Some were dry, but many were off-dry (the wine trade’s euphemism for ‘medium’) and many were from New World mega-brands such as First Cape and Jacob’s Creek.

These days, whether it is a magnum of Whispering Angel flaunted by an oligarch at a Saint-Tropez beach club, or a supermarket bottle of Côtes de Provence sipped in a back-garden deck chair, it is the palest and driest of pinks that have prevailed. Provençal-style rosé is now a brand in itself, no matter where it comes from or which grape varieties are employed. They may all look pretty much the same, but there are marked differences both in flavour and – especially – in price. Provence, in particular, has attracted a host of celebrity endorsements, but unless you are especially fond of Brad Pitt or Kylie Minogue (or even if you are) I would avoid them. The category also seems to specialise in winsomely beautiful bottles that don’t fit in the fridge. Perhaps most importantly, check the vintage. Having sampled a couple of dozen bottles from the last two vintages, I found the 2021s were almost all better than the 2020s. Rosé is often low in acidity, and relies on a fresh, astringent, redcurrant-like tang of fruit instead – something that fades quickly in most rosés (except Champagne, but that is a whole other subject). My favourites are these, all from the 2021 vintage. The Wine Society, as ever, has plenty of good options at decent prices. I particularly liked the zippy, mineral-edged Domaine les Mesclances Charmes (£8.95); the onion-skin-pale Merle, Château Pas de Cerf from Côtes de Provence (£11.50); and the Society’s own Corsican Rosé (£10.50), made mostly from the island’s indigenous black grapes. From the Pays d’Oc, try J-M Cazes’s L’Ostal, made with 50/50 Syrah and Grenache in the Minervois (£13.50, honestgrapes.co.uk); the summerpudding-scented Coeur de Cuvée de la Jasse (£12.95, mrwheelerwine.com); or the brambly Waddesdon Rothschild Collection Rosé (£10.99, dbmwines.co.uk). DBM also stock a variety of smart Provençal rosés, including the Bamford (as in JCB)-owned Love by Léoube (£16.99), and the pale, bone-dry Les Deux Anges Rosé from Château de L’Escarelle (£16.99). Rosé may not be a wine to swirl and sniff like a fine Montrachet or a great claret. But, when a stray ray of sunshine gleams alluringly in the glass, it can be splendidly seductive. Should you choose to forgo the tortuous process of holidaying in the Med this year, a bottle of something pink and ice-cold will provide much solace.

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of these three: a sprightly summer white from one of Argentina’s best producers; a pale but interesting rosé from France’s deep south; and a classy Vacqueyras that would brighten any back-garden barbecue. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine. Chenin/Torrontes Las Pampas, Mendoza, Argentina 2021, offer price £7.99, case price £95.88 Made by the renowned Zuccardi winery: a crisp, gently floral, well-made white with a tang of citrus.

Rosé Guilhem, Moulin de Gassac, IGP Pays d’Hérault 2021, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Half Grenache, half Carignan, from 20-year-old vines: very easy to drink and great value. Vacqueyras, Domaine Grandy, Rhône 2019, offer price £12.99, case price £155.88 Classic, fruit-driven Vacqueyras, a blend of Grenache and Syrah with a splash of Mourvèdre.

Mixed case price £123.88 – a saving of £30.99 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

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Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 15th August 2022.

The Oldie July 2022 73

SPORT JIM WHITE COMMONWEALTH HEROES Probably no one is more disappointed that the Queen won’t make it to the Jubilee Commonwealth Games (starting in Birmingham on 28th July) than the Queen herself. This is her kind of event: homely, friendly, lacking in flash and played out by representatives of the countries she holds most dear. And there is something else too about the Games: they include some of the proper sports ignored by the Olympics. This is where we – and the Queen – get to enjoy lawn bowls, cricket, squash and netball. None of them is at the Olympics; they have been squeezed out by things like surfing, speed climbing and, from the Paris Games in 2024, breakdancing. What a showcase the Commonwealths offer those sports. This is the pinnacle for netball, for instance. For a sport largely confined to the nations of the Commonwealth, it means the best practitioners in the world will be competing for the medals in Birmingham. The final in 2018 was frenetic, when England beat the favourites Australia with the last throw of the match. Given the heart-stopping levels of excitement, the Queen will probably this time be watching from a distance. The T20 cricket and lawn bowls, too, will feature all the world’s leading countries, as will the rugby sevens. It isn’t always like that at the Commonwealths. One of the endearing qualities of some of the sports at the games is that participants who wouldn’t get close to qualifying for Olympic competition are invited along for the ride. I remember watching the triathlon at Glasgow in 2014, which was staged in the glorious surrounds of Strathclyde Country Park on the kind of blistering summer’s day that suggested the race was being staged in South America rather than Scotland. The competitors had to begin their three-pronged assault on the course by twice swimming round a 750-metre lap of Strathclyde Loch. As the hooter sounded to start the race, some of the best triathletes in the world, such as the Brownlee brothers and the South African Richard Murray, were powering through the water at such a pace that it looked as if they’d secreted outboard motors in their wetsuits. It quickly became clear that not everyone shared their ease and ability. Several of the triathletes were ruthlessly cut adrift from the pack. At the back of 74 The Oldie July 2022

the field was Casmer Kamangip, the competitor from Papua New Guinea, who was doing a very gentle breaststroke. He was soon so far behind that he had been lapped by almost everyone else before he had completed his first circuit. Worse, as he continued sedately to bob through the water while the rest of the field were already on their bikes and halfway through the next stage, he was hauled into a rescue boat. He had been timed out. His race was over. He had flown halfway round the world to compete and hadn’t even got on his bike. Still, given that the race was staged in Britain, where the love of the underdog remains unconditional, he was given almost as rousing an ovation as Alistair Brownlee got for picking up the gold. If the hapless Kamangip is involved this year, the Queen is bound to join in the applause, as she watches on television at home in Windsor Castle.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD HOW TO BUY A NEW CAR Thinking of buying a new car? You might still have to wait because of the continuing shortage of semiconductors (you’ll wait 18 months for the new Land Rover Defender). Also, the way you’ll do it is changing, as franchised dealers move to what they call an agency or ‘direct consumer’ model. Until now, a manufacturer would sell a car to a franchised dealer, who would then sell it to you, adding a percentage profit of up to around 15 per cent. You might haggle a bit with the dealer – to get the price down, or options added, or the offer on your trade-in up. Sometimes, dealers are forced by manufacturers to buy cars they don’t want, in order to earn bonuses. Sometimes, too, they have to negotiate with the manufacturer over warranty claims. In law, if the car were not fit for purpose, they – as the seller – could be obliged to take it back and refund you. Under the new agency model, you buy online at a fixed price directly from the manufacturer, specifying the options you want. You do this via the dealer, whose

New army model: Ineos Grenadier 3.0

role is to advise and inform, guiding you to what matches your requirements. In the words of the CEO of Polestar, interviewed by Autocar, the dealer delivers ‘exceptional information to the customer, listening to their enquiries and helping to educate them’. I must say I thought this was what they were supposed to do anyway. The difference now is that manufacturers will make more money because they no longer sell to dealers at wholesale prices but sell directly to you at retail prices, with the dealer receiving a commission on every sale instead of a profit on every car. Presumably the dealer will still be responsible for maintenance and for buying your trade-in. And presumably they might have a demonstrator on the forecourt, since not everyone is willing to pay tens of thousands for a car they’ve never sat in, let alone driven. After all, don’t you want to know if it’s comfortable, whether you can see out of it or whether it makes you car-sick? Industry newcomers, such as Tesla, Polestar and Genesis, opted for the agency model from the start, as will Ineos with its Grenadier later this year. The thinking behind this is that, by selling online to you at retail rather than to dealers at wholesale, manufacturers not only fatten margins but establish a relationship with you, selling you options and modifications as well as the next model. Current margins are thin because electric vehicles, which are the future – for the time being – are four times more expensive to make than combustion vehicles. The whole agency process is supposed to be transparent and haggle-free. But most drivers never buy a new car. Only 124,394 were registered in May, the second-lowest May figure in 30 years. This is due largely to the semiconductor shortage, with about a third being electric or hybrid because manufacturers prioritised chip-supply to those vehicles. EVs need many more chips than combustion vehicles. Yet about 80 per cent of the 35 million registered vehicles are between six and ten years old – simply because that’s what most drivers can afford. In fact, nine million have over 100,000 miles under their belts (two of them are mine). If government and manufacturers really want us all to buy newer, more eco-friendly cars, they’ll have to find ways of making them more affordable. And the only way to do that – agency or franchise models notwithstanding – is to make them more cheaply. Come up with a new way of doing it and they’ll bite your hand off.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Where’s the great computer junkyard? I’ve been having a clear-out. That means getting rid of the obsolete, broken or unused bits of equipment that always silt up in a technophile’s cupboards. But how best to dispose of this stuff? I want as little as possible going into landfill; it is never going to rot down to compost, after all. In recent years, I have taken to kicking the can down the road by selling whatever I can. I seldom make much money but I do get a bit of a warm feeling about how kind I’m being to the planet, as I assume that if someone is prepared to pay for something, they won’t just throw it away.

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

BBC Good Food bbcgoodfood.com A huge resource of recipes – search for ideas for an ingredient. The users’ comments are invaluable. They work for you theyworkforyou.com Takes data information from official parliamentary sources and makes it easier to understand. Find out what your MP is up to and be alerted when they do something. I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

You can sell using eBay, and I have done, while a number of other companies will buy fairly recent equipment and will collect it or pay the postage. I’ve used uk. webuy.com and musicmagpie.co.uk and there are many more. They will often reduce their offer a bit once they see the thing but, once the deal is done, it’s over; no risk of later complaints about quality or condition. With eBay, you run the risk of the purchaser moaning about something, but it is good for shifting older things that the retail chaps won’t touch. I once sold a 30-year-old pocket calculator on eBay; it was so ancient it had achieved ‘collectable’ status, and there are collectors who buy them. Really, there are. However, nobody wants my old printer that doesn’t work. So I took it and a large bag of cables and chargers to the local dump (sorry, ‘recycling centre’). Under instructions from a laconic staff member, I threw them all in the ‘small appliances’ bin, a sad graveyard of once shiny equipment, now abandoned and unloved. I began to feel guilty. What will actually happen to the stuff piled up in the skip? The laconic chap just shrugged and said all he knew was that it was taken away. But where to? I know that many of the more complex items, especially phones and computers, are full of small amounts of rare metals and minerals that are expensive, and increasingly hard to procure. So I made enquiries – a depressing

experience. It turns out that the UK is the world’s second-highest producer of what’s known as e-waste, and my printer will probably be either crushed or burned – or both. Not, as I had hoped, dismantled for the various precious earth elements and other components to be extracted and reused. Such reclamation is possible, apparently, but it’s really difficult, like giving someone an omelette and asking them to extract an egg from it. Very few places can manage it at any price. However, it’s a problem that will need to be tackled soon. The Royal Society of Chemistry (sustainability.rsc.org) recently warned that we risk running out of elements such as indium, which is in touch screens, and gallium, a vital part of many semiconductors, unless we find a way of extracting them from discarded machines. Necessity being the mother of invention, scarcity may solve the problem. Once indium or gallium becomes hard to buy, or if the supply chain is disrupted (both those elements come mainly from China), perhaps a way will be found economically to recover what has already been used elsewhere. I hope so, as it’s the only real hope. It might also encourage the creation of equipment that is easier to dismantle and repair and hence allows us to use it for longer. The only alternative I can think of is that we all hang on to all our tech until we really do know how to dispose of it sustainably – but I fear it might be a very long wait.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

It’s your funeral – how to pay for it Buy now and you’ll (possibly) get what you paid for when you’re dead. That requires blind trust on the customer’s side, but it is how prepaid funeral plans – and a recent innovation, the prepaid probate plan – work. Funeral plans have long been criticised as risky, because they were unregulated – so there was no consumer protection. There was no control over 76 The Oldie July 2022

who could start selling the schemes, or what they did with your money. Finally, in July, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) took responsibility for prepaid funeral plans – but it is too late for the 46,000 customers of one company, Safe Hands, which collapsed last March. Their customers will likely get back only a fraction of their funds because at the time there was no compensation scheme.

There is still no protection for people who buy prepaid probate plans, and none on the horizon. Their selling point is the same as for funeral plans: you pay at today’s prices and you save your executors work and worry when you die. That is tempting and feels altruistic, but it is not necessarily how it works out in practice. Because they are unregulated, customers are exposed to

‘... and they both pretended to live happily ever after’

the same risks that forced the FCA to take control of funeral plans: high-pressure sales tactics, unfair charges, unprotected money and selling to people for whom the product is unsuitable by companies that are not financially sound. The family can end up sorting out and paying for any mistakes and delays. At least when you buy a funeral plan, you know that at some point you will die.

With prepaid probate plans, neither you nor the provider knows how large or complicated your estate will end up being, or if it will even require probate at all. To fix the fee at the outset the providers make various assumptions about you, your age and your assets, and their methodology varies. They might promise it won’t cost any extra if you become unexpectedly wealthier. But,

despite being fixed, the fees can still go up if the estate turns out to be more valuable or more complicated than expected. You are unlikely to get a discount if the opposite happens. You will be quoted around £2,000 to £5,500 and be shown examples of a probate plan being cheaper than solicitors’ current fees. The Solicitors Regulation Authority makes solicitors publish their fees for services including probate on their websites, so you can easily make your own comparisons. Executors must obtain a grant of probate before they can distribute the estate to beneficiaries. You can do it yourself fairly easily by post or through the government’s online portal at www.gov.uk/applying-for-probate/ apply-for-probate. Since last January, in England and Wales there has been a fixed probate registry fee of £273 for estates of any size over £5,000. It’s cheaper in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Even with a probate plan, you have to pay these fees. Some companies selling prepaid products are solid, but the flaky ones make it a risky purchase requiring careful checks before you sign a contract. They are sold as giving you peace of mind. It is quite possible that they will not.

invites you on a unique reader trip ‘Absolutely fantastic holiday’ in a castello near Rome

Castello di Mandela

with Huon Mallalieu 3rd to 9th July 2023 In June 2019, 20 lucky Oldie readers stayed with Alexandra White at her home, the magnificent Castello di Mandela. The tributes came flooding in … ‘best ever’. We promised a unique tour because lots of Alexandra’s friends opened the doors to their palazzi. And she delivered. Well, she wants us back … with a completely different itinerary. It would be impossible for any of us to have this experience as chance visitors, rather than as her guests. DON’T MISS OUT. We are in the hands of a great hostess and expert guides. We shall eat splendidly either at the Castello, with local produce and family-produced olive oil and wines, or in a range of restaurants.

Full itinerary and terms and conditions at: www.theoldie.co.uk/tours Sunday 3rd July – Arrival Flights to Rome TBC. Tour of castle and grounds. Welcome cocktails, introductory talk by Huon, dinner. Monday 4th July – Rome We will visit the magnificent gardens of Villa Medici, the Gardens of the Aventine and the Abbey of the Tre Fontane, on the site where St Paul was beheaded. Tuesday 5th July – The summer retreats in the hills of Rome Morning tour of the palace and gardens of the Pope at Castel Gandolfo; afternoon in Ariccia, a Chigi palace by Bernini, with wonderful collections in their original place. Visconti filmed the ball scene of The Leopard here. The gardens will be opened for us.

Wednesday 6th July – Subiaco in the footsteps of St Benedict Monastery of Saint Scholastica, Monastery of Sacro Speco and the Rocca Borgia, where Lucrezia was born. Thursday 7th July – Abbey of Farfa We will visit this splendid medieval abbey and its untouched hamlet, and eat in an agriturismo near Farfa with local cuisine and the proprietors’ produce. Friday 8th July – Monte Cassino Very special tour of the Abbey and visit to the library. Saturday 9th July – Blighty Flights from Rome Fiumicino to Heathrow TBC

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 Price per person: £2,450 which includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights. Single supplement: £300. A deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st April 2023. Please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk

The Oldie July 2022 77

The Grey Wagtail

CARRY AKROYD

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Grey! – what a mistitling, a Calvinist’s description of this jinking, weaving spirit of the sinuous burns, this leaper at gnats in mid-air, this avian jig played at speed on a new penny whistle, the rich slate blue of its back set off by the powder yellow of its breast curve. Birch-delicate, trig as a girl – can it be male at all? – it is mountain burns and the trickle of rivulets, it is skinkling rills and lit emerald moss; a chipping from sunlight, airily dressed in feathers. Re-lining, as often, a last year’s blackbird’s nest, in a cup on a ledge on an aqueduct it is one coveted egg whose spry potential twitterer I try to give back now. Gerry Cambridge (b 1959), Motacilla cinerea For beauty of movement and plumage, the grey wagtail (Motacilla cinerea) has few rivals. W H Hudson and Grey of Fallodon both rank it high. Hudson thought its plumage ‘pleases, perhaps, more than the colouring of any other British bird’ (British Birds). For Grey, it was ‘one of the most delicately beautiful’ (The Charm of Birds). All birds moult, but the male grey wagtail conspicuously moults twice: after breeding, from early August to the end of September; and a pre-breeding transformation between February and March. In spring, the female’s moult means she emerges the same but brighter. The male, similarly enriched, is differentiated by a new black throat. This spring moult turns the remainder of the bird’s white winter throat (the same in both genders) into a bright bordering line between cheek and eye to match a permanent white line above the

eye. In addition, there is a necklace of black feathers below the black throat. The male pied wagtail (M alba), its cousin, also smartens up for the breeding season, but most noticeably only through extension of his permanent black throat. Greys have longer tails, of which they take full advantage. They wag them vigorously and fan them exotically in courtship to more effect than the pied or the yellower yellow wagtail, a summer migrant. Grey wagtails are ubiquitous in Britain and Ireland, with a healthy increase in range and numbers over the last halfcentury, but resident population of 37,000 (2016) is dwarfed by the half million pied wagtails. Breeding densities are highest in the uplands – Wales, the

Pennines and mainland Scotland. They prefer swift rivers and streams running through broad-leaved woodland, a habitat that offers infinite insects. I am indebted to Gareth Thomas, a leading authority on the bird. He has studied grey wagtails and dippers, which often prove nesting neighbours, for over 50 years on the River Teme in Ludlow, where he is Weirs Manager. As a member of the Nature Photographic Society, he has made an unrivalled record of their movements and moults, especially their balletic ability to jump for flying insects. Let BB, last of England’s sporting naturalists, have the final word: ‘Daffodil yellow and soft grey, a fairy bird in fairyland’ (The Countryman’s Bedside Book, 1941). The Oldie July 2022 79

Travel Very Moorish Andalusia Huon Mallalieu tours Córdoba, one of the world’s great cities

PRISMA BY DUKAS PRESSEAGENTUR GMBH / ALAMY

n 929 AD, when Abd al-Rahman III declared himself Caliph of Córdoba, it was one of the western world’s greatest cities. The population was rising towards half a million, exceeded only by those of Baghdad, Constantinople and perhaps Cairo. There were 70 libraries, holding perhaps half a million books – in

