No. I am not going to pass. I am going to die. How can people be frightened of words? And, no, I do not want to be called by my Christian name by people I don’t know who don’t know me.
But at least we don’t have to deal with the confounded tu-ing and vous-ing that they do across the channel.
As a child one is naturally direct. Obfuscation, irony and all the twists and turns of language are still to come.
I will always treasure my eight-year-old son’s description of his much-loved tortoise which did nothing all day except shuffle about, bump into the wall and topple over, as ‘small, quiet and brave’; or the memory of myself, as a five-year-old, shouting FRIEND OR FOE? each time there was a knock at the front door. I was giving a very clear (if inappropriate) command, though it was not long before, to the delight of me and my friends, two German airmen, whose plane had crashed on the moors just beyond our house, did have to be rescued and were escorted away by the village policeman.
Such excitement was rare in that peaceful spot: excitement is far from rare as, spellbound, I watch an old BBC dramatization of Little Dorritt. Not unlike a child, Dickens saw things in black and white. He did not fudge experience by using euphemisms. His characters are, with a few exceptions, very good or very bad and death is death.
Things can go too far, of course, and blunt language is not always appropriate, but false intimacy is not the answer. One organisation which steers well clear of this is Universal Aunts. Every caller – and a person, not a machine, answers the phone – is addressed by their surname until a relationship has been established. Founded in 1921 by an unmarried lady at a loss for occupation when she was no longer needed to supervise the return from the colonies of all her nephews and nieces, it offered, and still offers today, to ‘do anything for anyone at any time’. A happy reminder of how things used to be.
I know of no one who is not beside themselves with anger, grief and disbelief at the suffering of the Palestinians, but I have also become aware of a difference in the way Jews who have living memories of the holocaust relate to what is happening from those who don’t.
For myself, I will never forget the day my mother got the news of her mother’s death. It was in a phone call from the Foreign Office. I was playing alone in the garden on the hump of the air-raid shelter when – the French doors were open – I heard the phone ring, and then my mother’s voice . . .
Corpses found by the Soviet authorities at the Klooga concentration camp after the Nazi German forces’ departure (late 1944) Image: Creative Commons
Nor have I been able to forget Ruti, daughter of my mother’s closest friend, who was raped before being murdered. The Germans kept meticulous records.
Ruti, standing between my brother and our English governess, on the beach.
Is it a wonder that a nation which emerged out of those horrors feels the need not to let it happen again? Like David pitted against Goliath, what choice do they have other than to use their wits? And where are they supposed to go? Why would anywhere else be more welcoming?
No one seems to want us, and yet I can’t help thinking that I wouldn’t mind finding myself in some Never-Never land along with Jerry Seinfeld and Harpo Marx . . . I would happily attend lectures by Ernst Gombrich or Jacob Bronowski and sit, willingly if uncomprehendingly, at the feet of Albert Einstein.
Photograph of Albert Einstein with Cmdr Locker-Lampson MP and secretary, in Norfolk, 1933, by Planet News Ltd., signed by Einstein. Image is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.
And how thrilling it would be to catch a glimpse of Soutine or Rothko or Modigliani, my teenage favourite who does seem a little vapid now. Or hear Barenboim or Horowitz practising scales . . .
And what about Claudia Roden, Maurice Sendak and Art Spiegelman? The possibilities for great food and amusing company are endless and, going back a bit, I might have caught a glimpse of Freud or Marx, or even Jesus himself.
In this Nowhere land there would also be those I would want to avoid, Netanyahu most of all. Every time there is a financial scandal I heave a sigh of relief if the culprit isn’t Jewish. They usually are. Centuries of practice in banking have refined this extremely ugly skill. Uglier still are the doings of the sexual predators, too often wealthy members of my race.
But it takes all sorts, and there would have to be room for them too, because no other country wants to have any of us, not even Leonard Cohen or Amy Winehouse.
As I walk a little unsteadily about the house I have lived in for sixty years, I often fall into musing about the different turns life might have taken.
What if, for example, someone had not dropped in on me and my three-year-old son and left a copy of the New Statesman on the table? Leafing through it I came on an ad in the personal column reading: American professor seeks room in genial household . . . .
And what if, some years before that, I had said Yes. I could have spent a sheltered life at the side of an Oxford don.
But you can’t have it all ways and so much is a matter of luck. For instance, what luck that we had just bought our first viable car when told of a cottage to rent on a North Yorkshire sheep farm. The car’s very first outing got us there in time, and it was eighteen years before the drive to that enchanted place became too much: not for the car but for us.
And if, in our travelling years, it hadn’t been that particular taxi which took us to the Valley of the Kings, I would never have been led through that biblical landscape sitting on a donkey. This is what happened after I had admired the view from the rooftop of the taxi driver’s house, and it is is one of the happiest memories of all our travelling days.
Other What Ifs were more consequential: what if the outgoing editor at André Deutsch Limited — an Oxford friend — had not talked her employer into taking me on as her replacement? I was to stay there for thirty years.
And more momentous still: what if in October 1939 my Estonian grandmother had prevailed upon my father to leave us behind in the then safety of Tallinn . . . Only my brother and I (of the eight children seen here at my previous birthday party) were to be alive two years later.
Having learnt, by chance, that a book I remembered lending to Craig Brown some forty-odd years ago (when we were working on the The Dirty Bits) was now worth quite a bit of money, I dropped Craig a line c/o The Oldie. Though we had not met since, he answered by return and in friendly fashion, but where my signed copy of The Book of Grass is now, remains anyone’s guess . . .
