retroSPECTIVE UKNORTH
15 October 2006
Like Clint clip-clopping slowly in from the open range, Accrington Stanley rides into town again – lean, hungry, much-ridiculed until now, once a joke, always much loved: the great sun of its resurrection has burst over the place where I learned my journalism.
They are back in the Football League. In the 1950's there was a conversation on an Accrington tram describing a full-back's dalliance with another man's wife. His efforts apparently led to him being shot. “Aye,” said someone discussing this event, “that bullet were t' only thing he ever stopped.”
Stanley departed the league in 1962 and it has been a long wait in the wilderness for this moment. A venerable club. On the afternoon of Monday, 14 September, 1891, before 3,000 spectators at Wolverhampton, another of its full-backs, in an act of desperation, turned himself into a goalkeeper and a new rule was enforced. This, gentlemen, was the very first penalty. In football terms – magic, unbelievable.
I was once employed in Accrington. I can't recall when exactly: probably just after the Romans left. The Accrington Observer paid me 12s 6d a week (just over 50p) to read proofs, run errands for the joint managing director, and report on minor matters at week-ends. I never once got to report on Accrington Stanley. This was reserved for the important seniors, Bill Palmer - who turned to walls and tried to climb up them whenever he laughed, which was often – and Frank Kitchener, whom I thought very rich indeed because his wife had a shop.
We did not have our own names. We were Centurion, or Ajax. I was Rex. My words were based on cricket. I missed the good years of Stanley and, equally, missed the dark years. In the mid1950's, Harry Crossley, son of the boss whose errands I had attended to, was editor of the Observer and he wrote a song called On, Stanley, On. They were the words last spoken by Marmion in Sir Walter Scott's epic poem about the Battle of Flodden Field, and the Stanley referred to was Edward, son of the first Earl of Derby. In 1963 the club went bankrupt and as an observer of the time said, it was now Gone, Stanley, Gone. There was always a movement to restore the club to greatness, to rescue it once for all from the grubby notebooks of comedians out for a one-liner.
There were heroes here, and Bill Parkinson was one of the greatest. In 1968 he called a meeting in a working men's club to test support for a team that would bear the town's name. It was packed to the doors. The climb-back had begun. From 1968 to 1970 he and his friends were in a flurry of raffle tickets as they fought for money. The weekly wage bill for the first season was £25. The manager, Jimmy Hincksman, got £5. The following season, Stanley won the league and Combination Cup. Where did Parky find his home? Why, Stanley-street, of course. There is a book called An Accrington Mixture, edited by an ex-policeman turned publisher named Bob Dobson. Accrington Stanley is there, of course – pages 100 and 101. My contribution – The Accrington Observer Observed – is on pages 124 and 125. So Stanley and me are separated in print, as we always were, but not in spirit. Time I closed the gap: Well done!
26 April 2006
Late at night, sitting with the dog, television off, I was reading Alan Bennett's Lady in the Van. Not for the first time. And for a long time afterwards, drifting into sleep, I was trying to work out what it was about the story that was so satisfying. Here we had a middle-aged and successful writer, getting on with his plays and observations, and suddenly, as if from heaven - or its opposite - there descended upon him a lady with a van. A lady a little potty, a little dignified, a little lost, and lonely foisted on someone reticent, talented, observant and with a deep social conscience. There you have all the ingredients of life. And of course, Bennett made the most of it.
"I ran into a snake this afternoon," Miss Shepherd said. "It was coming up Parkway. It was a long, grey snake - a boa constrictor possibly. It looked poisonous..." Miss Shepherd's van came to a permanent halt at Bennett's house in Camden Town, London, in 1971. For 20 years the dilemma of Miss Shepherd became the dilemma of Alan Bennett - she living in a smelly mess outside his front door; he resisting the tides of her advance on his life as well as he was able.
"The nuns up the road have taken to doing some of her shopping. One leaves a bag on the back step of the van this morning. There are the inevitable ginger nuts, and several packet of sanitary towels.. They form some part of her elaborate toilet arrangements, and are occasionally to be seen laid drying across the soup-encrusted electric ring. As the postman says this morning, ' The smell sometimes knocks you back a bit.'" And she died there. He had to sort out the smelly evidences of her existence, and question his conscience and moralities in the process.
Bennett's art is to take the apparently trivial - his mother's views of "her betters" and so on - and make them meaningful in much larger ways. Miss Shepherd tested all his beliefs and inhibitions one by one. The two of them existed together, but in worlds apart, like aliens. And yet, I suspect, it was the sameness that reached furthest into the writer's psyche. His long essay on Miss Shepherd is superb. Even on the second reading, I was laughing out loud, to the disgust of the dog,, and in the next sentence feeling for Bennett's own agony. So you have this magic formula, where the relationship between two people over 20 years can match the life experiences of us all. Leaving questions -
Whose was the great dilemma, Bennett's or Miss Shepherd's? Who benefited most from the relationship, the woman helped with shopping and pushing the van, or Bennett who immortalised her in print? George Bush has his Miss Shepherd now in the form of the Iranian leader. Blair has his Cameron, Berlusconi his Prodi. And the fellow down the road has his pools nights where teams from surrounding pubs arrive to challenge his skills and, by their incompetence, raise his spirits to ecstasy or, by their prowess, plunge him into despair, where only the pint glass ahead of him is the signpost to a little peace. All problems, whether great or minuscule, expand to fill the empty mind. What's the difference between them all? Not much. 23 april 2006
October 2006
I talked with Eddie Braben at Liverpool Football Club when he was writing Morecambe and Wise scripts. but it is only now that I know of the torments of that time.Braben (I read) had been writing for Ken Dodd for years when he was asked by Billy Cotton to change course. "It wasn't London I disliked. It was what happened there.
Three men (Eric and Ern with producer) sitting at a table, passing judgments, who'd eventually reach a verdict on something I had sweated blood over for over three weeks. You know: fourteen hours a day, which isn't an exaggeration, and all I could do was sit and wait. It was horrible. And eventually, there'd be the initial laugh that would break the silence - what a relief!" So Braben stayed in Liverpool and John Ammonds, in charge of production for the BBC, would phone him for long discussions on what had been said. Alterations were called for. It had to be very tactful. Ammonds said: "We were all guilty at some time or other of pushing Eddie a bit too hard.
"I wasn't ever easy on him. But Eric and Ernie could really pile the pressure on to Eddie at times - when they were feeling pressure, too - and I'd have to remind them: 'Look - it's not like a tap, you know. You just don't turn it on and get a load of great material and good sketches and good gags gushing out.' It takes a very rare talent, actually to write comedy - top-class comedy - under that kind of pressure."
So there was a degree of insecurity hanging around, and yet, Braben was the writer who made Morecambe and Wise flourish as never before. It was an inspired relationship.
They had left Sid and Dick behind, left ITV behind, and Billy Cotton had given them the broad canvas on which they could best work at the BBC. Perfect. And Braben observed each of the duo to such a degree that he etched in and emphasised their individual characteristics so that people were no longer viewing comedians telling jokes: they were close to them in a much more meaningful way. It was more intimate, more like the relationship between Laurel and Hardy. So that is what made Morecambe and Wise the most loved pair on television. Graham McCann competently tells all in Morecambe and Wise (Fourth Estate, London). Best line in the book is from Joe E. Lewis referring to American show host Ed Sullivan: "He could brighten a room just by leaving it."
To that little lower droop of the Lake District which reveals, in all its treachery, Morecambe Bay. The weather woman had promised better fare than we got. What we got was a glowering sky and whipping wind. We took ourselves to Silverdale, then Arnside, which is a few shops and houses overlooking the bay. When the children were young, which is a long, long time ago, the tide came up through the sand and began to pull my Mini Cooper like a bad tooth down and down. The water was half way up the wheels as a hysterical creature ran to a farmhouse and disturbed the farmer at lunch. The farmer was not impressed by that creature's dilemma. I know. I was the creature. He went on chewing his cud while I danced about in anguish. He had seen it all before. But he nevertheless stirred himself and got a tractor. And when he reached the area of disaster, various people were trying to dig the car out of the sands.
It was still going down. He dare not stop in case he, too, went down. He circled. He told me to attach his rope to a bumper. I said it would drag off the bumper. But I attached it anyway, because I had no choice. It dragged off the bumper. Thereafter there was much shouting and milling about, what with bystanders and helpers and resolute farmer, and my interested children, whose holiday was about to be spent on a bus. Eventually the car came loose, and was dragged clear, and we were mobile again. But much saddened.I distributed currency with mad abandon to my rescuers - a sure sign of hysteria. I remembered all that today as I glowered out at those sands.
I perched my car well up on the shore line where the flinty rocks were, ready for a quick exit should that malignant sandpit creep closer. And then we walked the dog in that lashing wind skirting the bay. It was violent enough to suggest to my mind that I could credibly cry "Mush" Mush" to our leaping creature. He was ecstatic at so much dog excreta lying about and leapt from one offering to another to nuzzle it with great enthusiasm. He is hand-reared but I can not recall teaching him that. I noted that half a dozen cars were parked near mine overlooking the bay and all contained old fellows and biddies. They stared without expression, some chewing slowly. One old fellow got out of his vehicle, went to the boot, inspected the contents, got back in the front seat, and came out ten minutes later to repeat the whole useless process. "My word,"
I observed to my wife, "he's lively today." We went back to the village and could not get a proper lunch because of the dog. We could not enter premises. We could have sat on a picnic seat outside one pub but it was covered in globules of water. We got sandwiches and coffee at a cafe take-away. For the first and only time in my life I found a use for the can holders in the car. My wife admired hers for ages. She had never used one before either. It occurred to both of us that - apart from being offensive - a recent TV programme on ageing drivers criticising their abilities is well clear of reality.
It is the white-shirt-black-trousers-small-moustache-sunglasses driver who terrorises the roads, leaping from lane to lane and achieving 90 in no time. He does that (I recall) because he is driving a company car and it won't cost him a penny if he bends it. The fact that he might be killed or maimed doing so is a thought too far for black moustaches and sunglasses. A further thought occurred: If it were not for ageing drivers half the village pubs and restaurants in the country would go bankrupt. These regiments of totterers are the backbone of the national economy. We were home by 3pm after ploughing through places with such names as Milnthorpe and Crooklands. The dog enjoyed it. That's the comforting thought.
November, 2005
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread... Ah, there you are. I was just ruminating on a little anecdote that came my way in a newsletter about former members of the Daily Express staff. It concerned Derek Jamieson, once editor of the Daily Express and prime mover behind The Star.
A writer named Michael O'Flaherty had written a story about Winston Churchill lying in state and had used the word catafalque. This, so the account went, enraged Jamieson. He was of the Christiansen tradition. Arthur Christiansen was the greatest of Express editors, reigning when its circulation exceeded 4,000,000, and he was strict on words. They had to be plain. They did not have to leave any question the reader might have unanswered. And if a curious word was used it had to be explained. "Jamieson," said the newsletter, " exploded and invited me into his office. 'What's this word catafalque?' he said, pronouncing it catafalkwee.' I tried to explain that it was a raised platform on which the body of the deceased lay. 'I am not having a word like catafalkwee in my newspaper," declared the irate Jamieson. 'Call it a platform.'
I explained that there was no real synonym for catafalque (pronouncing it correctly). 'I said call it a platform,' shouted Jamieson. And so Churchill went down immortally in the Daily Express as 'lying on a platform.' "Railway stations," said O'Flaherty, "have never been the same since."
I have no doubt that Jamieson used the mispronounced word catafalkwee to show his disdain for it. He boomed in a Cockney accent and liked to be a man of the people. I knew him in London Features, and he was an extremely good sub-editor. (I could tell a story proving that point, but I am not going to.) Then he became mighty with a black overcoat and executive escorts and his voice went louder. At that point, I felt that his belief in simplicity was over-emphasised.
I was not keen on his drift as an editor. I felt good writers were too restricted by his insistence on short features so that personality was being reduced in a paper noted for personalities. Be that as it may, it is why I was ruminating. I began to wonder how Jamieson would have his reporters come up with the Lord's Prayer:
Our dad in heaven, you've always had a good name; I'll give you that. And I hope it keeps that way because everybody I know thinks you're ace. So make sure we have a bit of good grub on our plates to prove the point. Don't be hard on us when we do wrong things and use the short words you don't like. And on our part, we won't hold it against those who do the same to us. Save us from all nasty things - if anybody can do that, you can. And let's hope it lasts. Amen. Oh, and a little addition: Make it a long time before I am laid by thee on a platform. And thanks, our dad.
Jamieson went on from various editorships to be a loud and opinionated voice on radio and television. He is, I believe, now in Brighton by way of Florida. Florida, I dare say, will not be unaware of it.
12 June 2006
There were two articles on the obituaries page of the Daily Telegraph: one dealt with Major Roy Farran and the other had the headline, “Revealed – Dante in all his glory.” I thought at first that the headlines had been transposed. Roy Farran DSO, three MCs, Croix de Guerre, American Legion of Merit, three times recommended for the VC, was a one-man force. He was unpredictable. Was he brave – or foolhardy? Was he a planner or an exhibitionist? Did he vanquish fear, or totally lack any sense of it?
Whatever the answer, every paragraph of his obituary – he died at the age of 85 – could have inspired a book. He sees a party of Germans escorting a group of 40 hospital patients who had been taken prisoner. He kills the guards. He retakes a village, is wounded in both legs and an arm, is taken prisoner, and gets his first MC. He is flown to hospital in Athens and escapes, wherupon he is passed from house by Greek peasants. He is appointed ADC to general Jock Campbell, VC, commander, 7th Armoured Division. in North Africa, and overturns the car he is driving so that the general is killed. He joins Colonel Bill Stirling and becomes second in command of an SAS squadron. With a detachment of SAS, he drops behind German lines and creates mayhem. Second MC. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera... Nobody ever knew what he was up to. With Lt Col. P. H. Labouchere, OBE, happily in charge of the 3rd Hussars, Farran – I happen to know because I was serving with them too - was writing to friends at the War Office suggesting that the regiment might be best employed as the armoured element of 6 Airborne Division.
And so it came to pass, to the surprise, I think, of the colonel, whose main claim to fame was that wherever he stopped in battle, he built latrines as a first priority. When the camp was raided by people in Airborne uniforms, Farran was to be seen running towards the main gate waving a revolver and shouting to anyone who would listen, “Come on. We can cut them off.” The raiders had just tied up the adjutant and left him next to a bomb at the ammunition dump.
One night, Farran crept into the orderly room with a woman and he was making sh-ing noises. They vanished into the darkness of the colonel's office and reappeared later, shushing again.
Next day, Farran accused the corporal on duty in the orderly room of being asleep. The reply was: “Sir, you arrived at 23.42 hrs with a lady, asked her to be quiet, walked past me and into the colonel's office. You did not switch on the light. You were there 24 minutes and when you left you closed the door quietly.”
Farran decided no further action was necessary.
His thoughts did not follow normal patterns. When he felt the propaganda war was being lost in Palestine his instincts were to go to Jerusalem and call a Press conference to tell the English correspondents what life was all about. Farran won a DSO in the name of Patrick McGinty, from a song about an Irish goat swallowing a stick of dynamite. He was likely to disobey orders if he thought it necessary and instinctively he was a mercenary. He would progbably have been court-martialled for an attack in Italy. He expected it. But he had, in the process, assisted the Americans and they gave him the Legion of Merit. So he escaped again. He did some kind of covert job for the Palestine Police.
His brother was killed by a bomb in England thereafter. Farran ended in Alberta where he was a city alderman, minister of telephones and utilities, solicitor-general and heaven know what. At 80 he broke his back for the sixth time while herding cows. He had throat cancer; his larynx was removed; but he talked through a hole in his throat and returned to public speaking.The obvious words that come to mind are: We shall never see his like again. In Farran's case, the words are not a cliché. They are absolutely, unquestionably true
.Charles Lamb - Kissing and congeeing
November, 2005
When I was 14 or 15 I was looking for elevation in life. I did not know where to find it - in pictures, in travel, in companionship. It turned up, by accident, in a piece by Charles Lamb - Imperfect Sympathies, first published in the London Magazine of August, 1821. And more specifically in a single phrase. Lamb did not relish "the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable." (Political correctness had not been born and he was rash in his assumptions.).
"The reciprocal endearments (he wrote) have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue" - and here it comes, the phrase that glued itself to my progress through a longish life - "kissing and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility." It was poetry at the time. It is arrogant balderdash now. But there is magnificence in it, too. "Kissing and congeeing." I did know what the latter word meant A Google search suggested "to bow ceremoniously," which figures.
Lamb was impish. I did not know it when I first came across him. But he was impish as Voltaire was impish. Impishness gets you anywhere and everywhere.
I even found Dr Daitetz Suzuki quoting Voltaire in a speech on Buddhism given to the Emperor of Japan. Had I realised that Lamb was impish I would not have been a plague on the combined sub-editors of an evening newspaper that employed me. I would not have invented my own pontifical phrases and showered them with pseudo-intellectual rubbish. But I was Lambed when I needed to be Lambasted. They tolerated me. They took out my more extravagant phrases. And while they did it, I devoured more of Lamb and his impishness:"I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me - and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it." Could I ever have taken him seriously?
Or Dr Johnson when he said that the most pleasant prospect for a Scotsman was the high road leading to England? Back to Lamb who, surely, would have been reported to the Race Relations panjamdrums for this:
"In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces — or rather masks — that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls — these 'images of God cut in ebony'. But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good-nights with them — because they are black."
He was having his little joke at my expense.It took years to drive ponderous phrases from my head. I was helped by a news editor who warned me not to keep slipping poetry into my theatre reviews. Theatre! It was small-time stuff where I could not criticise the players (because they and their friends were readers and we needed them all), so I criticised the authors, such as Oscar Wilde, because he was not a reader.
"From a comedy in three acts, this presentation plunged into a drama of two intervals," I wrote once - because the intervals were over-long and people were forgetting what they had seen in the preceding section of the play.
Who would have thought that so much commotion could have been caused by being exposed to three words at too early an age? "Kissing and congeeing." Only I cared for them. Meanwhile, Lamb is laughing in his heaven.
15 May 2007 (Picture: Edward Rawlinson)
There are few places, these days, where you can see old journalism rampant. But it showed its colours in Manchester at a place that is a shrine to its past: Sam's Chophouse. Old journalism was insecurity, hard work, outrageous behaviour, a determination to win, a monastery, a commitment that no college could teach and which only birth and experience could temper, booze at the right times and sometimes the wrong, writers with phrases sent directly from heaven who could hack it through half a dozen large whiskies; it was like the police used to be, in a way - a fraternity, a band of soldiers in suits.
This meeting of a few people in Manchester was to remember such things and, specifically, to record the fact that Stanley Blenkinsop, news editor of the old Daily Express, and Gordon Amory, who, principally, ranged Newcastle upon Tyne and the north-east as an Express photographer after working in Manchester, were marking the 62 years they logged up between them after joining what they care to call the World's Greatest in April-May, 1957.
There we were, then; and there was Manchester. A Manchester that, I swear, reinvents itself, every time I visit it, in brick, steel and concrete and which, even as I watched, was changing its shape. A confident city, this; not one I have much affection for in itself, but good enough to challenge any other I can think of. My affection was for the immediate surroundings of the great black palace of Express Newspapers: the Land o' Cakes, Yates's, where a woman named May ruled, the Crown and Kettle, once a magistrates' court, and Sam's.
Sam's was regarded as the editor's place. Editors took people there and reduced them or enhanced them according to performance or whim. Sam's shut out the world completely. If it was raining outside, or sunshining, or if it was besieged by aliens, it made no difference in Sam's. There was a little nook where you could drink large sherries from the barrel before lunch, and there you were cocooned against the entire universe. One editor was known as a lunch appointment. Another held a cigar in his mouth by means of a match inserted into the end and thence in his teeth. "Editors," said a journalist of the time, "always disappoint. You wind them up, put them on the table, and off they go clanking along, and always, they fall off at the other end." He was near enough right, but some went on to greatness.
After large sherries, there was wine at the table. And after wine, brandy. Always we discussed work. What to do, how to do it, where to go and by which path - work, work. The office car would call at 3.30 for the return to the glass palace. I recall one editor saying, as we entered it, "Now - let us get back there and DO it." Alas, we went back there all right, but he was left to do it. I had a beneficial rest at my desk and was in the Land o' Cakes by 5.30 for a livener before taking the train home. Life is full of good intentions. You now realise why this celebration for Stanley and Gordon was by way of the Crown and Kettle and Sam's, both smarter now. When you leave these places for too long you forget your roots.
I am inclined, now, to use the sort of humour that is considered insulting in normal society. But it lives. It gloriously lives. One journalist was describing how it had taken him 25 minutes to get from here to there. "Ah," observed his friend, "but you're a cripple." Outrageously out of tune with the times, that remark. But to me, like the first smell of Spring hawthorn: a reminder, a reawakening, a memory of a fraternity accustomed to hard talk and hard drink.When Stanley and Gordon joined, the circulation of the Daily Express was 4,250,000 a day. So you see why they wear Crusader ties and talk of the world's greatest.
Of course, it is impossible to compare those days with these days. Television came, and computers, and instant messaging, and the whole of the communications media is being re-thought and re-drawn. These are days of crisis. The menu is nothing like the one I remembered. I always had lamb chops and chips and was served (as were we all) by our own waitress, Edna. Somewhere in the dining room is a brass plaque to her memory. So - the menu. Brown onion soup with cheddar cheese; choice of fish chips and mushy peas; home-made corned beef hash; steak and kidney pudding; curried Welsh lamb's kidneys; a "most excellent cottage pie", Sam's bangers and mash. Perfect.
Gordon Amory had printed the menu and all its adornments and it was brilliantly done - and in itself a reminder of changing technology.The Land o' Cakes is now the Lord Atterbury, whoever he is. Opposite the glass palace, in place of an employment exchange and a newsagent's is a Travelodge. There is a big shop nearby selling all kinds of clothing, nothing costing more than £3. A pub says "No track suits after 10pm."
I seem to recall someone saying that the manager of Sam's is a Polish man improbably named Jim. If that is so, he is a very fine manager indeed. He slipped into our way of saying and doing things to perfection, and even seemed to look on in approval as our fish and chips were delivered wrapped in old Daily Express newspaper.Of course he was praised for his part. And I seem to recall - but it is an illusion, a trick of the mind - that as he received the praise he said, "Chuffed to buggery that you enjoyed it."
No. That could not be Jim, the Polish gentleman. Somebody else must have said it.
I was in Ambleside, Lake District, a few years ago when parts of England became lakes themselves, and the weather was about right for the area: that is, a gentle weeping followed by wetter spells. This is enjoyment for the masochist. I am not knocking it. I was a part of it. I tried to take on the mystic communion of a million trekkers and cyclists who have gone through this enormous shower-room for hundreds, if not millions, of years without feeling resentment. I was inclined to say, “I'm just going for a shower” when I intended a walk with my dog.
Here is the haunt of lecturers and professors who, in Leeds, Oxford, Cambridge or Reading would take shelter if it rained. The normal rules of perambulation alter. In the Lakes, pilgrims take on the beatific look of the holy martyrs, the eyes half-closed, the faces streaming, the back-packs bobbing, the bony knees exposed, the shoes like great clods of brown earth with laces. I applaud them. Like those burned at the stake in the cause of religion they have found the joys of martyrdom. As for the rain, it does not, in local parlance, exist. It began to rain as I strolled around Hawkshead.
A landlord leaving his pub and observing it stared at me for a moment and gave his verdict - “Mist.” The joy of getting into it only to get out of it can not be over-emphasised. I had hired, for the week, a floor of an ancient building with an elevated view. (The description said that it was part of a gentleman's house in the 16th century – the inference being, I thought, that no gentleman had set foot over the doorstep since.)
Ahead of me as I stared out was the main road from Ambleside to Bowness and Windermere, a thoroughfare of endless movement. Lining it were bed and breakfast places – Bee and Bees as one called itself – three newly-built houses in local slate, and a garage.