80 The Oldie July 2022

the 12th century, Paris’s university had some 2,000. At night, the city was lit by 35,000 streetlights, while London, with about 18,000 people, remained dark for another 700 years, as did the even smaller Paris. Building on the hydraulic work of the Romans, the Arabs brought fresh water

to their cities to irrigate what had long been one of the continent’s richest agricultural areas. Crops and fruits introduced by them include apricots, artichokes, aubergines, bananas, carrots, cotton, dates, figs (which they exported back to Baghdad), lemons, limes, oranges, parsnips, pasta wheat, peaches, pomegranates, saffron,

sorghum, spinach, sugar cane and watermelon. They also brought silk and papermaking. I have gratefully purloined this list from John Gill’s Andalucía: a Cultural History (2008). Although, by standards elsewhere, it was a tolerant society, in which Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed and co-operated, it was not always as tolerant as it has sometimes been portrayed. Conversions were not enforced, because non-Muslims could be taxed more highly. Still, during the Umayyad Caliphate, artists, philosophers and scholars, often persecuted by other regimes, were made welcome. Among them were astronomers, calligraphers, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, musicians, poets, geographers, linguists and physicians – perhaps even an early pioneer of flight. The polymath known as Zaryāb (c 789-857), Persian for blackbird, united many of these disciplines in one person. He was also a master of botanical sciences and culinary arts. He was a dictator of fashion and set standards of etiquette that are still observed today. We owe him the notions of placement, tablecloths and threecourse meals. There were periods when rulers were not tolerant at all. From 1090, the Umayyads were followed by the Almoravids, religious fundamentalists who promoted austerely beautiful architecture and came to appreciate the textile arts. They in turn were ousted by the still more extreme Almohads (1150-1269), little more tolerant than Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. It should be remembered, too, that the Christian monarchs who won Córdoba from the

Almohads in 1236, and focal point, the mihrab, is an Seville 12 years later, example displayed more tolerance of diplomatic convivencia, than their successors the its mosaics being a present Catholic kings from the Byzantine after 1492. Emperor. It also features Abd al-Rahman III’s trefoil arches, transition from emir to a century before they caliph may have lessened his became a hallmark of military effectiveness, since Gothic architecture. he no longer led the army in How did it all begin? person. Instead, he and his The Arab state in Spain successor Al-Hakam II had been established by (961-976) encouraged Abd al-Rahman III, Caliph conquest in 711. Then, an efflorescence of of Córdoba 929-961 AD much like Angles and intellectual activity. Saxons in Britain and Women took a very active part in this. Strongbow’s English in Ireland, Al-Hakam’s personal secretary was a mercenaries from North Africa turned on notable mathematician, Lubna of their employers in a civil war and overran Córdoba, who may have been his the Visigothic kingdom. slave-born sister. This convivencia or The first mercenaries were Berbers led co-existence – and, by extension, limited by Tariq, who gave his name to Jabal al tolerance – has been described as ‘the Tariq, or Gibraltar. defining issue in the history of Al-Andalus’. Despite a revolt of Berbers against It resulted in a major renaissance of Arabs, these men and their successors Arabic and Hebrew literature and expanded their rule across almost the learning, and an early flowering of whole peninsula by 750. Spanish culture. Around 300 years later, Muslim Spain Its waning is exemplified by Moshe reached the peak years of its cultural ben Maimon, known as Maimonides flowering under that man, the emir (1138-1204), the physician and Abd al-Rahman III (890-961 AD). philosopher. He was praised as the The best picture of him is given greatest figure in Jewish thought since by Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim (935-1002 the biblical Moses. His statue stands in AD), a secular canoness and the first honour near his birthplace in Jewish German female poet and historian. Córdoba. He spent much of his life in On the one hand, she lauded his Cairo, since his family exiled themselves court as ‘the brilliant ornament of the from the oppressive Almohad regime. world that shines in the west’. On the Al-Andalus (or Andalusia) gave the other, she condemned him as a ‘lewd world several of its greatest buildings, slave of demons’. most notably the post-Caliphate According to Edward Gibbon, at the Alhambra in Granada, and the Mezquita end of his life Abd al-Rahman said, ‘I – or Great Mosque – in Córdoba. have now reigned above 50 years in Among many other things, the victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, Alhambra, along with palaces such as dreaded by my enemies and respected by the Alcázar in Seville, is an expression my allies. Riches and honours, power and of the Arab love of courtyard gardens, pleasure have waited on my call, nor does specifically the ‘paradise garden’ which any earthly blessing appear to have been originated in Persia. The essential wanting to my felicity.’ elements are enclosing walls, for shade Abd al-Rahman was the eighth ruler and viewpoints, water, light and colour. of Al-Andalus since his namesake and Some Persian carpets could be taken for great-great-grandfather proclaimed planting plans. himself emir in Córdoba in 756. Ordered plants have their part in the There followed over 700 years of Mezquita too, not only in the avenues of intermittent warfare with the Visigothic orange trees by which one approaches, Christian counties and kingdoms to the but symbolically in the ordered forest of north; campaigns against Muslim rivals double arches into which they lead. in North Africa; and civil wars between Begun by Abd al-Rahman I and within dynasties only. around 780, it was enlarged several times It all ended with the surrender of to become the largest mosque in the Granada in 1492. As a cultured society, world by Al-Hakam’s time. The Al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian Peninsula, was indeed ‘the Córdoba: the Roman bridge and, brilliant ornament of the world’ and far beyond it, the Mezquita in advance of the rest of Europe. The Oldie July 2022 81

Overlooked Britain

A castle fit for a pig

lucinda lambton Larchill in County Kildare is an 18th-century ornamental farm, built for pigs, ducks – and a hunting obsessive

LUCY LAMBTON

Left: the Fox’s Earth folly built by Robert Watson, who feared being reincarnated as a fox. Right: the goathouse battlements

Larchill in County Kildare is thought to be the last surviving 18th-century ornamental farm – or ferme ornée. The ferme ornée was first written of by Stephen Switzer in The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation (1715). He pioneered the charms of ‘mixing the useful and profitable Parts of Gardening with the pleasurable’. Agricultural estates in particular could and should be aesthetically pleasing. Here in Ireland, the Prentice family, Quaker farmers from the north, made a fortune out of their flax pit and mill – and created the pastoral paradise of Larchill. It was then the dawn of the Age of Improvement, when enthusiasm was rampant for architectural adventure. Pattern books were appearing hand over fist with such outlandish schemes that they seemed the stuff of dreams. In 1994, the ruinous estate was bought by Michael de las Casas and his wife, Louise, who set out to revive the place, lock, stock and barrel. They have triumphed – both with their restoration of the 19th-century architectural oddities and, quite 82 The Oldie July 2022

gloriously, by building a great many more entirely from scratch! Particularly endearing is the arched and castellated Gothic dwelling for pigs, with its castle and compound occupied by a multitude of porkers. Here Saddlebacks and Berkshires rule overall, with the most appealing Beatrice poking her nose forth from the arched ‘window’; all in happiest harmony with the old model farm. Furthermore, joy of joys, the pigs’ quarters have the sweetest smell of clean straw and new-mown hay. A few feet away, there is another architectural gem with a goathouse adorned with Gwelfic battlements on high – a most perfect stage set for the long- and twisted-horned creatures. There is also an 18th-century Gothic boathouse, as well as, quite remarkably, a five-towered and castellated triangular fortress built for ducks in the middle of one of the three lakes in the demesne. Called Gibraltar, as it is the shape of the great rock, it has corner towers and turrets, rendered walls and openings with Gothic arches and gun loops. The Duke of Wellington was Larchill’s

neighbour as a child, and would come over and particularly enjoy indulging in battles in the fortress. He was highly praised by his godmother, the famed Mrs Delany, who wrote, ‘He is the most extraordinary boy… a very good scholar and whatever he undertakes he masters it most surprisingly… he understands fortifications, building of ships and has more knowledge than I ever met with in one so young… There are several ships, one complete man-ofwar. My godson is governor of the fort and Lord High Admiral.’ Another Larchill treat, called Temple Island, was a building with its roof sloping inwards and downwards to gather rainwater for a plunge pool. Statues were plentiful, with such figures as Apollo, Proserpine, Ceres and Bacchus. The Rustic Temple consisted of six rendered columns, stone seats and a rubble stone dome. There is also a shell house, the Cockle Shell Tower, with rare and exotic shells from far-flung spots proudly set into the walls and floors. The delightful centrepiece is a 19th-century

Clockwise from top: the castellated dwelling for pigs, with some of the apparently illegitimate piglets; Beatrice surveys her demesne; Gibraltar, the fortress for ducks

stained-glass window. Dovecotes abound in the farmyard, along with an owl roost or owlery, created to encourage owls to hunt vermin. Odd as can be is the 18th-century Eel House in the eel pond, where the slithery creatures, then considered a great delicacy, would be harvested inside a little stone tower. Last, but still by no means least, is the showstopper of this assembly of architectural delights. Gaze with wonder at an early-20th-century neoclassical temple, standing atop a mound created as a safe bolthole for Robert Watson. Master of the local Carlow foxhounds, he then owned Larchill. Having hunted and killed foxes relentlessly throughout his life, he was shamed into thinking that, as a punishment, he would himself surely be reincarnated as a fox. So he

designed an earth from which he could safely escape. There is an opening – the right width for a fox to squeeze through but too narrow for hounds! He also had the advantage of a great view of the Dublin Mountains across the far horizon. He stipulated in his will that hunting on his land be banned in perpetuity. There was plenty to atone for. His father had been Master of the Tallow Hunt for 62 years. His grandfather was credited with killing the last wolf in Ireland. His son was Master of the Meath Hounds; his uncle William was Master of the Cotswolds. And his brother George founded the Melbourne Kennel Club with the best pack of hounds in Australia – often, I fear, hunting emu and kangaroo. Robert Watson was Master of the Carlow and Island Hunt for 32 years.

When he died, the mourners at his funeral cried, ‘Gone away, gone away.’ Larchill is a key link in the history of Irish landscape gardening. It was created at the onset of the Romantic movement, when agriculture and architecture were to develop in aesthetic unison. And so they most marvellously did in these 26 acres of parkland. Furthermore, the gardens are still giving as much pleasure today as when they were described in 1830 by an Ordnance Survey publication as ‘the most fashionable garden in all Ireland’. Goth farm and parkland are filled with rare breeds of domestic farm animals. When I photographed the Gothic farmyard, the black Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs were suffering the public humiliation of one sow’s infidelity being revealed by the arrival of six pink piglets! Another very similar assembly of buildings was built earlier at nearby Dangan Castle, home of Lord Mornington, grandfather of the Duke of Wellington. This was undoubtedly the inspiration for Larchill, yet it is now in a state of ruin, while Larchill continues to go from strength to strength. Strangely dark rumours in fact abound about the place; rumours such as those of the mischief of Francis Dashwood’s disreputable Hellfire Club in Buckinghamshire. Whereas in England, obscene parodies of religious rites were practised, in Ireland we find a rustic temple to Venus – with vaulted tunnels and a cavern, which were said to be a uterus, along with Fallopian tubes and womb. Its owner, Mr Watson, was dismissed from the Quakers by the Brethren. There are surely few places as charmful as Larchill. The Oldie July 2022 83

On the Road

Return trip for a railway child Jenny Agutter recalls her Singapore childhood, LA stardom – and that red petticoat. By Louise Flind

The Railway Children Return is coming out this summer. What’s the difference between the versions you’ve done? For each episode for the television series in 1968, they took the chapters of Edith Nesbit’s 1905 book. For the 1970 film, Lionel Jeffries, the director, kept the naivety of the book. In 2000, Catherine Morshead directed it for ITV and it was more gritty. It’s lovely to be able to play different things. In The Railway Children Return, the only link is Bobby, who is now a grandmother [played by Agutter]. What was it like filming the famous red-petticoat scene in the 1970 film? Did you know it would be so iconic? Doing the scene on the tracks with the train coming was great fun. No – and, shortly afterwards, I went to the States and didn’t realise [how iconic it was] until I came back 17 years later. How did you get the part in The Railway Children? For the television, I auditioned; for the film, I was offered the role of Roberta. What was it like being a child star? The first thing I did was a Walt Disney film, Ballerina (1966), because they needed a young dancer. I carried on acting because there was an agent attached to the school. When I was 16, I did three films, including The Railway Children. Is it assumed after you’ve been a child actor that you become a grown-up actor? There’s an awful lot of growing up from childhood. I’d been at a ballet school, and knew nothing about acting. What was it like at the National Theatre in the early ’70s? Terrifying. I was the only person of my age who had no theatrical training. What was Hollywood like in the ’70s? Where did you live? I loved being in a Mediterranean climate and had a lot of support there – my

family, in that I could come back to the UK if things didn’t work out; and I had an agent who’d moved to California. And, at 18, I got an Emmy for The Snow Goose (1971). For a few months, very little came my way; then I did Logan’s Run (1976). I lived on Marmont Avenue. Did you really ride that horse in The Eagle Has Landed (1976), and what was Donald Sutherland like? Yes, I did. I had lessons from Egon Merz who trained Elizabeth Taylor for National Velvet. Donald was charming. Why did you return to England? Because my husband didn’t like LA, my family are in the UK and I didn’t see myself retiring there in the Golden Crest Retirement Center on Sunset Boulevard. Who’s been your favourite director? Sidney Lumet. Was it fun working on Spooks? Oh yes – and Tessa was a questionable character! Are you still a keen photographer? Yes. I’ve always loved images rather than being a great photographer. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Cameron Highlands [in Malaya] when I was four. What was it like being brought up in Singapore and Cyprus [her father was an entertainments manager in the British Army]? Singapore was very exotic. I was there from age four to seven; I remember the heat and my amah taking care of us, and her wonderful rice dishes wrapped in leaves. I learnt to swim there. I lived in

Cyprus till I was 16, which was a bit like living in Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. I went to boarding school in the UK. You trained at Elmhurst Ballet School – did you initially want to be a ballerina? I don’t remember having any yearning to be a dancer. Are you a traveller? It’s worrying now we know we should be travelling less. I’m thinking about a big birthday party at the end of this year and think it has to be UK and a fireside. Where did you go on your honeymoon? Sweden, because my husband’s Swedish. Stockholm, then sailing through the archipelago. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten? In Japan, my son and I had doughnuts that had curry in them. Do you have a go at the local language? Italian, when I was doing a film in the south of Spain with a totally Italian crew. Every evening we’d play ping-pong – so I had to be able to count up to 21. What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away? Making Walkabout [1971] in Australia, I slept in a brass bed in the middle of a dried-up river. What’s your favourite destination? Tobago: the people, the beaches and the feeling of being completely chilled. What are your top travelling tips? Travel with a pillow. Anything you can’t leave home without? A down pillow. The Railway Children Return is released on 15th July The Oldie July 2022 85

Taking a Walk

Dad’s field of dreams on Dartmoor

GARY WING

patrick barkham

If we measure our lives in miles walked, my dad has had a fair run. A huge map of Dartmoor is pinned to his hallway wall. On it, he has highlighted every track and path he’s trodden: a dense spider’s web of routes spreading out for miles around his home. As a child of the ’50s, he roamed far from his rural home. When I was a boy, he walked faster than anyone I knew. What for, I wasn’t quite sure. We would weave through the crowds on the stroll to a football match, overtaking everyone. On family walks, he was perpetually 50 yards ahead of Mum, my sister and me. His walking style was suffused with intensity. In retirement, he tramped 1,105½ miles of towpath in England (he counted). Three summers ago, when he was 76, I’d receive texts recounting the 20 miles of canalside he’d totted up that day. We marvelled at his vitality. Walking cleared his mind, widened his horizons and was a communion with nature; it was his world. Now his world has drastically shrunk. The drugs he requires to hold his cancer at bay have curtailed his wandering. Last summer, I repeatedly had to grab him to stop him falling on a gentle local walk. Strides became shuffles; tottering became toppling. He survived two nasty falls. This spring, my family and I visited and, without really thinking, suggested the mile-and-a-half walk to the Field, my dad’s informal allotment he shares with neighbours at the top of Bowden Hill, a round dome of fields just west of Ashburton. He’d normally go there every day, and it was only when we began to ascend the steep lane that Dad revealed he visited the Field only twice a week now. It was already late afternoon. Did he have the strength? He insisted he had. Dad shuffled along, head bowed, each step scratching the asphalt. He stubbornly eschewed a good oldfashioned walking stick, but earlier this year was not so stubborn as to refuse

exercise classes to rebuild his core strength. They’ve delivered a heartening transformation. He was moving slowly but no longer speeding from vertical to horizontal. He was steady. The Devon hedge banks were a tumult of spring green, pink and purple: red campion, bluebells, the first foxgloves. In Dad’s former position, 50 yards ahead, now ran my three children and Betty the dachshund. It was a still evening and swifts screamed through the sky. We paused to look up at their squealing and mid-air handbrake turns, Dad grasping my shoulder. He could no longer hear their screams (and stubbornly refused a hearing aid to bring them back). As darting children furtively stuck goosegrass to various backs, the track narrowed to a path that ducked into a tunnel of hazel, bluebells and badger holes. The children dangled upside down from hazel branches, hair cascading like waterfalls. A misspent youth bird-nesting meant Dad is a demon for locating a nest, and he found a long-tailed tit’s home in the

hedge. We paused to appreciate its marvellous dome, miraculously stitched from moss and cobwebs. Dad has always listened more than talked but, if asked, is a font of knowledge about the natural world. I will forever be asking him to identify plants and bird song (if he relents on the hearing-aid front). I dread the day when these questions remain unanswered. We found a robin’s nest at the Field, lay in the long grass and admired the fecundity of the other allotments. Dad’s given up his patch now, except for the fruit trees. Then the children tore back down the ascent, Dad and I slow but steady. When I next visit, will we walk up Bowden Hill together again? How many more strolls will we take? Each one is truly precious now. The Field path isn’t open to the public, but there’s a nice one-mile circular walk around Bowden Hill. Take Bowden Lane off West Street in Ashburton, turn right at Knowles Cross, then first right onto a green lane round to Ashburton again The Oldie July 2022 87

Genius crossword 415 el sereno Across 1 This picture gets a PE teacher in trouble! (3,5,6) 10 Tree found inside boundaries of volcanic crater (5) 11 Got back 50% of rest with insurance (9) 12 Imposing condition on limits of liberty (7) 13 Enthusiast going back north-east left, beginning to sense bores (7) 14 Play with no end of feel? (5) 16 Stock held by private landlord (9) 19 Where refreshments may be strangely guaranteed to be non-U (3,6) 20 & 25. MTV sequence edited to incorporate European actor (5,7) 22 Hotel work comes after ringing this porter (7) 25 See 20 (7) 27 Course requiring right line by expert (9) 28 Moderate losing head time after time (5) 29 Whoever may be in 1 - or 13! (3,4,2,5)