I had met George through M who I had got to know when she and her parrot were in the room next to mine at St Hilda’s in Oxford, where we were both reading English. As adventurous in life as she was intellectually (among her publications: Sixteen Takes on a Self-Invented Woman and The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee), she became a lifelong friend, and it was through her that I met many characters on the edge of polite society, two of whom, were to become my lodgers. One of these was George Andrews whose Book of Grass: an anthology of Indian Hemp has become a classic.
I was not interested in marijuana but had no objection to it – except as a substitute for the rent. When I told George I didneed the two pounds but I didn’tneed the weed, as smoking just made me choke, he came up with some hash brownies as a gift. But these had no more effect on me than the LSD I had experimented with a few years before.
In spite of my shortcomings as a smoker, our relationship remained friendly if remote. He would appear briefly in the kitchen to spoon out some brown rice (all I ever saw him eat) or greet me with a beatific ‘Hi man’ as he floated past on his way to or from his room.
It did not alter even after the visit of his wife – a spectre in flowing robes with glitter on her eyelids – of whose existence I had not previously known. She came, went and was never mentioned again.
Most of the time I was aware of his presence only through the smell of pot, of which the house reeked throughout his stay: a stay which came to an end when I could no longer put up with the tsunami of phone calls. George was, of course, dealing and my house had become his headquarters.
He moved on without rancour – I had probably lasted longer than most of his landladies – and, not long after, I received a letter from an address in Wales, inviting me to stay.
Some twenty years later my jazz musician son found it hard to believe that at one time he had hated the smell of pot. As for what became of George: when I last googled him, I saw he was back in the States and his interest now was in flying saucers.
“Do you have family?” I was once asked, in all seriousness, by my host, the lord of the local manor, who was kindly putting me up for the night after the funeral of a young relative of his who had also been a friend of mine. I must have muttered something, and the awkwardness of the moment was doubtless overlaid both by the nature of the occasion and the wonder of the surroundings: the panelled walls, the painted ceilings and, of course, the portraits of my friend’s ancestors, of whom she had never spoken, dating back to Elizabethan times.
Now, all these years later and with my genial host long dead, I want to give the answer I should have given then. Yes, I do havefamily but I wouldn’t need to stand on a chair to unfurl my family tree. I could write everything I know on a single sheet of paper and my forebears would have looked less like this:
Portrait of Mr & Mrs Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough, National Gallery, licensed under Creative Commons
than like this:
It is oddly fitting that they are so generously clothed for clothes, or schmutters, were the family trade. Though my father’s father got side-lined (see Land of my Fathers) and his Regent Street shop closed long ago, the shop in Tallinn that was founded in the nineteen-twenties by Heinrich Gutkin, an uncle of my mother’s, is thriving still. Long forgotten by most of those who wander among the colourful bales of fabric are the years of its closure during the Soviet regime and the fate of the shop’s founder, who was deported to a prison camp in the Soviet Union and never returned.
Forgotten too, but commemorated in this book, are the lives of those murdered during the German occupation.
Among them was my maternal grandmother, seen here (with parasol) in happier times.
That there are no earlier family photographs or records does not mean I have fewer ancestors than my long-ago host. What it means is that his family prospered, whether through gallantry or marauding, and were soon thoroughly ‘landed’ whereas mine, after leaving what was then Palestine, their ancestral home*, were scattered throughout Eastern Europe, living in shtetls: the men wrapped in their prayer shawls, the women foraging for food and preparing the next meal.
How these peasants morphed into the Jews of today is another story but both then and now, they belong to the same family as everyone else. Whatever anyone’s nationality, religion, colour or ‘standing’: everyone belongs to the Family of Man.
*As a result of persecution, expulsions and massacres carried out by the Crusaders, Jews gradually migrated to Central and Eastern Europe, settling in Poland, Lithuania and Russia, where they found greater security and a renewal of prosperity. (Wikipedia)
It was a comfort, the other day, to hear the actor who played Logan Roy in Succession say he is always forgetting what he has come to get as he moves from one room to another. But how on earth, I wondered, was he going to carry on in live theatre when so forgetful. Only a few days later, I happened to meet a mostly out-of-work actor who is quite often employed as a kind of super-prompter or horse-whisperer, able to feed an ageing actor his or her lines throughout a performance.
A full-time carer is, of course, the ideal answer when life becomes unmanageable and family is not at hand, but very few can afford this luxury and, when drawing up our wills, my solicitor warned against the phantom – he named her Agatha, for ease of reference – who might move in on my husband should I die before him. It seems widowers often take the Agatha route. The speed with which they re-marry is phenomenal. Does a decrepit eighty-five year old with a handsome pension really think it is him this sixty-year-old widow is in love with?
Be that as it may, most of us don’t have full-time carers and just have to make the best of it, treating the traipsing from one room to another – looking for we no longer remember what – as useful exercise, while we focus on finding new ways to do things.
In my own case, I have not yet found a way of opening a can which doesn’t have a ring to pull and was almost reduced to tears by a tin of rice pudding.
But though I was defeated by that, most problems prove to be solvable. For instance, bread can be defrosted on a radiator, and applying a bit of ink to the exact spot on my leg where there was a hole in my tracksuit made the hole disappear.
Less successful was hammering two frozen salmon fillets to try and separate them. Not only did the noise bring my lodger hurtling downstairs to see what was happening but the fillets, like an old married couple, would not be separated and were eventually cooked as one.
And then there were was the pack of sausages I had put in the freezer without separating them first. My friend Gill advised me not to be tempted to throw them at the kitchen floor, a method she had tried, breaking a floor tile but leaving the sausage sculpture intact.
It seems that I will just have to wait until I can face having sausages four nights running or, perhaps, a sausage party . . .
