Category: Personal (Page 2 of 6)

NEW YORK, NEW YORK . . .

28th February 2023 / Esther Menell

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. Marlowâ€™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.

LABOURS OF LOVE

22nd January 2023 / Esther Menell

For a very long time, maybe two years, my husband worked away in the scaled-down version of a house at the end of our garden, on a book about SCALE. I never really understood what scale was, though the word seemed to rouse interest in architect friends and, much against my wishes, R had accepted a commission to write the wretched thing.

The Passion of Creation by Leonid Pasternak

The idea for the book had been his. But a momentary enthusiasm, once a delivery date has been set and money has changed hands, cannot be easily discarded. As it ought to be. No wonder that all the books I value most from my years in publishing emerged from that heap of manuscripts known as the slush pile: books written because they demanded to be written, often by authors with very little knowledge of the publishing world.

Of course, great works, especially works of non-fiction, can be written to order, but being locked in to any schedule or expectations other than one’s own still seems like a straitjacket to me: not unlike being in debt, something of which I have a particular horror.

And so it was that R was toiling away at a project in which he had really lost interest while I, whenever I had the time, was writing short pieces, to no one’s order but my own, which my friend Nicky was posting every month on the website she had given me as an 80^th birthday present, at a time when I did not even know what a blog was.

THERAPY FOR US OLD PEOPLE is what Effie had said when she gave me this splendid pig who became our household god.

She had made the pig (I can still see the streaks of glue where she had slightly misfired as she stuck on the teats; it is a lady pig) at the nearby Charlie Ratchford Centre (see link below for how the Centre looks following its recent transformation by Camden Council) when she lived across the road from us in a pretty little house that had been provided for her by her ex-employer. She had been his housekeeper.

Of course Effie, still irresistible in advanced old age, must have been more irresistible still in her youth and, now that I am as old as she was, I appreciate even more her liveliness and the kick that creating that felt pig had given her.

And so it was that while Mrs Pig looked on from her post at the top of the stairs and I was enjoying writing about anything that came into my head, R was wrestling each day with a subject that had gone dead on him.

The answer was obvious. He should give up on books and turn to shorter forms.

What about the Essay?

Had he not implored me to read Montaigne, a pocket-sized edition of whose essays I carry around as a kind of mascot, but have yet to read?

Had he not loved Emerson and Thoreau? Did he perhaps prefer to forget that many readers found his thinking and his prose impenetrable and, thus, best taken in small doses? We could both remember his Aunt Eunice — a Methodist preacher’s daughter, as he was a Methodist preacher’s grandson — saying she was going to finish his first book if it killed her.

Why not make it easier for his loyal readers as well as for himself and, above all, why limit himself to one subject?

And so, after a long and difficult birth, his blog was born (link below) and the wasted years forgotten as this healthy child, which had been waiting impatiently in the wings, took flight . . . Rembrandt, Soutine, Cy Twombly, Shakespeare, Artaud, Ruskin, of course . . .

How right Effie was: making IS the best therapy of all.

The Charlie Ratchford Centre as it is now.

Robert Harbison’s blog

LIVE AND LET DIE

19th December 2022 / Esther Menell

A recent health scare has made me angrier than ever at the way you are not allowed to die when you want to. Of course, you can commit suicide, but what a sad and messy — dangerous hardly seems the right word — route that is likely to be.

Why does anyone, unless they have a strongly-held religious belief, refuse others the right to die? Are our current MPs really such a deeply religious bunch?

Whatever their reasons, I have to remember the arguments I had with the matron of a wonderful (and wonderful entirely thanks to her) old people’s home. She was fiercely opposed to sleeping pills which K, a friend of mine then in her eighties, craved. Some two years later — with us having won the argument — K marshalled a stash of pills and a plastic bag (which proved unnecessary) and, after locking the door to her room, lay back on her bed and ended what had become for her a life no longer worth living.

When the police were called in to deal with this crime scene, it was not long before they found K’s cuttings about the right to die. A rebel all her life, and a rebel to the end.

Now, all these years later, I found myself in danger of being in a situation I did not want to be in. It was only after a few days of mounting horror at the thought of becoming a permanent invalid that I remembered there was a way out. It did not have to be a home-made hit and miss affair: given the funds, and if I could keep my nerve, I could turn to Dignitas. It is no exaggeration, to say that the sudden and strangely belated realisation that I could take charge of my own death rendered me, momentarily, euphoric.

This is not the place to go into the complications of using this service. A Guardian article A Trip to Switzerland in Search of a Good Death tells you what you need to know, which is that while still in your right mind, sufficiently determined and sufficiently mobile, this can be achieved. But, beware of involving anyone else in helping to navigate this maze: assisting someone to kill themselves remains a criminal offence in the UK, punishable by up to fourteen years imprisonment.

But why on earth should it be considered less acceptable to help dying people to an easy death than to assist them (as, thankfully, we still do) not to give birth to babies they are not ready or able to look after?

When someone learns they have an incurable disease and knows the dying is likely to be long-drawn-out, painful and expensive, it is understandable that they might prefer to set their affairs in order, finish whatever book they are reading, say their goodbyes, and then let go.

We don’t all have the courage and genius of Tony Judt, whose rapturous essay The Memory Chalet was written when, in his own words, he lay ‘. . .trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy . . . ‘

As for me, I was given a reprieve. The whole episode proved to be no more than a dress rehearsal.

BORROWED PLUMES

19th November 2022 / Esther Menell

Unable to blog for the past two months and not wanting to miss November too, I am borrowing something written by a friend which I would love to have written myself.

Its author is not a writer but an artist. I only wish I could paint as well as she writes, but I have no talent whatever in that direction and still cringe at the memory of my School Certificate ‘Still Life’, even though it got me a Pass. The examiner must have been half asleep.

My recollections of Vicars Bell
by Sandra Oakins

Such an odd christian name we all thought as children: Vicars, in fact it still is. His
nickname was Ticky Bell. He was tall, looked like a hawk with a beak of a nose, a
large pale mole on one side of it and grey hair that stood up like a shoe brush. He wore what I now know as a Harris Tweed jacket, hand-knitted jumpers in unremarkable natural colours and a kind of silk cravat — yellow or red. And sensible walking shoes. His wife Dorothy played the piano for our country dancing lessons, until she got tired of the repetitions (The Dargason usually got to her) when he would take over by singing the piano part. She had eyes like blackcurrants and took no prisoners. She had a large handbag that was set down by the piano, wore dresses or more precisely frocks which went below her knees, cardigans and a string of amber beads. Her straight white hair was cut short, and her fringe severe, so unlike the hair of all our mothers whose perms and curls were the thing, and every one of them kept a shoebox of hair rollers in a cupboard. The school was open house, other grown ups would come and go, we knew them too. Geoffrey Tandy, Dorothea Patterson were two. The ‘Gaddesden Society’. By name and by nature.

Mr Bell could not abide Enid Blyton, comics and make up. And television—and—the hymn ‘When I survey the Wondrous Cross’ with a vengeance. Sentimentality was not on his agenda. He gave me my very first lesson in sexism. It was at church. Quite a few of us sang in the choir and before one morning service I went into the vestry to get some hymn books, he was there in his cassock and surplice and so were the choirboys. He came up to me and told me that women (and girls) had no place in the vestry. I dare say they were allowed in there to clean but at that time I would be about 12, so that didn’t cross my mind. I couldn’t really see why I shouldn’t go in and he didn’t say why.