Down 2 Plant found by park policeman, reportedly (9) 3 Stuff such as Cheddar, for example (5) 4 One hopes to get breakfast, almost missing new offer across river (5,4) 5 Understood one may be taken in by consideration (5) 6 Odds accepted by silly asses - it’s all the drink (5,4) 7 Match taking place in Gretna Green (5) 8 Target drug taker as consumer (3,4) 9 Green revolutionary understood capital (6) 15 Flying pigs hate taking time for food (9) 17 Abstainer who won’t pick up the tab in the north? (3-6) 18 Quiet person taking offence at TV host? (9) 19 Material from a pub bore’s last in races (7) 21 Current name taken by old river flowing north (2,4) 23 Substitute left nothing, lifting most of dirt (5) 24 Board changing sides for a joke (5) 26 Mostly repeat area allowance (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 27th July 2022. We do not sell or share your data with third parties. First prize is The Chambers Thesaurus and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15. NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 415 Across 1 Arrest (colloq) (6) 4 Free restraints (5) 8 Cut drastically (5) 9 Chic (7) 10 Lamp (7) 11 Wake up; excite (4) 12 Unhappy (3) 14 Slight advantage (4) 15 Doing nothing (4) 18 Submerge (3) 21 Proboscis (4) 23 Go rusty (7) 25 Strategies (7) 26 Fit out (5) 27 Glue, spread (5) 28 Give evidence (6)

Genius 413 solution Down 1 Expensive (6) 2 Erudite (7) 3 Got success at (8) 4 Employed (4) 5 Characteristic (5) 6 Whole (6) 7 Intends (5) 13 Careful, meticulous (8) 16 Free time (7) 17 Part of foot (6) 19 Self-control, equilibrium (5) 20 Tyrant (6) 22 Fires; bags (5) 24 Location (4)

Well done to those who managed to find Nobel prize-winner Marquez in the 3rd line up Winner: Ian Whiteman, London SW15 Runners-up: Mrs E Fletcher, Lochgilphead, Argyll; Les Edgar, London N20

Moron 413 solution: Across: 1 Writers, 5 Reign (Right as rain), 8 Ankle, 9 Declaim, 10 Swindle, 11 Clean, 12 Regime, 14 Remote, 17 Dig in, 19 Residue, 22 Check-up, 23 Exact, 24 Liner, 25 Awfully. Down: 1 Wraps, 2 Inkling, 3 Emend, 4 Sodden, 5 Recycle, 6 Irate, 7 Nominee, 12 Radical, 13 Moniker, 15 Oddball, 16 Grappa, 18 Green, 20 Shelf, 21 Entry. The Oldie July 2022 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO Don’t you hate it when partner says, as he tables the dummy, ‘I’ve got a great hand for you.’ Am I being overly sensitive, or is the subtext ‘If you go down, it’s because you misplayed it badly, as I’m giving you such a fine dummy’? On this month’s deal, North tabled 15 points facing South’s 15 –19 Two Notrump rebid. Yet making Three Notrumps on West’s ten of hearts lead required fine technique. Dealer South Neither Vulnerable North ♠ K2 ♥ KQ ♦ AK43 ♣ 8 6 5 3 2 East West ♠ 976 ♠ A 10 8 3 ♥ 10 9 7 5 3 ♥ 8642 ♦ Q 10 7 ♦ J9 ♣ J9 ♣ Q 10 7 South ♠ QJ54 ♥ AJ ♦ 8652 ♣ AK4 The bidding South 1♠ 2NT(1)

West Pass Pass

North 2♣ 3NT (2)

East Pass end

(1) Showing 15-19 and forcing to game (in the modern style). (2) Conservative, as there could have been the point-count for slam (33). The reason 30 high-card points was not enough to make Three Notrumps a cinch is simple: the horrendous duplication of values in hearts. As Ian Dury would have said, ‘What a waste.’ Let’s consider our twin goals: we must make nine tricks – and avoid losing five tricks. We have six top tricks – two in each suit apart from spades. We could lose a club to establish two extra clubs (presuming a three-two split). No good – the defence will have cleared hearts and there’ll be no ninth trick before the opponents have made five – three hearts, a club and the ace of spades). The solution is elegant. After winning the heart lead in dummy, you must lead the two of spades. Note, you have to guess which opponent has the ace, but East rates to have longer spades given that West led a heart, so is slightly more likely to have the ace. If West held the ace, you’d have to lead a low spade from hand towards the king. East must duck the spade (or you have three spade tricks and nine overall). You win the queen and can now play ace-king and a third club, establishing two extra club tricks. Game made via four clubs, two diamonds, two hearts and the one spade. ‘Gosh, you seemed to make heavy weather of that,’ said North, oblivious to the brilliance. Many choice ripostes occur; you elect the Duryesque ‘Can I hit you with my rhythm stick?’ ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 281 you were invited to write a poem called The Fair. You wrote of no Vanity Fairs, but plenty of funfairs. Susan Greenhill recalled, ‘Brains left in bumper cars, bums soaked on slides, /Steamy breath swirls in the raw morning air.’ Then hair. Philip Machin ended with a brilliant couplet: ‘Since Adam delved and Eve span, /The brunette’s been the also-ran.’ Commiserations to them and congratulations to those below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to G M Southgate. Sharp eyed barkers’ weasel faces, painted nags with flowing mane, Candyfloss and gewgaw hoop-la; girls are at the fair again. Engines, acrid smells of diesel, new-cut grasses, sneaky drags, Sour green apples draped in toffee, goldfish, sad in plastic bags. Here’s an edge-of danger feeling; what will the clairvoyant say When she maps their lives out for them in the booth with the display Of testimonials from the famous (famous very long ago)? Though her eyes are on the money, still the maidens want to know What the future’s going to bring them, when the game of life will start; On a wooden swing boat’s cradle, one of them has drawn a heart. And the hurdy-gurdy music roars across the coloured lights, And the boys pose with their rifles, ginger teddies in their sights, And the girls are dying for their knees to buckle in a kiss. Sixteen in the 1960s; even Elvis can’t match this. G M Southgate I woke up this morning as dead as the moon To an odour of wine and an old country tune. I drained the remains, got my eyes to dilate, Turned off Willie Nelson and pondered my fate. I’d been somewhere weird at the back of beyond Where the locals were female and famous and blonde. It was Planet Peroxide, a chaos of memes, Another return to the gulag of dreams. Madonna and Marilyn gave me the air, And so did Grace Kelly, all sporting fair hair. Debbie Harry strode by with a typical sneer – It wasn’t my party. That much was clear.

What makes blondes so snooty they blank you like that, Just because you are ageing and balding and fat, Thus turning a dream to an absolute mare? It may be a fact but it doesn’t seem fair. Basil Ransome-Davies Daydream awhile, my day-school sons, And see this salvaged oaken table Peopled down the length on benches, Little boys intently watching Head-of-table prefect charged with Carving into eighteen shares Not just the great sultana’d pudding But the syrup-soaked delicious top. Apportioning a basin shape Takes skill but also being fair. Look harder. See one little boy, Small fry. Identify your father. See him again, a prefect now, Scrupulously fair and able. Bless him and hold this table dear. Dorothy Pope It’s unfair on the fair: we have skin that is thin. We do all that we can, but we don’t seem to tan. We are subject to itches, belovèd by midges And don’t find it fun to relax in the sun. When the heat is extreme and we’re plastered with cream, When our limbs start to cook – well, it’s not a good look. (If your colouring’s dark, it’s a walk in the park – You look a real peach when you lie on the beach!) But there’s one foreign land where so many are tanned That the fair are sensational down on the sand! In Brazil, where a natural bronze is the norm, They delight in the sight of a pinkishwhite form. And in old nursery tales the fair maiden prevails, The snow-white princess in her silvery dress. As for me, with my freckles and pale sandy hair, I think it is cool to be fair – so there! Erika Fairhead COMPETITION No 283 Taking the idea how you will, please write a poem called Things Fall Apart. Maximum 16 lines. Please send your entries by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your postal address), marked ‘Competition No 283’, by 28th July. The Oldie July 2022 91

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside My husband’s porn habit

My husband, who is 70, is starting to become obsessed by what he sees as his dwindling sexual powers. We’ve always had a very good sex life and I wasn’t expecting to be at it hammer and tongs at our age, but what we have is still wonderful and I feel completely fulfilled. I think he thought that once he retired – which he did a year ago – he would feel more relaxed and could start to explore sex even more, but it hasn’t turned out like that. Yesterday I found him at three in the morning watching porn – which I’m pretty sure he’s never done before. He was very shamefaced and said he was doing it only to see how aroused he could get. It all seems pathetic to me and rather unpleasant. I keep reassuring him, but nothing works. Name and address supplied I don’t think this is all to do with a dwindling sex drive, though that’s obviously a part of it. He could probably get help with that from visiting his doctor and asking about Viagra. I think it’s more likely to be tied in with his retirement. A lot of men feel emasculated by losing a responsible position at work, which gave him status – and hanging about at home is undermining his confidence even more. Keep reassuring him, and encourage him to get some kind of role in the community that will make him feel needed and in control. Even ferrying the old and lame to hospital appointments or the shops would give him a role he could have pride in.

Never-ending wedding

My much-loved young nephew is soon getting married, with 100 guests. It all starts at 3pm

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on Saturday, followed by drinks and then a sit-down dinner and dancing. On Sunday, they are having a wedding breakfast and meeting at a pub for Sunday lunch. The lucky pair are then jetting off to Jamaica for their honeymoon! My husband – and I – are horrified by such extravagance! Particularly when we all know we’re faced with a dreadful recession. When we married, it was at a register office followed by drinks at my flat and then supper for six afterwards – everyone paying for themselves. And that was it. No honeymoon or anything. Do you think we could say we will just go for the service itself? Or would that be taken as a slap in the face for them? Stephanie D, by email That would be fine! As long as you let them know, provide a present and are seen to have attended and kissed everyone warmly, you’ll have done your bit. And maybe ask the couple over when they return from their honeymoon. I rather agree with your feelings. The only good thing for us oldies about the inevitable coming austerity is, I feel, that when there’s rioting in the streets and queues for bread, as war babies we’ll have a slightly better idea of how to cope than will the younger generation. Small comfort, I know, but we’ll be able to live on a lot less a lot more easily than they will, not to mention be able to make marmalade out of tea leaves and coffee from acorns, as it were.

Anti-social friends

At 70 – and single – I’m aware that I used to be very social, with a wide circle of friends, going away on holidays together, celebrating one another’s birthdays

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and so on. I hoped that once the pandemic was over everything would go back to normal, but now my friends seem to have changed. A couple have said they can no longer bother with going out to restaurants, and they hate the hassle of airports, and they’re just staying put. It’s all very well for them because most of them have partners but, even after lockdown has ended, I’m still feeling isolated – and, to be honest, rather rejected. Any ideas? F R, Newcastle I know the feeling. But in all probability this was going to happen anyway, to one degree or another, whether we’d been locked up or not. As we get older, we do get less adventurous – and more exhausted. The only solution, I think, is to keep organising events yourself and don’t expect much back from your friends. Day trips might be better than weekends away. And say you’ll organise everything – lifts to train stations, tickets, the agenda and so on. Or, even better, if you have a car, pick them up and drop them back. Ask them round for lunches and early suppers. And I mean early: 6.30 or 7 is perfectly acceptable. A lot of oldies prefer eating early – and leaving early – anyway. Once you’ve set the ball rolling, you’re bound to get some return invitations – good manners alone will demand it. But I’m afraid that for the single oldie this is the future – so perhaps get in a store of jigsaw puzzles and tapestries to begin to get used to the idea. As Bette Davis said, ‘Old age ain’t no place for sissies.’

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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Review of Books Summer round-up of the reviews

Michael Barber on Anthony Burgess’s many talents Lucy Lethbridge admires the imagination of Lesley Blanch Biography & Memoir History Governance Current Affairs Fiction Paperbacks Summer 2022 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Holiday reading Review of Books Issue 60 Summer 2022 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie The Palace Papers by Tina Brown A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd with Angela Patel I Used to Live Here: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose by Alison Weir English Gardening Eccentrics by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World by John Walsh

Now that lock-down is over, I have been taking full advantage of my aeroplane vouchers held over from the past couple of years. It feels almost like having ‘free’ holidays – which, of course, they aren’t. What to read? I am a great believer in taking with me books that are on the long, more ‘serious’ side – lying on a beach is a terrific opportunity to read large chunks without being interrupted. And so on my first trip abroad I took Putin’s People by Catherine Belton and Empire of Pain about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis by Patrick Radden Keefe. They had both been very well reviewed: ‘masterpiece of contemporary history’, ‘vital to our understanding of the Putin phenomenon’, a ‘riveting immaculately researched book’, the ‘definitive account’ were some of the accolades given to the former. And ‘a superb exposé’, a ‘chilling and mesmerising read’, ‘great and fearless investigative writing’ were some of the descriptions of Radden Keefe’s book. I agree and thoroughly recommend both – they are now in paperback. A friend pointed out to me that a recent Top Ten fiction paperbacks list in the Sunday Times was top-heavy with books about death and destruction: ‘murder at a street party’, ‘rich couple are murdered after a tense dinner with their three children’, ‘four friends in a retirement village team up to solve a murder on their doorstep’, ‘a woman avenges her mother’s death by bumping off her father and his family’ are some of the descriptions of the listed books. Relaxing holiday reading? Hmm. If murder mysteries are not for you, there are plenty of books inside to whet your appetite – whether history, biography, fiction or something else. I am a huge fan of Anne Tyler – and her new novel about a family over seven decades is reviewed on page 25. And I was relieved to read that ‘Nothing deeply traumatic happens in this family…’ Whew. Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

Bad Relations by Cressida Connolly

21 GRAPHOMANIA Michael Barber on Anthony Burgess

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

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Helen Hawkins, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Deborah Maby, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Rafe Thornhill, Jasper Gibbons For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk

9 GOVERNANCE 10 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS Lucy Lethbridge on Lesley Blanch

11 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

22 CURRENT AFFAIRS 24 GROWING UP 25 FICTION 27 PAPERBACKS 28 TRANSGENDERISM 30 CHILDREN’S BOOKS

18 MISCELLANEOUS The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022 3

History Robert Graves he despised the family’s “dirty trading” in the East... Ultimately the Sassoon empire was undone by complacency, family competition, the quest for social acceptance and lousy tax planning. But what a scintillating show it was while it lasted, as this vivid and richly researched book reveals.’

THE FRENCH MIND

400 YEARS OF ROMANCE,

REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL

PETER WATSON Simon & Schuster, 848pp, £30

Sassoon dynasty: David, seated, with his sons Elias David, Albert and Sassoon David

THE GLOBAL MERCHANTS

THE ENTERPRISE AND EXTRAVAGANCE OF THE SASSOON DYNASTY

JOSEPH SASSOON Allen Lane, 448pp, £30

The author not only shares ‘a remote blood tie’ with the Baghdadi Jewish dynasty which created an international business empire from the China opium trade, explained Financial Times reviewer Stefan Wagstyl, but also ‘knowledge of the obscure Baghdadi-Jewish dialect that the business family used in their correspondence to keep it secret’. Joseph Sassoon ‘grasps the complexities of the story – the Jewish heritage, the migrant experience, the brushes with anti-Semitism and the tensions of a big multigenerational family’. The great strength of his book is ‘its relentless focus on the family’s rise and fall. Not only is this a powerful human story but it also carries contemporary resonance in a time when great fortunes are being made.’ The Sassoons ‘understood the importance of working as a family, and had the instinct about when to invest, when to sell and when to hold 4 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

on to goods that most successful entrepreneurs possess’, wrote David Abulafia in his Spectator review, which concluded that Sassoon’s book is ‘a very readable, sensitive and original account of a remarkable family, deftly weaving together the history of the business, the history of the family and their place in the wider history of Britain, India and China’.

An engrossing story of the family’s rise and fall In the Sunday Times, Justin Marozzi praised this ‘engrossing story of the meteoric rise and calamitous fall of the Sassoons... set against a backdrop of peak British imperialism.... Although the businessheavy narrative can be demanding – there are just shy of 100 characters in the family tree – the reader is well rewarded with some pitch-perfect cameos. Take Rachel Sassoon, who became the first woman to edit a national newspaper in Britain (the Observer), before going one better and buying and editing the Sunday Times in 1893... And, of course, the Great War poet Siegfried Sassoon, an anti-Sassoon Sassoon who told

‘Are the French exceptional? This is the unwieldy question the veteran journalist Peter Watson hopes to answer in The French Mind,’ said Ruth Scurr in her review for the Times. His ‘spectrum of exceptionalism runs from the frivolous to the deeply serious. Watson is a Francophile and his baggy book is an encyclopaedic celebration of French intellectuals refusing to give up on universal principles, rooted in the Enlightenment and French Revolution, while remaining slim, bringing up well-behaved children and falling in love at every opportunity... Watson argues that since the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, when France ceased to be the world’s greatest power, the country has been periodically defeated, and each humiliation has led to cultural renaissance.’ In his review for the Times Literary Supplement, Neil Badmington found that ‘for Watson, France’s recoveries owe much to the phenomenon of “sociability” and its embodiment in the flexible institution of the literary/artistic salon (“part

Baudelaire, 1844, by Emile Deroy

History seminar, part dinner party, part flirtation, part intellectual sharing and part intellectual competition”)... At its heart his book is the story of a “great chain of salons”, all run by women, stretching from the early 17th century to 1991. He unfurls his intellectual history in the form of vivid biographies – of, for example, Catherine de Vivonne, Proust, Voltaire, Sartre, Baudelaire and the Nardal sisters, who ran the Négritude Salon in the 14th arrondissement in the mid-20th century – and with an eye for the relationship between the salons and wider cultural developments in fields such as fashion, sexuality, music, food, religion and architecture.’

of the lingering ironies of this book that although the “discovery” of this defining dynamic of French history is clear to an English historian such as Robb, it is yet to be discovered by the French themselves.’

THE GREATEST RAID

ST NAZAIRE, 1942: THE HEROIC STORY OF OPERATION CHARIOT

GILES WHITTELL Viking, 263pp, £20

JOANNE PAUL Michael Joseph, 528pp, £25

FRANCE

Picador, 527pp, £25

This is ‘not quite an orthodox history’, wrote Philip Hensher in the Spectator. ‘There are 18 chapters, in chronological order from the earliest Gauls to the eruption of the Gilets Jaunes protests. But it is not especially interested in covering the ground, and this is not the place to go for a narrative account of the Revolution or the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Instead, what we have are distinct episodes of particular interest. Some are recognisably grand subjects, such as Napoleon’s character, the medieval Cathars or the history and significance of the Tour de France. Other treatments are more indirect – for instance that of the immensely rich English prostitute who funded Napoleon III’s career.’ Because of this idiosyncratic approach, Robb has produced ‘a wonderfully energetic and illuminating book which, while never claiming to arrive at a single grand truth about the nation, makes the reader effortlessly understand just what it was like to live at one of these moments, however atypical its witness’. For Andrew Hussey, in his Observer review, Robb ‘reminds us why France still matters. This is because it is not the “Great Nation” it often thinks it is, but a mutating series of plural identities that are occasionally in harmony but all too often in collision. It is, however, one

THE HOUSE OF DUDLEY A NEW HISTORY OF TUDOR ENGLAND

AN ADVENTURE HISTORY

GRAHAM ROBB

Dieppe, ‘after which raids did not seem so splendid after all’. In the Times, Gerard DeGroot endorsed Patrick Bishop’s verdict, calling it ‘Churchill’s maddest mission’. He quoted Mountbatten as saying, all too accurately, ‘I don’t expect any of you to get out again’, thus proving ‘how the precious bravery of young men is always so blithely squandered by narcissistic commanders’.