There isn’t, alas, an easy solution to all the problems of old age and, as I go from room to room (looking again for I no longer remember what), I often think of the Mary Feilding Guild residential home, now sold down the river, where my friend Mary Hobson lived happily in one roomwith everything she needed within easy reach.
As a stepping stone back to the present from the distant past, a memory from not quite so long ago . . .
It was my good luck that, in the early sixties, when I came to work in the editorial department at André Deutsch alongside Diana Athill, Jean wasn’t famous. Bequeathed to Diana by that remarkable truffle-hound Frances Wyndham who had in truth rediscovered her, she was no more than a name on the list of five ‘outstanding options’ which I inherited from my predecessor and which became the bane of my life.
With Frances Wyndham now long gone, the name Jean Rhys sparked no interest in anyone in the office except André, who raised it and those of the other malingerers at the editorial meeting every single week. He had paid her £50 and if that meant sending someone down to Devon to get the long-overdue novel out of her, so be it. And the person who went, as no one else offered to go, was me.
Deutsch editorial meeting c. 1965
Briefed by Diana, who told me nothing about Jean except that she was old, in a muddle, drank too much and couldn’t type, I was happy to take a couple of days off from my own shaky marriage, packed my little Olivetti typewriter and took the train down to Cheriton Fitzpaine, where Diana had arranged for me to stay at the vicarage.
At the time the Reverend Woodward, a kind and scholarly man – one could imagine him playing cricket in his youth – was not yet a part of literary history as he and Mr Greenslade, the taxi driver, were to become in the excitement that followed Jean’s re-discovery: the initial boom now a cult, but still producing occasional works of real scholarship.
Be that as it may, I had a warm welcome at the vicarage and before long the Reverend Woodward – the one person in that benighted villages (as it seemed to Jean) who could understand her – was walking me down to the wretched little bungalow where she lived.
I will never forget the first sight of her as she opened the front door: small, fragile, quavery, her huge eyes downcast. She did not look long for this world.
In fact, she was to live for another ten years, but those days as her amanuensis (which I have described elsewhere) were to be the entirety of my role in her life. This was lucky for both of us: she needed someone more like herself, not someone with no taste for alcohol and no interest in pretty clothes, I would have been entirely out of place in the world she was about to enter.
But I feel lucky to have met her and to have had the privilege of typing out, at her dictation, several handwritten pages of Wide Sargasso Sea.
I may have discovered (or, rather, been the first to recognize) a few writers, but my grandfather discovered a gold mine. Well, not actually gold but oil shale which for many years has been one of Estonia’s largest industries and, though now a denigrated substance, is still exported by them and used throughout the world.
It happened something like this: born in a small town in Belarus but orphaned at an early age, my grandfather was raised by an uncle and aunt in nearby Tallinn, and soon speaking some Estonian as well as Russian and Yiddish. English was to be added when, to escape the mandatory twenty years of military service (Estonia was then part of the Russian empire) he made his escape intending, we believe, to go to New York but – could he possibly have thought he was already there? – never getting further than England. There he found work as a tailor and, before very long, had not only married and started a family, but had his own shop.
But, though as English as could be in appearance, with his trilby and plus fours, he still drank his tea with jam, Russian-style, and dreamt of home. And as soon as his girl children were old enough to be left in charge of the shop he went back to Estonia, not just on short fur-buying trips – for the shop now sold furs as well as ladies’ outfits – but on a mission to help it achieve independence. He had already arranged for Estonian flax to be shipped to Scotland. He was now on the look-out for something bigger . . .
Some hundred or so years earlier, according to legend, the villagers of a small parish in Estonia had found that the soil with which they were building a protective wall around a camp fire was combustible. They called the substance Burning Stone.
‘Burning Stone’
Perhaps it was this which set my tailor grandfather off on prospecting trips with his friend, Gerhard Lukk, a mechanical engineer who would have provided the know-how which my visionary grandfather did not have. Be that as it may, before long they had found the site which was to become the giant mining complex where my mining engineer father was to spend the next twenty years.
My grandfather on the site that became the Vanamoisa mining complex
I have seen Vanamoissa only in photographs: when, in the early 1960s, I first went back to Estonia, where I had lived for most of my first five years, foreigners were not allowed to go to the mining area or, indeed, anywhere else. It took endless meetings with officials to get permission to visit the family graves. We shouldn’t have bothered. The graveyard had been razed*. There was nothing left to see.
But photographs tell me as much as I need to know about Vanamoissa and this happiest time of my father’s life, when he was doing the work he was cut out to do and had no idea what lay ahead.
My father (seated on chair with arms and legs crossed) at Camborne School of Mines
My father (with cigarette) down the mine
What lay ahead for everyone, was World War 2. What lay ahead for my grandfather, back in England for good now, was a peaceful old age. It was very different for Gerhard Lukk. He had been (I quote) taken away from his home by the NKVD in an official black car as his five children looked on.
This, and the date of his abduction – June 18, 1941 – I was to learn only relatively recently when an Estonian film-maker, Tiina Soomet, living in Canada, got in touch with me after reading an article which I had helped to translate** on the Estonian Jewish Archive website. These were the words that had drawn her attention:
in 1919, two mining engineers, Alexander Menell and Gerhard Lukk (about whom, alas, we know very little) approach the Estonian government for permission to carry out a surface examination.
Thanks to Tiina, I learnt that Gerhard Lukk’s five children all survived the war and ultimately settled in the UK, Canada and the United States. One of Gerhard Lukk’s granddaughters had become a particular friend of hers and enlisted her help in piecing together what had become of her grandfather. In this they received invaluable help from the Netherlands Baltic Association, for it turned out that my grandfather’s friend had been not only an engineer but also Consul General of the Netherlands.