Beyond all that, a large hill and behind it more hills that came into sight or out of sight according to the moods of the clouds dancing around their upper surfaces.You can get Pavers shoes, Rohan gear, any sort of walking gear in fact, art of any kind, vases of most kinds; and I can not for the life of me see why that should be about it. No Tesco here, you will note. No great variation in the wares on offer.
There is a cannyness about in the way of groceries: a feeling that supermarkets are kept away by design. Best to keep to little shops where the profits are higher, some local probably argued. A couple of cups of coffee cost near enough five pounds. I am not quibbling. I drank enough of them to help someone eke out the long winters when the visitors have gone soft and gone home. In some shop windows, there are facsimiles - brown as the old tobacco smoke of pub walls - of the Cumbrian landscape; puckered, and pockmarked by tears – the blue slits of water that signal Derwentwater, Coniston or whatever.
I even climbed a hill impossibly high by my standards to view water gushing over a rock. People are intrigued by such evidences of nature and I never thought I would be one. Many must have had the same sense of wonder when they first saw a flushing lavatory.
I was not alone. It was so steep up there that a large backpacker emerged round a sharp corner at speed and out of control without brakes. I was glad to avoid a collision as he careered out of sight, like the water. Water is the beginning, middle and end of the Lake District, and when you view it in the placid reaches of village streams it is clear and the small rocks beneath it are plainly etched for your vision; there is none of your muddied nonsense of other places. It flows and gurgles its delight at being in motion and in that, it is not unlike the visitors from other places that do not have such magic. They, too, flow and gurgle their delights, endlessly coming, endlessly going to find what Wordsworth knew as his daily and yearly life.
Wordsworth!
There he was in Grasmere, and in Ambleside is where he had his office. A plaque marks the spot. He was in charge of the stamps thereabouts. As usual, I went to view his grave in a Grasmere churchyard. He planted trees in that place and then he was planted there himself, to grow only in stature. One should not be flippant about so serious a poet, but as I stood with a small group, I said, “I didn't know he was dead.” The remark was noted. I say no more.
I am always intrigued by the faces of people who travel half way across the world to do as I do. There were Oriental faces here and many have come, principally, to see something of the Beatrix Potter inheritance in Sawrey – she of Peter Rabbit and the glowering clothes and the Herdwick sheep with wool like Brillo pads. I know. I have one of the sweaters. It would keep the North Pole warm. As the days went by we were getting news of floods in parts of Britain.
Worst day for 50 years, said a headline as I braved my own grey drizzle. One would have thought that the gods of the lakes who growl through the hills here would sense the rivalry, and put on a show of defiance. But no. They growled but softly, not with heat. If they sensed a rivalry they knew it could not last. They were supreme in their historic role as the voice of the mid-heavens. But they were to show that they, too, could put on theatre. In my final night I looked out of my elevated window at around ten o' clock and the grey clouds were slowly, ponderously rolling in over the hills. There was not the slightest hurry in their progression.
They could have been ghostly monks gathering for a service. For the following day, my exit day, the forecast was horrendous, and perhaps this was the start. But no. These clouds were benign, playful even. And searing across their edges were great slashing streaks of red light from some far-setting sun. Enough to bring out the cameras – and tripod – next door. When the day of atonement came, this day when the forecasters had talked of doom as if they were hell-fire preachers, a light drizzle greeted the morning and through it I drove home in blessed peace. The Lakes had relented. All was well.
A long time ago - so long ago now that memories of it are fading - eleven people in a remote place found a cause, made a stand against government authority, and emerged bankrupt.
They were heroes to their friends, rebels to their enemies, unfit to be councillors according to Lord Denning as Master of the Rolls, and their battlefield was Clay Cross. But whatever you call them, they were, indeed, martyrs. And martyrs deserve to be better remembered whether you call them brave, stupid, or just stubborn. Little is seen or recorded of their battles today.
They were made bankrupt in the seventies after running up huge losses on the housing revenue account and refusing to introduce council rent increases ordained by a Tory rent act. And this - as one of them, David Skinner, recalled it - is what happened:
"One of us had just retired and booked a holiday. The firm went bust. Just about when the official receiver was tapping around, he got his money back and they took it from him. He had been a school caretaker for 30-odd years and he was going on a nice retirement trip with that.
"My brother, Graham (another councillor) had a car and they wanted that, so to make it a bit awkward, he jacked it up, stuck it on some bricks, and took the wheels off. The official receiver's staff came along, wound it onto a low-loader, and took the bricks and all.
"Another had some carpets taken."The people of Clay Cross, 10,000 of them in deep Derbyshire mining country close to Chesterfield, were part of the comedian's stock in trade: "Anyone in the audience from Clay Cross? Get off home and pay the rent."
They were remembered, as places like Marston Moor or Eyam are remembered: the name rather more significant with the passage of time than the event that makes it memorable. Clay Cross's reason for notoriety is complicated. It was to do with the Housing Finance Act, 1972, and rents rising according to market forces.
Clay Cross's housing was not all that good. Because of the decline of the mining industry in the sixties, the area had lost six or seven pits and, says David Skinner, "we were not prepared to increase rents dramatically bearing in mind there had always been high unemployment."
There was another factor: they,"too, had an election manifesto and it declared that they should not increase rents." That was the start of what is now history.
Like his brother, the MP, David Skinner was nothing if not blunt. At the time of the battle of Clay Cross he was a supervisor on roads for the highway authority. In the mid-eighties he was manager of a youth training scheme for the district council.
He had declared his office a no-smoking zone (and insisted on it). At 41, he was already been a member of the Labour Party for 26 years.
Given his temperament and beliefs, events of the early seventies had not scarred him; and at that time, he made light of what followed.
"We were not able to have bank accounts. The majority of us never had bank accounts anyway. We have not been able to buy things on HP. And while you are bankrupt you have to be wary because the Official Receiver can impound what bits of furniture you have. That's the difficult thing. A bit of an inconvenience.
"Politically, we couldn't have a school governorship or be appointed to public bodies. But we have been active in our unions and the wider Labour movement.
" We get together quite often. We had a tenth anniversary drink in a local pub. One member (a woman) has died. Two, including myself, have moved out of Clay Cross (very close to its boundary). Most of us are basically old-fashioned type Socialists."
They were out of bankruptcy in 1981 and disqualified from public office until 1986 - "you serve an extra five years after your bankruptcy has been removed and those five years come to an end in May."
In November, 1975, £64,000 was owed. This included £7,000 surcharge on the deficient housing account and £50,000-worth of other financial debt plus legal aid. Only £400 of the debt was recovered. For the next five years council tenants caught up in the dispute had to pick up the bill for what had grown into an £87,000 loss by paying extra each week.
There was no victory then, or later. Glorious defeat or stigma? "We didn't see it as any of that really. We carried out the mandate we were elected on, as Mrs Thatcher is doing now. We stayed the course. We knew what the consequences were. We have not mugged anybody."
They would claim to have invented the country's first job creation scheme - "we looked around the dereliction in Clay Cross and set up job creation before the Manpower Services Commission was born out of wedlock. We gave kids free milk back."
And they suffered the consequences of their acts. To what degree individuals felt that will probably never be known.
"Friends, neighbours, everybody were prepared to form human barricades when the official receiver's staff came and in some cases they could not get in. It was a spontaneous thing. People were prepared to lie down and stop them taking washing machines, things like that. We hadn't robbed anybody. "We hadn't fiddled anything."
Clay Cross was front-runner for what happened later in areas of local government. Now, as then, it is the law that has to prevail. The alternative is plain: You go for broke. And end up in limbo.
"Once the official receiver sends you that piece of paper, you are prevented from paying tax, which is not a bad idea; you can't pay electricity bills, phone bills, anything. Your gross earnings become your net earnings. It all goes into the official pot. They stop you paying anything. Everybody becomes creditors: Gas Board, Water Board, any other board."
It was not a subject that came easily to people in the area when I visited it. "It is all a long time ago, a sad time for all, and I see no purpose in resurrecting the past," said Roy Norbron, a Tory member of North East Derbyshire Council, which took in Clay Cross under local government reorganisation in 1974.What advice did David Skinner give to councillors running foul of the laws of the land?
"If you've got money, if you've got anything - shift it. Spend it. Take it out of the bank. Do anything with it before the district auditor sends in the official receiver."
A melancholy solution and not one to commend itself to anyone in need of peace of mind. But twenty years ago, it was the only one being suggested in the place where it all, unfortunately, began.
Edmund Spenser: The poet and his hard times
Picture of the Spenser House at Hurstwood by Edward Rawlinson
If you ask strangers about fairy queen these days you are likely to get a poor response and an odd look. But it is upon these two words that the memory and reputation of Edmund Spenser, second great English poet after Chaucer, rests. It was spelled Faerie Queene, of course, in his day, and it referred to Elizabeth 1 and the Tudor dynasty. An epic poem.
In the wilder part of East Lancashire, off a road between Burnley and Todmorden, is a place called Hurstwood, near Worsthorne. And in it is a sizeable chunk of Spenser memorabilia, solid as an oak, venerable as a bishop, secure in its time and this time, and eminently desirable to romantics. The House. Spenser House was built around 1530, and members of the Spenser family lived there until about 1690. But the great Edmund? Did he or didn't he? Would he or wouldn't he? Mystery, you see; all is mystery.
It would be nice for romantics to see him moving ghost-like by the monumental pile he loved as the last sunlight of the day slips into shadow. But in truth, he was born in London. I suspect he claimed better parentage than he had. And he was not all that nice a chap even for Tudor times when skulduggery was an art for infants who would later take first-class degrees in Mayhem.
Several of his pieces are addressed to the daughters of Sir John Spencer, head of the Althorp family; and in Colin Clout's Come Home Again he describes three of the ladies as "the honour of the noble family Of which I meanest boast myself to be."
Mr R. B. Knowles, however, is of the opinion (Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell, privately printed, 1877) that the poet's relatives must be among the humbler Spencers of north-east Lancashire. So arrogant he was, and talented he was, pretty ruthless, too - not at all humble.
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – 1599) was possibly the son of John Spenser, a free journeyman clothmaker living in East Smithfield, London. Possibly, you see. Nothing certain. Whatever his parentage, it is likely that the Spensers (or Spencers) originated in Lancashire, where they would have been connected with such as the Nowells and Towneleys. Three years after leaving Cambridge, in 1579, Spenser issued his first volume of poetry, the Shepherd's Calendar.
“Where and how he spent the interval have formed subjects for elaborate speculation. That most of it was spent in the study of his art we may take for granted. That he lived for a time in the north parts of England; that there or elsewhere he fell in love with a lady whom he celebrates under the anagram of Rosalind, and who was most likely Rose, a daughter of a yeoman named Dyneley, who lived near Clitheroe; that his friend Harvey urged him to return south, and introduced him to Sir Philip Sidney; that Sidney took to him, discussed poetry with him, introduced him at court, put him in the way of preferment - are ascertained facts in his personal history.”
Good. Wasn't he doing well? And courting influential friends along the way. Spenser may have been employed by the Earl of Leicester as early as 1577, perhaps carrying messages to Leicester's brother-in-law Sir Henry Sidney, then Lord Deputy in Ireland. And all went well. He was appointed clerk of the Chancery for Faculties in Dublin (whatever that was). He got a lease of Lord Baltinglas's Dublin home. He leased New Abbey, County Kildare, serving as Commissioner of Muster for Kildare (whatever THAT was).
And when the lands of the attainted (corrupt) Earl of Desmond were set out in plantation in 1586, Spenser was allotted 3,000 acres or so near Doneraile, including an old castle at Kilcolman.
So a degree of greed and ambition was in his soul and he was zealous in the destruction of Irish culture and colonisation of Ireland.
He met Sir Walter Raleigh, who read his draft of The Faerie Queene and encouraged him to join him on a trip to London in 1590, where he presented the poet to Elizabeth.
Spenser used his time in London to publish the first three books of The Faerie Queene, but although the Queen promised him a handsome pension for his labours, her generosity was questioned by Lord Burghley, whom Spenser went on to lampoon in Complaints, printed and almost immediately suppressed (or 'called in') in 1591. Judging from a commentary on the scandal recently discovered in a contemporary letter,Spenser seems to have returned to Ireland in the early months of 1591 as a direct result of the offence he had caused to Burghley.By chance, I happen to be a fan of Burghley. He was a sage, constantly at Elizabeth's side, and I consider his letter of advice to his son on how he should conduct his life to be a masterpiece of sense and cunning. Whatever the relationship Spenser was a fool to tackle him – a little like a hen challenging a fox.Arriving back late in 1598, Spenser took up residence in London's King's Street, and died there, according to Ben Jonson 'for lake of bread', on a Saturday in January 1599. Imagine that! Lack of bread!How could he soar and fall in so spectacular a way? There are more gaps than firm ground in all of it
.“It is not clear how a poet so well-loved by so many, an official so highly-regarded by so many, and a man so politically well-connected to so many, could have died in the fabled penury to which Jonson later testified." The Earl of Essex paid for his funeral, and poets carried his coffin, throwing their verses and pens into his grave. His tomb is adjacent to that of Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.And there you are. You can go up that tortuous road, as I did, and find that house, and speculate – as I did – on the secrets it still holds. But there are no obvious answers. Only wonderment.Surprisingly, there is an ancient house directly opposite for sale at £150,000 that would make a fitting home for reminders of Spenser. Mind you, it would be the ruin of Hurstwood. There's hardly room to swing a mini around. So I, for one, would prefer to leave things as they are.
August 2007
In the 17th century, people had to tiptoe through their opinions as if they were hot coals. Roman Catholicism and Henry V111's requirement for something rather different had made sure of that. So a man who could perform this delicate progression through life without losing it is worthy of attention.
Alexander Nowell (1507-1602) was notable on several counts: He invented (by chance) the beer bottle; he was Dean of St Paul's for 42 years; and he was heckled by Elizabeth 1. In a time of religious unease, he wrote three catechisms in Latin. He came from an imposing house and an imposing family, one of whom was to pursue Lancashire witches. At Read, near Clitheroe and the Ribble Valley, stood the Read Hall of the Nowells illustrated here as it was in 1750. (The present Read Hall of 1825 is nothing like it.) The inscription says: "To Alexander Nowell, Esq, of Hunderley Hall, Westmoreland, this view of Read, the seat of his ancestors for more than three centuries, is with sincere respect inscribed by his much obliged humble servant, R. Churton."The building looks to me like a school or an institution. No Roman pillars, no embellishments as there are - say - at Hardwick Hall, where Bess of Hardwick was almost imitating Elizabeth 1 in grand structural statements.
It is Spartan, yet grand, lavish yet muted. Is that the sort of man Nowell was? In his steamboat-funnel hat and dark clothing he stands as an emblem of his time. He looks inscrutable, reserved, and careful. Being careful was an art form among those who knew the tempestuous Court of Elizabeth. If Lord Burghley, her chief minister, could be bounced around, there was little hope for Nowell.Many years ago, I spent hours each day close to the clock in Clitheroe Library. When it first whirred and bonged I leapt from my seat. Then I got used to it. The clock had the sound of indigestion. The bong was the sign that the inner rumblings had produced their desired result.I did not get as far as the clock this time; only as far as the first floor. And there I surrounded myself with the Nowells of Read in picture and manuscript.Nowell, I noted, preached the first and last sermons in Lent before Elizabeth 1. In one he spoke less reverently than Elizabeth required in referring to the sign of the cross. So she called aloud to him from her closet window commanding him "to return from that ungodly digression and return to his text."Imagine that. A rebuke in public from she had who had to be obeyed. A man needed a strong stomach for such things.
Nowell attended the execution of the Duke of Norfolk, who had been found guilty of treasonable practices with Mary, Queen of Scots. A shift of fortune was never far away for the greatest of them.Nowell himself was vilified by Rome "from which place some issued measures of deadly hatred against him." He joined the Tudor equivalent of a hit list: he was to be despatched by burning or hanging.He had earlier developed "puritan and almost presbyterian views." but he submitted to the Elizabethan settlement of religion, and was rewarded with the archdeaconry of Middlesex, a canonry at Canterbury and in 1560 with the deanery of St Paul's. Nowell is believed to have composed the Catechism inserted before the Order of Confirmation in the Prayer Book of 1549, which was supplemented in 1604 and is still in use; but the evidence is not conclusive.
Early in Elizabeth's reign, however, he wrote a larger catechism, to serve as a statement of Protestant principles; it was printed in 1570, and in the same year appeared his "middle" catechism, designed it would seem for the instruction of "simple curates." He was twice married, but left no children. His chance to invent bottled beer came when he went fishing and forgot the beer he had taken with him. Returning days later, he found it in the grass and discovered that it was frothing when opened and in pretty good order. The Nowells had acquired land at Read in 1364 and at the dissolution of Whalley Abbey Roger Nowell was able to build Read Hall.
He had three half brothers each famous in their time, Alexander as Dean of St. Paul's, Lawrence as Dean of Lichfield and Robert, a lawyer at Gray's Inn. Dean Nowell was executor for Robert Nowell, who left money for a splendid funeral feast. It included many of today's dishes, but also 318 skylarks, a delicacy of the time, eight blackbirds, and £100-worth of sugar.I recently wrote here about Edmund Spenser, the poet, author of The Faerie Queen, whose family members lived not all that far from Read. He was helped to study at Cambridge through Roger Nowell's will. Another Roger Nowell (1582 - 1623) was Sheriff of Lancaster and as such was responsible for bringing the Pendle Witches to trial.Small world.
The way they tell it, the countryside was swarming with mink, enough to take the coat off your back, the child from its pram, the cat from its corner, the hen from its pen, and the bird from its roost; and pound for pound it is one of the most savage killers on earth.
Cecil Walling, countryman by birth, mole and rabbit catcher by trade, and mink hunter by choice, paints a less bizarre picture:"I can't see a mink flying at anyone. It'll go by them. You've got to see something like this to believe it - I've sat and seen them come by me, go, and come back again. They try to work out what you are. They chitter a bit. And usually they go under t' water and next time you see 'em they're coming up 300 yards away."I wouldn't feel in any danger.
Maybe they're different if they met cornered in a building but I think they try to get out of your way. A lot of this talk is stories made out of nowt."Cecil is an amiable predator himself. He has lived in Lyth valley; ten miles south of Windermere, for 30 years and listed in the next valley before that. He traps for farmers and in past winters has seen off, maybe, 5,000 moles. These days he expects 1,000 or 1,200 a winter. But since mole-ins is seasonal and rabbits are fewer he can bend his attentions towards mink which an organisation named Animal Liberation Front has been freeing from farms in Perthshire and Essex and causing a great to-do in the process (although the runaways tended to return)."I wouldn't say mink are really cunning," says Cecil, who is. "And they're not afraid of people. But I'd say it is dangerous to release them because as soon as they find streams or river courses away they go, and next minute they're breeding."
Cumbria has many."I have a mink cage trap and if I see any footings on the riverside I usually put it down. Sometimes it can be there a week or fortnight. They move on and you never see them again.
"They'll eat anything, following water, swimming under water, and they go for fish, wildfowl and other birds. A mole is more cunning. Their has to be just right. For mink, we use just a metal cage with a door and plate. Once the plate is touched, the door shuts.
"They'll go into them without bait. I always bait mine with a bit of liver. I've caught 36 by trap. I might have shot another dozen or so. There's one chap who must have had towards 100 over the years and he's retired on pension."There's someone else and his daughter said he'd had, I think, 32 this. year without baiting his traps, so they're going up his stream aren't they?"I've seen them swimming about among wild ducks. I watched one for a long time around six young ducks. The old duck knew it was there. The mink went under water and the old duck changed their direction so that when it came up, they were somewhere else."When.it.went under again, the old duck turned and brought 'em elsewhere and again the mink missed them It gave up. Then it came down river and I just sat there with my gun and, bang, I got it."They say there's quite a lot up the Lakes now. I should think they're up every mountain stream. There's some blackish and some brown, and I've heard of some with a bit of white under the chin but I haven't seen one."I've heard of them attacking swans and killing dogs -but I can't see a mink killing a dog. Somebody at Windermere said a terrier had been killed by a mink. But what's going to kill a terrier? It would have a go at a lion would a terrier. If it couldn't worry a mink, it must be a queer dog."I've heard of a woman whose cat was missing half its tongue. She lives near a river and doesn't know what happened. I've also heard of a bloke whose big cat brought in a dead mink. So it must work both-ways..
"Mink will clean little streams of brown trout. I've seen them with eels. I've.eeen trout heads just lying there. They've eaten the rest."We've noticed up this river here that moorhens have disappeared. You see only odd ones now. There used to be a lot. Only thing we can put that down to is mink."Sometimes they ramble away from rivers. They've been seen nearly a mile from water."There's a story going that a mink turned up in a chip shop and the lads say that's right, but I don't know: it has me beat, has that."The previous day the rain had been draped over the hills like a theatre curtain and the river ran high. In the evening Cecil; combining business with pleasure, took his fishing rod to the banks and inspected his trap. It was empty.He usually drowns the mink. It takes only two minutes. Some use exhaust fumes. "I don't do anything with pelts. I've given one or two people mink to take to a taxidermist.
One bloke wanted to make flies for fishing out of their tails."He is not married so there is no question of a wife missing out on a coat -"I've heard they're no good once they've been in the wild." Mink, he meant. He has an urbane view of living and dying. The moles he hangs on hedgerows so that farmers will observe that he is doing his job. He likes to have foxes around and if he comes across a litter of cubs he keeps the discovery secret."I like my fox-hunting. I go up into the felts, and it's a good walk out, a good view, and you see everybody."He and his kind are not alone in their pursuit of mink. "Otter hounds take naturally to it." Otter hunting is banned.
"If they ever did find another they might give it a run and say, well, that's a day, let it be going, and if they then got scent of a mink they'd be happy."He supposes the escaped mink which led to all the hunting and trapping don't know what to hunt for food when someone releases them,
"If we were shoved into a building and brought up like them, we wouldn't know what to start looking for when we got out."Mind you," he adds, "they can always go to the chip shop..."(The big debate about mink was in 1982. The above was printed at that time.)
Everyone has a secret ambition. Mine, was to be a country man, writing about the cherrvhorn and croot. dark - winged against fursil, or whatever all these things are called.I met such a man, splendid in visage, his fingers like twigs, fused interminably to his briar, and he wrote masterpieces of nature, sending them to London, New York or Paris, I imagine, by pack mule. He would note a mole. a wood pigeon, a shrew." As I tramped near old Bob's farm." he would begin. " a shrew peered timidly from behind an oak, then tripped across my path, causing my old collie to howl at the lowering sky. It is not generally known that shrews ... '
At this point would come wondrous revelations about their intimate thoughts and habits. It took me years to discover that after the first paragraph he turned to his large library and, by careful manipulation of other people's wards. presented an account of what he might have known had he wandered long enough to find out. I came across another countryman who used to prod udders and inspect horses' teeth while I tried to understand Lonk Tups. Ram Lambs and Shearlings. Old countrymen can prod udders for hours without a word and. I concluded it was their rustic way of doing nothing. I often wanted to prod udders but was, usually told to get off and find out something about, well, Long-faced Tipplers for a start. I suppose it was at that point that I decided I might never be a proper countryman, but I persevered.
Last winter I found myself high up in snow, dying. while a farmer stood by, coatless. All he said was. as my soul expired, "It's turning a, bit nippy." He helped me to his car where the fug of his heater restored me. I wrote a quick piece on curlews and pipits and took to bed. Even then I had not fully abandoned my secret ambition. Recently I browsed through a book without first looking at the title. "Madame Legras de St. Germain." it said. "has blooms of sumptuous size." Then - "Duchesse de Montebello, for sheer dainty freshness. is unrivalled except by some of the Albas." Eyes apop. I found that Frau Dagmar Hartopp, flesh pink with delicate veinings, is followed by some of the finest hips in the family for their size.