HMS Campbeltown wedged in the dock

Spring 1942 opened bleakly for Britain. Singapore had fallen and India was threatened. In the Atlantic U boats were lining up our ships like ducks in a row, and in North Africa Rommel was poised to attack Egypt. Cue what Giles Whittell calls ‘the greatest raid of all’, a daring attack by British commandos on the French port of St Nazaire, blowing up the only Atlantic dock large enough to house the mighty battleship Tirpitz, then loitering in a Norwegian fjord. This raised the nation’s spirits and enheartened our Allies. As Simon Griffith put it in the Daily Mail: ‘The Americans were impressed. Stalin was reassured that we meant business, and the British public at last had something to cheer about.’ But, said Patrick Bishop in the Daily Telegraph, whatever propaganda value was attached to a raid in which five VCs were won, it was ‘a massive waste of lives and resources’. Hitler was never going to risk sending Tirpitz south, where she would be exposed like the Bismarck, so the raid’s raison d’être was fallacious. Furthermore, the ballyhoo surrounding ‘the cheekiest raid since Drake’ encouraged Mountbatten, who had Churchill’s ear, to mount an even more catastrophic folly, the attack on

The British public had something to cheer about

Three generations of Dudleys dominated Tudor politics and rose to great heights, although a few lost their heads in the process. Joanna Paul’s book is ‘a full-blooded affair, as good on the horrors of war as it is on the soft power of the Dudley women’, declared Jessie Childs in the Sunday Times, ‘and written in a lively, episodic style that presents each Dudley as a foil to the monarch they served.’ It is ‘exciting and immersive’, she added. Writing in the Daily Mail, Kathryn Hughes was reminded of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy: ‘Just as the novelist used the figure of Thomas Cromwell to get into the engine room of Henry VIII’s gorgeous, brutal reign, so Paul uses the experiences of the Dudleys to light up odd corners and backroom spaces of Tudor palace life.’ For Gerard DeGroot, ‘Paul, a talented young historian at the University of Sussex, breathes new life into an old and familiar Tudor story. Viewed through the window of the Dudley family, the period seems grittier and more corrupt than previously imagined. Paul writes with the confidence and panache of a much older author; like a good novelist, she understands the importance of plot and knows how to build dramatic intensity, slowly dropping details into a carefully mapped narrative... It’s delightful, a joy to read.’ Spectator reviewer Elizabeth Goldring found it to be ‘riveting stuff: death, desire, power and scandal... Game of Thrones looks tame compared with the real-life machinations of the Dudleys and the Tudors.’ The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022 5

History THREE EPIC BATTLES THAT SAVED DEMOCRACY

MARATHON, THERMOPYLAE AND SALAMIS

STEPHEN P KERSHAW 486pp; Little Brown.

freedom and democracy are powerful motivators in war’. It is puzzling why this highly engaging account has not been reviewed more widely.

THE SCHOOL THAT ESCAPED THE NAZIS DEBORAH CADBURY Two Roads, 440pp, £20

Epic: the Battle of Salamis

The year 2022 marks 2,500 years since Athens, the birthplace of democracy, and Sparta, whose warriors were handed their shields by their mothers and told to come back ‘with it or on it’, fought off the mighty Persian empire. The Oxford classicist Stephen P Kershaw, wrote Christopher Hart in the Daily Mail, ‘tells the story in thrilling style, focusing on the three conflicts which really did save the Greeks from Persian tyranny. John Stuart Mill wrote that the Battle of Marathon (490BC) “is more important than the Battle of Hastings” in English history when it comes to the Western tradition of freedom.’ Hart continued: ‘10,000 Greeks who, to the astonishment of Darius’ army of 500,000 Persians, ran at them in full armour, carrying shields weighing up to 15kg and spears three metres long. They were only citizensoldiers, not professionals. What followed was like a “hyper-violent rugby scrum” said Kershaw.’ Darius’ son, Xerxes, followed ten years later but defeats both at sea at Salamis, in which 600 Persian ships and 20,000 soldiers were lost to the battle and storms, and at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae in which 300 Spartan knights ably supported for a time by at least 7,000 Greek allies held off the 100,000-strong Persian army, put paid to any further invasions of Europe. Saul David in the Times praised this ‘impressive and timely book that reminds us that the principles of 6 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

Gordonstoun School and its founder, Kurt Hahn, are world famous, but who has heard of Bunce Court? Or its German founder, Anna Essinger? Like Hahn, Anna Essinger was an inspirational Jewish teacher, the founder of a progressive boarding school in south Germany. She shared Kahn’s horror at Germany’s takeover by the Nazis and in 1933 resolved to try and create a refuge in England for as many of her pupils as she could. With the aid of supportive Jewish and Quaker groups here she was able to lease Bunce Court, a decrepit old manor house in Kent. Then, over a period of months, she managed to smuggle 70 of her pupils across the Channel, where they were later joined by many other young refugees as life became increasingly dangerous for all Jews in Europe. Noting that among Essinger’s pupils were ‘the future artist Frank Auerbach and the very naughty future cartoonist Gerald Hoffnung’, the Times’s Ysenda Maxwell Graham said that although ‘Tante Anna’, as she was known, was strict, insisting that everyone spoke English, she ‘devoted her life to helping these uprooted, homesick children adapt to Britain and have as fulfilling a childhood as possible’. In the Guardian, Matthew Reisz revealed that his mother was at Bunce Court, which latterly contained children who had been traumatised by life in Nazi-occupied Europe: ‘One boy refused vegetables because they reminded him of the grass he had had to eat to survive.’ Sadly, said Reisz, the presence of such horrifying material, though justifiable, ‘packs an emotional punch that rather

Bunce Court founded by Anna Essinger

overshadows Ettinger’s otherwise heroic achievements’.

THE LION HOUSE

THE COMING OF A KING

CHRISTOPHER DE BAILLAIGUE Bodley Head, 304pp, £20

For our understanding of Süleyman the Magnificent, the greatest of all Ottoman rulers, we depend ‘on fawning court historians and the reports of hostile, semicomprehending western diplomats’, wrote Noel Malcolm in the Times Literary Supplement, but de Bellaigue has adopted an original approach. His book ‘does not pretend to be a scholarly biography’, but instead ‘offers a vivid presentation of events, reimagined as scenes and episodes, and structured on the interactions between a group of key characters. The model is more dramatic than historical...’ and ‘so this book is written in a continuous present tense’. Justin Marozzi, in the Sunday Times, also welcomed de Bellaigue’s original approach. ‘This is history, but not as we know it,’ he wrote. ‘It is non-fiction posing as a novel, rich in incident and cinematic detail, not so much fly on the wall as prowling vizier in the hall — almost exclusively in the present tense. It’s tremendous.’ After conquering the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean in the 1520s, Süleyman overreached himself when he besieged Vienna in 1529. ‘If all this fighting on the battlefield is bloodsoaked, conflicts back at home, starring pushy pashas, treacherous courtiers and ambitious concubines, with bouts of imperial fratricide and patricide thrown in, are scarcely less vicious.’ The author succeeds in gripping the reader, wrote Melanie McDonagh in the Evening Standard, ‘by bringing out the fascinating individuals, the adventure, the lurid details, the barbarities, the opulence and squalor and near misses of the story. There are some insanely annoying aspects to de Bellaigue’s writing. He employs the historic present. His style is sometimes wince-makingly demotic. (He describes the flattery of one chronicler thus: “even by the highest standards of arse-licking, [he] has his tongue fully inserted”.) Yet for all that, you really want to read on.’

History financial journalist he is and lets the facts speak for themselves. It leaves you awestruck at the power of greed... After reading it, you will never again slide behind the wheel of a Volkswagen, insure your home with Allianz or reach for a Dr Oetker pizza in the supermarket without a twinge of unease.’

THE NORMANS

POWER, CONQUEST AND CULTURE IN 11TH-CENTURY EUROPE

JUDITH A GREEN Yale, 368pp, £25 Friedrich Flick at the Nuremberg Trials

NAZI BILLIONAIRES

THE DARK HISTORY OF GERMANY’S WEALTHIEST DYNASTIES

DAVID DE JONG William Collins, 400pp, £25

A Dutch former Bloomberg financial journalist, whose Jewish grandparents suffered under the Nazis, de Jong concentrates on five dynasties – the Quandts, Flicks, von Fincks, Porsche-Piëchs and Oetkers – which did well out of the Third Reich and have continued to flourish since 1945 with only token flashes of remorse. ‘It is impossible to fault de Jong’s fierce indignation in his book,’ wrote Max Hastings in the Sunday Times. ‘He must be right to urge that the descendants of Hitler’s tycoons should admit their ancestors’ criminality’ and it is depressing to realise ‘the rich can almost always buy their way out of trouble, and even war crimes’. As German-speaking historian Katja Hoyer explained in her review for the Spectator, de Jong ‘takes English-speaking audiences into the murky world of Hitler’s financiers, and the author cleverly weaves his astonishing facts and figures into human stories’. (For example, Susanne Klatten, Germany’s richest woman today, turns out to be the great-niece of Magda Goebbels.) ‘Its fascinating detail and engaging style make Nazi Billionaires a forceful book, revealing to a wide audience a vital aspect of Germany’s ongoing discussion with itself.’ For Patrick Bishop in the Daily Telegraph, de Jong tells his story ‘with the brisk clarity of the good 8 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

‘The Normans had an astonishingly good run,’ wrote Charles Spencer in the Spectator. ‘Not only did they take over England in 1066, of course, but they also triumphed over the Muslims, establishing themselves in southern Italy and founding a principality in the Near East. William the Conqueror’s is one of the most famous names from Europe’s Middle Ages, but the achievements of Robert Guiscard were nearly as astonishing: leaving Normandy with five knights and 30 infantrymen, he became Duke of Sicily, Apulia and Calabria. Meanwhile, his son Bohemond was one of several Norman heroes of the First Crusade, and rose to become Prince of Antioch.’ Gerard DeGroot in the Times said that Green, the emeritus professor of history at Edinburgh University, ‘is too desperate to debunk the Norman myth’, describing them as ‘archopportunists in an age of opportunism’. They employed a coterie of hagiographers who fostered the belief that ‘they were born of a warrior race whose victories showed that they were favoured by God’. From 1066 to the present, the prevailing opinion has held that the ‘stormin’ Normans’ were special. They were ferocious, innovative, wily and ruthless. That aura of invincibility, Green argues, was mere hype. And, she says, they took great care to look and act the part of ruthless warriors, their reputation preceding them into battle. William, Bohemond and Robert Guiscard were all tall, handsome and exceptionally strong men unafraid of leading their armies from the front. Unlike the Normans her account is ‘timid, modest, undramatic and rather dry’, stated DeGroot.

WATERLOO SUNRISE

LONDON FRON THE SIXTIES TO THATCHER

JOHN DAVIS Princeton, 554pp, £30

Davis is an emeritus fellow in history at Queen’s College, Oxford, who ‘delves deeply into news reports, public records and all kinds of miscellanea to present his nuanced portrait of London’s evolution’, wrote John Gapper in the Financial Times. His book was ‘often entertaining and affecting, particularly in its evocation of the music and cuisine of the 1960s and 1970s, though the degree of detail sometimes overwhelms’. During this period, ‘London’s growth was supported by two forces: an influx of newcomers, both British and foreign...and an urgent desire for fun.’ In the Wall Street Journal, James Campbell found that ‘one of the

Fashion and fun in the 1960s and 1970s

pleasures of Waterloo Sunrise is that it leaps from race and urban reorganisation to fashion and fun. Mr Davis is a wizard of the archives. The general reader will delight in his excavation of local newspapers in pursuit of treasures that illuminate whatever topic is under discussion, while diligent trawls through government reports are for a more specialised audience.’ Roger Lewis, who reviewed it for the Times, is ‘not a fan of hefty synoptic books – David Kynaston, Dominic Sandbrook and Alwyn Turner lead the field – where everything from television sitcoms to by-election results is chucked in the brew. Waterloo Sunrise, which deals with the “complex, diverse, multifaceted” subject of London until the advent of the Thatcher administration and “entrepreneurial dynamism” in 1979, is determinedly in this encyclopaedic-kaleidoscopic strain... But his subject is too vast, too various, for a lone academic. Weighty though Waterloo Sunrise is, it is only a sketch.’

Governance Is liberal democracy the best way to arrange society? Or will the authoritarian regimes of Putin, Xi Jinping and others triumph? American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, ‘has made a career out of being wrong’, wrote Iain Macwhirter in the Herald (Scotland). ‘He famously announced The End of History in a seminal work of 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. History has been getting its own back on him for the last 30 years. This has at least allowed him to publish a succession of books insisting that he never actually meant it. Of course, he never meant that history had come to a full stop... What he meant was that liberal democracy, on the model of the United States of America and Europe, was now the only game in town, historically speaking.’ Fukuyama’s latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents (Profile, 178pp, £16.99). From having been ‘the intellectual poster boy of this late 20th-century liberal triumphalism’, said Richard V Reeve in the Literary Review, he is now ‘a chastened liberal. But his argument is more persuasive as a result. He takes seriously the criticisms of liberalism from left and right and is not sparing in his own criticisms of public policy. His basic message is that liberal democracy is the best way to arrange a society, but that much more attention has to be paid to ameliorating some of the downsides of liberal economic policies and more respect has to be paid to traditional views and forms of life.’ Although Fukuyama’s book ‘does not supply all, or enough, of the answers’, wrote Andrew Anthony in the Observer, nonetheless ‘it’s a good place to start with asking the essential questions’. In The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World (Bodley Head, 288pp, £20), Financial Times foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman ‘takes us on an unforgettable global tour of resurgent authoritarianism, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia through Erdogan’s Turkey, Xi Jinping’s China, Narendra Modi’s India, Duterte’s Philippines, the Middle East of Mohammed Bin Salman, and the Latin America of Jair Bolsonaro, among other

Vladimir Putin: manipulating the West

destinations’, wrote Joyce Macmillan in the Scotsman. This is ‘a brilliant and profoundly alarming new book’ which offers a comprehensive survey, written with pace, clarity, and a superb, page-turning narrative fluency, of the gradual collapse of that fragile post-Cold War consensus into a new age of authoritarian dictatorship, mainly characterised by the historically familiar spectacle of ageing male leaders pumping up a rhetoric of war, threat, national destiny and “traditional values” to the point where actual armed conflict becomes difficult to avoid’. Rachman, said Lawrence Freedman in the Sunday Times, ‘has been well placed to observe their rise and has often interviewed them or their close associates. He has a journalist’s eye for the telling quote combined with a sharp analysis of the factors that enabled them to achieve power and hold on to it... In a series of brief but pithy pen portraits he outlines the shared characteristics of these rogues... It is especially depressing to note how many of these characters were cast early in their careers as moderates

Rachman outlines the shared characteristics of these rogues

and modernisers’, such as Hungary’s Orban, who ‘was a student activist during the dying days of the communist regime’. Since 2005 financier Bill Browder’s life has been consumed by his struggle to expose the kleptocracy of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Freezing Order (Simon &B Schuster, 314pp, £20) ‘tells the story of Browder’s quest to establish a global regime for sanctioning Russians involved in corruption and criminality’, wrote Jamie Susskind in the Times. ‘But it reads like an international spy thriller. If its subject matter weren’t so grave, the book could be said to have all the elements of a high-octane drama. Murder. Conspiracy. Piles of dirty money. Sexual intrigue. Freezing Order shudders with the constant threat of assassination, abduction or sudden, extreme violence. It is a tense and gripping read.’ Much the same assessment was given by Julian Evans in the Daily Telegraph. It is a ‘zesty new book about the theft, extortion, intimidation, lies and murder that are the Russian state’s daily levers of power’, write Evans, as well as ‘a breakneck financial thriller compelling breathless attention... One of the most sobering aspects of Browder’s rollicking, dangerous adventure [is] that late-period Putin has found it so easy to manipulate our western democracies from the inside.’ In the Observer, Andrew Anthony called it ‘an incredible story, told with pace and panache, that reads like a thriller... what is most troubling here is how acquiescent the western establishment has been to Russian crimes and lies’. This point was also made by Peter Conradi, in his Sunday Times review: ‘This tale is full of villains – not just the Russians... but also the politicians, lawyers and judges in the West who carry out the Kremlin’s dirty work. Despite the complexity of the affair, Browder has made his story into a real page turner. Amid the horrors being reported every day from Ukraine, it also provides a highly readable insight into the true nature of the regime that is responsible for them.’ The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022 9

Forgotten authors LUCY LETHBRIDGE is drawn to Lesley Blanch’s irresistible imagination Lesley Blanch is probably best known now for her 1954 book The Wilder Shores of Love, which told the stories of four European women who left home in variously adventurous ways to live in the Middle East. As an assiduous self-mythologiser habitually costumed in veils, kaftans and clanking bracelets, Blanch was drawn to the fanciful and the extreme. She told the stories of her own life many times but like all good storytellers had no particular truck with accuracy, preferring what she called (characteristically) the ‘lifegiving oasis’ of escapism. By the time she died at the age of 103, in 2007, the lines of real and imaginary had thoroughly blurred into a deliciously overdecorated confection of romantic and bohemian exotica. And why not? A touch of theatrical invention drew a useful curtain over humdrum reality. Though Blanch did also have the enviable capacity of transforming actual facts in the telling into searing encounters with fate. Anne Scott James, who shared a flat with her during the war, wrote that even a missed bus could be later refashioned into a ‘dark melodrama’. In her 1968 autobiography Journey into the Mind’s Eye, Blanch told a thrilling tale of her early encounters with Russia and Russian-ness – the country was to obsess her all her life, a ‘radiant, unreal horizon’ that served as the ultimate backdrop. In this account, she was seduced at 17 by a friend of her parents, a mysterious Russian ‘Traveller’. Twenty years her senior, he plucked her from the nursery and carried her off to make passionate love in Paris. The sort-of truth, dug out by her later biographer Anne Boston, is that the ‘Traveller’ was Feodor Komisarjevsky, a celebrated theatre director so fatally attractive to women that Edith Evans called him ‘come and seduce me’. He married nine times and number eight was Peggy Ashcroft. Blanch, whose childhood was in actual fact spent in a mansion flat in Chiswick, began her affair with him when she was in 10 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

Lesley Blanch: darkly melodramatic

her early 30s and working as a set designer. She’d already been married, for a year, to an advertising agent called Mr Bicknell who was never again mentioned but who did provide a beautiful house on the Thames at Richmond. Like her favourite heroes, Blanch, for all her lightfooted charms, was a shrewd opportunist who danced through the artistic and theatrical circles of the 1930s gathering interesting and useful people to her. By the middle of the decade she worked for Vogue, writing amusing articles on style such as ‘Anti-Beige’. Her homes were far from beige – stuffed to the rafters with lovely bits and pieces bought from souks or Romany pedlars or tokens of romantic adventure. She sought out Russians in exile in London for fiery, melancholy conversation round samovars. When she finally did visit Russia in the 1930s she thrilled to the onion domes of the Kremlin but barely alluded to the communist regime at all. Blanch’s Russia was definitely

Blanch’s prose style may occasionally be too purple for modern digestions

pre-revolutionary white rather than Soviet red. Blanch had a taste for unreliable lovers, having disposed of Mr Bicknell. At 40, she married the novelist Romain Gary, ten years younger than her (though she was hazy about her age) and almost as proficient a self-creation as she was, a fellow veteran of what she called ‘the run away game’. He was Romain de Kacew when they met, an airman serving with the Free French. She was asked to read the manuscript of his first novel, Forest of Anger. She wanted him to be a Russian (he was in fact a Jewish Lithuanian) and he wanted to be French and in the end he left her for Jean Seberg. But while it lasted, they lived in lovely houses including a whimsically cluttered cottage in Chelsea where they ate gulls’ eggs for breakfast. Or so the story went. Blanch’s prose style may occasionally be too purple, too whimsical, for modern reading digestions; her books certainly wouldn’t survive the dictates of cultural appropriation purists. But she is still a compelling scene-setter and her historical knowledge was wide. There is also something irresistible about her commitment to embellishment. Nothing is so mundane that cannot be turned by imagination into something beautiful or terrible or strange; nothing that can’t be gussied up by a good story, an observant eye and a bit of genuine curiosity. Her 1956 cookery book, Round the World in Eighty Dishes: The World through the Kitchen Window, is a particularly good example of Blanch’s enviable capacity for living to the hilt, for refusing to draw lines between the realities of everyday life and the realities of imaginative life. A dish of honeyed potatoes from Albania, she tells us, was a favourite of a ‘handsome creature’ she had once known who lived as an outlaw in the mountains: ‘I must confess I was once rather friendly with a bandit in the Balkans’ is how she begins. Is it true? Possibly not quite. But I defy you not to read on.

