The Oldie magazine March issue 410

MARY KILLEN – R.I.P. THE ALPHA MALE ANNE ROBINSON ON NIGEL FARAGE

‘You are as old as you feel’ – HM the Queen March 2022 | £4.95 £3.96

to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 410

The Oldie turns 30!

Richard Ingrams by Craig Brown Auberon Waugh by A N Wilson

Farewell, Barry Cryer – Gyles Brandreth and Roger Lewis Return to Oz – Barry Humphries and Bruce Beresford

30th

anniversary offer: 12 issues for

£30

see page 11

30 years on – Richard Ingrams page 14

Features 7 Barry Cryer remembered 11 The great Liberal comeback York Membery 13 The strange death of youth tribes Ali Farquhar 14 Our founding father, Richard Ingrams Craig Brown 16 RIP the alpha male Mary Killen 18 My true ghost story Barry Humphries 21 Sport’s golden oldies Michael Beloff 22 My friend Auberon Waugh A N Wilson 25 What happened when I went crazy Benedict King 26 A Supreme Court Justice regrets Simon Brown 28 Thirty years of Oldie laughs Valerie Grove 30 Francis Bacon, Queen of Camp Nicky Haslam 31 Do act with your heroes Michael Simkins 32 My Irish home is now a ghost town John McEntee 36 Jesus Christ’s descendant in Australia Bruce Beresford 36 I hate other people’s photographs Roger Lewis 38 Goodbye to Hollywood Mary Forbes

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S u bs queries Email h ? elp@ s u bsc r ib theoldiee. . co.uk

ABC circulation figure January-June 2021: 49,181

Mad as George III page 25

41 Pearls of wisdom from The Oldie’s 30-year archive 66 Boris – the fall of Falstaff AN Wilson

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 6 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What was the London Cyclist Battalion?

Ian Davidson 12 Modern Life: What is ASMR? Donna Freed 33 History David Horspool 34 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 35 Country Mouse Giles Wood 42 Small World Jem Clarke 44 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 45 School Days Sophia Waugh 45 Quite Interesting Things about ... spices John Lloyd 46 God Sister Teresa 46 Funeral Service: April Ashley James Hughes-Onslow 47 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 48 Readers’ Letters 50 I Once Met… Jackie Kennedy Joan Wheeler-Bennett 50 Memory Lane Antony Mason Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert 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

Farewell, Barry Cryer page 7

67 Media Matters Stephen Glover 69 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 69 Rant: Mumbling actors Carolyn Whitehead 97 Crossword 99 Bridge Andrew Robson 99 Competition Tessa Castro 106 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books 55 One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage, by Michael Crick Anne Robinson 57 A Class of Their Own, by Matt Knott Nikhil Krishnan 59 Tales of a Country Parish, by Colin Heber-Percy Ysenda Maxtone Graham 59 This Mortal Coil: A History of Death, by Andrew Doig Cressida Connolly 61 Constable: A Portrait, by James Hamilton Lucy Lethbridge 63 Against the Tide, by Roger Scruton, ed Mark Dooley Hamish Robinson 65 Love Marriage, by Monica Ali Alex Clark

Travel 88 Edwina Sandys’s Manhattan Anthony Haden-Guest Oldie subscriptions ● To place a new order, please visit our website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk ● To renew a subscription, please visit myaccount.theoldie.co.uk ● If you have any queries, please email help@ subscribe.theoldie.co.uk, or write to: Oldie Subscriptions, Rockwood House, 9-16 Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH

90 Overlooked Britain: England in Barbados Lucinda Lambton 93 Taking a Walk: London’s Thames path Patrick Barkham 94 On the Road: Celia Birtwell Louise Flind

Arts 70 Film: Parallel Mothers Harry Mount 71 Theatre: Private Lives William Cook 71 Radio Valerie Grove 72 Television Frances Wilson 73 Music Richard Osborne 74 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 75 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 77 Gardening David Wheeler 77 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 78 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 78 Restaurants James Pembroke 79 Drink Bill Knott 80 Sport Jim White 80 Motoring Alan Judd 82 Digital Life Matthew Webster 82 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 84 Getting Dressed Brigid Keenan 79 Bird of the Month: Common Gull John McEwen 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: Jamil Popat on 020 3859 7096 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk

Front cover Gerald Scarfe

The Oldie March 2022 3

Happy 30th Birthday!

Happy 30th birthday to The Oldie!

The first issue of the magazine (pictured) came out on 21st February 1992.

Richard Ingrams, the founding editor, said, ‘Many claim to have thought of the idea of The Oldie, including Alexander Chancellor and John McEwen, two of our backers. Another claimant is Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye. He is certainly one of the keenest enthusiasts, partly, I suspect, because if the magazine is successful, it will stop me hanging around in the Private Eye offices.’

Richard Ingrams is happily still with us, as is John McEwen, starring in these pages as our Bird of the Month columnist. Sadly, Alexander Chancellor, Richard’s successor as Oldie editor, died in 2017.

Other original directors included Patrick Marnham and the late Naim Attallah.

Another director, Stephen Glover, now writes our Media Matters column. What a delight, too, that original contributors Mary Kenny, Richard Osborne and Valerie Grove are columnists for the magazine today.

Craig Brown pays tribute to Richard Ingrams in this issue.

A N Wilson remembers another original director, the late Auberon Waugh. He also wrote a fine ode to Richard Ingrams in the first issue, reprinted above.

Ingrams Encore by A N Wilson. A tribute to The Oldie’s first editor in the first issue When you and Private Eye were in your youth, The oldies howled, because you told the truth About the humbug world which Baillie Vass [Alec Douglas-Home’s nickname] Tried to protect with money or with class.

Young Ingrams, Marnham, Rushton, Foot and Waugh Gleefully wove old England’s winding sheet.

Unveiled Profumo’s lies, Wilson’s clay feet, The sins of Maxwell, Thorpe and many more.

Some of your heroes then are now so old That they are dead and cannot be enrolled To write for you, but keep

them in your mind Lest, mellowing in age, you should grow kind.

Don’t wage a war on youth, which will outgrow Its childish follies – rather, raise a cry Against the shyster lawyers, the MPs, The flannel-bishops, the performing fleas Whom you lambasted yearly in the Eye. Remember Cockburn’s cruel vision, which Made him distrust the Tories and the rich.

When tempted to admire some oldie shit Puncture his vanity with Driberg’s wit.

When sentiment would lure

Among this month’s contributors Anne Robinson (p55) is known for being horrible on The Weakest Link and presents Countdown. She hopes to become a dutiful Cotswolds housewife even though, for obvious reasons, she isn’t married.

Mary Killen (p16) is Dear Mary on the Spectator. She and her husband, Giles Wood, The Oldie’s Country Mouse (p35), wrote The Diary of Two Nobodies.

Bruce Beresford (p36) is the director of Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy (1989).

His films include Breaker Morant and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, which he wrote with Barry Humphries (p18).

Craig Brown (p7 and p14) is Britain’s funniest writer. His diaries appear in Private Eye. He is the author of Ma’am Darling and One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time.

you to invest Belief in humbugs, I would beg you lift From Malcolm Muggeridge his greatest gift: the inability to be impressed.

Your enemies believe you’re off your trolley: Glory in that! And rage at this world’s folly.

And laugh at Death and, with no trace of fear Mock gilded butterflies, like old King Lear.

If, armed with writs, disgusted Middle Age Hires Carter-Ruck to close The Oldie down, Then you’ve succeeded!

Everyone in town Will cheer an Ingrams encore on the stage.

Are we getting too fat for our graves?

That’s the worrying news coming out of Shropshire. The Shropshire Association of Local Councils has been considering the introduction of mega-graves.

The suggestion is that the current standard grave size of four feet by eight feet – 32 square feet – will be increased to a minimum burial plot size of just under 54 square feet. That’s a bumper increase of 68 per cent.

As well as being worrying news about our waistlines, the suggestion would also lead to space running out in graveyards. It doesn’t help that lots of land that could be used for graves is now allocated for housing development. Many The Oldie March 2022 5

Important stories you may have missed Burglars ate advent calendar chocolates Stamford Mercury Chicken on the loose in Bicester Oxford Mail

Police look for man with ‘bag for life’ after burglary in the city Warrington Guardian £15 for published contributions

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6 The Oldie March 2022

cemeteries have less than 20 years’ capacity left.

It’s time for us all to start laying off the chips if we want to be buried in our favourite churchyards.

Bill Robertson, a Newcastle reader, sent the Old Un the greatest misprint of 2021. The Newcastle Chronicle hailed the opening of a retro launderette, Launder & Press, in Heaton. The paper reported on 28th December 2021, ‘The store offers a full wash and dry service, as well as ironing and altercations.’

Whatever happened to the Establishment?

And who actually belongs to it nowadays?

Even the origins of the expression are unclear.

Henry Fairlie (1924-90) was the journalist who defined the Establishment.

In the Spectator in 1955, he wrote, ‘By the “Establishment”, I do not only mean the centres of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.’

And now Fairlie’s son, Simon Fairlie, has written Going to Seed: A Counterculture Memoir, out this February.

Simon Fairlie began his life in a pretty Establishment way, at Westminster School and Cambridge. But then he dropped out of university to hitchhike to Istanbul, bicycle through India and establish a commune in France. He has been a labourer, stonemason, farmer, fisherman, shepherd, founder of the Land magazine as well as the co-editor of the Ecologist magazine.

He now runs a micro-dairy at Monkton Wyld Court, a charity and co-operative in rural Dorset, and earns a living by selling scythes.

Two Establishments: Henry Fairlie (1924-90) and son Simon

In his memoir, Simon Fairlie writes about his father’s famous article about the Establishment.

‘It is an unexpectedly slight piece,’ Simon Fairlie writes, ‘which does little more than assign a name to the bleedin’ obvious.’

In fact, you could say that, in these green days, Simon Fairlie, scythe salesman, has himself become part of the Eco-Establishment.

Oldie Towers is in deep mourning over the death of dear Barry Cryer.

As well as telling jokes to

readers, Barry also told us stories. This is his last story, sent a week before he died: ‘Alan Bennett once sent five people out, just to garner some of the things they might overhear people saying. My absolute favourite was this.

One of them was in a garden centre and he heard a man saying, “That sundial I bought last year has paid for itself already.”’

Alan Bennett, Barry’s fellow Leeds boy, would often ring up Baz and just say, ‘Joke, please.’ How deeply sad that Barry’s never-ending well of gags has run dry.

prue leith

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Barry Cryer, King of Comedy (1935-2022)

NEIL SPENCE

Barry Cryer was the greatest supporter of The Oldie, as a performer and contributor.

His friends pay tribute Craig Brown: Has there ever been such a funny man who was also so lovable and so generous?

Years ago, a friend of mine, who happens to be a High Court judge, pointed out that, of all the panellists on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, it was Barry who always laughed loudest and longest at other people’s jokes.

Barry loved jokes as David Attenborough loves wild animals – and, I suspect, for much the same reason. He saw in them and their variety the essence and spark of life.

He often compared jokes to perfect little dramas, and to the end of his days remained fascinated by the way in which the human mind would so happily embrace their constituent parts – a Scotsman, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a parrot all stuck in a falling lift, for instance – no matter how surreal or preposterous.

He was also intrigued by the quirk of character that made particular comedians so funny: in TV programmes about Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper or Ken Dodd, it was always Barry’s contribution that was the sharpest.

He was a veteran of stand-up from the days when it meant cracking jokes at the Windmill before the dancing girls appeared, yet in his eighties he was still eagerly welcoming newcomers into the world of comedy. He was the opposite of fuddy-duddy. I never heard him say a bad word about anyone – with the

very definite exception of Jimmy Savile.

I was just one of the extraordinarily wide circle of friends of all ages whom Barry would ring up with a joke every week or two. ‘Have you got a moment?’ he’d say, and then he’d tell his latest joke, as if for the first time. I felt like a student philosopher in the 16th century being phoned by Montaigne. And when he’d finished, he’d give a chuckle and say, ‘And now I’ll give you back your day.’

God bless you, Barry Cryer.

Gyles Brandreth: Well, now we can get rid of the landline.

In recent years, only two people ever used it. One was my friend Nicholas Parsons, for more than 50 years the host of Just a Minute. The other was Barry Cryer.

Baz was a regular caller – five days a week in a good week – and his calls were always a joy. They never lasted too long and they always featured a joke you hadn’t heard before.

The gift of generosity was his greatest quality. I can

picture him at one of the Oldie of the Year Awards lunches, sitting next to Ken Dodd, who was about to speak and getting very nervous.

Barry set to work, reassuring Ken, suggesting lines that would work, willing him to succeed.

Barry was an enabler – and our last link with that generation who started out as comics at the Windmill’s ‘nude revues’ in Soho. He liked crafting jokes and sharing them. He didn’t set out to change the world. He simply did his best to make the world a happier place.

And he succeeded.

Roger Lewis: One of my great joys these past 20 years was a phone call most weeks from Baz, when he’d tell a new joke he’d heard about parrots or I’d ask him to tell me an old joke about parrots. He had an inexhaustible fund of stories about the great comedians he’d worked with and had written material for – Tommy Cooper, Kenny Everett, Bob Hope, even Bob Todd. He was a veritable scholar of comedy, its history and personalities.

Barry was to light entertainment what Isaiah Berlin was to philosophy – the undisputed, honoured elder statesman.

Barry introduced me to the likes of Peter O’Toole, June Whitfield and Leslie Phillips. I was about 30 years Barry’s junior but he treated me, as he treated everyone, as an equal.

How could you not love him?

He was of course an Oldie stalwart, the centrepiece of all the parties and receptions.

The best place to be was outside Simpson’s on the pavement, where Barry went for regular fag breaks. A group would quickly form around

him and the laughter would carry to Trafalgar Square.

Comedians in real life are meant to be affected, miserable, vain creatures – not Barry.

James Pembroke, Oldie publisher: Barry was the most approachable star I have ever known. He warm-shouldered everyone, especially at Oldie literary lunches, which he hosted for the last eight years. He hated pomposity and aloofness. He clearly adored his wife, Terry, to whom he referred as ‘my first wife’ even in his last years. He was The Oldie’s greatest supporter.

Harry Mount, Oldie editor: Barry was our patron saint. In the pandemic, he told a joke a week to readers. His gags produced a million hits, a third of our traffic.

At one of our lunches, he told a supermarket joke. I asked him if he had any more.

‘I’ve got a Sainsbury’s joke, an Aldi joke and a Lidl joke.

Which one would you like?’

His mind was a vast joke emporium, split into infinite categories. But how modest he was. When he rang, he’d say, “It’s only old Baz.” He rang on my birthday. He rang me on my Dad’s birthday.

He said comedy greats, like Tommy Cooper (who he wrote for), had ‘funny bones’ but he didn’t. Oh yes, you did, Baz. Recently, Barry was MC at our Gang Shows. A week before he died, he apologised for cancelling.

‘Just a few aches,’ he said.

At an event for Barry a few years ago, Terry Wogan said, ‘Barry Cryer – forgotten but not gone.’ Barry loved it.

How unbearable that dear Baz is now gone. The Oldie will never forget him.

The Oldie March 2022 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Will you miss me when I’m gone?

My wife is merrily planning for life after my death

My wife is looking forward to my death.

I don’t mean she is eager for my departure: she is simply anticipating it with a not-altogether-flattering degree of enthusiasm. Since the first lockdown, we have got into the happy habit of taking a daily walk together.

We aim for 10,000 steps and we take them in assorted directions in the vicinity of our house. As we walk, we talk, and most of my wife’s chatter runs along the lines of where she might move to, the moment I die.

‘I couldn’t stay in the house – it’s too big,’ she says, ‘and it’s full of your clutter.

That little workman’s cottage looks nice – what do you think?’ She regularly stops outside estate agents and surveys the properties on offer. ‘I’ll still want stairs.

Stairs are good exercise. I like the look of this one – just two-up, two-down, and not too far from the shops.’

When I remind her that my mother lived to the age of 96 – so I could be around another quarter of a century – she simply laughs and says, ‘Yes, but your father died at 71 and look at your posture. There’s no hope. I’ve got to think ahead. You know it makes sense.’

In truth, I hope I do go first because I wouldn’t be a good widower. It’s bleak being left on your own, as I have been reminded reading volume three of Roy Strong’s diaries.

In 1971, when Roy was 35 and the wunderkind director of the National Portrait Gallery, he married the theatre and opera designer Julia Trevelyan Oman, 41. Despite some people’s assuming from his camp manner that Strong was gay, it was, as he puts it in the diary, ‘a full marriage’ in every sense.

When Julia died in 2003 of pancreatic cancer, Sir Roy was bereft. At 86, and no longer living in the beautiful home and garden they created together, it’s clear he still misses her every day.

I’d be lost without my wife, too –

literally. I don’t know where the will is, or the fuse box. Now I come to think of it, I don’t even know where she keeps our passports. (I had a look for them just now. They aren’t in any of the obvious places.) She’s out having lunch with a widowed girlfriend. Again.

‘I’ve got to keep my friendships fresh,’ she trills, gaily. ‘Let’s face it – you could drop off the perch any time.’

Roy Strong, incidentally, is now among my all-time favourite diarists, up there with Pepys and Virginia Woolf. My other current bedside favourite is the great Arnold Bennett (1861-1937), whose woefully underrated The Old Wives’ Tale is my favourite novel and whose journals are full of mellow wit and wisdom.

Bennett understood marriage: ‘Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.’ He understood life: ‘The moment you’re born, you’re done for.’ He is full of good advice: ‘Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.’

One thing my wife won’t be doing when I’m gone is going to any Stephen Sondheim musicals. They are not her thing. She has a particular loathing for Sweeney Todd and couldn’t believe it when a Sondheim number (‘With So Little to Be Sure Of’ from Anyone Can Whistle) was one of my selection on Desert Island Discs.

In the bar at the National Theatre, I once tried to introduce my wife to Sondheim. She wasn’t interested.

Sondheim was a genius and I had a particular soft spot for him because when a book of mine, The Joy of Lex, all about the fun of language, became a New York Times bestseller in 1983, he got in touch to say he wanted to turn it into a musical – with a cast of 26 singers and dancers, each one representing a different letter of the alphabet.

He was going to call the show Play on

Stephen Sondheim at 80, being applauded at the BBC Proms, July 2010

Words and got very excited about the idea of a four-part-harmony opening number, featuring four of the longest words in the language: floccinaucinihilipilification (it means ‘the act of estimating as worthless’ and dates from 1741), praetertranssubstantiationslistically (an adverb used in Mark McShane’s 1963 novel Untimely Ripped), pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s the name of a miner’s lung disease and was deliberately coined to be the longest word in the dictionary) and – wait for it – at 100 letters, bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk (from the third paragraph of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake).

As my wife could have told you, the show never happened. I wish it had.

Eat your heart out, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Sondheim was the real deal.

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

Grumpy Oldie Man

Welcome to my Gothic House of Horrors A nightmare day in a grotesque corner of Shepherd’s Bush matthew norman

An echo of Arthurian legend has visited my home – and, purely for the variety, thanks must be given for that.

For so long, the literary flavour clinging to the property has tended exclusively towards the Gothic.

Anyone glancing in from the street will be put in mind of Baron Frankenstein’s castle, albeit shrunken, decayed, and mystically transported from a German hilltop to Shepherd’s Bush.

No one could walk the short patch of gravel from gate to front door without anticipating its being opened by a hunchback called Igor, who will slowly turn his head while intoning, ‘Earthlings again, master.’

In its defence, the front garden has looked worse. It’s very late in the season, yet still there is no desiccated Christmas tree shedding needles by the bins (if only because the tree remains, fully dressed, in the sitting room).

Not that my son was notably impressed when, on his latest charity visit from Dorset, we sashayed along the wholly unlit path. ‘Always a joy,’ he murmured, taking in the empty crisp packets, KFC cartons and amply used condoms that thoughtful passers-by seem to enjoy lobbing over the wall, ‘to return to the House of Usher.’

If his tone suggested a certain reluctance about entering the residence, the beware-what-you-wish-for epiphany was close at hand. Entry was denied when the key, clearly relishing its chance to add to the aura of despair, became stuck in the lock.

I turned it one way, then the other. It traversed barely a sixth of an inch in either direction.

‘Let me try,’ he said. ‘I have a way with locks.’ His confidence, though touching, was misplaced. ‘It’s stuck,’ he admitted.

‘Ya think?’ I replied, quick as a flash.

What two gentile men would do in such an event is a mystery only they 10 The Oldie March 2022

could resolve. What these two Jewish men did was sit on a crumbling wall, resignedly nodding their heads, muttering, ‘Yup, yup, oh yup,’ at each other through rigidly pursed lips.

‘Tremendous fun as this is,’ Louis said, ‘I’m not convinced it’s helping. What are we going to do?’

‘The one thing we are not going to do,’ I said, ‘is call an emergency locksmith.’

‘But of course not,’ he replied, ‘because that would be crazy.’

‘I am not spending £150 on something we could easily fix if we could only get inside.’

‘We?’ he reiterated. ‘OK, not us.

Obviously not us. But someone who knows what to do with a screwdriver.’

We relapsed into silence, staring forlornly at the bag of cooling, congealing Chinese takeaway, until he said he didn’t suppose I had remembered to lock the back door. I supposed nothing of the kind. ‘Then I’m going over the neighbour’s wall.’

The phone call, when it came, lacked encouragement. ‘You remembered,’ said Louis, with less admiration than I felt this demanded, ‘to lock the back door.’

And then, noting the extreme unlikelihood that I’d also locked the veranda door, he made a declaration loosely in the style of Captain Oates. ‘I’m going to climb up. I may be a while.’

‘Should I ring for the ambulance now,’ I enquired, ‘or wait till it happens?’

He pondered for some time. ‘Wait till it happens. Just in case the 999 guys

‘We moved the elephant to a room’

aren’t keen on responding to potential accidents. Give me five minutes.’

Within four came the miracle. A light was illuminated within, and he opened the front door from inside.

‘But, but … but…?’ I stammered.

‘I know, I know,’ he said, grinning, ‘I put a chair on a table, and clambered up.’

‘But, but…’

‘I know. I didn’t fall.’

We embraced, and I told him I’d never been prouder. ‘Me neither,’ he said. ‘It’s a shock victory over my genetic and sexualpreference stereotypes.’ I considered rebuking him for the homophobia, but decided this would ruin the mood.

The mood didn’t last long. Impervious to the jiggling, caressing and eventually frantic punching, the key remained immovably stuck.

‘Do you not think it’s time…’ began my son.

‘I am not,’ I interrupted, ‘calling a locksmith. Let it stay where it is. We’ll have to use the upstairs door for now, and wait for someone to show up who can pull it out.’

‘Ah, I see, the key is Excalibur,’ said Louis, drawing heavily on his Englishliterature degree. ‘This is good. You’re seasoning Edgar Allan Poe with a sprinkle of Mallory.’

Almost a week has now passed. The key continues to poke invitingly out from the lock, clearly visible from the street, yet still not an Arthur in sight.

‘Fascinating criminological experiment as this is,’ my son pointed out when he rang from Dorset yesterday, ‘don’t you think you should at least hide the key from public view?’

And how did he imagine I could do that?

‘Its seasonal debut is way overdue,’ he said. ‘Put the Christmas tree in front of the door. In the Camelot House of Usher, there couldn’t be any better camouflage than that.’

Sixty years ago, the Orpington by-election shook up British politics. By York Membery

ANNIVERSARY

OFFER MARY KILLEN – R.I.

March 2022

The great Liberal comeback

30th

‘You are as old as you feel’

March 2022 | £4.95 £3.96

Things did not get off to the best of starts for the Liberals when their existing candidate, Jack Galloway, turned out to be in a bigamous marriage and had to be asked to step aside. Meanwhile, a carelessly discarded cigarette butt led to the newly established Liberal campaign HQ going up in smoke – thankfully with no casualties. However, in Galloway’s last-minute replacement, Eric Lubbock, the Liberals chanced on a dashing, family-friendly candidate with strong local links, who would wear out five pairs of shoes on the campaign trail.

It quickly became a two-horse race between the Tories and Liberals. But the Tory candidate, Peter Goldman, a brilliant party backroom boy turned would-be MP, lacked the common touch and couldn’t match Lubbock’s ‘local man’ credentials. To add to his woes, Harold Macmillan’s government had begun to lose its way – economic problems were mounting, ‘Supermac’ was looking past his sell-by date and a growing number of people thought it was time for a change after a decade of Tory rule.

By the time Grimond, with his flair for publicity, hit the streets of Orpington in a gas-guzzling Chevrolet on election day in a bid to get out the vote (imagine the furore if Ed Davey did the same thing today), the Liberals were on course to achieving a political upset of the first order.

The by-election win was widely credited with starting a revival in Liberal fortunes. The party went on to win hundreds of seats in that year’s local elections. Still, it did not result in Grimond’s getting a summons from the Palace to form a Liberal administration (a pretty far-fetched scenario anyway).

The Liberals’ successor party, the Lib Dems – still a shadow of its former self following the post-coalition hammering it took in the 2015 election – should look for more Lubbock-like figures if it wants to make further by-election gains in the future.

E

– HM the Queen

to subscribers | www.th eoldie.co.uk | Issue 410

30th Anniversa ry Issue

S

ixty years ago, on 14th March 1962, the Liberals overturned a near-15,000 Tory majority to win a sensational by-election in Orpington. Eric Lubbock (1928-2016), later Lord Avebury, won a 7,855 majority and held the seat until 1970, when it reverted to the Conservatives. It has remained Tory ever since.

The result sent shivers through the Conservative Party hierarchy. For a brief moment, it looked as if the Liberals might even replace Labour, which had lost three general elections in a row – 1951, 1955 and 1959 – as the main opposition party.

The Sunday Times argued that ‘the heady wine of Orpington’ was the Liberals’ ‘most exhilarating beverage since their finest hour of the landslide of 1906’. It suggested that, ‘in his wildest moments’, the party leader Jo Grimond might even ‘see himself driving to Buckingham Palace to form a Liberal administration’. A post-Orpington national opinion poll in the Daily Mail put the Liberals on 33.7 per cent, ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives.

The Liberal Party had become something of a music-hall joke by the mid-1950s, largely confined to the Celtic fringes – remote parts of Scotland, Wales and the West Country. But later in the decade the party showed new ‘fight’. The television broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy scored a strong second place for the party at the Rochdale by-election in 1958.

Mark Bonham Carter won the Torrington by-election a few months later. The party’s telegenic new leader, Jo Grimond (1913-93), won converts to the cause.

Nonetheless, few observers suspected that leafy, true blue Orpington, in suburban south-east London, would return anything other than a Tory – as usual – when a by-election was called in early 1962 after its MP, Donald Sumner, resigned his seat to become a County Court judge.

P. THE ALPHA MAL

ANNE ROBINSON ON NIGEL FARAGE

The Oldie turns 30!

Richard Ingrams by Crai g Brown Auberon Waugh by A N Wilson

Farewell, Barry Cryer – Gyles Brandreth and Roger Lewis Return to Oz – Barry Hum phries and Bruce Beres ford 001 Front coverwithspine

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IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

what was the London Cyclist Battalion?

The 25th (County of London) Cyclist Battalion was a bicycle battalion of the London Regiment of the Army. Founded in 1888, it was converted to a unit of the Royal Corps of Signals in 1922.

My grandfather Alfredo Free played the violin in the orchestra and the cornet in the band of the Cyclist Battalion on the North West Frontier in 1917. Forty years ago, I was telling Michael Palin about him when he suddenly jumped up from the table. ‘Good Lord!’ he cried and shot out of the door. He returned and thrust a book into my hands: The London Cyclist Battalion: A Chronicle of Events connected with the 26th Middlesex (Cyclist) VRC, and the 25th (C of L) Cyclist Battalion, The London Regiment, and Military Cycling in General.

How did Michael come to have the book? His fellow Python Terry Jones had spotted it and bought it as a present for Mike, back when they were writing Ripping Yarns, that series of absurd Boy’s Own Paper-style stories with titles like Across the Andes by Frog.

Bicycles, as they were better designed and built, became more and more popular throughout the nineteenth century. In 1887, Lt-Col A R Savile – a bit of a touring ‘wheeler’ himself – mustered

the first parade of what he hoped would become the Army’s ‘cycling arm’ and thus earned the title the Father of Military Cycling.

A Territorial unit was established in 1888 with 216 men. Sixteen of them were musicians – I’m sorry to say they got off their bikes to play.

In the 26th Battalion of the London Regiment were Lt Rucker, the amateur trick rider, and C A Smith, the Bath Road champion. Savile led the battalion on his tricycle, followed by all manner of machines (they brought their own), with rifles fitted on the front forks, speeding past in file with only a foot between them. There was even a Victoria tandem – 16 men on one bike.

On his bike, Colour Sergeant Jack Rule could rise from the firing position, mount, advance 100 yards and fling himself down to fire again in 21 seconds.

At the Royal Tournament of 1897, he performed his most amazing feat – picking up a wounded man from the ground while travelling at speed. For these public performances, all ranks were in the same gear – and thus pedalled in step.

Major du Maurier’s popular play of 1909, An Englishman’s Home, featured a brave cyclist. Men from Harrods, encouraged by the firm, joined in 1913.

In August 1914, the battalions – now there were two – were in summer camp.

Thereafter, they claimed to have been the first unit of the entire Army to be ready for action.

Someone on the General Staff must have read Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) because the 25th and 26th were sent off to patrol the east coast for three years.

In 1917, they surrendered their bicycles and were sent to India. In 1919, they fought in the Waziristan campaign; several of them died in the Khyber.

H H Gayler, holder of the world’s unpaced 12-hour amateur record, was killed with other members of his picket when their outpost was overrun on a hill overlooking the Khaisara valley.

Grandfather didn’t get Spanish influenza in 1918. Everyone apart from the band did. The battalion came home in 1919, never having pedalled in anger.

A huge black bicycle leant against Grandfather’s garage wall, its mudguards like cast-iron guttering. The only time I saw him ride it, he fell off.

Ian Davidson

‘Are your humans free-range or in lockdown?’

Jennifer Allen, an American IT consultant, coined the term in 2010 in a bid to lend more legitimacy and gravitas to the sexual and gimmicky ‘brain orgasm’ or ‘brain-gasm’ as it had been described on the web.

Allen sometimes experienced this sensation when watching videos of space, and wondered if anyone else felt the same. She put search terms like ‘tingling head and spine’ into search engines to no avail until 2009, when she came across a post titled ‘WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD’.

The post’s author was looking for an explanation for the sensation. While the ensuing discussion did not provide

what is an ASMR? Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a tingling sensation, or paresthesia. It starts on the scalp and cascades down the spine in a pleasant, warming sensation in response to auditory, visual or tactile stimuli.

These stimuli are called ‘triggers’ and are as diverse as whispering, nailtapping, scratching, page-turning or the close personal attention and intimacy of an eye exam. The sensation, associated with feeling calm and relaxed, is sometimes described as mildly euphoric.

12 The Oldie March 2022

Every cyclist will do his duty: 1912 poster

definitive answers, the respondents shared their own experiences as well as videos that had triggered the brain-gasms. Once Allen came up with the name and search-friendly acronym, she started a Facebook group whose members started sharing videos with content specifically created to act as triggers instead of relying on happenstance.

Since then, there has been an explosion of YouTube videos. Content ranges from hair-washing, -cutting and -brushing, vacuuming, drawing and bubble-popping to makeovers, dental or ear-exam role-plays, all with augmented audio.

One of the most prolific creators is Gibi Klein. Her YouTube channel, Gibi ASMR, has 3.91 million subscribers.

Her most-watched video to date, Fastest ASMR|Dentist, Eye, Cranial Nerve, Sleep Clinic, Lice, Ear Exam, Ear Cleaning, Makeup, Spa!, has had

‘Robbery is spelled with two “b”s’

over 33 million views. The 18 actionpacked minutes consist of a tight shot of Gibi performing the exams or treatments for the viewer. Her voice just above a whisper, she repeats phrases, adding in clicks, pops and other mouth sounds to punctuate the tapping of her various tools against the screen.

Relieving insomnia is one of the

purported benefits of ASMR. YouTube pays not only by the number of views but also by the length of view: while you sleep and the videos continue to roll, the revenue pours in.

Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting series endures as a popular ASMR trigger thanks to Ross’s soft voice intoning phrases such as ‘happy little trees’. The effect is increased by his extended eye contact with the viewer, the focus on his deliberate hand movements, loud, repeated brush strokes and the scrape of the palette knife against the canvas.

Whether or not ASMR is a real phenomenon is difficult to prove – and largely beside the point. In the ‘see a need, fill a need’ world of the internet, the act of searching for specific content is enough to stimulate its creation. You want to hear someone chew honeycomb or slurp oysters for your pleasure? You got it!

Donna Freed

The strange death of youth tribes ‘You’re not going out like that?’

Incredulous parents first started asking this question of their teens in the 1950s. Previous generations had been defined by religion or class; these kids were the first of their kind with disposable income and radio stations playing their choice of music.

Their commercial clout attracted sophisticated marketing and, over the next 50 years, they formed a series of tribes whose look, attitude and behaviour were inherently British. Where have all those tribes gone today?

Teds appeared first in the fifties, defining themselves by their flamboyant clothing, age and love of rock ’n’ roll.

Throughout the sixties, new groups kept emerging: Rockers, duffle-coated Beatniks, Mods and Bohemians. All were anti-establishment. When the baby boomers amalgamated causes under the broad banner of ‘hippy’, the messages of John Lennon and Tariq Ali caused consternation among the moral majority.

Joining a tribe gave youngsters a philosophical and cultural identity, plus a great new record collection. The seventies and eighties were the glory years: skinheads flicked a V sign at hippie culture, followed by suedeheads and Space Rockers dipped in LSD. The Northern Soul, Glam and diametrically opposed Prog and Pub Rock scenes all strutted down our high streets. Punk mutated into Post Punk and Anarcho

The way we were: Rick the rebel (Rik Mayall), Vyv the punk (Adrian Edmondson), hippy Neil (Nigel Planer) and cool Mike (Christopher Ryan). The Young Ones, 1982

Punk, to which there was a right-wing reaction with Oi, before New Romantics ditched the politics in favour of flamboyance. There was heavy regional bias to Headbangers and the Two-tone movement while the hairspray of Goths and Psychobillies threatened the ozone layer.

For a brief egalitarian moment at the end of the eighties, Ravers brought down the barriers of background and race, before promptly splitting into a manyheaded beast of mutually dismissive electronic styles. There were occasional cross-pollinations: Soul Boys & Disco, Punk & Rasta before New Age Travellers & Ravers bonded so successfully that the Major government felt the need to legislate against them. Crusties, Shoegaze and the Baggy phenomenon marked the last of the clearly identifiable pop cultural clans.

Music and fashion just didn’t have the same driving force as the millennium

drew to a close. New interests such as food and tech competed for attention, and dressing up was something embarrassing your mum and dad did.

The internet had the greatest impact.

When Spotify lists every song ever recorded and social media plugs you in to the world, there is no space for subcultures to incubate. Gaming, Grime and Skating persist but they are not as all-consuming as the original cliques, when every penny would be spent on your scene’s accoutrements and you would speak only to your kind.

