What You Didn't Miss

by D. J. Taylor

  Friday 31 March

  Irritated to find among accounts of other new arrivals in social column of Daily Heavenograph reference to ‘Lady Barbara Twytte’ (widow of my Balliol contemporary Gavin Twytte). In fact, as merest glance at appropriate reference books could have shown – tho’ possibly not procurable here – Barbara, as baronet’s relict, merely ‘Lady Twytte’. Naturally such sloppiness endemic ‘down below’, as I shall no doubt have to get used to calling it, but somewhat shocked to find celestial standards similarly lax.

  HEAVEN JOURNAL

  ANTHONY POWELL

  21 April 2001

  Somewhat surprised – as one receives few invitations these days – to be sent letter requesting attendance at Eton conference. Subject for discussion apparently oneself. Tho’ long past the age at which one could be expected to derive any satisfaction from such gatherings, decided that it might be thought bad form to decline.

  22 April 2001

  Pre-conference luncheon at Ritz. Great crowd of persons, many of them quite unknown to me. Food – pâté de foie gras, smoked salmon, entrecôte etc. – eatable without being notably exciting. Later caught a few moments of post-luncheon address on ‘The Genius of Anthony Powell’. This I was interested to hear, if conscious that certain aspects of an admittedly large subject had not been adequately dealt with. But I would hesitate to pronounce a judgement.

  23 April 2001

  To Eton. Here a somewhat seedy crowd had assembled: fans, academics, sprinkling of literary types, etc. Nevertheless, one felt their objectives deserving of encouragement. Glance at conference ‘programme’ – ‘Widmerpool – our greatest comic character’, ‘The Achievement of Anthony Powell’ and so forth, certainly subjects not without all intrinsic interest, confirmed this impression. Lunch taken in dining hall – chicken, rice, peas. To drink: tap water 2001 (I did not see the label).

  24 April 2001

  Various characters met on previous day (Massingberd, A. N. Wilson, etc.) given space in newspapers to reflect on proceedings at length.

  ANTHONY POWELL: A LIFE

  MICHAEL BARBER

  . . . It was at this point, with his magnum opus complete, that Powell began work on his four-volume sequence of memoirs, To Keep the Pot Boiling. As he came to complete the second instalment, Some Frightfully Amusing People One Has Known (the opening volume, Eton Ramblings, had been described by Hugh Massingberd in the Daily Telegraph as ‘the most agreeable portrait of C. M. Frobisher’s house yet committed to paper’) he was interrupted by controversy when the Times printed a letter from the Hon Algernon Dymme, with whom Powell had messed at Eton, alleging that his fictional anti-hero, Kenneth Widdington, was modelled on Lord Dull, Minister of Fisheries in the Attlee government. Powell’s response to these accusations showed him at his most Delphic. ‘The most frightfully tedious thing about these dreadful bores who come to see me,’ he remarked, ‘is that they all sort of assume that one simply puts into the books all the people that one knows. And if you take the trouble to investigate, which of course scarcely anyone does these days, you’ll find that Lord Dull, unlike Widdington, is actually left-handed and married to a Marquis’s daughter rather than an Earl’s divorced wife . . .’

  . . . It was at this time that I persuaded Powell to grant me an interview at his agreeable Somersetshire residence. The entry in his Journals describing this encounter strikes a characteristic note: ‘Really frightful character called Barber came to talk to me for some publication of which I did not catch the name. Spent the rest of the afternoon reading Debrett, subsequently being joined at tea by Sylvia Farquahar-Fitzlightly (nee Kent-Cumberland/Ashkenazy/Twistleton-Trevelyan), V’s cousin through her Delacourt-Delingpole connection, tho’ Debrett untypically ambiguous on this point . . .’ [continues].

  RENEGADE: THE LIVES AND TALES OF MARK E. SMITH

  MARK E. SMITH

  ON HIS EARLY LIFE

  Is this fookin’ thing switched on . . .? Right, then . . . Cheers . . . No, ah’m not raising me voice, else I’ll miss the Karaoke . . . Cheers mate . . . Me childhood? It was all right, torturing me sisters and trading porn mags with them Irish lads. I feel sorry for kids these days. They’re missing out on things. Not that I enjoyed myself, mind. At school they read us the fookin’ Hobbit. Can you imagine that? This book about some tiny fucker who lives in a hole. I couldn’t get me head round that . . .