Biography & memoir like no one else before or since.’ ‘The fact that this is Rundell’s first non-fiction book is something of a wonder,’ Hughes concluded. ‘On reading this extraordinary biography you are left concluding that her talent, like that of her hero’s, must somehow be super-infinite.’

CORNWALLIS

SOLDIER AND STATESMAN IN A REVOLUTIONARY WORLD

RICHARD MIDDLETON Yale University Press, 440pp, £25

SUPER-INFINITE

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF JOHN DONNE

KATHERINE RUNDELL Faber, 352pp, £16.99

‘In Rundell, Donne has an authoritative and sympathetic chronicler,’ Alexander Larman announced in the Observer. ‘This fine book demands and rewards your fullest concentration, just as its subject does: a super-infinite amount, in fact.’ Kathryn Hughes in the Sunday Times described it as a ‘frankly brilliant book’, while Daniel Swift in the Spectator described it as ‘a wonderfully Donnean book. It captures with an unusual wit the variety and richness of its subject. It is neither a strict biography nor only a critical engagement with his poems, but offers instead half a riff on his life and half a love letter to him.’ ‘It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these,’

Rundell’s talent must somehow be super-infinite

Portrait of John Donne

Lara Feigel noted in the Guardian. What prompted the high-born Anne More to risk and lose everything by marrying Donne, for instance? As John Phipps wrote in the Financial Times, ‘Rundell takes a thrilling leap at the biographical fence: “If he took her to bed like he wrote — if he knew how to render bodily his poetry — then he was worth sacrificing all the wall hangings in England for”,’ Phipps said. ‘It’s a typical remarkable way of seeing it and this is a remarkable book.’ ‘A woman who thinks like that is the biographer Donne has been waiting for,’ Nicola Shulman agreed in the Telegraph. ‘Her energy, intellect and arresting phrasemaking can keep up with her subject’s.’ ‘Her evangelical urges are expressed not in explicit exhortations to read Donne, but via the forms of responsive expression that he has inspired in — wrung from — her,’ Joe Moshenska noted in the Literary Review. ‘There were many different Donnes, as Rundell strives to show us,’ Helen Hackett wrote in the TLS, ‘but above all, she urgently and admirably wants us to appreciate that he understood the extremities of human experience and the transformative powers of language

Hot on the heels of a revisionary life of George III comes this attempt to redeem the reputation of General Charles Cornwallis (1738-1805), the man who surrendered to Washington at Yorktown. ‘Remarkably’, according to Richard Middleton, Cornwallis returned home from America not to disgrace, but to ‘bell-ringing’ and a subsequent string of high commands. When he died, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. As Ferdinand Mount put it in the TLS: ‘He might have lost America, but not his fan base.’ How come? Middleton implies that Cornwallis could touch pitch, yet remain undefiled, no mean achievement in the 18th century when probity was a rare distinction in public life. This was particularly true of India, where, said Paul Lay in the Telegraph, Cornwallis’s administrative reforms as Governor General of Bengal ‘curbed the powers of the rapacious East India Company and laid the groundwork for the Victorian Raj’. But Lay thought Middleton’s prose was as ‘pedestrian’ as his subject.

Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022 11

Biography & memoir In the Times, Gerard DeGroot took issue with Middleton’s claim that Cornwallis had become a victim of ‘wokism’. ‘He insists that “even dead white men have a claim to be understood”, and thinks that Cornwallis has been ignored “because he does not fit the image of a cruelly exploitative imperialist”.’ In fact, said DeGroot, ‘Cornwallis has been ignored because he is so dreadfully dull … [He] is an exemplar of a type common in British history … an Old Etonian educated beyond his intelligence and promoted beyond his competence. We are familiar with that type today, but Cornwallis, at least, possessed a firm sense of what was morally right. He hated parties.’

CLR JAMES

A LIFE BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES

JOHN L WILLIAMS Constable, 488pp, £25

‘Cyril Robert James was a conundrum: a Trinidadian Marxist with an unwavering regard for Shakespeare, Michelangelo and especially cricket – as displayed in his most famous book, Beyond a Boundary – he was also a major intellectual and a phenomenal orator,’ Colin Grant wrote in Prospect, describing the book as ‘a richly researched and inviting text’, adding, ‘Though Williams doesn’t genuflect in front of his subject, he is clearly enthralled by him.’ ‘What emerges from John Williams’s thoroughly researched biography, of a Trinidadian-born activist and writer who was as fanatical about cricket as the coming workers’ paradise, is a very different,

younger James, a bon vivant who always had a book or two at hand yet also a train of female admirers,’ Clive Davis wrote in the Times. Tomiwa Owolade in the Sunday Times described the book as an ‘exciting and briskly written biography’ offering ‘the perfect introduction to this titan of 20th century politics and culture’. Madoc Cairns in the Observer noted that ‘beneath the cult figure lay a flawed, contradictory human being. Williams, in this sense, writes a group biography.’ Paul Lay in the Literary Review described him ‘as an aesthete, someone who in his writing might appear preoccupied with the proletarian struggle but in practice preferred the sublime’.

When CLR died, the Times called him the Black Plato Writing about James’s masterpiece Beyond the Boundary in the Guardian, his widow Selma James described how the book ‘inspired our anti-discrimination struggles — and continues to do so to this day’. ‘One of the delights of Williams’s biography is how he draws out CLR’s gradual recognition of his own blackness — how he came to embrace the contradictions of his racial identity,’ Grant noted. The author of The Black Jacobins, he was able to take advantage of the rise of black studies and black power in the 1960s on the lecture circuit, ending his days, Davis noted, ‘as a sage to a new generation of activists raised on Black Power tracts’. Lay regretted the waste of his talents on radical politics, but when CLR died the Times called him the Black Plato.

THE YOUNG ALEXANDER THE MAKING OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

ALEX ROWSON William Collins, 494pp, £25

CLR James, 1938: major intellectual

When Philip of Macedon saw his young son Alexander mount an unruly stallion called Boukephalas that no one else could ride, he said that the boy ‘must seek another kingdom, as he would soon outgrow Macedonia’. So it proved. Encouraged to identify with Achilles, supposedly

Alexander Cuts the Gordian Knot, 1767, by Jean-Simon Berthélemy

his ambitious mother’s ancestor, he grew up thinking it was his birthright to invade Asia. By the time he died, aged just 32, he bestrode the world ‘like a colossus’, with one foot in the Nile and the other on the Punjab, where even today you can find coins bearing his head in the bazaars. What you won’t find are any first-hand accounts of his exploits: he is the stuff of legend as much as of history. This is particularly true of his early life. For instance, he was tutored by Aristotle, who neglected to record what he taught him. But according to Harry Sidebottom in the Sunday Telegraph, Alex Rowson, a successful producer of historical documentaries, has ‘risen to the challenge magnificently … The Young Alexander is popular history at its very best, thought-provoking and accessible. Underpinned by serious research, and written with panache, it summons up a vanished world.’ Sidebottom’s verdict was echoed by Christopher Hart in the Daily Mail. ‘Rowson is wonderful at conjuring the setting of rugged ancient Macedonia, the pelicans and the glossy ibis on the coasts, lions in the mountains, boys playing at knucklebones in the shade and, far away to the south, the snowy peaks of Mount Olympus, home of the gods.’ Noting that Rowson produced the BBC’s Digging for Britain, the Times’s Patrick Kidd said that Rowson’s descriptions of Macedonian life and customs ‘has been helped by the ever-growing archaeological record’. His ‘convincing narrative’ also owes something to the scurrilous Roman historian Suetonius, who said, ‘If it’s good enough, it’s true enough.’ The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022 13

Biography & memoir TRULY, MADLY

VIVIEN LEIGH, LAURENCE OLIVIER AND THE ROMANCE OF THE CENTURY

STEPHEN GALLOWAY Sphere, 416pp, £25

Vivien Leigh’s romance with Laurence Olivier began in 1937 when they played lovers at Elizabeth I’s court in the film Fire Over England and ended with their divorce in 1960. She suffered from manic depression, which worsened over time, and once told an interviewer she ‘would rather have lived a short life with Larry than face a long one without him’. They began their affair ‘as furtive adulterers’ and later became ‘figures of almost viceregal splendour’, wrote Peter Conrad in the Observer, ‘but what Stephen Galloway emphasises is the almost lethal madness of their infatuation... he concludes that passion is bipolar and “at times can seem like a mental illness”.’ For Louis Bayard, in the Washington Post, Galloway ‘lifts himself clear of previous chronicles, including Olivier’s own self-lacerating memoirs, by supplementing firsthand accounts with retrospective diagnoses by experts like Kay Redfield Jamison and by tracing a genetic link to Leigh’s great-uncle, housed in a Kolkata asylum for much the same symptoms. More lucidly than ever, we can see how, in the grip of her own brain chemistry, Leigh quite literally lost her mind.’

Sunday Times reviewer Kathryn Hughes called it a ‘gossipy, fluent dual biography’. She noted that ‘Galloway, rightly, reads Leigh’s behaviour through modern understandings of bipolar disorder, quoting extensively from the work of contemporary psychiatrists...’, yet at the same time he ‘wants things the older, cruder way, with “Vivien Leigh” as an avatar for the sexy tragic madwoman, all wild hair and vixen cunning. His attempt to square the circle in a clumsy final passage by suggesting that romantic passion is, in essence, a species of madness feels disingenuous.’ But although their story is familiar from previous biographies, Galloway brings out ‘the kind of nuance that often gets lost’, for example that ‘Leigh was prodigiously well-read and intellectually astute, while Olivier was neither’.

WHEN THE DUST SETTLES STORIES OF LOVE, LOSS AND HOPE FROM AN EXPERT IN DISASTER

LUCY EASTHOPE Hodder, 291pp, £20

Lucy Easthope is the UK’s foremost disasters expert and a leading authority on emergency planning. ‘What might seem shocking and gruesome to the reader is merely part of a day’s work for her,’ Fiona Sturges commented in the Guardian. ‘This is a gripping account, filled with compassion, but it can make difficult

reading,’ Laura Hackett warned in the Sunday Times. ‘If you need an iron stomach to work in Easthope’s world, you may require quite a strong one to read about it, too,’ Jasper Rees agreed in the Telegraph, but it is ‘never less than reassuringly humane’. Matthew Reisz in the Observer warned that ‘this vivid and humane book forces readers to look into some exceptionally dark places’, while Simon Humphreys in the Mail noted that Easthope ‘displays a deeply engrained humanity and compassion when describing the unthinkable horrors she encounters’. Rowan Williams in the New Statesman was most effusive in his praise, noting that Easthope ‘does a brilliant job of explaining what it is like to be a professional respondent to catastrophe, the person whose skills are sought in the wake of all kinds of mass suffering … skills both organisational — the practicalities of salvaging bodies and body parts — and pastoral: working out the basic human support needed by those most directly affected.’ Williams continued: ‘What makes this book distinctive is … the poignant awareness that loss is not to be “cured”, but can be integrated and honestly lived with if people are given the right level of time and attention.’ ‘Perhaps unsurprisingly this is not an apolitical account,’ Hackett wrote. ‘The mulishness of officialdom is a recurrent theme,’ Jonathan Buckley noted in the TLS, while Hackett highlighted the switch from an emphasis on resilience to ‘optics’ — how a response would affect a politician’s standing. ‘You will finish it amazed at what some people do for a living,’ Humphreys concluded, ‘but thankful that we’ve got Easthope on our side.’

FIVE LOVE AFFAIRS AND A FRIENDSHIP THE PARIS LIFE OF NANCY CUNARD, ICON OF THE JAZZ AGE

ANNE DE COURCY W&N, 330pp, £22

Almost viceregal splendour: Leigh and Olivier in That Hamilton Woman, 1941 14 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

This is a ‘highly readable romp through Nancy Cunard’s prime, much of it taking place in the louche nightlife of Paris in the 1920s and early 1930s’, said Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the Daily Mail. ‘To simplify the crazy story, so rife with

Biography & memoir casual love affairs that it’s hard to keep a tab, de Courcy focuses on what she sees as Nancy’s main relationships.’ ‘Born in 1896, Nancy was the child of fantastically ill-matched parents,’ said Jane Ridley in the Spectator. Her mother ‘neglected Nancy, leaving her in the charge of an odious governess. The only person who had any time for the lonely little girl was writer George Moore, her mother’s lover. Some said he was Nancy’s father, but this seems unlikely. He was Nancy’s faithful friend.’

Nancy Cunard, 1928: a lonely childhood

This is the friendship of the title; the love affairs, explained Ridley, were with Michael Arlen, Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Louis Aragon and Henry Crowder, ‘a black American pianist whom she spotted playing in a hotel in Venice’. Nancy’s unconventional behaviour – ‘She smoked in public, drank continually and went to bed at 5am... She had a seemingly insatiable appetite for sex’ – was ‘fuelled by a simmering resentment against her mother and all that the Edwardian generation stood for’. ‘Loyal to friends but unfaithful to lovers... she could be vicious, dismissive and violent when drunk,’ said Laura Freeman in the Times. But ‘she championed young and penniless poets and supported the rights of black Americans when few English women had seen a black man. She raised funds for the nine Scottsboro boys, [wrongly] accused of the rape of two white women in 1931. She ARMIN LINNARTZ

Cunard could be vicious and violent when drunk

founded a small press called the Hours, and worked through the night printing poems by Robert Graves, Pound and Aragon and a volume of Crowder’s jazz piano tunes.’

OUTSIDE, THE SKY IS BLUE A FAMILY MEMOIR

CHRISTINA PATTERSON Tinder Press, 406pp, £16.99

The reviewers were agreed: on paper, Christina Patterson’s life story could be a misery memoir. It started idyllically. She lived in Rome and Bangkok with her two older siblings, thanks to their English father’s Foreign Office postings, and visited their Swedish mother’s homeland in summer. Even settling down in Surrey was a golden time. Patterson found God and started talking in tongues; after university she found success as a journalist. In the space of a few years, though, she lost her parents and, shockingly, both siblings and her faith. As she cleared out boxes of photos and diaries in the family home, this memoir was sparked. It also detailed her own physical woes — had acne, lupus, polyarthralgia, breast cancer — and losing her newspaper columnist job. Another blow was discovering a diary entry by her schizophrenic sister, ‘Let Christina die this year of cancer.’ What all the reviewers praised, however, was her upbeat, moving approach to these multiple sadnesses. In the inews, Nick Duerden called the book ‘a hymn to optimism’; Blake Morrison in the Guardian noted that ‘it’s too honest and well written to be dispiriting’. And for Laura Pullman in the Sunday Times, who relished its dark humour, it was ‘a wise guide from someone who has endured more than her share of life’s slings and arrows’.

IN SEARCH OF MARY SEACOLE HELEN RAPPAPORT Simon and Schuster, 416pp, £20,

Did Helen Rappaport find her subject? The reviewers agreed that considering Seacole’s life story was an elusive one, she had coped impressively and had filled the biographical gaps with her

Photograph of Mary Seacole, c.1873

imagination and extensive research. For the Herald’s Trevor Royle, the biography had a welcome air of the detective story to it; for Tomiwa Owolade in the Sunday Times, its speculative tone could be ‘slightly frustrating’— and ‘much of what we think we know about her is wrong’ — but she found it ‘lively and enlightening’. What we do know is that Seacole, a mixed race Jamaican, married Nelson’s godson and paid her way to the Crimean War, where her work as a sutler was admired by the Times’s William Howard Russell. Not so admiring was Florence Nightingale, who turned down her offer to help at Scutari hospital and considered her a charlatan with no nursing credentials. Andrew Lycett in the Spectator usefully drew up the battlelines that helped deny Seacole public prominence, despite Queen Victoria’s admiration for her, until her memoir was reprinted in 1984. In 2004 she was voted Britain’s greatest black person, an ‘often contentious symbol of immigrants making their way in an inhospitable society’.

THE MAN WHO INVENTED MOTION PICTURES A TRUE TALE OF MURDER, OBSESSION AND THE MOVIES

PAUL FISCHER Faber, 416pp, £20

‘Two years after making what is now credited as the first motion picture, Louis Le Prince disappeared in France, just as he was preparing to unveil his invention. His body was never found,’ said Abby McGanney Nolan in the Washington Post. The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022 15

Biography & memoir ARNOLD BENNETT LOST ICON

PATRICK DONOVAN Unicorn, 280pp, £25

Louis Le Prince in the 1880s

‘His disappearance remains officially unsolved, though his wife, Lizzie Whitley, had one working theory: he had cracked the mystery of a machine Thomas Edison wanted, and was killed for it,’ wrote Leah Greenblatt in the New York Times. ‘It was after the couple’s migration to New York City in 1881 that Le Prince started experimenting in earnest, a progression that did not go unnoticed. Edison made it his business to know what amateurs like Le Prince were up to.’