Key motivating factors in joining tribes were revelling in the tabloid hysteria your leaders inspired and offending passers-by. But the shock value has gone and the tribal raison d’être with it. Old ladies just don’t care any more if you’ve got a green Mohican and a pet rat and you smell of solvent.

RIP the great youth tribes.

Al Farquhar The Oldie March 2022 13

Thirty years ago, Richard Ingrams, 84, created The Oldie. Sixty years ago, he set up Private Eye. Craig Brown salutes his hero

Our founding father

COURTESY OF CHRIS BEETLES GALLERY, LONDON / WWW.CHRISBEETLES.COM

M

ark Boxer once drew a caricature of Richard Ingrams dressed up as a schoolboy, wearing a tiny cap, sitting down with his hands lodged awkwardly between his legs, his mouth set in one of those upside-down smiles, like an upturned U, and a steely, unforgiving look in his eyes.

‘Caricature is a serious thing,’ wrote one of Ingrams’s favourite authors, G K Chesterton. ‘It is almost blasphemously serious. Caricature really means making a pig more like a pig than even God made him.’

Mark Boxer’s caricature seriously accentuates some of the key components of Ingrams’s character: his intransigence, his priggishness and what his enemies invariably term his ‘schoolboy’ sense of humour, though this, in my experience, is a term employed only by those for whom all humour is a mystery.

It is his sense of humour that defines him. Every year before COVID struck, Private Eye put on a show at the National Theatre. The key performers would remain onstage throughout while Richard and I sat in the wings together, awaiting our little moments in the spotlight.

I used to love sitting there in the semi-darkness alongside this figure who was one of my early heroes, hearing him chuckling along, ever hungry for the next laugh. Back in 1998, he delivered the eulogy at the funeral of our mutual friend John Wells, and spoke of their days writing Dear Bill and Mrs Wilson’s Diary together. They were, he said, among the happiest of his life.

Arthur Smith once wrote that laughter is a tiny escape into happiness. I imagine Richard would agree with this.

Satire too often employs humour as the servant of politics, as though the comedian’s highest aspiration should be comedy without jokes or, if you prefer, 14 The Oldie March 2022

comedy without comedy.

But, for Richard, the jokes have always been paramount. When his Oxford contemporary Dennis Potter attacked, in Isis, one particular play for being ‘uncommitted’, Ingrams printed a parody in his own magazine of a suitably ‘committed’ review of the Marx Brothers A Night in Casablanca. ‘The basic failure of the film,’ he wrote, ‘is due to the fact that it fails to assert the merits of a selfdeterminising stratocracy.

‘The point is so often sacrificed to some very irrelevant frivolity, and consequently the nihilistic tendencies of the virtually self-appointed seneschal are constantly being overstressed.’

Over the next 60-odd years, he dedicated his own peculiar genius to the notion that nothing is so sacred as to be beyond a joke. He warmly remembered his friend and mentor Claud Cockburn asking Willie Rushton, ‘Who’s the person who nobody’s got a bad thing to say about?’ Off the top of his head, Rushton suggested Albert Schweitzer.

‘Right, we’ll have a go at Schweitzer,’ replied Cockburn; and they did.

Ingrams often followed this random method. Was this fearless – or ruthless?

Mark Boxer’s caricature depicts something glacial in his eyes. People talk of his thick skin. He is both immune to criticism of himself and carefree in his criticism of others. Auberon Waugh once asked Christopher Logue if he was afraid of Ingrams. ‘So I said, “Yes, certainly. I’m

Richard Ingrams by Mark Boxer

afraid of Ingrams because I think if he thought that I’d done something wrong and he had to condemn me to death, he’d do so without a second’s thought. He’d regret having to do it, but he’d do it, and that would be the end of it.” ’ And Auberon said, ‘You know, I think you’re completely right.’

His biographer, Harry Thompson, identified in Ingrams what he called a ‘relentless capacity for revenge’. This might be overdoing it, but he certainly relishes a feud. That gentle, sweetnatured actor, the late Jonathan Cecil, who cornered the market in playing upper-class twits, first noticed this

DAVID HENSLEY

predilection when they were both students at Oxford: ‘Even then, I was puzzled by the almost venomous acerbity of Ingrams’s pen, contrasting with his personal gentleness.’

Of course, most of his prime targets deserved it: Robert Maxwell, Jeremy Thorpe, the Krays et al. He picked his enemies well. They all hated being figures of fun and, sensing this, he tried to goad them beyond endurance. In this, he seems to have succeeded. In the middle of Private Eye’s long-running feud with Jimmy Goldsmith (aka Sir James Goldfinger/ Sir Jammy Fishpaste), the louche publisher Anthony Blond bumped into Goldsmith, and found him seething at the latest cracks against him in Private Eye: ‘I will throw them into prison!’

Goldsmith thundered, ‘I will hound their wives, even in their widows’ weeds!’

I can picture Richard chuckling at this.

He chuckles at everything. I suspect he sees the human condition as essentially ridiculous, and the blind rage of his enemies its most absurd manifestation.

In his brief anthology of wit and wisdom, Quips and Quotes, he includes this observation from G K Chesterton: ‘It is easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous… Responsibility, a heavy and cautious responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody can do it. That is why so many tired, elderly and wealthy men go in for politics. They are responsible because they have not the strength of mind left to be irresponsible.’

He also quotes his old friend Malcolm Muggeridge: ‘Don’t believe everything you write in the newspapers.’

He relinquished his editorship of Private Eye in 1986 because he had grown bored of the responsibility of dealing with the endless libel suits, which were then, as now, the price irresponsibility pays to power.

With characteristic perversity, six years later, in the midst of one of those periodic crushes Britain has on ‘youth culture’, he hit on the idea of a magazine devoted to its opposite.

What to call it? Ian Hislop, his successor at Private Eye, suggested The Old Bore, but instead Richard opted for The Oldie. At the time, he was just 54.

‘This old-man thing, he’s been putting that on for years,’ noted his old schoolfriend Willie Rushton – who, as it happens, had long employed much the same act, to great comic effect.

Friends and enemies alike predicted a flop. ‘The Oldie is a joke. It will go down with all hands,’ predicted Peter McKay, who went on to become editor of Punch, before it went down with all hands. The Guardian predicted that The Oldie ‘will

So farewell then... Goodbye cover of the Oldie, 2014

prove that this satirist of a certain age, this doyen of the dinosaur hacks, this gerontosaurus rex, is committed only to the cares of his class, sex and generation’.

Julie Burchill greeted the first issue by sending a letter to its editor: ‘Congratulations on producing the most pathetic magazine ever published.’

Ever perverse, Ingrams welcomed such vituperation. ‘It was this letter from Julie Burchill that persuaded me that we might have a future. It was such a magnificent tribute from exactly the right sort of icon of modern Britain that I took some convincing it wasn’t a hoax.’

It turned out that his critics were barking up the wrong tree. From the start, The Oldie was much broader than the song sheet to old-bufferdom its rather narrow title suggested. Its contributors were many and various – Germaine Greer, Beryl Bainbridge, Richard Mabey, Auberon Waugh, Ruth Rendell, Lucinda Lambton, William Trevor, Jennifer Paterson – and Ingrams encouraged them to venture away from the beaten track. For instance, Patricia Highsmith, best known for her dark tales of murder and recrimination, contributed charming pen-drawings of Venice.

In its readiness to incorporate the past, The Oldie made the fixation of other newspapers and magazines on the here and now seem peculiarly limited.

Its wonderful range was best caught by my favourite feature, I Once Met, in

which random correspondents recalled chance meetings with the famous and infamous. An elderly reader remembered being attacked in an air-raid shelter by a policeman during the war, and narrowly escaping with her life. At the time, no one had believed her but, ten years later, when John Christie was put on trial for the murders at Rillington Place, she realised with a start that this was her assailant.

A TV producer remembered dealing with Evelyn Waugh before the BBC recording of Face to Face with John Freeman. ‘The name is Waugh – not Wuff!’ he barked. ‘But I called you Mr Waugh,’ Freeman protested. ‘No, no, I distinctly heard you say “Wuff”.’

And, as if to prove Claud Cockburn’s instincts right, one correspondent recalled an encounter with Albert Schweitzer that had turned unexpectedly sour. As a student at Oxford in 1932, the young Joseph Connolly – later to become known as master of the dummy keyboard – had been asked to assist the great humanitarian in an organ recital at New College. Connolly was in charge of pulling out the stops on the left, and Madame Schweitzer the stops on the right. Alas, Madame Schweitzer pulled a stop out at the wrong time.

‘Dr Schweitzer cut short his playing and, in a loud voice, thundered abuse at his poor, weeping wife and ordered her out of the organ loft.’

The Oldie March 2022 15

Mary Killen is charmed by the breed of daring, confident ladies’ man that’s fallen out of fashion

RIP the alpha male

W

hatever happened to the alpha male?

He still exists – but has had to go into hiding.

When the Duke of Edinburgh died, I considered his achievements. He carried out 22,219 solo royal engagements, and 637 overseas tours. He was a race-winning yachtsman, a helicopter and aeroplane pilot, a world-class polo-player, a crack shot and a world-champion carriagedriver until his 98th year.

His wife wore the crown, but behind the scenes he wore the trousers. He was well informed and made the decisions and his family went along with them. It was good for Britons to have such an exemplar to represent us on the world stage – a top-of-the-range, alpha male.

But where are the other alpha males in 2022?

Alpha males in general are no longer fashionable. How has it happened?

Sixty years ago, many women openly aspired to marry a rich, powerful man.

The woman saw her contribution as looking good and providing pleasant company. In public, she would park her own personality and just come in ‘on the wake’ of her charismatic, popular husband – smiling.

Of course she was smiling. The alpha wife had fur coats, jewellery, villas abroad, yachts and protection from the unpleasantnesses of the real world. Her husband went out to the coalface and his well-rested wife had only to be nice to him for three waking hours a day.

But in the early ’60s came the pill and second-wave Feminism. Women, who had been perfectly happy having all the glorious mental privacy allowed by the man’s being out at work all day, read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and now felt unsettled about their lack of intellectual fulfilment.

16 The Oldie March 2022

Roll on 60 years. Young couples need two salaries to start a family. The woman has no mental privacy and still has to do the bulk of the housework alongside her full-time job. The children are all naughty right through to adulthood.

Not all oestrogens can be filtered out of the water supply – so we have had 60 years of being microdosed by the pill and HRT. We have all been slightly gender bent – and got plumper. Men used to have hairy chests – younger men don’t.

Or if they do grow a smattering of fluff, they have it waxed off.

Do we women now want to compete with alpha males rather than be protected by them?

The loss of positive alpha-male role models is startling. As Tory MP Nick Fletcher noted, why have Dr Who, Luke Skywalker and the Equaliser all been replaced by women? And why are so many people assuming a woman will play the next James Bond?

Fletcher pointed out that this leaves ‘only Tommy Shelby [the gang leader in Peaky Blinders] and the Kray twins as role models for young men – no wonder so many are turning to crime’.

Sixty years ago, business was always driven by thrusting alpha males. A professional speechwriter for business leaders tells me, ‘That sort of leadership would not go down well today. You cannot lead millennials in the way they led the staff in Mad Men. Today, you need soft skills; feminine skills. The CEO’s main leadership skill is to be hyperaware of where the next potential lawsuit about misgendering, sexism or workplace harassment might be coming from.’

There were more alpha males – authoritative, butch leaders in the past – because there was a call for them. Men were physically stronger than women.

They had to go out of the caves, tackle

Alpha baddie: Tommy Shelby

lions and go to war.

Today, society instead requires empathy.

But does the alpha still exist? Yes, but apart from Boris Johnson and Jeremy Clarkson, we don’t see him so much. In public, the modern alpha male has to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Tony Blair, for example. ‘There is no way you get to be prime minister without being an alpha,’ says the business speechwriter.

‘The alpha enjoys risk, competition, striving to achieve a goal, ruthlessness. So how come Tony Blair was so feminised and metrosexual, boasting of changing nappies in Downing Street? Clearly he had tuned in to alpha-phobia and was responding to the requirements of half the electorate, while disarming the other half by pretending not to be a threat.’

While male leaders channel their inner female, female leaders are trying to take on more masculine traits. Look at Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted fraudster, head of the disastrous Theranos blood-testing company, with the deep man’s voice she developed deliberately to give herself gravitas.

But, still, undercover, the alpha male exerts an attraction for his air of cool command. Even the toughest feminists soften on the impact of his stamina, cool confidence, mastery on the dance floor, ability to catch the waiter’s eye and to insist to the sommelier that the wine is corked, and decisiveness behind the wheel.

And his lack of inhibition when lunging – he knows from experience that the lunge will be welcome. He knows that who dares wins. These days, his omegamale competitors often don’t dare.

My true ghost story Barry Humphries didn’t believe in ghosts – until one helped him out in an Adelaide cemetery

L

ast night I found a smudge of lipstick on my COVID mask.

I don’t drink or suffer memory lapses and have no recollection of any intimate encounter that might have created this crimson blemish.

In my previous – very popular – column in this periodical, I described a romance with Audrey Hepburn, long whiles agone, brutally cut short by a Procrustean elevator. Audrey may well have materialised in a burst of ectoplasm on New Year’s Eve, and resumed her amorous attentions.

To many, this may seem a far-fetched explanation, but it is the one that I offered my wife, who respects my interest in the supernatural.

I am regularly haunted and, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I find the ghosts of past loves to be the most terrible. There is an alcove in my library which I call ‘spooky corner’. Here you will find my large collection of ‘unsettling’ literature, from Poe to Phyllis Paul.

All those Victorian women writers are there, many of a rare excellence, and I believe that a well-told ghost story requires all the imaginative and technical skills of a great writer. The author of a truly spooky tale needs to have an understanding of houses, for it is in these human habitations that the most frightening phantoms frolic.

This may be why Edith Wharton’s ghost stories are so effective – her first book (1897) was The Decoration of Houses. If you can describe the prosaic and palpable fabric of a house and its contents, you can the more effectively haunt it.

18 The Oldie March 2022

The flat stone (detail, left) at the foot of the obelisk is Percy Grainger’s tombstone. West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide

I am at one with the witty and acerbic Marquise du Deffand. She was asked, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ She replied, ‘No, but I am afraid of them.’

Although I have never actually seen a ghost, I am convinced that, on several occasions in my life, I have been ‘guided’.

One of my heroes is Percy Grainger (1882-1961). This extraordinary musician, Melbourne-born friend of Grieg and Gershwin, composer, virtuoso, inventor, flagellant and most charming of men once shook my hand when, as a schoolboy, I visited him at the small

museum of his memorabilia on the campus of Melbourne University.

Although Grainger was then resident in America, he had built this eccentric and hermetic repository in the city of his birth to encourage young music students.

Entry was available by application at the Conservatorium of Music, but few students, if any, sought to inspect the exhibits, which Grainger himself came to Melbourne once a decade to maintain and augment.

It was on one of his rare visits that I waylaid him and was taken on a personal tour of the museum. There were the lederhosen of Henry Balfour Gardiner, a sadly neglected British composer, and a holograph manuscript by Frederick Delius. Beside a bust of Scriabin and Roger Quilter’s toothbrush, there was a collection of vintage photographs of Percy with Grieg, who regarded Percy as the greatest exponent of his famous piano concerto, of which he made a definitive recording in 1920.

A curiosity of this museum was discovered only in recent years when an enthusiastic researcher disinterred a collection of envelopes containing fibrous gleanings culled by the famous composer. A distinguished Australian diplomat and arts minister has described the source of these supposedly erotic souvenirs as clippings from the ‘welcome mats’ of Grainger’s female students.

Catalogued and conserved, they may be inspected by arrangement with the Conservatorium of Music.

Some 20 years ago, after a performance of one of my shows in Adelaide, a journalist friend suggested that we pay a midnight visit to the vast

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, AUSTRALIA / GIFT OF L GORDON DARLING AC CMG AND MARILYN DARLING AC 1998 / DONATED THROUGH THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT’S CULTURAL GIFTS PROGRAM / SHANE PUGH

West Terrace Cemetery to pay our respects to Percy Grainger. I had not known that his grave was in Adelaide, but my friend assured me that he knew its exact location.

Surprised to find the cemetery gates wide open, we drove the car into a broad and sombre avenue. At this point, my friend broke down and confessed that he had absolutely no idea where to find Percy’s grave. He’d been telling porkies.

It was then that I summoned my Guide. ‘Please, Spirit, help me!’ I remember saying under my breath.

We drove on in the darkness, until suddenly I told my friend Peter to stop the car. Seizing a torch from the glove box, I plunged into the tangled weeds and briars, stumbling on, totally obedient to the internal promptings of my Guide. I turned left, turned right, then left again, the beam from my torch dancing ahead, and noxious foliage slapping my face. I battled even deeper into the dank boscage, and turned another corner, tripping on brambles and wild, overgrown fennel.

Feral fennel, actually.

Suddenly, the wavering beam from the torch hit a lopsided, white, marble obelisk, fissured like old bone.

At that point, a mechanical voice should have said, ‘You have arrived at your destination.’

Emerging from my trance, I heard my friend Peter yelling from the car yards away in the blackness. ‘Sorry, Barry – my cock-up. Let’s call it a day.’

But there, in a place of 60,000 graves, in the dark, without a map, I’d found Percy. Or had Percy found me? Now that Grainger is no longer dismissed in Australia as a ratbag, and properly regarded as an Internationally Respected Ratbag, his monument has been cleaned up and disinterred from the jungle of neglect – not yet ‘reimagined’.

Returning to Melbourne many years ago, I engaged a taxi at the aerodrome to take me to visit my recently widowed mother. It was a 50-minute trip and a nice fare for the driver, and why would he mind the capricious route that I suggested? But was it really I who had suggested it?

After 24 hours in a plane, I was disorientated and somehow disembodied, and I heard myself say,

I must have accidentally flipped the switch on my psychic satnav

Portrait of the artiste as a young man: Barry Humphries in 1958, oil on canvas, by Clifton Pugh (1924-90)

‘Don’t take the usual route, driver. I’m sick of it. Pretend I’m some ignorant tourist and take me on the scenic drive.’

I was rich in those days: rich and reckless. And I must have accidentally flipped the switch on my psychic satnav.

We passed through strange suburbs, the names of which I had only ever seen on trams, and I was in the alternative Melbourne. Cities of one’s birth are endless and constantly revealing themselves to their inhabitants. That is why so many people never leave home.

But I felt impelled by an inner voice, my Guide. ‘Stop here!’ I suddenly adjured the driver, having glimpsed a nondescript terrace house with a shingle proclaiming it was an Art Gallery.

I knocked on the door and it was answered by a young man with a beard.

Beards were then rare and imparted an artistic look. Later they became the uniform of the advertising executive and director of commercials who wanted to identify as artistic. Now they are just too busy to shave.

‘Who told you to come here?’ demanded the proprietor, for it was he.

I felt I couldn’t betray my supernatural source – so I just told him that I had been passing and stopped by on a whim.

‘I’ve just put up that sign outside. So you are my first customer,’ he said, regarding me with suspicion. ‘Are you sure no one told you to come here?’

He led me up a narrow, freshly painted staircase.

‘Actually, you are not quite my first customer, because a chap sold me a picture this morning.’

He flung open a door into a large, white room. Today, I suppose it would be called a ‘space’; and he would be called a ‘gallerist’.

‘I haven’t hung anything yet, but that’s the picture I picked up this morning.’

There, on the far wall, was me!

It was a portrait painted by my friend Clifton Pugh in the fifties of last century, and long presumed lost. It depicted me in a gaunt, ‘aesthetic’ pose.

When I returned to my patiently waiting cab, it was with a large painting in tow. It’s now a star attraction in the Australian National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

Since then, in passing an antiquarian bookshop, an art gallery or Belgian chocolate boutique, I have always responded to those insistent injunctions from the ‘twilight zone’ - and I have never been disappointed.

The Oldie March 2022 19

Sport’s golden oldies Some athletes defy their age and go on competing for ever.

Michael Beloff explains how

PA IMAGES / ZUMA PRESS / ALAMY

A

mong Michael Caine’s contributions to the English phrasebook is ‘Obsession is a young man’s game.’ So, famously, is mathematics. And until recently one might have said too that games are a young man’s game.

There were, of course, always exceptions to that rule. Stanley Matthews last donned his England shirt aged 42 and played in England’s top football division when he was 50. W G Grace, a most eminent Victorian, was a Test-match cricketer at 50 and was still playing first-class cricket at 66.

But even he had to yield his podium place to Raja Maharaj Singh, the oldest cricketer ever to have played a first-class game, at 72, in 1950 – with a day job as Governor of Bombay.

But these records were set in more leisured times, when sport wasn’t a roundthe-clock, round-theglobe occupation and was in many areas, at least nominally, an amateur one.

Now new marks are regularly set by golden almost-oldies. Phil Mickelson, with his win at the 2021 PGA Championship, became the oldest major championship winner in history at 50 years, 11 months and 7 days. His even more famous rival Tiger Woods was still competitive into his forties and might have emulated Mickelson had not his driving of a motor car been less proficient than his driving with a golf club, resulting in serious injuries.

Tom Brady, the best American footballer of all time, is the only quarterback to win a Super Bowl in three different decades – most recently, last year, at the age of 43.

The sprinter Justin Gatlin, at 39, would all but certainly have been in Team USA for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics had they not anachronistically taken place in 2021.

Evander Holyfield the only four-time world heavyweight champion, boxed on at the age of 58 – if for less than a round.

Tennis has long been dominated by the three middle-aged musketeers of the racquet, Federer (aged 40), Nadal (35) and Djokovic (34), tied on 20 grand slams until the Australian Open.

Djokovic’s ban meant Nadal was set to break the deadlock.

So why do these sports persons all choose to linger on while they can? Money more than ever makes the sports world go round. Billie Jean King was given a £49 voucher for the first of her three Wimbledon wins in 1966.

This year’s winner – could you even recall Ashleigh Barty’s name?

– earned more than two million pounds on court and far more off it.

Veteran pugilists well past their sell-by date fight on to fight off the rapacious claims of the Revenue or first wives – or just à la recherche du temps perdu.

Another reason is the lack of an after-sporting life. If one has enjoyed not Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame but 15 years or more of the same commodity, its end can lead to a depression still greater than the stress of success suffered by active competitors – think the candid revelations of Ben Stokes, Simone Biles and Tyson Fury.

What else is there to do? A transition to meeting and greeting is a cruel and unusual punishment – suffered even by the legendary Joe Louis. Or there’s commentating in the media – and exposure to the truth that star performances From top: Tom Brady, 44; Stanley Matthews played until he was 50; Roger Federer, 40

on the field don’t automatically translate to star performances behind the microphone. Or running a pub in the time of COVID with a declining clientele, who don’t even recognise your name.

These oldie athletes continue also simply because they can. Love of sport is no fleeting romance. In most sports, masters’ tournaments proliferate. In track and field, a M105 age division has had to be newly formed for centenarians.

Stanisław Kowalski, born 14th April 1910 in what is now Poland, became the oldestever competing athlete, aged 105, setting records in sprinting, shot put and discus – truly a Pole apart.

Better diet, better training and better equipment have everywhere raised sporting standards. An impertinent journalist once asked Sir Donald Bradman, whose lifetime batting average fell only marginally under 100, what he thought he would average if he were playing against modern bowlers with their professionalism and their approach to fitness.

‘Oh, about 50, I suppose,’ came the reply.

‘Do you really think cricketers have improved that much?’ said the journalist.

Bradman responded, as ever scoring freely, ‘You have to remember I’m over 90.’

In his 1951 farewell address to Congress, General Douglas MacArthur, then 71, said, ‘Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.’ Old athletes do die. But now they fade away more gradually than ever.

Michael Beloff QC sits on the Court of Arbitration for Sport on behalf of the International Olympic Committee The Oldie March 2022 21

Auberon Waugh, an Oldie founder, was a kind, malicious, angry, genial crusader for justice. By his friend A N Wilson

The great Waugh story

NICHOLAS GARLAND

I

t is 21 years since Auberon Waugh, an Oldie founding father, died, aged only 61, on 16th January 2001.

Readers of the frequently cruel productions of his fluent pen, not least his Rage column in The Oldie, might be surprised that all my memories are of his personal benignity. This paradox is exemplified in an evening we spent together a few years before his death.

Four of us – Bron, two young journalists and I – entered the restaurant. I watched a sheepish expression pass over Bron’s face.

We were passing a woman of about his age – late fifties – who was evidently in the company of a daughter and her young man. Bron, wreathed in what seemed apologetic smiles, approached them, slightly bowed and laughed politely at the woman’s greetings, and we were then shown to our table.

When we were settled, I asked Bron who the lady was. He said she was a Somerset neighbour not seen for a number of years. I explained to the younger journalists that when they were still playing with dolls or colouring books, Bron had a Diary in Private Eye which, in issue after issue, was filled with some of the cruellest but also the funniest prose ever written.

The surname of the woman at the nearby table had awakened in me the memory of who she was. She and her husband had employed a Filipino servant. Private Eye in those days published lists of those among the privileged classes who made the selfish decision to employ Filipinos on very low wages. His entry, written when this woman’s husband had just died, now returned to my mind. The cause of death, 22 The Oldie March 2022

Auberon Waugh (1939-2001) and the mascot of his Way of the World column in the Daily Telegraph, which ran from 1990 to 2000.

Both pictures by Nicholas Garland

Bron revealed to readers of the Eye, was gluttony. He had eaten the servant.

More or less every convention of decency had been offended by Bron’s joke, which of course was why he had made it. Therein was one part of his character. Another was revealed in the fact that his Somerset neighbour was so charmed by his manner, when they met in person, that she was prepared to smile with him as he came into the restaurant.

The third element – one that Bron himself would vigorously have played down, or openly denied – was that, like Dean Swift, a writer to whom he was in many ways similar, he used indecency as a weapon against indecency.

One of his children he had christened Biafra, and he had been tireless in his exposure of the British Government’s knowing involvement in that disgusting piece of post-colonial genocide in the late

1960s and in the attempts to cover it up.

Mingled with the many different and paradoxical elements of his nature – the benignity and the malice, the anger and the geniality – there was a powerful sense of justice.

He deplored ‘campaigning’ journalism in others, particularly when practised by Dame Harold Evans (as he called the then editor of the Sunday Times).

That newspaper’s many selfcongratulatory ‘campaigns’ to expose this or that supposed evil would be compared

by Bron to his least-favourite figure in Fleet Street History – W T Stead, who had published an article in the Pall Mall Gazette ‘exposing’ ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, demonstrating the supposed ease with which you could cheaply buy a child on the streets of London for sexual purposes.

Bron hated self-righteousness more than anything. He thought that the mere wish to be a politician demonstrated mental derangement.

But he did share with his fellow Private Eye columnist Paul Foot a sense of fury at the injustice of things. Until he had a flat of his own in London, he always stayed, for his three or four nights in town each week, with Trotskyite Paul Foot in the outer reaches of East London.

On Fridays, he would return to Combe Florey, to the house in Somerset where his father Evelyn Waugh had died on the lavatory after Easter Mass, celebrated according to the Tridentine Rite in 1966.

After the great novelist’s death, the house had in fact been bought by Bron’s wife, Teresa, a formidably clever, beautiful woman, to whom he was devoted.

They shared a love of France, where they had a house, of food and wine, and of their four children – as well as fondness for a wide circle of friends.

They were extremely good hosts. It was a sometimes abrasive relationship. I remember, when I was staying there once, Teresa and I agreed on admiring W B Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse which begins, famously, with a prose extract from Walter Pater’s description of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

Bron would not let us sit on the sofa and gush, as he saw it, over Pater. A real row developed – no doubt alcohol-fuelled.

There was a robust, English philistinism in Bron’s nature – it was the only thing about him I found unappealing. He had more in common with his bald uncle, Alec Waugh, than with his Victorian-aesthete, biographerof-Rossetti father, Arthur Waugh. Bron liked Gilbert and Sullivan, and distrusted poetry that did not rhyme. I do not think he knew what poetry or music were.

Richard Ingrams once asked me whether an entry in Bron’s Eye Diary on the death of the Duke of Norfolk was meant seriously: ‘When a great nobleman dies, we are all diminished.’ He would have shared this belief with another West Country journalist and fellow scribbler, Anthony Powell. In fact, as was notorious, Bron abominated ‘Toni’.

A Dance to the Music of Time was French knitting. The Diary was full of entries in which ‘Toni’ was to be found lugubriously knitting on the seats of public lavatories. Powell attributed the obsession to the ‘inherent sadism’ (he pronounced it sah-deezm, with emphasis on the second syllable) of the Waughs.

When she knew that Bron was dying, Teresa alerted all his close friends and allowed us to troop through the house to make our farewells. It was a time when most families would shelter behind a stockade, but she opened the doors to all, including some truly awful girlfriends.

The doctors had given Bron only days to live when Ingrams and I entered his bedroom. He was still benign, smiling, courteous, trying to speak and laughing at his new inability to do so coherently.

He managed to say, that, in the end, nothing would be seen to have mattered that much. At the funeral, his family had someone sing the song from Goethe’s

Faust – ‘There was a king in Thule’ – about the toping monarch who was given a golden beaker by the woman he loved.

Did he retain any of his father’s faith?

Undoubtedly when, as a young man on National Service, he had accidentally let off a machine-gun into himself, removing a finger, his spleen, a lung and half his insides, he still was a Catholic.

Evelyn Waugh’s letters proudly dwell on young Bron’s piety and courage as he lay apparently dying.

Teresa told me once that, in later life, he had no belief, and she would probably know. Were his denunciations of the ‘Blue Peter religion’ of the modern RC church a tribute to the lost old faith of his father? Maybe.

With every passing 5th November, I always miss the article he wrote, calling on the Pope to canonise Guy Fawkes for his sensible attempt to blow monarch and Parliament sky high. But then I also treasure the article written in 1982, when Pope John Paul II visited England.

Bron urged the Metropolitan Police to arrest the Pope at the airport, for his part in the murder of the papal banker Roberto Calvi – found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets full of bricks and hundreds of thousands of used dollar bills.

The Oldie March 2022 23

Right royal madness When Benedict King was diagnosed as bipolar, he realised he had something in common with George III

DONALD COOPER / ALAMY

T

aking up the latest fashion in one’s fifties is ill advised, but sometimes one just can’t help oneself.

So it was when I was inadvertently catapulted into the ranks of the ultratrendy last year, diagnosed as mentally ill. Bipolar, to be precise. It is very rare for people over 40 to be so diagnosed.

I was over 50.

Still, my late diagnosis was eclipsed by that of George III. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as the root of his madness by Andrew Roberts in his biography of the king, published last autumn – when George would have been 283.

Bipolarity is an odd disease. It makes you think and behave in the strangest ways. When you are at your illest, you can be utterly certain you are well. In the grip of my most recent mania, I convinced myself I was playing an important role in some Great Drama. What drama and what role I can’t explain.

The upshot was lots of apparently unconnected, bizarre behaviour. I deliberately broke up precious musical instruments I owned, and pinged off random emails, more or less batty, to various friends, family and acquaintances. I donned one of my wife’s dresses because I thought (entirely erroneously) that might amuse her.

I pulled up the ‘Keep off’ signs on the cricket square of a local school, shouting at the bewildered boys nearby to help me.

At one point, for some reason, I mixed myself a large cocktail composed of champagne, elderflower cordial and wee (mine).

I barely slept at all in a week, slowly building up the most absurd convictions that the most straightforward countervailing evidence could not budge. By the end, I literally couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. Although I could see it was dark outside, it seemed to have been light for only a very short time.

Vexed rex: Nigel Hawthorne in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III, 1993

This led me to believe that time had ceased to work in the usual way. I surmised that I had actually died and was walking the earth like a zombie. Under this assumption, I went for a stroll into town with my fairy godmother, by then my constant companion. Since I was dead, I imagined only other dead people would see me properly.

But if that was right, there were an unusually large number of zombies out for a good time that Saturday night.

My fairy godmother convinced me there was no need to take a wallet and told me how to get a drink without having to pay. Remarkably, that did work. Less positively, the ghostly pub crawl ended early when I was picked up and sectioned.

Some of the details might sound vaguely amusing. And, indeed, my manic episodes did feel enjoyable in some ways … to me. But for my nearest and dearest, trying to look after me was a nightmare.

My depressive psychosis left me with no amusing anecdotes. It finished with a suicide attempt, then a week in intensive care, followed by my first stretch in a psychiatric hospital.

Wards in psychiatric hospitals are not designed to raise the spirits of the new arrival. Doors and windows are firmly

locked. There are no pictures on the wall, no seats on the loos, no hooks for hanging your towels (or yourself) in the showers and no plugs. In short, outside well-monitored, communal areas, where you can find TVs, games and books, there is nothing that might allow you to harm yourself. A musty smell of unwashed socks permeates the place. High steel walls ring the garden. It’s not a prison, but it feels like one.

It’s certainly not Windsor Castle, where King George was largely confined.

But, in spite of the grim surroundings, great efforts are expended by all staff, mainly nurses and health-care assistants, to treat all patients with respect – even love – at all times. A real culture is built round this and it makes a massive difference. Without that – and modern drugs – the confinement would be hell and extended. With it, patients are mainly cured and returned eventually to normal life outside.

Poor George III, as Roberts relates, was frequently straitjacketed during his illnesses. Some of the other treatments prescribed by his ignorant doctors amounted almost to torture.

Most of us have dreamt of being magicked back in time to the Regency period with its empire-line dresses, bucks in exquisite tailoring, Palladian houses, romantic poets and martial glory. The list of attractions is endless. But it’s odd how when we think of the Regency, we forget its cause, the blind and deaf old madman with a long white beard, holed up in Windsor Castle.

And if the king was treated so badly, what hope for other bipolar sufferers of the time? We may over-egg the whole mental-health thing a bit these days, but for the genuinely ill the current era has everything to recommend it.

The meanest and most distressed subject of our present Queen is treated not just with better knowledge and drugs, but with more dignity than the King of England 200 years ago.

The Oldie March 2022 25

Laughter – and tears – in court Former Supreme Court Justice Simon Brown only changed a sentence twice: in a very funny case – and a very tragic one

O

nce a judge passes a sentence, he has 28 days to change it if he wishes. This power is seldom exercised – no doubt because judges seldom have the time or the inclination to reconsider decisions.

Only twice in my eight years on the High Court Bench did I alter sentences I had originally passed.

The first, not long after my appointment to the Bench, was a most tragic case, for which there could never have been an obviously right answer.

It was a mercy killing, by a husband of his wife. They were both old. She was incurably and painfully ill. It cannot have been a straightforward mercy killing or, under our law, it would have been murder – just as a gangland killing or any other sort of intentional killing is murder. And all murders attract a life sentence, although release dates vary widely.

The sentence I originally passed was 18 months’ imprisonment – a conspicuously light sentence, even for a killing that was provoked, or mitigated by diminished responsibility.

Judges are taught that all criminal killings are serious offences – and obviously to be discouraged. Those committing them need to expiate their guilt and come to terms with the enormity of their wrongdoing.

As the days passed, the thought of this old man, locked up in a prison cell, got to me and filled me with gloom. He was cut off from his family and friends, grieving for a wife with whom he had lived lovingly for more than half a century. Yes, he had killed her, but only because he could no longer bear to watch her suffering.