  I couldn’t afford to go to college: went for about three months, but I never had any money. Not that I liked it, mind, fuckers telling you what to do. Educate yourself, that’s always been my philosophy. George V. Higgins – that’s a good writer. You don’t get fellows like that on any of the reading lists. Not, that I agree with reading lists, mind. You don’t fookin’ tell me what to read . . . [continues].

  ON HIS PUBLIC IMAGE

  I really do think there’s people who think I’m an aggressive character, y’know, some kind of maniac. . . Look, just fuck off will y’pal, else I’ll . . . Right, I fookin’ told you, you fucker . . . Anyway, it’s mostly journalists as do that, that fookin’ Paul Morley . . . [rambles uncertainly for some minutes]. Ask anyone that’s been in The Fall – that bloke there, he played bass for us for ten minutes in 1980, or was it 1981 – and they’ll tell y’, Mark, he looks after his own. That time I clobbered Eric Lard [Fall lead guitarist, 13 September–3 October 1982] with his Fender Stratocaster – fookin’ poncey guitar, I mean why couldn’t he have a Woolworth’s one like everyone else? – it were all over the papers – trust that fookin’ Paul Morley – but what no one ever remembers is that it was me that took him down Casualty and phoned his dad to say, ‘Your wanker of a son’s had an accident.’ Credit where credit’s due. The fucker.

  ON THE BAND’S EARLY DAYS

  Rat Street, Prestwich was quite a going place at the time. Always plenty of vomit on the doorsteps at Christmas, which is a sign that folk aren’t feeling the pinch . . . Good solid working class people . . . Not that I liked it, mind. Then when I saw the Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in ’76, I thought, ‘My lot aren’t as bad as that.’ Not that they were any good, mind. There’s people who’ll say, ‘that Mark, he’s a fookin’ dictator, he’ll sack his band every fookin’ week’, but the way I see it is, them musicians, y’have to watch them, always ready to get pissed . . . Cheers mate . . . and shout their mouths off about things they know nowt about. The fuckers.

  ON THE SARTORIAL NICETIES

  As a band, we’ve always dressed sharp. You have to. That Oxfam shop on Salford High Street sells some all right stuff at a fair price. There’s times I’ve taken the whole band in there – well, them that I hadn’t fired that morning – and had them kitted out with flares and red-and-white tank-tops. Nobody rates a scruff. Not that I’ve ever really bothered about clothes, mind . . . [continues endlessly].

  MAD WORLD: EVELYN WAUGH AND THE SECRETS OF BRIDESHEAD

  PAULA BYRNE

  . . . It is really rather surprising how Evelyn Waugh’s relationship with the Starborgling family of Starborgling Court, Loamshire, and its absolute centrality to his literary career, has so far escaped the attention of critics. In fact, aside from the seventeen authorised biographies, the multi-volume edition of his letters, the ten-part television series presented by Nicholas Snargs, and Lady Stultitia Blodwyn’s exquisite memoir, scarcely a single book and barely a dozen or so scholarly articles have dwelt in even the most incidental way on the Starborglings’ extraordinary influence on his great masterpiece Bargshead Revisited.

  Although Waugh had known The Hon. Hyacinth ‘Fruity’ Starborgling (famous for remarking, on the occasion when a crowd of Mayfair debutantes were caught in a hailstorm, ‘My dear, it didn’t rain, it Diored’) at Oxford, where they were both members of the Rectum Club, his real introduction to the family of Earl Starborgling, and in particular his daughters the Ladies Mortitia, Venetia and Drusilla, did not come until 1931. ‘Darling Bonkers,’ runs one of his characteristically witty effusions to Lady Venetia from around this time, ‘I don’
t suppose you’d let me be your chum, would you? I’m afraid I didn’t go to Eton like Fruity and my wretched father is horribly middle-class, but if you could see your way to overlooking this I’d be most fearfully chuffed. Please ask me for Christmas – it would be just too super. Just off to roger a tart, so let’s hope the old cock doesn’t drop off eh?’