Then I discovered the book was about flowers, not ladies boasting of their embellishments; and I was reminded anew that I am but a would-be countryman optimistic about my ignorance. I am not alone. Beneath a townie lurks the hunter. I found a man who fattens trout in his stream before transferring them to the river where city men with pallid faces haul them out, believing they are battling raw nature. The fish are tame enough to leap to the surface each time some simple yokel slings in a handful of food pellets. So who's the fool? It is fine enough in an old pub listening to country talk about crows lettin', and astigotabitoproven? but note the narrowness of the eyes. They're not daft.
A city-born should have ten miles of concrete between him and reality. When night falls I imagine myself shouting, "Mornin' Reuben." prodding an udder with my long stick and looking at horses' mouths, my tweed hat jaunty atop my battered face. But deep in my heart I know the long road of reality is. for me. a ribbon of black asphalt and a lone sparrow fighting bronchitis as it stabs at my poor garden crumbs.
Trading on the London stock market was thrown into confusion after technical problems resulted in misleading information being published. In a highly unusual move, trading on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) was extended to 1800 GMT after terminals in the City displayed incorrect prices.These showed the benchmark The LSE blamed disruption on problems with "data dissemination" - News item.
Technology, technology... A man has to have a sharp mind to navigate life these days. "Have you got your locking nut?" says the mechanic changing a tyre. "Ah, yes," you reply. "My locking nut 4706." He takes it, uses it to release a wheel from vehicle, then pretends he has made a simple mistake when he transfers the nut to his own pocket. Motorists without a locking nut are doomed, doomed. Even more doomed if they do not know its number. The other day, my bank, which requires three means of secret entry to its web site - a long number, a password, and digits entered separately at its request - added several more requirements for my choice. Favourite colour, mother's middle name, favourite food, best friend. Any one of these questions might, at the bank's discretion, be asked at any time.
That added flavour to an already complex task. I put down "dog" as my best friend on the grounds that a dog remains constant but best friends have a habit of moving on. Or off. My mother did not have a middle name because when she was born, people could not afford them. Is my favourite colour red or blue? I can not decide. So there you have but one bank and a multitude of reasons why, in the future, as memory and eyesight fade, I shall have the greatest difficulty in regaining my money. Even worse. If I pass on to a pin number in the sky, relatives will have the devil of a job benefiting from a lifetime of my prudence.It might not be too bad if there were only one bank.
But there are endless financial institutions interested in putting numbered and encrypted barriers between me and them. There might be little or no money involved: I can, for instance, view the annual reports of companies. Of course, I never do. Beyond things financial there are all the bits and pieces that are attached to computers: firewall, anti-virus programme, phishing thingy and so on. They have licence keys so vast that you could not possibly enter them without a week of your time to spare. You have to copy and paste them.And each time you go to their web site they say: Forgotten your password? Of course you have. And even if you have not forgotten it, have you not just entered the pin for your Abbey National card into the little machine clutching your Barclaycard in the hope of petrol and been given a blank stare and a disconcerting beep for your pains?
Did anyone ever get out of Amazon with a clear conscience?
Or did they all agonise, as I do, about whether they have ordered no fewer than eight times the single copy of a book they required? The only time I ever exceeded a credit card limit was when I discovered that two identical television sets - flat-screen, large dimensions, costly - were on their way. Now how did that happen? I wanted only one. Amid all the clickings and whirrings something plainly went wrong. I was advised to wait for the two and send one back by the same vehicle.
I did this, but in the meantime I had been charged for exceeding my credit limit. A lady at a call point in India received my cry of agony and did the merciful thing. She cancelled it. Once, few people had a telephone. Now, they have telephones on every shelf. Or in every pocket. If you know, say, 100 people, you have to remember 200 or 300 phone numbers. You buy a phone that remembers these for you and promptly lose it. I drink with a small group of people only one of whom understands mobile phones. The others sheepishly produce their phones so that he can explain something highly technical. Like how to turn one on for a start. Town of birth, date of birth, mother's maiden name...
What does this mean? F-Prot 149? I have made a careful note of it. Is F-Prot the product or have I used it as a password for another product? Is 149 some kind of pin number with one digit missing or something else more mysterious? I can not remember, of course. To add to the confusion, I often use Pitman's shorthand to make notes. I can not read half of it myself. I dare say I have 70 or 80 - give or take 50 - numbers, passwords, pins or items of personal nature to remember. Plus the Pitman's which increasingly looks like Gregg's. How can I possibly remember? And if I write down a pin number on a piece of paper, red lights flash in the headquarters of financial institutions, sirens sound, bank bosses awake from their after-lunch slumbers and call down shafts of lightning. I confidently forecast that when a person dies ten years hence, it will take a young person his entire lifetime to sort out the financial mess.
There will be half a billion pin numbers for the 60 million population and power failures will account for the irretrievable loss of half of them. We are doomed. Not by nature with its whirlwinds and floods and capricious dances, but by pins. By passwords. By plastic cards. By holes in the wall. By trying to recall favourite colours or mothers' maiden names. By cloaking our pins in fake telephone numbers, then not knowing which of the numbers is the actual pin. In short, by technology. By encryptology. By us. I expect that when we get Up There - you know? - the first words from St Peter will be: Have you logged in?
When they compile the list of women whose reputations live for ever - Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette among them - I do not suppose they will include Rosie Boot. But the name of that theatrical lady is one that decimated the Daily Express in Manchester one evening long ago. And she achieved this unlikely result, not by displaying her talents, but by abandoning them. In short, her entrance was her exit. She died. The Irish edition had gone, and I suppose that by Greenwich Mean Time we were between the second and third editions when a small group of men gathered quietly in the Crown and Kettle pub, 20 brisk paces from the front entrance of the Express, and quietly drank.
They were in twos. Nobody to this day will know why this tranquility should explode as it did. Charlie - the one who said there was no call for tonic when asked to provide it as an addition to gin - was behind the bar with Edie, his beloved. And Edie was resting against the bar top in the way which led our theatre man to declare, "If those two ever have pups, I would like one. "Peace on earth, goodwill towards men time. Not a discordant note. But then something happened. The editor of the time was with a companion and he invited another two to have a drink.
This drink had, of course, to be reciprocated. Others around the bar were offered drink, in turn, and the twos merged into a group. The group was invited by the editor to toast the life and times of Rosie Boot. Nobody had heard of her, but they - we, I might add because I was there - drank whole-heartedly as a tribute to her unknown past and her possible heavenly future. Magically, it seemed, a circle formed to continue this tribute and as a diversion, one of our members absent-mindedly decided it was a scrum. Bending low, he headed in the direction of the editor and took him cleanly below the waist. In no time at all others had charged in any direction and our leader was beneath a turmoil of people. Not so much a try as an accomplished fact.
He raised himself from the floor in a dishevelled state and toasted Rosie Boot all over again to cheers of approval. Edie, capturing the moment, and seeing profit, detached herself from the bar and stood in the centre of our group with a bottle of Scotch.
She went in a regular circular peramubulation pouring a shot into each glass and as each glass was charged all cried aloud, "Rosie Boot! Eighteen and eight" - the latter being the cost of the round which was cheerfully borne in turn by each of us.
Charlie watched. I thought he might. On busy evenings Charlie tended to move to the front of the bar and if you asked him how he was, he would reply, "Working me puddings off," while sitting on a stool. Edie was quick with the bottle, so that by the time she had passed she was, it seemed, there again. Charlie was shovelling the money like small coal. Amber was flashing before my eyes at about the same pace as Edie. I lost count. But much later, all could count the number of celebrants who dropped in repose as they attempted to make the 20 paces required to the office steps.
This trivial distance had become Scott of the Antarctic trying to make the tent during a hurricane. Those who made it, quickly took to the newspaper equivalent of intensive care: the cubicles to be found in the second-floor washrooms. And there they stayed for hours, staring fixedly at the doors as editions came and went, emerging only to view a world that had somehow changed for all time.
I said to one friend who had dropped to the pavement six paces from the pub front door, "What a night that was." He stared at me as if I was mad and denied recollection of any of it. As for me, I sometimes waken, usually around 4am, and the damnable words still drift across my mind - "Rosie Boot! Eighteen and eight." The stark vision returns. Rosie was, without doubt, the most remarkable lady none of us ever met.
In the broth of life, I am not the greatest of cooks; but there are times when one is forced to declare an interest, a modest competence. That time came around mid-November last year when my wife ran head-first into medical problems and I took over the kitchen armed only with hope and a small piece of printed paper headed: Risotto. I am still there, and I still have the paper.
A chef like me can expect some early casualties. Rice pudding was one. A home denuded of one devourer amasses a great deal of milk. Milk belongs to rice puddings. I made a rice pudding which a granddaughter, who took a large dollop home with her, declared to be lovely. Superb. A granddadian triumph. It was awful. Wrong rice. Like eating road grit. It proves only that my granddaughter was prepared to lie on my behalf. Which is one reason why I bought her an implement that cuts wavy chips. She had coveted ours for some time.
Soups: I became a dab hand at those. You can claim authorship of a soup by using frozen mixed vegetables, adding a sache of cup-of-soup, then zapping the lot, when cooked, with a food mixer. The result is a smooth, thickened gruelly meal made more interesting by the addition of a few flakes of tarragon, plus plenty of pepper.
A shop in my neighbourhood sells pies that are noted widely among the cognocenti - ie, people felling trees, attending to electricity pylons or building houses. Those people, in short, with the greatest appetites satisfied only by bought lunches.
The pies are nectar to the climbing classes. And why? I decided it was because the cook added lots of pepper. There is a satisfying bite at the back of the throat from a peppered pie in cold weather that is altogether wonderful. Never underestimate pepper. Other pie makers in my area fail on that account.
Great truths about cooking will emerge with experience. If, instead of adding a lot of liquid (ie, a soup) you drain off the liquid, you have the ingredients of a spaghetti meal. You add a tin of plum tomatoes (zapped). The spaghetti is no problem: in eight minutes those little yellow spears are a squirming mass of goodness.
If you keep to soup, you can quickly make the meal interesting by what you put on a side-plate. A good, crusty baton is an obvious choice. Beyond that, cheese on toast. Put your solid cheese into a food whirler with a few bread crumbs and zap the lot together before putting the mixture on lightly-toasted bread and melting it under a grill. The crumbs will ensure that you get a lovely mottled effect. They will tend to burn a bit while the cheese melts and that is nectar.
There is nothing in nature so satisfying as the chip butty. Some people who make a living from selling that kind of thing have gone overboard by using barm cakes. They are not half so good. A good chip butty needs a lot of butter so that it melts into the potato and bread to form what I can only think of as a heavenly concoction requiring that you wear a bib, like Poirot. Always use your own chips, not frozen ones, with one exception: supermarkets sell the very thin frozen potato chips that fry in a couple of minutes. I use McCain's. They are superb for lunches with soup.
A good cheese recipe that I like to think of as my own is prepared as follows:
For two people: Chop an onion into small pieces and fry until soft in a knob of butter. Add two or three ounces of chopped Cheddar cheese, salt and pepper. Pour onto the mixture half a cupful of milk. Let it simmer and bubble to its heart's content. After about 20 minutes of bubbling, the milk should be absorbed, and the mixture should be ready to spread into fresh batons of bread. Heavenly. (If it begins to cook dry, add more milk of course.)
The better supermarkets these days - Booths in my area - have hot joints of beef or ham. Get a couple of thick slices (for two people) and you have a good lunch if eaten in a baton, or a better dinner. For the latter, let the meat go cold and boil small white potatoes without taking off the skins. When they are soft drain off the water, add a knob of butter and some fresh chopped parsley; swirl the lot around the pan. Mix a good salad. And there you have a healthy meal without much trouble on your part.
As you grow more confident, you will begin to boast. This is a tricky business. You might be talking to someone more accomplished than yourself - which, let us face it, is not difficult.In the pub, I jeered in the most kindly way at a friend whose wife had gone away for a week. When that kind of thing happens, he makes a stew and lives off it. "How many stews?" I asked. "Seven? Or did you have three lots of fish and chips?" He said he had kept to the stew.
I fastened onto another in the company named Ernest. "Did a Risotto, mushrooms and chicken, this lunchtime, Ernest. Came out well."
I could not have timed it better."I have never been able to do a good risotto," he said.
"Ah well," I replied, "you have to work at it. Five ounces of risotto rice - it has to be risotto rice - mixed with the ingredients, in my case mushrooms and chicken, and stirred constantly for half an hour or so, adding hot stock, or chicken soup, from a pan at the side, half a cupful at a time. Takes an awful lot of liquid. But finally, it is all absorbed in the rice and you have a chewy mixture."
"My wife," he said wistfully, "does not like risotto or pizza. She doesn't make it."
"Keep at it, Ernest," I said adopting my wise expression.
His wife is a cordon bleu cook.
(Les Chapman died in May, 2008. This tribute to him was written for his 100th birthday.It is good to have young people around me, and a particular friend fits the bill nicely.
He has just celebrated his 100th birthday*, but I have met people of 50 whose minds are less active. Indeed, he has a mischievous mind at his best. And when I saw him a day or two ago, he was sitting in an easy chair whose legs were on small blocks to raise him to the
desired level, and by his side was the Queen's rather large card with her message of congratulation.
The front was dominated by a picture of her in yellow. I said to Les Chapman, "She will be 82 on April 21, so I will do you a card to send to her for the occasion. There will be a big picture of you on the front, and the message inside will be similar to hers."
The big picture I had in mind was one of Les in his new Arab headdress, and if that is mysterious, hold hard; all will be revealed.
I do not know how old Les was when I first met him. In his nineties, of course, and a bit of a dandy. But he was not the oldest member of his Probus group. Seniority belonged to a coach proprietor who had a soft heart, a stern frown, a strong will, a walking stick covered in little shields, and, it is said, an opinion: He did not want people under 60 admitted to the club because they tended to be frivolous.
Les did not have airs but he had graces: a strong whiff of class: the clothes tended to be carefully chosen, he talked of fishing great rivers, and when he went away from home, which was seldom, he was staying with friends in banking. When his wife died, he wore her Fedora, and it looked well on him. I saw a picture of him in his wartime days, when he served in a photographic unit, and he was the one languid and slim.
When Germany surrendered to the Allied forces under Field Marshal Montgomery at Luneburg Heath in Germany. Les was there with his camera. He was at Belsen concentration camp, too, snapping victims and guards.
So there he is, now, at 100. He sits regally at home while various care people go in and out, and I could not think of a better present than a shemagh, or Arab scarf - the thing they wear as a headdress. I chose it because I know his tastes.
He will appreciate the bizarre nature of the choice. With it, I included instructions on how to wear it during sand storms.
We do not have many of those in Lancashire, but you never know, Lytham St Annes might perk up a bit, and if it does, Les will be there, I dare say, looking like Laurence of Arabia.
We used to sit together during lectures and were shushed more than once. Les spoke rather loudly at times so that no-one was sure which of the two was the speaker. When I replied, my head tended to bob this way and that in the close vicinity of his head as I tried to find an ear that was receptive at one-inch distance. Les's hearing was fading, as mine was. When he got a hearing aid, he tended to fiddle with it in class and it whistled. It whistled when I tried to reply to his remarks.
If he took out the battery to inspect it, the reverse process was like facing molecular physics with an O-level. For both of us.
Throughout all this he remained cheerful, observant, and mischievous. "Who was that woman I saw you with on a park bench?" I asked. There had not, of course, been either a park bench or a woman. "Oh, her," he said.
It became a bit tedious one day as we waited for the coffee lady to serve us. We were in a queue. So I asked Les whether he would like to do our tap-dancing routine. We did not have one. It was the first he had heard of it. But Les immediately volunteered, and we stepped out of line and performed a passable imitation of two Fred Astaires on an extremely bad day.
He got himself in a bit of a pickle one day. His motorised vehicle was at a clinic in town and he had no means of reaching it. Which meant that I drove him to the clinic. He had some medical business there and won immediate attention through a breezy belief that there was no need to wait in a queue.
At the end of it we found his invalid machine in a small room where it had been parked overnight for safety reasons. He began to go forward and reverse in the most confident manner and within inches of filing cabinets and so forth.
Nail-biting moments for watchers, of whom I was, of course, one. But he got himself out unscathed and sailed off at a good speed into the street, wearing the Fedora and with not a care in the world. I chickened out. I drove another way, but came across him again, by accident, just as he was passing the rather large police station. He was in the roadway, sailing with the traffic, his Fedora rampant. Again, I took a turning, because I do not have his spirit.
A couple of times, a mutual friend and me took him to a pub for lunch and he was splendid company. Les appreciated the trips and invariably praised the host vehicle in the way that would baffle a younger man. "It runs well," he would observe.
Well, they all do these days, don't they? "It's quiet running, isn't it?" He was no Jeremy Clarkson, having come from an era of solid tyres and radiator steam, but then, he would not wish to be.
The mutual friend renovated milestones as a hobby (he had been a county council surveyor) and was an expert on cloth caps. To test them, he would put cap on head, then bow low, up and down, violently, to see whether the cap fell off. If it did, it failed the test. It was wrongly constructed. But all this bowing at a fast rate was a bit disconcerting to strangers, and what with Les in the Fedora, I suppose we were an odd trio.
I am, of course, a dab hand at 100-year-olds, having interviewed them at a rapid rate when I was a junior reporter. They never made much sense. A friend engaged in the same trade said wonderingly, "I've just interviewed one and he said his most memorable time was when he helped move the machinery from one mill to another over a week-end. Fancy that - in his best moment he bahaved like a donkey."
Les is nothing like that. Given half a chance, I dare say he would be out there interviewing 100-year-olds. A local paper picture showed him having a go at a computer in the local library. It figured.
* Peggy Ashcroft, Lord Hailsham, Dixie Dean, Cesar Romero and W. H. Auden were born in the same year.
I can hardly think of a time when Abbot Paslew was not leaving his Abbey of Whalley, in Lancashire, to be hanged. Here is an event frozen in time. It must be 40 years or more since I walked into a Manchester jeweller's and found a large, framed engraving of that very act hanging on his wall. It was etched by Charles Cattermole,* and the jeweller had bought it to cover a damp spot. I bought the print from him. Which is why I see Paslew every time I go for a shower.
Paslew was, of course, a victim of greed and double-dealing on a monumental scale and he was executed in 1537, caught, I suspect, bewildered between King and rebellion. The event, as part of dissolution of the monasteries, was partly about religion and partly about graft. The monasteries offered good spoils. Everyone had his fingers in the tills, not least Henry V111 who was desperately in need of cash. Next, Cardinal Wolsey. And so on down the line to the minor lords. Many waiting to get their fingers on the loot and all masters of the art. MPs massaging their expenses today are of little account by comparison.
Henry was helped in no small way by Martin Luther who, in 1521 had published a treatise stating that the monastic life had no scriptural basis; that it was pointless and actively immoral in that it was not compatible with the true spirit of Christianity.
The Paslews, meanwhile, were a family of substance, dignity and importance, which would explain the abbott's activities and style in Whalley. His father was a "gentleman" and to be awarded that designation meant that a man had to be a landowner of at least three generations. John, born in 1464, entered the novices' cell at Whalley in 1487 (at 23). In 1507 at (43) he became abbott and he ensured that Whalley became a mitred abbey. So he had ego and he wore a big hat! He also had taste. He ate well and drank well. Much of the abbey's money was spent on meat and wine. From an income of less than £1,000 a year more than half was going on provisions.
In 1534 Henry had Parliament authorise Thomas Cromwell, to "visit" all the monasteries (which included all abbeys, priories and convents), ostensibly to make sure their members were instructed in the new rules for their supervision by the King instead of by the Pope, but actually to make records of their assets.Many dismantled monasteries and friaries were sold for nominal amounts (often to local aristocrats and merchants), and some of the lands were given by the king to his supporters; there were also pensions to be paid to some of the dispossessed clerics. Many others continued to serve the parishes. The total value of the confiscated property has been calculated to have been £200,000 at the time, but the income King Henry received from it from 1536 through 1547 averaged only £37,000 per year, about one fifth of what the monks had got from it.
Where stood Paslew in all this?
He was a witness of the Pilgrimage of Grace. And since we have all forgotten what that amounted to, here is the explanation:
The worst uprising of Henry VIII's reign. was a direct result of dissolution, a policy that angered most Englishmen. The rebellion began at Louth in Lincolnshire in 1536 and the cause was a royal commission. The Lincolnshire rebellion lasted a fortnight, but Yorkshire - led by the lawyer Robert Aske - was next. An army of perhaps 30,000 men gathered in the north. The king ordered the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the earl of Shrewsbury to respond. But there was no standing army in England and the people's sympathy lay with the rebels.
The king's forces were hopelessly outnumbered; their soldiers lacked equipment and the will to fight; and the rebel forces were far more experienced in battle. So the king turned to diplomacy. The rebels, after all, did not seek to overthrow him. Their primary desire was for the dissolved monasteries to be restored.
Henry negotiated peace through Norfolk, conceding demands and promising free pardon to all rebels who dispersed. Monastic lands would be restored and a new parliament called to address their concerns. The rebels, foolishly, dispersed; and then, on the slightest pretext, Henry broke his word; martial law was declared, rebel leaders were indicted and put on trial and several hundred, including Aske, were executed.
The earls of Derby and Sussex were appointed joint commissioners for Lancashire to receive the submission of the rebels and to administer the oath of allegiance. They were to deal summarily with men who refused to swear the oath and to show no mercy to them who had committed acts of treason after the operative date of the pardon. There is some suggestion (writes ) that Paslew either was reluctant to take the oath or even refused to do so, but there is no evidence to support this. The abbot was arrested and faced five charges of treason, three by himself, two with others. Surprisingly, he pleaded guilty although as Sussex said "... it would have been hard to find anything against him in these parts."
So meekly goes the lamb to slaughter and on 10 March, 1510, he exited, aged around 73. At Whalley? Elsewhere? Nobody seems quite sure. And he was neither martyr nor saint, but rather a man caught between two forces of history - king and rebels - and probably wishing they would go away, taking their problems elsewhere.
Not a great deal to see at Whalley now. They have a cafe for tea and a shop for books, and you can't make much sense of the stones here and there - survivors of the great abbey. But those who like atmosphere can conjure from space or their imaginations something of what happened and my wife swears that as she stood amid Paslew's ruins she heard the voices of monks, singing.
* Cattermole was a noted artist of the time. He also etched James 1 and his retinue as they visited Hoghton Tower, near Preston.
Wellington's England remembered
I have been following the Duke of Wellington's feisty campaign against Napoleon's generals in Spain. And it is conceivable that it has told me more about this island's spirit than anything in my morning newspapers.
Questions that emerged: Who are we? A nation strong in traditions, an example to others, with a sense of purpose and resolve? Or a nation weakened by handouts, a nation with a youth that has little to commend it; a nation past its best, petrified of causing offence to others, made rigid by political correctness, discredited in the world by an imperial past? We are a chameleon nation, all things to all men, and no thing to many men.
I read, rather late I admit, The Age of Elegance, by Arthur Bryant, a man called, by A. L. Rowse, "our best historical landscapist."
"Love of country," he wrote of Britain, "was something that transcended class or rank. Looking at that landscape of splendid properties and at the country's mansions, banks, markets, warehouses and factories, it was easy to account for the patriotism of the upper and middle classes.
"Remarkable was the national pride of the poor, their instinctive belief in the superiority of their country and its ways of life, and their unfailing readiness to die for it.
"Theirs was a deep, sensitive love of its beauty, of its peaceful civilisation and free traditions. At farm feast or in village alehouse, the artless chorus would rise, a warning to foreign tyrants who put their trust in lawless strength:
The race is not always got / By them wot strive and for it run, / Nor the battel to them peopel / Wot's got the longest gun.
"For all its harshness and injustice, such simple folk thought there was no country like their own."
All this, you remember, within sight and sound of the French revolution that destroyed its monarchy, freed its people, and set Napoleon on his trail of conquest.