Gerhard Lukk
Further information began to emerge and we find that in 1942 Gerhard Lukk was sentencedby the Special Board of the NKVD to 10 years in a Labour Camp. No more is known about the last years of his life but, In June 2001, it appears he was rehabilitated (posthumously) by ‘the resolution of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation.’ Small comfort.
But, happily, the story does not end there. In 2022, at an official state ceremony on June 14 (the National Day of Mourning***) a plaque with his name on it was unveiled on Tallinn’s Memorial Wall to the Victims of Communism, and his granddaughter was there to see this happen.
View of the dazzling 200 metre long corridor showing the section where 22,000 honeybees represent the number of victims
How little has changed. The town in Ukraine where my grandfather was born is a battleground. The country where he grew up and which he so loved is in imminent danger of being invaded, once again, by its powerful neighbour.
I am glad my grandfather doesn’t know this, nor that his granddaughter can’t sew on a button. The one time I did this it was sewn on so tight it wouldn’t button or unbutton.
Received last Christmas from one of my relatives still living in Tallinn
*The Germans overran the country in the first year of the war. Only eight Jews of the original 4,000 survived the occupation. The other Baltic countries, which had large Jewish populations, became killing fields.
**Burning Stone by Mark Rybak in the Estonian Jewish Archive
*** This day commemorates the victims of the June 13/14, 1941 mass deportations of Estonians to uninhabitable parts of Russia.
It is good luck, while I am feeling out of sorts, to be able to recycle something written long ago for my own amusement. The model for it and a few others like it (Jean Rhys among them) was the ‘I Once Met’ column in The Oldie and it happens to fit with the concluding lines of my last post: ‘You only have to live long enough to become of interest because of the people you have known.’ In this case it is the writer V.S. Naipaul.
It had been my good fortune that Naipaul had, albeit briefly, fallen out with his long-time editor, Diana Ahilll, and I had the honour (as he would certainly have considered it) of editing A Bend in the River which arrived during this spat.
So nervous was I of displeasing our most important author that I put everything else aside and read A Bend in the River in one long sitting. Compared with his early novels and brilliant non-fiction this was dull stuff, but admiration – whether genuine or feigned – goes a long way and when, in the course of the phone call that followed, he heard I was going to be spending a week not far from where he lived, he invited me and my husband to supper.
The evening did not begin well. It was Vidia who opened the door to us and, all nerves, I thrust the bottle of wine I had bought that morning into his hand. I had made a special trip to Marlborough to get it and, knowing nothing about wine, just chose one with an appealing label.
His very first words, as he slid the wine out of its wrapping were: This isn’t fit to drink.
With the speed of lightning his wife, Pat, took the bottle off him, saying it would be perfect for cooking. Even as she spoke I could see a table laid with three glasses beside each plate and, in the far corner of the room, a stack of Wine Society cartons. And I had wondered if, as a Hindu, he drank at all . . .
I was soon to find out how wrong I had been as he squatted in front of me – I was seated by now – and, like an overly concerned nursery-school teacher, proceeded to give me detailed guidance on what to buy, what to pay and what to drink with what.
Amazingly enough, after that inauspicious beginning, and thanks to the presence of my husband, to whom he could not condescend, we had a pleasurable rest of the evening. When he was not focussed on his own importance, it was enthralling to spend time in his company and, difficult though he was in so many ways, I am left admiring him, not only his own works but also for allowing his biographer a free rein to expose him as the monster he was and knew himself to be.
I heard the other day that cassettes are coming back into fashion. For me, they never went out and I find myself ahead of the game, just as I used to be at school when, being so slow on my feet, I was always in the right place when the game turned.
Photo: State Government Photographer, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
How could people, I wondered, keep discarding one precious thing after another, as long-playing records took over from 78s and then more and more sophisticated electronic devices allowed a person to carry about more music than they could possibly find time to listen to, secreted in one small electronic device.
I was horrified when R, who was pretty much immune to shopping, bought himself one of those gadgets, and pleased that before long he had forgotten where he had put it and didn’t try to find it.
We went on listening to our records, CDs and the radio, sitting down beside the ‘music centre’ which had been our first major purchase. And, when away from home, I took my cassette player with me and always had just three or four cassettes which have remained, for ever, connected to the place where I listened to them most often. The ‘green record’ shown directly below (Mozart Trio K563) will always take me back to the Outer Hebrides.
Then, of course, there were those cassettes bought wherever we happened to be: Bruno Venturi in Naples, Georges Brassens in Paris, in Portugal Amalia Rodrigues and, from a rack in a Spanish petrol station, Nina de Antequera belting out some wonderfully coarse flamenco.
Less entirely pleasurable to listen to but wonderfully exotic are the Turkish dervish music from Konya and the cassette chosen for me – it was his favourite – by a boatman on the Nile.
Now that I seldom travel further than the local high street, these memory-laden tapes serve as time travellers and, ropey as most of them now are, become more precious with age. So, it seems, do I. You only have to live long enough to become of interest because of the people you have known: a kind of living relic.
All publishers, past and present, have stories about authors theyhave missed out on, but not many will involve having the soon-to-be-successful writer on their premises. I was reminded of this by coming across one of Andrea Newman’s novels in a charity shop the other day . . .
The first thing I had noticed about Andrea was her ring. Which would have pleased her. For she had bought the large diamond for herself.
The two of us were in a kind of mini-bus along with several other people who had been on the flight from London to this Majorcan resort and were now being dropped off at the various hotels.