The other side to this was that he expected us, both girls and boys, at the age of seven onwards, to have the intellectual capacity to be able to ‘get’ Shakespeare and poetry (and I mean poetry and not verse). Dickens, T H White, H G Wells, G K Chesterton were his writers and Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, John Masefield, Rudyard Kipling, Ralph Hodgson, James Stephens, Hilaire Belloc, D H Lawrence, W H Davies his poets of choice. He expected us to be able to look at things we had produced with an eye to making changes. We had poetry read to us every Friday morning for about an hour. Every so often we were allowed to write our own poetry. When we thought it was finished we had to go up to his desk and show it to him. He taught us to recognise derivative ideas and how to choose the words for what we meant. We also had to write descriptions and make up stories in our ‘Rough Writing ‘ book. Once I took my description of ‘The view from my bedroom window’ to show him and he took out his Osmiroid fountain pen and carefully drew a a circle, in brown ink, round the word ‘nice’ (another of his pet hates) each time it appeared in the piece I had written. There were quite a few circles by the time he got to the end. He said “I was thinking the other
day how well you used words but nice…nice, nice means ‘neat’, is that what you
meant to say?” I think I did get to buy my own Osmiroid pen, from Mr Ward’s Post
Office, they were about six shillings. And I think we used them in school.

Mr Bell was the only bell in the school, time was called by him, and literally so at the end of playtime. Lessons were elastic and so was the learning space. Outside was as good as inside, especially if the weather was good. There was a kind of timetable, but I never saw it written down, lessons just came and went. In them we were often given the benefits of his thoughts and experiences. The days started with a bit of bible or common prayer and included reading, writing, painting, weaving, potting (in an asbestos shed), dancing, singing, gardening, walking in the woods, writing with italic dip-in-the-ink pens, spelling (that word ‘necessary’) and, in the school hall, music and movement. This was thanks to the BBC and it was about the only thing we had to do ON TIME. A radiogram in a blond coloured wooden case on legs and castors was wheeled out and plugged in, we sat cross-legged on the wooden floor then performed. Possibly the radio was supplied by the Council. They also sent, on a regular basis, large wooden crates with black painted hinges and fastenings, full of library books, that we could borrow and take home.

His teaching methods went back to basics, fundamentals. We had abacuses in Miss Taylor’s infant class. Long division and fractions were taught from first principles and then there was mental arithmetic, even my father remembered having to do mental arithmetic. We worked in groups to write and produce a ‘play’, and there were these so-called games. For one he would stand at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand and he would pick an object, say a bus, and we would have to tell to him how to draw it on the board. He did precisely what we told him, with hilarious results. This was really a lesson about using words and it fooled us into being precise. He knew of course that the idea of getting the better of your headmaster was always a game with great potential as far as we were concerned.

School dinners, like music and movement and jumping over the ‘horse’, a nightmare apparition of padded brown leather and splayed wooden legs, with Mr Bell standing by to catch us, were taken in the School Hall. This pale green painted prefab building with French windows along one of the long sides, was, in wet weather, a short sprint over the playground. It had a small lobby with coat hooks and there were murals on the end walls of the actual hall, painted by Geoffrey Drewitt, a previous pupil, village scenes I think. Separate tables seating about 6 or 8 were laid out. The teachers not only served us, they sat at ‘our’ tables. We walked through the kitchen in an orderly queue and held out our plates, Oliver Twist fashion and they spooned out dinners from aluminium trays, cooked by Mrs Rogers and Mrs Bunting.

Vicars and Dorothy lived in one of the middle Ashridge Cottages, at the far end of the village next to the council houses and he cycled to work on a dark green bicycle. The house was a small and basic, to the right of the front door was his ‘study’, to the left the sitting room and at the back a scullery/kitchen. Dorothy had a wooden hut in the garden where she slept because of her having had TB. Vicars went on walking holidays, alone.

I have found that there is a black and white photograph of him writing at a desk, in the National Portrait Gallery archive. It was taken in 1948 and put there in 1996 (I wonder who by). He also has a Wikipedia entry, I wonder what he would have made of that. As John Rogers once said “He taught us common sense.” I think he would have been pleased to have us think of our education that way.

MULTIPLES OF TEN

24th August 2022 / Esther Menell

It was on one of the hottest days of the year that I made it to the cashpoint only to have my request rejected because the amount I entered wasn’t a multiple of ten. I didn’t know what a multiple of ten was. I still don’t.

It all began a long time ago, this problem with numbers, and though I have just found out there is a name for this condition* and that it is just as common as dyslexia, I haven’t yet looked into it and cling to my own theory which is that it all began because I missed a few days of school when I was six years old.

At the little school in Ilkley, while bombs were falling on London and many of the major cities, we were knitting scarves for ‘our brave servicemen’ (see above) while learning to read and write and ‘do arithmetic’.

The key to the reading and writing was the alphabet and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know my ABC, but I still don’t have the Times Tables – key to the universe of numbers – at my command. We learnt the tables by rote. I missed a few days and never caught up. That SEVEN TIMES SEVEN IS FORTY-NINE I can still hear in my head but, beyond that, all is silence. The doors that open onto fractions and decimal points have remained for ever closed.

But when one door shuts, another opens. In their majesty, Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin, were prepared to consider me when none of the other universities were open to someone who had failed to matriculate. To matriculate, you had to pass three subjects. Maths was one of them.

So it was being innumerate that led me to Oxford and from Oxford to a job where Reading and Writing were the only requirements. Even so, there are times when Arithmetic raises its ugly head, but they can usually be managed by the time-honoured practice of counting on my fingers.

And there is always help at hand. There are friends. There are accountants. There is Google. And just one block down from that cash machine – tucked away, at the back of a gift shop – the remains of a Post Office. The bank, of course, closed long ago.

* Dyscalculia: a condition, according to Google, that makes it hard to do maths and tasks that involve maths. Not as well known or as understood as dyslexia .

OF BOTH THE PRESENT AND THE PAST

28th July 2022 / Esther Menell

One of the many things I didn’t know about dying and death is that you can’t scatter ashes just anywhere and it was enough for me to hear from the funeral director that I would need permission to carry out my plan to go to a spot in Regents Park which R particularly loved, for me to drop this idea, and to ask no more questions. I don’t therefore know if what we did the other day was illegal. All I know is that it didn’t feel illegal and couldn’t possibly have done anyone any harm.

My son was in England. So was my daughter-in-law, who has a wonderful voice and would have sung a traditional lament as we said our final goodbyes, but we feared attracting attention as we scattered the ashes in the churchyard of one of the little parish churches that R had so loved and that he and I had visited together.

Far from London, where he had lived most of his life, and further still from his birthplace but, as I comforted myself and told my young grandson, not far at all from his ancestral home, just across the Scottish border . . .

It was on a very wet Sunday morning that we had arrived in Selkirk, some twenty years before. The town square was empty except for a statue of Mungo Park.

Desperate for a cup of coffee, we tried a few side streets. Not a sign of life. Back in the main square, we noticed an open side door in the one grand building.

Inside we found an office and a helpful lady who explained this was the Court House and told us that Walter Scott had been the Sheriff here for almost thirty years. Surrounded by files and with a computer, which seemed strangely out of place in this mausoleum, it didn’t take her long to establish that the Harbisons had once lived in this town and she told us we would find their gravestones in the churchyard.

On some other day, we might have found them but by now the rain was bucketing down. The sodden grass was knee-high, the inscriptions on the ancient tombstones hard to decipher, and a light had gone on in a window in the town square. We turned back and headed for it. And there, in a tea room as spartan as the British Restaurant that my mother used to take me to during the war, we had a comforting hot drink of something like coffee.