Is there really much point in being a judge if one cannot correct an injustice such as I now felt this to be? I therefore 26 The Oldie March 2022

had the case relisted before me and suspended what was left of the sentence I had earlier passed.

In the other case, it was laughter, not tears, that made me reduce the sentence.

It came during one of my circuit visits to Sheffield. The defendant, an 18-year-old local lad, was pleading guilty to two counts of attempted armed robbery. On a Saturday night, in the outskirts of the city, desperate for a few drinks but with no money to pay for them, this youth had hatched his plan. On a piece of paper, he wrote, ‘I’ve got a knife in my pocket.

Hand over everything in the till or I’ll kill you.’

He took this to the first place he found that was open. This happened to be a small Chinese takeaway with a single elderly Chinese gentleman at the counter. Thrusting the note at him, the defendant stood back expectantly.

What he had not counted on was that this man couldn’t read English.

Assuming the note to be a written takeaway order for sweet and sour pork or whatever, he smilingly indicated he would take it upstairs to the kitchen.

Moments later, his irate son came storming down the stairs, wielding a large metal wok to attack this presumptuous youth. The defendant ran off up the street.

But not far up the street because, before long, he came to a small Turkish restaurant. There, prominently displayed on the counter, sat a large doner kebab machine. Noting again that there was only one member of staff inside (in fact,

the Turkish owner), the defendant went in and showed him a duplicate copy of the one he’d had to leave behind at the Chinese takeaway.

Waiting nervously while the owner deciphered the note, the defendant failed to notice behind the counter the large, sword-like knife used for slicing meat off the doner kebab. The owner suddenly seized this and brandished it furiously at the defendant – who once again fled back out on to the street, straight into the arms of the local police, responding to the 999 call from the Chinese takeaway.

Two attempted armed robberies – even with no previous criminal record to speak of – merited at least the five-year sentence I initially passed.

But at dinner that night with my fellow judges, I couldn’t resist telling this story. We all started laughing at its absurdity and at the sheer incompetence of this aspiring robber.

As the days passed, I found myself continuing to chuckle whenever I thought of it. So I decided that a five-year term was not necessary. So gormless a youth was unlikely to progress into serious adult criminality. Surely he must have recognised by now that he really wasn’t cut out for such a career.

I had the case relisted and found a form of words – other than that the offences had reduced the judges’ lodgings to helpless laughter – to justify reducing the sentence to two years concurrent on each count.

I doubt whether anyone suffered later from such leniency on my part.

And it certainly saved the taxpayer quite a lot of money.

Simon Brown is author of Second Helpings (published by Marble Hill)

Thirty years of laughs Valerie Grove, our radio reviewer since the first issue, recalls the birth of The Oldie and the three joyous decades that followed

Oldie launch at Wheeler’s, 1992 Back row: John Mortimer, Larry Adler, Roy Greenslade, Carmen Callil, Miles Kington, Naim Attallah, W F Deedes. Front row: Jennifer Paterson, Candida Lycett Green, Richard Ingrams, Beryl Bainbridge, Harry Enfield

I

n 1991, a caucus of middle-aged public-school chaps half-jestingly set about launching a magazine with what seemed a terrible name, The Oldie. (‘Why not Old Bastard?’ suggested one reader.)

Actually, John McEwen the art critic – now our Bird Man – says the idea came to him in a dream: a magazine for elders, called not Saga but Sage. Richard Ingrams, late of Private Eye, and Alexander Chancellor, late of the Spectator, met over a pub lunch. They were taken with this notion: an antidote to the cult of youth; a riposte to all things new-fangled – ‘the ugly debris of the 20th century’, as Ingrams put it.

Auberon Waugh and Patrick Marnham came on board. Stephen Glover, co-founder of the Independent, was approached for advice about backers; he became their fourth investor. Nobody was over 54, but all were photographed donning their reading glasses. Ingrams’s anarchic spirit prevailed. The Oldie (despite protests from some potential buyers) was to be the name.

Two feminist publishers (Carmen Callil of Virago and Liz Calder of Bloomsbury) threatened to launch a rival to this all-male enterprise, to be called The Crone.

But Ingrams was already recruiting a harem, starting with Germaine Greer, Candida Lycett Green, Beryl Bainbridge 28 The Oldie March 2022

and the Spectator’s in-house cook, the jolly, smoking, motorcycling Jennifer Paterson, soon to become one of the Two Fat Ladies on TV. ‘Pound three hard egg yolks…’ began her recipe for a hollandaise sauce to adorn Ingrams’s fish-finger suppers.

There was a launch party at the Groucho. The husky-voiced Emma Soames, then deputy editor, recalls the early days in a chaotic office, where everything was ‘totally unprofessional’. ‘There were no brainstorming meetings – there were no meetings! I would say, “Shouldn’t we produce a dummy?” and Richard would say, “What for?” But he had a commendably clear idea of what The Oldie was about, and every news programme and paper clamoured to interview him.’

Auberon Waugh claimed, in his Rage column, that the single event that propelled The Oldie into existence was the memorial tribute to Freddie Mercury ‘an ugly and untalented, possibly unpleasant Persian singer from Zanzibar’.

Everyone knew that Bron’s splenetic bark was far worse than his bite, but Tim Rice rightly leapt to Mercury’s defence anyway.

‘Congratulations on producing the most pathetic magazine ever published,’ wrote Julie Burchill. Ingrams proudly made this the lead letter in the second issue.

He also printed A N Wilson’s letter in the form of an Augustan ode (reprinted in

the Old Un’s Notes in this issue), imploring The Oldie to carry on the ethos of Private Eye and rage at the follies of the world.

Many readers shared this expectation – hence the first issue’s sales of 100,000 – ‘but it was never intended to be Eye Mark II’, says Ingrams. Still, a 2012 issue he edited did feature an Eye-like exposé, by Miles Goslett, of the late Jimmy Savile’s crimes and misdemeanours.

Instead of publishing exposés, The Oldie specialised in venerating the venerable and traditional, deploring neologisms of modern life – in the first issue, a bewigged judge asked, ‘What is “Heavy Metal”?’ It welcomed readers’ tales for slots such as I Once Met (chance encounters with famous people) and Not Many Dead (trivial news stories about celebs, eg ‘Singer Billy Joel gashed his finger on the lid of a tin of beans he was opening for his dinner’ – Daily Mirror).

In the first issue, Jilly Cooper produced her list of pin-ups: ‘I really wanted to include Richard [Ingrams] – the most beautiful man ever, don’t you think?’ she says now. Invited to give us her pin-ups again for our 400th issue, in 2021, she included just one repeat: Andrew Parker Bowles, the ‘blue-eyed brigadier who was incredibly brave in the Army – and rode in the Grand National’.

Ned Sherrin boldly became Ned the

Dead, covering memorial services. Barry Humphries’s creation Dame Edna soon had a column – ‘I am a Renaissance woman, possums.’ Sara Wheeler, Arctic traveller, was sent out on stunts: ‘Richard sent me to learn to belly dance, and Willie Rushton drew me at it; then Richard sent me to the London School of Striptease to learn the ropes for a piece (I banned Willie).

Then Richard said I was past it, and sent me on a plumbing course.’ She cherishes a framed copy of the Rushton drawing.

At Oldie events, much fun was had.

Drinking and smoking were almost obligatory, though Ingrams, casting inscrutable blue eyes over all social occasions, indulged in neither. Everyone gravitated to the inimitable sound of laughter from Alexander Chancellor, his cloud of smoke mingling with that of Bron Waugh, Beryl Bainbridge and Alice Thomas Ellis (who wrote the God slot), Jennifer Paterson and Miles Kington: all blithely smoking themselves to death, alas.

There were Oldie lunches at Simpson’s – notably the Oldie of the Year awards, presented successively by a variety of legends including Terry Wogan and Gyles Brandreth. You never knew who you’d sit next to: wicked Wilfred De’Ath, uproarious Admiral Lord West, the Hancock scriptwriters Galton and Simpson, or Sir Edward Ford, the Queen’s Private Secretary who had recently coined the term annus horribilis. (Ford’s son David was Oldie business manager.)

You would certainly encounter The Oldie’s saviours – Naim Attallah, John Paul Getty, human dynamo James Pembroke – who all revived the mag whenever it seemed about to go under; plus Jeremy Lewis, pillar of The Oldie, our patron saint ‘Jezza’.

Ingrams’s favoured lunch venue was a greasy spoon in Soho called The Star.

Here we first met Edward Enfield, newly retired civil servant, father of the great comedian Harry. Harry suggested his dad should write for The Oldie – and how right he was. The World According to Enfield Senior kicked off with his description of

Clockwise: Jilly Cooper and Oldie of the Year Basil Brush, 2018; Willie Rushton; Joanna Lumley and Terry Wogan; Germaine Greer; Alexander Chancellor and Barry Cryer, Oldie lunch, 2014

having his four offspring home for Christmas, ‘sprawling about the place using foul language and laughing immoderately’.

An instant success: Enfield Senior forged a new career as author, voiceover artist and Anne Robinson’s crusty-old-buffer sidekick on the BBC’s Watchdog.

In 2006, The Oldie first went cruising – on Swan Hellenic’s Minerva II, bound for Leptis Magna in Libya. ‘Sir Richard’, as the captain called him, was by nature cruiseaverse. But, with The Oldie’s agony aunt Mavis Nicholson on his arm (‘Mavis and I are an item,’ he said), Ingrams acquired a dashing Berber hat and coat from a souk.

He discovered a keyboard and began accompanying the sweet young flautist who played Bach and Mozart on deck every night. He was even seen dancing one night in the Orpheus Bar. Our cabaret performer Maureen Lipman’s hilarious imitation of an Arab tour guide in the medina of Tunis would definitely de-platform her today.

Our next editor, Alexander Chancellor, was another ace pianist who only ever sought amusement, and could never tolerate being bored. One night, he met Brigid Keenan at dinner, was instantly captivated and made her fashion editor.

One memorable Tuesday, during an Oldie literary luncheon, he fell sound asleep at his table in Simpson’s and crashed to the floor.

Luckily, the speaker (it was Terry Waite) seemed not to notice and blithely carried on.

Our third and present editor, Harry Mount, arrived on his bicycle, exuding fitness and youth. Luckily he was able to reassure us, the aged regulars, that in spirit he had been an old fogey since the age of five.

Like Richard Osborne, our distinguished and scholarly music critic who lives at Eton, I joined The Oldie (writing about Wireless) in its first issue. I was 45. So I have grown old along with The Oldie. By chance Mary Kenny (my friend since 1967 when we met on the Evening Standard Diary) also appeared in the first issue.

She interviewed Monsignor Francis Bartlett for Still With Us, and he died within weeks. (‘Such a sweetie,’ she recalls, ‘who told me it’s never a problem keeping servants if you have plenty of babies and funerals.’) Thirty years on, Mary and I are still here, doubly bonded – since her second son married my second daughter – as co-grandmothers of three adorable (of course) grandchildren.

One day, they will find me in my study, buried alive under towering columns of Oldies: all 410 of them are stored in chronological order. I sometimes flick through a selection of the thousands of cartoons which Ingrams always said were the core of The Oldie’s success. At random, I pick one out. An imperial figure in laurel wreath and sandals is addressed by a soothsayer: ‘And it shall come to pass, great Caesar – you shall have a salad named after you.’

Ho ho. Happy 30th birthday, dear Oldie.

The Oldie March 2022 29

Nicky Haslam remembers meeting Francis Bacon, the eminence mauve of the Colony Room Club, in 1950s Soho

Queen of Camp

JAMES JACKSON / GETTY IMAGES

T

he Royal Academy has posted trigger warnings of – deep breath – ‘adult content’ on paintings in its new Francis Bacon show.

But just how ‘adult’ are they? They are anything but. Instead, Bacon depicts sophisticated but infantile images of bad dreams and worse memories. They’re decked out on modish furniture – which, in an earlier career as an interior decorator, he designed – and they’re imprisoned by linear structures to impart a Giacometti-ish, hard-edged modernism.

The sheer grotesqueness of Bacon’s images was once considered the acme of Freudian night sweats. Now they seem more like storyboards for some Squid Game spin-off – the very thing, these days; the stuff of a five-year-old’s yearnings.

Dear old Francis is beginning to look dated – quite apart from the fact that much of his work is really rather bad. While the major works are (along with, say, Basquiat) apples in collections of those who have precious little eye or taste, the impact of their flaunted frightmarishness can somehow seem merely decorative.

Isn’t Bacon’s work the epitome of high camp? There’s nothing wrong with that.

Many breathtakingly innovative artists produced profoundly camp paintings: Parmigianino, Caravaggio, Fragonard, Beardsley, Dalí and let’s not forget Warhol.

Bacon was an accomplished enough draughtsman to bring high camp to a new low. Those isolated, twirling, multifaceted figures bring to mind Gustave Moreau’s Sirens – vampiresque brides stripped bare of their rococo rockery surroundings, or the contorted, bleached flesh of his dying Apparition. But Moreau was a far happier camper than Bacon, for whom melancholy is outstripped by angst.

I do not mean to use the c word pejoratively. Many people’s lives – including Francis’s – were led on the high-camp wire in a kind of postwar euphoria. In the late ’50s, eager from school, I was taken to the Colony Room Club, known as Muriel’s, in Soho. Up the wonky, viridian30 The Oldie March 2022

Francis Bacon strikes camp. Soho, 1970

green-painted stairway of a tumbledown Georgian house, past a landing – and lav of indescribable chaos – the door opened to Muriel. Large-featured and solid, she perched surprisingly elegantly on a bar stool, delivering her famous greeting, ‘Hello, Cunty,’ in a smoke-ridden and alcohol-perfumed room.

There the cleverest, most waspish and campest (in its humorous, rather than sexual, sense) artists, writers, journalists of the time gathered, drunker and drunker, to bitch about all others outside its grimy windows and, more remorselessly, those inside.

Francis, with his piercing eyes and jerky smile in a face that looked as if it had had ‘work’ long before such a thing seemed possible, was the Colony’s eminence mauve, and a great friend of my first lover, the artist Michael Wishart (1928-96). I was quickly swept into his galère – the painters Colquhoun and MacBryde, John Minton and some ravishingly beautiful girls, Henrietta Moraes and Diana Melly, George Melly’s wife.

The photographer John Deakin was a former passion of the exotic American moneybags Arthur Jeffress. Deakin hurried me, soon after our first meeting, to his ramshackle flat off Edgware Road for a portrait session. The result became the cover of my autobiography, Redeeming Features.

A plethora of books on Lucian Freud, both hagiographic and chatty, tumbles off the presses, thick and vast. There have been fewer about Bacon, once the closest of Lucian’s friends but, by the time I was around, his bitter rival.

I can’t recall ever seeing Lucian at Muriel’s. Initially married to Michael Wishart’s cousin Kitty Epstein, Lucian had an almost daemonic allure. It shot him into a social stratosphere alien to Francis’s more earthly delights. Beyond mutual denigration, both had drawn a veil over their shared past.

Neither had much truck with nostalgia, which shows in the early, surreal work of both artists. They both fought – and eventually won – a war against the soft realism of living British painters, and the self-proclaimed art lordship of the École de Paris with its Tachiste canvases.

Both deeply private with their personal emotions, not for many decades to come would Lucian sometimes, and Francis rarely, let a little limelight into their creative dual monarchy.

Now the art dealer James Birch, whose parents were among Bacon’s intimate friends, has published a fascinating account of his friendship with the Francis he knew from childhood. It centres on his cherished quest to take the first-ever exhibition of Bacon’s work, and Bacon himself, to Moscow in 1988.

The tangled process involves dodgy Russian entrepreneurs and beautiful lady spies, Grayson Perry, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Francis’s long-term love object (and heir) John Edwards and, not unnaturally, Francis himself.

The twists and turns, the vagaries of plots and promises, the letters and loopholes and Francis’s changes of mind about attending the opening – he eventually agreed but was prevented by his acute asthma – make for fascinating reading, like some latter-day mix of Kafka and Firbank. Like Bacon’s work, perhaps.

James Birch’s Bacon in Moscow (Profile Books) is out now

Do meet your heroes Actor Michael Simkins has met some showbiz monsters in his time – and one great angel

I

t was flamboyant American producer Allan Carr who once wrote, ‘Never meet your heroes, lest you discover they have feet of clay.’

His remark came after an encounter with Paul Newman, an actor Carr had long worshipped from afar, but who by the time of their meeting was just an old man in shell-suit bottoms, slippers and a jumper, who ‘wanted to go home’.

I learnt not to expect too much from your heroes at an early age. In the mid-1960s, Tesco opened their first supermarket in my home town of Brighton. Coco the Clown, then probably Britain’s most famous children’s entertainer (and certainly its most celebrated circus performer), was hired to open the premises. I joined a crocodile of overexcited children waiting to meet our hero.

When my turn came, far from meeting the warm, cuddly, anarchic funster of my imaginings, I found myself standing alongside a clapped-out and fabulously grumpy old geezer wearing a costume that smelled of wet dog. He pushed brusquely past me with barely a smile (even if one was permanently drawn on his face). I had nightmares for weeks.

A cricket-mad mate of mine never got over the shock of finding himself at the next urinal to South African bowler Clive Rice in the gents at Scratchwood services, only to be asked to go forth and procreate when he asked his champion for tips on how to improve his outswinger.

You can see how difficult it is for your heroes to maintain the public face. As Stephen Fry said, ‘It prevents me from ever showing annoyance at terrible service in a restaurant or tutting with annoyance in a supermarket queue.’

I’ve frequently decided against approaching those I’ve admired from afar – BBC foreign-affairs correspondent John Simpson at a Parisian café table and composer Tony Hatch in a London restaurant spring to mind – exactly because I don’t want to be disappointed.

As an actor, I’ve had various encounters with the great and the good,

from Michael Caine and Albert Finney to Glenn Close and Meryl Streep. My most spine-tingling encounters have been with the actors most closely associated with my youth. Somehow there’s an air of unreality about meeting them; as if, for a brief minute, you’re stepping back via a virtual time machine to the young, wide-eyed child you once were but have almost forgotten ever existed.

Few encounters have matched the thrill of being introduced to the incomparable Leslie Phillips or, as occurred backstage at Wimbledon Theatre many years ago, to comedian Freddie ‘Parrot Face’ Davies.

Once, while attending a summer party given by my agent for his clients, I found myself standing next to the dessert trolley with actor Frank Windsor. He was DS Watt in the long-running police series Z Cars (and, later, Softly Softly), when each week he and his boss DI Barlow waged war on the criminal fraternity of the fictional northern conurbation of Newtown.

My meeting with Windsor was all the more electrifying because of its unexpectedness. He asked me, ‘Would you like me to cut you a slice of Black Forest gâteau?’

I replied, with utmost sincerity, ‘I’d sooner you take me down the station for questioning.’

Occasionally our hero even surpasses our expectations. In 2004, my actress wife, Julia Deakin, was touring South Africa in the musical Mamma Mia! With time to kill in Johannesburg one day, she wrote a fan letter to Nelson Mandela to thank him for all the hope and inspiration he’d given, both to his country and to the world. She received not only an

immediate response, but also an offer for her and her fellow ‘dynamos’ in the cast to have a half-hour meeting with him in his office. Afterwards, she told me dreamily, ‘It was like meeting Father Christmas. The handshake, the voice…’

A photo of the event still has pride of place on our mantelpiece.

People often ask me for my most memorable encounter. Arthur Miller?

Victoria Wood? Len Hutton?

It happened in 2013. I wrote to theatrical impresario Bill Kenwright after hearing he was producing Reginald Rose’s courtroom drama Twelve Angry Men, starring Hollywood star Robert Vaughn. As a kid, I’d been obsessed with The Man from Uncle – with Vaughn as smooth, silver-tongued secret agent Napoleon Solo. I suppose you’d call my fixation a Napoleon complex.

Now, 50 years later, I might have the chance to work with my childhood hero.

Alas, my letter arrived three weeks too late. Kenwright had already cast the production – but still he invited me to the press night and the junket at the Waldorf Hotel. Towards the end of the evening, I saw him threading his way towards me.

‘Come on, son. Time to meet the big man,’ he said gently, and led me back across the floor to where my idol was finishing dessert. When Kenwright introduced me to Vaughn and then added how much he would have liked to have me in the cast, Vaughn wiped his mouth with his napkin, looked straight at me and replied without a pause, ‘Well, Michael, when I heard you weren’t, I nearly pulled out myself.’

Pure Solo. Pure class.

What a saint! Robert Vaughn (1932-2016) The Oldie March 2022 31

When John McEntee’s sisters bought back the family house in Cavan, he found the place unchanged – except his friends are in the cemetery

My Irish home is a ghost town

R

eturning for Christmas for the first time in 40 years to my home town, Cavan, was a curious experience.

My sisters, Ann in Boston and Grainne in Brazil, had joined forces to buy our family terraced house in Church Street.

They were coming home – so why not me, too?

Nudging 70, I’m afraid many of my friends are no longer alive. The town is mostly alien to me. It remains much the same architecturally, just with new people occupying all the familiar bars and shops and homesteads.

But nearly everyone I grew up alongside is gone, resting in Killygarry or Cullies cemeteries, whose serried boulevards replicate the streets where I grew up. Paddy Elliot, John Sullivan, Baby Whelan, Margaret English, Mollie Soden, Tommy Brides…

There are too many memories. Church Street, where I was raised, still, in my memory, retains the Surgical Hospital, Paddy Maloney’s palatial house, Gheoghan’s, Gough’s, Phil Gargan’s Ritz Bar, the post office, Whelan’s. Further afield, there are the ghosts of the old market in the square, Foster’s newsagents, Murray’s garage, Mrs Cullen atop the Town Hall, Woolworths, the Ulster Arms, the County Hotel on the corner opposite McDonald Hub Bar… Down Bridge Street, long-dead soldiers still chuckle over Fanta and chips with girlfriends in Sean McManus’s Central Café. The Congo, the Blue Moon, Mick Crosby’s butcher’s shop astride the Cavan River. Phelim Coffey in River Street hiding after breaking Tilson’s window and blaming Mickey Breslin.

Onwards to Railway Road’s Rivals Inn – later the Lakeland – within earshot of phantom steam trains departing for

32 The Oldie March 2022

Clones. And the town where I nudged my Avis long-gone wall car down a rainswept College opposite, where Street to meet my sisters, Ann Edward English showed and Grainne, and brother me the finger imprint in Desmond in the Abbey Bar. I wet cement where pointed the hired motor his sister memorialised towards Main Street and a her finger kebab shop next to the road shortly before she leading to the peak of Cock drowned in the Hill and the reservation adjoining river… housing Ireland’s Swerve to upper dispossessed travellers.

Main Street.

Wishing the Turkish and Hourican’s, Edward Croatian kebab-providers a O’Gorman’s, Smyth’s merry Christmas, I clambered pub turned electrical into the car. Suddenly the First Holy Communion at shop, opposite Fay’s, passenger door opened and a Cavan Cathedral: John Cooke’s and Eugene young man clambered in. He McEntee, aged 7, in 1960 Monaghan’s, long closed said, ‘I’ll give you anything to since the day my uncle take me up the hill. My mother is sick.’

Frank Conlan recorded the visit of two In tandem, the back doors opened. farmers who, on Fair Day, were told by Two easy-on-the-eye girls and two Eugene, ‘We’re stocktaking – come teenage boys piled in. My travel bag was back tomorrow.’ perched on one of the back seats. My new And there, atop Farnham Street, female traveller simply lifted her elegant resides the old De La Salle primary legs and placed them over the bag, either school, where long ago my favourite side of the headrest. Fait accompli.

Brother Francis tickled my privates, I started the car and turned left exhorting me to join the football team towards the sick mother’s home. ‘Left, and the recorder band. right, left again,’ declared my navigator All is the same but different. My head next to me. ‘Pull up here!’ fills with the laughter of growing up.

He offered me money. I declined. As Stealing golf trollies at Cock Hill and they evacuated the car, I declared, discovering that the buckled wheels at ‘Consider this a festive gift from the the bottom of the hill belonged to McEntees of Church Street.’

Surgeon Maloney. The garage proprietor I finally arrived at the family home, known for his profanity, ‘Double F’ gloriously bought by my siblings. Ann Donoghue, trying to sell an Austin A40, asked, ‘What took you so long?’ farting oil, to my cousin Michael and me.

I explained, telling her about my We were trying to buy a staff car for parting exhortation. our dance-hall empire – neither of us had ‘Thanks, John,’ she replied, drily. a licence. We auditioned go-go dancers ‘Now they know where we live.’ for our disastrous disco in a hall behind the Rivals Inn. John McEntee edits the Ephraim At Christmas, this was the haunted Hardcastle column in the Daily Mail

History

Could the Navy save the Falklands today?

ADRIAN BROWN / ALAMY

Forty years after the victory, we don’t rule the waves any more david horspool

Britain’s relations with France are supposed to be at their lowest ebb since Waterloo, or maybe Agincourt.

So we should be grateful that a recent ceremony between the Royal Navy and their French counterparts went off peacefully.

On 11th January, in the sort of thick Channel fog that used to get headlinewriters informing us that the continent is ‘cut off’, command of the NATO Maritime High Readiness Force passed from France to Britain for the next 12 months.

The ship on which the flag-raising took place – below decks, so the able seamen could see one another – was the relatively new Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales, whose active career the Navy projects will last 50 years or more. That’s about £62 million a year if the reported up-front costs for two carriers of £6.2 billion is accurate.

It’s a lot. But though the Navy has never been cheap, it has usually proved good value for money. For centuries, it has protected Britain and projected British power in ways the British Army has very rarely been able to do. The current Prince of Wales is the seventh of that name, and the fates of some of her predecessors illustrate how Britain’s history has been entwined with her naval fortunes.

The first Prince of Wales was a third-rate ship of the line – a technical term, not a disparagement – equipped with 74 guns and launched in 1765. In the pivotal American Revolutionary year of 1777, the Prince of Wales captured an American ship, a feat she improved on the following year by capturing two ships in two days in the Atlantic.

The second Prince of Wales was rather less glorious, missing the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) after Admiral Robert Calder’s command aboard her at the Battle of Cape Finisterre was publicly questioned. The most distinguished of the subsequent Prince of Wales ships was the present vessel’s predecessor, which

Action stations: HMS Ardent fires during the Falklands War, 1982

saw action numerous times in the Second World War. She was responsible for curtailing the activities of the notorious Bismarck in 1941, scoring three direct hits and forcing the German battleship back to harbour. The British ship’s short career came to a disastrous end, however, when she was sunk off the coast of Malaya by Japanese bombers, two days after the raid on Pearl Harbor.

That Prince of Wales provides a direct link to Britain’s most recent naval victory, the campaign to retake the Falkland Islands 40 years ago.

As Charles Moore relates in his biography of Margaret Thatcher, the son of Prince of Wales’s Captain John Leach, who had gone down with his ship in 1941, was Sir Henry Leach (1923-2011), the First Sea Lord. In March 1982, soon after the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands, he barged his way into a Commons meeting with the Prime Minister. He told her that what Whitehall had called the ‘almost impossible task’ of retaking the Falkland Islands could – and should – be done: ‘We can, Prime Minister, and though it’s not my place to say this, we must.’

Mrs Thatcher replied, ‘Why?’ Leach said, ‘Because if we do not, or if we pussyfoot in our actions and do not achieve complete success, in another few months we shall be living in a different country whose word counts for little.’

Once the timetable of naval operations had been confirmed to her – when Leach told her the task force would take three weeks to steam to the South Atlantic, she at first thought he must have meant three days – Thatcher and her cabinet gave the fleet their full backing.

Readers will have their own recollections of an event which for many has not quite receded beyond memory and into history. I was a lucky schoolboy, whose Mediterranean ‘educational cruise’ was cut short when our ship, SS Uganda, was requisitioned as a hospital vessel.

Don’t Cry for Me Argentina was played over the Tannoy before the captain – with all the lugubriousness of Neville Chamberlain in 1939 – announced the news that we were returning to port, in Naples. I don’t remember my shipmates singing Rule, Britannia!, as was reported, when we docked.

Back in England, I learnt that my mother’s cousin was actually part of the task force, flying Lynx helicopters, including an action against the submarine Santa Fe off South Georgia – part of the first successful recapture of British territory from the Argentinians.

The ship from which he and his comrades flew was one of 15 frigates in the task force, to go with the two aircraft carriers, eight destroyers, two amphibious landing platform docks, six submarines and more that took back the islands from the Argentinian junta.

One reason Leach had barged into that meeting was that he was upset about cuts to the Navy. One shudders to think what he would make of today’s top-heavy fleet.

The two aircraft carriers are impressive icing on a bitesize cake. The whole Navy boasts only six destroyers, three of which are not available for service.

Unless something changes, Britain’s days of naval glory are definitely in the past, even if that past is more recent than you might think.

The Oldie March 2022 33

Town Mouse

Who wants to be an editor? Millionaires do tom hodgkinson

On the occasion of The Oldie’s 30th birthday, I hope readers will forgive me for reflecting on Town Mouse’s own life in magazines.

The magazine I edit, the Idler, is a mere 28 years old. I started it from my bedroom in my twenties, while on the dole, and we’ve had a somewhat bumpy ride since. We started as a bi-monthly, but managed to produce only about four or five issues a year. After a while, we turned into a bi-annual. When that proved to be too much work, we published it just once a year, with the exception of 2015, when we published no issues at all.

Luckily, we were rescued by a group of investors, and we now produce six Idlers a year for a growing gang of readers. And though at times it’s been tough, I maintain that editing a small magazine is the best job in the world. This might seem a flippant bit of rhetorical hyperbole, but I can prove it.

My proof comes in the form of two notable editors and former editors of small magazines, Sigrid Rausing of Granta and Mary-Kay Wilmers of the London Review of Books. Both are very good and successful periodicals, and both 34 The Oldie March 2022

are owned by extremely wealthy women who have no need to work. Rausing is heir to the Tetrapak fortune, and Wilmers has been able to dip into a family trust to bail out her mag when required.

Money being no object, the highly intelligent Wilmers and Rausing could have done literally anything they wanted with their lives. They could have worked in the City, become doctors or lawyers, started a gambling website, built up a property empire, opened a restaurant or loafed about on chaises longues smoking cheroots and hosting literary soirées. But they both chose to edit small magazines.

Why? Because editing a small magazine is simply the best job in the world. You have pure freedom to print whatever you like. Each issue is enormously exciting to assemble and, I hope, exciting to pick up for the first time, like when you listen to the new album from your favourite band.

It’s an artistic creation. You build a supportive community of wonderful readers. And you are never, ever bored.

Those distinguished editors Richard Ingrams, first of Private Eye and then of The Oldie, and Tyler Brûlé, first of Wallpaper and then of Monocle, buttress

my point. Both made a great success of their first magazine and could have gone on to do anything they liked. Both chose to start a second magazine. Even Charles Dickens, who made a fortune from his novels, chose magazine editor as a second job, and ran periodicals such as Household Words and All the Year Round. Oscar Wilde edited the Woman’s World from 1887 to 1889.

It’s a job I would do even if I were not being paid to do it – which for many years of the Idler’s life was in fact the case. I also edited small magazines when at school and university for no pecuniary gain, just for fun. My first magazine was the Penguin, followed by the King’s House Times, the Sixth Form Rag and, at university, Broadsheet.

It’s also a job that can be done from anywhere – at least in theory. I spent 12 years editing the Idler from my study in a farmhouse on the North Devon coast. Still, I think that an editor is really best off being a Town Mouse, because it’s so stimulating to be in the whirl of the city. A chance encounter with an old hack friend at a book launch can turn into a great piece for the mag. I’ve commissioned articles from people I’ve bumped into while riding my bicycle around town. And it’s far easier to interview and photograph interesting people when you’re in London.

What joy to be in Grub Street itself, as a Grub Street hack. To see St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, where Dr Johnson worked.

To walk through Chelsea past the houses of Oscar Wilde and Carlyle. To stand on Westminster Bridge; to see a play at the Globe or a show at the Serpentine. Pure delights which cannot be replaced by Zoom meetings.

And what about gossipy lunches? You can’t really do those in the country. My resolution for 2022 is to go out for more long, boozy lunches, in the spirit of the late, great Keith Waterhouse, the master of the art.

It’s a world I grew up in, as my parents were both smoky, boozy Fleet Street hacks, and our house was often visited by their smoky, boozy mates. Lunch, said Waterhouse, was not simply about satisfying hunger: ‘It is not a meal partaken of, however congenial the company, with the principal object of nourishment,’ he wrote in his brilliant book The Theory and Practice of Lunch (1986). ‘It is not when either party is on a diet, on the wagon or in a hurry.’

So here’s to The Oldie, here’s to Grub Street and here’s to small magazines everywhere.

Tom Hodgkinson edits the Idler

Country Mouse

My lifetime highlight: buying rinse aid giles wood

There are so many things about the modern age that puzzle me.

Why, when Vox Poxes (sic) are being conducted for TV news footage, does every high street feature such a large percentage of obese pedestrians, waddling along in Lycra gym kits with trainers when they have clearly never been near a gym?

Why is redcurrant jelly now hard to come by? In our local supermarket, a shelf-stacker had never even heard of it.

‘But we’ve got all the normal-flavoured jelly cubes from Chivers!’

Why do all bedroom scenes in TV dramas show sheets coloured grey, green or black? I can only breathe a sigh of relief that black loo paper, as favoured by Simon Cowell, is not yet mainstream – only, no doubt, because the price would not be right.

The music mogul, as revealed by biographer Tom Bower, has to pay £10 a roll for his bespoke black and insists on having them ‘in all his homes’.

Most puzzling of all – why has the catchphrase ‘making memories’ gained so much traction? Adverts for holidays (Centre Parcs) and butter (Kerrygold), to name only two, show smiling families being urged to enjoy the products not because – as in traditional advertising – they will lead to consumer satisfaction, but so as to ‘make memories’.

I don’t live my life with my family expressly to make memories. Most of my days are characterised by my trying to remember to tackle chores such as unblocking the drains, buying rinse aid or putting the car in for an MOT. Nothing much worth remembering there.

In COVID times, with travel and big-event socialising off the menu, and group walks stymied by seasonal mud, the only memory a family can make is bonding by watching television together.

All too often, we have let ourselves

‘After the festive period, I only eat people who have been on a diet’

become emotionally invested in a typical six-hour-long mini-series, only to be faced with an ending ranging from implausible to inconclusive or downright depressing. These have left a sour taste in our mouths – not unlike the cheese footballs of the festive period (another product I found unavailable at the supermarket).

We binge-watched BBC’s The Tourist.

We marvelled at the originality of this twisty Outback thriller, shot in sepia tints. We warmed to the unlikely romance blooming between hunk lead Jamie Dornan playing Elliot, an amnesiac on the run from people trying to kill him – he knows not why – and a chunky but charming rookie female cop, the scene-stealing Danielle Macdonald.

We expended six hours of precious quality time on settling down together with the dog in front of the screen with log fire blazing. It was tense and

My days are spent unblocking the drains or putting the car in for an MOT

exhausting viewing, but we bonded in our affection for the protagonists and our desire for a positive outcome for them.