Hers, reached before mine, was on the front, and I did not expect to see her again nor think that, with her bouffant ash-blond hair and diamond ring, we would have much to say to each other. It was a surprise, therefore, when the next day, as I looked down from the promenade, I saw her lying flat on the sand, reading what looked like a very long poem . . .
Andrea, it turned out, was a writer who, unlike most published writers, was sensibly hedging her bets by taking a further degree. She did not take it for granted that she would complete another novel or have the film rights of it bought if she did, and it was Paradise Lost she was reading on the sand.
From now on she, who had come to recover from a broken love affair and I to get a good night’s sleep while my baby son kept his father awake in my stead, spent a lot of time together and, thanks to the tour company preferring not to have people dining alone, it was arranged for me to have all my evening meals with her at her seafront hotel.
It was thanks to this that Andrea discovered that though I knew more about Milton than she yet did, there was a subject about which she knew a lot and I knew nothing, and that was alcohol. It made no difference when I told her I didn’t like the taste. Every evening she would try me on something different till, in despair, she ordered a very sweet liqueur . . .
It would have amused her to know that some years later, Henry McNulty, the suave anglicised American who was drinks editor of Vogue, complained that I had a ‘child’s palate’, though he did congratulate me for my contribution to his book. I had invented names for many of the extravagant concoctions in his Vogue Guide to Cocktails.
I was never to edit Andrea, though I might have done had André paid more attention when I brought her round to see his office. This was by way of research. She was planning a novel in which the main male character was a publisher. Had André turned on his charm, we could have published Bouquet of Barbed Wire which, when adapted for television, had 20 million viewers.
It is also not impossible, for Andrea liked older men (well, actually, she liked all men), that she might have brought the book to life. Although an early marriage to a local boy in the provincial town where she was born allowed her – with her strict Catholic upbringing – to have early sex, that marriage didn’t survive what London had to offer. I listened raptly to her tales of group sex, and was shown photographs, both lewd and sentimental, taken by the rich lover who had recently deserted her but who would soon be replaced.
Not only a sexual adventurer but also an astute and self-taught businesswoman, Andrea was in many ways ahead of her time.
And though our friendship ended in tatters, as her friendships with women always did, I remember her with affection and some admiration. She not only wrote well but, for all her metropolitan success, did not forget the past. She remained a dutiful and loving daughter, though what her pious mother made of the novels she typed up for her daughter and then put in the fridge for safe-keeping, we can only guess.
Whilst every news item tells of the horrendous war raging in the Middle East, I am taking shelter down memory lane, taking a last look at R’s papers before I hand them over to the archive*. Amongst them I rediscover the several hundred bad-tempered letters (there were letters in those days) I found waiting for me, some thirty years ago, when I returned to the office after a week’s holiday.
At the time I was working on R’s guide to parish churches, and the last thing I had done before leaving was write to the vicar of every church which had an entry enclosing the relevant text and asking him (or her) to let me know of any factual errors; at the same time, offering a discount, should they want to order a copy. And, in the hope of averting irrelevant comment, I ended by saying we hoped they would be happy with the description of their church and pointed out that it had been singled out from a stock of more than 18,000.
Among the flood of replies – every one of which enclosed an order for one or more discounted copies – a half-dozen were friendly and appreciative. The others ranged from disgruntled to enraged. One vicar had simply scrawled UGH! beside a common contraction. Another slashed out ‘remarkable’ (in relation to bench ends) and substituted UNIQUE. Yet another accused our author of ‘slapdash work’, though every one of his myriad complaints showed we had both Nicolas Pevsner and the RCHME on our side.
These good men of the cloth (they were mostly men) were up in arms. One actually had one of his parishioners re-write the entry and demanded payment for it, while another asked, more politely, but firmly, that his church be omitted. Yet another asked to be paid for answering and, most un-Christian of all, was the vicar who (his alarmed lady secretary rang to warn me) was planning to sue us.
Is it any surprise that most of the wars we have experienced or learnt about when we were at school have their origins in one religion or another?
But best not to forget that so many of the world’s greatest buildings and works of art, share the same foundation.
The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
*The Archive of British Publishing and Printing, which also has a copy of the slightly enlarged edition of the guide published by that radical newspaper The Daily Telegraph.
I should have remembered my decision never to visit a popular destination again (see Abu Simbel) before making the detour to see Salisbury Cathedral with my son and his family.
The previous few days had been spent in Dorset, where the only crowd we had encountered had been as we queued, with other holiday-making families, in the small front garden of the little fossil museum.
Dinosaurland Fossil Museum, Lyme Regis
I did not realise at the time that all the plants on our left were species which had existed over a million years ago. This was the Jurassic Garden. While to our right were the newcomers in what Steve Davies, the creator of the museum, calls the Cretaceous Garden: plants that flowered and fruited aeons before the building of any cathedral.
It was only later I learnt that every plant had been sourced and planted by Mr Davies (who was also selling the tickets) and that he and his wife had arranged the display of the exhibits in this beautiful old building, once a congregational church. Nor did I know that when the museum first opened it had only eighteen exhibits, and that the present glorious profusion is almost entirely the owner’s own work.
In the little book which tells the story* he writes about collectors past and present, the collection itself, and all the people (including his bank manager) who helped him fulfil his dream since, obliged to give notice to a lot of his colleagues (he had worked for twenty years in the oil industry) he also gave notice to himself.
Mary Anning, pioneer fossil collector of Lyme Regis, Dorset. Oil painting by an unknown artist, before 1842. Golden Cap is visible in the background. Held at the Natural History Museum, London.
How different to that happy morning in Lyme Regis was our stopover in Salisbury a few days later.