No wonder the Harbisons had fled all those years ago from this rugged little town whose townspeople were permanently at war with their English neighbours.

The ferocious Battle of Flodden would still have been a relatively recent memory: a memory vividly recalled in the little museum we came across, in a cobbled side street, when we had warmed up and dried off.

Housed in a plain but beautiful old building, the very best example of civic pride, here we learnt the war-torn history of this place, now a quiet backwater, but once the scene of endless strife.

I wish I could remember exactly when R’s family had left. I think it was mid-eighteenth century; anyway, long enough ago for one of his ancestors to get herself captured by ‘Red Indians’, an experience she survived and wrote about in an account which, like other captivity narratives, still exists.

So, I am able to tell my grandson, who is proud of his own Native American blood, that his much-loved grandfather was not the first Harbison to be a writer and his memory, like that of his intrepid Scottish predecessor, will live on.

REALMS OF DELIGHT*

24th June 2022 / Esther Menell

From Cicely Mary Barker and the Flower Fairies to Robert Mapplethorpe is a far cry, and the sudden appearance of the latter in a review of an exhibition of his flower photographs when I had been thinking of blogging about the former, has thrown me.

I had come across this old Flower Fairy postcard and been thinking how much the gifts of flowers during the months that R was at home, waiting peacefully to die, had come to mean to us both. And how flowers had now become a habit.

Unused to spending money on anything except necessities (in a first world sense) I now treat myself to a bunch of something every time I pass our local Lidl.

They have become as necessary to my life as they clearly were to Cicely Mary Barker, a pious Anglican, living with her sister in Croydon where they, the daughters of a seed merchant, had been born.

It is easy enough to see where Mapplethorpe got his inspiration (for copyright reasons I dare not reproduce any of his beautiful, suggestive photographs here but they can easily be found online), but I could not have guessed that the models for Miss Barker’s fairies were the children who attended the kindergarten that her sister had established in their home. This much-loved artist — belonging by upbringing and temperament more to the homely world of the ‘flower ladies’ we met in the several hundred churches I visited with R during one of the happiest times of his life* — evokes a kind of Englishness that no foreigner could ever aspire to. And how much more desirable than the razor-sharp beauty of Robert Mapplethorpe’s black and white studies which mirror his private obsessions.

Here I have to remind myself that R loved not only the common or garden flowers of garden, park and hedgerow which translated so happily into little children with butterfly wings but also orchids, the feral denizens of the flower world.

Entranced by their complexity, he began to collect them and every time we needed to go to Ikea (they were the lure to get him there) meant one more for him to cherish. As for our expedition to the Orchid Festival at Kew, what a different experience from our harmonious church visits that turned out to be. In the steaming heat of the tropical glass house we lost each other.

Glued to a particular bloom, he hadn’t noticed that I had moved on and I hadn’t noticed he wasn’t still following. For more almost an hour I sat at the exit until one of the kind guards who had joined in the fun (for them) of R’s disappearance managed to find and deliver him.

Memories, memories. What else does old age comprise? I remember that flowers were a part of my mother’s life, and will never forget the sight and scent of the freesias, bought off a market stall in the Portobello Road, with which I covered her coffin.

* See R. Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, Foreword.

** Almost every one of the thousand or more churches that he visited evoked a rapturous response. He so loved ‘dark plaster, faded colour, crumbling stone — perishable materials perishing . . . . ‘ (from the Introduction to English Parish Churches). For R, to ‘assimilate more and more to the realm of delight’ was what life was about.

OUT OF JOINT

27th May 2022 / Esther Menell

I have never felt more at odds with the world than these last few days. It began with finding that the acronym d.v. (‘god willing’) which litters my father’s wartime letters to my mother is now more commonly used as an acronym for Domestic Violence, and then hearing that it can now be OK to use the word ‘queer’.

I feel like the characters in Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint who are described as feeling that the world is unravelling around them. Of course, Shakespeare got there first. It was Hamlet’s words that have been haunting me as the world becomes more alien than ever. Gender issues, bitcoins, naked dresses . . . Of course, the photograph of a young woman walking down a busy street looking as if she isn’t wearing anything – her skin-tight dress picturing breasts and highlighting the crease of her buttocks – isn’t going to disrupt anyone’s life or bankrupt them, but it is all part of this unreal world in which I feel I have no place.

It doesn’t help that I can’t, or prefer not to, recognise myself in this person who can no longer get up off the floor or bend down to plant a bulb and forgets to put water into the poacher so that the egg melts into the plastic and the plastic melts into the tin and the kitchen almost goes up in flames. Like all people my age who live on their own, I am a bit of a threat to myself and to everyone else, but not as much of a threat as climate change and the war in the Ukraine are to us all.

And I am, at least, taking measures. I am for ever muttering: More haste, less speed and advising myself not to try and do – or carry – two things at once. But it is hard to change a lifetime’s habit in which for so many years it was necessary, as it used to be for most women, to do at least three things at once. R could never understand the rush.

But things have changed and it seems that in my son’s generation, husbands are as likely as their wives to ‘multi-task’. But what won’t change is what ageing does to us all and among my favourite reading now is The Oldie which is full of information about gadgets which make life easier and I am reassured at finding I am not the only person who doesn’t know how to zoom or use a smartphone, nor the only person who remembers Laurence Harvey and Patricia Roc, and gets a thrill from getting upstairs and finding they have remembered to make the bed.

EASY DOES IT (OR DOES IT . . . )

25th April 2022 / Esther Menell

Before posting this, I had to remind myself of this principle, first expressed when writing about Diana Athill, after her death.

. . . the principle of my blog is to talk about what concerns me at the moment of writing, or has interested or concerned me in the past.

Today’s post, about last week’s experience, ticks all the boxes.

What the Managing Director of the company that laid my new artificial lawn failed to mention when he sent me these images, designed to impress upon me what a transformation his company had brought about in my garden, is that the one on the left was taken after two of his workmen had spent a couple of hours tearing up my original lawn, before one of them got bitten by an insect and they walked off the job.

I was cowering in a back room as the men went back and forth, unmasked, carrying bags of what had been my garden through the house, when suddenly the rhythm changed. They stopped, tapped on the window and the one with more English, said: PROBLEM. What the problem was he couldn’t or wouldn’t divulge. They walked out of the house and joined the driver of the flatbed lorry that had just drawn up, leaving me and whatever had so frightened them behind.

Frantic at being left with the garden in this state and imagining they must have raised a hornets’ nest or come across human remains, I closed all the windows and rang friends for help. I also pleaded with the men to stay until we got further word from Head Office. So far, I had simply been e-mailed this photo and told: ‘They believe this is a flea . . . the message concluding: All members of the team have been bitten . . . I am speaking with them now regarding a solution.

As for what had frightened them, there was no sign of anything when, a few minutes later, my friend Leo arrived and we went out to look. No hornets. No corpse. No nothing.

What happened next was not the arrival of someone experienced in crisis management, but another e-mail to say that the company would not return to finish the job until the garden had been thoroughly disinfected. So, here I was with a churned up garden and no alternative but to let Leo go off and buy a flask of some kind of poison with which he watered the innocent earth of the garden I have cherished for almost sixty years.*

Satisfied that their workmen would now be safe, if unaware of the neighbourhood’s amusement at this very public event, the day-after-next was set for the replay, along with the promise to send a different ‘team’.