When I researched a murder of 1863 for a book questioning a conviction, I wrote: "This is an age when, in the darkness of night, people are either leaving work or going to work. Pieces of burning coal are put out on the pit banking to serve as beacons for the colliers arriving for their shift - for how else would they find their place of employment?" Intense patriotism - through all that? Through all that Dickensian land of harsh employment and deprivation?
Now, throughout this free-wheeling country with its protective employment laws, this country of free medical care and State handouts, there does not appear to be a sense of national pride. It has gone. It is obliterated, out of fashion, or, if it shows itself at all, it is watered down to suit others. National purpose, if it exists, is obscured. We are the neutered products of our own past. In becoming Europeanised we have become neutered. We have lost values.
Conversely, the prides of Scotland and Wales as single entities have been re-ignited. Thus cohesion is lost, and national patriotism is lost. People who died for King and country in two world wars did so with intense patriotism. Monarchy was the centre-point of all we were. God was on our side and no-one else's. Now? They are betrayed by ridicule. Derision is the essence of this age: quasi comedians queue up on TV to mock everything including Church and State, for both are good for a quick sneer and a laugh. And individuals in all this - where do they stand? Not highly at all, alas. Too many fingers in too many tills.
"A man's reputation as a gentleman was looked on as his most valuable possession," wrote Bryant. "Any action, or even association, incompatible with it was regarded as a stain which must be immediately expunged. This accounted for the extreme sensitivity with which public men reacted to any slight on their honour, vindicating it, if necessary, in some dawn encounter with pistols. Pitt, Castlereagh, Canning, Wellington and Peel all risked their lives in this way while holding high office."
Again, there seems little point in defining the difference between individuals then and now: the contrasts are startlingly evident to everyone. There are areas of national life where the word honour is no more than a relic.
People in Regency days were graded. In democratic terms that was a bad thing. In practical terms it is what held society together. Everyone knew his or her place. "The English liked the rich to be splendid, ostentatious and free with their money. it was what, in their view, the rich were for... The ideal of equality which had so intoxicated the French had as yet made little impression on the British mind."
That is a remarkable and surprising fact. The lasting significance of the revolution was in its recognition that power could be held by ordinary citizens, not king or God.
People growing older invariably regret the past because it has become a comfort to the memory and events that have run their course have lost their threat. But it is surely sad that we seem determined to forget those ideals of patriotism that caused our fathers, grandfathers, and great great grandfathers to respect their heritage and, if necessary, die for it: not for some idealistic principle such as "freedom" or "democracy", words banded about today in an international context, and virtually meaningless under examination.
Bryant concluded: "The splendours of Regency society, the power and wealth of early 19th-century Britain, seemed brassy and eternal to the men and women of the time. So did the destitution and degradation that accompanied them. To poor and rich they appeared to be unchangeable - part of a divine, or, as many had begun to suspect, a diabolical ordinance. The poets taught otherwise. They could not change the laws or the harsh economic phenomena of the age, or arrest the cumulative evils to which those phenomena gave rise. But they could make men want to change them."
Change.
There is an over-worked word. What is the word that politicians in America heading, they hope, for the White House most employ? Change.
We must never cease to hope. But forgive a note of cynicism: I think Dr Bryant might concur.
The Age of Elegance, Arthur Bryant, the Reprint Society, London, 1954.
The soldier
1812, Wellington in Spain, and here, the spirit of a soldier as taken down by a subaltern of the 34th - later, the Border Regiment - from the lips of his laundress, the wife of one of his Irish soldiers.
"Yer honour minds," she said, "how we were all kilt and destroyed on the long march last winter, and the French at our heels, an' all our men droppin' an' dyin' on the roadside, waitin' to be killed over again by them vagabonds comin' after us. Well, I don't know if you seed him, sir, but down drops poor Dan, to be murdered like all the rest, and says he, `Biddy dear, I can't go no furder one yard to save me life.'
'Dan jewel,' sis I, `I'll help you on a bit; tak' a hould av me, an' throw away your knapsack.' `I'll niver part wid my knapsack,' says he, `nor my firelock, while I'm a soger.' `Dogs then,' sis I, `you 'ont live long, for the French are comin' up quick upon us.' Thinkin', ye see, sir, to give him sperret to move, but the poor crather hadn't power to stir a lim'; an' now I heerd the firin' behind, and saw them klllin' Dan, as if it was! So I draws him up on the bank and coaxed him to get on me back, for, sis I, `the French will have ye in half an hour, an' me too, the pagans'; in thruth I was just thinkin' they had hould av us both, when I draws him up on me back, knapsack an' all.
'Throw away your gun,' sis I. `I won't,' says he, `Biddy, I'll shoot the first vagabond lays hould av your tail,' says he. He was always a conthrary crather when anyone invaded his firelock. Well, Sir, I went away wid him on me back, knapsack, firelock, and all, as strong as Samson for the fear I was in; an' fegs, I carried him half a league after the regiment into the bivwack; an' me back was bruck entirely from that time to this, an' it'll never get strait till I go to the Holy Well in Ireland, and have Father McShane's blessin', an' his hands laid over me.'
Evil and good were never far apart and the extremes of both have been witnessed on that large and brooding shape. Pendle Hill in Lancashire was the place that inspired George Fox, whose vision led to the Quaker religion in 1652. It was the place, too, that inspired witches, or at least the hunting of witches. So good and evil were intertwined in much the same era and what was evil and what was good was all in the eyes of the beholder.
It must have been good, as a magistrate, to catch a witch. But what if the witch was not a witch but a bumbling, ignorant old woman marred by delusions of the time? Who knows, who knows? For all is conjecture, all is doubt.
From childhood I have been fascinated by this area and the names are as familiar to me as my own town of birth - Sabden and Barley, Newchurch and Colne and on the other side Clitheroe where the manorial lords, the Asshetons, live now as their ancestors lived then with Downham as their home and their birthright. It was an Assheton who told me that his wife's family were late-comers, having arrived with the Conquerer.
For these mixed reasons I went back and the witches got there before me. As I arrived in Barley, a village sturdily built up narrow lanes, the weather was bright and blustery. And within an hour the blackness was upon it and then within half an hour green hillsides were white with hail. In the old days, I suppose, that would have been interpreted as a sign that I was marked for punishment.
Barley has a car park, a couple of pubs, a scattering of homes and a long memory. The car park has a machine requiring one pound. But it does not, like all other machines I have seen, give tickets. My money plonked in to a sound of near emptiness. Payment, it seemed, was on trust. And trust is a fragile thing, as the witches discovered. At the cafe there, only guide dogs were allowed, and since our dog never joined the guides, my wife and I got two large mugs with the tea bags floating, and sat outside, beneath a limited extension of the roof, for shelter.
Out of the bluster and at the start of the storm a wiry old man arrived with a shivering dog and what looked like a tiny grandchild. He reminded me of actor Lionel Jeffries' description of Leeds - "a place where everybody leans forward against an imaginary wind." Others ran for shelter but he carried on as though nothing was happening and vanished into woodland. That was the nearest thing I saw to 17th century behaviour.
The Pendle trials of 1612 are among the most notorious in English history. Twelve accused were charged with murdering 10 people in and around the Pendle Hill area by use of witchcraft. One, Old Demdike, died, aged 80, in jail before her trial. All but one of the surviving ten were found guilty, and hanged at Lancaster Moor on 20 August, 1612. It meant slow strangulation in front of large crowds.
Mothers Demdike and Chattox, two old widows living near Pendle hill, had been in Lancaster Castle where prisoners were held 30 feet below ground in a small dungeon. They did not have legal advice. The star prosecution witness, whom they could not challenge, was nine years old.
So there is your evil, allegedly in pursuit of good. James 1 thought there was evil about, and no doubt many more did, too. Because of James, an Act was passed imposing the death penalty "for making a covenant with an evil spirit, using a corpse for magic, hurting life or limb, procuring love, or injuring cattle by means of charms."
These witches owe much of their resurrection to the fiction of Harrison Ainsworth (The Lancashire Witches, 1849, to Robert Neill ( Mist Over Pendle), and Thomas Potts, clerk to Lancaster Assizes, who presented an account of the trials. Potts was instructed to do so by the trial judges, Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley. Was at least one of these anxious to have an account that would advance his own career? Do parts of the witches' confessions reveal symptoms of psychotic illness, delusions, hallucinations? Some made their statements voluntarily, without any threat of torture. Strange. An odd figure in the business was Alice Nutter, a woman of some substance by comparison with her fellow prisoners. Roger Nowell, an investigating magistrate, had a boundary dispute with her and make of that what you will.
Whether dealing with fact or fiction, there are more questions than answers and superstition threads itself through both. My own grandmother, a God-fearing woman who died in her eighties spoke in mysterious terms about playing cards - "they had a way of witching with them in Immanuel churchyard..." She lived almost within sight of Pendle and her remark was made in the 1940's.
George Fox, his head full of love and dedication, was the other side of the coin: a different path but the same sort of zeal. The message he spread gained strength far from this spot. William Penn was his friend, and Pennsylvania is the result.
Fox wrote of Pendle in his autobiography:
"I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it; which I did with difficulty, it was so very steep and high. When I was come to the top, I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire. From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered. As I went down, I found a spring of water in the side of the hill, with which I refreshed myself, having eaten or drunk but little for several days before.
"At night we came to an inn, and declared truth to the man of the house (some of the landlords I know would have thrown him out), and wrote a paper to the priests and professors, declaring the day of the Lord, and that Christ was come to teach people Himself, by His power and Spirit in their hearts, and to bring people off from all the world's ways and teachers, to His own free teaching, who had bought them, and was the Saviour of all them that believed in Him. The man of the house spread the paper abroad, and was mightily affected with the truth. Here the Lord opened unto me, and let me see a great people in white raiment by a river side, coming to the Lord; and the place that I saw them in was about Wensleydale and Sedbergh."I have no quarrel with the Quaker movement. Indeed, in one of their meeting places I once enjoyed their communal silence. But it does seem to me that people of the time were desperately keen to acquire visions of one kind or another.
I had less visionary ideas myself before the storm. I found the village cafe and they were advertising dumplings and stew. Fox would have drooled at the thought of it since he had eaten so little; and I was not far off drooling myself; but I had the dog and the dog would have been barred from the premises, so I settled for the Pendle Inn, where dogs are welcome. A good choice as it happens since I had the cheese and onion pie after observing that the hail had filled the window boxes so that the tiny flowers looked as thought they were wrapped up in bed.
Lustier people than me were coming in from the hills for food and it was all very pleasant.
But how unpleasant it must have been, once upon a time, when people's minds were warped by their own imaginations. And now? Look around this sorry world of ours and it is still much the same.
Greenhouse weeds: a mortifying tale
You would need to follow a long trail to know why tomato plants have only now appeared in my greenhouse - much later than everyone else's. And it raises a question I am not prepared to answer at this point: it is too embarrassing by far. I would prefer to explain my gardening credentials rather than my discrepancies for the time being.
First and foremost, the credentials: My broad beans circa 1984 were praised at the time and long remembered. I have had serious discussion with both Percy Thrower and Geoffrey Smith. I have spoken to a grower near Forton in Lancashire who has onions so big they could challenge those balls you see on pillars at the entrance to stately homes. None of them laughed at anything I said unless I wished them to. We were compatible. Mr Thrower gave me a large gin and his big black dog certified my credentials but without offering a rosette.
Perce always had a swarm of midges around his head. I think they were trained. He smiled through them as they busily wove their wonders. I dare say they never left him even as winter approached. Indeed, I imagine they went on dancing above his head until the frosts came when, being so tiny, they would freeze up immediately and fall with a tiny tinkle at his feet.
I saw Geoffrey Smith at his home in Yorkshire and we had an earnest discussion about our plant trade as his wife provided a splendid meal that came crunchilly straight from his garden.
So much, then, for the credentials. On tiny matters, however - names of plants, how to propogate them, their chief characteristics - I am, I have to admit, inclined to go wrong. Many years ago I invented a way out of this: I began to invent names.
Walking through stately gardens I would say, "What a wonderful betta splendens," and people would stare at the plant concerned with greater interest. Betta splendens is a Siamese fighting fish. I am not bad on fish, having kept tropicals as a yoof.
As an alternative to Betta, I would say, "I have never before seen such a beautiful lebistes reticulatus." And my wife would say, "It's a nasturtium," sabotaging me totally.
She rumbled me long ago. Lebistes reticulatus is also a fish, a humble guppy.
A gardening person like me has to be more cunning than those Who Know. I overturned her complacency. While driving, I said, "Have you, by any chance, noticed a huge rhododendron?" and when she replied "No," I added: "You should have done." "Why?" she said (just the once, just the once). "Because," I replied in triumph, "that last sign said, 'Large plant crossing.'"
Which brings me - most reluctantly - to the nub of the matter: Why have tomato plants just appeared in my greenhouse?
Well, it came about this way. A friend who helps out in my garden said his growing family had a great affection for chillies, and since he did not have a greenhouse, would it be all right for him to plant chillies in mine?
Of course, I said. Chillie away. And when I next looked, the greenhouse was unusually tidy and there were five large pots of soil in a row. Very quickly there were signs of plant activity in each. To save my friend the trouble (he visits once a week but usually goes nowhere near the greenhouse) I watched them day and night, watering carefully. They shot up from nowhere like people you know do when it's your round. Finally, they reached the roof and began to show modest little purple flowers.
My wife, who had not been visiting the greenhouse, said how nice it would be to pinch a chillie or two. "They're in flower yet," I said. "There's nothing there that looks like a chillie."
When my friend next came and attacked an unruly hedge, I said, proudly, "You want to look at your chillies. Coming along nicely. Water 'em every day."
"What chillies?" he said and we ran briskly towards the greenhouse. He had not planted any. "These," he said, inspecting the tall plants, "are weeds."
I congratulate the man who invented the word consternation because that is what I felt, and it precisely describes the condition.
The tale got around. When my wife went to meet others of her coven for coffee recently, she was presented with several tomato plants, quite small, and I duly potted them on (a technical term which you need not bother with if you are agriculturally challenged).
I sent the husband of the donor an email: "I thank you very much for the plants. They are already potted on by the green fingers possessed of yours truly, and the weeds have been turfed out of the greenhouse to much wailing and gnashing of shoots."
"We are delighted that they are going to a good home," he replied.
To underscore his wise judgment, I then declared, "We have called the larger one Bruce. He has a bigger pot. Still undecided about the children. I water them daily. If only they could wet themselves like other infants."
And there the matter rests. We should have a great tomato crop by next February or March. Don't pass this on. As I said - too embarrassing by far for the ears of gentlefolk.
The suggestion that in these stringent times people might try a second pullover rather than turn up the household heat took me back a bit. Well, all right, a lot then.
There were days before the big war when all the women had mottled legs. You knew, then, that it was winter. Sexual equality, so women hogged the fire and men were pushed to the perimeters, hugging the bowls of their pipes to warm their hands. These handy winter-warmers had the pungency of a factory chimney.
As for second pullovers, when a relative collapsed and the doctor came, he went through an unravelling process with her garments that took some time before he was able to examine her. She was layered like an onion, a walking parcel, so far divorced from weather that she was virtually immune to cold, doctors or anything else dire.
The old iron ranges had all sorts of drawers and all kinds of things went into them - caps, slippers. Bacon has never tasted as good as it did from a heavy black pan put directly on the flames. For some large families, where workers came and went at different times, a stew pot was never missing. My father's household was one of those. As a member of the family entered the house, a raised eyebrow from somebody already there indicated the word, "Hello." A nod towards the grate indicated that the stew pot was willing, able, and available. In those days they economised on everything, including speech. "Take care" became "tekeer", and it was the equivalent of a long speech.
I can well imagine - though I never met them - families where, as a child was born they said, "Owdo," and as it grew, then died in old age, they said, "Tekeer" and that would be the sum of a lifetime's conversation.
The only central heating you got was to jog up and down in the middle of the back yard. But there were compensations: the frost patterns on the inside of house windows were splendidly complex. You could walk on ice at the delph until it began to crack beneath your feet
Walls ice-cream vans were pedalled about and the favourite was not ice-cream at all but something called Snowcream or Snofruit. When you were served at the roadside an icy mist rose from the containers.* Injudicious use of dry ice could give you frostbite in July.
When you got into bed in winter it had the same effect that danger has to a spider: everything retracted at once and the whole of you condensed into a ball. If you were lucky enough to have a hot water comforter, it was probably one of those copper containers that burned your feet. And if you did not have one, then you moved your legs down the bed very tentatively in the first half hour, an inch at a time.
My Uncle Bob - the one killed by a cyclist - had been in the Navy in the first world war (older readers should, at this point, move on to the next paragraph since I am in nostalgic mode and might repeat myself endlessly). He and my Uncle Harry had to share a bed at my grandmother's. Both tugged at the rubber hot water bottle in a surreptious attempt to get the most heat. Eventually, a piece came off. My Uncle Harry leapt from the bed. Uncle Bob merely hoisted both legs into the air and declared, "Been washed out of my bunk thousands of times." In the next room, there was an oil-painting of a relative who fought at Trafalgar, or was it Waterloo, and it hung over my grandmother's bed. He was shown in profile, because he had lost an eye.
The children all made slides on pavements and the mottled legs went down like skittles. We made winter warmers: tins with punctured lids containing smouldering cotton wool. Most people had chilblains. Men walking the streets looked like small tents - large caps or trilbies, three-quarter-length coats. An old fellow who worked ten miles away, over the moors, said he always collected bracken coming home so as to have some kindling for the following morning. Otherwise, he did not get his cup of tea before setting out again.
For the usual winter ailments, Fenning's Fever Cure was always available. I don't know what it did for my health, but it did nothing for my palate. Cod liver oil came on big spoons. When I was delirious with a fever I thought I saw a Crusader in full battle kit at the top of the dark stairs. His cross was glowing red with fire, and I thought: How remarkable that he should choose 31 Stanley Street.
Dr Farqueher would come if he was not too cross, or busy. He is the one who put a notice on his surgery door - "If you feel as ill as I do you will go home to bed."
Another doctor sent a patient to bed. A fortnight later, a relative of the patient met the doctor in the street. "Can he get up now, doctor?" she said. "Good God!" said the doctor, "is he still there?"
If my father felt ill - anything from sore throat to something terminal - he would say, "Go and get Emeric to mix me a good bottle." Emeric Eccles was the local chemist, much consulted and admired. His "bottles" were legend. His shop is still there, and his name is displayed over the door, but if Emeric were there he would, I think, be around 150 years old so it is unlikely. I suppose there was no bottle in creation that could keep even Emeric on his feet for ever.
As we queued for the ninepennies at the entrance to the Empire. condensation streamed down the inner walls and people's breath came out like hot steam. Decades later, I was in a Manchester pub used by Granada's best - Peter Eckersley, Michael Parkinson et al - and Harry Whewell told a group of them that they should get out into the cold air and photograph cows as they steamed and streamed, since the sight was both beautiful and dramatic. They listened with great attention, since they were ex-Guardian and respected Harry, who was still there, but I wondered what they would call the programme and how long it would last.
Meat, cheese, fats, sugar, sweets, tea, were rationed until the start of the fifties.
For entertainment, nobody missed Tommy Handley in ITMA. The valves in the radiogram glowed hot and voices came from the speaker full of rust.
"Who is the fastest runner in class?" asked our head mistress. My hand flew up. No contest. "Go to the dairy," she said, "and tell them the milk hasn't come."
I was glad when I grew up and discovered central heating. There wasn't a mottled leg to be seen anywhere, and women were all out shouting for equality.
More people, it is said, are having teeth taken out rather than filled because of the cost of today's dentistry. By coincidence, a friend was talking the other night about his sister, a child of the twenties I would think. For her 21st birthday present, she had all her teeth extracted and replaced by dentures.
I am familiar with that curious logic from my own childhood - No teeth, no pain, therefore no further expense: that was the attraction. Anything other than extraction was of doubtful use in my locality, quite apart from cost.
We had a dentist whose fillings were like uninvited guests in that they rarely stayed long. There seemed little relationship between cavity and filling. It was a sort of little and large situation. If he was educated in anything at all, which I doubt, it was more likely to have been road mending. He had the statutory white coat, but then, so did ice-cream salesmen and lunatic asylums.
Another local dentist, rather better technically, always walked about with one hand behind his back. It concealed the implement he used for extraction. His ploy was to ask an innocent question, then, as you opened your mouth to reply, he broke in and tugged away like mad. I am told that he usually chose the right tooth, which is a mercy. He did very well for me, but that might have been because he knew my Uncle Ben.
In the matter of dental hygiene, I think I might have preferred a parrot. No, no - I am serious. One went missing from his home on Sydney's northern beaches, and when he was recovered, his owner, one Michelle Needham, declared, "I know it's him. If you open your mouth, he will stick his head in and clean your teeth."
Some people's teeth became a large part of their personality: Ken Dodd, Freddie Mercury for instance. And Janet Street-Porter's teeth always seem to me to be telling us something, I don't know what. I knew a newspaper executive who had strangely protruding teeth, so much so that I doubt whether his dentist ever had to go inside his mouth. There might have been ten per cent off for that. I did not like him all that much, so I spread a story around that he was able to eat apples through a tennis racquet. Some credulous souls believed me and viewed him in a new light.
False teeth were handy for throwing. Several soldiers I knew were invited to an Arab banquet in a Palestinian hill village. There was a language problem so things proceeded silently. One soldier decided to break the barrier. There was a picture on the wall of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He took out his teeth, threw them into the air, and cried, "Shufti Mufti!" (look at the Mufti).
There was a roar of laughter and approval and things proceeded most amiably from then on.
In Liverpool, a place always quirky and unpredictable, I was startled, when talking to a child of eight or nine, to find him removing his dentures for his own amusement and mine. City of Light now. I used to think City of Fight more appropriate. Still do, come to think of it.
From the time of the Pharaohs dentists, pseudo and otherwise, have been dabbling about in people's mouths. I suppose George Washington was the most famous wearer of dentures. He had a great deal of trouble, always, with his gnashers and was obliged to a bit of the tooth of a hippopotamus for his lower set. (Hippos have huge jaws with tusk-like teeth, you will note.)
There was this enormous beast happily going about its business of leaping in and out of water when someone from the State Department called out, "Hey, buddy - greetings from our free and democratic nation and what's with the big teeth?" To which the hippopotamus would, presumably, slowly sink out of sight, pursued by the State Department.
There does not seem to be any official record of the reaction of the beast to this invasion of his territory. Was he enraged, compliant? Did they explain to him that George was living on pobbies (pieces of bread in sweetened milk) and required urgent assistance so that he could give orders to the troops? Or perhaps they needed the whole animal from the start so that they might more easily carve up a tooth. The mind boggles, as it often does in such matters.Did George, since he wore a bit of hippo, take on hippo habits and pass them on to future Presidents? Dominant males, I see, mark their territory by wagging their tails and scattering dung around. It figures.
At one time, George Washington was thought to have wooden teeth, but this was disproved, regrettably from my point of view. The thought of George chewing away at his food with bits carved from an oak tree is intriguing. And it would have been interesting to observe him in Autumn during leaf fall.
Last time I went to my dentist, he handed me safety glasses and said, "Would you put these on for me?" I was about to apply them to his head when it occurred to me that I was the one required to wear them. Health and Safety, I assume. My, haven't times changed?
It reminded me of a lecturer I heard earlier in the same week - "Health and safety is for lawyers, not people."
Bite on that thought for a moment or two. He's right.
Not a pleasant thought, teeth, and I doubt whether I shall ever return to the subject. Meanwhile, I am fond of recalling my father's wisdom - "Never have stuff on. You just get the pain afterwards."
20 September 2008
The American Presidential election is nothing to do with me, and my eyes are averted, my senses numbed against the tidal wave of information; and above all, I keep clear of the sight of the older politicians trying to look bouncy, young and virile. Better to look oldish and wise and be themselves. Those light, tripping steps in imitation of optimistic youth don't fool anyone.