By the time we got to there and had parked the car (at no little expense), the place was heaving. Exhausted by the long tree-lined walk from the car park to the cathedral itself, I had to prop myself up against the ancient doorway while we queued at the makeshift ticket stall and I wondered if it was worth complaining, but there were chairs in sight now: rows and rows of chairs, which would not have looked out of place in a kitchen.
Collapsed on one of these,** I watched the clusters of volunteer guides chatting away as they distributed leaflets and directed visitors to the highlights, of which the one attracting the largest crowds turned out to be a late 20th century font with mirror-like qualities that, we were told, ‘lead to some incredible reflective photos.’ No mention of the medieval vaulting which people were, perhaps, admiring on their smartphones.
More like Oxford Street on the first day of the sales than a church, we could not escape fast enough, only to find the cathedral was encircled by a barren stretch of grass which had to be crossed to get to a bench. So, to view this glorious edifice sitting down, you found yourself within feet of the road where a stream of cars was making its way to the exit.
Photo of Winchester Cathedral by Zachariah Whitby, 2023
How lucky that earlier in the week we had been to Winchester Cathedral, as yet unspoilt by the ravages of mass tourism. How lucky too that we had also been to see one of the remote village churches R had visited when he was writing the Shell guide.*** No longer in regular use but lovingly cared for, it was – like the little fossil museum – a quiet celebration, not a noisy desecration, of the past.
*The Time of My Life: what does a palaentologist really do. Available from the Dinosaurland Fossil Museum, Lyme Regis.
**There were, it turned out, some wheelchairs stacked against the wall, which it would have been more useful to have found at the distant car park.
It was hearing that many publishers have pretty much given up editing and possibly reading too, along with news of the Parthenon being closed, that reminded me of the last time I had been in Greece, and of who I had met there . . .
I had been working as an editor at André Deutsch for thirty years when an invitation arrived from the Greek Ministry of Culture to a forum on translations. Like all unsolicited mail for editorial it had come to me, but I could hardly take up the invitation as I was on the brink of retiring. By the time of the conference I would have my bus pass.
To my surprise, when I brought the letter down to the next editorial meeting, no one was interested in going. To decline the invitation seemed ungracious, to say the least, and, deciding it was better for them to have me than nobody, I accepted and, after re-reading the Greek novel I had managed to get onto our list: Alexis Parnis’s delightful, absurdist The Proof Reader, I located a Greek-language bookshop, not far from where I live but, until then, unknown to me. Not long after, I was on my way to Delphi.
It was not the first time I had been there, but things had changed. Before, it had been possible to walk in among the ruins, now fenced off against visitors, and my then-husband and I had stayed in a kind of shepherd’s hut. Now I was to be housed in great comfort and though not one of the six of us – for that was the entire numberof our delegation – knew a word of Greek, all except me were in a position to champion the cause of modern Greek literature, above all one of the publishers among us: the shambling, untidy and generally absent Peter Owen.
Our hosts had laid on a series of lectures which, as we could see, had been well attended by previous guest nations. Mortified by the paucity of our numbers, we all, except Peter, attended every one. What he was doing I don’t know, but I do know that on the plane home, while we were all talking about the previous night’s banquet at the Royal Yacht Club in Athens – enlivened by the screeching arrival of my Greek author on a motorbike – he was quietly reading, not a fashionable novel, not the obscure Greek poet who, I believe, he came to publish (he had not been wasting his time) but Jane Austen.
There are not many publishers like him and though he could be inattentive and also late in paying royalties (one of his authors told me that he was ready to throw a brick through his window) he never gave up reading things for himself.
It is now two years since R died and I had hoped to celebrate his life by printing here something I found recently among his papers: an account of a trip he made to Alaska, at the invitation of an old college friend who, at the last moment, was not able to make it himself. R however, fully equipped for the adventure, thanks to his friend’s generosity (this friend had taken a very different path in life which enabled such excursions) did make it and I have, all these years later, come across what he made of the experience. I have not, however, had the time to make it presentable (there are parts which would be of no interest or might be considered indiscreet) so, instead, I reproduce here a detachable piece of his published writings — the preface from the 1994 Ecco Press edition of Eccentric Spaces — which I treasure, even though it did not, as we had hoped it would, land him a job . . . *
It is now more than ten years since this book was written. My own position in the world has never been more eccentric than it was in the year (1973-1974) in which I wrote it. I was out of work, a condition the book cured me of, not by landing me a job (I am still looking) but by making me think it was the right way to be.
I had come back to America to find work after two idyllic years in England. At first I lived with wonderful friends, who though they had a large family and a small house still made room for me. By the time I moved into the sleazy apartment where Eccentric Spaces was written I had applied for everything I could think of, including a post at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and been turned down.
So here I was living on the fringe of the university (Washington University, St Louis) where I used to teach, not allowed to take books from its library, stuck in a student slum, and feeling like a conspirator when I visited my old friends in the English department.
Writing filled up that empty space in the most miraculous way. I am a far from mystical person, but I was propelled to begin by a dream. I mean one of those events which happen to you in the night, not an ‘idea’. Though it would be self-indulgent to recount it here, I think it would have convinced anyone. From that moment I have not really been capable of the same depths of unhappiness as before. From then onward I could say with conviction that everyone contains his own happiness within him.
Vicissitudes, after that, were provided to give something to rise above. In the third week someone came to reclaim the desk I was writing at (borrowed like everything else in the room. My own things were laid out like a simplified map along the base of one wall).
So the next morning I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and locked myself in with a white plastic coffee table. There were further deflections, including, worst of all, two months in which I couldn’t get a word out and read most of the books treated in chapters five and six. The room was bare except for a series of pictures I borrowed from the local library and stared at when I got stuck. It was in that way through Hunters in the Snow that Bruegel made his way into the book and I realised he was my favourite painter after all.