Different, but not different enough. They, too, walked off the job, the taller of them, breathing down on me (again unmasked), tried to explain in his broken English that he was fearful for his baby’s health.

There followed a photograph of a black speck on his trouser leg.

Fast forward. It is now late morning. The MD and my friend Nicky, who has come to lend me support, are coming towards me. I am sitting on a chair in the exact spot the men had indicated, trying to get bitten. I have not succeeded. Nor does the MD succeed in photographing any insects, although he does opine that I have an ‘excessive number’ in my garden. We later conclude that the barely visible flying things are probably fruit flies, attracted by the compost heap at the end of the garden. As for the putative flea, we do have a visiting fox . . .

In avuncular mode – possibly uneasy at hearing that I had a stress-induced heart attack a few years ago – the MD now told us to have no further worries and congratulated me on having such a high degree of biodiversity in my garden. He would sort everything out, even if it meant that he and his brother had to come and do the job themselves.

He was as good as his word. But it wasn’t the MD and his brother, it was the original team. They arrived on Good Friday, wearing gauntlets and armed with incense sticks.

It was a very hot day. The smell of incense filled the air. They did not stop to eat. I began to worry. They might be frightened of small insects (which made it unlikely they were Ukrainian), but they were somebody’s father, husband, son. I found a couple of Mars bars and bananas and fed the workforce.

By mid-afternoon, the job was done, and done well.

The next day, having decided not to go legal but needing closure, I sent a note to the MD (as the men had implored me to do) to confirm my satisfaction with that last day’s work, but adding that I had not forgotten what had happened earlier. Apart from the stress, I had refused this lucrative job to a young man I know and like but who, working alone, had said that he could not get it done as quickly.

The MD’s friendly and jovial ‘all’s well-that-ends-well’ response, was to remind me that his firm does after-care and to send me those before and after photos.

*Memorialised by my husband in Eccentric Spaces, published in 1977. To quote:

‘One small homemade garden that I disagreed with off and on for two years while living in it and being naturalized by it matters more to me than the others . . . It was closed in and overgrown, a tunnel and not a tunnel where one felt overshadowed and impeded but more brushed and caressed by plants. We need these two homes, a green one and a brown one, a grown one and a built one, two worlds in tension.‘
Robert harbison

ON STEPPING INSIDE

23rd March 2022 / Esther Menell

How, I have been wondering, can I make people understand how wonderful this book is? I have just finished Evgenia Ginzburg’s Within the Whirlwind and I want everyone I know to read it. To experience it. It is no help to find it is out of print so I can’t, as my immediate impulse was, buy a few extra copies but, even then, as I know from the pile of unread books on my table, having a book is no guarantee of its being read and someone else’s liking it is no guarantee that you will.

Getting something read was a constant problem during my working life. Neither of my employers (André Deutsch and Tom Rosenthal) could wait to get their hands on the latest Mailer or Updike, but to get them to read something by someone no one had ever heard of . . . I still remember having to reject the then unknown Peter Carey, and if André had read either of Edmund White’s first two novels he might not have been so ready to reject A Boy’s Own Story, which made the author’s name and increased his value a hundredfold. With Tom it was a little easier: the trick was to point him towards any ‘dirty’ bits.

But though I spent thirty years paying attention to every book or manuscript (it was manuscripts in those days) that came into the office, and had the thrill of discovering some wonderful writers among the dross, I could be as obtuse as my two employers when left to myself. It took me several years to get round to reading the two books I now value above all others. Both looked forbidding.

Klemperer’s diaries had been among R’s books for years. The volume was immensely fat and the diary form wasn’t appealing. I don’t know what eventually made me pick it up, but I do remember it was in the early Trump days and how frightening it was to find history repeating itself. I also remember being unable to put it down, as one entry followed another and this love story, for that is what it is (among so much else) slowly unfolded. As for Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, that too waited several years before I picked it up for the second time. The first had been when I saw it lying on a blanket, along with a saucepan and a lot of trinkets, at a boot sale in the North Yorkshire village of Hutton-le-Hole.

Boot sales. Realms of the great unwanteds. I think the lady asked a pound for it. The same amount that I had paid a few weeks previously for an unblemished copy of the Times Atlas. But not quite as much as the £7 that I was to pay for a beaver coat with a slightly worn lining that now belongs to my daughter-in-law and helps keep out the New York winter cold. A treasure trove of discarded clothes, surplus crab apples, mysterious-looking tools – which our farmer landlord said were bound to be stolen – and pile upon pile of Catherine Cooksons. And among the rubbish, just as among the flood of words that reached me every working day, there might always be something.

On what proved to be a memorable occasion, the something looked particularly uninviting. The pages of the book-length cartoon sent in by an agent were not even in order and, with comics being one of my several blind spots, I was tempted to return them unread. As it was, the moment I pulled myself together and stepped inside, I was spellbound. What I had in my hand was Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

I wish I could say that that experience has made me any more open to graphic novels. It hasn’t. But it was graphic novels which, indirectly, led me to Within the Whirlwind, for I came across it as I was scouring R’s shelves for anything Japanese – novels, films, whatever – for my thirteen-year-old grandson, a veritable scholar of manga. The manga exhibition at the British Museum had been the high point of his last visit to London and the last thing he was to do with his grandfather who, unlike me, was ready to enter an alien world.

My own reluctance suggests that a venture I heard about the other day will fulfil a real need. The aim of the London Literary Salon is to help its members come to grips with those difficult books they have always wanted to read but never had the courage to tackle. The hurdle is unlikely to be the title itself – though Praeterita stopped me in my tracks for years – but size and reputation. If Toby Brothers’ encouragement can get people past the first post, never was being lost in a big, long, ‘difficult’ book a better place to be.

WHAT ABOUT SALLY . . .

24th February 2022 / Esther Menell

It was coming across Rory Stewart’s choice description of Boris Johnson as ‘a terrible prime minister and a worse human being’ which prompted me to listen again the other day to his, Rory’s, Desert Island Discs, and this reminded me of something I had never understood, which is why we were always hearing so much about Rory Stewart’s father but never a word about his mother.

Why am I interested? Well, Sally and I had been in the same year at Oxford in what was then a women’s college and met up, fifteen years or so ago, at one of those overnight college get-togethers, particularly memorable because the electricity failed and my expectation of hot cocoa and gossip went for a burton.

But we had been seated next to each other at the evening meal and it was then I learnt that we had sons of much the same age and now that I know how very remarkable Rory already was, she did not make a production of this. But that was Sally. She had always been exceptionally well-mannered and discreet.

*St Hilda’s 1954 intake. Sally, front row, 5th from left. Me, front row, 2 1/2 from right.*

Most of us in that mid-‘50s intake had very quickly paired up, even ganged up, and spent at least as much time talking about ourselves as we did about Chaucer or Milton or whatever; but Sally, though courteous to all, wasn’t a joiner and, thinking back, the only thing we knew about her home life was that she lived in Wimbledon. To discover – in a long New Yorker piece which did mention Sally – that her father was Jewish, was a surprise.

And, hadn’t there also been an earlier husband? I can’t be sure for – with the exception of a couple who had been joined at the hip since day one – none of us actually got married before we went our separate ways. But the pressure to be married, when we were young, led to a lot of false starts. If you didn’t find a husband then, when would you? So it wouldn’t be surprising if, like me, she was on her second husband.