To convince voters of anything you have to act your age, be yourself, be true to who you are. Because that is integrity and the public likes integrity. As for the rest of us, the ones politicians tend to describe as “right thinking people”...Some see the age of 40 as a watershed, and I once did myself. But there are no true watersheds. There are tuming-points, and for men, 65 is the principal one merely because the Government made it so. It is the age when prime ministers, judges and some leaders of industry alone are assumed to be at their peak while everyone else has a happy face and a vacant brain. Private Godfrey from Dad's Army limps to mind.
Overnight, people who, throughout their lives, have been accomplished, and upwardly mobile, are now assumed to be tranquil, unemployable,and in a permanent state of simple enjoyment. They are pensioners. Senior Citizens.
Try gardening, say their advisers. Or painting. Or walk the dog. Or join a group. Or take a cruise. Or spend a couple of months in winter accompanied by others of your kind in some cheap Spanish resort Or look after the grandchildren. A deckchair is a fine thing in summer and a straw hat. But keep active, they say. Watch your diet. Try not to stumble because the bones are becoming more brittle. And the one thing they do not say is: compete. For that would impinge on their own territory, providing threat.
This is, of course, a conspiracy to neuter, to immobilise. All those below the age of 65 want the action for themselves. By arbitrarily setting a limit on worthwhile activity for others, they reduce their own fear about their ability to survive. Mind you, while the really important people ignore 65 altogether, at the lower end, many yearn for it because they do not like contest and the competition of work has worn them down.
At 64 years of age, many a man ,nevertheless, stands four-square to the world. He is a part of it. Maybe he has a desk and can inspire fear in his subordinates. The moment the clock strikes his 65th birthday, dynamism is withdrawn like a tooth. Status is withheld
One building society, I recall, referred to men at 65 or women at 60 as being part of the Golden Generation. How degrading! A Senior Citizen is, to my mind, someone of any age who, by his (or her) efforts, his imagination, his intellect, has shown himself to be more useful than many others. No-one else is a Senior Citizen, whatever his age.
Citizens who lurch about on pavements and clutter up pedestrian precincts are, for the most part, just citizens. They could be of any age or persuasion. There are youths of 18 who have no intention of working for a living any more than 80-year-olds. So let us be clear about our descriptions.
As doctors insist on preserving people rather than despatching them prematurely with good intent, as they did through history, and as producers of food, hampered by hygiene regulations, have less chance of killing citizens off, so the expectation of long life increases.
Eighty today, a hundred tomorrow, on, on, to 120 as an average. Eventually,a man will spend the first 65 years preparing for the second 65 years. There will not be a patch of ground untilled, a picture unpainted, a dog not exercised, a pair of free spectacles not dispensed, and buses will be so inundated by people with passes that there will be no room for Junior Citizens of any kind whatsoever.
Meanwhile someone will have to do something about the Twilight Fields, which brought into being those establishments for the physically or mentally deprived. Some remind me of Mexican horse flies - an entry but no exit, so that people in them implode. With nothing to think about but ailments and death, they line the walls brooding away their remaining moments while unattended television sets blast out their wares at high volume.
Occasional bodily function is all that distinguishes living from dead. There is a joint responsibility here. Many old people give in easily. Many rest home proprietors seemtoo busy to properly encourage them or occupy their diminishing talents.
Young attendees at these places treat the old as if they were the very young. "How are we today, then?' (patronising smile);"you're looking a lot better"(to someone barely able !o move and with a skin like parchment); "Where's your friend, Jack?" followed by a hurried,"Oh, did he? Well I am sorry." Jack died.
The combination of patronising talk, constant heat, regular meals, doctors' visits, and immobility preserves these senior citizens as if they were in some kind of warm vacuum, like a tin of beans. They are isolated from all risk. In the old days, they would have been dead at 40, 50, or 60 because of germs, or cold, or lack of food, or whatever. But I am not sure whether a senior citizen of the 19th century would envy one of the 20th century his longer years and gradual crumbling away. There is endless room for debate here. And endless room for action; action with some dignity, not the sort that reflects the belief that age is about silly games in a paper hat. Or bingo.
What price a life without quality? The Mozarts and Michaelangelos of this world had to get along with what they were doing pretty dam'd quick because the grim reaper was industrious in their particular meadows. A man had no sooner written the prelude than the final movement was at hand. No point in being at university at the age of 23 if life expectancy happened to be 30. In modem times, the East has much to offer the West in the way of example.
There, young and old mix to their mutual advantage. There is nothing so barren as a smart English suburb where all the occupants are up-coming execs with trim moustaches to mirror their trim lawns, a bottle of Chablis in the fridge and two cars to accompany the two dustbins. Weighed down by self-importance they all have firms' cars and their wives hold coffee momings. There is no-one over the age of 50 within a mile. And such estates are hell.
Those who do reach the age of 65, the young-old, are desperately searching through reference books for evidence of people who did remarkable things in their advanced years. Like Churchill, or Helen Bradley, the painter (who had her first exhibition at the age of 65) or de Gaulle, or Adenauer, or even,in a muted sort of way (because she just went on doing what she had always done), the Queen Mother. She had been waving to us politely for almost a century, constantly leaving us but not really going until the last wave came.
I am surprised, now, to think that I was once uneasy about being 40. Looking back on my comments of the time I find the following: "Being a cautious sort of fellow, the kind who builds air-raid shelters at least ten years in advance of a war, I began to take pills that fortify the over-40's rather earlier than most. At the age of 32 to be precise. I did not want to be caught short, reasoning that if I were eight years in advance of everyone else in the matter of rejuvenation, I would still be doing the Dashing White Sergeant immaculate in white gloves, when all my friends were memories.
Considering myself, then, free from flagging corpuscles, all my chromosomes leaping about vigorously, I had a shock when the makers of the pills changed tack and announced that 'growing old begins at 28'. They had robbed me indiscriminately of four years when I ought to have been fortifying myself instead of lolling about."
Now that I am a bit older, depending on what you call a bit, I realise that I did not take the subject seriously, although I did make some generalised comments that ring true now:
"The breath comes shorter. You can't take whisky like you used to. You tend to cry for help when you slip in the bathroom, and your car insurance has gone down because you no longer burn up the country lanes on Saturday nights. You avoid arguments at parties in case someone invites you outside. You no longer remember how many pints you drank last night but you know precisely how many hairs there are in your comb. It is not so much that the policemen look younger; everyone looks younger, even the 60-year-olds, and they talk to you man to man as if there were some affinity, asking you whether you've yet had trouble with your waterworks.
"Some 40-year-olds fracture under the strain. They buy boats and smuggle things from Tangier, or fall in love with girls of 12. They exercise with great weights in their bedrooms at the coming of night and end in hospital with hemias. They try to comb their hair over their eyes in some grotesque teenage imitation, then give the game away by talking about Jimmy Durante or Bing Crosby. They condemned their fathers for remembering The War; and now they are the ones who remember. All the questions they put to their fathers are now put to them."
I find it remarkable that a 40-year-old would not expect a 60-year-old to talk on equal terms. I know some people of 40 who are a bit old for me yet.
What it amounts to is that no age can be properly assessed until one reaches it. I find, now that I am impatient of old people. I fume and fret behind other drivers of my own age. I drift into sleep at funny times of day: deep sleep, too. It lasts half an hour or so. It does not worry me. While Churchill was zizzing away in a boiler suit his friends were taking Tobruk. Was he pickled, I wonder, Like an egg or a roll mop herring?
I do not hear too well, but that is a hereditary affliction and an advantage because much of what people say is not worth hearing anyway. I adjusted my TV to a point where conversation was entirely clear to me and what I saw was a bouncy sort of girl-child from one of the early morning television news shows interviewing a salesman from Selfridge's or Harrod's, I forget which, and she asked what people did during the sales.
Well, said the assistant, they come in, they look around, choose something, and buy. He put it a little differently but that was the sum total of his revelations. She looked amazed. I was amazed that she was amazed. Where had she been all her life? Plainly, not in a shop. Who are all these frantic youngsters awash in trivialities? What tums them on? Or, more pertinently, how does one turn them off? I lowered the sound to near silence and all was well with my world once more.
(I recommend similar action when watching Test matches: many cricket commentators are only ledger clerks on holiday.)
I have reached the conclusion that if a thought is not put down on paper, it is not worth having. And I can read for hours on end without bother. There seems little point in listening to a face on a screen filling in his time and mine if you have, say, Mark Twain and Dr Johnson by your right hand.
I once assumed that I would drink a great deal in retirement; that it would be a principal enjoyment; but for some reason old topers are less able to drink in quantity, so they improve the quality, and there's a mellowing compromise. A little of what you fancy. There was a point in my life when drink was the essential lubrication of working hours. In small quantities it inspired better thought. In larger quantities it quelled the restive mind. Occasionally, it removed rational thought altogether but that kind of slip-up inevitably occurs and it is convenient to blame the last thing you ate..
To drink was to heighten experience. I had a friend who suffered from a surfeit of it, and concealed from him the hoardings announcing, 'Drink Canada Dry." I was afraid he would take it literally. He eventually gave up drink but enjoyed seeing others drink. I think I might be approaching that happy stage. At any stage of life there are compensations.
In winter, I get up later to find that younger people have been in motorway crashes while I slept There are web-site pictures of their company cars looking as if they have been dropped from a great height. Two dozen knicker salesmen have gone to their doom together with three area managers as you lay comfortable and warm. And for what? They would have been better off riding horses.
Human progress is not necessarily advanced by the inventiveness of humans. One has a few shares and reads the business sections of newspapers; and these sections record how the young workers are being screwed to produce better profit. It is called Efficiency. But I know what it really is. It is The System, grinding on and finding its victims at all and every age. Faster and faster it goes until nobody wants to stay on the turntable.
A load of shibboleths are proved wrong. The meek do not inherit the earth. The earth inherits them. Tum the other cheek and the nearest human will slap it. As one door closes another door closes. Early to bed and early to rise means no more than that you are a milkman, a newsagent or incontinent.
My mother eventually thought life "was all a dream." This at a time when she had 80-odd years of it. Shakespeare ("all the world's a stage') obviously had the identical thought. On the whole, the world rushes about looking for something to achieve. There is nothing to achieve: that is the big secret. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.. What profiteth a man...” People of whatever ability can only discover what is already there. Old Albert Einstein, he of the theory of relativity, with his E equals MC squared, merely saw what was staring him in the face. His one distinction was that nobody else had seen it.
Art? Painters invariably say that something beyond them flows through the brush strokes; but even great art is not up to reflecting the realities of life, so it always shadows truth or pretends it has some mystical insight into the human condition..
I still agree, on the whole, with some conclusions made at the age of 40:
"There is a psychology of age. The young and old want to be older. The middle ones want to be younger. All the 16-year-olds say they are nearly 17, and all the 69-year-olds say they are going on 70. Meanwhile, all those who are 30 tomorrow are running around, up to the stroke of midnight, shouting to anyone who listens that they are only 29... Growing old does not begin at 20 or 30. It begins the day one is born."
To be serious about life is, I suspect, to mistake its purpose. We are no more than leaves moved by unpredictable winds. But hopefully, we learn a little along the way.
Not long ago I thought hedge funds were something belonging to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Now in the midst of this world financial turmoil, I wish they were. Mr Bush looks quite worried.
I suppose I came close to a near equivalent of a real hedge fund in Edmund. Edmund kept a little sports shop in a small town centre and lived in the back with Vera, and he looked ordinary, or near enough, until you drank with him; and then, unlike anyone else, he would sidle up and without preliminaries say, "What do you think of ICI?" That is a hard question to answer when your mind is floating on pale ale.
When I introduced my then fiancee to him he eyed her swiftly and (being small for his age, 36) decided against a question involving the Stock Exchange and said, instead, "Give us a kiss." while closing his eyes and puckering his lips. She looked down on his upturned face from her (then) dizzy height and it was like he was waiting for the sacrament.
To get to his rear living premises you had to bang your head against suspended bikes and mudguards and the like, but it was worth the trip because Edmund treated friends to a lot of dancing and a lot of Sinatra to go with it. One visit to his place and Sinatra was singing in your head for months.
Pubs closed at 10.30 in those days, so he recruited his agents, us, his friends, to buy crates of ale and carry them back to his shop. I did my share. So 30 or so people would end up on his lounge floor dancing. The local tailor went upstairs one time, having been caught short, and when he descended, he said loudly, "Hey, who's come without?" Everyone was dancing, not a person left over except him, and he had a wife whom he expected to be available for his light fantastics.
Edmund did not stand out at all in our pub. He was comfortably ordinary, whereas a pub nearby had a chap who could eat his own height in meat pies, or see off 100 oranges as fast as you could quarter them on a bar top. Everybody knew him, and how he would challenge strangers from out of town to either of his feats, and as a sweetener he would sometimes say, "And then, to give you a chance to get your money back, I'll race you across t' baths." It wasn't much help to them. He was a superb swimmer as well.
All Edmund did was smooth things over, enjoy himself, organise things, say little, and worry secretly about gilts and commodities. He did once tell me about his mother and that should have been a clue.
The shop stood between glowering hills as, indeed, did the town. So steep were some of those hills that I swear half the population had upturned toes, like Aladdin. Edmund's mother, it turned out, lived up one of the steep hills, so she walked down for her shopping but caught a bus back.
The cunning was there, you see, in the blood line, albeit in innoculous measure. And Edmund acquired cunning in large dollops, hence the innocent little questions about ICI, Marks and Spencer, and so on. He was very attentive to me because he knew I had travelled in the back of a Roller with Joe Hyman, then chairman of Viyella (name-drop - 1). It had the first TV set I ever saw in a car but you could not make out anything being shown because of the interference.
Joe Hyman had said: "A man is worth three times as much as he thinks he is worth. And it is not money that counts. Money is always there if you know where to look. It is idea. That is the thing."
I had spoken to Hyman in his big office and Edmund liked to hear little inside snippets about that conversation. "He had three bells with different colours," I said, "and each represented a secretary."
"THREE bells," said Edmund in admiration, for he had only one on the front door, and no secretary.
Then -
"When we walked one floor down from his office, he saw an attendant at the foot of the stairs. 'Have there been any calls for me?' he said, meaning during the ten seconds it had taken him to get there.
Edmund was even more impressed. He widened the scope of his furtive questioning at parties to include commodities, mining in remote parts of the world, and the upsurge in packaging, but he remained unassuming and did not add to his own bell. I told him of a man I regularly saw in another pub who always had his head buried in the Financial Times. And always it was the shares page. Edmund said he would like to have met him.
One of his guests fancied my new car and requested a run around town at and I was silly enough to agree. When it came back it was thinner. It had been propelled up an entry not made for that kind of vehicle. I was incensed, but Edmund advised me to calm down. It was not the end of the world, he said (I imagine that would qualify as a hedge trader's remark these days). One had to expect these things (World Bank chairman?).
It was all very well for him, but I had to arrive home in that car and I was living with my parents at the time. Furthermore, my tie had been snipped at the knot by another guest, a dentist, who usually snipped off people's ties at the witching hour of his choice.
My only consolation was that his wife had once taken out one of his teeth when he had a pain crisis in the middle of the night and he did not enjoy the experience.
I moved away from home and lived 35 miles away for years. When I went back to Edmund's old town I asked about him and they said, "Oh, he went ages ago. Jersey. Tax exile." The bikes were obviously a front.
Somehow it figured. It's the silent ones who call the tune. I don't know whether he did what hedge funders do, but whatever it was, it worked.
What with the war and the arrival of a new editor, the 1940's were troublesome times. Mr Churchill and one or two others had obliged us by taking over the former; we were left to cope with the more difficult task.
The editor was Welsh by way of Liverpool, where he had been a sub-editor, it was said. We were very concerned in case he resembled in any way a predecessor of his who was not of this world: that editor arrived by horse and carriage, around 11 am, shut his office door, and wrote his leader column. Nobody dared knock or enter while this awesome task was proceeding. Having put his last full stop to paper, he delivered the work to the composing room and the world, now properly guided, could continue. He left for home I was told, early in the afternoon. I never saw that man and did not wish to.
So here was a new editor appointed by the Northern Daily Telegraph, with its head office in Blackburn, and we were apprehensive. On the morning of Mr Percy Hoare's arrival, it was as if he had been transported by some heavenly procedure. Nobody saw him arrive, yet he was in his office, and we were required to visit him one by one. Eyeball to eyeball.
I was, as the most junior addition to staff, called in last and he rose to shake my hand. A stern man, I quickly decided, not given to levity; probably a church man, too, being of the Welsh persuasion. We introduced ourselves and he settled back in his chair.
“Now,” he said, “how are you?”
That startled me. I had anticipated a different question and almost blurted out, “160 words a minute shorthand, and pretty fast touch-typing, two languages” (I always claimed two languages and never mentioned that they were English and Lancastrian). But I quickly recovered and said, “Very well, thank you, apart from a cold.”
I was surprised by the reaction. “Oh dear,” he said, starting to his feet and looking at me earnestly, “I am sorry. I hope you recover quickly. Should you, perhaps, be at home?”
The thought had never occurred to me. Our chief reporter would not allow a day off unless you had something less trivial than a cold – a leg off, perhaps, beri-beri, denge fever, the flesh-eating thing; any of those.
I was rather flustered when I left his office. The goodness of human nature was new in my experience. And such was Mr Percy Hoare.
He had been interviewed covertly, I gathered, after spending a night in the town centre hotel where, at 6 am he was awakened by what he thought was heavy hail outside. It was workers traipsing by in their clogs.
I was sub-editing at one point and my brethren sat around a circular table with a hole in the middle containing a large sack for the waste paper. The sack caught fire. Flames were leaping towards the ceiling and I immediately ran for a bucket and took it to the wash room. The wash basin was large and circular, too. The water sprayed weakly (energy-efficient) from a circular pipe serving all of the basin at once. I put the bucket beneath the circular pipe and it began to fill very, very slowly. When I had a full bucket, I ran with it to the editorial room and was in full Formula One speed, bucket sloshing at an angle of 45 degrees, when I was confronted by the editor, both arms raised like a traffic policeman, shouting, “No, no, no – it is out!” It was a nasty, skidding moment. He almost got the lot.
Apart from that, I did not see him very much unless I went to one of his conferences.
But I heard stories. The photographers were asked for suggestions on how to make the dark room more efficient. “Perhaps,” said one, “we could have a girl for mounting.”
“Is there something funny?” said the editor, his eyebrows meeting in the middle. It was a reasonable question because two photographers in his room were practically on the floor, tears flowing, their stomachs heaving with uncontrolled laughter.
One of them met the editor on the stairs and attempted to delay him with a question. “Don't bother me now, Mr Duff,” said the editor. “His Majesty has just passed away.” Mr Duff was not pleased at all. He was the one usually called upon to take the editor home in his vehicle at around 6pm. I often wondered how they fared. The vehicle was not of the best and there was a terrible wind through the floor, and no heater. Also Mr Duff was inclined, when he saw a bus stop in heavy rain, to slow down almost to a halt so that those sheltering assumed it was a friend and streamed out for a free lift, at which point he drove away, fast, to the accompaniment of manic laughter. It was not a pastime Mr Hoare would have enjoyed.
One day, I was told that as the editor was entering the office he slipped on an icy step. “What happened?” I asked – and this, remember, at an age where I believed that middle-aged editors from Welsh backgrounds probably had a dispensation from The Lord preventing such things – and the 'grass' replied, “Attache case went one way, hat the other, umbrella up in the air. Bits of him ended up all over the boulevard.” I tried to picture this scene but could not. It seemed too much of an impertinence.
Here was an editor who said, “I can understand a man having one drink to satisfy his thirst, but not two.” That jarred. I was an apprentice drinker and keen to pursue my craft. So I kept well away from him by night and never drank by day. I came close to disaster, nevertheless. With a friend, I decided In a mad moment to go to a Press Ball. In Bristol.
I arrived back in Blackburn the worse for strong drink, around dawn, and, with the friend, sat on the newspaper's steps in the centre of town with my suitcase, trying to decide whether I should wait there and start work at 8am, or go home and have a quick wash. A constable arrived. “Now then,” he said, “what's going on, and what's in that suitcase?”
My friend's uncle was Provost of the cathedral, a building within sight and sound of us, and he said with some heat, “He is a sub-editor here.” An odd admission in the circumstances; not one I would have made. There must have been some residual effect of the drink, for at this point I opened the suitcase and flung clothing high into the air to prove a point. The clothing floated all over the place.
“Oh,” said the policeman, my pyjamas at his feet. “I see.” And off he went.
The editor at one point shared an office with the news editor and they decided, between them, that there was a gas leak. So they called the gas company to report it. Along came one of their workmen who, after inspecting everything in sight, decided that the odour came from the editor's new white macintosh. Consternation all round. It must have been constructed from a kind of solidified petrol popular in those days..
Equal consternation when the two of them walked into the office and found a workman apparently repairing the safe, which was not broken. It took a time to occur to them both that what they had was a burglar, not an honest artisan performing his proper duty.
All in all, I got along well with Mr Hoare. He defended me when Mrs Barbara Castle, MP, wanted me fired for getting my facts mixed up. He came to watch me play cricket. He appeared to banish me from his presence by sending me to Clitheroe where my office was a newsagent's shelf behind the counter. I had a phone for company but nowhere to sit. So I spent much time walking the dog along the banks of the Ribble and eating sandwiches in the castle grounds. But he rapidly brought me back to head office when I mentioned that I was bored. We were mano a mano, sharing a stretch of porcelain at the time.
Wartime required us to firewatch on rota and there were no exceptions. So I found myself with Mr Hoare surrounded by an uncouth mob from Below Stairs. He kept very close to me and there was winter in his smile. One fellow watcher had an interesting thumb to show us – it was all chewed up at the end by the saw he had been using to cut metal. “Came out like little bloody worms,” he said conversationally. Mr Hoare blanched a little.
Later, when we were all sitting on our beds, a machine room minder arrived with a bag of chips and began to eat them with great relish. Mr Hoare looked at him with interest, as if he had encountered an almost extinct animal as, in retrospect, he had. The minder threw back his head, suspended one very long chip above his mouth, and said with anticipation as he lowered it slowly - “Just like a big, greasy, fat....”
I knew what the last word was going to be and stuffed my ears with my fingers. In the sudden silence, I was able to observe Mr Hoare's face. The normally grey but placid features were transforming into something awful, something outraged beyond endurance, something even a thousand Welsh chapels could not erase. For him, the great war of 1939-1945 had reached its most critical and dangerous point.
Much later, I moved on to Manchester where I was employed by an editor, one Dick Lewis, who got firemen merry on pints when they arrived to put out a blaze in the upper parts of the office pub.
You might call that move a culture shock. It gave me a chance to pursue my apprenticeship in the drinking trade and I could not have had a better tutor.
(The above also appeared in gentlemenranters.com)
Wig and Pen
Journalists and barristers go well together because they suffer the same faults and vanities. The best of them are egotistical, theatrical, mischievous, and occasionally outrageous. By a divine providence, they frequently work together – one side creating words, the other deleting them, both profiting as a result. How good can it get?
I was reminded of this by a follow-up to an obituary in The Times. Edward Grayson, lawyer, had died. Pauline Lyle-Smith responded with this anecdote:
He invited me to Middle Temple one Friday evening to show me articles and his books about the subject (of sport and the law). At 7pm I told him I had to go home as we were taking our elderly neighbour to dinner. Edward said he would accompany me in the cab as he had not finished telling me what I should know.
As we drove along I told him that my husband had been captain of football at university. Edward enthusiastically asked if it were soccer or rugby and was horrified when I had to admit I did not know. His comment was: “Pauline, that is divorce material, divorce material.”
He came home, had dinner with us, and was introduced to John, our neighbour. The conversation centred on football in Chelsea.
Edward: I've always wanted to meet someone who was at the FA Cup Final at Stamford Bridge in 1922.