This all sounds very solitary, which it was, but I had some fathomless support from three people in St Louis and one in London, who are mentioned in the book’s dedication and acknowledgments, and who each in a different way made that year one of the happiest.
If it isn’t already, the story becomes tedious when it comes to the stage of looking for a publisher . . . and it become drearier still when one compiles things like a list of where it wasn’t reviewed. It is a book which has made its way obliquely, not in public channels of communication, but in friends (or strangers) talking to each other. I have met some of the people I value most through its agency, have re-met good friends from the past, and am very glad that this book for which I have a really lamentable fondness can now start on its travels again.
*Not many years previously when R had been granted a Guggenheim Award, he had been tactfully described by that august body as ‘an independent scholar’.
This post was written before the catastrophe of the Ukrainian dam, the waters of which are drowning villages, displacing whole populations and, as the waters reach the sea, endangering the world far beyond Ukraine itself.
But this tragedy does not lessen the desperate need for clean water.
Too good to keep to myself is the news that I am about to receive compensation for that week without hot water (see previous post Someone Else’s Problem). A friend complained on my behalf and soon £300 will reach my bank account. From the modest amount of this rebate one can only infer that this establishment, which exists to restore the sick to health and provide respite for the weary, considers well over £400 to be a reasonable daily charge for a room lacking the most basic of mod cons.
The story does not end there for, by pure chance, while surfing the net – probably looking for a guide to the latest episode of Succession – I found myself riveted by a sequence of black faces distorted by hideous swellings of monstrous size and I remained spell-bound by a documentary film illustrating the consequences of living without access to clean water: the fate of millions of people in other parts of the world than ours.
It is not that there is no water – though that can be a problem, and I have never forgotten our geography teacher telling us never to complain about rain – but what is and should be the source of life, is the frequent cause of slow, disfiguring and painful death.
Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink . . .
For a long time now I have been saying to unknown callers as I nervously unchain the front the door: ‘Sorry, I already have my charities’. Well, at this very late date, I am subscribing to one more. That £300 will be my first contribution to Water Aid.
It was a surprise when I learnt there was a problem with the plumbing in my part of the building.
I had come, at major expense, to a highly recommended clinic for a week’s ‘respite’: that is to say a week in a safe environment in which I would have no responsibilities and I would have nothing whatever to do.
Here I would leave behind all the worries of life – lost door keys, drain flies, tax returns, all dealt with by endlessly patient friends – be no bother to anyone and have a welcome change from my diet of soups made from vegetables on the turn and Charlie Bigham’s Fish Pies.
I had not expected on two occasions to have to wash from a bowl of hot water and for the rest of my stay (apart from immediately after a visit from the maintenance men, which enabled two showers) to have to manage with only a trickle of tepid water from the basin tap.
This was not how we had fared the only time R and I had gone up-market on our travels . That had been when tourism ground to a halt in Egypt after some dreadful event and Bales – the firm that specialised in Egyptian travel – was offering everything at rock-bottom prices. And so it was that we came to stay in the Old Winter Palace in Luxor, where we enjoyed luxury such as never before or since.
Accustomed as I had been in the past to roughing it when travelling – happily washing out of buckets and eating out of pails – I was NOT happy to find myself roughing it at several hundred pounds a night in England’s home counties. But at least – and I took great comfort from this – it was not my problem to solve, as it would have been at home.
My outrage evaporated and, having taken my cue from Johnny Mercer:
“You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative“
I was soon out in the magnificent grounds which my room overlooked. Here the wisteria and apple blossom had come out overnight, and a red kite circling overhead sent me soaring down memory lane to the little school in Ilkley where this beautiful bird had become my second identity, for we six-year-olds were divided into ‘houses’ named after birds of prey: Eagle, Falcon, Kestrel . . . KITE!
It is more than fifty years ago now that I had a brush with the Tavistock. My five-year-old son, happy and confident during the day, was having night fears of such intensity that – guilt-ridden and fearful, as single mothers are wont to be – I sought help. And, where did one go for help? One went to the Tavistock: the Institute of Human Relations which, as it happened, was (and is) close by.
What a mistake that proved to be! I had come to ask for advice: things like whether I should get into bed with him or, maybe, set up a camp bed beside him, whether to use phenergan or . . . ? But, within no time at all, the doctor’s attention (for she was a doctor: of something, anyway) turned from him to me and was advising me to come to the Tavistock on a long-term basis not to talk about my child but to allay my own ‘deepest fears’.
When I told her that my ‘personal life’ was unusually happy and my ‘deepest fears’ would only prove to be about dying, and that I thought anyone not frightened of dying must be mad (I was awaiting the result of a biopsy at the time) her immediate response – I wrote it down at the time – was: ‘Ah! So you are frightened of going mad.’
One more visit and the psychobabble became intolerable. I never went back. As for the nightmares, they were treated with long readings aloud from the more soporific poets and soon came to an end.
It was hearing the other day about the goings-on on the Isle of Man – where, it is rumoured, eleven-year-olds are being alerted to sexual practices which, whether considered deviant or not, definitely rate an X certificate – that I remembered my experience at the Tavistock.
Who, I have been wondering, can have come up with this new curriculum which is being served up in some Isle of Man schools as part of the well-established and nationwide RSE (Relationship and Sex Education) programme, generally welcomed by parents and teachers alike?
My guess is that whoever provided the sensational new input will have the same skewed mindset as the practitioner at the Tavistock who deemed me – neurotic, certainly, but far from mad – a suitable case for treatment.
What is it with these giant corporations? Why don’t they provide an address you can write to or could give to a taxi driver . . .