Whether or not, I had a hazy memory of a very tall, very English man – an engineer, a builder of bridges, and talk of foreign lands . . . And any time I thought of Sally, I imagined her leading a Somerset Maugham kind of life in some faraway place. Not a bad guess, as the one fact that googling ‘Rory Stewart’s mother’ reveals, apart from her full name, is that her son was born in Hong Kong.

If my attempt to get Rory’s books out of the local library hadn’t failed (see Now What?) no doubt all would have become clear. As it is, I will always regret that we haven’t seen him in Downing Street over these past few years. And it remains hard to understand why there has been so much in the media about his father and nothing about his mother. Can it really be that in this day and age mothers*, including women like Sally who have careers of their own, are still not considered worth mentioning?

*Our year excelled in mothers. Hugh Grant’s mother is also in that photo (3 rows down and 5 across) and, like Sally and me, she spent her first year living in digs way up the Iffley Road.

OF PLACE NAMES, CHURCHES, TEMPLES AND REMEMBERING JAMES

30th January 2022 / Esther Menell

With R, who for forty years had never had anything worse than a cold, registered as high risk – having never fully recovered from the pneumonia which felled us both a couple of years before – Covid spelt the end of life outside the four walls of our house and beyond the rickety fences of our back garden. But, after one lengthy argument which ended in his reluctantly agreeing not to go to the recently opened Aubrey Beardsley exhibition¹, we both gave in to the inevitable and, like everyone else, found ways of making this new life liveable.

For R, the first step was to order the Beardsley Catalogue Raisonné, a book so heavy that I can barely lift it. For me, the first step was to get out a set of ivory-layered dominoes, bought at a boot sale but never until now used, and begin the search for the instructions to a mah jong set. These I never found. And, though I remembered tales of an ex-uncle-in-law’s obsession with dominoes which, when his job as a GP allowed, he would play for money in Soho cafes, its possibilities seemed quite limited to us and this and all other games soon bit the dust.

But there were, of course, books. Some two thousand or more of them. And also the place-names game of which we never tired. This memory-laden game, which required no more than a piece of paper and a pencil, had for years been reserved for birthdays and New Year’s Eve, but we now allowed ourselves to play it any time we felt particularly low.

This all came back to me at gale force yesterday when I came across a clutch of these lists in a copy of one of my favourite of R’s own books, his Guide to English Parish Churches. It was to its index that we would so often turn to see what names – what places – we had forgotten.

There were no rules to the game, except that we should both have been there, but we did have to try to curb our enthusiasm and stop at two or three letters, so as not to use up the alphabet too quickly. We had to leave time to forget again before the next time.

Of course, it wasn’t only English names – Abbeydore, Beeston, Crewkerne . . . though they predominate. It was also Bari, Cromarty, Delft . . . Bari where, finding I had forgotten my sleeping pills, I relied on wine to get to sleep. Even as I write the words, the memories pile in. Melk, Narva, Oberlin, Palafrugell . . . The bright orange bathing trunks that R, who hated shopping, had to go out and buy in Melk so he could swim in the Danube. The three sex manuals² that were almost the only books in the pretty little apartment we had rented in Palafrugell . . .

Oddly enough, we hardly ever seem to have come up with the names of places we had passed through when taxi-ing around India in the company of James and his schoolfriend Sanjay (brought along to give James company on the 800-mile drive from Goa to Bhopal to meet us). Travelling with these two exceptional youngsters – one a Catholic, the other a Hindu and, between them, versed in stuff you could get from no travel guide: the crops, the wildlife, the food, the customs of this ancient land – life was a daily miracle. And, for R, the temples of India remained a life-long passion³. It was with great sadness that I learnt, a few days ago, that James, now the father of two beautiful young boys, has died of Covid.

R has been spared this news. And I return to find solace in those lists, which are a reminder of the best of times.

1. See R on Beardsley here.

2. Alex Comfort hit the mainstream in the ‘70s.

3. See R on Hindu temples here.

CHRISTMAS THEN

24th December 2021 / Esther Menell

One of the first things I learnt about R, when he became our lodger, was that he loved Christmas, and especially Christmas trees. My son was five years old then and R, having recently failed to get tenure and me having recently become a single mother, we were both on the lean side financially. Which is why we made our own decorations.

We brought petals in from the garden, made strings of cranberries and popcorn and golden sultanas, pasted children’s drawings onto bits of cardboard and filled every dark hole with a glowing orange tangerine, suspended on sewing thread or, when we ran out of these, with gaudy Quality Street toffees which led to the tree rocking dangerously as small children made a bee-line for them. To these home-made devices was added one shop-bought ornament: a very small green felt sock, covered with glitter.

All but the edible still survive.

On his first return from Carlisle, PA, where he had been to visit his parents, R brought a box of ornaments dating back to his own childhood: little angels in crescent moons, metal fruits, glass balls. And every time we went anywhere over the next forty years we brought something back with us: shiny metal baubles from Mexico; from Moscow, a silver pasteboard parrot; seaweed from Pacific Valley; lace from a sleepy little town in Czechoslovakia where we didn’t know everything closed early on New Year’s Eve and had nothing to eat except a bar of chocolate.

R is no longer with us, but he lives on in his books which will still be around when I am gone too. And here he is, talking about Christmas . . . in the opening words of the first chapter of his one book about books, Pharaoh’s Dream: the Secret Life of Stories.

The strangeness of finding such a thing indoors continues to cling to a Christmas tree through its life, even though the accumulation of offerings changes it from wildness into art. It is constructed from the building blocks of the universe, or at least of the imagination, reduced to doll-forms accessible to a child.

Like illustrations in a wordless book or examples in a grammar for foreigners, objects on a Christmas tree correspond to a simpler view than we usually take, as if the enterprise has caused us to ask, what comes first? and to answer: animals, birds, nuts, shells, stars, bells, hearts, spheres, adding a few parochial references to winter and plenty of shrunken versions of ourselves wearing wings or red caps.

From humble origins in afternoons of glueing, tying, and stringing, these objects are raised to a consecrated state like the equipment of an Egyptian tomb, some of it usable, but not meant for our use, some of it only a replica of the usable or edible. Towards the end of the tree’s life some offerings begin to look less desirable: cranberries shrivel, popcorn shrinks, oranges turn brown or even black in places. As time goes on, children, less awed by the spectacle, take bites out of cookies or extract a toffee from its silver paper, leaving the dented husk weightless on its string.

Like ex voto limbs, many of the unsightly throng on the tree commemorate specific times and persons, were made by a friend who has vanished or bought in a shop that has closed. Altogether this custom makes the most telling exposition of yearliness, of a spot returned to at unlengthy intervals to be reminded of the chain of visits stretching back into the distance. One is most lonely for the past when brought vividly into its presence like this, and the gaps between the objects only serve to heighten this private rite. They give it a kind of mosaic glitter, jumbled syllables of lost story, like Gaudi’s sinuous bench clambered over by the uncongnizant.

A crucial difference between one’s worshipful searches of a Christmas tree and the observances of primitive religion is the self-willed nature of the former, though it is true that if the tree were changed too suddenly it would lose its power like a newfangled liturgy.

However great one’s allegiance, luckily it has little chance to go stale. Like an author fearful of tiring the reader the tree-custom brings disrobing hard on the heels of dressing up. Treasured and then outcast, the tree seems an emblem of myth’s current place. Myth survives in pulverized and babified form and in two weeks feels exhausted to all of us.