Spoiler alert. In the final scene Dornan takes an overdose.

Puzzled again. Does he die or not? The selfish scriptwriters may want to leave open the door to a potential Series 2 but meanwhile their viewers, consigned to a limbo land, have been cheated of closure.

Surely, at this particularly grim time of year, a suicide, successful or not, was deeply irresponsible of the BBC. Do they feel no duty of care to their viewers?

Couldn’t the fashionable scriptwriters, the stubble-chinned brothers Harry and Jack Williams, have lightened our darkness with an old-style happy ending, not least so as to fuel hopes for buxom women everywhere that larger-size females can aspire to romances with Hollywood A-listers? They chose instead to make memories for us that, like the amnesiac Elliot, we would rather forget.

Meanwhile, Mary was also making a private memory, reading Clare Chambers’s novel Small Pleasures.

After 39 uncomplaining years of drudgery and duty, during which she has always made the most of what small pleasures – eg puffs on a cigarette – she can get, a spinster meets a lovable but unavailable man.

The deft and quietly witty plot is, says Mary, gripping. Plausibly, towards its end, the lovable man becomes available and declares his own love. It is hinted that a pleasant care home could even be found for the grumpy mother. Spoiler alert 2. Guess what happens on the last page? The man is killed in a train crash.

Why do these writers do it? Mary spoke to one of the best-read bookshopowners in the country, Mary James of the Aldeburgh Bookshop. She surmised that writers seeking awards and prizes may be worried about happy endings in case the books are deemed schmaltzy rather than edgy.

Has none of these writers heard of the law of diminishing returns? If the memories we have made during COVID binge-watching have been negative, then, as COVID recedes, we will find less time for ‘feelbad’ productions that make us feel worse rather than better.

We can only console ourselves that we never watched an episode of the allegedly addictive blockbuster Game of Thrones.

Apparently, it would have taken three days and 16 minutes out of our lives, and the ending left most of its fans infuriated.

Mary wants a new classification, ‘Spoil alert’ – ‘meaning the depressing ending of this film/book will slightly spoil your life’.

The Oldie March 2022 35

Christ’s Aussie family The day Bruce Beresford met Jesus’s descendant in the Outback

I

n 1986, I directed a film of Beth Henley’s play Crimes of the Heart and then flew from Los Angeles to Sydney to visit my elderly parents, who lived in a small country town less than 100 miles from Sydney.

I took with me a copy of the film. My mother had seen few films in her life and was baffled by changes of scene, or of time, never having learned the basics of film language. My father was bored by the tale of three sisters in Mississippi, having lost interest in films after the deaths of Ronald Colman and Errol Flynn.

A day or two later, my father announced that there was someone special he wanted me to meet. With some reluctance, I sat in the passenger seat of his decrepit car, awash with KFC chicken bones and old newspapers, as he drove erratically off into the countryside to a remote and fairly ramshackle old farmhouse.

We were greeted by a big, elderly man my father introduced as Aub. Aub was dressed in the khaki shorts and shirt typical of the local farmers, though I thought his glowing, blue eyes and straggly beard gave him the appearance of a biblical prophet.

Aub, a man of few words, led the way into the house. My father was clearly excited by whatever the reason for our visit could be, but said nothing until we were in a neat living room, crammed with furniture from the 1920s. Then he said, ‘Aub has something to show you.’

I looked towards Aub, who said nothing as my father pointed to a huge chart on the wall.

I walked over to the chart, which was covered in names and connecting lines. I turned to my father and commented on its being an involved ancestry chart. ‘Yes,’ my father said, ‘but look at the top.’

I turned back to the chart. At the very

top was a small drawing of a bearded man, identified as ‘Jesus Christ’.

‘Now,’ my father continued, ‘look at the bottom of the chart.’

My eyes wandered down a maze of names over many centuries and ended with the name … Aubrey Gillespie.

‘You see,’ said my father triumphantly, ‘Aub is a direct descendant of Jesus.’

Aub modestly lowered his eyes. I refrained from comment, hoping my silence would be interpreted as my being awestruck and so enable a rapid departure.

In the car, I calmly told my father that the chart was a fake and that he was gullible, to put it mildly, to believe Aub’s claim of illustrious ancestry. ‘What!’ he said. ‘You saw it! You don’t believe it?!’

I reiterated that there was no possibility of its being accurate.

My father shook his head, saddened.

‘You were always a cynic,’ he said, ‘even as a little boy.’

Photo finish

Stop showing me your old pictures, says Roger Lewis

T

he other day, I came across box upon box of old photographs.

The children growing up, birthday parties, trips to safari parks, days out on the beach. There was that predictably melancholy frisson, seeing my parents younger than I am now, plus other dead relatives and longlost friends – people less bald, unfat, not yet divorced or let down by life.

But though the archive is of interest to me, it is of no consequence to anyone else – and I was reminded that the most boring hours of my life have been spent having to look at other people’s photographs, particularly holiday photographs, simulating polite interest and curiosity.

In my childhood, an uncle and auntie who were teachers, and hence had loads of paid free time, would come round 36 The Oldie March 2022

armed with their photographs for what were called ‘slide evenings’. A bedsheet was pinned on the wall, a projector set up on my mother’s ironing board, and we’d sit there in the dark gazing at these several hundred Kodachrome images of alpine ski huts or three-star half-board hotels in the Balearics.

It was all very boastful. We never went further than Tenby, and there only occasionally. Abroad was very fancy in the sixties. It also looked tedious. ‘Here’s Auntie Marion by a wall.’ ‘Here’s this nice couple we met from Tredegar who got locked out on their balcony.’ ‘Here’s Uncle Eifion trying a stuffed pepper.’

People are still liable to inflict their albums on the innocent, the trapped. In France quite recently, when conversation had flagged, our neighbours showed us their immaculately arranged

photographs of a trip to Thailand, which was evidently a highlight of their existence. It was like a very protracted documentary on a duff telly channel, no fact or figure excluded. Nowadays, with video footage on mobile phones, the parallel is frighteningly exact.

The point, I think, about holiday pictures, apart from the one-upmanship, the implicit bragging, is that by proving a fortnight has been spent in Borneo or Alaska, people feel they have been made momentarily exotic by travel – the flying fish, the sarongs, the garlands of paper flowers.

To me, though, it is all more evidence of how humdrum everyone actually is.

The art of acting Mary Taylor, 90, starred in Robin Hood, acted with Laurence Olivier – and then gave it all up to become an artist

Acting (left) under her stage name, Mary Manson, with Carol Gray in Curse of the Fly (1965)

20TH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP / COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION / ALAMY

M

y second life – the one I have lived for the past 40 years – has been as an artist.

It is a life I did not imagine as a child growing up in Oxford, although my mother was an artist of some note, painting landscapes and flower studies.

Although my early artistic efforts displayed some aptitude, they were greeted by her with a gruff ‘I should think I’m the artist in the family!’

My first life, starting 70 years ago, was totally different…

My father, an academic, had had a brief early career as an actor, which may have inspired my parents to decide I should be an actress. I auditioned for RADA and was rather surprised when I got in.

Two years later, I graduated and my ‘first life’ – the one that would occupy the next 21 years – began.

38 The Oldie March 2022

Using a family name of my mother’s, I made my debut as Mary Manson at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. I played the sister of another beginner, Geraldine McEwan. Several years in repertory, during which I played juvenile leads, followed. At Bridgwater in Somerset, one of my fellow actors was John Osborne, whose first wife, Pamela Lane, had been at RADA with me.

I joined a company that went round the country in an enormous lorry, driven by one of the girls, to perform religious plays. In Cardiff Cathedral, my part required me to stand motionless with my arms spread in the form of a cross. Stealing a glance downwards, I saw an enormous black spider creeping in beneath my long skirt.

It took all my powers not to run down the aisle screaming!

My first London engagement was as an understudy. It was at the Royal Court

Theatre in Sloane Square, enjoying a brilliantly successful 1956 season, which included my old friend John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger.

I understudied the juvenile lead – and got what all understudies dream of – but rarely get: one evening, I ‘went on’!

I played opposite Richard Pasco and Alan Bates and it went so well that I was offered a place in the company. I went on tour with John’s Osborne’s next play, The Entertainer, starring Laurence Olivier. I also acted with Bob – later Sir Robert – Stephens, in a strange play called How Can We Save Father?, which did not run very long.

It was at this time that I married. My husband, Forbes Taylor, was a film director and for our first year he was off to the studio at the crack of dawn and I was on stage until late most nights, so we saw little of each other.

My husband was working on the

Far left: As Judith Denton in ITV’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Richard Greene (1955-59). Left: As an outlaw in The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956-57)

Adventures of Robin Hood television series, which ran from 1955 to 1959, and the producers gave me a leading part, opposite the star, Richard Greene. It was my first experience of film acting.

Further parts followed in the later series, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, which ran from 1956 to 1957.

Then everything changed very radically.

My husband became head of films in a new ITV company starting up in Norwich.

It meant a move to a new home far from London. We found a ‘fairy-tale’ thatched farmhouse far out in the countryside.

Although Anglia Television was a small, regional TV company, it produced major drama productions and I was invited to appear in several of them.

Some required me to speak with a Norfolk accent. I called on my nearest neighbour and asked her to read my lines, so that I could imitate her characteristic Norfolk lilt.

I was offered film roles, one of which, a dreary little drama called Life in Danger (1959), is shown with mysterious regularity on TV today. There was also a weird part in a horror film called Curse of the Fly (1965). I was supposed to be ‘transmitted’ by wireless in a machine – which went wrong, so that half of me got jumbled up and reached the other end a ghastly mess. It necessitated dawn rides to the studio for hours in make-up.

All this came to a temporary end when our first son was born. After six years of motherhood, a second boy joined him.

One was to become an archaeology professor and the other a producer of music for television programmes.

There was also a weird part in a horror film called Curse of the Fly

When they were old enough and away at school, I felt an urge to do something creative again. A return to acting really meant London, which was not feasible. So my thoughts turned to my first love – art.

I enrolled at the local art college as a mature student.

By chance, my tutor was one of the few Western artists working in the difficult and very beautiful oriental technique batik, where hot, molten wax is painted on fine fabric to block out areas where the colour is not to go. Once the wax has dried, dyes are applied to develop the desired image. The wax is then washed away.

I was immediately hooked. It just seemed absolutely right for me. I set up a studio in an outbuilding of our home and began to produce batik works of art in the European tradition: flower studies – and even landscapes.

Batik is not without dangers…

Working on a large landscape one morning, I caught my sleeve on the handle of the pot of molten wax, tipping the contents into my lap. I suffered severe burns, which resulted in a stay in hospital.

Over the past 40 years, I have exhibited in countless shows, including at Santa Barbara, California, and Boston, Massachusetts. Selfridges in London commissioned me to produce long flower panels. I wrote and illustrated a book on my work, The Art of Batik: Flowers and Landscapes.

I’m 90 now, and still have a batik or two on the go. We have moved near the sea in Suffolk and I exhibit in the local art society’s annual exhibition.

Touch wood, I am extremely lucky. My husband and I are celebrating 64 years of marriage. I love walking, cooking and gardening. We enjoy The Oldie every month – but find it disconcerting that it reminds us that time flies by far too fast for us oldies!

Above, from top: Rhododendron in Garden in Wales; Dawn Snow, Walberswick; Mary in her Suffolk studio The Oldie March 2022 39

On our pearl anniversary, we’ve raided The Oldie’s brimming archive

30 pearls of wisdom God speed to the Old Un! Terry Wogan on our 1992 launch I am so looking forward to contributing to The Oldie. I see it as a truss for the brain, a surgical stocking for the soul and a Zimmer frame for the mind.

Beryl Bainbridge, Oldie theatre critic 1. Inveighing against the ignorance, idleness, stupidity, dishonesty and sexual incompetence of the young.

2. Insulting the young in any and every manifestation.

3. Insulting the old who seem to be deferring or otherwise sucking up to the young.

4. Promoting the idea of ‘age fascism’, whereby the young are automatically seen as inferior.

5. Denouncing new things, new ideas, modernism in any form, especially anything proposed in the name of youth or by someone under the age of 40.

Auberon Waugh’s initial suggestions for his Oldie column, ‘Rage’

Surface Yorkshire grit concealing a raging romantic.

Barry Cryer on J B Priestley At the end of our interview, she wrinkled up her nose and said, ‘Shall I get my kit off, Gyles?’ Now that’s my idea of a pin-up.

Gyles Brandreth on Melinda Messenger, the Sun’s ‘Page 3 Girl for the Thrillennium’ I generally read theatre reviews as a prophylactic measure to inoculate myself against the risk of seeing the performance.

Edward Enfield I don’t know why, but this young lad has always had a strange effect on me. He makes me really get in touch with the woman in myself. He makes me feel like I’ve been to paradise but I’ve never been to me. I want to discipline him – soon.

Dawn French on Jimmy Krankie

The ultimate idol. He called interviewers ‘Sir’: the combo of courtesy and cool is a killer.

Joanna Lumley on Elvis I’ll let you in to a secret about why I like painting either houses and streets or the sea. I can’t draw trees at all.

L S Lowry to a 12-year-old A N Wilson I have no regrets. Things are regrettable. I am not a French singer!

Peter O’Toole Fragrant? I wouldn’t say no to a closer sniff.

Sir Les Patterson on Mary Archer I want to apologise to him on behalf of the Old Bailey.

John Mortimer on Oscar Wilde The wages of gin is breath, as Oscar would have said.

Lord Alfred Douglas to Donald Sinden

Ideal toyboy material. Drop-dead handsome, sexually depraved and wonderfully funny. I prefer him without his turban.

Jilly Cooper on Lord Byron

I follow in the footsteps of two notorious Catholic converts, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh – the first a ferocious womaniser, the second a terrible snob. I admit to both of these faults.

Wilfred De’Ath

Where is the pleasure of traipsing through the fields with 30 pretty boring-looking people in bobble hats?

Richard Ingrams’s rant about ramblers

Bye all!

My ideal last words – Anthony Hopkins

I don’t shun them. I simply have no interest in them.

Quentin Crisp on women

The long, heavy, dark-blue towelling dressing gown I’ve worn for years.

Alec Guinness’s ideal shroud

Spencer Tracy – The greatest screen actor. I met him once in Hollywood and wouldn’t leave him my number. Mad? No. Married.

Honor Blackman

I like to play villains best – bastards. I don’t look like a villain, you see, so it’s quite nice.

Leslie Phillips

In Who’s Who, they have an impressive satire or bullshit monitor on the team, as my attempt to add my appearance on the Bernie Clifton Show to my list of achievements was disallowed.

Roger Lewis

Foolish and misguided young people are still making the pilgrimage to Soho. Perhaps they think that Dylan Thomas is still propping up a corner of the French pub. He isn’t, he is dead and Soho is in its hideous death throes.

Jeffrey Bernard Shall we go up to my bedroom and read the Guardian together?

Chat-up line to Anne Robinson by a policy adviser to two Prime Ministers

Tommy Cooper – funny. Eric Morecambe – funnier. Wilson, Keppel and Betty – funniest.

Ronnie Barker on his comedy heroes Philip Larkin told me that were it not for his job as a librarian, he would long ago have killed himself.

Miriam Gross Are there at least 20 people in your address book who are dead?

A telltale sign you’re an oldie

Don’t print I’m mad!

Ronnie Kray to Duncan Campbell

The absurdity of dress codes.

Where do they come from? Fashion may decree but, in the end, class dictates.

Raymond Briggs The downside of having these seven new older friends was that I was going to lose them early in my life. I was not long out of my teens and they were my dream oldies.

Ian Lavender on his Dad’s Army co-stars The Oldie March 2022 41

Small World

Steven Spielberg’s Cleethorpes adventure Hollywood mogul is my best friend – according to Mum 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…

Today has been a day of unexpected but not unwelcome solitude.

I announced to my parents that I was off to the cinema for a morning viewing of Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story.

As ever, my mother somehow thought the whole misguided venture was my fault: ‘Natalie Wood’s not good enough for my son – he has to make the whole film again, apparently!’

‘Mum, I had nothing to do with it. I am not a film studio. I am not an executive producer. It’s Steven’s … fault.’

‘Steven who?’

Dreading that she might actually somehow phone him, I was reluctant to reveal his identity. But, still, I gibbered, ‘Spielberg. It was Steven Spielberg.’

She huffed at the name and said, ‘I suppose if Steven wants to go along with you to watch paint dry, you’d better go.’

I taunted her back: ‘Do you really think that, on a Saturday morning in Cleethorpes, I’m off to the cinema with someone called Steven Spielberg? Do text Martin Scorsese and David Lynch.

They mentioned they might want to meet us in the KFC opposite the boating lake afterwards.’

‘Well, they’re all fools, then, and you all deserve whatever you get,’ Mother said.

What I did get was the smallest screen in the cinema and, thankfully, only six other attendees. I’m not antisocial but, as a little person, even with tiered seating I find sitting behind someone in a full cinema is often challenging. It only takes one string bean of an adolescent in front of me and there are no Sharks or Jets visible to Little Jem. The movie was more than passable, if not entirely necessary. I was saddened to hear the attendance in my flea-pit mirrored the national box-office receipts for my great friend Stevie. He should 42 The Oldie March 2022

remodel himself as King of COVID and release a series of remakes that attract just the right number of people to allow significant safe-spacing. Sorry, Steven.

Still, I did experience the buzz of early-in-the-day cinema that Graham Greene celebrated as ‘mornings in the dark’. I followed up with an ‘afternoon in the strip lighting’ at one of Cleethorpes’s larger independent supermarkets. ‘Six aisles – and a shelf each for vegan, gluten-free and Polish,’ as I heard an impressed caravanner boast once.

Unfortunately, the only person working on the whole shop floor was my sometime nemesis – Gerty the Gatekeeper. Never has one woman done more to promote the usefulness of the automated self-checkout. A minute with Gerty can feel like 20 minutes on a chat show, given the range of questions you’re expected to answer.

The automated tills were all out of order. She explained, ‘Gary from Meat is in Mykonos, and the only computer I can handle is my dishwasher.’ So I had to take my basket of goods to Aisle Two – Gerty’s favourite because it’s ‘roomier’.

As she turned my frozen onions over twice, she asked, ‘You still working?’ I nodded politely, thinking my mute response would deflect any further questions. But she fired off follow-up questions at machine-gun speed: ‘Where? How long that’s for? Enjoying it?’

These were just warm-ups. Soon she was assessing each and every shopping choice. Looking at my liver-and-onionsfor-one ready meal, she said, ‘Be warned – that mashed potato is like soup if you go over 700 watts.’

She shook her head fervently at the daring selection of three king-size Pot Noodles. ‘Bloody hell, you’ll be regular.

Do you find that?’ Suspiciously dangling a bag of Chupa Chups, she asked, ‘You’re childless, aren’t you? So what’s the occasion?’

I felt like a felon in Columbo. I began to crack. ‘I just occasionally like a lollipop. The comfort of oral fixation, I suppose … and perhaps a sliver of a remembered childhood.’

She laughed with a loud, single ‘haw-haw’ and said, ‘You’re a sensitive one, aren’t you? You a writer?’

As I left her to mop up and shut up, on this crowd-free, early-closing, end-ofsomething-that-never-really-started day, I reflected on Gerty’s questions. Her deductions were spot-on – they were annoying only because she was in the wrong job.

She would have been brilliant as the Barry Norman/Jeremy Paxman of Cleethorpes. She would skewer my mate Steven Spielberg: ‘West Side Story? Really? Seen it. Done it. Why don’t you come up with your own ideas, Steve?’

Postcards from the Edge

Shed a little bitty tear for Prince Andrew

TOBY MORISON

Yes, he’s a chump – but he’s paid a higher price than most for his stupid behaviour, says Mary Kenny

Those of us who came to adulthood during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s may sometimes entertain a private reflex of sympathy for Prince Andrew. What if all the foolish escapades of our lives were brought into the public realm as relentlessly as his have been?

I can think of many a harmless septuagenarian who might break into a cold sweat at the thought of what mortification might follow if every folie de jeunesse was disclosed to the world.

Not only might there have been some laxity over the matter of ‘consent’ – now greatly emphasised, and indeed rightly so. But there might be pangs of conscience over the question of a young female’s age.

One pal recalled being, when he was in his twenties, in the full throes of canoodling with a pretty teenager he took to be around 17. He was appalled when she disclosed merrily that she was 12.

The age of consent has been a noticeably movable date. Many Latin countries, until recent times, placed it at 12 – probably under the supposition that chaperones would prevent any misbehaviour. France once had no age of consent at all – only latterly setting it at 15. Germany’s age of consent is 14. Britain’s is 16, but it hasn’t always been observed, as we know.

Ireland, like New York, places it at 17.

Andrew has been a chump in choosing some of his friends, and he may well have had some unwise sexual relationships; something he denies. But, if so, he surely has paid a higher price than most: accused of crimes, condemned, stripped of his armed forces positions, unable to use his HRH title, stigmatised and even described as a threat to the monarchy and a possible shadow over his mother’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

Who would be in his shoes? I should think there are many thanking their lucky stars they are not.

The New Testament says that every man’s sins will be proclaimed from the 44 The Oldie March 2022

rooftops on the last day. Some don’t even have to wait that long to undergo such an ordeal.

In my senior years, I’ve developed a refreshing habit of taking a siesta.

Between 3pm and 4pm, I take to my bedchamber and rest. As Winston Churchill said, the siesta turns one day into two: on rising, you begin again with new energy.

And now a French neuroscientist, Brice Faraut, from the Sleep Centre at Hotel Dieu in Paris, has endorsed the value of the afternoon nap in a book, Saved by the Siesta. He claims that the siesta boosts immunity, reduces stress, may help us lose weight – not sure about that one – and can enhance night-time sleep. Between 20 and 40 minutes seems to be best.

A fine old Spanish practice, indeed, although I’m told the modern Spanish, now keen on keeping Brussels business time, no longer indulge in it quite so much.

There has been some discourse in recent times about the question of whether juries can be trusted to interpret the law correctly – following the toppling of a certain statue in Bristol.

Our learned friends have pointed out

that juries can arrive at eccentric verdicts. An Irish judge once said to the accused, ‘You leave this court with no greater stain on your character than having been acquitted by a Limerick jury.’

The author of this anecdote, Maurice Healy, also warned smart-alec young advocates not to score points against the bench. A judge was inclined to let off a plaintiff for a trifling offence, saying, ‘You’ll be aware of the principle of De minimis non curat lex.’ To which the defending barrister replied knowingly, ‘Indeed, m’Lord, in the hills of Connemara where my client dwells, they speak of little else!’ Annoyed, his lordship doled out a custodial.

Actually, De minimis… – the law does not concern itself with trifles – was a sound principle, respected in the days before lawyers saw trifles as a chance for compensation claims.

Italy is always lovely. The Economist recently named it ‘the country of the year’ for its performance in Eurovision, football and post-pandemic economic recovery under the wise leadership of Mario Draghi. But there’s still a lamentable postal service.

It can take between six weeks and two months for a small package, sent from Kent, to arrive at a town near Rome and, even then, a Brexit surcharge of three euros may be applied on delivery.

In the days when I reported from Rome, I was advised to post outgoing mail from Vatican City, as the Holy See routed their postal services through the very efficient Swiss Post – still ranked as the world’s best postal service.

Postal performance is uneven throughout Europe, but it’s hard to escape the judgement that Protestant cultures generally run more reliable postal services than Catholic ones. This may be related to the frequency of holy days, still observed, even where life is largely secular.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

It’s crying time again As the Everly Brothers sang so poignantly, ‘I’ll do my crying in the rain.’

And at lots of other moments.

I cry every time I read of George Osborne’s death in Vanity Fair (even though, or perhaps because, he was such a shit). A good, strong power ballad or a bit of country music can produce a little water in the eyes. My voice can break when I’m reading a good line of Shakespeare. Nowadays, I make it break – it has such a good effect on the children who are astounded that Shakespeare can bring a strong woman down.

Sometimes I have to fight against tears of frustration, or anger, but I absolutely will not cry in front of the children. It is the first rule of self-preservation. That, and don’t tell them your phobia – or you’ll have plastic spiders thrown at you from here to eternity.

So I am rather surprised to find staff sobbing everywhere at the moment.

Strong women (I’ve not yet caught a man crying but if I did, I’d congratulate him and point him towards Macduff) are blubbing all over the place. I find them under staircases, shut away in little offices and in the car park. A kind word and their tears flow ever faster.

Why? We’ve survived the longest, hardest term. We’ve survived a peak of COVID cases among staff and students which we, almost alone among local

schools, weathered without closing or sending year groups home. We’ve survived the lockdowns, the home learning and the juddery returns to work.

So why the crying now?

Some people admit to crying through fear – of COVID. They’ve had it, or they haven’t – either way, they’re getting the collywobbles. We have howling gales blowing through the classrooms: coats allowed, face masks on. Everyone who wants to has been double vaccinated and the children get the virus so mildly they barely notice it. But, still, the tears…

The majority cry through sheer exhaustion. Even for a hardy old warhorse like me, this has been draining.

The constant necessity to be upbeat for the children, the accumulation of tasks on top of the normal ones (parents’ evenings, reports … all the usual stuff) are taking their toll. A child panics because the hand-sanitiser is empty, which you haven’t noticed because you are wilfully ignoring the germophobia.

Another child has been filled up with buzz words: ‘stress’, ‘mental-health issues’ and ‘COVID’.

You have to work out whether these problems are really there or are just auto-suggested by aggressive media and an over-anxious parent. A student becomes hysterical when she says, ‘Lady Macbeth wants to be a man,’ and you

bellow, ‘LADY MACBETH IS NOT TRANS.’ Then she thinks you’re transphobic.

Every minute of every day, we are watching our backs, and our students’ fronts. We are fighting the fire which is steadily encroaching, quietly advancing, circling us from every side. The fire of a frightened, angry, confused society.

There are still glorious moments. I am teaching Macbeth for the hundredth time and Jane Eyre for the first, both to hard-working, interested, motivated classes. I am writing a scheme of work for my favourite history play, Henry V, which involves rereading, researching and looking far more deeply into it than is needed for a Year 9 class. But it gives me so much satisfaction. I can return to my love of the literature; the joy in prompting children, of whatever ability, to think, feel and react.

But then I come blinking out into the world of fear, pain and exhaustion. And I perform my clown dance, or play the confessor or the therapist and wish, like the old lady that I am, that we could go back to a simpler world of banning conker fights and not wincing when someone coughs.

We need to stop crying and start fighting. Take off the masks, close the windows and chuck the hand-sanitisers.

The worst has passed. The children don’t need our tears. They need our courage.

Quite Interesting Facts about … spices Anise is a member of the carrot family.

Caraway seeds are not seeds but fruits.

Contact with wasabi is fatal to fire ants.

Fresh vanilla beans have no taste or smell.

Cloves were once worth

their weight in gold.

There are at least 2,306 different chemicals in raw garlic.

In ancient Egypt, cumin was used for embalming mummies.

Turmeric is more effective against Alzheimer’s than any drug.

A fatal dose of saffron may be as little as 10g.

Taking fenugreek makes your sweat and urine smell like maple syrup.

Cauliflower, cabbage, kale, broccoli and kohlrabi were all bred from wild mustard.

cinnamon by the FDA in the US is 400 insect fragments and 11 rodent hairs per 50g.

JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia

The maximum amount of filth permitted in ground The Oldie March 2022 45

sister teresa

A cautionary tale for grown-ups Hilaire Belloc is currently not held in high regard. I don’t propose going into the reasons for this, but no man who wrote Cautionary Tales for Children can be all bad.

And, added to this streak of comic genius, he penned these lovely lines: From quiet homes and first beginning Out to the undiscovered ends, There’s nothing worth the wear of

winning, But laughter and the love of friends.

It is all too easy to underestimate the value and usefulness of laughter. At 5.50 on a dark and damp winter morning, I went into the smallest room in the house to replenish basic necessities, only to find the prioress scrubbing the lavatory bowl with disinfectant for all she was worth.

I apologised for bumping into her – inevitable in the confined space. To which her answer was ‘No need to apologise: this is the place to be.’

The silliness of the situation made us laugh out loud and transformed Lauds, which took place ten minutes later, from being a religious duty to a low-key but

nonetheless cheering singsong in praise of the Lord, which is definitely the way it should be seen.

Aside from the cheeriness, the prioress’s action was well and truly in line with the Carmelite spirit. St Teresa of Ávila was constantly on the watch for an overdeveloped sense of honour, which in her day was a weakness which had a crippling effect on community and individuals alike.

In her Constitutions for her nuns she specifies, under the heading The Humble Offices, ‘The first on the list of those who

‘How can I be of absolutely no assistance whatsoever?’

are to sweep the house is to be the mother prioress, that in all things she may give a good example.’

Noblesse oblige. Should this country ever implement a written constitution, it is highly unlikely that such a clause would find its way into it – more’s the pity.

Another basic Carmelite principle requires that the sisters in each monastery should all be friends.

‘I should think so, too’ is a common reaction to this idea. But it is not as easy as it sounds, and is something that has to be worked at from the day one enters until the end of one’s life.

This conscious and ceaseless effort to be charitable is not, of course, confined to nuns. It is the very heart of the Gospel message. If one goes back to the common Greek usage of the word philia – friendship – one finds that it has some very concrete and practical connotations.

These include being helpful and caring.

Rather more surprisingly, there is also an inference that friendship should be entertaining: not insipid or cliquey, but enjoyable and involving everybody.

Funeral Service

April Ashley (1935-2021) On a frosty, sunny Liverpool day, three officers from HMS Eaglet were among the pallbearers for April Ashley, the transgender model, actress and writer.

In her former life, April Ashley was able seaman George Jamieson in the Merchant Navy. Ashley was buried next to her father, a Merchant Navy cook, in Ford Cemetery, Liverpool – where she was born. The service was taken by Father John Williams, a naval chaplain, who described April as a ‘lady of great determination and great courage’.

April was the most famous sex-change patient in her day, after an operation in Casablanca in 1960. She appeared with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in The Road to Hong Kong in 1962. Her fame increased when, in 1963, she married the 46 The Oldie March 2022

Hon Arthur Corbett, later Lord Rowallan.

In a famous case, Corbett v Corbett, the marriage was annulled in 1970 on the grounds that April was male.

The Last Post was performed by the graveside. My Sweet Lord by George Harrison was played during the funeral.

‘April was a princess,’ recalled Peter Maddock, an old friend and partner in the restaurant they ran in Knightsbridge.

‘Her humour was essentially northern.’ He described her dazzling appearance at a dinner party dressed as Madama Butterfly. A recording of Maria Callas singing Un bel dì, vedremo from Madama Butterfly was played.

Bev Ayre read She Is Gone by David Harkins.

Lou Muddle read Farewell, My Friends by Rabindranath Tagore.

The popping of a bottle of champagne by the grave ended the service.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Why do some people never get COVID? Humans, thank God, aren’t identical and suffer in different ways theodore dalrymple

In the 19th century, the chemist and hygienist Max von Pettenkofer conducted an unwise experiment.

He swallowed a concentrated culture of the cholera germ in front of others. He was trying to disprove Robert Koch’s theory that his newly discovered germ, Vibrio cholerae, was the cause of cholera.

At least Max von Pettenkofer proved the sincerity of his disbelief in Koch’s discovery. He did not subsequently suffer from cholera – at least not severely. From this he concluded, wrongly, that the germ was not the cause of the disease.

He strengthened his wrong conclusion by also drinking bicarbonate of soda with the cholera germs to neutralise the stomach acid Koch had suggested might protect against cholera.

There is a difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition in the causation of infectious diseases. The presence of Vibrio cholerae is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of the disease of cholera.

This is the same with the infective agent of most other infectious diseases.

Factors such as the dose of the agent and the genetic susceptibility of both individuals and whole groups are of great importance.

The Spanish conquest of what became Latin America was facilitated, if not made possible, by the susceptibility of the Amerindian populations to imported diseases, such as smallpox and measles.

They had no previous experience of these diseases and therefore no relative immunity, conferred by the workings of natural selection.

It has been estimated that nine-tenths of the catastrophic population decline in the century after the arrival of the Spanish was caused by disease – and not by the cruelty so beloved of purveyors of the anti-Spanish Black Legend, la leyenda negra.

By contrast, Europeans were unable to penetrate the interior of Africa in any

numbers until the cultivation of cinchona, the medicinal tree, on a large scale, because they had no natural immunity or resistance to malaria. Hence the old sailors’ jingle: Beware, beware the Bight of Benin, For few come out where many go in.

That is why European slave-traders had to use Africans as intermediaries.

Is it possible that the difference in mortality between East Asia on the one hand and Europe and America on the other is the result of differing exposures to like viruses in the past?

Individual variations in susceptibility to infectious disease, for example among people of different blood groups, have long been the subject of research.

If people exposed to similar doses of germs nevertheless differ in their clinical outcomes, some explanation of the difference must be possible, at least in theory, and might offer clues as to prevention or cure of the disease.

It was only to be expected that there should be differences in susceptibility and response to COVID-19 infections: in fact, anything else would have been surprising. Not everybody in a household

in which there is a case of COVID-19 comes down with it. A doctor friend of mine who was ill with COVID for two weeks in the first wave, and remains to this day without a sense of smell, was nursed by his wife, who not only had no symptoms but had no virological evidence of infection in the first place.

Initially, only 15 per cent of the members of a household with a clinical case of COVID suffered themselves from the disease. Still, with ith the greatly increased transmissibility of the Omicron variant, this figure has risen enormously.

It was indeed fortunate, then – and not a foregone conclusion – that increased virulence did not accompany the increased transmissibility of the Omicron variant.

While differences in personal and group susceptibility may yield valuable clues, the problem of confounding variables is bound to be difficult to solve.

Humans are not bacteria in Petri dishes, even under the most stringent dictatorships, where conditions may be conveniently controlled so that everyone behaves in the same way. Let us hope this always remains the case.

To celebrate our 30th birthday....

The Oldie Annual 2022 Buy one copy for £5.95 and get £2 off every subsequent copy

128 pages of the best of The Oldie since 1992 To order the annual or the new cartoon book, go to www.theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop FREE POSTAGE AND PACKING IN THE UK

Overseas deliveries: £5 base postage for deliveries to Europe, £8 for deliveries outside Europe and then £5 for every subsequent book.

The Oldie March 2022 47

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

Light relief SIR: Like Gyles Brandreth, my husband and I are great fans of Bargain Hunt. As well as enjoying the banter between contestants, presenters, experts and auctioneers, we’re often amused by the discrepancies between what is actually said and the (presumably) computergenerated subtitles.

The best we’ve spotted to date relates to one of Philip Serrell’s finds, ‘ewer and basin’, being rendered as ‘urine basin’.

Maggie Cobbett, Ripon, North Yorkshire

Beatrix Potter gets lost SIR: Having recently spent a wonderful week’s holiday in the Lake District, I thoroughly enjoyed William Cook’s article ‘The Tale of Beatrix Potter’ (January issue). However, the Tower Bank Arms (great beer) and Hill Top Farm (Beatrix’s home) are in the village of Near Sawrey and not, as the article implied, in its twin village, Far Sawrey, half a mile away.