Edison was a bully who nicked other people’s ideas ‘Edison,’ explained Kathryn Hughes in the Sunday Times, ‘was a bit of a bastard. While he revelled in his reputation as the man who brought light and heat to the world, he was actually dark and cold... a ruthless bully who nicked other people’s ideas, and turned to the law to knock out anyone’s claim to have thought of anything before he had. But could he have resorted to murder?’ Hughes continued: ‘With Le Prince missing but not declared dead, his widow had to wait seven years until she could claim his patents and start her legal claim against Edison, who had used the time to firm up his narrative about being the inventor of this new medium.’ And the murder theory? ‘Fischer comes down in favour of another theory,’ said Hughes, ‘one bound up with the mundane dynamics of Le Prince’s family life rather than anything to do with industrial espionage.’ 16 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

At the height of his career, Arnold Bennett, chronicler of northern provincial life, was a multimillionaire, with large houses, a yacht and a taste for luxury. In 1912, Patrick Donovan calculates, he earned what would in today’s money be £1.8 million; his newspaper column alone paid him nearly £8,000 a week. His huge earning power was surely one of the main reasons why Bennett, the son of a solicitor in Stoke on Trent, was so disparagingly regarded as middlebrow by many fellow writers. As AN Wilson, reviewing Donovan’s new biography in the Spectator, pointed out, ‘it was easy to be snobbish about Bennett’. He was, ‘what all writers loathe – prodigiously and commercially successful’. Reviewing Donovan’s new biography in the Sunday Times, John Carey, a longtime defender of Bennett against his detractors, noted that he had a terrible stammer but ‘once he put pen to paper words poured from him – thousands of newspaper articles, 13 plays and on his own estimation 70 to 80 novels’. Carey enjoyed Donovan’s book but felt that Margaret Drabble’s 1974 biography had the edge as she was more interested in Bennett’s writing. Drabble herself reviewed the new biography in the Times Literary Supplement and in turn gave a nod to Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses – in which he had ‘pitted Bennett against Bloomsbury’. She thought Donovan ‘thoroughly fair’ but wondered why he was so concerned to

Taste for luxury: Arnold Bennett, c.1920

stress that Bennett is almost forgotten – when for his fans, he is still considered one of the most important British novelists of the 20th century.

THE GIFT OF A RADIO

MY CHILDHOOD AND OTHER TRAIN WRECKS

JUSTIN WEBB Doubleday, 256pp, £16.99

A ‘humdinger’ is how Melanie Reid, in the Sunday Times, described the memoir of Justin Webb, the longest serving presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme. She admitted that while all childhoods are ‘slightly odd, touched with parental quirks and family secrets’, Webb described a life ‘walking on eggshells, trying to please, trying to conceal’. He was trapped by an oppressively adoring mother and a mentally ill stepfather. Out of these inauspicious circumstances and from this ‘darkly hilarious account of growing up trapped by weirdness, deprived not of love but of normality’ emerged a man ‘eternally grateful to have washed up on the shores of adulthood’. This is a ‘beautifully sensitive, mordant book’, with its poignant resonances of the Seventies. Norma Clarke in the TLS agreed. Webb looks back at his ‘abnormal’ childhood in ‘amazement, not anger, with compassion and clear-eyed tenderness. He survived.’ Any damage he may have suffered he regards through his adult eyes as formative to any success he was to come to enjoy. It is a ‘crisp, un-self-pitying memoir’, said Helen Brown, in the Telegraph. It is a refreshing read because ‘his book is a careful, nuanced counterpoint to a culture in which people often seek to point unsparing fingers at the people and cultures which damaged them’. Instead his unusual childhood taught Webb sound journalistic lessons: ‘In an age of shouty politics, the 61-yearold calmly goes about the business of sifting sense from a revolving cast of evasive and borderline-delusional interviewees. Listeners may have found themselves wondering how he keeps his head while all about him are losing theirs. The explanation? He’s being practising since childhood.’ Indeed, ‘he offers precisely the kind of brisk honesty and considered analysis he expects from his interviewees. Our politicians should all read it and step up their game.’

Miscellaneous

Couples Therapy: psychoanalyst Dr Orna Gurainik offers her guidance to couples

EVERY FAMILY HAS A STORY

HOW WE INHERIT LOVE AND LOSS

JULIA SAMUEL Penguin life, 320pp, £14.99

The psychotherapist Julia Samuel admits she comes from a family of ‘great privilege and multiple trauma’, but in this book offers up eight other families for psychoanalysis. ‘Her latest work embraces the trend for fly-on-the-wall analysis, such as the hit documentary series Couples Therapy,’ Jackie Annesley observed in the Sunday Times. ‘Samuel’s scenarios are equally captivating.’ They ‘have been carefully chosen’, Kate Kellaway noted in the Guardian. ‘They are diverse in ethnicity, sexuality, economic circumstances and in the issues they raise: divorce, bereavement, same-sex marriage and adoption, addiction, empty nest syndrome… The effect is at times almost too schematic, but the Samuel magic continues to obtain. She shows there is no family tree without its gnarled complexity.’ ‘The overwhelming sense is that, for better or worse, we are “trapped” within our families … We can never leave them,’ Bel Mooney wrote in the Daily Mail. However, ‘One of the most impressive features of this engrossing book is Julia Samuel’s extraordinary personal honesty… In the eight case studies we are gently guided, along with the participants, towards a deeper understanding of the importance of honesty, selfexamination and communication within all relationships.’ Not only does Samuel nudge each family 18 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

towards a deeper understanding of each other, but she offers 12 touchstones for the well-being of family’ — as Mooney put it, ‘11 pages of excellent advice worth a whole shelf of textbooks’. ‘Samuel’s books have been bestsellers because they are infused with hope,’ Kellaway concluded. ‘She is on the side of making life better, and, especially at this moment in human history, nothing could matter more.’

IN THE MARGINS

ON THE PLEASURES OF READING AND WRITING

ELENA FERRANTE Europa Editions, 100pp, £12.99

Elena Ferrante, wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Guardian, ‘has always been fascinated by the way reality is transformed into art. Who gets to tell whose story? What if the story I’m telling leads nowhere? Is fiction more truthful when seen behind a veil of lies?’ We get a closer look at her preoccupations in the new book In the Margins, which collects four lectures Ferrante wrote for actors to deliver last year. And, as ThomasCorr noted, though their ostensible subject is the pleasure of reading and writing, she doesn’t make these activities sound all that pleasurable. It describes Ferrante’s ‘agonising’ struggle to find her own style in a male literary environment, inspired by (among others) Gertrude Stein, Dante’s Beatrice and the Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa. ‘Despite its insights, I’m not sure this tour of Ferrante’s own mind offers the same

rewards. The book feels uneven, tantalising in places, opaque in others.’ It left you wanting another novel. ‘Writing here sounds like an absolute agony,’ agreed Sarah Ditum in the Times. ‘Part of her struggle to write, she thinks, was to do with her sex. Serious writing seemed to belong to the male tradition; she wasn’t male, so even when she got it right she would still be in the wrong. It’s an impossible bind that led her to “imagine myself becoming male yet at the same time remaining female”.’ But Ditum had warmer words about this volume: ‘In the Margins makes the seemingly arcane problems of the writer feel immediate and vivid. Reading it is a pleasure.’

THE POISONOUS SOLICITOR THE TRUE STORY OF A 1920s MURDER MYSTERY

STEPHEN BATES Icon, 336pp, £18.99

In the early 1920s, ‘The case of the Hay poisoner’ gripped the nation. Katherine Armstrong, aged 48, of Hay-on-Wye, had died quietly in her bed in 1921 but was later found to have been poisoned by arsenic. Her husband, a quiet solicitor, churchwarden and pillar of the local community, Major Herbert Armstrong, was charged with her murder and found guilty. He was hanged in Gloucester in 1922, still vehemently protesting his innocence.

Poisoner? Major Herbert Armstrong

Miscellaneous Janice Hallett in the Times, reviewing Stephen Bates’s new book on the case, found the Armstrong poisoning was still as gripping a century later. What happened to Katherine Armstrong ‘fuelled the creative minds of some of the greatest detective novelists of the 20th century, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Georgette Heyer’.

Despite the evidence could it have been suicide? Bates’ re-examination of the case is the first since Robin Odell’s Exhumation of a Murder, published in the 1970s. Odell concluded that Armstrong had indeed murdered his wife but Bates, whose book was praised by Hallett as ‘meticulously researched’, leaves the question of guilt open: could it have been suicide? Although the evidence against Major Armstrong looked damning (including packets of arsenic – for ‘weed killer’ – found in his pockets), Bates examines the prejudices of a jury who might have been manipulated by local gossip and the influence of another recent murder trial in which another solicitor was thought to have got off ‘scot-free’. Hallett found The Poisonous Solicitor as exciting as a novel with ‘all the ingredients a crime fiction fan could hope for – an inconvenient wife, an apparently cunning husband, poisoned chocolates, a pipe-smoking detective and an excitable judge who itches to don his ominous black cap’. Nigel Andrew in the Literary Review was equally enthralled. ‘There will surely be more books on this fascinating case but it would be hard to best this one.’

CANNABIS (SEEING THROUGH THE SMOKE)

Now Nutt has written a book on cannabis – pointing out that the criminalisation of what was once an uncontentious medical herb used to ease a variety of conditions, has caused far more social ills than it prevents. The anonymous blogger on VolteFace (who campaigns for de-criminalisation) summed it up: ‘As the world moves slowly but unstoppably away from a century of cannabis prohibition, this book acts as an indispensable guide to the past, present and future of cannabis and its uses across the globe.’ In the Times, Tom Whipple enjoyed Nutt’s historical round-up. First mentioned in a 5,000-year-old Chinese manuscript, cannabis was described as useful in treating more than 100 ailments. In 1890, the Lancet thought it ‘one of the most valuable medicines we possess’. Nutt dates its pariah status to America in the late 1930s when the end of alcohol prohibition encouraged police to look for another target. In an essay in the Times Literary Supplement, Nutt argued his case. ‘Morphine is illegal when used recreationally – yet is allowed for therapeutic purposes – so why not cannabis, a herb with a long tradition in medicine?’

A dried cannabis flower

Whipple agreed: ‘His case feels impregnable. Criminalising this drug criminalises millions. It gives money to organised crime. It leads to unsafe products with no quality control. Ultimately – and this is a societal crime in itself – it is irrational.’

CONTROL

THE NEW SCIENCE OF CANNABIS AND YOUR HEALTH

THE DARK HISTORY AND TROUBLING PRESENT OF EUGENICS

DAVID NUTT

ADAM RUTHERFORD

Yellow Kite, 278pp, £16.99

W&N, 288pp, £12.99

Readers with long memories will recall that Professor David Nutt was the government advisor on drugs who was sacked in 2009 for saying that ‘ecstasy is no more dangerous than horse riding’.

Adam Rutherford’s brief history is, as Katy Guest put it in the Guardian, ‘a short book about a big subject’. It takes ‘patience to trace the complicated web linking these ideas but Rutherford does so with much-

Lebensborn birth house in Nazi Germany created to raise the birth rate of ‘Aryan’ children

needed nuance and an absence of alarmism’. Rutherford, well known to listeners of Radio 4 for the ‘curious cases’ of everyday science he investigates with Hannah Fry, is a graduate of the Galton Laboratory at UCL. Francis Galton is known as the ‘father of modern eugenics’ but is now considered by Rutherford a ‘white supremacist’ and out and out racist ‘whose views led directly to the gates of Auschwitz’. Yet it wasn’t only Galton whose ideas of genetic selection now seem appalling to us: Marie Stopes, Charles Darwin and DH Lawrence were all sympathetic to the idea of selective breeding to eradicate hereditary disease, for example, or to maximise IQ. Biological design, as Rutherford points out,‘for half its existence was regarded as desirable and for the other half as poisonous’. In the Observer, Tim Adams praised a ‘sharp and timely study’ but in the Times, Emma Duncan noted that Rutherford ducked some of the ethical tangles of modern genetic profiling. ‘On the matter of Down’s Syndrome, for which we have a nation-wide screening programme, Rutherford merely says “it is an incredibly difficult question”.’ Duncan suggested that our wide acceptance of screening for Down’s means that we would probably accept screening for, say, alcoholism or schizophrenia. But the bigger question to be answered in the future is … should we? The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022 19

Miscellaneous THE SHEEP’S TALE

THE STORY OF OUR MOST MISUNDERSTOOD FARMYARD ANIMAL

JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL Doubleday, 192pp, £12.99

countryside. It’s all about proper management. What you don’t want is monocultures, be it of sheep, or trees or anything.’

THE MEAT PARADOX

EATING, EMPATHY AND THE FUTURE OF MEAT

ROB PERCIVAL Little, Brown, 384pp, £18.99

A Welsh mountain sheep

Nigel Farndale wrote in the Times that he groaned inwardly when, ‘a few pages into [The Sheep’s Tale], I read that the author named his sheep silly names such as Maid Marian, Shortbread and Tiddlywink…We were, it seemed, in the realm of the dreaded “hobby farmer”.’ However, Farndale pressed on and was glad he did because ‘I learnt a lot’. The book is structured around ‘the farming year, starting with lambing time in the spring’. Susan Flockhart in the Herald (Scotland) thought Lewis-Stempel was ‘an amusingly eccentric guide to the ancient, and sometimes gruesome, business of sheepfarming’. He sets out ‘to challenge our perceptions of “our most misunderstood farmyard animal” through a combination of history, folklore and personal experience’. His observations ‘are delivered with engaging wit. Lewis-Stempel has been butted, bruised and knocked out by sheep’s hard heads and methane breath. He’s seen lambs’ eyes gobbled by crows and endured cold nights under the stars, wrist-deep in sheep’s innards. Yet all this is recounted with affection for a species he says is unfairly caricatured as dim, docile and timorous.’ As Farndale explained: the book ‘is topical because sheep have lately become the target of environmentalists such as George Monbiot who accuse them of “sheep-wrecking” the upland landscape. Lewis-Stempel gives a sound counterargument that sheep are essential to the biodiversity of the 20 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

Julian Baggini began his review in the Guardian: ‘If you’ve ever sighed “Ahhh” at a flock of young lambs and then gone off to gnaw on some of their shanks for your lunch, you’re a living example of the meat paradox. Animals elicit empathy and we don’t wish them harm. But the vast majority of us still kill and eat them, or at least kill their male young and take their milk.’ Rob Percival is head of food policy at the Soil Association but his book ‘is not another lecture on how we need to swap the sausage sarnies for tofu tempura’, wrote Christina Patterson in the Sunday Times. ‘If fingerwagging worked, we would all be slender, glowing and not facing a climate emergency in the first place. What Percival offers is much more interesting: an exploration of our psychological relationship with meat.’ She thought The Meat Paradox ‘fascinating’, ‘part cultural history of meat, part manifesto, part pilgrimage. Percival is a gifted writer, marshalling evidence, weaving together interviews and offering descriptions that at times verge on the poetic.’ And Bee Wilson concluded her review in the Financial Times: ‘But if this fascinating book has a flaw, it’s that Percival is stronger on philosophy than on practical solutions. There is no proposal here

We are still a nation of meat-eaters

for the policy levers that could reform a global meat industry that causes so much ethical and environmental harm. Nor does he explain how, as an entire population, we could ever find our way back to ethical meat-eating from where we stand, as he puts it, “chicken nugget in hand, swaying over the precipice”.’

METAPHYSICAL ANIMALS

HOW FOUR WOMEN BROUGHT PHILOSOPHY BACK TO LIFE

CLARE MAC CUMHAILL AND RACHEL WISEMAN Chatto, 398pp, £25

The authors are philosophy lecturers and friends, and their book sprang from a concern about their students: why were so many female fledgling philosophers leaving the discipline? In the Times, Anil Gomes explained that the four women referred to in the title are Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch, who ‘were all students at Oxford during the second world war. They found a world in which many of the men were absent…It was a world, as Midgley later put it, where women’s voices could be heard.’ Andrew Anthony pointed out in the Guardian that, in the late 1930s, British philosophy was ‘dominated by AJ Ayer’, the ‘chief promoter of logical positivism’. The four women ‘were not fans of logical positivism, dogmatism or conclusions’, Anthony continued. ‘Fortunately for them, if not for the world, the second world war intervened in their studies, removing Ayer and his acolytes from Oxford, and bringing a large influx of European émigré philosophers. Suddenly metaphysics was back in fashion…The four women all committed to establishing themselves as philosophers, and sought to refute Ayer and his ilk.’ Kathleen Stock in the Spectator thought that, like their heroines, the authors ‘stand against the fashions of their age. The absence of any rote mention of “whiteness” or “privilege” comes as relief... There’s no particular effort to make characters relatable, which makes them the more so. The payoff is four glorious heroines, confident and curious, focused on the world and not themselves. Reading this book was like a miraculous holiday from modern life.’