Ars longa, vita brevis

THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER

12th November 2021 / Esther Menell

Confused, as I often am nowadays – only yesterday I took my valerian drops in the late afternoon, thinking I had woken in the middle of the night – I am having trouble distinguishing between Snow White’s seven dwarves and the Seven Deadly (or Cardinal) Sins. What I am looking for is a way to describe the sensation that overwhelmed me when, not long ago, a friend told me had had spent the last month, during which I had been no further than the corner shop, bowling across Europe with his gorgeous new lady friend.

It was not envy I felt as he rattled on, but full-blown jealousy. The green-eyed monster had me in thrall and, as I shut the door on my erstwhile and soon-to-be-again friend, it would not have surprised me to find I had turned green.

But, wait a minute, I told myself. Remember your age. When you were in your sixties, as he is now, you weren’t only bowling around Europe, you were also in Turkey and Egypt and Mexico and taxi-ing around India, and had a home-from-home in a farmhouse on the North Yorkshire Moors.

The view from our window there surpasses even the sight of the Taj Mahal at dawn, and sitting in front of that window with R, listening on the radio to Seamus Heaney reading Beowulf, is one of the most precious memories in the memory bank that now sustains me.

It is a consolation to find other friends of my age have been shocked by the strength of their feelings when hearing of things now beyond their reach. It is not the wistful longing of one who has made the wrong choice at a high-end restaurant. It is something more akin to those other hard-to-distinguish Capital Vices (yet another name for the deadly sins) Greed and Gluttony: desire for more of what one has already had.

We seem to have pretty much forgotten the turmoil of love affairs and marriages and the ups and downs of a working life when we envy friends in early middle age as they take off for Sicily, Thailand or wherever, disregarding the fact that we now have trouble getting up off a chair and would find it hard, if not impossible, to put up with the discomforts of serious travel.

Best to remember the biblical warning that ‘envy makes the bones rot’ and, to be grateful that when we were travelling the world was not generally known to be hurtling towards extinction.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY . . .

6th October 2021 / Esther Menell

A few weeks before R died, a friend of ours and the very last person in the world anyone would take practical advice from advised me to take a few thousand pounds out of the bank and buy a small safe. I didn’t. I didn’t because I didn’t then know that on the day someone dies (or very soon after) all their accounts are frozen and in an old-fashioned marriage (such as that of our friend’s mother) a widow is left with nothing but the loose change in her purse.

Luckily, R and I didn’t have that kind of a marriage and I had my own bank account. We had the kind of marriage which has more to do with impending death duties than with a need to feel comfortable about living together, which we had been doing happily for forty long and precious years.

It was a shock to think of the number of married women, fortunate enough never to have had to think much about money, suddenly finding themselves – albeit temporarily* – penniless.

What about those women and men who don’t have any money in the bank? How do they find the four thousand pounds plus which, I was to discover, is the price of the average funeral?

For a funeral, and for that purpose alone, money can – where it exists – be extracted from a partner’s frozen account. But not, in my case, extracted fast enough. To my surprise, the funeral director wanted to be paid in advance. To his surprise – and mine too, I had been far too preoccupied in the weeks leading up to R’s death to keep a check on my bank balance – the cheque that I gave him bounced. I am happy to say there were no recriminations from the recipient, but my dealings with the bank throughout this period were a source of additional stress that I could have done without.

I was left wondering, do the many people unable to borrow or to organise crowdfunding find the money to bury their dead?

The answer is that they don’t. The State steps in and provides the modern equivalent of a ‘pauper’s burial’.

*The average time for Probate to be completed is nine months.

AN APPLE A DAY . . .

28th April 2021 / Esther Menell

In the habit of blogging, once a month, I am resurrecting the March post (which I took down almost as soon as it went up) with additional narrative to bring the story up to date, for it is now more pertinent than ever. The only significant change is that the number of GPs who have failed us has risen from seven to nine.

It was the 23^rd of November, eight months to the day since the start of Lockdown. We were taking our regular early-morning walk in Regent’s Park in preparation for yet another housebound day ahead, when R’s legs gave way. Able to move but frighteningly unsteady, he made it back to the car and I drove us home. And thus began a living nightmare which we have only just survived intact.

No one could have prevented the onset of what we were eventually to learn is a well-known condition, but there were myriad opportunities for diagnosis, had we ever seen a doctor. As it was, during those interminable weeks (which stretched into months) when we initially had no idea what was happening, were then allowed to think it was Parkinson’s Disease, and at no point knew how best to handle it – we did not see a doctor once.

Parkinson’s came into it for this reason: R was, indeed, being treated for it, but it was at such an early stage that we had been told, convincingly, that death was likely to upstage it: one of the benefits of old age being that one may outwit the slower-paced killers.

Looking back now that R has started to recover spontaneously, it is hard to believe there was a time I didn’t know that a sudden loss of mobility is almost certain to stem from the spine. The writer of Dem Bones, that spiritual inspired by the book of Ezekiel and set to music by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) would have been less easily fooled than we were. Dem Bones, with its jaunty ‘. . . the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone . . . ‘ says it all.

No, it was not Parkinson’s. It was something called Lumbar Spinal Stenosis, which I now know to be a narrowing of the space between the vertebrae, very common at our age and generally due to the dehydration of the discs and years of bad posture.

Why did no one think of this or of NPH (Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus) which also causes sufferers’ legs to suddenly give way? But, as NPH is often mistaken for Dementia, it was perhaps lucky no one did think of it, as R has always said he would rather anything than lose his mind. I, on the other hand, would rather prefer (as my multi-lingual Italian aunt would say) to be permanently befuddled than in constant discomfort. We were better off thinking he had galloping Parkinson’s than that he was losing his mental faculties.

As to why no one thought of it, the answer is simple. They never saw him. They were just voices on the phone. Not one of the seven doctors I spoke to had suggested – or, when asked, been willing to make – a home visit. It was not until a routine hospital appointment that, almost nine weeks after that fatal walk, R actually saw a doctor, and that doctor, seeing the way he walked, referred him straight on to the Department of Spinal Neurosurgery.

It is not surprising that the one medic who had seen R – a young male nurse who arrived to take a blood sample a few hours after my initial call to our GP practice – did not have the experience or training to recognise the symptoms. He came from an organisation (Rapid Response) whose dual function is to try and keep patients out of hospital (a laudable enterprise at all times, and the more so during a pandemic) and to lighten the GP’s burden by carrying out simple but essential procedures.

To lighten the GP’s burden . . . how my doctor uncle (one of five Estonian-born doctor siblings) would have welcomed that!

But how he would have scorned the idea of treating a patient without seeing him. And surely no one of my age can forget the tongue out, hands-on procedures which almost any visit to the doctor once entailed.

Of course, there is nothing like having grown up with a doctor in the family, and I was to acquire two more on my marriage.

But what one really wants, of course, is not a doctor uncle and a doctor father-in-law (both long since dead) but every Jewish mother’s dream, a doctor son.*

And what one wants from one’s GP, when things are serious, is his or her physical presence.

*The greatest comfort I had during those stressful weeks, from anyone in the medical profession, were unhurried phone calls from the newly qualified doctor son of a concerned friend, now working on the wards of a Scottish hospital.

To bring the story up to the present:

When, in early April, R suddenly developed new and terrifying symptoms, Dr 8 did not offer to visit, but he did arrange for someone to come ‘later in the week’ to take a blood sample. There was, I think, one more inconclusive phone call with a Dr 9 before, three days later, the ‘someone’ arrived. But we no longer needed him for we had a last reached a doctor – Dr 10 (acknowledged below) – who responded at once to my desperate after-hours-call and stayed with us until R, now barely alive, was rushed to hospital.