Yours, Robin Vlies, Rossett, Wrexham

Æthelred the Ready

Bargain Hunt blunder

Shell toil SIR: I have just read Memory Lane in the November issue and it certainly brought back memories of my days as a petrolpump attendant back in the 1960s. I too had a holiday/Saturday job, at our local Shell garage, and in 1964/65 Super Shell was 5/6d a gallon while Shell-Mex was only 4/6d.

One had to be very careful of blowback in those days, and unfortunately the only time I mistimed it was for a diesel vehicle and I was covered in the stuff. The clothes I was wearing had to be binned!

I worked at the garage until I went to college in 1967 and, before that, in 1966, I met my future husband, who was working in the parts department.

When I left college in 1968, I went to work for Shell in London and so the connection continued. Happy days!

Yours faithfully, Fiona Youlton, Lavendon, Olney, Buckinghamshire

48 The Oldie March 2022

reminded me of an anecdote from Virginia Graham, lifelong friend of Joyce Grenfell, which you may like to pass on to him or her.

Joyce’s handbag was apparently renowned for being stuffed with every manner of item, some seemingly inexplicable. On one occasion, when this subject was mentioned among a group of friends, Ginnie, with heavy irony, said that if asked, no doubt Joyce could probably produce a piece of beige braid from about her person. Joyce delved in her bag and extracted that very object with a small smile of triumph.

Jane Bower, Cambridge

SIR: I was surprised to find no reference in Hugo Gye’s review of Æthelred the Unready (January issue) to the common misperception of that king’s nickname. It means not ‘unready’ but ‘unadvised’.

The word ‘rede’ has long fallen from use, but it is there in Hamlet, Act I Scene 3, when Ophelia begs her brother not to be hypocritical, like the ‘ungracious pastor’ who ‘recks not his own rede’. Here, ‘rede’ is noted as meaning ‘counsel’ or ‘advice’, still in common use in Shakespeare’s time. We would probably say that the ‘ungracious pastor’ doesn’t practise what he preaches.

The question posed by Gye as to whether Æthelred inadvertently signed the death warrant for Anglo-Saxon England tends to confirm that the king was ‘unadvised’.

Brigid Purcell, Norwich

SIR: I’ve enjoyed Elizabeth David’s books and certainly wouldn’t question her profound influence on postwar British food. But Ann Morrow’s recollections certainly tally with other such accounts of her behaviour in restaurants and I’m just glad I was never her dining companion!

She really does sound like hard work.

I remember once reading an article in which prominent chefs were asked to name their favourite rubbish foods: one enjoyed eating cold baked beans straight from the tin while another liked tucking into the occasional fish-finger sandwich.

I’m guessing that Elizabeth David would have been quite unable to make a contribution to that!

Rhona Taylor, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire

Joyce Grenfell’s handbag

At Oxford with Liz Taylor

SIR: I’ve just read the Old Un’s request for details of pocket contents. It

Scary Elizabeth David

SIR: Re your article ‘Burton and Taylor go to Oxford’ (February issue) – how well I remember this occasion! I was 20 at the time. I still have framed on my kitchen wall the glossy red-and-black souvenir programme showing a satanic Dr Faustus, leaning into the picture.

A group of us English students were treated by medical students from Richard Burton’s old college, Exeter – they bedded down in sleeping bags on the street at the entrance to the Oxford Playhouse to assure us good tickets.

Such chivalry or, rather, wetness and unawareness on our part, would exist,

how my father, an ex-soldier, obtained these, remains.

Yours faithfully, Kevin J Last, Hinton St George, Somerset

Kingsley’s lordly tenant

‘It’s amazing – you can’t see his lips move’

I am sure, no more! I shall never forget Richard Burton’s voice, like heated treacle, and Elizabeth Taylor’s tout ensemble.

I shall always remember David Wood, too – such a familiar figure on the Oxford student theatre scene for his huge comedic talent. I thank The Oldie for reminding me of those days, so suffused with glamour and promise, and I look forward hugely to David’s book, describing what became of his early gifts – something meteoric, I feel sure.

Sue Tyson (née Yarker), Bramhall, Cheshire

Poor Boris SIR: Stephen Glover may or may not have cooked Boris’s goose at the Garrick (February issue), but even he surely knows by now that the Prime Minister, poor chap, is a pauper who relies on others to pay his bills.

Yours sincerely, Roger James, London SE5

Irish Tutankhamun SIR: Reading Eleanor Doughty’s enjoyable article about Lord Carnavon and Howard Carter (February issue) reminded me of a curious incident in my own background.

My father, who died in 1971, was alleged to have met Carter and obtained from him certain Egyptian artefacts. I have been unable to verify this meeting and the current Lady Carnavon had no relevant information. What I know for certain is that my father donated about 50 items to the National Museum of Ireland, in Dublin. I have been there to check. So, if the source was not Carter, where did he get them from? While he was certainly in India, there is no record of his ever going to Egypt.

One cannot now approve of the export of such indigenous artefacts to foreign lands, as was the habit in the early-20th century, but the mystery of

SIR: I much enjoyed Roger Lewis’s salute to Kingsley Amis (February issue), but there is one small point I would like to make. My wife and I were good friends of Hilly and Lord Kilmarnock, or Ali as we knew him, and visited the house in Primrose Hill they shared with Kingsley on several occasions.

Although we never met Kingsley, my recollection is that the house belonged to Kingsley and it was Hilly and Ali who lived in the basement while Kingsley occupied several of the substantial rooms upstairs.

Yours, Michael Fletcher, Wivenhoe, Essex

New York state of mind SIR: Daniel Koch’s affectionate portrait of New York State (February issue) rightly tried to emancipate the north of the state from the tyranny of people’s knowledge of the city in the south.

However, even he in his references to ‘upstate’ never gets far enough north to mention the place I once lived in for a year.

Champlain occupies a reach beyond the Adirondacks, a bit of land that a New York City dweller insisted to me was actually Canada, despite my protestations that I lived there. This is where the folk describe everywhere that isn’t Clinton County or thereabouts (London, Uganda, California) as ‘down there’, by which they mean south of Plattsburg or perhaps Albany, which is actually the state capital.

Thirty-five years after leaving, we were revisiting and, crossing south from Canada, were greeted by an immigration official in his early forties who remembered everything about us, including where we had lived. I guess not much had happened in Upstate New York in the intervening years! It’s a beautiful, gentle plot of the USA always overlooked.

To come back to Daniel Koch’s comparison to England, I wonder if there are any areas here that he would characterise as being so unnoticed. If so, I would like to move there.

Martyn Offord, Crich, Derbyshire

It was 30 years ago today...

SIR: Almost 30 years ago, while in

London on home leave from Switzerland with my husband, I celebrated my 60th birthday and invited an old friend to join us.

He arrived with a very appropriate birthday present, the first issue of a new magazine. It was, of course, The Oldie.

After reading it, I took out a subscription and have received and enjoyed every issue since – and I hope to continue doing so on and after my 90th birthday in a few weeks’ time!

Thank you for the enjoyment that you have provided!

Long may you continue.

Yours sincerely, Renate Walsh (Mrs), West Chiltington, West Sussex

Long live tea cosies SIR: I thought Edward McParland (Rant, February issue) might feel reassured by this picture of my nutty, home-made tea cosy.

Yours warmly,

Cup that cheers: Glennis’s tea cosy Glennis Gomersall, Havant, Hampshire

Antonia Fraser v Milton SIR: There is a misprint in my poem, Crashing, published in the January issue. The correct version is below.

I’m sure Milton made less fuss about Paradise Lost!

Yours, Lady Antonia Fraser, London W8 If it’s true about Adam – There was only one fall – Why blame Madam that he fell at all?

Old age is a stage When most people crash And frequently smash But God made Adam Pure without sin.

He had his chance.

I wish I were him.

Yet we have to believe That he fell once.

So why blame Eve For the work of a dunce?

The Oldie March 2022 49

I Once Met

Jackie Kennedy Jackie and I lived on the same corridor at Vassar College as fellow undergraduates in 1947.

She shared a room with Edna Harrison from Hawaii, while she came from Manhattan, Paris and exotic places; one did not venture to ask exactly which.

We were only 18, and glamour already set her apart. She and the silent Edna avoided the communal jollities on the corridor. We later read Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963). She reminded me of Lakey.

Jackie and I were catapulted into a close friendship. One dreadful night, I had been awakened by the muffled sounds of distress from the room next door. I pulled on my dressing gown over my nightie, ventured a knock on the closed door and peeped into the darkness. I saw a shuddering form, wound in a sheet wet with blood.

My heart tightened while I sought help from our neighbour, Jackie.

‘Something serious,’ I said and in no time Jackie left her bed to join me.

Turning on the light, we saw a small figure under the twisted sheet, blood everywhere. While I attempted

reassurance, Jackie fetched the resident caretaker. No phones in those days.

In consequence of this unhappy episode, Jackie and I become close.

A mixture of horror and guilt bound us together.

Eventually we learned that Jean, for that was her name, had survived and had returned home in the care of a psychiatrist. Yet other than extending one invitation to supper in the dining hall, abruptly refused, none of us had made an effort to befriend this shy, solitary student whose head was always down when she scuttled in and out of her door.

Too late we learned she was a maths major with a full Coca-Cola scholarship from upper New York State.

College campuses were isolated in those days and counselling was non-existent.

Jackie’s brand of aloofness had inspired awe; she embodied a mix of mystery and movie-star beauty. But after this episode she became approachable – even friendly. To my pleasure, she shared her secret application for that year’s Prix de Paris. As the prize was an apprenticeship at Vogue in Paris, I was amazed.

‘I just need to prove to myself that I

can do it,’ she explained as one night she laid out the sheets of drawings and essays on fashion and why she wanted the job.

My humble admiration was reinforced.

This was a mammoth undertaking alongside her academic studies. Her submissions were stunningly professional and, yes, using a pseudonym, she did win the Prix de Paris.

To my disappointment, Jackie did not return to Vassar the following year to finish her degree. She became engaged while working as a journalist in Washington, where she met JFK; they were married in 1953. She became First Lady in 1960 aged 32.

A bunch of red roses appeared by our front door in Barnes on the day President Kennedy was murdered in 1963 – a touching acknowledgement of my North American antecedents. The anonymous donor was not to know that I had once enjoyed a friendship with Jackie Bouvier, now Jack’s widow.

However, I was telephoned that day by the Times: could I shed light on the character of Mrs Kennedy?

Appalled as I was by the tragedy and horror of what had taken place in Dallas, Texas, I declined to comment.

Joan Wheeler-Bennett

NICHOLAS GARLAND

Magnifico Alexander Chancellor

Forty-eight years ago, I was a long-haired student living in the kind of chaotic shared house that might, some years later, have inspired the TV series The Young Ones.

In spring 1974, taking time off from listening to Bob Dylan’s new Planet Waves album, I fell upon a two-line notice in Private Eye: ‘To rent: Tuscan farmhouse between Arezzo and Siena, with pool.

Sleeps 18. £120 per week.’

I rang the number, and the owner invited me up to London to meet him. He took me to lunch in a trendy 50 The Oldie March 2022

hamburger joint in the King’s Road, along with his wife and two angelic daughters. This was Alexander Chancellor (1940-2017) – editor of The Oldie from 2014 to 2017.

I must have passed muster, because I and the full capacity of friends spent the summer deep in the Tuscan countryside.

It was a beautiful, large, robust old farmhouse, tenderly restored, with living space and bedrooms on the first floor, a huge loggia overlooking the garden, dormitory accommodation under the roof, wonky, tiled floors, rafters and no electricity.

We gloried in the local food, markets, paintings, the Palio in Siena, our sun-burnished

bodies and far too much wine. Even with that casual nonchalance of youth, we knew our luck. Many of that same group have been renting summer houses in Italy ever since.

Years later, in 2005, I read Alexander’s ‘A to Z’ column in the Guardian magazine. He wrote how he, as a 19-yearold new driver in London, had knocked down an elderly woman who had walked out in front of his Mini, attracting an angry crowd of passers-by who wanted to see him arrested.

But the woman, not badly hurt, vigorously defended Alexander, declaring that it had been her own fault, and the ‘lynch mob’ dispersed. She had been willing to give

youth the benefit of the doubt. ‘Nearly half a century later,’ he wrote, ‘I still think of her fondly from time to time.’

I always wondered if this incident had in some way influenced Alexander in entrusting his precious Tuscan farmhouse to a rabble of students – a gift that changed the course of our lives. I meant to write to him to ask, but never did, and now that he is no longer with us, I can’t – an eternal regret. But nearly half a century later I still think of him fondly from time to time.

By Antony Mason, West Norwood, London, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Happy 30th Anniversary to The Oldie

52 The Oldie March 2022

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The Oldie March 2022 53

Books Nigel the kingmaker ANNE ROBINSON One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage

By Michael Crick

GARY WING

Simon & Schuster £25 Quite a few people – who shouldn’t – have a soft spot for Nigel Farage. You can see why. Funny, quick-thinking, selfdeprecating, authentic. Also egotistic, arrogant and duplicitous.

UKIP, which the then unknown 29-year-old joined in the early nineties, was created by the euro-sceptic Alan Sked, an academic and historian from the London School of Economics. Young Nigel couldn’t have been culturally more poles apart from Dr Sked. As the seriousminded Sked soon discovered.

After a national executive meeting in London, Nigel persuades Sked and a few others to follow him to a Mayfair strip club. According to Sked, it was incredibly sleazy – ‘full of hatchet-faced women wearing nothing but G-strings, selling drinks’.

Sked has one drink to Nigel’s halfdozen. As Sked leaves, he describes Nigel as ‘completely blotto’ and notes Nigel’s head is wedged between a woman’s breasts.

No matter: when re-elected to the NEC, Nigel tops the poll.

Soon he is promising that UKIP will be great, ‘once we get the right people in charge’. As history shows, the right people – or rather the right person – turns out to be Nigel.

The one who regards ‘lunch’ as two bottles of red. The one who, when he discovers there’s only mineral water in the television greenroom before a live debate with Nick Clegg, warns he’ll withdraw unless something stronger is delivered, pronto.

He’s very lucky to have Michael Crick as his independent biographer. Crick is an old-fashioned, first-rate political reporter, who’s produced a strikingly even-handed work. Delicious in its detail.

There’s Nigel’s early childhood, spent living in a semi-detached Victorian cottage in a village outside Bromley. The boy who spends hours in the nearby parkland in walking distance of the North Kent Downs, searching for fossils.

The day pupil at Dulwich College, remembered mostly for ridiculing classmates when he spots a fragility. The star of the debating society, whose elevation to prefect causes a mildmannered female English teacher to write a strong letter of protest.

Who cares? By then, Nigel is dressing like the successful stockbroker he is to become, with no time or desire for further education.

John Major’s decision to join the ERM lights his political fire. By 2006, he’s the leader of UKIP, doggedly fighting for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. The brilliant upholder of democracy who nevertheless runs first UKIP – then, after the referendum, the renamed Brexit Party – as his own personal fiefdom, without any discernible sign of consensus.

He’s the Farage who turns emotional when referring to King and Country, or anyone he spots in a Bomber Command tie.

Once an MEP, he uses the European Parliament as his personal theatre. Yet when his MEP days are over, he refuses to take the £153,000 severance pay.

A chapter headed ‘A Weakness for Women’ delves into Nigel’s affairs when he’s still married to his German, longsuffering second wife. Bang in the The Oldie March 2022 55

middle – and it stops you in your tracks – is the most tender of letters to a fragile mistress, as he ends the relationship: ‘I wonder whether I am capable of this job without you. I will miss you horribly and painfully and the love that we have shared. I will still think about you and worry about you.’

Elsewhere, his famous friendship with President Trump has him tipped to become Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Washington.

The most outstanding revelations in the book are after Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister and the announcement of the 2019 General Election. The Brexit Party has just triumphed in the European elections with 29 seats. Farage declares back home his party is fielding a full slate of candidates. The Sunday Times warns that he is paving the way for a hard-left Government. The secret negotiations to strike a deal with the Conservatives to prevent the vote splitting grow more and more intense right up to the close of nominations at 4pm. By then, the Brexit Party candidates have been halved.

Farage claims he was offered a place in the Lords by two separate people at No 10. Another Brexit MEP is told he might become Transport Minister. It’s suggested that eight former Brexit MEPs will be offered peerages. Crick calls it ‘serious criminal activity at the highest level’. In the event, no gongs change hands. The Brexit Party fails to win a single seat. The kingmaker is reduced in the results table to an asterisk.

Crick concludes that, while Farage can’t take sole credit for Brexit, it’s hard to think of any other politician in the last 150 years who has had so much influence on British history. An arresting statement.

Except, for now, he is still 57-year-old Nigel from Kent, with no title before his name or letters after it. Just a former politician with an interview slot on GB News.

Poor little rich kids NIKHIL KRISHNAN A Class of Their Own: Adventures in Tutoring the Super-Rich

By Matt Knott Trapeze £25 Matt Knott is now a screenwriter; his memoir suitably has multiple plotlines.

The A plot is about the years he spent after university as a dogsbody to the children of the filthiest of rich. His B plot is a portrait of the author as a 20-something gay man in the big city

trying to make a short film and have a love life.

The first two plots are both played for laughs, poised somewhere between satire and farce. But the book also has a third, and sadder, C plot: about the desperate loneliness of the children he tutors, and his own dawning awareness of his complicity in the system he mocks.

Despite his private education and Cambridge degree, Knott identifies as one of the poor. His fees at school were paid by a bursary for ‘staff kids’. Arriving at parties for friends without a present, he is in the habit of writing ‘Don’t drink it all at once’ on a card he leaves by the Bollinger.

Graduating from university on the eve of the financial crash of 2008, he finds himself turning to ad hoc tutoring to pay the bills while he tries to make a career in film. Because he’s young, well-spoken and good-looking, the agency tells him he will ‘fit’ nicely into his clients’ lifestyles.

And so he finds himself set loose on children who range from the suffering to the insufferable, some neglected, some over-parented. He finds himself wandering through homes with private cinemas, private saunas and kitchen larders stocking £40 artichokes. Mothers flirt with him, neglected children mistake him for their absent (delinquent or incarcerated) fathers, and everyone assumes he knows how to get their children into Eton.

Soon, he is part of the retinue of staff and sycophants that accompanies the families on their (skiing, sailing, shooting) holidays. He is a well-paid ‘buddy’ to children who have no friends.

His Cambridge degree makes him a ‘branded accessory’ – a sort of talking Gucci handbag.

Knott’s tone is tart. ‘Historically Horace was always in the top third of his

year,’ says one worried mother. ‘I presumed she meant the lower end of the top third,’ the tutor observes. ‘God, I loved Biggles,’ says one wistful father, as he commands Knott to read the books aloud to his son; ‘as though he and the fictional pilot had conducted a torrid affair during the Battle of the Somme’.

Meanwhile, he klutzily attempts to make himself into a filmmaker. The ironic self-deprecation is a riskier strategy here. It’s one thing for him to admit to being a bit of a fraud as a teacher. As one frank housekeeper tells him, ‘Por favor, Mateo… Charge what you like. They can afford it.’

But revealing that he doesn’t know what ‘storyboarding’ is to a potential producer of his short film suggests that he has imbibed more of his schoolfriends’ chutzpah than he admits. Can he claim inferior status just because he doesn’t own a yacht?

To his credit, Knott raises the accusation himself. ‘You’re not exactly Oliver Twist,’ a friend tells him. ‘I am, compared to these kids,’ he replies – reasonably enough, but thereby reminding us that other, poorer children do exist. A few of them even appear in his story. For their families, an hour with a tutor represents a real sacrifice – perhaps even a meal or two skipped – ‘rather than a rounding error in a vast weekly budget’.

But it is the rich kids whose sadness seems to come as a surprise. Young ‘Felix’, who seems to have got through as many tutors as the Von Trapp children did governesses, announces, ‘Just want to stop breathing.’

‘If you do that, you’ll die,’ says Knott.

‘Good.’

Knott begins to appreciate the advantages of growing up as a member of the unaspirational middle class.

He eventually summons up some anger at the whole system but adds, guiltily, ‘I had tacitly endorsed my clients’ values and turned a blind eye to their behaviour.’ He leaves it there, content to be funny and to hint at depths left unexamined.

His publishers tell us the book has something to say about capitalism. I’m not sure it does. Affluence and status anxiety are older than capitalism, and vulgarity may well survive it. What Knott has written is a traditional comedy about old (human) vices in new (capitalist) bottles. He reminds us of what we already know: that great wealth confers neither happiness nor (in any sense that matters) class.

Nikhil Krishnan is a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge The Oldie March 2022 57

Holy folk

complacent faith allowed. Heber-Percy forces himself, and us, to see the good in everything we might dislike, including the wasps in his study, ‘like the Pharisees, always buzzing in with their tricky questions’. But ‘every story needs a baddie. Jesus has to be tested’.

The book is best kept on the bedside table for a nightly dose of inspiration. But beware lest these apparently beguiling writings provoke you to sleeplessness.

YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM Tales of a Country Parish: From the Vicar of Savernake Forest

By Colin Heber-Percy Short Books £12.99 Many of us, during the darkest days of the pandemic when churches were locked, clung to a regular online holy event to guide us through the grimness.

We weren’t just watching the streamed Sunday service from the local vicarage’s kitchen. Thousands tuned in to the Dean of Canterbury, live-streaming Morning Prayer from his garden while his cat disappeared into the skirts of his cassock.

Others (I was among them) listened to Benedictine monks of Le Barroux in Provence singing Vespers together every afternoon – the most consoling sound, especially when you’re trapped on a small island and forbidden to sing hymns.

These things really did prop us up.

The parishioners of the Savernake Forest parishes of Wiltshire were kept going by the written reflections of their vicar Colin Heber-Percy, which he shared as online parish letters. The parishioners forwarded them to their friends and relations all over the world, and they soon went viral in the more benign sense.

Here they are in book form, taking us back to that first year of doom-filled elation when the busy world was hushed and you could hear the birdsong.

I happen to know the village Heber-Percy lives in. Tidcombe is an enchanting cul-de-sac village that peters out into fields at the far end. He takes us there, and that is the book’s first act of kindness. We experience it all with him – the sky in the evening, the mice in the larder, the wasps in the study, the ancient burial mounds in the fields and the beloved church, its doors eventually creaking open after the first desolate four months.

Heber-Percy is excellent and witty company. He is good on his own physical shabbiness, as well as that of his car, a beloved old rust-bucket of a Seat Ibiza.

It not only ‘doesn’t spark joy’; ‘it barely sparks at all’.

He looks at himself in the mirror one morning, feeling old and tired. ‘I looked like a potato – no, the ghost of a potato.’

(Don’t we know the feeling?) He mentions his children in their 21st-century normality: teenage sons who leave beer bottles, Rizla papers, crisp packets and cereal bowls lying around. His daughter says, ‘This is what Heaven is like,’ when she steps into the

‘I love gas – it gives such a warm glow’

newly refurbished Londis shop at the petrol station on the A338.

Heber-Percy thinks about the Christian faith while scraping pigeon droppings off the car with an old CD case. He thinks about it when trapping the mice benignly and releasing them into said fields. The shopkeeper in the DIY shop asks him, ‘What would St Francis do?’

This is the essence of the book. His Christian reflections on everyday life and goodness remind us how mad and topsy-turvy Christianity is. Every single thing seems to be a paradox: ‘It’s not a case of our penetrating the mysteries of scripture, but of letting the mystery of scripture penetrate us.’

‘A means of murdering a human being becomes the site of our salvation.’

‘We can’t absorb these texts [the Parables]; they absorb us.’

How perplexing and confusing it all is.

Fair is foul and foul is fair. But this is clearly how Heber-Percy likes it. He relishes the knottiness and provocativeness of the Gospel, just as Jesus did.

‘Religion doesn’t work,’ Heber-Percy writes. ‘Why would you ever suppose religion works? Does life work? Does love work? No, it fills you, changes you, changes the world around you, puts you to work.’

You can see how he kept people all over the world mentally awake during the pandemic. These essays are vigorous spiritual exercises. No relaxing into

‘I see you’re young … how brave’

Grim Reaper’s memoir CRESSIDA CONNOLLY This Mortal Coil: A History of Death

By Andrew Doig Bloomsbury £25 There are two pitfalls with a book that sets out to tell the history of anything.

If the writer has too particular a voice, he may be accused of glibness. But if he leans too heavily on facts and tables, the book will be dry.

Andrew Doig, a professor of biochemistry, avoids both. He writes clearly and with occasional flashes of wit or impatience: government drug policy clearly gets his goat. He also presents enough information in graphs and diagrams to appease the boffin. This is a book that deserves a wide and appreciative audience.

But Doig does face some difficulties.

The first is that, as we near the second anniversary of life with COVID, the reading public may be violently averse to yet more facts about transmissibility, vaccination and demise. But of course many of the 116 billion people who have lived on this earth met their end from infections of one sort or another, and the author does not – could not – shy from this.

Indeed, the longest section of the book is given over to infectious disease, from the plague to influenza. Tuberculosis gets short shrift, but there’s plenty of typhus, cholera, malaria and smallpox. The passages about parasites and worms are not for the faint of heart.

Doig makes the excellent point that the best course for those opposed to vaccination is to adopt it with some enthusiasm, since it’s the only way of eradicating a disease, thereby making inoculation obsolete. As a professional hypochondriac, I have spent many years quaking with fear about Ebola. So it was a huge relief to learn here that there is now a vaccine against it.

Much of this material will be familiar to fans of Jared Diamond’s groundbreaking Guns, Germs and Steel (1997).

Doig restates the extent to which The Oldie March 2022 59

colonial invaders brought disease. He also revisits the fact that agriculture caused its early practitioners tremendous problems. There was vulnerability to crop failure, bringing the horrors of famine. Hunter-gatherers ate more than 120 different things, but settled farming reduced people’s diets, with the result that many suffered a fatal lack of vitamins and iron.

That said, being a hunter-gatherer wasn’t much fun. Adherents of the Paleo diet, take note: it wasn’t all rosy. Doig asserts that the Neolithic was by far the worst time to be a human, with deadly infections and violence never far off.

Archaeological records show violent death rates of up to 60 per cent.

Only the Aztecs had a worse time of it, fighting ‘so-called Flower Wars that were arranged in advance with neighbouring states, rather as we might arrange sporting fixtures’. Life at home wasn’t much safer, with people’s ‘hearts being cut out on top of pyramids on a staggering scale’.

It’s a relief to reach the sunlit uplands of the present day, where we’re more likely to die as a result of eating too many chips and sitting too long on the sofa.

Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine – and hygiene – we are fated to die from diseases associated with longer life spans: the familiar triumvirate of heart disease, cancer and stroke. The older we get, the higher the odds of our developing dementia and type 2 diabetes.

This is the price we pay for our unprecedented life expectancy.

The actual process of death is not dwelt upon at great length here. For the nuts and bolts of how a body shuts down, Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die cannot be bettered, while amateur oncologists will relish Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies.

A more serious lack, though, is cultural context. Doig does provide some detail about the Black Death. He describes how households where a plague death had taken place were compulsorily shuttered up, their terrified inhabitants trapped inside. The bodies were wheeled through the streets, preceded by a sombre figure with a loud bell. But there’s little else here about death customs and nothing at all about death rituals.

Dying itself is less fascinating than what we have thought about it, over recorded time. Death ritual shows us the grandiosity, futility and desperate hope that it may not, after all, be the end of us.

That’s why it’s so astonishing and so moving to learn that Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers.

Take a child to a museum and they’ll be agog at the mummies, but tell them someone died from complications arising from osteoarthritis and you’ve lost their attention.

The adult reader may feel something similar here.

In Constable country LUCY LETHBRIDGE Constable: A Portrait

By James Hamilton Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25 In 1823, John Constable presented to his friend John Fisher, the Bishop of Salisbury, his lovely oil painting Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds. Fisher objected only to the looming grey clouds.

But what is a Constable without clouds? He is the pre-eminent artist of the English sky in all its tumultuous variations, an obsessively close observer of ever-changing weather.

Constable’s The Hay Wain, so familiar from a million reproductions that it is difficult to see it with a fresh eye, first went under the title Landscape: Noon.

That is far more evocative of its feeling of midday stillness, before the sudden breaking of the rain-cloud.

Following his wonderful biography of the roistering Gainsborough, James Hamilton’s Constable is another tour-deforce of historical imagination. He embeds Constable so deeply in his period, his place and the circle of his friends and acquaintances, that all the artist’s many contradictions make complete sense within his life’s whole.

He is helped by the fact that Constable was a prodigious and vivid correspondent. His writing is a joy. It flows out of him in an unstoppable flood.

We learn about his voracious reading, dogged determination, emotional response to nature, scabrous views on

fellow artists and paranoia. He exposes the internecine rivalries of the early19th-century Academicians: ‘the field of Waterloo is a field of mercy [compared with] ours’. We learn too about his self-absorption and hypochondria, his love for his wife Maria and their seven children. ‘Bottled wasps upon a southern wall’ is his description of their huggermugger family life.

Constable couldn’t have been further from the swooning, decadent artist of the Romantic imagination – all his radicalism went into his painting. He is long on self-regard and short on self-awareness but an alluring, if opinionated, companion.

Constable inherited his letter-writing skill from his mother, Ann Constable, who also had a talent for the ‘colourful, incidental detail’. The Constables were prosperous Suffolk people with roots deep in the Stour valley. His father, Golding, owned the Flatford Mill that his son made famous. They lived in a handsome house in East Bergholt. If not quite squires, they were people of substance, with a pew in the village church.

John was handsome, gifted and loved: it is one of the many delights of Hamilton’s book that we enter the encircling group of encouragers who supported him. Time and again, he lands in the middle of an interesting crowd – and has the intuition to seek out engaging, curious, inquisitive types.

An uncle was a brewer but also a dedicated amateur botanist and fellow of the Linnean Society. John Fisher was a ‘sociable smoothie’, who oiled the wheels with introductions and stimulating conversation.

From the diaries of the artist Joseph Farington, we learn how the young Constable knocked on the door and wouldn’t be rebuffed. Another uncle paid for him to go to the Lake District, where he met Wordsworth.

Hamilton has a particular affection for John Dunthorne, who lived in East Bergholt. Dunthorne did a bit of everything – plastering, building and fixing up – and he had an unconventional and capacious intellect. He was an autodidact fascinated by ideas of all sorts.

He could make musical instruments and loved to paint. Hamilton calls his infectious company ‘the wealthy openness of the untaught mind’.

It was he who encouraged the young Constable to pay attention to nature, to what was present in his own stretch of landscape. They spent hours outside with their easels, looking and painting.

Constable’s marriage (after an The Oldie March 2022 61

‘Eye of newt’s fine but might I suggest introducing a hint of coriander, a little oregano, a mere soupçon of marjoram and a generous splash of Châteauneuf-du-Pape?’

agonisingly long courtship) to Maria Bicknell was another stroke of luck.

Maria, intelligent and empathetic, put up with his selfishness because she too was dedicated to his painting and to him.

They lived in a cottage in Hampstead from which they could see the shining lights of the city below: ‘a view unsurpassed’, thought Constable, ‘from Westminster Abbey to Gravesend’.

It wasn’t until 1829 when in his fifties that he was made a member of the Royal Academy. By then, Maria had been dead for a year. This recognition by the Establishment was important to Constable, yet he never compromised his own vision – that ‘attentiveness to nature’ for the kind of picturesque artifice then fashionable in landscape.

He was barely 60 when he died, suddenly, at home in Hampstead. It was 1837. The Victorian age had begun and Constable had become, as Hamilton felicitously puts it, ‘a legend in his own landscape’.

On a coach to Dedham, shortly before he died, he exclaimed on the beauty of the countryside to a fellow passenger who informed him, ‘This is Constable’s country.’

And so it has been ever since.

Roger the forager HAMISH ROBINSON Against the Tide

By Roger Scruton Edited by Mark Dooley Bloomsbury £20 When does a philosopher cease to be philosophical?

The conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote a guide to Derby form.

Here surely was a man who had laid

‘Citizen James (Sid James)’ by Ruskin Spear, 1962. From Humankind: Ruskin Spear: Class, culture and art in 20th-century Britain by Tanya Harrod (Thames & Hudson, £35)

down his philosophy. Indeed. But that was partly Oakeshott’s point. As a conservative philosopher, he believed that such activities had their own rationale and dignity and that picking a winner was just as important and more fun than doing philosophy.

Against the Tide, a brilliantly stimulating selection of the journalism by the late Sir Roger Scruton edited by his literary executor Mark Dooley, presents a case in point. Many of the lesser, autobiographical pieces – such as diary columns for the Spectator – are exercises in what might be called ‘little platoonery’, after Burke’s famous phrase for wholesome forms of civil association.

Sir Roger is encountered en famille attending a school play, a point-to-point or a rodeo – all of which have their interest and charm and breathe confidence in a way of life. Little essays

on wine-drinking and hunting are in similar vein. There are also less genial accounts of his peremptory dismissal from his government-appointed position as chair of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission in 2019. That was following the revelation of supposedly ‘Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic comments’ in an interview given to the New Statesman, comments that turned out to be the cut-and-pasted fabrications of an over-eager young journalist. But even this scandal is turned to the good: there are opportunities for reconciliation and forgiveness.

Reaping an extraordinary late harvest of loyalty and support from friends all over the world – not least in the former Eastern Bloc countries where he had given sustaining underground seminars – the philosopher counts his blessings.

Even a course of chemotherapy in The Oldie March 2022 63

the same year provides time for ‘intensive reading’. His last piece, published a month before he died in 2020, ends, ‘Coming close to death you begin to know what life means – and what it means is gratitude.’

But this is only half the book. Its real thrust is imparted through a series of startlingly contrarian, leader-like pieces dating from the 1980s onwards. These are little masterpieces of philosophical polemic. Gone is the expansive, autumnal, Four Quartets-like Christian sentiment of the later journalism.

Rather one is reminded of the chilly, doctrinaire logic of the philosopher Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821).

There is a brilliant little essay on the inapplicability of human rights as a guiding doctrine in foreign policy.

Another argues that the interests of animals are best served by our eating them. Another says the state has no duty to provide education. No sensitivity is left untouched. Never more than a couple of pages long and ranging from the humorously ironical to the earnestly indignant, they are closely argued and hard to summarise.

One can’t help thinking that Scruton’s hard philosophical nuts would make a wonderful gift for some young and intransigent proponent of today’s orthodoxies to try their teeth on.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Tricky marriage vows ALEX CLARK Love Marriage Monica Ali Virago £18.99 Monica Ali’s exuberant, entertaining novel opens with a marriage plot in which the deal appears already to have been sealed.

The obstacles lying in the way of Yasmin Ghorami, a junior doctor, and her fellow medic, Joe, have largely been cleared. Even one of the trickiest hurdles, the meeting of the parents, with which Love Marriage opens, is a success.

Anisah and Shaokat have run the gauntlet of Harriet Sangster’s oppressively welcoming North London kitchen and survived.

Even her short speech about liberal guilt and memories of an Ayurvedic retreat in Kerala have been absorbed into a general sense of mutual benevolence: ‘ “I see,’ said Shaokat. ‘Thank you for explaining this phenomenon.” ’ There is only her forceful suggestion

‘I’ll be very, very angry if I find out this was you, cheating on your diet’

that they involve an imam, contrary to secular Shaokat’s and fuss-averse Yasmin’s wishes, to navigate.