For example, the friendly letter from Thames Water inviting me to extend my permit to use a hose pipe had obviously been written by someone who knew many of the recipients wouldn’t know how to use ‘online’ and it gave a phone number. But none of the options offered by some robot fitted. They never do. I gave up and prepared to write a letter back. But there was, of course, no street address.
Thames Water HQ
This mattered less than not having been able to reply to the long and effusive apology I got, online, from British Airways after complaining about failures in their Assisted Travel programme. I have no idea how to collect the £100 voucher intended to compensate me, but I could have given it to a friend. And they could surely have guessed, knowing my age, that I was unlikely to be doing much more flying and wouldn’t choose British Airways if I did.
As if it wasn’t frustrating enough that so many of the organisations we have to deal with don’t let us know where they are (presumably because they don’t want letters arriving in their soulless, paperless offices), worse still is the alternative they offer – the dreaded options – to those who are not computer savvy, or who (imagine that!) don’t even own a computer and have to use the phone.
In ‘the old days’ options were not primarily a list of random possibilities delivered by a mechanical voice that one has to sit through before being either cut off or, if lucky, transferred to ‘an adviser’, but a word used either in business dealings (as it still is) or, as in my world, having to do with meaningful choices.
‘Keep your options open’ was, for instance, every parent’s appeal to a teenage son or daughter ready to throw everything up to follow some passing enthusiasm or extravagant whim.
More serious were the options – the choices – that could present themselves in adult life. How, I wondered, had Alan Turing dealt with the stress of knowing every single day that, having cracked the ‘Enigma’ code, alerting more than one target would risk the enemy realising that we had gained access to their plans. Like the thoughts that must go through the minds of those who take their own lives – To be or not to be: those are the options – life and death decisions.*
Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game
But to end on a lighter note, though this too is a war memory: my father chose the option of sleeping upstairs while my mother slept with us under the kitchen table. ‘No Jerry,’ he said, ‘is going to get me out of bed.’**
Nor did they.
* See that brilliant film The Imitation Game, made in 2014, but still easily available.
**Disappointed at being too old, this time, for active service, my engineer father spent the early years of the war in Yorkshire, working on the Lancaster bombers which were manufactured there. But got back to London (with us) in time for the V2s and the buzz bombs. He was now doing a desk job at the air ministry which morphed, at the war’s ending, into turning the aluminium used in the manufacture of planes into the building of prefabs. Many are still lived in today and I often wonder why more are not being erected to house today’s homeless.
In order to collect my late husband’s American pension from those long ago days when he had taught English at Washington U, where his very novel interpretation of Romeo and Juliet had (among other things) shocked the older members of the faculty, and he had failed to get tenure, I had to get a document notarised on American soil.
And so it was that I was back in New York, staying with my son and his family: my English son having done as his stepfather had done, but in reverse. For him, New York is now Home as London had been for R, and he knew just where to go to get the document notarised: a kiosk, a few streets away, where it was done within minutes and cost something like five dollars.
Not long before, in London, where lawyers have a stranglehold on this simple procedure, notarising does not come cheap. I had paid £400 for the same thing*.
There is a lot to learn from this wonderfully brash and friendly upstart of a nation which, when it wants to, can copy us to a T. I hadn’t on previous visits been in Gramercy Square which is as lovely, leafy and tranquil as any in Canonbury.
All the more surprising then to find Union Square – New York as we know it from the movies – such a short distance away. More surprising still the sight of a giant rat looming over the parked cars on the far side of the square.
I did not know then, as I was to learn from the man who had erected it, that these inflatable rats are seen quite often in this country – not crippled by good taste and ancient by-laws – and that they denote something rotten in the building they are parked outside.
Our informant, who turned out to be a member of the Union of Carpenters, told us the owners of this building were engaged in negotiations which would deprive him and his fellow members of badly needed jobs.
How long, I wondered, would my two ex-employers have been able to put up with such public shaming? The first had threatened to close the firm down when we tried to join a union, but was not as absurdly pompous and concerned about self-image as his successor who had, as it were, sold the family silver, and then departed.
What I can be sure of is that neither of them, on their frequent trips to New York, would have taken the commuter ferry from which, on a glorious spring-like February day, we wove backwards and forwards across one stretch of water after another, dazzled by the strange beauty of this city which reaches for the sky, one building after another, in its contortions defying the rules of gravity.
It was not till looking for photographs of British cathedrals to send to my grandson, that I was reminded that building high long pre-dates those computer-generated structures.
GB. England. Winchester Cathedral. (Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity and SS Peter, Paul and Swithun)
From ‘The English Cathedral’, a Book published by Merrell in October 2012. Between 2010 and 2012 Peter Marlow photographed the Nave’s of all forty two of England’s Anglican cathedrals using only natural light at dawn. Marlow’s photographs are accompanied by his commentary on the project, including sketches and preparatory shots; an introduction by V&A senior photography curator Martin Barnes on the tradition of church photography in England, and a concise summary of each cathedral interior by architectural historian John Goodall.
2012
As for the faith which inspired the creation of those cathedrals, it now hangs by a thread over here and Mammon – the god of skyscrapers and Canary Wharf – will soon be all we are left with. Not so over there, where the god of material wealth is in deadly harness with a warped form of the old Christian faith, and you can see exhortations like this on any street corner outside the soaring banking sector, without needing to travel to the Bible Belt.
*The U.S. Embassy had withdrawn its notarising service, perhaps because of Covid, and with no information as to when it would resume.
For more of this kind of thing see Esther Menell’s memoir, Loose Connections, available at £13.95 (including UK postage) via the link on the CONTACT page.