As I write this coda, on the sixth day of R’s return following nearly three weeks in hospital and the diagnosis of a new and unrelated condition, I want to record that although the GPs let us down, I can’t find the words to express appreciation for what the NHS has done and is doing for us.

We are being looked after at home – as we were in hospital – with a degree of diligence and loving care by absolutely everyone, from the most senior doctors to the cleaners (who never complained that I was in their way, even though I most surely was).

Back at home, with a constant and welcome stream of nurses, carers, occupational therapists, et al arriving at our door, only the GP practice (our ‘primary carer’) has yet to make contact. In contrast, the two organisations responsible for providing our seamless 24-hour ‘care package’, have provided me with weekday and weekend phone numbers, and a real person comes to the phone, at all times of the day and night.

Our GP practice asks for calls to the Duty Doctor – that is to say, calls about something that can’t wait for an appointment – to be made before 11.00 am (only on weekdays, of course).

When, in a time that now seems aeons ago, I banged saucepan lids for the NHS, I had not given a thought to how very much more than Covid the doctors, nurses and ancillary staff were dealing with every day and every night.

The ambulance men were the first in a long series of ancillary workers and hospital doctors who (along with Dr 10) have entirely restored my faith in the NHS.

RING A DING . . .

19th February 2021 / Esther Menell

As a very late and reluctant-comer to mobile phones, I wonder whether I will ever learn to tell their ringing from the ringing of the real phone – the one that stays

in one place and you see in those wonderful old black and white movies, like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

And how will I learn to distinguish its ringing from the doorbell itself?

By the time I had got it out of my back pocket yesterday morning – for once it was actually there, and not still in some other pocket – and realised it wasn’t ringing at all, whoever had been at the front door had decided I wasn’t in: a cruel joke, as I have been in for the last ten months.

And how do people manage it when their land lines and their mobiles ring at the same time? I immediately go into panic mode: shouting ‘I can’t talk now’ down the receiver while fumbling for the mobile, only to find the person has given up and left me a message which now joins all the other unread messages, as picking up messages and texting are both skills I don’t yet have.

The apotheosis was reached the other day when, happily lost in an episode of that brilliant French soap opera, Call My Agent, I tried to answer a fictional call.

It was neither the real phone, nor the mobile, nor the doorbell. What I had heard and tried to answer was a phone (the smartest of smart phones, of course) belonging to one of the characters.

It was easy enough, to catch up on what I had missed while, inadvertently, taking part in the action. But much as I love Andrea, Gabriel and Jean Gabin (at least I can recognise barking, for what it is) I do still regret the days when even agents could carry out their mostly nefarious business without the soulless machinery of modern life.

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

25th January 2021 / Esther Menell

Not long ago, in a rather heated discussion about bike lanes, a friend who I had always valued for her good sense asked me, in all seriousness, whether I preferred cars to children.

It turns out that she is a passionate advocate of a car-free city, an idea which makes no more sense to me than the idea of a forest without trees.

Perhaps the fury that the whole bike issue engenders is some kind of displacement: what we are really furious about is the turn life has taken through no one’s fault – or everyone’s fault, if you prefer that version – and yet, even as I say this, my hackles rise as I remember that particular conversation.

I had been lamenting the disruption caused by the introduction of bike lanes on the road where, in my cycling days, I had never felt a need to be protected from the rest of the traffic, and where now confusion reigns.

Left to right: pavement, bike lane (interrupted by zebra crossing), more pavement, more zebra, mysterious section of road with bike symbol (just visible) and, not visible (because a few feet to the left of the picture), legal parking bays between the bike lane and open road!

In their enthusiasm for thwarting the driver and prioritising the cyclist, the Council has lost sight of the needs of the pedestrian, as can be seen in the now iconic snapshot of an elderly lady sitting on a bench in the middle of a bike lane as she waits for a bus. The Council had neglected to move the bench when they moved the stop.

Bench in bike lane (without elderly occupant)

What, I asked my friend, have these measures achieved except waste public money and raise a storm in the local press? Instead of (or as well as) cars endangering cyclists, cyclists now endanger pedestrians, and if the streets were to become children’s playgrounds, wouldn’t their games be very different from those of yesteryear . . . ? The cheerful little girl, hiking her frock up with one hand as she dances in the street is no longer among us. Her great-grandchildren would not be playing hopscotch. Not long ago, at the other end of our street, a boy was deliberately run over by his mates, in a stolen car. Kitchen knives are kept out of sight in the local shops.

To think that city streets were meant as playgrounds is on a par with town-dwellers complaining about the mud in country lanes. Cities are cities. The only reason that little girl was dancing in the street is that she lived in a slum and there was no park nearby.

Much has changed since then. The war created a lot of open spaces, and enlightened councils have provided many more. It does not surprise me that the blocked-to-traffic side roads are deserted. As I go for my Covid constitutional, I have never seen any children playing in those empty streets.

The way it used to be in some of the less prosperous areas of the city

No, I don’t prefer cars to children, but I do think that cars belong on the road and children don’t. And though I sometimes think longingly of the years spent in a remote part of North Yorkshire, where you recognised every vehicle that passed, I don’t want or expect Kentish Town to resemble it.

Londoners using what my father used to call ‘Shanks’s pony’

Like any reasonable adult, I think city-dwellers should use public transport or their legs whenever they can but, as one gets older, one comes to realise the very real benefit of four wheels and to dread the day when one will no longer be able to manoeuvre one’s ageing body into the driving seat, putting so much that is precious for ever out of reach.

As I fill in a Camden questionnaire on ‘traffic solutions’, and wonder why on earth they need to know my ‘sexual orientation’, I am also thinking, with some satisfaction, of the day in the future when the fit young things who spearhead the powerful cycling lobby will be old themselves (if they have survived the killing fields of Chalk Farm Road*) and may come to regret what they have done.

*In its wisdom, the Council has just introduced bike lanes on this road which is being used by all the heavy traffic serving a major building development scheduled to take six years to complete.

REMEMBERING KEMAL

10th December 2020 / Esther Menell

It is not hard to remember someone you could never forget.

I am riffling through some of the many, often enigmatic, messages I got from Kemal during the four years that I was sending him second-hand paperbacks for the shelves of his little bookshop in the back streets of Antalya.

This, one of the earliest, is typical:

You have time do box of fiction?

Good evening

I must pay you

Kemal

Luckily, I did have time and those four years, when life was one long treasure-hunt, were among the most carefree ever.

The timing could not have been better. Retired by then from a life working on other people’s as yet unpublished books, I had just given up on the last of several attempts to be useful, and was ready for something new. And so it was that I stopped the numbingly useless attempts to improve literacy in prisons (the bureaucracy, not the prisoners, proved the sticking point) and plunged happily into finding reading for the English-speaking walkers of the Lycian Way in the seaside town of Antalya.

It is said that it was the paperbacks, abandoned by tourists – and found by Kemal while working on the buses – that had propelled him, a young man with little formal education but a passion for books, to start his own bookshop.

Of course, even if this is true, there must have been other steps along the way, and those of us who came to know Kemal have spent many hours trying to reconstruct his past life. It is only very recently that I heard the bus conductor story: a little more likely than the fantasies prompted by signs of a bullet wound on his shoulder.

I never saw his shoulder. We were not in Antalya long enough to join him for his daily swim.

. . . only the dead know Brooklyn by Thomas WOLFE . . .

Take care

I swim every morning

Kemal

and, having told him, almost as soon as we met, that I had a husband, I like to think it was only this that kept him from inviting me to spend a lot more time with him. For Kemal loved women almost as much as he loved books.