Ali’s lightly satirical approach makes good use of comic stereotypes. Not only is Harriet, once a highly prized feminist intellectual whose star is on the wane, the perfect example of inclusion by steamroller, but Anisah travels nowhere without carrier bags stuffed with homemade pakoras and chutneys, while Shaokat is a restrained GP whose leisure time is spent drilling with Indian clubs and rehearsing his daughter in arcane medical case studies.

His weak spot is Yasmin’s brother Arif, a drifter who has not only been chucked out of college but also impregnated a cheerful girl from a white working-class family. Meanwhile, he makes vague pronouncements about getting into telly via a YouTube documentary about Islamophobia.

But beneath this set-up, something far more delicate and disquieting emerges.

The novel’s short, vignette-ish chapters begin to include exchanges between a therapist and his patient. The patient is being treated for a sex addiction that is driving him to the point of breakdown.

It soon emerges that he is one of the story’s principal characters.

Yasmin herself begins to fumble her way towards her own sexual reckoning.

Elsewhere, subplots with little flares of violence, co-dependency and abuse begin to accrete.

As wedding preparations dominate the narrative’s superficial conversations, each character retreats into varying degrees of shame, silence and secrecy.

They are fuelled both by a sense of self-preservation and by the fear of inflicting pain on others they consider too fragile to endure it. It’s a dynamic common, perhaps, to family cultures, regardless of nationality, race or religion.

One of the most compelling themes running through Love Marriage – the title refers to the match between Shaokat and Anisah, itself under scrutiny by the end of the book – is the link that binds the adult child to his or her parents.

Another is the extent to which all generations are invested in believing their family’s communal, collaborative account of its genesis.

For Joe, brought up solely by his mother with what transpires to have been a disabling amount of licence, the result is social ease but personal disarray.

For Yasmin, trained in polite concealment and hypervigilant for any sign of her parents’ idiosyncrasies, the challenge is to let go of her need to control and smooth over.

Ali’s talent, as demonstrated in her fizzing debut novel, Brick Lane, published in 2003 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is to blend these intractable questions of family and identity into broad-brush comedy.

It is hard not to laugh as Harriet takes up Anisah, parading her at her Primrose Hill salons. In the process, she inadvertently launches her into an entirely new phase of her life.

But the humour also sits beside an abandoned Shaokat, ineptly microwaving rice and vegetables and drinking miniatures of whisky, furious, proud and intransigent. His and Anisah’s story, which finally unspools at the book’s close, is an impressive example of a revelation that makes sense of what has gone before rather than invalidating the reader’s experience.

There’s been an interesting discussion in lit-crit circles of late about the effect of the ‘trauma plot’ on contemporary fiction. If characters are burdened by too elaborate a psychological back story, they have little room to manoeuvre.

The writer becomes excessively preoccupied in excavating their past and isn’t motivated in propelling them into the future.

It seems fairer and more accurate, though, to note that this is in the novelist’s hands. People, in real life as well as on the page, are often held hostage by the stories they have imbibed and created about their own lives.

The trick is to resist a sort of doomy portentousness and interleave darkness and light, as Ali ably does here.

The Oldie March 2022 65

Falstaff ’s last act Fat, scruffy and brought low by wine, women and cake – the Prime Minister is just like Shakespeare’s tubby knight. By A N Wilson

NICHOLAS GARLAND

P

oins, when plotting the highway robbery at Gad’s Hill with Prince Hal, in Henry IV Part 1, concludes his recommendation with the line ‘The virtue of this jest will be the incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue will tell us when we meet at supper.’

Queen Elizabeth I was only one of the many Shakespeare fans who clamoured for more Falstaff. Thus, when Mistress Quickly had described his demise in Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor had to revive the roistering fat knight, with a bedroom farce.

The drama of the Henry IV plays – which are surely the best things Shakespeare ever wrote – consists in the madcap young Prince Hal’s coming to political maturity and throwing off the company of the fat knight. It is a comedy with a quasi-tragic ending. Hal turns into a real monster when, having become King, he rejects his old friend: ‘I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.’ Falstaff is taken off to the Fleet prison by the Lord Chief Justice. Verdi brought out the tragedy of it all, in his rich late masterpiece.

Generations of theatregoers have delighted in Falstaff, and some Shakespeare scholars, such as Katherine Duncan-Jones, believe that Shakespeare himself took the role. The character combines such a range of the lovable and the hateful. He is ruthless, grasping, greedy for political influence. Yet he is also hilarious and endearing.

The whole logic of the play would collapse, however, if the audience supposed the roles of Hal and Falstaff could or should be reversed.

It is a measure of what a strange nation we are that so many people at the – so recent! – General Election voted for Falstaff to be our king, or ‘world king’ as his sister Rachel told us all had been Boris’s ultimate ambition since childhood. Though his girlfriends and wives might have considered themselves a cut above Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly, no member of the public, however

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‘Falstaff’ Boris and David Cameron

sheltered they might have been from newspapers and broadcasting, could have been ignorant of his reputation. To think that Cecil Parkinson, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite to succeed her, had his career ruined by fathering a child out of wedlock. How times had changed!

One of the keys to Falstaff’s success in life is his capacity to make his friends and fans love him, not in spite of but with his faults. Likewise Boris. Whereas Matt Hancock, caught snogging in the office, had to go, Boris in comparable circumstances would be seen as just dear old Boris.

The reason that Mistress Quickly’s account of Falstaff’s death is so moving is her preparedness to overlook all the obvious faults. His disreputable friends suggest that he was crying out of [about] sack on his deathbed, which she concedes. But when Bardolph says, ‘And of women,’ she hotly contests it.

Operagoers and playgoers could all see what was happening during Brexit.

They were entertained into half-enjoying ‘the incomprehensible lies this same fat rogue will tell us’. I do not believe any voter was so stupid as to believe that recouped subsidies from Europe would pay for a hundred, or was it a million, new hospitals.

They voted like audiences at Henry IV, who positively enjoy, or half-enjoy, Falstaff’s cynicism, his belief that honour is ‘a mere scutcheon’, that the human race ‘are generally fools and cowards’.

When he is exposed as the most outright liar on the field of Shrewsbury, claiming to have killed Hotspur himself, he still has the barefaced cheek to lament, ‘Lord, lord, how this world is given to lying.’

Of course, in the well-ordered world in which Shakespeare and Elizabeth I wished to live, it was necessary to ‘banish plump Jack’. But the Boris drama revealed how things have changed. The Conservative Party was perfectly happy to cling to the sticking-out shirt-tails of their Falstaffian hero when he was providing them with the unlikeliest of parliamentary seats. (Stoke-on-Trent going Tory – ye gods! As a Stokey, I found this simply unimaginable.)

As someone who does not vote any more, but who loves the Henry IV plays, I felt I could see where the voters were coming from. They wanted to kick over the traces and so they were prepared to support a man who had, when Mayor of London, devoted over £11,000 to Doll Tearsheet, aka Jennifer Arcuri – a woman whom he claimed he scarcely knew, but who apparently deserved large dollops of other people’s money.

Any other politician caught up in such doings would have been finished, but he went on to get a parliamentary majority of more than 80 seats.

Then, however, recovering himself from COVID, the hilarious, clubbable Falstaff, who enjoyed potations with the tavern-goers of Cheapside, demonstrated his amiable self. He raised a glass of wine in the garden with some exhausted civil servants and, horror of horrors, consumed a bit of cake in the Cabinet Rooms. How the Puritans gasped, and ‘Crucify’ was all their breath.

It seems in the end that ours has been a less elevating drama than Shakespeare’s, and certainly a less amusing one.

Media Matters

A new magazine called

? Crazy!

Thirty years on, Richard Ingrams’s risky venture makes perfect sense stephen glover

Three decades ago, there was a general feeling that weekly or fortnightly magazines faced an inexorable decline.

Many believed that Saturday and Sunday newspapers, which had been adding new supplements that seemed to cover the whole of human life, made intelligent publications increasingly otiose. How wrong they were.

But that was the widespread view when The Oldie emitted its first cry 30 years ago. The Listener had just closed, and Punch was about to. The New Statesman had embarked on a long downward path. The Spectator, acquired by the Telegraph Group a few years before, was admittedly showing some signs of revival, while the Economist was pinning its hopes on the United States.

If Richard Ingrams, The Oldie’s founding editor and chief progenitor, had sought the advice of media experts, they would probably have told him that a magazine for older people disregarded by the mainstream press was a barmy idea. Thankfully he didn’t. He had a hunch, and didn’t give a fig about market research. He was, of course, extremely fortunate to have, in the late Naim Attallah, the best sugar daddy imaginable.

Richard couldn’t have known, though he must have guessed, that there were tens of thousands of people who had been waiting for The Oldie to exist. It turned out that they could not find everything they wanted in the voluminous weekend supplements.

The new publication – at first fortnightly and then monthly – was one star in a constellation which, contrary to almost everyone’s expectations, shone ever brighter over the next few years.

Other intelligent magazines were launched, and some of them thrived. In 1995, David Goodhart unleashed Prospect, a distinguished, intellectual monthly vaguely of the Left. Though it

has struggled financially over the years, it has made its mark. That same year, Jolyon Connell’s the Week was launched.

It slowly built up a large, profitable circulation and, having passed into other hands, spawned American and Australian editions.

Meanwhile, many established weeklies, whose demise was authoritatively forecast, have flourished as never before. The Spectator, which sold as few as 13,000 copies a week in the mid-1970s, now sells not far short of 80,000 print copies, and over 25,000 in digital form. The New Statesman has reversed its decline, while the Economist sells more copies than ever, in print and digital combined, in Britain and America.

The passing years have done nothing to dent the success of the fortnightly Private Eye. What is so remarkable is that serious magazines have been enjoying a golden age while all print newspapers – whose existence was once seen as a threat to the weeklies – have steadily been losing sales. For some magazines, most notably the Economist, digital provides indispensable extra revenue.

The fact remains that readers are far better disposed towards print in news and current-affairs magazines than in newspapers.

It is perfectly true that not all magazines have prospered. Some glossy ones, such as Glamour, have bitten the dust. New Musical Express, Loaded and FHM are no more. Even among the publications I have been writing about, in which words predominate over images, there have been one or two casualties.

Daniel Johnson’s Standpoint, an intellectually stimulating right-wing counterpart to Prospect, never got close to break-even, and had to close. Its progeny, the Critic, is tied to the political agenda of the multimillionaire City magnate who owns it.

There is a lesson here about sugar daddies. They are often vital for new publications. The Oldie had a succession of them before becoming financially viable. The fortnightly London Review of Books – another stunning publishing success of recent years – for a long time depended on subsidies from its wealthy co-founder and editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, who stepped down last year. Now selling more than 80,000 copies, it is strong enough to survive and thrive without its sugar mummy.

The trouble with benefactors is that they can grow bored with their voracious charges, and they will one day assuredly die. A magazine that remains reliant on a sugar daddy or mummy cannot be certain it has a future.

Rich owners with agendas can be dangerous creatures. Financial independence is ultimately the only guarantor of survival.

This largely explains the success of The Oldie and other new magazines, as well as those older ones that have revitalised themselves. They have made themselves into going concerns, and they have done this by appealing to a segment of readers who feel poorly served, or at least not fully served, by newspapers.

There are hundreds of thousands of intelligent readers out there whom newspapers can never completely satisfy.

Some may be so tired of the daily news that they will embrace a lively weekly synopsis, such as is supplied by the Week.

Many others, in common with Richard Ingrams, feel that what used to be called Fleet Street tries too hard to please younger readers.

And so this magazine was born. The measure of its success is that it does not seem vainglorious to suppose that The Oldie will still be entertaining and enlightening its readers when another 30 years have passed.

The Oldie March 2022 67

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Food’s greedy appetite for foreign words

TOM PLANT

In the aviary of languages, English is a jackdaw or a magpie, a bird that steals widely and insouciantly. Grammarians call this readiness to pinch foreign words ‘borrowing’, but it’s not the kind encouraged by your bank. True, the purloining of words deprives no other language of its inventions but, even so, no interest is paid and no capital returned.

Little exemplifies the kleptocharacteristics of English so well as the vocabulary of eating. When it comes to the matter of the menu, English seems to turn to Johnny Foreigner at almost every turn.

Consider ‘breakfast’. The word itself, with a pedigree going back to 1463, has fairly typical origins. ‘Break’ and ‘fast’ both appear in Old English, the language spoken by Anglo-Saxons from the fifth century to the 12th. They probably got it from Germanic, which seems to have formed brekan from frangere in Latin.

But similar words were knocking around Europe in Dutch and Old Frisian.

This is a common pattern. As Professor David Crystal has pointed out, no language is ever pure. Each is a mixture, formed by the contacts between its speakers and outsiders. Thus the English spoken in the middle of the first millennium AD took from Latin such modern breakfast words as ‘butter’ (butyrum in Latin, butere in Old English) and ‘pear’ (pirum in Latin, pere in OE).

Latin also gave us ‘toast’ from tostus and ‘cereal’ from Ceres, the Roman

Mumbling actors Why do so many younger TV actors mutter their lines? For dramatic effect? Listen up, directors. It … doesn’t … work. And no, I’m not deaf.

Take a recent episode of Silent Witness. Chris, having been possibly wrongly convicted of murder, is released from prison but then shot. As he’s dying, he whispers something.

Sam the pathologist bends

goddess of farming. Greek was the source of ‘marmalade’, which had hit English by 1480, via Latin, French and Portuguese.

‘Orange’ had also been adopted by then, sweeping like a virus through French, Arabic, Persian and Spanish.

‘Muesli’ appeared in English dictionaries about five centuries later, after Dr Max Bircher-Benner had launched his morning mixture as Müesli, a Swiss-German diminutive of Mus (‘mush’). And croissants had long since crossed the Channel.

Skipping elevenses (provenance: ‘eleven’ from Old English and many of the usual sources, including Old Norse and Gothic), we get to ‘lunch’ (originally a ‘thick piece or hunch’, as in ‘hunchback’).

Here, with the advent of the Normans, the extent of word theft broadens. The conquerors brought French to Britain to describe the food eaten by their class – hence ‘beef’ (boeuf), ‘mutton’ (mouton) and ‘pork’ (porc) – while those who reared the animals retained the English names, ‘cow’, ‘sheep’ and ‘pig’.

Recent research suggests that the French had already introduced early Celtic languages to Britain in the Bronze Age. More striking, though, are the later imports, and not just from France, though béarnaise, coq au vin, soufflé, quiche, tarte tatin and many others have now entered the language.

So, skipping quickly over tea (from Chinese) with its strudel (German) and marzipan (Italian), we can welcome

over him and I lean forward to hear. Did he confess? Who knows? I felt so cheated that I found the script online. His final two words were ‘I have…’

‘Turn the sound up,’ hubby yells, ‘and keep it like that!’

I’m especially cross when two cops shout at each other at the same time. The so-called background music battles with the muffled dialogue – a full orchestra bashing away with an endless cacophony of deafening drums. Really? I think we realise when we should be excited or frightened. After five minutes, I have to scrabble about to find the remote to set up subtitles.

dishes from all over the world that are suitable for lunch or dinner. The list is long, from caviar (Italian), chop suey (Chinese) and coleslaw (US) to fettucine, frankfurter and frittata; from polenta, popadum (Tamil) and pizza to satay (Javanese), schnitzel and smörgåsbord.

English even invents foreign names for such British delights as Bolognese sauce.

Foreign languages are not, however, the only source of English food names.

Some home-made terms, such as angels on horseback and pigs in blankets, show inventiveness. But look across the Atlantic, too, for nifty neologisms.

Several have been brought together by Alexandra Day in Frank and Ernest, an American children’s book about a bear and an elephant who take on the running of a diner. They find they have to expand their vocabularies to make a success of their task. ‘Cow paste’, they learn, is butter; so ‘dough well done with cow to cover’ is buttered toast. ‘Fry two, let the sun shine’ is ‘Fry two eggs with yolks unbroken.’ ‘Mama on a raft’ is marmalade on toast. ‘Put out the lights and cry’ is the order for liver and onions. ‘Paint a bow-wow red, and I need a nervous pudding’ will bring a hot-dog with ketchup and a serving of jelly.

Some may say that the relative paucity of indigenous food terms has something to do with the nature of British cuisine. Perhaps the British could be as original as the Americans if they ate more nervous pudding.

Why do actors, both male and female, blub or howl when detectives interview them after a death? ‘Dawa mo … it,’ they explain. What? Someone hands them a hanky or hugs them. And I give up. Why can’t they have a quick snivel and then say something we can hear?

Programme producers should stop showing two

SMALL DELIGHTS A slice of lemon in my iced water, the lemon picked from a tree in the room where I’m sitting. No air miles.

ELEANOR ALDRED, SHREWSBURY Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

police swapping ideas with thundering noise nearby. Law & Order: UK and other programmes obliterated most conversations by staging them beside the M25, in Heathrow Airport and on a packed Oxford Street.

Please, directors/ producers – take every auditioning actor to an empty theatre and sit at the back. If you can’t hear them making a speech, don’t give them a part. They must learn to project their voices beyond their chins. In the meantime, I’m switching to American crime programmes, where these problems don’t happen so often.

CAROLYN WHITEHEAD The Oldie March 2022 69

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT

LANDMARK MEDIA / ALAMY

PARALLEL MOTHERS (15) Brush up your Spanish history if you really want to enjoy Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film.

Ostensibly, it’s about a middle-aged, single mother – played by Penélope Cruz, whose superhuman good looks defy her 47 years – who ends up going home from hospital with the wrong baby.

But it will have any real emotional pull only for Spaniards or foreigners who know the film’s backdrop – the 100,000plus bodies buried in the Spanish Civil War, whose whereabouts aren’t known by their descendants. Imagine Spaniards trying to feel moved by an English film about the Jarrow March, and you’ll see what a mountain Parallel Mothers has to climb to appeal to British viewers.

Janis (Cruz) is descended from a great-grandfather who is one of those lost Civil War dead. The married father of her child, Arturo (sympathetically downplayed by Israel Elejalde), is an archaeologist trying to find the unmarked grave of that great-grandfather.

Spoiler alert! While pregnant in hospital, Janis befriends a much younger mother, Ana (Milena Smit) – only to find the hospital has accidentally swapped the babies soon after they were born.

She doesn’t discover this until several months after she’s formed a bond with her baby daughter. And only several months after that does she discover that her real baby has died while the baby she’s misguidedly been bringing up as her own has survived.

It’s a wrinkle on Sophie’s Choice and the Judgement of Solomon – what’s the ideal way to treat a baby you love when you’re forced to make a dreadful decision? Does she give the baby back to her real mother or cling on to her?

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The decision is such a gripping, universally appealing one that it’s hard not to be engaged by the plot. Cruz helps, too – not least because of her old-schoolHollywood-megastar looks: Sophia Loren meets Gina Lollobrigida.

She is also gifted at underplaying the torment of her tortured position – thereby successfully inducing sympathetic torment in the viewer.

But even Cruz can’t lift Almodóvar’s clunky script. To be fair, clunkiness is always increased by subtitles.

Dialogue like this doesn’t really get you going, particularly in big letters on the big screen: ‘We have to talk about us two.’

‘I don’t know where I stand with you.’

Almodóvar is famous for a particular brand of melodrama in his previous films. But the plot’s natural power – the combined tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and the agony of swapped babies – has sent him in the opposite direction, producing a linear, flat, functional screenplay. And the parallel between lost babies and lost ancestors in the Civil War is heavy-handed. As Kingsley Amis said of simplistic fiction, it’s all a bit cat-saton-the-mat.

A soap opera would have played more skilfully with such a sensational plot, introducing cliffhangers and dramatic music. But that’s too populist for Almodóvar the Oscar-winning auteur.

So he dials down the drama in the dialogue, while lobbing the odd surprise hand grenade into the plot. At one moment, with no attempt to build up any crackling romance, Janis and Ana leap into bed together – only for Janis to reverse-ferret at top speed and fall deeply for the father of her child once more.

But, then again, I’m not Spanish. Even if I know about what happened in the Spanish Civil War, I wasn’t brought up under Franco and in the shadow of that war, unlike Almodóvar, born in 1949. So

I can see that Spanish audiences will be compelled by this film in a way I never could be – not least at the end.

Another spoiler alert – but you probably need to know this spoiler if you aren’t a keen reader of international news. The body of Janis’s greatgrandfather is eventually found, still clutching the rattle that belonged to her grandmother when she was a baby.

That directly echoes the recent story of a rattle found in a Spanish Civil War grave: a dead mother in a Catalan town was discovered holding the rattle of her baby son, who was still alive, aged 75, in 2011, when the body was exhumed.

When real life inspires a fictional film such as this, the emotional boost is that much greater if you know the real-life story. A brilliant screenplay can make up for it if you don’t know that story; this screenplay can’t.

Bringing up baby: Ana (Milena Smit) and Janis (Penélope Cruz)

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK PRIVATE LIVES Touring nationwide ‘Even the youngest of us will know, in 50 years’ time, what we mean by “a very Noël Coward sort of person”,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan.

But what is a Noël Coward sort of person? I’d say it’s someone with an effortless sense of style, a shrewd understanding of life’s absurdity and a rank refusal to take themselves (or anyone else) too seriously.

These admirable attributes are encapsulated in Coward’s finest play, Private Lives, and this fine touring production, directed by Christopher Luscombe, does it credit. It doesn’t break any new ground - it doesn’t need to.

Like all great dramas, it has its own momentum which sweeps the actors along with it, like surfers riding the perfect wave.

Coward liked to boast that he wrote Private Lives in just four days, and its construction is so clever and yet so simple that you can see how he too was swept along.

Two honeymooning couples, Victor and Amanda and Elyot and Sybil, arrive at a hotel in Deauville. What follows is one of the funniest plays in the English language, but beneath the laughter there are some profound insights into the complexities of sexual attraction.

The revelation that drives the drama is that Elyot and Amanda have been married before, to each other, and out of these circumstances Coward constructs a brilliant examination of romance. Elyot and Amanda are utterly despicable, but we can’t help but adore them because their love for each other runs so deep.

Victor and Sybil, conversely, are utterly respectable, but we can’t warm to them because they’ve never known true love.

Coward’s daring argument – although he’s far too good a dramatist to spell it out – is that Elyot and Amanda, who seem so selfish and frivolous, are far wiser (and, in a way, far kinder) than Victor and Sybil, whose prim morality is no match for the untidy complications of real life.

Dugald Bruce-Lockhart and Natalie Walter are faultless as Victor and Sibyl, but theirs is a thankless task. The play belongs to Elyot and Amanda, and Nigel Havers and Patricia Hodge are perfectly cast as these cynical yet sympathetic lovers. However, Coward and his great friend Gertrude Lawrence were in their early thirties when they premièred these

The Master’s masterpiece: Patricia Hodge and Nigel Havers in Private Lives

roles, in 1930. Havers is 70 and Hodge is 75. Are they simply now too old?

Absolutely not! If anything, Coward and Lawrence were rather too young to play these parts. I’d say 40 might be the ideal age – and 40 back in 1930 is more like 50 now. OK, so it’s still a stretch to say that 70 is the new 50, but look at it this way: we live in a brave new world of colour-blind and gender-neutral casting, where actors of any ethnicity or sexuality are supposed to be able to play any role.

If a woman can play Hamlet and a black man can play Macbeth, why can’t older people play younger people? Equal rights for all!

In fact, evergreen Hodge and Havers both look at least ten years younger, but that’s beside the point. The point is that if people of every race and whatever gender can have a go at any part they like – and quite right too – then surely it’s only fair that we oldies should be allowed to join in too?

Indeed, just as a female Hamlet or a black Macbeth reveals different aspects of Shakespeare’s characters, so older actors bring something new to Coward’s masterpiece. When I’ve seen these parts played by younger actors (closer to the ages Coward intended), Elyot and Amanda have seemed rather heartless.

Played by older actors, they seem warmer and more vulnerable, acutely aware of their mortality and the remorseless march of time.

What Hodge and Havers demonstrate so adeptly is that great actors can not only play any age; they can play several ages simultaneously. In Havers’s skittish

performance, we see both the young man he once was and the old man he’ll soon become. In Hodges’s measured portrayal, we see the mature woman she’s become and the young woman she used to be.

‘Very few people are completely normal, deep down in their private lives,’ Amanda tells her shallow second husband, Victor, in the line that defines the play. In this priceless observation, as in so many other things, Noël Coward was at least 50 years ahead of his time.

Tynan was quite right.

Until 18th April. For tour dates, visit www.theatreroyal.org.uk

RADIO VALERIE GROVE The year 2022 is one of anniversaries, ripe for exploitation.

Wireless broadcasting arrived in 1922 at Savoy Hill, as we were told in Matthew Sweet’s ten 15-minute episodes of The Birth of Now on Radio 4. We heard Eliot’s own voice: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’.

A hundred years on, the BBC faces a ‘demographic time bomb’ with its licence fee frozen. A third of people under 30 don’t give a fig, since they never watch any BBC TV programmes anyway.

Over-40 radio listeners, who now use TV sets as a home cinema, remain the truest BBC adherents. They still listen to radio – and radio, of course, is free.

But the licence fee is what pays for the breadth and variety of BBC radio programmes. They are unmatched The Oldie March 2022 71

anywhere else, maintaining a high standard of spoken-word services, embracing drama and poetry, plus orchestras and choirs, including the Proms.

We who appreciate having these things belong to a club. We listen to Radios 4 and 3, 4Extra and the World Service, Radio 2 (and, outside the BBC, Times Radio, LBC, Classic FM and stations peddling vintage pop) according to mood. When we discuss programmes, it’s usually about one of those.

Sometimes, American public service programmes intrude: Think with Pinker, Radiolab, The Moth Radio Hour.

Perhaps we can imagine life without BBC television. But, unlike our podcastcrazy young, who flit about wearing ear-cans, we depend on timed fixtures such as The World at One, which means lunch, with a cabaret of hubris-filled bulletins from Downing Street’s Merrie England.

So if there were a radio fee per programme, how much per month would we happily pay? As much as our new fuel charges? Tough, isn’t it?

This year blew in with big themes.

There was Amol Rajan’s excellent, head-spinning five-part discussion series Rethink Population. And Gabriel Gatehouse’s The Coming Storm. Then the culmination of Jon Ronson’s series Things Fell Apart, which exhumed warring cultures, discovering exactly when they began, and showing how things improve if adversaries confront one another and talk them through.

But did people really stop their cars and weep to hear the sobbing televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker shrilly apologising to her AIDS-afflicted (but long-surviving) priest victim (who would now go to heaven), as Ronson claimed? I found myself callously wondering what happened to the spiritual effects of Modernism.

Forced good cheer in the style of Butlins Redcoats, canned laughter and giggly presenters… Spare us these, please. But how cheering that The News Quiz, blessed with Partygate, had something to be funny about. Hugo Rifkind said, ‘I’m not sure we can call this a quiz unless Sue Gray tells us it is.’

Chairman Andy Zaltzman made buzzing sounds and uttered injured cries. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m busy sticking my fingers into an electrical socket. Nobody told me not to do it!’

And in a jocular rejoinder to criticisms of excess BBC wokery, Daliso Chaponda, on the licence-fee story, lamented, ‘So – it’s over for the BBC. My jobs [ie as token panellist of colour] will disappear. But this piccaninny with his watermelon smile has his AK-47 loaded!’

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TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON The Russells are moving in. Or rather the Russells are moving up. It’s 1882 and carts of gleaming statuary roll though a sheep-strewn Central Park to the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street.

Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), chatelaine of the sprawling Versailles, whose scaffolding has only just come down, is no one from nowhere, and her husband, George (Morgan Spector), is a railroad billionaire. Peeking through the net curtains of the brownstone over the road are the widowed Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and her spinster sister, Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon).

Agnes, whose people came over on the Mayflower, prefers things to be old.

‘We only receive the old people in this house,’ she instructs her socially innocent niece, Marian (Louisa Jacobson), who has moved to New York from the sticks. ‘Not the new. Never the new. The old people ruled until the new people invaded.’

Bertha, who likes things to be new, has ditched her old friends and is on the lookout for new ones – but will Mrs Van Rhijn call on Mrs Russell? The battle lines are drawn, the tension is high, the stakes are nothing less than the continuation of civilisation itself. ‘I am struggling to hold back the tide of vulgarians that threatens to engulf us,’ Agnes despairs. ‘I feel like King Canute.’

If HBO’s new mini-series The Gilded Age sounds like an American Downton Abbey, it’s because it comes from the same creative team. The Gilded Age was written by Julian Fellowes, produced by Gareth Neame and directed by Michael

Engler, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Agnes van Rhijn, with her caustic asides, is the new Lady Violet, and Bertha Russell is what Cora Crawley would have been had she not married the Earl of Grantham (the Grantham estate is bankrolled, remember, on Cora’s dollars).

Life downstairs at the Russells’ is as busy as an ant colony, what with the French chef, the malignant lady’s maid, and the two dozen footmen in velvet pantaloons who are on full display when Bertha invites New York to her first ‘At Home’. Over the road, the Van Rhijns (who do not attend the soirée) get by with an upright English butler and a cook with a gambling problem.

Both households also, of course, have marriageable offspring, and in this sense the plot is less Downton than Bridgerton. Mrs Russell’s delicate daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), should have been launched a year ago but her mother can’t host a debutante’s ball until she can fill her new ballroom, and she can’t fill her new ballroom until her calling cards are acknowledged by ‘Mrs Stevens, Mrs Ruckerford, Mrs Jones, Mrs Vanderbilt, Mrs Schermerhorn and Mrs Astor, of course. We cannot succeed in this town without Mrs Astor’s approval – I know that much.’

Currently getting one guest into her house, let alone the Four Hundred (as Ward McAllister referred to Manhattan high society), is proving a problem. ‘This is what Dido felt when she was about to throw herself onto the flaming pyre,’ says Mrs Morris, dragged by her husband to supper chez Russell.

While Bertha Russell is either

Manhattan Downton: Bertha (Carrie Coon) and George (Morgan Spector) in The Gilded Age

Ed McLachlan

‘Hey, Nigel – I’ve just heard a rumour that the company is going to replace us with AI’

ghastly or sympathetic, depending on whose side you are on, George Russell is winningly ruthless. Conversation between the Russells is nothing if not solipsistic. When Bertha tells her husband to remove his feet from the table that once belonged to King Ludwig of Bavaria, George replies, ‘He had it once. I have it now.’ When George tells Bertha, ‘They’ve shot Jesse James,’ she replies, ‘He had his troubles. I have mine.’

The future of America is determined not only by money, of course. Race is also a part of the story, and Marian Brooks arrives at her aunt’s with a ‘coloured’ girl she met on the train from Pennsylvania. Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) is an aspiring writer and Agnes, with her nose for talent, employs her as a secretary. ‘They’re coming here to take our jobs,’ complains the housemaid.

It is a witty piece of casting to have Cynthia Nixon – currently also playing Miranda Hobbs in the Sex in the City

reboot, And Just Like That – as the spinster aunt. Similarly, Christine Baranski, the democratic Diane Lockhart in the legal dramas The Good Wife and The Good Fight, is a canny choice. The performances are all terrific, the settings lush and the bustles ridiculous. The Gilded Age will be as talked about as one of Mrs Astor’s dinner dances.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE 1992 AND ALL THAT Elgar, Rossini and Thomas Tallis are subjects for any season. Others who featured in the earliest editions of this column, when it appeared in the first issue in 1992, were more of the moment.

And what a year it was. The times they were a-changing, much as they had been back in 1963, when Bob Dylan wrote that celebrated lyric and Philip Larkin raised

two cheers for the brave new world of sexual liberation.

Larkin called his poem Annus Mirabilis. After the Windsor fire and numerous other well-publicised royal événements, the Queen dubbed 1992 her annus horribilis. Where the arts were concerned, the year was a bit of both.

An early plus was John Major’s return to power, and the decision to give the newly created Department of National Heritage, begetter of the National Lottery, a seat in cabinet. The aim was to undo some of the damage of the Thatcher years, during which wrecking balls had been taken to the BBC, the Arts Council and much else whose benefits we’d taken for granted since the mid-1960s. That was when Harold Wilson’s arts minister Jennie Lee and Lord ‘two dinners’ Goodman had created an arts environment that made Britain, briefly, the envy of the world.

Glyndebourne’s closure of its old theatre in 1992 in order to open a new one in 1994 was another vote of confidence in the future. This at a moment when our state-funded opera companies, for the first time in their 46-year history, were in serious disarray.

Warmly encouraged by Glyndebourne’s George Christie, the fledgling summer opera festival, which music-obsessed merchant banker Leonard Ingrams (brother of Richard) had started on the terrace of his Oxfordshire manor house, moved up several gears to help bridge the gap.

I reviewed that 1992 Garsington season, carefully omitting all mention of the Ingrams name, lest mean-minded readers suspected nepotism on the part of The Oldie’s founding editor.

By 1992, things were looking none too rosy for the classical-record industry. In a newly published book, Evenings with Horowitz, the great pianist railed at the brevity of the New York Times’s review of his latest CD amid a sea of reviews of albums of rock music.

The launch of Classic FM in the autumn of 1992 was another long-term plus; the arrival of John Birt as the BBC’s new Director-General an evident minus.

‘So how many people listen to your little lunchtime chamber-music concerts?’ Birt is said to have asked the BBC’s outgoing Controller of Music, John Drummond.

‘As many as need to’ was the great man’s withering riposte.

Drummond was the last Controller brought up in the old quality-driven, ratings-free dispensation that had begun with the founding of the BBC Third Programme in 1946 and continued The Oldie March 2022 73

night raid on the safe of music publisher Boosey & Hawkes produced the readies.

Or of Ruth, Lady Fermoy, founder of the King’s Lynn Festival, conniving with the Queen Mother to drum up custom for a slow-selling concert of music by that engagingly off-the-wall composer Phyllis Tate.

‘So what should I come to this year?’ enquired the Queen Mother.

This was on an open telephone line in an age when rural exchanges continued to be manned by eavesdropping locals.

‘Oh, the Phyllis Tate should be fun.’

The concert sold out within the hour.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON

BRITTA PEDERSEN / DPA-ZENTRALBILD / DPA / ALAMY

John Manduell receives an RCM Fellowship from the Queen Mother, 1980

with the launch of its all-day classicalmusic service in 1964.

The young producer charged with overseeing that launch was John Manduell, a South African-born, English-educated composer and administrator, whose speciality was being in the right place at the right time and knowing what to do and how to conduct himself once he was there.

Manduell spent 12 years at the BBC, before – troubled by the essentially ephemeral nature of broadcasting – he moved into education and festival management. Who can forget his 26 years as director of the Cheltenham Festival and the 300 commissions of new music they generated; or his 23 years as the founding head of the reconfigured Royal Northern School of Music in Manchester?

Shortly before his death in 2017, Sir John published an absorbing memoir, No Bartók Before Breakfast, the title taken from a 1964 memo from the BBC’s then Head of Radio, Frank Gillard. It’s a marvellous evocation of a halcyon age of broadcasting and music-making from which some of our latter-day administrators might still usefully learn.