John: You don't have to wait any longer. I was there.
Edward: Were you... were you really? Can you tell me the name of Preston North End's right back?
John: I am 89. I can't remember any more.
Edward: It was Hamilton.
Edward, with his encyclopaedic memory, could remember the names of almost the whole team.
I happily bore people with barrister stories, and repeat them until I am sure they have sunk in – as I am about to do now, so, fair warning, friends can switch off. They have suffered enough.
I worked with a barrister who entered a taxi on a busy city road one night, exited at the opposite door, and sat in the road waiting for it to move. People might say he was the worse for drink. I would say that, for the most part, he was the better for it. When sober, he was a bit incomprehensible. Drunk, he was lucid, clear-cut and divine. In a Yates's wine lodge he invited his large audience with their blank-looking faces - in from the cold of the streets - to join him in a rousing marching song, in German. And he seemed surprised when there was a poor response.
I suspect he was afraid of his wife – who was German – because if he was in the pub expecting her to arrive in their car, he bounced up and down to elevate his view through a window into the adjoining street. When he kept her waiting he swiftly arrived back in the pub with blood streaming from his thumb. She had slammed the door on his digit. “Not on purpose,” he said, opening for the defence, though guilt was tragically mirrored in his eyes.
I have had the honour and privilege of being found drinking after hours with, among others, a man who became an eminent and sober judge. He said little of it at the time, whereas my editor said, “We just got drinking.” How drab! How uninventive! An assistant editor said, more briskly, “Get on with it then.” The police, to a man, were trembling. They had arrived in plain clothes and knocked down, then ran over, the surprised body of a journalist who had been about to join us.
Why were we drinking after time? Because we worked at night and were deprived of refreshment at the proper time given to others. We rectified a stupidity of the law that gave other people benefits and denied them to us.
Why were we raided? Well, you won't find the reason in a report of the court summonses to which we all pleaded guilty. But the landlord had found a police sergeant reaching over the counter for a bottle when he came downstairs from his living quarters. And when he said, “What are you doing?” the sergeant said, “Why, do you object?” The landlord did. The raid came days later. It could have been coincidence, of course...
A long time ago, m'learned friends; a very long time ago, so it matters not and I am sure that the particular short arm of the law of that time has amended its practices so that they are pristine in every way.
I had formed an attachment to the theatricality of lawyers at an early age in the journalistic profession. At a celebrated murder trial, the question was raised of how and to what degree a poison was absorbed. There was a very elaborate formula for finding an answer. The judge's head had sagged and he appeared to be in deep sleep. The formula droned on. At the end of it, the speaker dredged his mind for an answer, a conclusion. The judge's head arose from his chest and clearly and concisely, he gave it.
You see? Theatre. Pure theatre.
Like the barrister (and why were they always met in Yates's wine lodges?) who took a sip of his wine and declared, “A perky little grape and so obviously exposed to the west winds of the Gironde.” He was the wonder of us all and probably spawned a generation of incomprehensible professional wine tasters. When I next saw him, barrister in a London newspaper office, he daren't raise his voice above a whisper in case the Lords of the Back Bench (those who create the newspaper at night) heard it. He had been de-flowered, muted, deprived of his extrovert nature, and I mourned for weeks.
I sat at work close to a barrister whose main claims to notoriety were that he smoked a particularly foul brand of herbal cigarette and had his clothes chosen by a wife by mail order. In the Spartan conditions of the time he had not been given an office. When, after much advocacy, he achieved a kennel of a place on the next floor up, with phone, desk, and chair, a Lord of the Back Bench, sitting close to him on the main floor, said, “Do you never answer your phone?” The barrister dutifully went up one flight of stairs to answer. The Lord's joke – for he was the caller - was duly appreciated, but not by the barrister.
A barrister on another newspaper wore a wig. I had a friend who drank with him. He stood behind him on occasions and plucked hairs out one by one as the barrister, not feeling a thing, and all unknowing, went on with his fluting comments to an entranced audience.
There were barristers around town whom I would gladly have welcomed into our newspaper company, but alas, we could not be entertained by them all and their exploits came to us by proxy.
I particularly liked the one who was struck by a vehicle on a pavement and who, when asked what went through his mind at that moment, said, “Res ipsa loquitor” - The thing speaks for itself, or, put another way, something self-evident. When I passed on this story to someone who became a judge he said in a rather loud voice, that the Latin was “perfect for the wife's headstone.” Then he looked around the bar in panic in case there was a grass among the customers who might inform on him to her.
Now who was the QC who found himself one dark night driving the wrong way up a one-way street with a jemmy in his boot (because his garage door was faulty and needed encouragement to open)? Heaven forfend that I should reveal his name. The oddity of his behaviour struck him forcibly at the time. And me.
And who was the High Court judge so devoted to the task of understanding law at university that he hung up a ham in his room and ate a slice when he was hungry, whatever time of day or night that happened to be? The same judge who absent-mindedly proposed a toast to The Queen, the Duke of Lancaster, at a Yorkshire law dinner?
The most successful of advocates have a tendency to be vulnerable out of court. When I gathered anecdotes about George Carman, QC, with the idea of writing a profile of this remarkable man and his idiosyncrasies, I had a phone call from his office asking me to stop because it would damage his reputation.
I doubt it. His reputation was his strength. He was the sort of barrister who reminds us of OK Corral time and John Wayne walking down a dusty street with a gun at the ready.
Barristering, in short, is a slightly off-key pursuit and those who take it up are much given to exaggerations in conversations and life-style.
Which is why I like it and them. And why I was pleased to share a newspaper office with one named Sir Lindsay Platt. Because then I was able to put a notice on the door
Mather and Platt.
All right clever clogs - where did they film Last of the Summer Wine?
We were discussing memory loss - all right, then, Alzheimer's - in the pub, five of us getting on a bit, and a sixth comfortably placed in early-to-middle years.
The health service, we had noted, was about to place memory experts all over the land to cope with the forgetful and we were wondering whether we should go mob-handed and overwhelm them.
That was the tragic point at which we decided to test ourselves.
"Where was Last of the Summer Wine filmed?" said someone and I could have strangled him because I did not know. I was a bit desperate not to acknowledge that discrepancy and considered quoting "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh."
That usually deflects the conversation because everybody thinks Shakespeare said it and I know it was in Ecclesiastes. My party piece.
I needed a goodish break to consider Summer Wine quietly, on my own.
But before I could enter my ploy, it became stunningly obvious that nobody could remember where it was filmed. And this, the longest-running comedy programme in Britain and the longest-running sitcom in the world.
"I could ring Roy Clarke," I said. "He wrote it. Lived in a windmill. Used to be a policeman Had a wife called Enid." I thought it was a nice bit of name-dropping but they were ignoring me. Their faces were contorted as they whipped their brains into action. And I was beginning to wonder whether Roy Clarke had been a policeman or whether that was Ray Reardon, the snooker player. Or both. I tossed that additional problem aside as an irrelevance.
"It was Yorkshire," I said.
"I know it was Yorkshire," said Bert. "But where?"
"Heckmondwyke?" It was the only Yorkshire-to-the-core name I could think of. Somebody threw in Todmorden and was ignored. A border case.
Hebden Bridge was mentioned, but only in relation to lesbians for some reason obscure to me. If Hebden Bridge is as I remember it, people there must have the characteristics of goats whatever their sexual preferences.
Arthur, a Stoic in a former life, had taken on his Stoic look: measured dignity, quiet introspection, but no immediate verbal output.
As a collective, we had to admit, shamefully, that we were beaten.
"It will come to us," said Bert, making himself sound like a preacher discussing The Word, and of course he was right. Question is - when? No point in it coming to us in 2033. That would be too late for us. We needed an instant, rat-a-tat response, a flash of recollection to place us comfortably in contemporary society, confident down at the memory clinic.
Then - and I don't know where it came from - somebody said "Holmfirth." I think it was our yoof-full member. I was amazed. It is not only correct, but unYorkshire-like. To be proper Yorkshire it has to have a wyck or a wick in it. There is not a Yorkshireman alive who is not proud of his wick or wyke.
All these contorted faces took on a more gentle aspect, once the conundrum was solved, and everyone babbled at once about the iniquities of present-day life: the fuss about gollywogs and BBC green rooms for a start. We were back to normal. I introduced the second Sir Robert Peel into the conversation.
"Very intelligent face," I said. "Just like his father, the first Sir Robert Peel. 'Parsley' Peel started that dynasty and he printed fabric. His first designs are on show not far from Peel Fold in Oswaldtwistle, where he lived. And," I added for the benefit of Bert, the copper among us - "I was looking only today at pictures of the first Peelers - they all looked fierce and dignified and wore top hats."
There was some slight interest in all this, almost exclusively from me. Minds were secretly still focused on Last of the Summer Wine. Did we qualify for the memory bin?
"Holmfirth," I said at intervals, whatever the conversation, to make sure that none of our mob failed the test if called upon by visiting Thought Police.
It all went on for a long time. The landlord and his missus had been out to a bistro for the evening and arrived back happy and late, and suddenly he - Robin, that is - hopped into view from an adjoining bar. "Who rubbed a bottle?" I asked Jack, poet, cricket umpire and local byways expert, who was in his usual place in the corner, and who had not been burdened by Last of the Summer Wine. "Very good, that," he said, meaning the joke.
Bert wandered out and didn't come back. He was supposedly on a short visit to the lav. Arthur looked startled when he discovered he had lost him. It meant he would have to walk past the church and up the ginnel to his dream home on his own.
I reckon Bert was pondering the Summer Wine thing and pounding Holmfirth into his memory so that he forgot to come back.
As for me, I awakened at 4am after disturbed sleep and the first thing that came to mind was that damned question:
Where did they film Last of the Summer Wine?
For the life of me I could not remember. Again. At five o' clock, I had to look it up in Google.
I mentioned the problem to my wife over breakfast. "Derbyshire," she said without a moment's hesitation.
Drunk for 2d, clean straw for nothing. The 1700's had some potent business plans. And who knows? What with deflation and global warming and all the energy running out we might all end up with a garden vegetable plot and a pot still. The straw will be optional.
Meanwhile, I mourn today for an old friend: the Yates's Wine Lodge that gave nobility and character to Blackpool centre is a victim of fire. In memory it was like the prow of a ship heading for the gray sea. This jewel of empire, "bold, confident, Victorian," the one with the champagne on draught, was one of the resort's greatest landmarks. I could go on; oh Lord, I could go on.
(The evocative illustration, by the way, is by Eddy Rawlinson, of Cliviger. It is how he remembers Yates's wine lodge customers of the late 1950's.)
As I write, I have before me a a picture: it shows a queue of people waiting to enter Blackpool Yates's long ago: a football-like queue, the sort you see before a major match. I also have a picture of the great Peter Yates in cloth cap, standing outside the Blackpool premises. And what a remarkable man HE was. Bow tie, winged collar, watch chain, moustache, white handkerchief in the breast pocket, suit made from the sort of cloth a Yorkshireman would feel for quality. arched moustache. Another picture in his early married days made him look melancholy and introspective. Mrs Peter Yates was simply a cracker. Handsome, air of authority, fashionable, self-contained. A formidable household, that.
Peter Yates was born in 1854, died at 89. During the first 20 years of the business it grew from one branch in Oldham to 20, some of them very grand indeed.
Those who drank in the old Yates's Wine Lodges were more than customers and not necessarily those he would have chosen: they were a Bruegelian elite. The majority, from my observations of the time, never appeared in the streets. They materialised in the splendid settings of Mr Peter Yates's creations like genies, or perhaps ginnies, conjured up by bottle-rubbing. They were dedicated, as we all were, to atmosphere.
The Australian red all-ins were like masonic rituals. First, the hissing boiler, dripping slowly whether in use or not, its water required to scald the wine glass. Then the good measure of Australian red wine (not so sophisticated in those days), then the topping up with scalding water, then the sugar and the slice of lemon. There were droves of people subsisting on this heady stuff through winter and they never felt a thing. Colds attempting to settle on their chests came staggering out, defeated. The Yates All-in was an eternity with neither past nor future to bother about.
When I left Manchester Yates's for the last time - three of them were in close proximity - I took with me a bottle of Australian red. It was awful to drink on its own, but paradise when doctored in the way I have described. While I was away from home one night, my younger daughter drank it. She thought it was some miserable old kitchen-sink bottle of ill-repute. I was severely stricken. I would as soon lost a bottle of Lafite, had I owned one.
Yates’s had farms to provide roast beef for the lodges; tee-total taverns, healthy bread to match the trendy stuff of today and a commitment to provide the best at lowest prices. Peter Yates's aim was to make people healthier and happier and fitness was at the heart of it - "The body should be our constant care to maintain in perfect order." It was noble of him, but I saw some rickety old bodies in his premises down the years, clicking their old bones and exercising their throats and they would not have been anywhere else had you let them win the lottery.
From Peter Yates's notebook of 1898: "Scotch, direct from the distilleries. Irish direct from Dublin. Port direct from the vineyards. Sherry direct from Cadiz. Tea direct from the Gardens. Tobacco direct from the plantations. Cigars direct from Cuba." Beat that.
There he was, then, in pretty spartan surroundings by modern standards, selling booze to people with a convivial need for it, and proclaiming with conviction that "moderation is true temperance." Ah, those posters on the wall, seen through a haze! And the Yates's princeling, a journalist of repute, who fell to the pavement when leaving and blamed a slice of lemon on the doorstep!
One day when Peter Yates went to his tobacco factory to wish the girls a happy Christmas, he offered a £1 note to anyone with a full set of teeth. One girl put her hand up and claimed the prize. Peter Yates asked her to open her mouth so that the teeth could be counted. Then he handed over the money.
Top Yates’s, opposite the Daily Express in Ancoats-street, Manchester, was the true journalists’ pub. It had a hot foot rail by the bar and you recognised drinkers around town by burns on the soles of their shoes. The leather cracked.
Mirror men, when they headed for other Yates’s, said they were “Going to sink the Bismark.” This was office code for the excellent port that Yates’s sold.
Yates’s were all different. Bottom Yates’s was a small hotel. Henry Rose lived there - he of the enormous reputation as a sports writer for the Express who died with Manchester United players in the Munich air disaster. It had a dining room with solid cutlery, and editors would eat there on occasion, sometimes even paying the bill for minions (though one, having done so, asked his guests for their share when they were outside and beyond the hearing of the Mirror editor and his crew).
Middle Yates's was tee-total but always good for a lunch on the way to work if you were a sub-editor - as I was initially - finishing after midnight and walking from the building to be exposed to Manchester's night life. "Look," said a gentleman trying to sell me a diamond ring in the early hours, "It's genuine." And he cut a long line in a plate glass window to prove his point.
May Townend, matron of top Yates’s, was a gaunt and tall figure of great gravitas. She ordered, others obeyed. Her comments could be withering. When Pat Phoenix, of Coronation Street, heard May was retiring she said, “I must give you a signed picture.” May said, “Who of?”
David Cooksey, an Expressman, had two birthdays, like the Queen, and was minded to entertain at Yates's with their champagne. The Golden Guinea bottles tended to line the counter eventually in rows like some bizarre version of the terra cotta army.
Top Yates’s was eventually done over and it went all respectable. Its directors drank there. They would occasionally send over a bottle of wine. The Bosley beef was superb. The Beaujolais often lasted beyond its allotted short span and the price went down. I never knew whether that was because Yates’s didn’t bother to test it, or whether they were being kind. At any rate at two quid a bottle you could have an agreeable lunch and forget dinner. Forget everything, come to think of it.
They had shelves of stuff nobody drank. Parfait Amour was a drink that baffled me. I was not surprised when the only drinker I knew who preferred it took a bird home only to discover that it was a transvestite bloke. Whoever else would dare ask for the stuff? Yet for what they did sell, people would stand three deep at the bar and I bore everyone with the story of the black customer who shouted from the back, “This country was all right until you whites came.”
Around the time of Peter Yates’s birthday, April 22nd, Peter’s Port would appear in celebration. Underpriced and excellent. I had better reason to welcome it than most: it was my birthday, too.
But then the change. A life change. A total change. Instead of sawdust, carpets, instead of a steady walk from bar to seat trying not to spill any, came a degree of poshness. Yates's was in flux.
You have to be with it these days to find out what it is to be without it. I was without the Yates's I knew. And in retrospect, I believe that the wine lodges went in the wrong direction. Instead of becoming like a lot more wineries they should have gone backward in time:
Sawdust back on the floors. Waiters in long white aprons. Bosley beef and onion baps. The best port and sardines on sale, as they once were. Portraits of Peter Yates with his slogans. Champagne on draught in all the outlets. Wine bars are just wine bars. Ones I describe would be totally different and - I modestly suggest - trendy as a result.
I suspect that is the sort of place Peter Yates would have gone for, bow tie, moustache, slogans and all.
For more than 30 years now, I have lived in a former pub, The Brown Cow. It was already old but in good order in the time of the Napoleonic wars and that period came into close focus when my wife asked some questions of a ouiji board. It was shortly after we moved in. The wine glass supplying the answers was shooting around all over the place. There had, it seems, been tragedy: Love Torn Assunder and The Matter of Proof.
Rose, a barmaid, married a yeoman of the district, who was killed in the wars. Theirs was a secret liaison. The marriage had been kept so because Rose believed it would have led to her being sacked. Her one comfort was the wedding ring. But one day it disappeared beneath floorboards. Later, our floorboards. She never found it. And so she had no proof of her yeoman.
Hence, resident troubled ghost.
That would have been fine. She caused no trouble to me though one or two others who visited were apprehensive about a particular corridor where they detected A Presence. But there was additional information: the glass indicated the rough area for search. Rose required that I search. The instruction would not have been sufficient for me - a landlord being instructed by a barmaid after all - but my wife supported Rose. So on a Friday night, and into the early hours of Saturday, I was ripping out part of a ceiling in the kitchen, with plaster all round my ears, and finding nothing apart from dust.
"The dusts of isolation had settled on their lives and obscured their purpose," Time magazine once wrote of a remote part of Spain, and that penetrating description described me to a 't'. I looked like something any short-sighted baker would have kneeded into a loaf.
My wife, who did not have any plaster around her ears, urged me on to greater things. There was some sort of treasure beneath the Ugly Tree and it was to be garnered, through root and branch.
I have many trees - apple, oaks, one or two sneaky sycamores (my version of a tree weed), hawthorn, two sturdy beeches and some Miscellaneous. I would not describe any as ugly, but we decided - not to be put off - to choose the least ugly, one inconveniently placed on a steep banking by the stream. I excavated as well as I could with a spade to the annoyance of several regiments of worms disturbed in their vocations..
I did not find anything else except a sharp pain in the lower back. Replacing the soil and worms carefully before reassuming an erect posture in gingerly fashion, I addressed Rose in a language she might well have recognised from her days in the tap room, now my lounge.
Wife and self took to dowsing with coat-hanger wire and we found meridians or water lines or whatever they are called in dowse language, but Rose's ring, it seems, together with treasure that had been hinted at by the hurtling ouiji glass, was lost for ever. All I have are some very ancient and broken clay pipes which I found buried in the old tap room ceiling when the plaster was removed to expose the beams.
My view is that, like the ceiling, Rose was plastered. Or she was telling lies about the marriage. Or that the yeoman was a charlatan and Rose was telling the truth. But I will never know. There was a shortage of small currency during the Napoloeonic wars and the pub had its own - pennies stamped with a brown cow. Someone in the village had one, but we never found him, or it, either.
We found, however, the grave of the landlord of the time, one Ralph Whitehead, and his wife, Sarah. And I even discovered Ralph's will. His premises must have been prominent in the district: a welcoming beacon in an extended gloom. Looking around the place, I found few houses to match the age of his.
Our garden path was a toll road. Ralph did his brewing in a separate structure across the path and in his roof space he had muslin (correct) weavers. Altogether a prosperous chap, I would say. Not so in his will. He was wheedling about, hinting at poverty so far as I could see. Locals said he used to lower bottled spirits into the stream on strings when Customs and Excise were about to avoid tax.
Mine is one of those places where incomers are noticed for 20 years or so until they blend in. I was both an incomer and inncomer, to compound the fault. And, damn me, if I did not discover that my great grandfather lived and worked in the next village around the time of Rose and that he must, when he moved home and eventually died of gangrene of the leg, have passed my present house. He would, indeed, have been a fool not to take the opportunity of calling in for a pint, leaving his few pathetic sticks and family on the cart.
So from Incomer I was promoted beyond reproach to Historic Family status. I began to call old residents incomers and the burden of Rose and her wedding ring lifted accordingly. In retrospect, one thing balanced out the other. Fair enough, I think, and I shall tell her so in the great by and by.
April 2009
The earthquake in central Italy is a tragic and terribly sad affair; and it reminds me that people wishing to sample journalism at its most cutting of cutting edges should think twice. I thought once immediately after an earthquake in Italy, and that was enough. I declined it.
There were very good reasons, one being that I was slightly the worse for drink; a good second was that I did not speak the language; a third was that the BBC man in our party of a dozen or so enjoying a freebie declined to go ("There was no mention of covering earthquakes when they invited me") and I needed support; and the fourth is that it was bedtime where I was, in Sienna, and the earthquake was way, way up north somewhere.
As I reached my room, which was sumptuous, in a large hotel which was equally sumptuous (freebies for newspapers being nothing like the poor-relation holidays people pay for), the phone rang. It was my wife, asking whether I was all right. I wondered at first how she knew my condition: that I had retired, having absorbed a very pleasant and adequate amount of drink. Not so. She had heard of the earthquake and had visions of me brandishing my notebook and shouting, "Si, por favor, ici earthquake, pardon?"
No, no. It would not do. The spirits were strong and the flesh weak; the language, too demanding. I went to bed with dignity and slept with the thought that there was a good train service from Rome to the earthquake site that would allow the resident Italian-speaking staff scribbler to do his worst. The editor rang to ask politely whether I was still alive and once I had assured him that all my observations supported the belief that I might well be, he rang off diplomatically.
I went on a number of these freebies and never got the measure of them. Our parties were so mollycoddled that it was impossible to see their worth as examples of the real. The Daily Mail rep, for instance, a man of some eminence at the time, treated couriers like servants, demanding that they go to the third floor for his spectacles when we were outside on the pavement, and so on. He was the only man I ever came across who could carve his steak with his right hand and without the aid of a fork.
If you wanted strawberries in Italy they came in thousands cascaded in sugar. The drinks were never-ending. You found presents in your room, beautifully wrapped. You were given mineral water to take to bed as a matter of course.
You were invited to meet bank directors. Or concert pianists. In France, I had a 13-course lunch, one part of which was a single radish, newly picked, and preserved in iced water. I sat next to the Mayor of Cahors, who told me that their wine lived in the bottle and fizzed when it scented spring (secondary fermentation: he didn't kid me, the wicked old poet). I met a man who was third-generation family taster for a brandy company. Is there any better job on earth?
He had to decide when the spirit was ready to be bottled. A bit like God, really.
The German commander, during the '39-'45 war, decided that production should stop. Wine growers politely reminded him that "when Germany won" there would be no good brandy. So he relented. And became, when war ended, a representative for the brandy company. How very apt.
I doubt whether Fred Clegg from Cleckheaton would get any of that.
In one place I had a mountain of oysters, built like a pyramid. The top oyster, partly open, revealed an occupant: a thinnish black worm with big eyes. We stared at each other for several seconds before he dived back into his living quarters. He was safe from me. I had never in my life eaten an oyster and that experience convinced me of my instinctive wisdom.
I doubt whether Fred Clegg would even want any of that.
Anyway, I did my best to write for Fred and hope he missed the earthquake, as I did, in a manner of speaking. People were very kind. They never mentioned it on my return with the goodies, so chosen ones got a slice of freebie cake.