Graphomania MICHAEL BARBER admires Anthony Burgess, who was not only a novelist but a composer, screenwriter, translator, poet and essayist as well Sixty years after it was published, to a chorus of disapproval from British reviewers, Anthony Burgess’s dystopian fable, A Clockwork Orange, has been included in the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Read. Wherever Burgess, a lapsed Catholic who died in 1993, came to rest, he must be having a wry smile. He once described the book as ‘a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks’, and blamed Stanley Kubrick’s notorious film for encouraging people to think that it glorified sex and violence, ‘a misunderstanding that will pursue me until I die’. Burgess deserves to be remembered for much else beside A Clockwork Orange. How many other English writers have written symphonies and concertos? Or completed five novels in a year, one of which, published under a pseudonym, he later reviewed himself (making him, as Gore Vidal quipped, ‘the only English writer who could be certain the reviewer had read his book’). Writing, for Burgess – a self-confessed ‘graphomane’ – was a lifelong struggle to control ‘that intractable enemy, language’. In love with words, he admitted that if his novels weren’t widely read it was ‘because the vocabulary is too big and people don’t like using dictionaries when reading novels’. After reading an interview Burgess did with him, Graham Greene complained that ‘he put words into my mouth that I had to look up in a dictionary’. A Mancunian of partially Irish descent, Burgess, born John Burgess Wilson, spent almost all his life living on borrowed time. His father, so he said, returned home from the Great War to find his wife and daughter dead in their beds from Spanish flu and young John miraculously chuckling in his crib. Mr Wilson, a bookkeeper who also played the piano in pubs, then married the widowed landlady of a huge ‘local’. Growing up, Burgess was adequately fed and watered, but missed out on love and affection, hence the theory that he was more interested in form than people. In his teens Burgess wanted to

Burgess appearing on After Dark, 1988

become a great composer, but failed to pass the physics exam then required to read music at Manchester University. Instead, he read English, before being called up in 1940. He spent the war in the Education Corps, emerging, like so many other intelligent NCOs, with a ‘bloody great chip’ on his shoulder. By now he was also a married man. Tragically Lynne, his wife, was viciously assaulted in the black-out, a crime echoed in A Clockwork Orange. She lost not only the baby she was carrying, but also her equilibrium, seeking solace in drink and sex, and dying of cirrhosis of the liver in 1968. After the war Burgess spent several years teaching in Malaya during the Emergency, the setting for his trilogy The Long Day Wanes. In common with most of his colleagues, he slept with native women; unlike them, he mastered Malay and spent his siestas writing rather than snoozing or copulating. Shaping a sentence in the tropics, he said, was an agony that only drink could mitigate. Fortunately, he had a very hard head. In 1980, after a boozy lunch with him in Monaco, the young Martin Amis retired to bed for three days. Burgess, he

He spent his siestas writing rather than snoozing or copulating

supposed, went straight back to work. In 1959 Burgess was invalided home with what was diagnosed as an inoperable brain tumour. It was now, anxious to provide a legacy for Lynne, that he wrote five novels in very short order, among them Inside Mr Enderby, the first of four novels about a flatulent poet who wrote on the lavatory. The poems Burgess attributed to him earned a nod of approval from TS Eliot. By now it was apparent that Burgess was not at death’s door, but instead of taking a breather he embarked on a sort of literary decathlon, producing not only novels, but screenplays, essays, reviews, poems, parodies, translations and libretti. He might have lost his faith, but you sense that, for Burgess, Sloth really was a mortal sin. In two years alone he reviewed 350 novels, as well as books on ‘stable management, embroidery and car engines for Country Life – the very stuff of novels’. His prodigious industry finally began to pay off in the 1970s, by which time he had commenced a peripatetic life abroad with his second wife, Liana, an Italian academic who had given birth to his son following a brief fling in 1964. Explaining why he chose exile, Burgess said he wanted the sun on his back and the Inland Revenue off it. The only guilt he felt at leaving England was ‘the guilt at not missing England more’. Despite continuing to drink copiously and chain-smoke ‘foul cheroots’, Burgess saved some of his best work till last. His magnum opus, Earthly Powers, may not have won the 1980 Booker Prize, but who could fail to read on after an opening like this: ‘It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the Archbishop had come to see me.’ He followed this with two volumes of picaresque ‘Confessions’, told with his customary gusto, in which a life less ordinary than most was weighed and measured. Was he found wanting? That, Reader, is for you to decide. The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022 21

Current affairs Mediterranean seaport into a lucrative base for the world’s gambling giants and, more recently, blockchain investors. But it is back in Blighty that Bullough’s investigations will have readers shaking their heads in despair at our unwillingness to stop oligarchs, gangsters and money launderers from milking our systems.’

HOW A NEW RELIGION HAS BETRAYED BLACK AMERICA JOHN MCWHORTER Forum, 224pp, £14.99

BUTLER TO THE WORLD

HOW BRITAIN BECAME THE SERVANT OF TYCOONS, TAX DODGERS, KLEPTOCRATS AND CRIMINALS

OLIVER BULLOUGH Profile, 288pp, £20

‘Could a book ever be more timely,’ asked Simon Nixon in the Times. Oliver Bullough’s Butler to the World is a ‘highly readable but thoroughly depressing’ analysis of Britain’s role in enabling a ‘shadowy global super-rich’ to ‘launder and hide their vast fortunes’. But for Guardian reviewer Tim Adams, ‘to say this unmissable, deeply depressing book... is timely is to miss author Oliver Bullough’s point... Sordid tales of a nation flogging its real estate and its services and its football clubs and its good name to the shadiest and highest bidder, no questions asked, have been hiding in plain sight for decades. It has just seemed in no government’s interest to notice them... Bullough begins by showing how old colonialists found a new niche in recreating the further-flung outposts of empire – the selfgoverning protectorates of the British Virgin Islands, the Caymans, Gibraltar – as looters’ havens.’ Sunday Times reviewer Dominic 22 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

Perfect butler: Jeeves in the Springtime

Sandbrook was sceptical of this argument. ‘The link between this and the end of empire is never entirely clear: Bullough argues that the City needed to reinvent itself as the “amoral servant of wealth wherever it could be found”, but he doesn’t show that Suez had anything to do with it. In any case, this is the conceit on which he hangs a series of grimly fascinating chapters, each focusing on a different financial and legal loophole.’ In the Observer, Robert Verkaik called it ‘both a brilliant and depressing blast at decades of malign financial cosiness and the politicians who let it happen’. But Bullough ‘doesn’t just sit back and drily condemn all this financial skulduggery: he goes to meet the people involved. In the British Virgin Islands, he interviews the English barrister who in 1976 helped turn the islands into a tax haven for American investors. And, in Gibraltar, Bullough tracks down the politicians who drafted the laws that transformed the

It’s both a brilliant and depressing blast at decades of malign cosiness

John McWhorter is a bracing pundit and a distinguished academic – a linguist at Columbia University known to the wider world for his YouTube sparring sessions with fellow academic Glenn Loury. He is also black, and his ideas on race are markedly in conflict with the black American political mainstream. In a previous book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, McWhorter argued that a cult of victimhood was a trap for young blacks: it was being used as an identity rather than a problem to be solved. His most recent book was written in the heat of the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the rise of Black Lives Matter. As Sean Illing put it in Vox, for McWhorter, ‘anti-racism functions more like a religion than an ideology or a political project. Its adherents are obsessed with “performing” virtue, not for the sake of societal change but because of the sense of purpose it offers them.’ Zaid Jilani in the New York Times took up this theme, agreeing with McWhorter that ‘the only story the “elect” want to tell is where whites are the villains and minorities are the victims.’ In the Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan called it a ‘cry from the heart’, noting that McWhorter does not tick the boxes. ‘He’s often miscast as a black conservative by glib taxonomists.’ The book received only one review in the UK – by Clive Davis in the Times who thought the book ‘breathless and occasionally repetitive’ but praised the uncomfortable questions it asked, such as ‘who can name a nonfiction book by a black American writer that neither battles nor even addresses race or racism?’

Current affairs THE WAR ON THE WEST

Rozenn Morgat, the journalist who wrote the book with her, ‘Uyghurs in France suspect she may be a Chinese spy’. That, he discovered, was ‘when she realised, distraught, that China had won. A chilling victory for a regime whose treatment of Uyghurs amply meets the UN definition of genocide.’

HOW TO PREVAIL IN THE AGE OF UNREASON

DOUGLAS MURRAY HarperCollins, 320pp, £20

Reviewers of Douglas Murray’s new polemic against wokeness and western self-flagellation were almost unanimous in their agreement with him. The absence of reviews in the left-wing press seemed to confirm Murray’s argument that opinions have become tribalised and real debate has been stifled by zealots. ‘Wokeism,’ observed Robert Colvile in his review in the Sunday Times, ‘is not an academic movement but closer to a religion – the complex liturgy, the divide between the elect and the damned, the obsession with the excommunication of heretics.’ Colvile laid out Murray’s theme. ‘A cultural war is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the western tradition and against everything good that the western tradition has produced.’ In obsessing over our own sins we allow other countries to paper over theirs. Marc Sidwell in the Daily Telegraph was full of praise for how Murray ‘skewers inconsistencies, historical distortions and blatant hypocrisy’. And Noel Yaxley in the online magazine the Article thought it a thoroughgoing call to arms.’The past is being weaponised against us and it is time we fought back.’ Some reviewers thought Murray invigorating about what was wrong with the world but rather low on solutions as to what to do about it. And Alex Massie in the Times also sounded a note of caution. ‘Silly ideas at university, corporate bandwagons, diversity audits, apologies, selfadministered lashings that are really acts of preening’: he thought the author might justifiably be accused of shooting fish in a barrel.

EMMANUELLE MARCHADOUR

HOW I SURVIVED A CHINESE ‘RE-EDUCATION’ CAMP GULBAHAR HAITIWAJI AND ROZENN MORGAT Canbury Press, 280pp, £18.99

‘So it must be explained again,’ began John Phipps in the Sunday Times: ‘The Uyghurs are Turkic Muslims who live in the northwestern Chinese

WHO ARE WE NOW? STORIES OF MODERN ENGLAND

JASON COWLEY Picador, 304pp, £20

Learning to lie: Gulbahar Haitiwaji

region of Xinjiang, where the Chinese Communist Party has initiated a state project to destroy their way of life.’ Part of this process has involved the construction of a network of internment camps and, as Roderic Wye noted in the Literary Review, ‘Although their existence has been well documented abroad, few first-hand accounts of what goes on in them have emerged.’ One such, he wrote, ‘is Gulbahar Haitiwaji’s moving and devastating book’, adding that ‘It is not an easy read.’ Simon Scott Plummer in the Tablet outlined how Haitiwaji had been living in Boulogne with her husband and two daughters for many years when, in 2016, ‘she was tricked into returning to the city of Karamy and swept into a gulag where she would remain for three years, finally released due to diplomatic pressure from the French government’. Phipps related how internees were forced ‘to stand motionless for hours, sit on plastic stools day in, day out until their intestines prolapsed and demean themselves by singing patriotic songs and giving thanks to Xi Jinping’. To save herself, said Wye, Haitiwaji learned to lie – ‘to herself, her family and the jailers’. Phipps was impressed by ‘her psychological honesty’. Re-education works she admits. ‘When she is finally told she can leave, she lies motionless on her bed.’ Scott Plummer questioned the cost to Haitiwaji of her release: ‘A woman traumatised in mind and body, ashamed of the lies she had told’, and noted that according to

Jason Cowley began writing his book after the Brexit referendum and finished it in the height of the pandemic. The result, a thoughtful, studiously non-partisan look at the state of the nation, was warmly received by reviewers who particularly praised Cowley for the willingness to entertain a range of views which is also evident in his editorship of the New Statesman. In the Guardian, Julian Coman called it a ‘gentle and intelligent’ and ‘subtle and sophisticated’ book. It was, he went on, ‘refreshingly unpolitical and reflective’. Cowley takes as his starting point the town of Harlow in Essex where he grew up. He wants to know why so many people feel their Englishness has been suppressed and why so many others feel uncomfortable about celebrating their Englishness. What are now the ties that bind us? Sukhdev Sandhu in the Times Literary Supplement picked out how Cowley finds that the GP surgery in Harlow was suddenly closed down with not even the district council being informed in advance: it turns out it was owned by a multibillion dollar private insurance company in St Louis, Missouri. Matthew Syed in the Sunday Times was rapturous. ‘I can’t tell you how refreshing it is in these polarised times to read a book on politics that doesn’t have an axe to grind. To read a book where the arguments are not prejudged, where there is no attempt to fit arguments into simple causeeffect templates, where different views are assessed on the evidence rather than squeezed into pre-packed ideological boxes.’ But Who Are We Now? is, however, a ruminative rather than a prescriptive read. There is, wrote Syed, ‘a gaping hole where there should be solutions’. The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022 23

Growing up MOTHER’S BOY

A WRITER’S BEGINNINGS

HOWARD JACOBSON Jonathan Cape, 288pp, £18.99

‘Has there ever been a funnier book about being gloomy?’ asked Craig Brown in the Daily Mail. ‘Jacobson is a meticulous chronicler of his own failing. Even as a baby he was a dead loss and from there on it was downhill all the way.’ Alex Clark in the Guardian described how, ‘Once Jacobson has thrown off the hated shackles of infancy he is reading books with his mother, who introduces him to the sorrows of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and the escapism of Somerset Maugham.’ His father, meanwhile, was ‘rooted in the baffling variousness of the material world… an upholsterer, a driver, a tailor, taxi driver, magician and market trader’.

KEKE KEUKELAAR

Howard Jacobson: funny and serious

He was also, wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Sunday Times, ‘a talker, inventing an idiosyncratic language that mixed Yiddish, Polari and something that belonged just to him, and in this brilliantly funny memoir Jacobson recounts how he emerged out of these irreconcilable elements into wartime Cheshire’. Frances Wilson in the Spectator described how as well as being a ‘failed son, a failed undergraduate, a failed husband, and a failed university lecturer’ he was also a failed novelist, unpublished until the age of 40. His writer’s block, she believes, was the result of also being a failed Jew: ‘In order to become a novelist he needed to become a Jew, and when he wrote about “being Jewish” he found he had something to say.’ 24 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

For Clark, the book was ultimately about the ‘lifelong struggle to integrate the subjectivities of one’s parents with one’s own desires’, concluding that Mother’s Boy is ‘very funny, profoundly serious and demonically fluent. If there is a better contemporary account of the cost of becoming a writer I’ve yet to read it.’

MY OWN WORST ENEMY SCENES OF A CHILDHOOD

ROBERT EDRIC Swift, 260pp, £14.99

‘Robert Edric’s memoir of his Sheffield childhood opens with one of the best set pieces I’ve ever read,’ said Rachel Cooke in the Guardian. The 12-year-old Robert comes home from school to find his father back strangely early from work. What is going on? ‘In truth the merest glance,’ related Cooke, ‘provides an explanation. His father, who is bald, is proudly sporting a toupee.’ This little tableau establishes straight away Edric’s contempt for his ‘vain, spiteful and bullying father’, as Andrew Holgate described it in the Sunday Times. For ‘even as he is encouraged to admire the weave of real hair, Edric remembers feeling “a vague sense of satisfaction that this side of his nature – his vanity and self-regard – was now blatantly revealed to everyone else”.’ The memoir ‘reads like a kind of inventory, each short chapter devoted to one aspect of working-class life in Sheffield in the 1960s’, wrote Cooke, while Holgate described it as summoning up ‘a world that now feels like another planet … where no one has a phone or a bank account, hot water taps and indoor toilets are a novelty, and cigarette smoke fills every room in gently undulating waves’. There is violence, too: ‘Both adults and children are cruel to those who are poorer than them’, while ‘men are always fighting, and vomiting all over their front doorsteps’. Via grammar school and Hull university, Edric escapes, becoming a historical novelist, twice longlisted for the Booker, but never, in Holgate’s view, quite receiving ‘the recognition he deserves’. The world of his childhood is, he wrote, ‘precisely rendered in a book that feels as rich and carefully observed as any of his novels – and which should finally

make Edric as celebrated as he so clearly deserves to be’.

NO ONE ROUND HERE READS TOLSTOY MEMOIRS OF A WORKINGCLASS READER

MARK HODKINSON Canongate, 354pp, £16.99

‘Mark Hodkinson was born in a “modest, boxy” house in a Manchester suburb,’ wrote Andrew Martin in the Observer. ‘There was one book in the house, kept on top of a wardrobe.’ When he was ten, the family moved to Rochdale, where he still lives. He became, continued Martin, ‘not only a working-class reader but a workingclass publisher and writer too’.

His dad thought reading was girlish, like sewing and netball Roger Lewis in the Daily Mail said it was a ‘compelling memoir’ set in places, like his own industrial South Wales, ‘unpenetrated by flower power, free love, olives, lasagne, garlic, asparagus or avocados’. John Carey in the Sunday Times told how Hodkinson’s dad ‘was an electrician and spent every evening in the pub’ and never did any housework or cooking. According to Lewis, he ‘thought reading was girlish, like sewing and netball’ and even implied that ‘bookworms were homosexuals’. Carey told how it was being stuck at home with asthma that ‘gave him time to read’. A book that changed his life was Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, along with The Catcher in the Rye, which ‘made him sense that he could become a writer’. For Martin, Hodkinson ‘reads to be spirited away from reality’ and he related how ‘On a snowy day in Rochdale, the young Hodkinson reads The Outsider by Albert Camus and in his head he is in dusty Algiers watching the sea sending “long, lazy” waves across the sand.’ Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman was unimpressed, claiming that parts of the book had a ‘tetchy, almost peevish tone’, but Lewis summed it up as ‘not a maudlin book’ but one ‘written with verve’. Hodkinson, is, in his view, ‘sticking to his guns and is a hero’.

Fiction

FRENCH BRAID ANNE TYLER Chatto & Windus, 244pp, £16.99

What makes a family work – or not work? It is the intricate pleating of strands of lives that create a family. Jessie Thompson, in the Evening Standard, enjoyed French Braid, Anne Tyler’s keenly observed new novel about a family through seven decades. ‘Nothing deeply traumatic happens in this family – in fact, it’s the nothingness that conjures a kind of unshiftable cloud of pain and loss.’ We meet the Garretts who are a family that don’t really know each other, nor what to say to one another. Thompson liked Tyler’s gentle observations of the all too familiar that capture the reader: ‘Sentences appear that seem simple and then suddenly break your heart.’ This is about ‘empty nesters taking later-life left turns and family rifts surrounding odd-one-out siblings,’ summarised Anthony Cummins in the Guardian. ‘Funny, poignant, generous, not shying away from death and disappointment but never doomy or overwrought, it suggests there’s always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just

The novel is a moving meditation on the passage of time

French Braid: taking the long view

another turn of the prism.’ Jennifer Haigh in the NY Times saw something new in Tyler’s latest novel. ‘She is no longer quite so interested in the details. Instead, French Braid offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family: what remains years later, when the particulars have been sanded away by time. The tone is wistful, elegiac.’ For her, this long view has produced a novel about ‘what is remembered, what we’re left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realised or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time.’ Ron Charles in the Washington Post wholeheartedly agreed. ‘Tyler can move freely up and down the scale of ages with complete authority. … Every time we meet the Garretts in a new chapter, about 10 years have passed. The effect is neither jarring nor schematic, more like the gentle turning of leaves in a photo album.’

THE SLOWWORM’S SONG ANDREW MILLER Sceptre, 288pp, £18.99

Andrew Miller’s The Slowworm’s Song tells the story of Stephen Rose, an alcoholic former English soldier struggling to come to terms with his past experiences in Northern Ireland and to form a relationship with the grown-up daughter he barely knows. ‘Miller specialises in characters who

are lost, often struggling to deal with the burden of failure,’ wrote Susie Mesure in the Spectator. ‘They don’t come much more adrift than Stephen Rose.’ She judged the book a complete success: ‘Miller is a wonderful storyteller […] and he deserves more readers. In this novel, Stephen’s reckoning may be extreme but his message is universal.’ The TLS’s Nicholas Clee was less sure: ‘What readers might question is Miller’s ventriloquism. Stephen, we learn, flunked his A-Levels, joined the army, and served in Germany and Northern Ireland. Is this introspective, elegiac voice that of an alcoholic ex-squaddie, notwithstanding that he is halfheartedly studying for an Open University humanities degree? Perhaps this question matters less than that of whether one wants to spend 280 pages in his company, from which there is no escape: The Slowworm’s Song is a novel without dialogue.’ The IPaper’s Peter Carty, however, was wholehearted in his enthusiasm: ‘Andrew Miller is one of our finest writers. Few can match his sensitivity of touch, eye for telling detail and acute feel for setting.’