The book was based on conversations Manduell recorded with friends and former colleagues in 2005-06: conversations that can now be enjoyed thanks to Prima Facie (six CDs – £20), the distinguished small record label which devotes itself to the promotion of contemporary British music.

If I prefer the CDs, it’s because of Manduell’s immense charm as a conversationalist and the numerous stories that are not in the book.

I think of Stravinsky, post-concert in the BBC’s Maida Vale studio, demanding his £1,000 fee in cash, on the spot. A late74 The Oldie March 2022

COVER MODELS Live music is pretty much still dead.

Most of us have spent longer watching an ‘immersive’ Beatles documentary on Disney+ (Get Back) over the past two years than listening to rock and pop played ‘in person’ at concerts or festivals.

May that change in ’22. Until we can re-enter Joni’s lost garden, let us divert ourselves by peering into the deep well of dullness we find ourselves in to admire any gold coins glinting at the bottom.

There’s every chance that Glasto, Wilderness, Cornbury etc could again be cancelled by the medical-socialist state as an instrument of coercive control under the cover of COVID. So let us cling to something else, something good, which is the way some artists don’t try to dazzle us with their own originality but are content to thrill us with that much underrated genre the cover version.

Indeed, many of our best singers have brought out, without apology, entire albums of cover tracks. Hat tips to David Bowie’s Pinups (1973); John Lennon’s

Rock ’n’ Roll (1975); and my own personal favourite coverer of choons, Johnny Cash with his American Recordings (1994).

Then you have the crooners and ivory-botherers such as Jamie Cullum and Michael Bublé, who you will agree have their place, especially over the festive period.

What draws me to this unsung genre – see what I did there – are the songs that are done better not by the composer but by A N Other. Here are my picks of versions that aren’t the originals but are the best.

Johnny Cash’s Personal Jesus and his take on Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt (go to Spotify or You Tube NOW – thank me later). Joe Cocker, of course, with his live sweaty and visceral version of the Beatles’ With a Little Help from My Friends. Elvis’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. Most acts approach covers with awed respect for the original. The Depeche Mode lead singer Dave Gahan has just brought out an album of covers and called it, oh so humbly, Imposter. His version of Neil Young’s A Man Needs a Maid (and how I’ve always wanted to write a whole column about that song title) is, for my money, up there.

But I cleave to the cockier attitude of Nick Cave and his Lightning Seeds. He asserts that some of the songs reworked and reinterpreted on his album of covers ‘weren’t done particularly well in the first place’. Take that, Roy Orbison and co!

Indeed, Janis Joplin’s version of Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee blows the cotton socks off the beardie’s, and Jeff Buckley’s version of the Lenny Cohen dirge is the ne plus ultra of Hallelujah.

I will not be taking questions.

The real thing? Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode presents Imposter in Berlin, 2021

Crivelli’s hyper-real deal. Left to right: The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius, egg and oil on canvas (1486); Saint Mary Magdalene, tempera on lime (c 1491-44); Saint Roch, tempera and oil on limewood (c 1480)

EXHIBITIONS

THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON / THE WALLACE COLLECTION

HUON MALLALIEU CARLO CRIVELLI: SHADOWS ON THE SKY Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 23rd February to 29th May JULIAN PERRY: THERE ROLLS THE DEEP Southampton City Art Gallery 18th February to 4th June Carlo Crivelli’s The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (pictured above) has been in the National Gallery since 1864.

It is one of the best-known works there, familiar even to those who cannot quite recall the name of the painter. It is the one in that, through a doorway, we see the Virgin receiving the Holy Spirit, as she prays in an elaborate room. In the narrow street, Gabriel waits to give his message – if allowed by the local saint determined to distract him with a model of his town. Above on a balcony are a peacock and a goldfinch, representing the Resurrection.

The painting had a strong influence on Edward Burne-Jones, most obviously in his 1884 King Cophetua and the Beggar

Maid, which echoes its closed, vertical composition. The balustrade above that Maid is decorated with peacocks and, two years later, Burne-Jones used a very Crivellesque peacock for his memorial to Laura Lyttelton.

For Susan Sontag, the definition of ‘camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe l’oeil insects and cracks in the masonry’. She might also have mentioned some of his hands. His hyper-real style is almost surreal. He was evidently a lover of animals and particularly birds; birders should have great fun at the Ikon show.

Crivelli (c 1430-95) was Venetian and

‘Alexa, suggest reasons why Paul and Maureen should think of heading home’

worked mostly in the Marche. The German Lucas Cranach (1472-1553) never went to Italy and is unlikely to have seen a Crivelli, but there are strong affinities, especially in their females. A possible conduit is Jacopo de’ Barbari, who trained with Crivelli’s Venetian teacher and then settled in Germany where he met Cranach.

Depending on how you list polyptychs, between 30 and 50 works by Crivelli are known. The group at Birmingham includes paintings from Berlin, the Wallace Collection and the V&A, as well as several from the National Gallery. It is a treat.

In advance of a bid to be the 2025 UK City of Culture, Southampton has refurbished its art gallery, which reopens with Juilan Perry’s powerful show on coastal erosion as a symptom of climate change.

There are 30 new works centred on a polyptych ‘secular altarpiece to the Assumption of CO₂’, inspired by Grünewald. Around it are 14 3D cube works: transparent boxes, each containing a double-sided painting and a mirror.

There are also three large canvases of uprooted trees first shown at the Venice Biennale. This exhibition should be Perry’s long-overdue reputational breakthrough.

The Oldie March 2022 75

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER SPRING SURPRISES Having moved to this corner of southwest Wales just a few months ago, we’re ignorant of its spring and summer characteristics. We’re anxiously waiting to see what delights lurk in the burgeoning garden and woodland glades.

Just a week into the new year, there was a goodly sprinkling of snowdrops under a venerable chestnut tree. Beneath sycamores and limes, daffodil foliage was pushing through the sods in thick battalions. It will be a few weeks yet before I know whether we have a legion of brazen, retina-staining King Alfreds or a more diverse and pleasing assembly of desirables, flowering over a long and satisfying period. I’m doubtful.

It’s no good surveying the scene and saying to yourself you’ll put fresh and different bulbs in next autumn where bare or skimpy patches exist now or where drifts of samey varieties are failing to excite. You must bring out the smartphone. If you take photographs of places that need some attention, marked perhaps by a stick or a large pebble, you’ll know exactly where to plant when new stocks of bulbs arrive in the shops in the autumn. Better still, raise new additions in pots and decant the contents into vacant or impoverished places next spring when the same old scene repeats itself.

I know already that this garden is deprived of crocuses. Their distinctive foliage would surely be apparent by January, even if later-flowering kinds loiter unseen in hidden, brambly dells.

Visiting nearby gardens that open to the public in the year’s first couple of months makes it possible to compile a list of bulbous plants that will also do well in your own garden.

My own tally includes numerous crocuses and hundreds if not thousands of Anemone blanda in the ‘Blue Shades’ variety (cheap as chips if you buy them wholesale) which ought to naturalise and increase in number in short turf. This anemone’s perennial joy emanates from an early flowering – by March, almost anywhere in Britain – and its knack of surviving a massacre of its leaves by the time the grass needs mowing.

Over a 20-year period at our previous garden, a mere hundred bulbs spread widely in the orchard to give coverings of cerulean blue flowers that amply compensated for prolonged spells of grey skies. Better still, they were able to compete spiritedly with other plants, including the thickly matted roots of three-foot-tall Iris sibirica, whose flowers provided a similar but much taller ‘sea’ of blue in midsummer.

I referred to this pairing as our low and high tides – such was the depth and purity of the colour and the ocean-like waving of foliage on breezy days.

No great skills are required to

Born in the USA: Trillium grandiflorum

accomplish any of this. I might, however, need a master class to succeed with a long-held ambition to establish a colony of much-loved aliens. Trilliums! These North American wildflowers fantastically first revealed themselves to me in great number when I stopped one April day on a lonely stretch of road in Vermont to respond to a call of nature.

Carpeting groves of dogwood and sugar maple, there grew one of the temperate world’s most alluring and beautiful of all bulbs, flowering shoulder to shoulder, chalky white beneath a high, arboreal glow of emerging lime-green leaves lit by an afternoon sun.

It’s a vision I’ve held dear for more than 30 years. Trillium grandiflorum – will you appear for me here?

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD BORLOTTI BEANS The term ‘French bean’ (describing a vegetable that originated in South America) is not confined to those slim-podded varieties that are eaten before the bean seeds have matured.

Though most are green, I have had some success in recent years with a slightly sweeter yellow bean.

Less successful, however, has been my experience with another member of the Phaseolus vulgaris family, the borlotti bean, which I shall try again this year.

Because of the red-flecked pods and beans, it is also known as the cranberry bean, and it is the beans that are normally harvested from the pods. They can then be dried and stored as haricots in airtight containers.

My problem with borlottis has been twofold. The first year I grew them, The Oldie March 2022 77

I went away in July when the pods were forming, and the woman who was looking after our vegetables, thinking they were like runner beans, picked all the pods before any beans had swelled.

Last year, I tried a dwarf variety, ‘Borlotto Lingua di Fuoco’. The pods grew well but they hung down to the wet ground and most of the beans were mushy before they were ready for harvesting.

I will grow a climbing bean this year, a much-acclaimed variety called Lamon, from the Italian seed supplier Franchi.

It is said to be the best bean for the dish pasta e fagioli.

The beans can be pressed into compost in modules in April, and kept at a minimum temperature of 15°C until ready to plant out at the end of May. They can be picked and eaten fresh, but are better left until the end of summer, when the pods shrivel and the beans inside are ready to be dried.

I had intended to experiment with another climbing bean, called helda or romano. It is not unlike a runner bean, but the pods are wider and flat. On the BBC’s Gardeners’ World, it has been voted the tastiest home-grown bean.

But I think it will have to wait another year, while this summer I concentrate on the borlottis.

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD LET THEM EAT PANCAKES Pancakes are not just for Shrove Tuesday (1st March this year) – a thrifty reason to use up luxurious ingredients before the austerities of Lent.

They’re also an opportunity to prepare something that’s really delicious for now and later.

That’s not to suggest depriving yourself and your best beloveds of the merriment of pancake preparation – tossing, flipping and pancake racing.

That’s all that remains of our own pre-Lent carnival – a rake’s progress of unlaced corsets and unbuttoned britches which never really recovered from Lord Protector Cromwell, the nation’s ultimate spoilsport.

Prepare your pancake batter in double or triple quantity and assemble your audience. With or without the tossing, serve the first batch hot from the pan with sugar and quartered lemons, and freeze the rest, neatly layered with greaseproof paper, as the basis of what Mrs Beeton called ‘made dishes’.

These are the kind that involve white sauce and makes proper use of leftovers.

Victorian virtues rule.

78 The Oldie March 2022

chosen additions into the rest, season generously, spoon two-thirds of the mixture down the middle of each pancake, roll each into a neat little bolster, arrange in a buttered, ovenproof dish into which you have trickled a little of the plain sauce, cover with the rest, dot with butter and bake in a medium oven till brown and bubbling.

Basic egg-and-milk pancakes Milk that’s just on the turn is perfect for pancakes – even better than fresh. Ring the changes with oat or buckwheat flour as a replacement for no more than half the wheat flour. Makes 8-10 pancakes (depending on size of pan).

100g plain flour 2 large eggs 250ml milk tbsp melted butter plus extra for frying pinch of salt butter for frying Prepare the batter at least ten minutes ahead. Whisk everything together – except the butter – into a smooth, pourable cream.

Heat a frying pan and add a scrap of butter. As soon it melts, pour in enough batter to cover the base of the pan – tipping it around before it sets, to make a thin layer. Wait till the edges curl and the top looks dry – 3-4 minutes – then flip to cook the other side. Tuck in a clean cloth and continue till all the batter is used up.

Stuffed pancakes This is a leftovers dish that makes good use of scraps of chicken, ham, grated cheese, smoked fish, diced mushrooms cooked in butter, chopped spinach or nettle tops wilted in a little water. As a light supper, allow two medium-size pancakes per person.

First prepare the basic white sauce.

To stuff six pancakes, warm 350ml full-cream milk to finger-heat.

Make a roux by melting 50g butter over a gentle heat in a heavy pan, stir in 50g flour and wait till it turns sandy (don’t let it brown). Add a splash of milk and cook on a low heat, stirring, till the roux forms a ball. Then add a little more milk and repeat the process till the roux softens and liquefies. Now you can add the milk a little faster, beating out any lumps. A white sauce takes patience – allow at least 15 minutes.

Save a third of the sauce and fold your

Crêpes à l’orange For a delicious little dessert à la grandmère, replace half the milk with orange juice. Prepare the pancakes as usual. Fold them in half (or quarters) over orange segments, arrange in a gratin dish, dot with butter, sprinkle with sugar and bake in a high oven till the pancake edges curl and crisp.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE GO INDIAN IN THE WEST END ‘Look, James. It’s so good to see you – but, please, for the love of all you hold sacred, don’t make me go to an Indian tonight.’

Thus spake Charles: by day, a top banker; at weekends, a genius at Dame Edna impersonations. A man whose gastronomic repertoire begins and ends with roast chicken. His wish was not fulfilled because I explained to him that, during the Terror (aka Dry January), I needed to visit all the Indian restaurants in London’s West End for you readers.

Everyone has a favourite local Indian restaurant. There are 8,500 in the UK, and eight out of ten of them are owned by Bangladeshis, 95 per cent of whom come from the city of Sylhet. My own favourite is India Zing in Hammersmith, but I wanted to find out what’s happening up West, now that the Red Fort and Gopal’s have closed.

There has been something of a reinvention. Until recently, most Indian restaurants adopted the 19th-century Anglo-Indian recipes pioneered by Edward Palmer, who opened Veeraswamy in 1926. Madras and vindaloo are a delightfully inauthentic tradition born out of pure invention – the equivalent of chop suey in China. Until the 1990s, when Pat Chapman launched the Curry Club, most Indian kitchens had a vat of a single standard sauce to which they added a few herbs and spices for a dopiaza or a jalfrezi.

Things have changed: not just here but also in India, where restaurant food has leapt forward in the past 20 years.

Indian here is now dead chic: Veeraswamy has celebrated its Michelin one star with a very glamorous makeover. Chutney Mary, where poor

Charles was won over by the mildness of their baked Marwari veg samosa and the beautifully mannered waiter, has swapped Chelsea for St James’s. Glitzy Tamarind of Mayfair similarly has a strict nabobs-only door policy but the dishes are sublime.

However, there is plenty of choice for common-or-garden memsahibs like us.

Not least the India Club on the Strand, which was set up in 1951 by the India League to foster post-independence relations. Proper brown formica tables like in the old country and an excellent lamb bhuna for a tenner.

The ‘youf’ are mad for Dishoom; there are eight of them in the UK. I was so excited that I didn’t mind joining the 20-minute queue only to walk past eight empty tables on the way in. In the unflattering orange lighting, I ordered their legendary black dahl and pau bhaji, each of which is shortlisted for the Brown Sludge of the Year awards. How dare they have a cookbook? And why do all of these places serve cocktails? Didn’t the King of Denmark prescribe lager as curry’s eternal partner?

I also wouldn’t rush to the Tandoor Chop House. Their signature lamb chops were too fatty and it was very noisy.

Cinnamon Bazaar looked fun but was wrongly proud to boast that its lamb rogan josh shepherd’s pie was one of Time Out’s 100 best dishes in London.

For me, there were two clear winners: Kricket and Hoppers. Kricket was recommended by Scotch Nick, who crossed the border to take his bairns out.

The joint fizzes with its long counter bar overlooking the fiery furnace. No korma in sight – just original dishes; the skate was unforgettable. And Hoppers in Frith Street is ideal for a lunchtime dhosa.

The one constant throughout my passage was the service. Only Italy can challenge India in the Waiters’ World Cup.

DRINK BILL KNOTT VERSATILE CHENIN BLANC First impressions can be just as powerful in the drinks world as in any other sphere of human activity. Some tipples in which I overindulged when young have led to life-long aversions: Sainsbury’s mediumsweet cider, for example, with its brash red-and-white label: 12½p a litre, and guaranteed to make a young head swim.

It has, thankfully, been discontinued.

Or ready-mixed snowball, a lurid yellow delinquent of a drink, or sicklysweet sambuca: if you have a suspicion that my friends and I were raiding the recesses of our parents’ drinks

cupboards, I fear you may be correct. I feel faintly nauseous just thinking about it.

Other drinks have needed lengthy spells in rehab. I still remember the first time I tried Vouvray, at a student party in the early 1980s. The bottle had a smart label, in a Gallic joined-up-handwriting sort of way, and I uncorked it eagerly, only to discover that its contents resembled sugar water with a top note of stagnant pond.

When I later discovered that Vouvray is made from Chenin Blanc, my prejudice widened to encompass anything made from that pestilential variety. Then, a few years on, a friend poured me a delightful glass of Savennières, and I was converted.

For the winemakers of the Loire, Chenin Blanc is obligingly versatile; rather like Riesling, it can make excellent wines in several styles. The Savennières I tried, for instance, was bone-dry, but with a zesty nuttiness that took the edge off the grape’s naturally high acidity. Dry Chenins rarely achieve the nervy, nuanced subtleties of great Burgundy, but they are none the worse for that. Try Famille Bougrier’s ‘Confidences’ Vouvray Sec 2019 (£12.99, dbmwines.co.uk) or Champalou’s Vouvray Sec 2019 (£17.50, ewwines.co.uk).

And there are excellent demi-sec wines from Saumur, Anjou and Vouvray (but also some stinkers: caveat emptor); greatvalue fizz from Saumur and Vouvray, often including a splash of Chardonnay (Lidl’s own-label Crémant de Loire is a steal at £8.49); and some truly wonderful, worldclass, botrytised dessert wines, especially from Côteaux du Layon. Marmaladesweet, but with plenty of acidity to stop them cloying the palate, they are superb with fruity puddings or hard cheese: try Côteaux du Layon Beaulieu, L’Anclaie Château de Pierre Bise 2014 (£17.95/50cl, leaandsandeman.co.uk).

Avoid Chenin Blanc from California (except for Clarksburg), where it is often overcropped and thinly flavoured, but do try South African Chenin, especially the widely available wines from Chenin pioneer Ken Forrester in Stellenbosch.

The Wine Society’s Exhibition Chenin Blanc 2020 (thewinesociety.com, £13.50) made by Chris Alheit in the Western Cape is terrific, juicy stuff, too, as is Jordan Vineyards’ Inspector Péringuey 2020 (£12.50, dbmwines.co.uk).

All of which should be a lesson to me: when a bottle of wine disappoints, it is rarely the fault of the grape variety. I have had similar epiphanies, over the years, with Trebbiano (a visit to some of the best wineries in the Abruzzo was responsible) and Müller-Thurgau (ditto, but in the Südtirol/Alto Adige). I await, with some trepidation, an invitation from the Consortium of Sambuca Producers.

Wine Following last month’s column about the renaissance of Spanish wine, this month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three Spanish wines: a delightful white from the underappreciated Godello grape; a bright, cherry-ripe Rioja; and a spicy, complex Garnacha from the Catalan countryside. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Godello, Lagar da Xestosa, Monterrei, Galicia 2020, offer price £11.99, case price £143.88 Delicious, mineralscented white from a variety that nearly became extinct. Crisp and delicately floral.

Vina Eguía, Tempranillo, Rioja 2019, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 A young, easy-drinking Rioja, unoaked and bursting with ripe fruit.

Terrific with tapas.

Mas Collet, Celler Capçanes, Montsant 2018, offer price £12.99, case price £155.88 From a small village just inland from Tarragona: old-vine Garnacha made in a modern, fruit-forward style with a long, savoury finish.

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The Oldie March 2022 79

SPORT JIM WHITE FOOTBALL’S HARD NUTS Here is a striking fact. For the first time in more than 25 years, at the time of writing none of the following was managing a club in the top four divisions of the English football league: Sam Allardyce; Tony Pulis; Neil Warnock; Alan Pardew.

For more than a quarter of a century, one or all of that quartet was ensconced in the technical area of a top-flight club, shouting at players, snarling in press conferences, issuing withering put-downs of referees. They were the fire brigade, generally called in by anxious chairmen when relegation threatened. If you were in trouble, you knew whom to call.

And when they had played their get-out-of-jail card, they were always open to an arrangement. The contractual pay-offs were significant; their bank accounts bloomed. And, besides, none of them worried about the heave-ho: another job was round the corner.

Until now. The game these days has moved on. It prefers the cerebral to the shouty; the delegator to the dictator; the calm rather than the storm. Look who is in charge of our leading clubs. Managers such as Graham Potter, Brendan Rodgers and Thomas Frank are masters of data and analysis, with PhD levels of knowledge about everything from physiology to nutrition. They stand in the technical area, watching, observing, calculating, rather than ranting, raving and roaring.

They prefer to check their iPad for a breakdown of running stats rather than bawl. Even the new generation of former great players now migrating to the technical area – such as Patrick Vieira, Steven Gerrard or Wayne Rooney – are noticeably restrained on the sidelines.

What a contrast to the old-timers. I remember during a match in lockdown watching Allardyce, then in charge of West Bromwich Albion, suddenly leaping off his seat in the dugout to issue a withering assessment of his fullback. As his verbal flurry echoed round the empty stands, the air turned not so much blue as a deep, dark purple.

Sure, modern managers such as Thomas Tuchel, Antonio Conte and Jurgen Klopp are more than capable of a pitch-side bellow. But their interventions are generally framed as instruction rather than mere fury. The watchword is control. After all, it was not entirely clear, that afternoon when I was watching West Brom, that the poor full-back actually understood how he might eradicate the error that had so incensed the big man.

80 The Oldie March 2022

Modern footballers simply don’t respond to the insult and the put-down. Brought up in an environment of nurture and encouragement rather than hard knocks, they tend to fade and sink when yelled at.

They respond to performance evaluation rather than a kick up the backside.

Which means, among today’s players, the ability of the old school to motivate is rapidly diminishing. The prevailing orthodoxy is now one of care and nourishment – the insistence that you get more out of a player if he is happy rather than angry. Chairmen know this: the players’ agents constantly tell them so.

Whatever the scale of an impending crisis, it is unlikely anyone in charge of a club will again reach for his phone and speed-dial the once-renowned bunch of relegation-busters. The Big Four, it seems, are history. Though whether football is better for their passing is another question entirely.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD INSURANCE ENDURANCE AA renewal time again.

I’ve been a member for 55 years, not far short of half the AA’s lifetime (founded 1905). I used it frequently in the early years because I drove old bangers, and cars were generally less reliable then. ‘Failure to proceed’, as Rolls Royce used to put it, occurred most often on cold damp mornings or during heavy rain, although I also recall fuel evaporation in hot weather and, embarrassingly, more than once running out of petrol.

I never queried the value of AA membership until noticing that they advertised lower membership rates for newcomers than for loyal old fossils like me. I rang and told a nice lady that I was thinking of leaving and rejoining at the lower rate or perhaps even defecting to another organisation. Would I prefer to pay less, she asked? I would.

She gave me a substantial reduction and an even more substantial piece of advice: ring and query every renewal time and you’ll get a reduction.

Service with a salute: an AA patrolman at Garston, Hertfordshire, 1920s

And so it has proved. My AA policy is the full works – home start, relay etc – and covers all the family. Last year, the renewal cost quoted was £373.01. I rang and, after the usual polite conversation, they reduced it to £260.

This year, they quoted £413.17, saying costs had gone up. I didn’t doubt that but said I’d still prefer to pay less. They reduced it to £275.42.

From 1st January this year, quoting lower rates for new joiners has been outlawed as far as home- and motorinsurance policies are concerned. I don’t know whether the same applies to breakdown organisations. If it doesn’t, it should, because they’re a form of insurance.

This sharp practice was unknown before 1999, when the AA was a mutual association run for the benefit of members. Since then, it’s been listed and de-listed as a plc under various venturecapitalist owners, the latest being Towerbrook Capital Partners and Warburg Pincus. I can’t say whether it works better or worse for being demutualised and profit-seeking.

But this sort of thing didn’t happen before it became a commercial organisation hunting for customers, as former members are now regarded.

I’m happy to say, though, that when it comes to breakdowns, the AA has served us well. Whether it’s relay – the-get-youand-your-car-home service, something you don’t often need, but when you do, you really do – or removing a punctured wheel that’s rusted on, a service I needed last weekend, they have been helpful and efficient. The other stuff they push – insurances, discounts on burgers, ferries, hotels etc – is all very well but the reason we join is to keep us and our wheels moving.

They’ve come a long way since 1905, when they were formed to warn early motorists of police speed traps, and I’d like to think they’ll still be here in 2205 – as long as they don’t stray too far from their core business or keep trying to con us into paying more than we should.

It’s impossible to imagine what they’ll be repairing in 2205. Will we and our cars be so ‘connected’ that repairs are conducted only online? Or will all travel be virtual and we – mere bodies – will never go anywhere? But change is not always as foreseen. In 1900, the future for cars in the US was electric – 28 per cent of them already were.

It’s the future again now, albeit that only 2.6 per cent are currently electric.

Will the future be hydrogen? My AA membership will have lapsed by then, barring supernatural intervention – but can I trust Towerbrook and Warburg to cancel my direct debit?

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Handy power points We are all facing a significant increase in electricity charges at the moment.

I’ve just signed a new 12-month fixed-rate contract that means my costs will increase by about 40 per cent. Such is the state of affairs that I’m congratulating myself it won’t be more.

You can blame all this on Russian gas supplies, or on changes in the way we generate electricity, or on Greta Thunberg, but I can’t help feeling that at the bottom of it all lurks old-fashioned supply-and-demand economics. When something is in short supply because of increased demand, the price rises.

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk Maps of the internet vox.com/a/internet-maps Forty maps that explain how the internet works, and how it is used.

A little dated (2014), but very worthwhile.

Natural History Museum nhm.ac.uk/discover/video The museum publishes many excellent free videos showing their work and explaining a range of crafts and activities. Learn to make a volcano, for example.

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

Perhaps you think your demand for electricity hasn’t grown, but think again.

Part of the blame must, I’m afraid, fall on our shoulders – that is, on the shoulders of anyone who uses computers and the internet, whether it’s for email, websites, running a company, designing spaceships, Netflix or anything else.

It starts at home. Your laptop may not look like much of a power vampire, nor your router, but it all adds up. One expert I consulted worked out my own usage. At the new price I am paying for my electricity, the rough annual charges work out like this: our two laptops are £75 each, our two tablets (mainly for reading the papers) are £30 each, my desktop is £200 and £15 covers the Wi-Fi router.

Even charging our mobile phones once a day might add up to £10 over the year.

So that lot is already well over £400 a year before I even start thinking about TVs, sound systems, radios and the like. I must admit it took me by surprise.

Thirty years ago, barely any of us would have been using electricity on that scale for household electronics. Such equipment barely existed, beyond hi-fi systems and televisions. I am afraid that we are all very much part of the increased demand for electricity which is helping to drive up the price.

However, we are just the start. The really big guzzlers of energy are the huge data centres and internet hubs that we all rely on to make the internet work at all. Not many of those existed 30 years ago, either.

These data centres are huge, windowless warehouses which have

sprung up like giant carbuncles all over the world. They are filled with computers (‘servers’) which are both the bloodstream and the memory of the internet. Most governments and companies, other than the giant ones (and not all of them), outsource their data storage to these specialists. So do you, if you use Gmail, for example.

It’s a huge industry that uses prodigious amounts of electricity, not just to run the servers, but then to cool them down.

They are black holes for energy.

One of the bigger firms has estimated that three per cent of all the world’s electricity is used by data centres. This is much more than all the electricity used by the whole of the United Kingdom for all purposes.

Just like our own household electronics, these centres are also entirely new users of electricity, adding to the demand.

The news is not all bad. It’s obviously in their interest to keep their energy usage down, and they are trying hard.

Google, for example, publishes quarterly figures showing the effectiveness of their power usage, which is improving all the time. But the ultimate solution will be to build computers that use less electricity and also to find cheaper ways of generating it.

In the meantime, remember that ‘standby’ power is a silent thief. Switch your machines completely off when you’re not using them. As my Scottish father-in law, who abhorred wasted electricity, was fond of saying, ‘Many a mickle makes a muckle.’

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Tax squeeze gets tighter Fiscal drag is not the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s fancy-dress costume of choice.

Still, he embraces the get-up because it enables him to take more from us in taxes without increasing the actual rates of tax.

More people are paying tax, or paying a higher rate of tax, even though their earnings have stayed the same. It is just one component in what is going to be an expensive year.

82 The Oldie March 2022

Fiscal drag happens when the Chancellor keeps tax thresholds at the same level for several years in a row.

In 2021-22, the personal tax allowance, the amount you can earn before paying any income tax, is £12,570. It will stay at that level for at least the next four years. The threshold for paying higher-rate tax is also frozen until April 2026, at £50,270.

In good times, you would expect those figures to go up each year by the rate of inflation, broadly to match improvements in your salary or investment income.

When the threshold stays the same and your income goes up, you pay more tax.

As a result of fiscal drag, says the Office for Budget Responsibility, an extra 1.3 million people will be paying income tax and another one million will pay at

‘As soon as I read the part about “being of sound mind”, I knew who was getting all his money’

the higher rate – a windfall for the Treasury of an extra £8 billion a year by 2025-26.

The same tactic is used with inheritance tax, where the threshold has been stuck at £325,000 since April 2009.

With indexation, it would be around £460,000 today. The Chancellor could be raking in £6.6 billion a year from inheritance tax by 2025-26, against £5.2 billion in the current year. There is now

an additional £175,000 inheritance-tax allowance if a direct relative inherits your main home but, with property prices so high, the tax take will only increase.

The capital-gains tax allowance is also frozen, at £12,300. But other taxes are actually going up. National Insurance contributions for many workers will rise by 1.25 percentage points from April – an increase of over 10 per cent and even more for higher tax-payers and the

self-employed. From April 2023, people over state retirement age who continue working will have to pay 1.25 per cent contributions for the first time.

Dividend tax, the tax payable on dividends earned from owning shares, is going up by 1.25 per cent while the £2,000 dividend allowance, the amount you can earn from dividends tax-free, is unchanged.

Nearly every other household bill is getting more expensive. The cap on Council tax rises was lifted from 2 per cent to 3 per cent. Gas, energy, rail, phone and broadband costs and insurance premiums are rocketing.

Inflation is the other big concern at the moment. It ended last year at 5 per cent and is heading towards 6 per cent.

Already the cost of borrowing including mortgages has gone up, but banks are slow to improve the interest paid on savings accounts.

Scrapping the triple lock on the basic state pension leaves the rise lower than inflation. Pensions will go up by only 3.1 per cent a year, instead of the 8 per cent that would have been paid if the lock still applied to average earnings.

This year is being called the year of the squeeze. Tighten your belts, because it’s going to get worse.

‘Did you remember to take the dog out, Vinny?’

The Oldie March 2022 83

Getting Dressed

Queen of camouflage

Dafyyd Jones

Mimi Adamson’s skin clinic is a godsend for burns victims brigid keenan Mimi Adamson had lived more than half of her life when she discovered what she really wanted to do with it.

When she was growing up in New York, her very first ambition was to become a doctor. But that, in the fifties, proved impossible – girls rarely got into medical school.

Adamson decided instead on occupational therapy and studied at Columbia University School of Medicine, before moving to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago. There she met and married her husband and settled down to raise a family of four.

When her boys were at university, the tedium of suburban life in America, combined with a long-felt itch to travel – especially to Britain, which had always fascinated her – persuaded her to up sticks and live in London for a while. Her husband took her, their younger son and daughter to the airport. Later they divorced but have remained friends.

Adamson did various office jobs in London and, ten years later, she met and married the late Sir Campbell Adamson (1922-2000), former Director-General of the CBI and by then Chairman of Abbey National. ‘He was a wonderful man – he was intellectual and funny and played the piano well, he loved everyone and didn’t give a damn where they came from, and he was interested in everything.’

Lady Adamson doesn’t talk about age – ‘an unnecessary label’. Her eldest son, a neurosurgeon, lives in London, and she makes regular visits to Boston to see her daughter and other sons in America.

That is where she stocks up on clothes – she is fond of the velvet jacket in our picture: ‘It’s like a really useful cardigan – you can put it over anything.’ For shoes she chooses Emma Hope: ‘They are comfortable, which is the most important thing.’ She broke her ankle not long ago and that has made walking difficult.

After working with camouflage make-up all day, Adamson herself uses a base she loves: Hyaluronic HydraFoundation, a range produced by Terry de Gunzburg, a former make-up artist and creative director of YSL. Her hair is cut and coloured by a hairdresser friend.

On a visit to Jersey with her husband, 84 The Oldie March 2022

Left: Lady Adamson in December 2021.

Jacket and scarf old favourites, trousers

by Prada, shoes by Emma Hope. Above: With her daughter Hilary in the sixties

Adamson finally discovered her calling.

They went to a lecture by a plastic surgeon on camouflage make-up. He explained how it was an essential tool for concealing disfigurements that plastic surgery could not deal with.

‘Something in me clicked,’ relates Adamson, ‘I suddenly knew that this was I wanted to do. After the talk, I went and talked to the surgeon, and he told me about the British Association of Skin Camouflage.’

The Association was set up by Joyce Allsworth, a WAAF officer during the war. Allsworth had been so shocked by the facial burns on a fellow airman that she became expert in camouflage make-up. She then worked with the Red Cross on training others and founded the British Association of Skin Camouflage.

After a course with the association, Adamson joined the Red Cross-trained team at King’s College Hospital, south London, and then moved to the Chelsea

and Westminster Hospital, where she has held a clinic for years. Her patients have had burns, dog bites, birthmarks, vitiligo and other pigmentation problems.

She says, ‘People are so vulnerable and so concerned when they have a disfigurement – 80 per cent of the treatment is the understanding and kindness you give. But they also need constructive advice. It is no use just saying, “You poor thing.” You have to give them real solutions.’

The first camouflage make-up was arguably invented by Max Factor, a Polish refugee, in the US in the 1920s.

He actually coined the word ‘make-up’ and produced the Pan-Cake and Pan-Stik concealers, so beloved by Hollywood stars.

Things are far more sophisticated now. Adamson uses camouflage creams made by Dermablend and Covermark.

She works with a palette of more than 150 shades. And the colour is waterproof – so it remains stable in the rain or when anyone wearing the cream is swimming.

She proudly shows me extraordinary before-and-after pictures of her patients.

‘I get very emotional,’ she says. ‘This work is so rewarding. It changes people’s lives – it has changed my life.’

The Common Gull

CARRY AKROYD

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Gulls test the ornithologist because of their seasonal and juvenile plumage changes. And they exercise the trophyseeking twitcher because five of the recorded UK dozen are rare visitors.

‘Seagull’ most aptly describes the kittiwake, which is oceanic in winter but breeds here in summer in greater numbers than any other gull. By contrast, all the other species are principally winter migrants. Only four of them are significant summer residents.

One of these is the common gull (Larus canus), which is indeed common but more of a birdwatcher’s bird than those urban scavengers the herring gulls, the black-headeds and the lesser black-backeds.