One of the many women lucky enough to cross his path was already a friend of mine. Another became a friend. Both treasure his memory and share with me their grief at the news of his death. Which occurred exactly one week before, unknowing, I included one of my own Kemal memories in my September blog.

It was he who hauled that hideous bowl (which I now know was a choice example of Palissy ware) to Sotheby’s, and it was the young woman who had collected it from me who, all these years later, unearthed my address and let me know he was, by his own hand, dead.

. . . next summer I will built my own spulcreve in my willage . . .

wrote Kemal almost exactly nine years ago.

What is all this about a sepulchre? Surely it is a bit early to be planning

your tomb . . .

I wrote back. I had no premonition of what was to come. Nor did he. He had simply found a sculpture (cat sculpture seal by French sculpcure) that he wanted for his tomb, and I can only suppose that now he had left the house with its large garden where he lived when I first met him, he had nowhere to put it. So he took it to where it would finally belong.

No one I know has been to his village, or even knows its name. I hope someone who was around when he died knew what he wanted, and made it happen. I hope too that they knew what kind of a send-off he would have wanted. Here again, we can only guess. That he was a Christian at birth – another of the stories about him – seems unlikely. I know for certain that at the sound of the muezzin he would close the shutters; and everything about him suggested this was not only for the sake of his eardrums.

There is so much we don’t know. And never will. For instance, where did the Palissy ware bowl and the many beautiful objects he sold or gave away come from? And what about the palatial house, with its garden full of antiquities, to which his little bookshop was an annexe? My guess is that it belonged to a wealthy foreigner: that Kemal was his manservant and became his heir.

If we seem here to be in the realms of popular fiction, or even crime fiction, so be it. Kemal, in his beauty (‘a Neptune arising from the sea’, is how one of his highly educated lady friends describes him) is a story-book creation come to life. How appropriate for someone who so loved books.

What kind of books? had been my first anxious question when, months after exchanging addresses, and never having expected to hear from him again, I got a scribbled note asking me to buy books for him, and saying that a lorry driver, already on his way to England, would come and collect them.

And so began the four years of trawling the charity shops for any book that cost no more than two pounds, was in good condition, and I would want to read myself!

Here is a page from the notebook in which I entered each purchase:

Joan Didion Where I Was From £1

Reginald Hill Death’s Jest Book £1. 50

Andrea Ashworth Once In a House on Fire £1

Rachel Cusk Saving Agnes 70p

Ian Rankin The Falls £1

Proust Vol 4 Sodom and Gomorrah £1

Don Delillo Underworld £1

Graham Greene May We Borrow Your Husband 75p

I hadn’t read them all, and still haven’t. But each author or title whetted the appetite. In the case of Proust, my own appetite had, in truth, been satisfied long ago by the end of volume 3, but the title of volume 4 seemed likely to attract a browser’s attention.

Whether it did or not, I will never know. Nor will I know what has become of the stunning collection of antiquities, dragged out of skips, gathered from building sites – ‘the dustbins of history’ (here Kemal was quoting Trotsky) – and now displayed amid the tangle of shrubs and flowering trees in that garden, which I had glimpsed that morning when I first entered the shop.

That same morning, my husband was looking at antiquities too. But in the local museum. Antalya was not a destination, but a stop on the way from the classical glories of the western coast to Beyşehir, a small town in Anatolia, renowned for its ancient wooden mosque.

There were no museums In Beyşehir, which we were to reach a day or two later, but this was to be the most memorable of all our stops. A faded leaflet pinned to the board in the only hotel showed something that looked like a well and claimed it dated back to Hittite times.

Wishing Kemal was with us, for no one spoke a word of English, we still managed to find it: a water hole in a flat, empty landscape, with a trickle of water issuing from a pipe which – such is the power of suggestion – appeared numinous in the gathering dusk.

Who knows how long we would have stood there in wonderment, if we hadn’t been distracted by the sight of a small crowd of women, approaching slowly across the scrub. When close, they emptied sacks they were carrying onto the ground and there were mounds of knitwear – sweaters, hats, gloves, scarves, in all the colours of the rainbow – spread out for us to buy.

It is a regret to this day that I did not have the entrepreneurial skills to have magicked that beautiful handwork into some Knightsbridge boutique and given much needed custom to that remote community. But this short-lived dream, which had Kemal as the middleman, lasted no longer than any other day-dream, and second-hand paperbacks remained the cargo which an increasingly unreliable lorry driver carried from England to Turkey.

In the long exchange of e-mails, the lorry driver makes many appearances:

Hope lorry driver doesn’t forget the books this time everybody seems to get alsemeir . . .

He is still in Italy . . .

Am I right in thinking we can’t expect lorry driver during Ramadan?

And then, inevitably

I am terribly sorry, but lorry driver is kaput

My memory lets me down there. Did K find another driver bringing cargoes of lemons to London? I think he must have done, because my ‘sales ledger’ tells me another year passed before things finally came to a stop. By then, I was haunting the charity shops not just for Kemal but also for my grandson, Zachariah, to whom I sent a book every month for his first five years.

Now 12 years old, Z is lost to me (though not to books) in the baffling world of Manga, and the charity shops, thanks to Covid, have long been out of reach. Those halcyon days are over when ‘buying for Kemal’ was a part of life and R and I would scour the high streets of market towns for Heart Foundation shop signs, and the back of the car was always full of books.

But the memories linger and they are not only about books. There was the time when Kemal came and stayed with us: the only time, except for that encounter in the shop, that he and I were in the same place at the same time. It was during this visit we discovered what a wonderful and willing cook he was. He loved food, as he also loved flowers: he recognised almost every one that was growing in our garden, and had grown many of them in his.

Was it an illness of mind or body that made this man, with his lust for life and love of beauty, die as he did? Or was it the increasing ugliness of the world that made him want to leave it? Whatever it was, it is over now.

Wherever you are and however you got there, Kemal,
rest in peace.

THE ACCIDENTAL PHOTOGRAPHER

12th November 2020 / Esther Menell

Five years ago, to my surprise and that of everyone else, including my husband who used to joke that I was a ‘folk-photographer’, a lot of snaps I had taken of him – mostly looking at buildings – were exhibited at the architectural school where he had been teaching and, not much later, and more surprisingly still, in a gallery in Rome.

It seems there is a category of photographers called Street Photographers, and that I counted among them. Worlds away in skill and subject (I did not have the nerve to photograph grown-up people), I nevertheless found myself in the same category as ex-nanny and one of the greatest of all street photographers, Vivian Maier.

The film about Maier*, made by the young man who came across crates of her abandoned work in an auction sale, is a joy on two counts: because it allows us to see a lot of her astonishing photographs, and because her life is as strange and unsettling as that of a character in a Ruth Rendell novel. Tall, plain, stiff (unable to unbend, except with children), this nanny-from-who-knows-where moved from one kindly middle-class family to another, with her ever-increasing number of suitcases and boxes, all hidden from view by her insistence on having a lock on the door of her room.

None of her charges came to harm. Many have good memories of her. And all of them will have been present when some of her greatest pictures were taken. As for the boxes, it was not until young John Maloof – thinking he might find something useful to illustrate a paper on local history – put in a bid and took them home, that their contents were revealed.

It was seeing this marvellous film that made me go back to my own heaps of photos, mostly taken before DoublePrint went out of business and I had to go digital. Almost all, I have now thrown out. But here are a few for which I have a lamentable fondness.