  In old age Lady Venetia would remember the sensation that these letters produced at the breakfast table. ‘He was just so frightfully funny that we all loved him. Of course it was rather sad that he couldn’t find anyone of his own class to associate with, but father always said we should be tolerant towards members of the lower orders who got above themselves, and of course he’d been very kind to Piers when they were at Oxford, carrying his bags and doing his essays and so forth, and so whenever anyone found him hiding under the sofa the day after we’d seen him off on the train, we were always terribly amused: it was almost as funny as the time father shot the gamekeeper and the blood dripped all over the antimacassar.’

  Surprisingly, no previous biographer has ever remarked on Waugh’s momentous encounter with Lord Starborgling, which I am able to date to an afternoon in May 1932, when Waugh, entering the gentlemen’s lavatory at the Drones Club, found his lordship, well known for his ability to handle servants, engaged with one of the attendants. ‘Christ, aren’t you that ghastly little parvenu who writes smutty letters to my daughters?’ Lord Starborgling is supposed to have remarked. No finer example of Waugh’s aristocratic beau ideal could have been imagined. It is not exaggerating to say that the scene resonates throughout Waugh’s later work. Clearly when Sir Basil Digby-Vane-Cretin in Next Stop White’s is loudly sick into the waste-paper basket, Waugh has in mind the antique vomiting basins designed by the third earl and brought out at Starborgling only on ceremonial occasions such as the annual Roasting (always spelt ‘rosting’) of the Tenants. Similarly the celebrated scene in Bargshead in which a footman is sacked for referring to ‘note paper’ rather than ‘writing-paper’ can only have its origins in . . . [continues for several hundred pages].

  . . . In later life, although Waugh maintained a charming correspondence with his old friends – ‘Darling Bonkers,’ he wrote as late as 1959, ‘isn’t life foul? Even the Pope is a bloody liberal’ – it was clear that the heady days of their first acquaintance could be no more. Lady Mortitia, who died in 1981, became an authority on port wine and sitting in chairs. Lady Venetia, alternatively, made a puzzling and short-lived late marriage to the flamboyant Sir Robin Gaye-Ladd, who is thought to have left her his collection of duchesse brisées. Lady Drusilla, after enjoying well-publicised affairs with the Dalai Lama, His Holiness Pope John-Paul II, Rolf Harris and many other prominent men, devoted herself to the Mastership of the local Vole-hounds, in which capacity she was an august presence on the Starborgling lawn on meet days until her 109th year . . . [continues endlessly].

  WILD MARY: A LIFE OF MARY WESLEY

  PATRICK MARNHAM

  . . . It was at this point, with the storm-clouds gathering over Europe, that Mary took the opportunity to sever her brief alliance with the Hon. Edmond Crackwytte, Lord Clantantrum’s eccentric heir, and fall wholeheartedly into the arms of Reggie Kent-Cumberland, first met on an excursion to the Bavarian alps as long ago as 1932.

  ‘War,’ she later wrote, with her customarily penetrating shrewdness, ‘was a splendid excuse for people to behave even more appallingly than they would otherwise have done.’ Although the affair with Reggie was of brief duration (27 May to 1 June 1940) she remained grateful to him. ‘Reggie was most awfully sweet. He used to lend me his copy of the Times and would always stand one a lunch at the Ritz and that kind of thing.’ Indeed, there is an echo of the relationship in her second novel, Frightfully Posh, in which Salmonetta Frink-Parsnip, bathing naked off the rocks of Pollwiddlem with Hector Fitzboodle, is shocked by the size of his genitalia. ‘Of course, Reggie was hung like an orang-utan,’ a friend recalled, ‘only one didn’t talk about such things in those days.’ Now, with her children lashed to pushchairs in the care of an obliging factotum, Nanny Fang, and her husband off somewhere or other, Mary was able to join the ‘top secret hush-hush Whitehall show’ run by her Old Etonian friend Walter ‘Carrots’ Cholmondeley, and accumulate the valuable experience that was to see her, many years later, emerge as one of the most tedious upper-class drips in modern English letters [shouldn’t that be ‘distinguished lady novelists’? Ed.].