There are 50,000 resident common gulls in the British Isles, most of them in Scotland and north-west Ireland. That makes it the fifth-most numerous bird in the country. And in winter this figure soars to over 700,000, with the migration from Scandinavia and Siberia, promoting the common gull to thirdmost populous after black-headed and, marginally, herring gulls.

Telling it apart from these species can pose a problem until you see them side by side. A solitary common gull, white and grey and with yellow beak and legs, can be confused with the similarly coloured herring gull. But when they’re seen together, the herring’s bulk and formidable, red-flecked beak make the differences clear.

It’s more taxing when commons mix, as they do, with the similarly sized and graceful black-headeds, which in winter lose their chocolate-coloured hoods. A smudge of the hood remains, and the black-headed’s legs and beak are red. But the most notable difference is the gleaming white outer wing in flight.

Behaviour also sets it apart. The black-headed is a noisy, gregarious bird, hunting for scraps in packs; aroused in city parks at any sign of passers-by

offering food. The common gull, slightly larger and rounder-headed, tends to keep its distance on these occasions.

At the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, a favourite central London venue, common-gull behaviour last February was certainly not ‘common’.

It held aloof from black-headed mob tactics, maintaining a polite distance, even among its own kind, on land and water.

Nonetheless, common gulls can have an eye for the main chance and will grab food from black-headeds and contest roadkill and rubbish dumps with the other main species, as well as adding to the wake of ploughing tractors. They

share the black-headed’s taste for probing mown turf for worms, their principal food, making them a familiar sight on winter sports fields, joining the spectators when disturbed by a game. By the sea, they drop molluscs from a height to crack the shells, in the way of hooded crows.

Like many sea birds, they ‘take to the hills’ for the nesting season. Their call ‘has a lovely, wild, lonely quality which is perfectly in keeping with the rugged nature of the Scottish breeding grounds’, writes Mark Cocker (Birds Britannica).

Hence its melancholy name sea mew and such local variations as white maa, blue maa, peerie maa, pikka maa, tinna maa and tanyick.

The Oldie March 2022 87

Travel Winston’s girl takes Manhattan

Artist Edwina Sandys, Churchill’s granddaughter, is inspired by her New York home and her great ancestor. By Anthony Haden-Guest

A

rt wasn’t Edwina Sandys’s first choice when it came to deciding on an occupation.

That was in the early ’70s, when she was married to Piers Dixon (1928-2017), son of the British Ambassador to France, with two sons.

‘I thought, what next? I should be doing something,’ says Edwina, 83. But what? ‘Then I thought, well, we’ve got a family business.’

Yes, indeed. Winston Churchill was her grandfather; she is the daughter of Diana Churchill (1909-63). Duncan Sandys (1908-87), her father, was a Cabinet Minister under Macmillan and Churchill, his father-in-law. Going for a seat in parliament was clearly the answer for Edwina, too.

She was chosen to contest a difficult seat in London’s East End. ‘I made a speech. I said striped suit and spotted tie will not win this constituency,’ she says.

‘As I was a different sort of person from the average Conservative toff, they’d be more likely to be interested in me.’ She was selected.

Except it wasn’t the answer. Piers Dixon had already been offered a chance 88 The Oldie March 2022

Edwina with Child, UN, New York, 1979 Inset: Winston and Edwina, far left, 1943

at a seat, but was informed by the constituency that the offer had been made on the assumption that the Dixons’ presence would be as a married couple and would be withdrawn if Sandys pursued her bid. He went on to be MP for Truro from 1970 to 1974. She withdrew, teary-eyed. But she held on to the magic

markers, then rather a novelty, that she had been using on her electoral map to colour in the areas she had been to.

‘When I had to give up the seat, I did quite a few abstract drawings, on nice heavy paper,’ she says. These were her first drawings since childhood but they looked strong. So she framed and hung them.

Thus the accidental birth of Edwina Sandys, amateur artist. It is interesting that her grandfather had been Britain’s best-known amateur artist.

‘We used to watch him,’ she says. ‘It was a very lovely thing – because we saw him when he was at home and relaxed. He was a different person from when he was in the House of Commons. When he went on holiday, he took the canvases with him.

He did them fairly quickly. He didn’t stay with one for a month or anything like that.’

Sandys’s birth as a professional artist was also sudden.

A friend who came round for a drink one evening owned a restaurant on the King’s Road, Chelsea, and told her of an ugly incident that very day. ‘All the paintings we had hanging in the restaurant were stolen,’ he said. He was looking around her walls as she commiserated. ‘Why

Pictures by Edwina Sandys: Winston at Work, 1991; Peregrine Worsthorne, 1973; Window Shopping, 1974

don’t we hang some of yours, Edwina?’ he proposed. ‘And we can sell them.’

The show sold out. ‘Mostly at £20 each, which was wonderful,’ Sandys says.

She settled down to making sketches of her London life, vivid in colour and observation. Some are charged with a naughty sexuality, such as the woman with an open coat, apparently flashing at the window of the posh Jermyn Street shirtmakers Turnbull & Asser.

Others catch the likenesses of figures on the London scene, such as Sir Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph and the writer and Colditz inmate Michael Alexander. Others are of those dear to her, like her sons, Mark and Hugo.

She had soon had her first gallery show with the Crane Kalman Gallery, Andras Kalman’s space on the King’s Road.

Sandys’s move into sculpture was occasioned by a visit to the studio of an artist friend who worked in clay. ‘I said, “Oooh! That’s rather nice. Maybe I should have a go!” The first thing I did was a head.

Out of my imagination. A woman in a hat. Then I did a man. No model. And then I thought, what should I do now?

Oh, I’ll do a female Christ! Women’s lib was in the air at the time. So I did it.’ This was Christa. A naked woman on a cross.

Did Sandys work from a live model? ‘I didn’t have any models,’ she said. ‘I can do faces anyway. What I really needed were things like arms. So I looked at my own. And my feet. They are important on a cross. I made it in one week. Then we had it cast. In bronze resin, which wasn’t too expensive.’

In the mid-’70s, Sandys, now divorced, rented a house in Lucca, Tuscany. ‘A friend there told me, “You’ve done bronzes – but we’ve got Carrara round the corner and all that wonderful marble,” ’ she says.

She made the trip but saw that she couldn’t replicate in marble what she’d been doing in clay or bronze. ‘I would spend my life carving.’ Many artists have this meticulously detailed grunt labour done for them by the Carrara craftsmen. ‘But I didn’t want to rely on their brilliance.’

No problem. She radically simplified her ideas. When working in bronze, she had made unusual use of negative space, building a figure from a head and an arm, with the body wholly absent. She would take this further in marble.

‘I got flat slabs of marble. I would draw a shape on one and get them to cut it out,’ she said. The block with its negative space would sometimes co-exist with the separated piece.

‘The important early one was Woman Free,’ Sandys says. ‘It’s a woman coming out of a block of marble. She’s polished.

She’s free to go places. Free at last!’ In a later marble, Hands, one hand is growing out of the head while a cut-out hand replaces a breast.

Sandys showed this work in London, along with Christa, which provoked relatively few hostile reactions. She had been increasingly showing in America and in 1978 she moved to New York, part of an influx of Brits and other Euros into Manhattan – a significant element in the disco phenomenon.

There Sandys visited the Very Rev James Parks Morton, Dean of the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which he had made into a vital part of the city’s cultural life.

‘I went to see him in the cathedral,’ Sandys remembers. ‘And I said, “How brave are you?”

‘He said, “Well, try me.”

‘I said, “Well, how would you like to have Christa, the female Christ, in the cathedral?”

‘So he said, “Yes, I’d like to do that.”

And we did.’

It made the papers, worldwide, while Dean Morton was on holiday. ‘And all hell broke loose. It even made the papers in Tokyo,’ Sandys says. ‘The junior bishop was looking after things. We got letters saying, “It’s wonderful … it’s dreadful … sacrilege…’ So the junior bishop said, “Please take the sculpture back.” It was there for less than a week.’

She drove off with the sculpture on the top of a car and kept it under her bed. In time, the letters, warmly pro or fiercely con, stopped coming.

Sandys was by now married to a New York architect, Richard Kaplan. They lived in a SoHo apartment – two floors, tall ceilings, reconfigured by Kaplan – long before a downtown move became modish. Their social life was energetic, her work life productive.

In 1979, the UN Year of the Child, through an Austrian friend at the UN Sandys got her first public art commission.

‘I went to Carrara and designed a large piece called Child. It was first of all set up at the World Trade Center but then we moved it to the UN School on the East River. It’s been there to this day.’

This was followed by a UN commission for a piece in Geneva and another in Vienna. She has recently had solo shows at New York’s Salomon Gallery and Iona Studio in Toronto.

Richard Kaplan died in 2016. They and the Christos were the best art marriages I have known. ‘It was very important for me, being married to Richard,’ Edwina Sandys says. She now lives in New York’s Chelsea Arts Club equivalent, the National Arts Club, surrounded by her work.

The sculpture of three breasts, carved from a flat marble slab, is on her windowsill with a view of Gramercy Park. A model of a project of long standing, The Freedom Circle, is on a coffee table. Based on Stonehenge, it will be a circle of 20-foothigh stone blocks, from which female figures have been cut out and stand free.

A recently completed canvas shows Shakespeare, painted in black and white, sitting at a green desk, writing a sonnet.

This is part of a series of pivotal figures.

The first is her grandfather, painted sitting in front of one of his best-known paintings, Bottlescape – a still life of, yes, bottles, including his favourite, Pol Roger champagne.

And the next subjects?

‘Einstein and Madame Curie.’ A woman. Well, of course.

The Oldie March 2022 89

Overlooked Britain

English corner of a Caribbean field

lucinda lambton Barbados said goodbye to the Queen last year – but remains full of British architectural gems On 30th November last year, in front of Prince Charles, Barbados replaced its head of state with a president – Sandra Mason.

Still, lots of the island’s 17th-, 18thand 19th-century British buildings, great and small, not only survive but thrive.

What a huge pleasure it is to discover them all.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was spot-on in The Traveller’s Tree (1950): ‘In nothing is the illusion of England so compelling as in the parish churches of Barbados.

They stand alone in the canefields, their battlemented belfries and vanes and pinnacles appearing over the sheltering tops of clumps of trees.’

Despite the odious nature of slavery, apparent when these churches were built, many of them are wholeheartedly glorious.

So deep is the pleasure of coming upon them that they quite sear themselves into your senses. Today, when seeing a church in England, I have many a time actually found myself momentarily confused as to whether I had suddenly arrived in the Caribbean!

Few sights are as magical as these buildings found so far from home, yet so English in their every detail.

Take the Gothic Parliament of 1872, with its assembly of stained-glass windows of the English monarchs – from James I to Queen Victoria – alongside, lo and behold, Oliver Cromwell. There is only one other such assembly like it in the world – to be found, if you please, in Rochdale’s Town Hall!

Thanks to these delights, the Barbados National Trust was created in 1947 ‘to preserve the unique heritage of our island home, be it historic buildings, places of natural beauty or the island’s flora and fauna’. It has triumphed to this day. HURRAY! It was founded by Ronald Tree, who built the exquisite neoclassical villa Heron Bay on the seashore.

The island was at the forefront of the British Caribbean from the start. It was the first place to establish the industry of sugar and slaves. For 20 riches-soaked 90 The Oldie March 2022

Marble bas-relief of King’s Lynn, 1687 Below: Oliver Cromwell in stained glass, Barbados Parliament, Bridgetown

years, it was the only West Indian supplier of sugar to a Europe that was forever licking its lips with longing for the sweet stuff. Barbados was therefore the first island to breed the Caribbean ‘plantocracy’, monied men whose show of voluptuous opulence often excelled that of the grandees of the motherland.

Fine buildings proclaiming their importance were bound to be the result.

In the humid heat of the Caribbean, the English lived in a manner that bordered on sheer lunacy. Determined literally to keep the home fires burning, they built fireplaces into their brick-built houses and put glass windows – not considering there was such a thing as shutters – into their low-ceilinged homes. The 17th-century historian Richard Ligon complained that with the low ceilings he could hardly keep his hat on!

What treasures survive on the island.

Take the 1687 marble bas-relief of Norfolk’s King’s Lynn – ‘Lynn Regis’. It’s a delicately carved townscape, crammed with an assembly of buildings worked in fine and historically interesting detail.

This bas-relief originally hung in the front hall of Holborn, one of the earliest

houses in Barbados, built in the early17th century. In 1958, it was demolished to make way for the building of Deep Water Harbour – the Port of Bridgetown, today the heart of the island’s trade.

The marble was rescued and is now safe and sound in the care of the exemplary Barbados Museum and Historical Society, in the building that was originally the Garrison’s military prison. Built of the palest yellow brick and grey stone, it was designed in the early-19th century and extended in 1853.

It was taken over as ‘the home of Barbadian culture and heritage’ in 1933 and has since amassed a vast collection of some 5,000 artefacts dating from prehistoric times to the 21st century.

The most gratifying painting in the museum is the anonymous portrait of the planter Seal Yearwood and his servant.

It’s a quite glorious glimpse of an 18th-century grandee of the Barbadian

LUCINDA LAMBTON

plantocracy. With a long clay pipe at the ready, he sits with buttoned, breeched legs, fine white stockings and buckled shoes. With a look on his face of settled and supreme confidence, he is attended by a liveried servant with a gigantic glass of rum on a silver salver.

From the earliest days, Bridgetown was an architecturally pleasing town. In 1813, a monument to Lord Nelson was put up in Bridgetown’s Trafalgar Square (renamed National Heroes Square in 1999), a full 27 years before one was put up in London’s Trafalgar Square. In England, Nelson’s somewhat coarse likeness was sculpted in stone by the little-known Edward Hodges Baily. In Barbados, the refined features of Nelson were created in bronze by Sir Richard Westmacott – one of the greatest sculptors of the day, known as ‘the first castor of brass in the kingdom’.

The finest house in Barbados is Farley Hill, built in the 17th century. It had collapsed but was saved from oblivion when it was chosen as the setting for Island in the Sun (1957), starring James Mason and Harry Belafonte, based on the 1955 Alec Waugh novel. For two months in 1956, the crumbling old palace experienced a transformation as 300 people converted it into a mansion suitable for a sugar baron. A complete new gallery and stairway were constructed to face the lawn.

Island in the Sun gave a short yet sensational reprieve to Farley Hill. Today, the ruins are enjoyed by one and all.

There can be few houses to have plunged through such a rollercoaster of such fortunes and misfortune.

Of the three Jacobean ‘manor houses’ still standing in the Americas and the Caribbean, two of them are in Barbados, while in America there is only a lone example! St Nicholas Abbey in Barbados is the most beautiful. The other survivors of the period, Bacon Hall in Virginia and Drax Hall in Barbados, are somewhat plain and severe.

St Nicholas Abbey, with its festive forms, seems to be positively dancing with delight at its survival on this tiny island in the Caribbean. Not only has it held on, but it has recently undergone a masterful restoration, as befits one of the most important buildings in what was once the British Caribbean.

Following the maxim ‘Curly early, straighter later’, the house’s curvilinear Dutch gables date the house as having been built around 1650. A grandfather clock, made by James Thwaites of London in 1759, was brought to St Nicholas Abbey and has stood halfway up the stairs ever since.

Royal Caribbean, from top: Jacobean Farley Hill; St Nicholas Abbey, c 1650; Nelson outside Parliament

When, in 1851, the owner Laurence Trent Cave was married, the ceremony was performed by the Very Rev W C Breton, Dean of Jersey and father of the actress Lillie Langtry (1853-1929).

I met Colonel Stephen Cave, the last of the family to live on the plantation, always valiant in his determination to maintain the place. He told me a story of how, many years before, he had gone to a dinner in Government House, given in honour of Princess Alice of Athlone by Sir Arleigh Winston Scott, the first native Governor of Barbados. My father, Tony Lambton, was there with Anthony Eden, his friend and fellow MP, who lived a good deal on the island.

When the time came to leave the dining room, who should be given precedence? Princess Alice, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, or the descendant of an African slave? After no more than a second’s hesitation, Princess Alice gave a deep curtsy to the Governor and begged that he leave the room before her.

In 2006, St Nicholas was bought by the Barbadian architect Lesley Warren and his wife Anna, who have since been restoring, to fantastical effect, every inch of the place. The surrounding fields are to be extended and prepared for more sugar cane. A cottage industry in sugar has been established, resulting in the entrancing production of the finest brown sugar as well as St Nicholas Abbey Blackstrap Molasses and St Nicholas Abbey Barbados Rum, their labels emblazoned with a painting of the house.

That this 17th-century English building in the Caribbean should have been given such a new and vibrant 21st-century life is extraordinarily pleasing.

The Oldie March 2022 91

Taking a Walk

A stroll alongside Old Father Thames

GARY WING

patrick barkham

‘There are two things scarce matched in the universe – the sun in heaven and the Thames on earth.’ So declaimed Walter Raleigh, according to lettering on the stone embankment close to Southwark Cathedral.

Had Raleigh really sailed around the world when he made those remarks? Or was London’s murky, grey-brown water blue and leaping with salmon in Raleigh’s day?

I squinted to imagine a different time as I took a walk along the south bank of England’s longest and best-known river, but gave up. The present was so different – though as compelling as any ancient vision too.

London is a place mostly without weather but the Thames conjures it up – a breath of fresh air with a briny tang that whips through the biggest city in Europe.

Close to the Raleigh inscription, the air was rich with the scent of charred meat and spices from the stalls of Borough Market. Here, the rivulets of people streaming along the Thames-side path were lunch-bound City workers in Christmas jumpers. Some sat down to eat in little solar domes – plastic dining pods added to walkways. These COVID cubicles appeared to be the most brilliant invention for spreading the virus.

Across the river, the dome of St Paul’s matched the colour of both clouds and river. The tide was so low that a wade across to the north bank didn’t look implausible and the riverside beaches were huge. One beach, a mixture of cement, tiles, shingle and grey London clay, was bustling with mudlarking dogs and toddlers. It felt homely and slightly subversive – an intimate, temporary fissure in the city, beyond the reach of commerce.

The flow of people changed beside Vinopolis and the Premier Inn. Office types were replaced by tourists served by global chains and global buskers. I suppose I was a tripper too, not having lived in London for more than a decade, although I had no desire to eat in Pret or

Pizza Express or to take a selfie in front of pavement musicians belting out Jailhouse Rock and My Way. Is it too much to ask for site-specific pieces?

Surely we could have Waterloo Sunset.

The grey, concrete sweep of Waterloo Bridge matched the river’s grace, sweeping its red buses high overhead.

The South Bank was zhuzhed up with a profusion of new stalls but the brutalism of the National Film Theatre and the National Theatre looked quite modest now beside the new glass towers that bulged like contemporary cars. The roll and clatter of the skateboards echoing in the concrete, graffiti-clad caverns sounded like an incompetent delivery guy constantly dropping a large box.

At the precise moment I passed the Gothic extravagance of the Houses of Parliament, Boris Johnson was fielding Prime Minister’s Questions about Christmas cheese-and-wine sessions. At least the underpass below Westminster Bridge had been laced with disinfectant.

Between St Thomas’ Hospital and the river, I stumbled on a wall of hearts – the National Covid Memorial Wall. The plain stone wall was decorated with thousands of pink and red, painted hearts, which

contained sorrowful and heartfelt tributes – some plain; others poetic; all moving. ‘My much-loved mother’. ‘Nano 1936’. ‘Robert “Bob” Justice’.

There were a few ‘Ashley+Jodie 4 Eva’ scrawls. But a committee of volunteers, the Friends of the Wall, have scrubbed off graffiti and repainted words and hearts when they have faded.

What a beautiful addition to the spectacle of the Thames – as organic and democratic as the river itself.

As I reached Vauxhall Bridge, the sun came out, and I took my leave of the water as the tide bore plane leaves upstream.

On the internet that night, I learned that Walter Raleigh’s words were fiction, created by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Kenilworth.

The Thames may not be a wonder of the universe but it is a wonder of our world, a gift of life that keeps on giving to the millions who walk beside it.

I walked from Bank tube station across London Bridge, picking up the Thames path by Southwark Cathedral and walking westwards, to finish at Vauxhall Bridge The Oldie March 2022 93

On the Road

The girl in the picture Designer Celia Birtwell, 80, remembers posing for David Hockney with her gifted, tormented husband, Ossie Clark. By Louise Flind Do you travel light?

If we go and see David [Hockney] in Normandy, we might go to something rather nice. So I try and itemise things in my head.

What’s your favourite destination?

We have this tiny little cottage in Shropshire.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

My family lived near Prestwich and we’d go to a farm in North Wales in a rolling landscape with an orchard and an oven in the wall making bread.

How did you and your husband, Ossie Clark (1942-96), divide up your designs?

You could just put a piece of fabric on the table. He would draw on the fabric, make a toile and put it on the stand.

Then he’d draw on the stand to eliminate darts etc, and get his pattern-cutter to cut it out. I worked from home – so I’d always take the fabrics in and see what he’d done with them. They were very exciting times.

CARL DE SOUZA / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

What made Ossie such a good cutter?

I think it was instinctive, and he was trained rather well.

Why did London swing so much in the 1960s?

I think we were all children born during or after the war and it had been so austere, and the fashion was very stiff.

Ossie would make clothes where you didn’t have to wear a bra. The freedom and the music upset everything and gave ordinary young people a buzz which then encapsulated the rest of the ’60s.

Who were your great influences?

Léon Bakst, Picasso and Matisse.

What was David Hockney like back then?

I remember seeing him in Portobello 94 The Oldie March 2022

Road and asking a girlfriend of mine, ‘Who’s that?’ He somehow stood out – I can’t remember if he had dyed blond hair or not. I think I make him laugh and we’ve been friends ever since.

What happened to the famous Hockney of you – Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971)? Do you like it? Did you ever own it?

I think it was sold for five or six thousand pounds to the Tate and still lives there. We never owned it. I can’t say whether I like it or not because it’s sort of part of you.

What are your favourite parts of Manchester and Lancashire?

Prestwich, because I was 13 when we left there – and I went to Salford Art School at 14. I loved Albert Square in Manchester because there were coffee bars.

What was Lowry like?

I remember him because my mother was a huge fan and he would visit the library at my art school.

Why did you and Ossie drift apart?

The drugs and his lifestyle. I just couldn’t put up with it really. I was very sorry for him actually because workwise we were brilliant together. We produced lovely boys and we had a lovely career for a short while.

Why did things go wrong for Ossie?

He kept running out of money. It was just very sad because you could see this person who’d been so dynamic fall apart, and then the boyfriend he had in the end – whom I never met – was bad news. It was a dark ending. [Clark was tragically killed in 1996 by his former lover Diego Cogolato.]

With Hockney in 2006 in front of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970) What was it like living in LA? I went to stay with David Hockney for three months when the boys were very small, and modelled for him.

What clothes suit older readers?

Long sleeves, for sure. I think Mary Berry looks pretty good – she’s an old girl. I think you want to look quieter but still relevant.

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

I didn’t have a honeymoon – I got married in a register office and that was it.

Do you go on holiday?

I suppose going to see David was a holiday last summer.

Do you have a daily routine even when you’re away?

Always do the Carmen rollers every morning.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

In Mexico, we ate fried crickets and they were delicious [she cackles].

What’s your favourite food?

Rose-and-violet creams from Fortnum’s.

Do you have a go at the local language?

No, because I went to art school too early.

What’s your biggest headache on holiday?

It’s if I’ve left the curlers in.

Do you like coming home?

Love coming home … yeah, yeah, yeah.

Celia Birtwell’s latest Next collection is now available online

Genius crossword 410 el sereno A number of clues share an unstated definition, which needs to be written in the grid at 1 Across Across

Down

1 See preamble (6) 4 15’s back, surrounded by girls! (8) 9 Leading hotel on a budget finally getting suitable cover (3,3) 10 Oh - for such a work contract! (4,4) 12 They may be seen in diesel car, occasionally, reversing (8) 13 Go wrong inside - for what reason? (6) 15 Take heart from fresh time of celebration (4) 16 Women and everybody let down by fellow - one waiting for a dance (10) 19 Silly fool knocks, bristling with fear (10) 20 Attempt to cover new problematic situation (4) 23 Charged and put up for hearing (6) 25 Sort of government has-been found outside bar (8) 27 Plot affair (8) 28 Hotel with shabby exterior (6) 29 Fancy coat given to top player (8) 30 Put on party for men needing beds stripped (6)

1 One may, subject to tax giving the authority of the Pope (7) 2 Policeman on the girl’s love for Spiderman perhaps (9) 3 Bishop’s check subject to European standard (6) 5 Top answer with Times supporting exercise (4) 6 Ladies help, weirdly ringing round for a way out (8) 7 Reputation of old party sure to lose case (5) 8 Rose finally says Grace! (7) 11 Eat nuts, prepared to get such a disease (7) 14 Extract from film suppressing retro material (7) 17 Top politician of old accommodating Independent silly girl (9) 18 Covering of chocolate eclair spoilt this in salad (8) 19 Gadgets eliminating source of rot in food containers (7) 21 Action to protect low island crumbled (7) 22 Curious answer stifled by one of five on time (6) 24 Praise has no boundaries for such coffee (5) 26 Revolutionary journalists must depress bankers at heart (4)

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: 9th March 2022. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary 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 410 Across 1 High-quality hard wood (4) 4 Hurts (5) 8 Tension, anticipation (8) 9 Posterior; bring up (4) 10 Cry with sorrow (4) 11 Average (8) 12 Quit job (6) 14 Cursory (6) 16 Scented (8) 19 Beat easily (4) 20 Stallion (4) 21 Pronounced (8) 22 Mix of metals (5) 23 Emblem of Wales (4)

Genius 408 solution Down 2 Throw out (5) 3 Male relatives (7) 4 Correct, improve (5) 5 Vaults over (7) 6 Besmirch (5) 7 Compassionate (6) 13 Unbeliever (7) 14 Addendum to will (7) 15 Astuteness (6) 17 Bonus ball? (5) 18 Opaque, dirty (5) 19 Male duck (5)

The C in question was CAR, whether a particular make, or the letters CAR Winner: Phillip Wickens, Horsham, West Sussex Runners-up: E C Eddles, Galmpton, Brixham, Devon; Phil Goreham, Hull

Moron 408 solution: Across: 1 Reef, 3 Reigns (Refrains), 8 Typhoon, 9 Flier, 10 Halve, 11 Worship, 12 Tirana, 14 Scares, 18 Gimmick, 20 Yield, 22 Leave, 23 Wet suit, 24 Pewter, 25 Fees. Down: 1 Ratchet, 2 Expel, 3 Renown, 4 Infer, 5 Neither, 6 Poteen, 7 Trip, 13 Rampage, 15 Coyote, 16 Sedates, 17 Skewer, 18 Gild, 19 Inert, 21 Elude.

The Oldie March 2022 97

Competition TESSA CASTRO It is natural to want to make your longest and strongest suit trumps. In 1956, one Felix Vondracek considered these two hands: West ♠ 432 ♥ 432 ♦ 5432 ♣ 432

East (declarer - you) ♠ A8765 ♥ A K Q J 10 ♦6 ♣ AK

Assuming 3-2 splits in both majors and the defence leading diamonds at you, you’ll lose trump control in 4 ♥ and go down. However, you’ll make 4 ♠ – by ducking a round of spades, winning the ace on the second round, and, leaving the master trump outstanding, playing winners.

On a similar theme, it is often right to make the trump suit a 4-4 fit in preference to a 5-4 fit – giving you a discard on the fifth card. Take this deal from the New Alt Competition.

Dealer West Both Vulnerable

West ♠ 62 ♥ 10 8 7 ♦ K 10 8 6 ♣K 9 6 5

North ♠ KJ85 ♥QJ62 ♦A93 ♣7 4

South ♠ A Q 10 9 7 ♥AK43 ♦♣ A Q 10 3

East ♠ 43 ♥95 ♦QJ7542 ♣ J82

The bidding South Dbl 7♥(3)

West Pass 3♦ end

North Pass 4♦(2)

East 2♦(1) Pass

(1) Weak Two – with the emphasis on the word ‘weak’. Liberties can be taken in third chair, as partner is a passed hand and will not take you too seriously.

Note, East knows North-South have the values for game, so he is ‘playing with their money’.

(2) Pick a major.

(3) Cleverly choosing the 4-4 fit rather than the 5-4.

South would not have made 7 ♠ , being forced to try a club to the queen at some point. Declaring the 4-4 fit 7 ♥, declarer ruffed West’s (hopeful) diamond lead. He cashed the ace of hearts and crossed to the queen (if trumps had split 4-1, he would have needed the club finesse). He ruffed a diamond (with the king), crossed to the king of spades, cashed the jack of hearts, and ran winners, throwing a club from dummy on the fifth spade. Grand slam made.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 276, you were invited to write a poem called The Carpet.

Dan Rubinstein told of a rock band’s drummer stopping on a tour to buy some carpet to stop his bass drum wandering.

Dorothy Pope’s poem was about being ‘coventrated’, carpet-bombed, November 1940. Nigel Partridge gave the carpet’s point of view: ‘I hate feet…’ Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Philip Wilson.

The pattern that lies oblong by my bed, A kilim bought in downtown Istanbul, Has seen a lot of life it can be said, And makes it to the finish. Like a fool I paid top dollar, didn’t beat it down, Just fell into the clichéd tourist trap Some forty years ago. I brought it home, Soft silk beneath the feet to plug a gap.

The colour’s gone. The threads are kind of bare.

Tall flowers in its meadow seem to wilt.

And edges blur. And corners start to tear.

I eye it as I lurk beneath the quilt And wonder if it’s time to throw away, And get a new one in, but know that I Am somewhere in its weave. Such games we play.

You end up on the carpet, then you die.

Philip Wilson All rooms look bigger emptied. Our downsizing Removed us to a more convenient flat.

For one last time I wander round the old place.

The carpet maps where furniture once sat – Each compressed pile a trace of chair or bookcase – Each now-faint stain of lingered-over wine Tells stories that perhaps are best forgotten, Where memory and shagpile intertwine.

The carpet doesn’t chart those indiscretions.

No trace remains of each ill-judged affair, Of where the blazing fire warmed two lovers Whose lies lay deeper than bookcase or chair.

I close the door on this room, and its secret, The carpet’s shame discreetly swept beneath it.

Con Connell

She was to be his carpet, Expensive, plush and new.

He felt her, liked her appearance, Thought to himself, You’ll do.

Installed her in his household, Gave her pride of place, So sumptuous and stylish; All admired his taste.

And of course, he walked all over her With hard and heavy feet Until she was shabby and threadbare, No longer a tactile treat.

He sighed at his once smart purchase, Faded and worn, beyond all doubt.

So he bought a new, luxurious one, And threw the old one out.

Martin Brown She saw the new-laid square of carmine red.

‘Gymnast or dancer, which am I?’ she said, And was off, to the air between carpet and ceiling, Was darting and leaping, handstanding, cartwheeling, Alighting with only her fingers and toes: The air was her partner, she moved as she chose.

No sound in the house but the swish of her dress, In the silence she might have been dance’s priestess.

Today the carpet is again stripped bare.

Four indentations where we set her chair.

A patch that marked the bedspace dusky red, The rest worn pale and thin by regular tread.

All curtains gone, the windows open wide, Fresh air moves in, and from the trees outside, A soft susurrus as their branches sway.

Across the empty floor their shadows play.

Peter Hollindale COMPETITION No 278 I feel the cold more than I used to, or at least it hurts more. A poem, please, called Cold Feet, in any sense. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 278’, by 10th March.

The Oldie March 2022 99

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The Oldie March 2022 105

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside I long to be a granny

Q

My daughter has just told me that she has no intention of having children. She is my only child, and I’m devastated. I had been longing for grandchildren and she’d make a wonderful mother. She says the world is too dangerous and unpleasant and she’s made up her mind. She’s 30 – so time is running out. How can she be so certain?

Tessa G, Brighton She has no idea what she wants.

Or, perhaps more honestly, she has no idea what she’ll want in the future. And nor do any of us. I suspect that she hasn’t found anyone she’d like to have children with and, in these restrictive times, can’t imagine meeting anyone she’ll love enough to want him to father her child. So this may be a way of trying to justify some situation she feels is inevitable – that she’ll end up childless. It’s much less agonising to fool yourself that you’ve taken a decision yourself rather than find yourself passively suffering. At least you feel in control. It may be that she will fall in love and her outlook will change radically. It may be that she simply finds herself pregnant accidentally. Whatever, the chances are that she will become pregnant at some point – nature can make fools of us all. But whether she will or not is not something neither she – or you – can possibly predict.

A

Boring organ recitals

Q

The conversation at gatherings with friends and relatives is dominated by (often depressing) health problems. How can I steer conversation onto more interesting topics?

Andrew, Bristol

A

Andrew, what is depressing for you is not necessarily depressing for other people! For many of us, health, at our age, is crucially fascinating.

I can listen for hours to accounts of my friends’ ailments – and how they’re trying to overcome them. It’s not just gossip. I learn a lot, and enjoy the empathy, consideration and thought involved in such conversations. How the body works is endlessly fascinating – as any GP will tell you. Have you ever looked into the mechanics involved in a triple bypass, for instance? Or how our digestion works? Health trumps most other topics because it includes mechanics, personal feelings and psychology – not to mention potential mortality – all in one subject.

Don’t try to change the subject. Try to find something interesting in it yourself.

Family misfortunes

Q

Having had a very stressful Christmas with the family, I’m dreading the next get-together, which will be at Easter. I really don’t get on with my relatives – and they don’t get on with one another, it seems. So I can’t understand why we keep up the same old rituals. We all agree it’s marvellous when it’s over, after all.

J S, Surrey Well, you agree on something, don’t you? And, quite honestly, if you can get through these occasions without a murder being committed, I think you’re doing well. We keep up these rituals because they’re really important. However much you don’t get on with them, you do have a bond with relations over even the oldest of friends. There’s an unspoken loyalty, deep down; a primitive connection that we often don’t like to admit to. Try to focus

A

ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by Walstead Group. Distributed by Seymour Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

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on your blood connections rather than on petty jealousies or disagreements. When the chips are down, it’s a relative who’ll step up to help you first, I’ll bet, rather than a friend, however old.

Desert Island Slipped Discs

Q

I think the idea of doing Desert Island Discs with one’s oldies is a brilliant idea. However, I’m 90 – and if even I have only very vague memories of my favourites, how would my children find them? Who for heaven’s sake sang about ‘the man with the goo-goo-googly eyes’? When I was six, I had a wind-up gramophone and only two records, Mr Bach Goes to Town and The Animals Went in Two by Two. You might just find those, but if I can never remember who sang, ‘If the nightingales could sing like you,’ who can? My husband would imitate him in the car when we went pub-crawling in our teens.

Beatrice G, Harrogate I’m sure your grandchildren would love to learn to sing Barney Google (with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes)! I remember learning lots of wonderful old music-hall songs from my grandmother – including the inimitable Ain’t It Grand to Be Bloomin’ Well Dead which was macabre but irresistible. The nightingale lyric you mention is, by the way, the first line of a verse of You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me which was sung by Frank Sinatra, among many others. Search YouTube! Or get your grandchildren to do it for you.

Happy reminiscing!

A

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

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