Lillian Ross of the New Yorker and Picture
I first read Picture, in the 1950's and the pleasure and awe I felt then never quite left me. This is a book in which Lillian Ross, a staff writer on the New Yorker, recorded, in exquisite detail, the making of Red Badge of Courage, a John Huston civil-war film`whose most revealing cast list was off-screen: Louis B. Mayor heading MGM studio where fear, hope, ego jostled in the absorbing business of entertaining the world while making money.
The film was voted an artistic success and a box-office nothing. Huston, director, went on to make a Bogart film, African Queen, leaving his producer, Gottfried Reinhart, to face the agonies of scrutiny from a hierarchy keen to rip bits from the picture and put its own stamp on the result, with Mayer in the background always grumbling: Where's the story?
Show business. Jungle in a suit. It all came back to me... Newspapers were like that, too - 90 per cent self-preservation and ten per cent the joy of creation. Back-stabbing with sophistication. One journalist said of an editor, "I feel as though I am being smiled in the front." It made a change.
Movie-maker Sam Spiegel waiting for Huston to finish Courage before moving on to his African Queen with its broader commercial appeal:
'So, how are things on the script?' (meaning his own).
Huston said things were fine. 'Only trouble is, Sam, we just demolished two weeks' work. Threw out every bit of it,' he added lightly.
Spiegel swallowed hard. 'When?' he asked.
'Just now,' Huston said with a forced grin.
'My ulcers are being formed,' Spiegel said, and gave (an onlooker) an appealing look.
'Beneath this facade of worry is worry. Did you get anything done today?'
'Don't worry, Sam'l,' Huston said in the reassuring tone he had used in talking with Reinhardt about the script for The Red Badge of Courage. 'I like to know what I am worrying about,' said Spiegel. 'Now it's that I worry and I don't know why.'
Hollywood was very Jewish and a glory of this book is that it washes through the words like cream. Nobody is immune.
"I'd rather be loved than get ten million dollars,' Louis B Mayer was saying emotionally. He had a lot of emotion and a huge well of tears to support it. When he watched a film he liked, he was never ashamed of tears.
Commitment, you see. Not job, life-style. Not work, obsession.
Now what has this to do with newspapers? Just about everything. The Hollywood machine came under pressure from television just as newspapers came under pressure. An overnight revolution had happened almost unnoticed to both. One night, I watched a chief sub-editor emerge from a gruelling time putting his pages to bed only to see on a TV screen the whole thing that his readers would not encounter until morning.
With his ink smudge and owlish glasses he looked like he was about to sing Mammy. Instead he flung his wet proofs on his desk and stared long into the distance thinking, no doubt, of the pub next door.
So what's different?
I know that journalists these days are downtrodden in a way that we never were. Under-paid, under-expensed (unless they happen to be at the peak of the business). When newspapers were a primary source of news, they bred pirates, not naval officers. They rampaged about with a common purpose, drinking too much, scheming too much, and working too much. Working. Now there's a thing the modern reporter would find it hard to believe.
Some old hands left the office only for the Press Club. After that it was a few hours' sleep and back to the desk. Monks in inked clothing.
"I was having a row with the wife," said a photographer. "I was angry. I said, 'Look...' and do you know, for a moment I could not remember her name."
A picture desk man confronted colleagues with red face and angry words - "Who shopped me?" he said. Someone had pointed out to the editor that he had not had a day off for weeks. The editor had told him to take the time off. That's all.
He was a fifties man and here was a a fifties film. It was the same in Badge of Courage land. A Time magazine writer who complained he had to share a desk was rebuked for lack of log cabin spirit.
Work! It was the great thing because for the committed it was virtually the only thing. Sometimes, after a night of it you could spread your newspaper across the floor of the kitchen and look at your pages - not the proprietor's pages; your pages - and work out how you might have improved the make-up. An indent here, a standfirst there. A page was your personal canvas. You could pore over every inch of it and learn a bit more to take to the office next day. If you were lucky, you thought of something to surprise them.
Nowadays, journalists are having as much fun revealing MPs' expenses as golden-age journalists had in spending theirs. What goes around...
So there they were - Hollywood dominating the world with its Clark Gables, Jean Harlows, Spencer Tracys, Garbos and Bogarts, tears in its eyes, Jewish to the core, inventive, vulnerable, blessed by climate, limos and money but tormented, insecure and edgy as fledglings in nests.
And there were we - living the golden age of our own and not recognising it for what it was - a passing thing.
In both industries the costs were huge, but those who created were the ones who could, to some degree, dictate the final bill.
Not now. Now, accountants rule the earth with their controlled portions, straight faces, small screens, office hours and fitness shoes.
Lillian Ross re-creates the best of Hollywood's times with fact that sounds like fiction: one of the great journalistic feats of my time.
And old journalists, as ever, do it all more modestly for themselves over a pint with anyone who cares to listen.
Theirs, too, was the Badge of Courage of sorts.
* Picture, by Lillian Ross: my copy by Penguin, 3s 6d.
If I said that Jean Rook, named "first lady of Fleet-street" by the Daily Express, took time out while working to irritate farm workers gathering their crops would you be surprised?
Could it be that in this enterprise she was encouraged by a colleague of hers and mine who wore a bathroom tap on his head at political party conferences? Who possessed a two-foot fork to nick other people's food?
We are not, I tell you in all truth, in never-never land. And I am reminded of Jean Rook because the editor of a web site devoted to the prides and passions of Fleet-street (http://www.gentlemenranters.com), has been ranting himself: he can not understand why people will not write obits for him. Why? I ask myself on his behalf. And the reason is that obits are usually lists of achievements, solemn, processional, like many a cortege, long on fact, short on image. People are not really like that. The man of God can be the sinner. The sage can act the fool. In the philosopher there might be an irrepressible child. That's my excuse and I am sticking to it.
We pause here for solemn reflection. As you see, I am not even sure what an obituary is: A song of praise? The case for the defence in the hereafter? Dishonesty with good intent?
I admired a deputy editor who, on his way to an editor's funeral. mulled over the characteristics of the deceased, and decided that he did not, on the whole, like the fellow. So he turned back and went home.
I have written one or two obituaries and pulled back at the point where I was about to be over-honest.
For instance, I often worked with Brian Duff, Express chief photographer in Manchester (left), and if you said he was a generous man, you would be right and wrong at the same time. If you said he was a born artiste, similar. He was both generous and ungenerous, artiste and anti-artiste. An enigma.. So how do you label an enigma with surprising variations?
I enjoyed my time with him. I enjoyed his painstaking and impressive work, but I have a feeling that I enjoyed his discomforts more. I did not mention those at the time I penned his obituary when he actually died in January, 2007.
He lived in Burnley - which he called the Venice of the North - and once had a tremendous row with his wife, Anne. The serving hatch was between them. It got slammed by both contestants a few times until it fell off, and he then said that was it, the end, total crisis point, no turning back, shame about the kids, split the assets down the middle, or perhaps, dear Lord, more in his favour, cut the cat in half, he was leaving home. Off he went. Shortly afterwards, he was back. "I thought you had left home," said Anne. "It's raining," he said.
He fussed a great deal about his health. "How are all your consultants?" I used to ask. I thought of him as the only human I knew who was ineligible for the National Health Service because he claimed to have no health whatsoever.
When his wife was in bed suffering he volunteered to get her medicine. Off he went to the doctor's only to return with medicine for himself. "Where's mine?" she asked. "Damn," he said, "I forgot yours."
He turned up at parties in a knitted pullover reaching well below the knees. He had an expanding fork allowing him to take things from other people's plates at dinner Before mobile phones were invented, he had a black telephone of the ancient variety which he kept in a bag. It had its own curly line attached to nothing. He would pretend to answer calls in pubs, confusing all around.
Enter, Jean Rook.
When she was writing pages, not columns, for the Daily Express, he was her photographer. He would meet her at Piccadilly Station in Manchester and ferry her around in his car. She quickly learned the drill. If he saw a group of people grubbing about in a field and gathering some crop or other, he sounded his horn several times and they all unbent themselves wearily to see what it was all about. He waved at that point. They all waved back thinking they knew him. Then, of course, they had to go through the wearisome process of bending down again.
Jean Rook liked that. More, it entranced her. It was a form of human torment she had never before witnessed. When she first saw it, she asked whether she could have a go with the horn next time and he generously agreed.
If it was raining heavily he hooted at people huddled in bus shelters then stopped 20 yards further on. Usually one or two broke ranks believing they had found a friend. They hadn't. He waited until they were almost there, then drove off. I know, I know. I, too, have read about torment in the gulags.
He had a piercing blue lamp in the roof of one car, and at night he would flash it at vehicles ahead of him. They invariably pulled in to the side and stopped only to hear his manic laughter as he overtook them.
Once, parked outside a county police headquarters, he was listening to police traffic on his expensive radio and a deputy chief constable peered in to see what was happening. "Good radio, that, Brian" he said. "We are hoping to get some ourselves soon."
The tap? Ah, yes. At political party conferences he wore the tap on his forehead for no particular reason. Good knock-about stuff. But in Jekyll and Hyde mode, he was also a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society after being an associate and he would fret for hours, days, about the right picture. He had more reflective umbrellas than a space station.
In spite of his own eccentricities, he wanted the world to behave as he expected it to. Since his was a rather tidy vision, the world took no notice. That infuriated him. Big companies, shops, waiters and hotel managers were his normal fodder. He terrorised them. When he snagged a coat on something protruding in Woolworth's, he said to the manager, "This is an expensive coat." "I can see it is," said the manager. "I noticed it when you came in." "Right," said Brian Duff, "I expect you to pay for it. And I don't want it invisibly mended because you can see it."
In cheap roadside cafes he had some exciting times. He bartered. "I would like egg and chips but no tomato. Can I have an extra egg to make up for the cost of the tomato?"
"No." "Why not?" "Because there are no two eggs with chips in the pictures." "What pictures?" "The pictures of the meals outside and on the walls."
"You'd think," he said to me later, "that they would have given me the extra egg. Miserable buggers."
If we stayed in London hotels before interviews, he always got the best room because I do not remember him ever accepting the one first offered to him. He would complain about size, draughts, noise of dustbins, views from windows, alleyways, the funny look the maid gave him, the lavatory seat still being up, anything.
Once, in a London night club with a Manchester writer, a full bottle of whisky appeared at the table. They viewed it with distrust. They had, of course, heard of these London practices: drink the whisky and you get a bill for, oh, £200 - that might be about right. But then they got a message from the club owner - "You are not drinking the gift I sent over." They drank it then in some haste. They would have drunk a small reservoir if it had been free.
Brian, who was a first-class drummer, and who could have made a living at it, was made even bolder than he normally was. He asked the group playing whether he could have a go at the drums and explained his impeccable credentials. They agreed.
What followed, according to the writer, was the most miserable time of his life. Brian Duff was plainly out of chunter with the music. Drum was beating time vigorously to a tune entirely foreign to the one being played. The whisky had worked. He had a serene look of total confidence in himself. Heaven and hell had collided in a most unlikely place and hell was plainly winning.
Truth only dribbles out long after people's deaths when the total image has congealed into something tangible. Until then, it is something flimsy, borne on the wind.
The pictures he took were invariably artistic; yet when we visited an art gallery in Verona, he was indifferent to anything he saw. It meant nothing to him. He was out at the other end before I had started.
I often think of Brian Duff now for he was never less than entertaining. I can awaken at 2am and hear laughter. The vision has formed and congealed. Now, I think, I could write a proper obituary. But at this stage, who wants one?
There he is in vision, great, domineering nose, tiny mouth ("Watch my lips." "What lips?"), full of inhibitions, spiky. "Do you think this is catarrh?" he would ask, waving a handkerchief in front of my face. "No," I would reply. "I think its probably something to do with the scaffolding in your left nostril."
We are in the office, the two of us: "Why can't we charge reversing mileage? It doesn't show up on the clock."
And in the city street when the great Europe bike race was in motion before his very eyes - "Vive, ole," he was crying loudly, with precisely that pronunciation.
A Hickey reporter who turned up for an appointment with a Stately Owner of a Stately Home introduced Brian Duff as "my photographer." The result was pulverising. He felt two hands squeezing his neck and bearing him to the ground. Nobody, but nobody, could call him "my photographer." The Stately Man left immediately and the appointment was ended.
One reporter at the Express said he was glad to be appointed because the first thing he saw on arriving from Liverpool was a figure flying over a desk to grab a colleague by the throat. That was Brian Duff, too.
Mean? Of course he was. If you lunched with him and had a bottle of wine he could so engineer matters that he got two-thirds of it. His ploy was always to charge the glasses himself. Two big gulps, charge both glasses again. You might not even have touched yours in which case he would go through the motion of topping it up. I tried an experiment. One day, every time he drank from his glass, I drank an equivalent amount from mine.
"Ee," he said when we had finished the bottle in three and a half minutes, "that went fast."
Go to his home to drink, and he was the perfect host: always looking to see whether you needed more, always supplying more, almost pleading with you to have more.
Jekyll and Duff.
And so the final joke and the farewell. Not to me. Jean Rook. She was leaving for London on an evening train and Brian Duff delivered her to her seat, putting her case on the rack, and kissing her fondly and ostentatiously on the cheek.
"Lovely time," he said very loudly so that all the businessmen heard, "I do hope nobody finds out."
Meditation is when you sit in silence for long periods and think of nothing apart from breathing. That takes in many of our schools and colleges, I am told. In my early years, of course, you had to think of something because it was believed to be beneficial.
Nowadays, I find it is a very good thing, just sitting there, concentrating on breathing. Even my younger daughter says so, and when she wants a good thing she usually thinks first of Harvey Nichols. Not this time. She is well into sitting comfortably. And breathing.
I must have had a go at it, oh, about the time of the Bore War when the BBC and ITV channels went down market and slugged it out on behalf of couch spuds.. I am a lapsed veteran of the great silence.
So there I was, the other day. In a bit of a turmoil really. I felt I ought to be writing something but not a thing occurred. Absolutely nothing. That is close enough to meditation and panic at the same time, a double whammy. So after a long spell away from it, I would choose meditation.
I went into Yoga mode. That was the signal I feared of old. All my troublesome yesterdays came back. Instead of concentrating on breathing my mind awakened, looked around in amazement at finding itself meditating, and sent a bedlam of thought crashing into my consciousness:
Anything would do in this deluge of flashing images. Songs of praise, space ships, the price of petrol, dog fouling, Mr Cameron's biking hat, you name it.
That's the trouble with my sort of meditation: You want peace, you get turmoil. You are ready for turmoil, can't find it, you get peace.
Songs of praise? Wasn't it, my supposedly tranquil mind asked, Jeffrey Bernard who watched the programme as it came from Maidstone Prison and spotted a man in the congregation who owed him £50? It was not so much the money that mattered to Bernard but the fact that the man had the gall to be singing Abide with Me.
Then my mind turned to a coffee I had in Weatherspoon's. Outside was a taxi rank run from Bombay by the look of the drivers. And a building society. My mind was at it again... Why do people hailing taxis sit in front with the driver these days? They wouldn't do it in buses. And why do building societies and estate agents never offer two for one?
Out, out damned thoughts! Breathe in, breathe out. Other people do that and life is suddenly hushed, peaceful, transcendental. They are thinking things like Om mani padme hum. Or gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, svaha. The magic formulas. First problem is to remember what they mean. Second is, whenever I do that panic sets in. My rhythm is upset. I begin to wonder whether I can get a full breath. Or whether I have missed out a gate. Then I wonder whether I should try breathing fast into a brown paper bag... Then... Well, bedlam.
The book said, "Let thoughts pass in and out of your mind without thinking of yourself being connected with them. They are just thoughts in transit. Watch them in and out."
I did that, and then wondered: If it's not me, who is paying so much for the petrol? And whose is the big black dog with soulful eyes and a permanent squatting position that appears to have a home up the road?
It's not easy, you know, this nothing business. There was a woman long, long ago - so long ago that the world was young and bankers and politicians were trusted - who tried to develop a way of seeing through her ears. That's taking things too far and I would like a word with her if her mouth is listening. I can't hear through my ears, let alone see.
I once passed on my great meditational wisdom to a friend and sent him upstairs to un-think himself for the very first time. He was up there for ages. Meanwhile, I frittered a away time by listening to the football results on radio.
When he came downstairs, I said, "How did you get on?"
"Arsenal 2, Everton nil. What do you think?" he said.
I have just closed my eyes and, using all the skills accumulated down my years of wisdom, I am thinking of ...nothing. Good.
Or rather I am thinking: "I am thinking of nothing." Damn. So I am really thinking about something, because nothing is a something if you have to think about it. I should not be thinking of anything except breathing.
That's a bit deep for the time of day, but if you concentrate and read it a dozen times, it makes a sort of sense; as much sense as you are likely to get anyway.
Emptiness, that is the goal. An emptiness, a vacuum, so that wisdom might flow in from the great beyond. If you think Nothing, it is not empty. That is my conclusion. Or it would be if I did not wonder whether Emptiness is nothing, too. Or something.
Men of great wisdom have been troubled by much the same thing. "All is One" - that is the great deliverer. But some meddlesome soul then said, "If all is reduced to the One to what is the One reduced?" No, they didn't shoot him. There were no guns in those days. But they possibly gave him a damned good chasing.
I have just tried meditation again, in a sitting position, and the squirrel leapt into my head. It was inevitable. I just knew it.
We were walking the dog a couple of nights ago and there was a squirrel, quite dead, in the road. Not yet squashed by those hordes of vehicles that pass by us, but arrayed in all its beauty. It was on its side and its belly was in full view. White. Pristine white, the belly. Now how does a squirrel come to have a pristine white belly when it gallops up and down dirty old trees all the time and lives in muddy time-shares? My wife could not explain it, either, and she never misses Location, Location.
I mourned for that squirrel, dead before life had given it a chance. It was still with me just before sleep and when I awakened. I was convinced that it was the squirrel that ran past the kitchen window, full of life, hope, anticipation only the day before. A bounding squirrel probably knowing that I had an oak tree for its personal use and a hazel nut tree for afters. A middle-class squirrel. And suddenly there was no squirrel, no future, just me, mourning.
Then, half an hour ago, I was looking out of the same kitchen window and a squirrel bounded along a wall for all the world as if it had gone through a copying machine. Now could it be that I had mourned for a stranger rather than a casual friend? Could this bounding one be the friend after all? Could it be that all squirrels are exactly alike, as - James Thurber noted - all pigeons are exactly alike?
Breathe in, breathe out... In, out. Slowly. Concentrating on every moment. We live the moment. No past, no future. Just this continuing moment... Splendid.
Damn. Now it's bus stops. There is one up the road, but no bus ever stops there. It is a liar on a pole. A woman stood by it the other evening and we directed her elsewhere, to a place where buses do stop. I reckon we saved her life.
So now it's no-bus bus stops in the mind. And the time we used to tie a vicar to lamp-posts by his trailing raincoat belt, so that he could not get aboard when the bus stopped for him. That gave his brotherly love a good testing, oh Lord.
I couldn't do it. I couldn't let the bus-stop thought pass through. It stuck like tea leaves in a sink.
To hell with buses. And squatty dogs. And as for squirrels - "If all squirrels are alike, how many of them are up my trees? If their faces, eyes, ears, squiffy tails are identical do they have any means of distinguishing their putative wives in the mating season? Or do they just leap into bed with anybody as I've heard people do in places like Islington and the more rural parts of Dorset?
My wife sits in a chair and does meditation for what seems like hours. I can see her from the corridor, camatose, peaceful in the pale blue glow from her Apple computer. She comes round refreshed as if after deep sleep and heads with renewed energy for the kettle and tea bags. You can't buy it, you know, that kind of relaxation. Priceless.
But she doesn't sleep at night, whereas I do. And when the practice nurse took my blood pressure she was surprised at its normality. Never been normal in the past. "That," I told her with just the slightest hint of omnipotence, "is because I composed myself in advance." I did, too. I told my body to be more attentive or else. And it worked that time.
So there's something in mind over matter, I dare say. Or rather no-mind over matter. (I have a book titled The Zen Doctrine of No Mind, by Dr Daitetz Suzuki and he had one hell of a mind.)
But if I ever succeed in emptying my mind, how will I know what the something is that worked, because an empty mind doesn't reason?
Here we go again. I'm off. You can please yourself. Gate, gate, parasamgate, bodhi, svaha...
Sawdust mouths, hangovers, clattering tongues, smiling deception, rampant egos ... ah, those wonderful political party conferences where ambitious people of all kinds and persuasions paraded their talents like tarts in a side street!
Blackpool for me, of course, not Brighton. Where else? Political writers from dahn Sarf were never really happy with Blackpool. Didn't go with the proper image. Not up their Shaftesbury Avenue at all, this Norf.
I wasn't too sure about it myself at times, but loyalty, loyalty. You know what it is. You have to defend the territory of your birth and stop people noticing too much. Uncle Joe's Mint Balls, for instance. To Sarfs, the name was hilarious. If you were out and about with the writers, you could conceal tins by standing in front of the display, but if you succeeded there, the Sarfs always spotted the advert from the windows of their train returning to Euston, and another jokey column would be born. It usually followed the one drawing attention to the appalling state of food in this or that Blackpool establishment.
That hurt. Well, twinged.
Prime Ministers and Prime Ministers in waiting used the same suite at the Imperial Hotel and in advance of one or other of them, I went on a security patrol of my own - eating a mint ball of course - and stared at the precise place where they would put their feet in the bath, wearing the same shower cap. It somehow put life into perspective, this naked truth.
The proper security lads gave everything the once-over, unscrewing the bath panels and so forth. But I found - exclusive! - a shoelace in a plant pot, buried two inches beneath the surface. It had plainly escaped their attention. A fuse of some sort? It looked harmless enough, but you never know. It could have been controlled by radio. Innocent until primed, creeping out of its pot, guided onto the floor at dead of night and edging itself towards the vulnerable neck of one of our Great Leaders, there to strangle him, or her in sleep. I didn't tell anybody. I reasoned that if a prime minister was garotted by the shoe lace,I had an exclusive. We all have to make a living. What's more, I put my Uncle Joe's wrapper in the plant pot, too. There was nowhere else suitable.
When Sir Trevor Evans, industrial man for the Express turned up, he introduced me, at different times, to two people: Harold Wilson and A Great Writer. Wilson kindly told me what the weather in Blackpool was like at the time (nasty, probably), then exited to pay full attention to his pipe. Great Writer bored the hell out of me all night long. Literally all night. Evans knew what he was doing. He went to bed, leaving me with this endless gramophone of rasping sandpaper.
Great Writer went through his life several times - "This hotel in the Middle East... Got talking to the owner... We chatted about people we knew... This (internationally known) name cropped up... How a man can contrive to defecate on the ceiling of his room..." Was I hearing aright? On and on.
Next morning, at breakfast, he walked right by my table and obviously didn't know me. The shoelace sprang to mind. If only I could find its controls and head it towards his neck ....
I was sitting with a large group at a conference when Terry Lancaster, then a political writer, went by. He was following Bob Edwards (The People), his editor. "Hello!" I called to Lancaster, and he carried on without expression, turning, and mouthing the word, "Later."
I was a bit miffed. We knew each other well.
The walk-by reminded me of another place, another time: our earlier incarnation together when I tried to nobble Fidel Castro. (I know you did not expect him to step in at this point so I will wait until you adjust your concentration... Ready?)
It was all down to a Yates's wine lodge and what they called Australian Red All-ins. I tried one or two and think the slices of lemon might have been 'off.' At any rate, it occurred to me that I should talk to Havana.
It seemed entirely reasonable at that precise moment, and possibly only at that precise moment. The world was in torment because of tensions between Cuba and the US. The Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, was about to go to the United Nations.
So I went to the library, and looked up Cuba. There it was, convenient to America. A mere inch away. And the lot only six inches away from my office. A doddle. I sent a telegram to Havana saying that I would appreciate a word with Fidel. Quietly, like.
I was alarmed - the effect of the lemon had worn off - when I got a message back saying that the leader was on his way to New York and would I make contact there?