PEOPLE PERSON CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS Trapeze, 368pp, £12.99

Candice Carty-Williams has followed her irrepressible bestseller of black British life, Queenie, with a second novel, the central figure of which is a feckless ne’er do well and neglectful father called Cyril Pennington. In the Guardian, Sharlene Teo thought Cyril a ‘well-drawn cad, a “master of detachment” who deflects any personal responsibility. People Person explores the legacy of emotional damage wreaked upon his five adult children when an unexpected event draws them all together.’ Through the Penningtons, Teo thought, ‘Carty-Williams explores what it means to strive for identity and belonging in a big, broken family – part IndianJamaican, part white, part Yoruba – united in heartbreak by a selfish father figure with an unknowable smile always plastered across his face, and one foot always out of the door.’ In the Observer, Kadish Morris was intrigued by the portrait of The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022 25

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Fiction

em pe n m

Emotional damage in People Person

30-year-old Dimple, Cyril’s daughter. ‘She is an aspiring social media influencer who lives at home with her mother, a barrister and recovering alcoholic. She’s anxious, a little narcissistic and hungry for companionship.’ But there’s a lot of ‘stressing and scheming’, wrote Morris and ‘so much fretting and melodramatic buildup than when everything is wrapped up with a single, finger-wagging chat, you feel cheated’. And at the Times, Claire Allfree was not impressed. She thought it poorly edited (‘the execution is clumsy and the prose sometimes appalling’) and full of ‘bland generalisations of therapy-speak’. Carty-Williams is ‘better than this’ was her conclusion.

THE CANDY HOUSE JENNIFER EGAN Corsair, 352pp, £20

Jennifer Egan’s sort-of follow-up to her 2010 Pulitzer-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad did not register as a similar success with all reviewers, even though it used a similar kaleidoscopic structure of crisscrossing stories from different decades and settings. The vehicle for her satire this time was an app called Own Your Own Unconscious, whose users could download and probe their memories and also trade them for other people’s. Privacy had died.

Novelists are the exact opposite of the social media giants

For Anthony Cummins in the Guardian, it had too many ideas and a ‘shortage of human moments’. Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times wasn’t convinced Egan had managed to show what it’s like to enter another person’s consciousness. ‘We are told this technology has changed the world, but rarely see any characters behaving differently as a result.’ But Egan’s writing seduced Andrew Billen in the Times, who was astounded by its ‘visual brilliance’. Novelists, he argued, are the exact opposite of the social media giants who commodify our similarities, because they ‘strive to illuminate what makes us unique’. For him, Egan’s novel was a ‘web-like form, a network in which people’s stories meet, connected sinuously, generationally and sometimes hardly at all’, an idea echoed by James Poniewozik in the New York Times, who saw it as nothing short of an attempt at ‘describing social technology as a lived environment’.

Unusually for Keyes, some jokes come across as quite stale wrote Nichol, is ‘still crazy, gagslinging and fizzing with craic after all these years’. The Irish Independent’s Meadhbh McGrath, however, was a bit underwhelmed. ‘Keyes can usually be relied upon to temper the heartbreak with humour but the comic moments here are notably milder. Unusually for her, some jokes come across as quite stale.’

AGAIN, RACHEL MARIAN KEYES Michael Joseph, 608pp, £20

Irish novelist Marian Keyes is a book-creating wonder and a recent entrant to the National Treasure hall of fame. Twenty-five years ago, her novel Rachel’s Holiday, about a woman in a drug and alcohol rehab clinic in Dublin, sold 1.5 million copies and made its author a star. Now Keyes has produced a sequel which revisits Rachel in middle age and finds a drug rehab counsellor who has acrimoniously divorced the boyfriend in whose passionate and optimistic clinch had concluded the last book. Hannah Beckerman in the Guardian enjoyed Keyes’s trademark ‘whip-smart dialogue’ and her engagement with messy characters: ‘As ever dealing with a plethora of emotionally and psychologically knotty issues.’ In the Times, Patricia Nichol observed how Keyes, once dismissively shelved as ‘chick-lit’ is now a social media star with thousands of Twitter followers. She has been profiled by the BBC’s Imagine series – and you can’t get more culturally arrived than that. ‘Keyes’s signature gabfest style’,

SEA OF TRANQUILITY EMILY ST JOHN MANDEL Picador, 224pp, £14.99

Emily St John Mandel was on a book tour to publicise her sci-fi novel, Station Eleven, when Covid-19 hit. Her contemporaneous notes became the springboard for Sea of Tranquility, about a time-travelling writer on a book tour to publicise her novel, when it is curtailed by a pandemic. Reality and fiction deliberately bleed into each other. Susie Mesure in the Times enjoyed this story where reality, fiction and simulation are interchangeable. ‘Sea of Tranquility stands on its own, either as an entertaining introduction to sci-fi for those normally averse to the genre or as an original way to reminisce about living through our own pandemic.’ Marcel Theroux felt the same in the Guardian: ‘an interest in complex patterns animates Mandel’s new novel.’ He liked the confidence with which the novel moves through time and space: ‘There’s something simultaneously fresh and old-fashioned in the novel’s comfort with omniscient narration,

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Fiction Fiction and its relaxed style that can swoop between the history of a lunar colony and the most intimate moments of a human life. It conveys the vertiginous sense of a reality that transcends a single existence and feels simultaneously poignant, celebratory and uncanny.’ Alexander Larman in the Observer found it a ‘thoughtprovoking read’, which successfully binds time travel with contemporary concerns: ‘Colonialism, misogyny and environmental disaster are all touched upon, but without unduly didactic emphasis.’ But Jessa Crispin in the Telegraph was troubled: ‘another puzzle book by Emily St John Mandel’, she decried, which is ‘all fizz, but no punch’.

jumble of domestic tragicomedy that should ensure an easy jump from the Booker longlist to the short. This is late Shakespeare meets Modern Family and it’s irresistible.’

GLORY NOVIOLET BULAWAYO Chatto & Windus, 403pp, £18.99

THE EXHIBITIONIST CHARLOTTE MENDELSON Mantle, 336pp, £16.99

‘If vivid, drily hilarious tales about messy families stuffed with passive aggression and seething resentment are your thing, you will gleefully hoover up Charlotte Mendelson,’ declared the Spectator’s Leyla Sanai in opening a review of Mendelson’s fifth novel – which she called ‘a glorious ride’. The Exhibitionist describes the ménage of one Ray Hanrahan, ‘patriarch and painter’ (as the Observer’s Sarah Moss called him), ‘who lives in a large house in north London amid the chaos of “books everywhere, wizened tangerines and cold coffee”, declaring that “Tolstoy was an idiot”.’ The novel takes place ‘over the weekend on which Ray has summoned his adult children, his brother and family, and an assortment of friends to celebrate the opening of his first exhibition in a decade. He wants to flaunt his career, his ownership and neglect of a big house, his wife’s loyalty and his children’s submission. It rapidly becomes clear that none of these things is as it seems.’ Moss warned that ‘to build a novel around a monster’ is a risky enterprise, but here it comes off: Mendelson is ‘unfailingly excellent at the level of the sentence’ and Ray ‘horribly convincing’, so this is ‘a fine and haunting book’. Writing in the Times, Melissa Katsoulis applauded ‘a delicious

The acclaimed Zimbabwean novelist NoViolet Bulawayo has followed up her Booker-Prize shortlisted We Need New Names with a scorching new take on Animal Farm. Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman loved the first and adored the second. ‘It is a delight to be able to say that Bulawayo’s new novel, Glory, is even better and radically different,’ he enthused. Glory, an allegory of the political chaos of Zimbabwe in the aftermath of the reign of Robert Mugabe, is set in the animal kingdom of Jidada. After a 40-year rule, the ‘Old Horse’ is ousted in a coup, along with his much-despised wife, a donkey named Marvellous. The former vicepresident takes over but everything goes downhill fast and, wrote Sarah Ladipo Manyika in the Guardian, ‘Into the period of post-coup despair steps a young goat named Destiny, who returns from exile to bear witness to a land where greed, corruption and false prophets are rampant.’

The specific speaks to the universal Ladipo Manyika thought Glory was a ‘spellbinding allegory’, pointing out that the reader didn’t have to be an expert on Zimbabwean politics to relish the novel: ‘As with all good satire, the specific speaks to the universal.’ Bulawayo’s novel is, as Violet Kupersmith in the New York Times observed, ‘manifoldly clever’.

Paperbacks Lea Ypi’s memoir, Free: A Child and Country at the End of History (Penguin, 336pp, £9.99) is about growing up during Albania’s transition from totalitarian communism to liberal capitalism. Albania, wrote Max Strasser in the New York Times, ‘followed a uniquely strange and often bloody path through the 20th century.’ The communist regime fell in 1990 when Ypi was 11 years old; she left Albania in the late 1990s and is now professor of political theory at the LSE. Her book is ‘brilliantly observed, politically nuanced and – best of all – funny’, wrote Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian. ‘It is a remarkable story, stunningly told,’ agreed Emma Duncan in the Times. ‘Having lived in a country that was turned upside down overnight, she understands how easily institutions can collapse. “When you see a system change once, it’s not that difficult to believe that it can change again.” The citizens of western democracies would do well to remember that,’ said Duncan. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (Transworld, 688pp, £8.99) was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker prize. It charts the parallel lives of an aviation pioneer and a present-day movie star. Both women, explained Stephanie Merritt in the Guardian, ‘are pursuing freedom in a male world that wants to confine them within preconceived ideas about who and what they should be’. Merritt concluded: ‘Like her fictional pilot, Shipstead has aimed high; in both cases, the result is a breathtaking, if flawed, achievement.’ Melissa Katsoulis in the Times thought it ‘worth sticking with this gigantic novel if what you like is full immersion in a minutely described world full of adventure, passion and tragedy’. Simon Winchester in the Spectator thought Nicholas Crane’s Latitude: The Astonishing Adventure that Shaped the World (Penguin, 272pp, £9.99) ‘an engaging book about the French Geodesic Mission to the Equator’ in the 18th century. Crane has ‘a lasting fondness for Andean exploration and adventure’, explained Winchester, and this is an ‘admirably told story’ of ‘anarchic shambles in the jungle’ while attempting to determine the shape of Earth. Kirkus agreed that this is a fascinating account of an overlooked scientific endeavour.

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Transgenderism the book ‘bonkers’ and ‘one of the most misogynistic books I have ever read. The way it talks about women and their bodies is repellent.’ Spiked published Lavery’s furious riposte to the review. She called it a ‘Weird little diatribe’ full of ‘gouts of warm hate’ and said O’Neill had ‘skimmed the index and pretended he’s read it’.

TRANS

WHEN IDEOLOGY MEETS REALITY Grace Lavery: online exhibitionist

PLEASE MISS

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING PENIS

GRACE LAVERY Daunt Books, 304pp, £14.99

Grace Lavery may well relish the pile-on her memoir sparked in the British press. In America, the reviewer in the Publishers Weekly concluded it was both ‘engrossing and impenetrable’ but here reviewers were less polite. Born in Sheffield as Joseph, Grace is now a professor of English Literature at Berkeley University, California, and is a veteran of online exhibitionism. As Sarah Ditum put it in the Times, she displays a marked willingness ‘to get into any and all social media dramas’. Her memoir (as the title would suggest) is, wrote Ditum, ‘a tiresome, taboo-trashing rampage’. Ditum was among several reviewers to pick out as particularly distasteful Lavery’s comparison of her post-hormonetreatment penis to a ‘coiled foetus’. As Ditum put it: ‘Whatever your gender politics, no amount of penis can make this bearable.’ Lavery’s opponents are parodied in the book as provincial and uptight but this didn’t stop Julie Bindel in the Critic who called it a work of ‘staggering narcissism’ and defiantly referred to Lavery as ‘they’ throughout. Bindel also reported, delightedly, that Lavery had at the last minute withdrawn from a debate with her and Helen Joyce. ‘Well, obviously, it was that they “realised” Helen Joyce is nothing but a fascist and that, although I am “reasonable” and “thoughtful”, they were under pressure from their trans siblings.’ In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill called 28 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

HELEN JOYCE Oneworld, 320pp, £18.99

Economist writer Helen Joyce has taken up arms against the rise of trans-activism and the hugely lucrative business of trans-pharma. Gaby Hinsliff in the Observer wondered if the book were evidence that ‘something is shifting’ in the public’s response to the distinctly fraught argument about transgenderism and biological sex. ‘Joyce thinks the tide is turning. She sees support for the belief that people can change biological sex as a “crony belief” which makes people feel good in front of other people.’ Stella O’Malley in the Evening Standard was impressed by Joyce’s dogged research. ‘She goes through every issue related to trans activism and, painstakingly, piece by piece she takes a scalpel to it.’ And in the Times, David Aaronovitch also praised the book: ‘Joyce is icily furious’, he wrote, noting that in 1989, the Tavistock gender clinic had two referrals and in 2020, there were 2,378 referrals, most of them girls. The Sunday Times’s Christina Patterson called it ‘searing and sometimes devastating’ and was struck by how it was meeting ‘de-transitioners’ (those who regret having sex-change surgery) who claimed to have been ‘manipulated’ at a young age, which inspired Joyce to write the book. ‘She keeps her cool, but boy is it depressing.’ There were some caveats. Hinsliff thought there were ‘curious holes’ in the book, including an absence of more than ‘contentious speculation’ about what makes a person trans. Aaronovitch thought it a little too ‘angry and polemical’ and O’Malley wondered why Joyce listed the billionaire funders of trans activism (including George Soros) but didn’t ask why they did it.

THE TRANSGENDER ISSUE

AN ARGUMENT FOR JUSTICE

SHON FAYE Allen Lane, 320pp, £20

Former lawyer Shon Faye was once a bullied gay boy and now she is a prominent and highly articulate trans activist. The Transgender Issue is not a memoir (though it includes her personal experience) but a sometimes angry look at life for trans people today and the difficulties they face. In the Guardian, Felix Moore, himself a trans-man, was completely

Shon Faye: highly articulate

on board. It’s not a ‘relaxing read but I am profoundly grateful it exists’. Moore went on: ‘Many cisgender people live in blissful ignorance of the acute crises that face trans people in this country every day.’ He fully supported Faye’s refusal to engage with gender-critical argument on the grounds that ‘we have to fruitlessly argue the same points over and over’. Sophie McBain in the New Statesman thought it a ‘bracing and corrective read’ as did Christine Burns in the Times Literary Supplement who wrote: ‘This will be a challenging book for those lulled by the nonsense that sometimes passes for journalism about trans lives.’ But Christina Patterson in the Sunday Times was among several reviewers who thought Faye’s solutions to trans problems were simply self-defeating. These included the abolition of the police (‘because of their complicity with white supremacy’), prisons and the whole of capitalism. ‘It’s a strange experience,’ observed Patterson, ‘to read a book like this and realise that many of the ideas are mainstream.’

Books & Publishing

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Children’s books EMILY BEARN on books for the summer

One of the oldest clichés in children’s fiction is the notion that grown-ups should be got out of the way, in order to let children solve problems on their own. But times are changing – and the modern picture book is increasingly placing the adult centre stage, and offering the young reader a master-class in midlife psychology. In When Mummy Works from Home (Templar, 22pp, £6.99) by Paul Schofield, we learn about the pressures faced by the multi-tasking mother: ‘Sometimes I can’t stop to talk. There’s just too much to do! / But you’re my inspiration / And I do all this for you.’ In the companion volume When Daddy Works from Home, published simultaneously, the young reader is advised how to soothe a frazzled father: ‘Sometimes when I work, / I have to really, really think. / Do you know what would help me most? / Yes – lots of tea to drink!’ In Small Person’s Guide to Grandmas (Walker Books, 32pp, £12.99) by Jane Clarke, the instruction is given by an expert grandchild, who advises the reader how to manage the older generation. Take Grandma to the park by all means – but make sure she doesn’t get too adventurous on the climbing frame! Any child who has a relation suffering from memory loss will appreciate the gently uplifting message in Phyllis and Grace by Nigel Gray (Scallywag, 32 pp, £12.99), which tells the story of a little girl who befriends an increasingly forgetful neighbour. ‘I think I’ve got a horse. I forget her name now. There have been so many,’ Phyllis tells Grace, whose new friendship will prove surprisingly rewarding. The theme of intergenerational 30 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2022

relationships is also explored in Dadaji’s Paintbrush (Andersen, 32pp, £12.99) by Rashmi Sirdeshpande, which tells the story of a little boy who is left bereft following the death of his grandfather, who taught him how to paint. The child cannot bring himself to use the paintbrush that Dadaji left him – but with the help of a new friend, he will find a way to continue his grandfather’s legacy. For slightly older readers, Enid Blyton is also making a summer comeback, with several of her titles being re-launched. The beloved Adventure series, featuring Philip, Jack, Dinah, Lucy-Ann and

From top: When Mummy Works from Home; Phyllis and Grace; and Enid Blyton

Kiki, the ever-loquacious parrot, comes in a new edition with retro covers (Macmillan, £6.99); while The Magic Faraway Tree has been reworked by Dame Jacqueline Wilson. Her version (Hodder, 304pp, £12.99) remains loyal to many of Blyton’s original creations, though the political landscape has been discreetly updated. When Moon-Face asks Silky the Fairy to help with the domestic tasks, for example, he is given a lecture on gender equality; and we learn that in the modern world girls are sometimes cleverer than boys.

Valuable lessons indeed – but as Wilson concedes: ‘I’m not sure that [Enid Blyton] would be that thrilled.’ Eva Ibbotson has also been given a modern makeover in Escape to the River Sea (Macmillan, 288 pp, £12.99), Emma Carroll’s follow-on to Ibbotson’s beloved Journey to the River Sea (2001), set in Brazil. In Carroll’s version we take up the story a generation later, when a young girl called Rosa finds herself unexpectedly adventuring into the rainforests in search of jaguars and giant sloths. Ibbotson’s fans might balk – but Carroll is a superb storyteller who succeeds in capturing the spirit of the original novel, while making the new story thoroughly her own. And for some cheerful mayhem, Small! (Everything with Words, 224pp, £6.99) by the debut children’s novelist Hannah Moffat tells the story of Harvey, whose mother sends him to a school for giants: ‘I’m sure Madame Bogbrush’s School for Gifted Giants will be the perfect place for my gifted boy.’ But will Harvey’s new classmates discover his shameful secret: that he is not a giant, but rather a small boy wearing stilts? But fiction is seldom as thrilling as the real life adventures played out in Dominic Sandbrook’s superb Adventures in Time stories – a series of narrative history books which have raced us through the marital dramas of Henry VIII and the two world wars. In the latest instalment, Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile {Particular, 336 pp, £14.99), we follow Egypt’s most famous queen through a roller coaster of military battles and doomed love affairs – until her dramatic death with her two hapless handmaidens. And if this leaves young readers in search of light relief, they will find plenty in What Goes Up White and Comes Down Yellow? (Puffin, 224 pp, £10.99), a book of riddles by The Oldie’s venerable columnist Gyles Brandreth. ‘When first I appear I seem mysterious, / But when I am explained I am nothing serious. / What am I?’ (A riddle, of course.)

The Oldie magazine - July 2022 Issue 415

Articles inside

The Old Un’s Notes

Uncle Ronnie Biggs

Grumpy Oldie Man