This posed a serious problem. How was I to explain to the Express in London my urgent need to talk to Fidel Castro in New York?
I decided to admit to the foreign editor that I had flipped. That foreign editor was, at the time, Terry Lancaster, the very Terry Lancaster who had whispered "Later" in Blackpool. Well, he thought the matter over carefully indeed and with Salomon's wisdom concluded that if I left Castro alone, he would not interfere with Manchester United. Those were his very words. Deal done. Would that Cuba had been settled so simply.
We had a reasonable relationship, you see, which is why I could not understand the whispered "later". Mr Lancaster in his Express days had been despatched to Manchester to hide. He was in waiting for Higher Things. It was felt that he might reasonably sit next to me in Features, and supply what help he could. It wasn't much since he couldn't sub.
He made up for it by talking. When the man in charge of London's Hickey phoned to complain that his work was being supplanted by Northern stuff in Manchester and threatened all kinds of dire consequences, not excluding excommunication, Lancaster was hopping about by my side sensing an enjoyable fight. Better still, fun. "Tell him to bugger off," he advised. "Tell him, tell him! We'll decide, here, not him. Tell him..."
Well it was all right saying "Tell him" but I had a mortgage, a wife and three children and decided on caution. I advised the Hickey man that I was responsible only to my editor so any complaints should be addressed to him.
There was a brooding sense of unease for weeks. In the meantime, I had dinner with Lancaster and backed my car into a tree afterwards. A slice of lemon again, I suspect. I was a martyr to them. He was in another car and I heard shrieking laughter alerting anything within 500 yards of my dilemma. He had just eaten an abnormally large scampi.
"Mine," he proudly announced to the restaurant in general, "has gout."
Anyway, there we were in Blackpool, Great Writer, Lancaster, Bob Edwards, a prime minister, a stalking shoelace (maybe), plus, possibly, Norf-Sarf unease about Uncle Joe's mint balls.
And what sparks all this rambling is that people making those very mint balls in all their commendable glory might be on the move. Large new premises, advanced technology and all that. On the cards, I gather.
Uncle Joe's - wait for it, wait for it - are now being sold in Harrods and Harvey Nichols. Plus New York.
Where's the editor who said there was no Norf-Sarf divide? I want him to have a crateful. Gratis. For without doubt, the divide that never existed in his mind alone has done a Berlin Wall: it is positively, absolutely crumbling in reality, and now, he could be right.
Be so kind as to pass the Fisherman's Friends, would you?
Sawdust mouths, hangovers, clattering tongues, smiling deception, rampant egos ... ah, those wonderful political party conferences where ambitious people of all kinds and persuasions paraded their talents like tarts in a side street!
Blackpool for me, of course, not Brighton. Where else? Political writers from dahn Sarf were never really happy with Blackpool. Didn't go with the proper image. Not up their Shaftesbury Avenue at all, this Norf.
I wasn't too sure about it myself at times, but loyalty, loyalty. You know what it is. You have to defend the territory of your birth and stop people noticing too much. Uncle Joe's Mint Balls, for instance. To Sarfs, the name was hilarious. If you were out and about with the writers, you could conceal tins by standing in front of the display, but if you succeeded there, the Sarfs always spotted the advert from the windows of their train returning to Euston, and another jokey column would be born. It usually followed the one drawing attention to the appalling state of food in this or that Blackpool establishment.
That hurt. Well, twinged.
Prime Ministers and Prime Ministers in waiting used the same suite at the Imperial Hotel and in advance of one or other of them, I went on a security patrol of my own - eating a mint ball of course - and stared at the precise place where they would put their feet in the bath, wearing the same shower cap. It somehow put life into perspective, this naked truth.
The proper security lads gave everything the once-over, unscrewing the bath panels and so forth. But I found - exclusive! - a shoelace in a plant pot, buried two inches beneath the surface. It had plainly escaped their attention. A fuse of some sort? It looked harmless enough, but you never know. It could have been controlled by radio. Innocent until primed, creeping out of its pot, guided onto the floor at dead of night and edging itself towards the vulnerable neck of one of our Great Leaders, there to strangle him, or her in sleep. I didn't tell anybody. I reasoned that if a prime minister was garotted by the shoe lace,I had an exclusive. We all have to make a living. What's more, I put my Uncle Joe's wrapper in the plant pot, too. There was nowhere else suitable.
When Sir Trevor Evans, industrial man for the Express turned up, he introduced me, at different times, to two people: Harold Wilson and A Great Writer. Wilson kindly told me what the weather in Blackpool was like at the time (nasty, probably), then exited to pay full attention to his pipe. Great Writer bored the hell out of me all night long. Literally all night. Evans knew what he was doing. He went to bed, leaving me with this endless gramophone of rasping sandpaper.
Great Writer went through his life several times - "This hotel in the Middle East... Got talking to the owner... We chatted about people we knew... This (internationally known) name cropped up... How a man can contrive to defecate on the ceiling of his room..." Was I hearing aright? On and on.
Next morning, at breakfast, he walked right by my table and obviously didn't know me. The shoelace sprang to mind. If only I could find its controls and head it towards his neck ....
I was sitting with a large group at a conference when Terry Lancaster, then a political writer, went by. He was following Bob Edwards (The People), his editor. "Hello!" I called to Lancaster, and he carried on without expression, turning, and mouthing the word, "Later."
I was a bit miffed. We knew each other well.
The walk-by reminded me of another place, another time: our earlier incarnation together when I tried to nobble Fidel Castro. (I know you did not expect him to step in at this point so I will wait until you adjust your concentration... Ready?)
It was all down to a Yates's wine lodge and what they called Australian Red All-ins. I tried one or two and think the slices of lemon might have been 'off.' At any rate, it occurred to me that I should talk to Havana.
It seemed entirely reasonable at that precise moment, and possibly only at that precise moment. The world was in torment because of tensions between Cuba and the US. The Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, was about to go to the United Nations.
So I went to the library, and looked up Cuba. There it was, convenient to America. A mere inch away. And the lot only six inches away from my office. A doddle. I sent a telegram to Havana saying that I would appreciate a word with Fidel. Quietly, like.
I was alarmed - the effect of the lemon had worn off - when I got a message back saying that the leader was on his way to New York and would I make contact there?
This posed a serious problem. How was I to explain to the Express in London my urgent need to talk to Fidel Castro in New York?
I decided to admit to the foreign editor that I had flipped. That foreign editor was, at the time, Terry Lancaster, the very Terry Lancaster who had whispered "Later" in Blackpool. Well, he thought the matter over carefully indeed and with Salomon's wisdom concluded that if I left Castro alone, he would not interfere with Manchester United. Those were his very words. Deal done. Would that Cuba had been settled so simply.
We had a reasonable relationship, you see, which is why I could not understand the whispered "later". Mr Lancaster in his Express days had been despatched to Manchester to hide. He was in waiting for Higher Things. It was felt that he might reasonably sit next to me in Features, and supply what help he could. It wasn't much since he couldn't sub.
He made up for it by talking. When the man in charge of London's Hickey phoned to complain that his work was being supplanted by Northern stuff in Manchester and threatened all kinds of dire consequences, not excluding excommunication, Lancaster was hopping about by my side sensing an enjoyable fight. Better still, fun. "Tell him to bugger off," he advised. "Tell him, tell him! We'll decide, here, not him. Tell him..."
Well it was all right saying "Tell him" but I had a mortgage, a wife and three children and decided on caution. I advised the Hickey man that I was responsible only to my editor so any complaints should be addressed to him.
There was a brooding sense of unease for weeks. In the meantime, I had dinner with Lancaster and backed my car into a tree afterwards. A slice of lemon again, I suspect. I was a martyr to them. He was in another car and I heard shrieking laughter alerting anything within 500 yards of my dilemma. He had just eaten an abnormally large scampi.
"Mine," he proudly announced to the restaurant in general, "has gout."
Anyway, there we were in Blackpool, Great Writer, Lancaster, Bob Edwards, a prime minister, a stalking shoelace (maybe), plus, possibly, Norf-Sarf unease about Uncle Joe's mint balls.
And what sparks all this rambling is that people making those very mint balls in all their commendable glory might be on the move. Large new premises, advanced technology and all that. On the cards, I gather.
Uncle Joe's - wait for it, wait for it - are now being sold in Harrods and Harvey Nichols. Plus New York.
Where's the editor who said there was no Norf-Sarf divide? I want him to have a crateful. Gratis. For without doubt, the divide that never existed in his mind alone has done a Berlin Wall: it is positively, absolutely crumbling in reality, and now, he could be right.
Be so kind as to pass the Fisherman's Friends, would you?
There are severely deprived people in this world - people who went to Oxford or Cambridge, Winchester, Harrow, Eton. Becoming a journalist after that bad start is a difficult business. They have to make the leap from quiet learning and cake in the dorm to bedlam and duplicity virtually overnight. They are the last dogs out of the traps.
"Let me put it this way," as one Daily Express news editor in Manchester said in a well-publicised remark to a newly arrived, unsullied, sober, highly educated, oh-God-what-have-I-come-to? up-from-the-Smoke, well-I'll-just-have-a-small-one-if-I-must new reporter - "have you ever reported a fire?"
Answer, No, of course not. Nor a court. Nor an inquest. Nor a road accident. Nor a rural auction mart with shearling gimmers, twinters, ram lambs and lonk tups in need of sorting. Nor had the accused witnessed the animal cunning, treachery and tenacity of the pack on the trail of a big story. That's the very gritty nitty of the job. And the lust for success is like flu - it hits when you least expect it, turns your legs to jelly, and can knock you over.
I played back-street cricket with a lad named Kenneth Barnes who, sadly, lacked the proper guidance. He wasted his life. Not once so far as I know had he considered being One of Us, a junior reporter. He left us quietly and struggled along unsighted. He went to Oxford University and became something in one of the government ministries where he was made Sir Kenneth Barnes with a CB and a KCB. The knighthood was some kind of compensation for the sad obscurity of his post, and inability to progress, I imagine. Not a single byline in an entire lifetime: what a shameful waste of a brilliant mind. The rest of our team were so sorry for his failure to grab his early career opportunities as we did.
You will have noted that the newly-deceased chef, Keith Floyd, began working life as a junior reporter, which, I imagine, kitted him out perfectly for stardom: irreverent tongue, brash awareness, loud, gutsy sense of humour, taste for good wine while actually working, nightmare hangovers. Early journalism can do all that for a boy on the way up. Becoming a TV chef is just a slight change of direction: in the worst scenario, where you lack real journalistic flair, you merely exchange writing tripe for slicing it.
I do, I admit, have some very, very slight secret envy of the Oxbridge lot. A smidgeon. The merest trace. A midge's. All right, then, quite a bit. OK, OK, a lot. Enough to make me sad occasionally.. Let us pass swiftly on before that nasty little hurdle sinks in and causes confusion.
Some of them might, just might, envy me my bits of gritty nitty. For a start they missed the local reporter who, given the chore of recording the town's events of 50 years earlier, slammed the file shut at the conclusion of his year and said, "Thank God, that's the job finished." It was gently pointed out to him that however long he lived and slaved, and grew peevish and a small black moustache, there would always be a 50 years ago waiting for him in the brittle, yellowing pages.
"Accrington launch survival fight," said a recent BBC headline and I thought for a moment that the old town had given up, sold the silver, headed for Blackburn eight miles away, clacking away in its little clogs. Not so. It was about football, not the town. And I am glad about that because once, Accrington, the town, belonged to me, JRPR (junior reporter/proof reader), aged 16 or thereabouts - and Mrs Sinkinson, give or take one or two more who were there at the time. We were, in military terms, "embedded" in the nicest possible way.
Mrs Sinkinson was sister of the proprietors of the Accrington Observer and every week she wrote a column called Ladies' Chain. Nothing to do with tying herself to railings: it was just considered an appropriate title. She never visited the office so I visited her - the reporter seldom trusted to report. I cycled up the long hill to her home once a week. There, panting like a new-born pup - me, that is - she confronted me on her doorstep, and never once invited me in. She placed the golden despatch in my hand and I went back to the office, feeling no less important than Reuters. Her despatch, in the little black case that swung from my saddle, was secure. Without me, Accrington would have lost its links to the charms and graces of its leading local ladies.
Mrs Sinkinson never said much. "Nice" was her usual response to my arrival. "Nice day" was a speech that exhausted her. But eventually, she presented me with a well-thumbed book about journalism in London and smiled, in a wintry kind of way, before closing her door. I read it almost immediately, then read it again for good luck. It was a sort of unemotional bonding, a passing of the baton of life, this unusual gesture.
I still remember a snippet from it:
If with the lamp of truth you'd look to see things plain and clear, first you must dam the beaver brook and drain the rother mere.
Not very nice to Lord B, my future employer, was it? For him I mean. I rather liked it.
Mrs Sinkinson was, in the memory, tall, slender, shadowed and faceless, a Victorian figurine, Beatrix Potter without the Herdwicks.
I would like to have asked one of the proprietors - Mr Richard Crossley, actually, rather than Mr Robert - about her but never dared. He and I were always wrestling to preserve his wretchedly rumbling and domineering stomach, and there were days when the stomach was beating us both. He was a martyr to stomach was Mr Richard. The only mercy in his important life was that he hadn't been born a cow, with four. I was never out of Boots on his behalf. I don't suppose the Bodleian would be able to solve that.
The proof reader, Guy Cunliffe, tussled with the professional part of Mr Richard. "Mr Richard," he said, "this advert in the earpiece at the top of page one - it could give us a bit of trouble."
Mr Richard examined it carefully, then said, "Why?"
"Well," said Guy, "the advertiser's name is Robert Saul and he has used only the initial, R."
"What's wrong with that?" said Mr Richard?
"R. Saul," said Guy summoning all the courage he could muster in Mr Richard's previously unsullied office.
I am not, at this point, sure what Mr Richard's verdict was. Perhaps he decided that if he did not see a fault, his readers were incapable of seeing one. In any case, he probably realised that he was the one who would have to tell Mr Saul that his shortened name was an abomination in the eyes of decent Accringtonians, Guy Cunliffe, almost certainly Mrs Sinkinson, and, however reluctantly, his good self - not easy when the advert pulled in regular cash.
I recall another conversation between Guy and Mr Richard. It involved a cartoon of a flock of birds in an advert. One of the humans passing beneath them was quoted as saying, "Out of all these people it had to choose me." Mr Richard, in his innocence, could not get it through his head at all. To him, it was a a pastoral scene with a human being grateful in a quasi-religious sort of way for the close proximity of these lovely airborne creatures. But suddenly, with an awful expression, truth dawned and he said, "You mean one crapped on him? We can't have that."
Trivial stuff, you might say in the face of that noisy nonsense despatched from New York, Tokyo, or Paris, where the late-comers, the university lot, often ended in the course of their journalistic careers. Trivial? Trivial? My word, it was Ypres, Dunkirk and the Boer War in our little nook down a side street. You see now, perhaps, why I am sensitive to news from Accrington?
While Mr Richard and Mrs Sinkinson were still abed on Tuesday mornings I was in the machine room of the Observer selling the new edition to newsagents who were a bit testy at 6.30 am. They smelled of Thwaites's bitter, and gnashed their gums at life's minor ills, their heads monotonously clothed in the same kind of cap: worn slightly to one side, left or right depending on individual choice, damp, and uniformly drab. No ties of course, just granddad shirts. They reminded me of the agricultural show livestock - "Long-faced tipplers with not more than four broad teeth."
There were always a few Observer spoils in the bin and I took them home as a perk of the trade. If I had a tiny byline after working the week-end - Rex being my proper signature for sporting events, the well-read among you will no doubt recall - I could see it six times at once if I laid out the papers on the floor. I could then sense an attentive audience. It was, in my eyes, Power. Not so much as Mr Richard's Power, but real, tangible, displayed-on-the-carpet publish-and-be-damned Power.
I got a bit bored sometimes. I covered a Sunday church gathering of council chairmen and officials at Church Kirk, Church, and wrote, "At this point, the chairman of the council turned to a fellow chairman, and since there is some doubt about the propriety of what was said, the Rev. R. H. Steven is believed to have offered up a prayer for their souls."
The editor - who drank 40 cups of tea day, 36 made by me, four by his wife - was delighted. I had to practically wrestle him to the bare boards of the readers' office to convince him that I was joking.
Many mature women in those days finished a little above the ankle and appeared again in the area of the neck. Anything that might have caused emotion in men was buried beneath this black and uncharted railway tunnel of cloth. There was not supposed to be anything noteworthy between opposite ends of them apart from corsets. In the circumstances, I am surprised the human race continued at all.
"I fancy an early night, dear." "Right, darling. You nip off to bed then. I'll just disrobe in the spare room and be with you in four hours."
Frank Randle, the Lancashire comedian, had a caravan at Accrington, close by the Hippodrome. He was against fellow performers appearing with teeth. His teeth were in his pocket (a trait adopted by John Barbirolli as he conducted the Halle) and he produced them only for the final curtain. They allowed him to talk pseudo-posh to show that he wasn't as daft as he looked.
Randle joke: "Church bells are nice." "What?" "Church bells - nice." "Eh?" "I SAID T' CHURCH BELLS ARE NICE."
"Oh it's no good. Can't hear thi for them bloody bells."
"And what do you want to be when you grow up?" asked a teacher of the boy Amos Wade.
"Please miss," he said, "mur of Accrington." And you know, he was.
When I left Accrington for Blackburn, where the resident lady journalist composed Doris Chats With You Over the Teacups, Mr Richard was not convinced that I could write their language. Blackburn was slightly west of Tokyo in many Accrington eyes, and although it had a nice Booth's emporium, it was marred by city slickness and made over-confident by having its own cathedral.
"Are you sure you are ready for the big time?"
Ready? Ready, willing and able. While the future Sir Kenneth Barnes was trudging away with economics, philosophy and whatever came his featureless way at Oxford, I was soaring in clear career-choice skies with those defacating birds.
Or I thought I was. The ladies' circles would miss my vivid four-line descriptions of their affairs, I imagined. But I swopped 12s6d a week for £1 willy and nilly. I would learn; I would spread; I would not necessarily get my suit at Burton's any more. My mother would no longer choose it. I would leave the bike at home; I would become a theatre critic in Blackburn's noted cultural life, and one of the very best table tennis players at the police station (basement). And lo! it came to pass.
Now you see why my spreading roots have left a little cluster of twitching tendrils in Accrington.
And why the headline about Accrington survival gave me a start.
It was Accrington Stanley again: they needed £308,000 for Inland Revenue, otherwise it would be good luck and goodbye to them. Had to be serious. Bury were thinking of a bucket collection to help.
If anybody runs into Sir Kenneth, give the poor soul the news.
I don't know what our colonel would have made of Helmand Province, a sad, sad place to live in, or fight in. He was the biggest digger of latrines in history, they say. Thankfully, he had done it all before I joined his regiment.
We all know what a latrine is, I take it? A lavatory having a joke. I came across one Army version near Toulon – circular, a 12-holer by the look of it: I never counted. Brave fighting men dare not use it until the sun went down because otherwise, French women came to chat to them in a most friendly way. It seemed to be their idea of neighbourliness.
Orderlies cleaned the monster regularly by throwing a gallon of petrol down one hole, followed by a match. The result was, I imagine, a bit like Baghdad on an average day. Bubooooom! Anyway, one day they did it and some poor hero sailed off his seat at the other side of the structure. I don't know the end result. I imagine he was recruited on landing by the Air Force.
In Israel nee Palestine, civilians did not flush paper because it would have blocked their narrow pipes. They erected big wire baskets next to their lavatories. As for the army, an orderly rigged up a row of seats for a general's visit. As the great man entered at one end, the orderly pulled a rope and every seat went up at once: the most inventive salute since the more modern waving of one finger.
Our colonel would have loved it. Somebody, some day, will discover that there are 1,000 of his disused latrines all up Italy. Some poor soul with a small trowel and a magnifying glass might even look for pottery there, to his everlasting grief. Now that I have revealed the source, Mr Berlusconi – if he can find a chink in his exhausting lifestyle - will know that the culprit was not, after all, Nero in one of his moods.
I could imitate the colonel very well, they tell me. At jollies, people formed a squad and marched up and down among the beer bottles doing the Gateshead shuffle. This was supposedly imitating cocky young men in the north-east. It was a sort of strut; every other step sent up one shoulder, and that's as near as I can describe it. I can walk it easily, though, even now. There was a mantra attached - “Does your mother sew?” “Well, sew that.” Followed by the swing of an imaginary cycle chain to the head.
So there they were: marching up and down and at the end I would give a little speech, just as the colonel would give it:
“I want you all to know that vewy showtly we will be going to BOAR.” He meant BAOR, the British Army of the Rhine, but got it wrong. He did not sound his r's – that was the trick. I have marched a squad of Gateshead shufflers up and down at jollies in front of majors who rather liked this treacherous demeaning of our master. The colonel never knew, of course. He was too busy practising more speeches or writing letters to pals at the War Office.
In jocular mood, he would draw two little circles at the foot of his letters and add: “They bounce, too.”
Not too good on generals, our colonel. We were in the Middle East. He had been on leave and arrived back from UK in a shabby uniform and soiled belt. “The general is arriving any minute, sir,” said the orderly room sergeant major – who, incidentally, was named Kemsley and who conducted radio orchestras with all the passion of the real thing.
The colonel began a run towards the door. Too late. The general had arrived. The staff car was there. The general – Bols, I seem to remember (we were 6 Airborne) – exited through one door of his car and the colonel by this time had opened the wrong door, allowing a corporal to get out. Dancing in sprightly manner to the other side, the colonel made up for his mistake and said to the general, “So sorry, sir. If I'd known you were coming I wouldn't have been here.”
It was an improvement on the melody line of later years - “If I'd known you were coming I'd have baked a cake.”
I liked the colonel. He was a good man, rather avuncular, and Up There. He once stopped me and inquired about my health: he thought I needed to put on weight. I could see his point. I was 107 and a half pounds and thought it best to keep to gliders since had I chosen parachuting I might have gone up rather than down when exiting the aircraft.
When the RSM screamed at some poor bloke who had annoyed him by existing in the wrong place, making it all the louder to impress the colonel, the orderly room window shot open and the C.O. shouted, in that familiar squeak, “Stop that bwoody wow!” I rather admired that. Chastened RSM's were rare, I had discovered. Give an Army man a little stick to put under one arm and he rules the world.
Our colonel had an adjutant who practised quick revolver draws in front of their shared office mirror when he thought no-one was watching. It was his John Wayne act, though he was better at the draw than the drawl.
Adjutants, I thought, were always slightly dotty. Long after I had left the Army I bent down to pick up something in a Southern supermarket and spied, three aisles away, some legs. I recognised them immediately as the quick-draw adjutant's. I instinctively looked for the horse but there was none. When I knew him he was never beyond sniffing distance of one even though we had armoured cars.
There was an adjutant who could never get the exchange to answer his phone, so he would leap to the open window and bellow, “Answer this bloody phone will you?”
Another put sand on the steps at Shepherd's Hotel in Cairo so that senior officers could walk down them in their desert boots.
Yet another was captured on his way to lunch in the mess. He ended in a right mess as it happens. He was tied next to a kind of large fizzing bomb by the side of the ammunition dump. Fortunately the RSM noticed something funny was afoot – not often you see a prostrate adjutant lying next to a fizzing bomb during lunch after all - and we all ran about doing brave things. Well, some did. At any rate there were a few bodies strewn about afterwards.
The second in command was notable for having eaten his credentials when captured in the Western Desert. His credentials were made of cardboard. We all admired that. It was probably the first recorded instance of recycling by mastication.
So there we are, then. No, I don't envy all those who have to endure Helmand Province. Not at all. The whole place looks like a latrine to me. all brown dust and distant peaks made of more dust. Who would want to lift the tent flap and see that?
I can't even offer any worth-while comment, unless it is that if our troops discover any strange latrines containing Vera Lynn pictures they will know who has been there before them.
© geoffrey mather 2009