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Mary’s great-great-grandmother, Henrietta ffrench-Saunders, painted in Rome by Garibaldi, RA

  October 1933 En route to India with Bobo, Oofy and Gervais

  July 1941 Christening of the Hon. Toby Snargs, St Philomena’s, Pendennis-on-the-Tamar

  FROM THE INDEX

  Wesley, Mary: . . . marries Esmé Snargs, 112, marriage sours, 113, wartime affairs, 114–88, divorce petition listed, 189, in WVS providing comforts for troops, 190–1, care lavished on children, 191 (footnote iii), divorce hearing, 192, on erotic nature of war, 193– 208, on ‘frightfully good time’ with Hon Clarence Maltravers, 209 . . . [continues endlessly].

  MISCELLANEOUS TRIFLES

  ALBION: THE ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH IMAGINATION

  PETER ACKROYD

  i THE TREE

  The poetry of England is born in a glade hedged round with the shadows of the ancient trees. Made of wood, ever sprouting their charming and tremulous leaves, their roots extending far underground, bark-adorned, they bring mystery and enchantment to the poetic imagination. Thus Sir Hugh de Hee in his fifteenth century ‘A Pretty Chaunt to ye Verdant Woodland’ remarks that:

  A canopy of grene fronds dost ere enclose

  The wood wherein my ladye goes

  In much the same spirit, four hundred years later, the Lincolnshire dialect poet Silas Bole intriguingly observes:

  Alas! The lofted arching tree!

  That harbinger of melancholy

  Ash and elm and oak and larch

  Proud sentinels of my funeral march

  Tennyson, clearly, had seen a tree, otherwise he would not have been able to write ‘Come into the Garden Maud’. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover there is a fascinating conversation between Connie and Mellows: ‘What is that large tall thing in the field with bits sticking out of it?’ ‘Don’t be so bloody soft lass, ’tis a tree.’ Potent, symbolic, tall, thin, often with green decorations, the tree bestrides the interior life of England.

  And yet this is no calm and sequestered bower. Trees can fall down. They can sicken and die. The Plantagent poet Eorpwald the Lame writes of a birch tree that ‘fell upon this mannes head/and presentlee did kill him ded’. A fourteenth century legend records the arrival in the English forests of the giant Ag-royd who, together with his demonic helpers Chatto and Windus, sets out to fell the mighty oaks in order to ‘render them into countless bokes fit for Master Ottaker’s remainder traye . . .’ [continues for hundreds of pages].

  A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF BRITAIN

  REBECCA FRASER

  FROM THE PREFACE . . .

  How well I remember, as a young girl, sitting at tea in the nursery at Campden Hill Square and being read to, by our governess Miss Chasm, from that most estimable volume, Mrs Bute Prendergast’s Precious Albion: a genteel and patriotic history (1894), a work forged in an age when our Imperial responsibilities were a source of satisfaction rather than disquiet. Needless to relate, time’s winged chariot has swept on since this dauntless lady first appraised her quill. Clio, the muse of history, has gathered up her skirts and skipped away. A swimming pool, to a former generation, may seem only a sink to its less heroic successor.

  And yet it seemed to me, embarking on this book with my three young daughters, Tantarella, Hexagon and Ariadne, in mind, that some easy framework were required to guide members of the general public through the shooting gallery of contending arquebuses that is the historian’s disputed fact. Furthermore, it appeared to me that our debt to certain gifted individuals in our nation’s past wa
s such that it behoves us to celebrate their achievements in no very niggardly manner. Sir Winston Churchill, for example, was a great statesman who contributed in a by no means unremarkable fashion to our military dispositions at a time of considerable international strife. Others there are that go unsung, such as Mrs Stultitia Blodwyn, originator of that both elegant and necessary feminine garment, the crinoline. Yet all have their undoubted place in a rich and picturesque tapestry, vivid in its outlines, savage in its extremities, pitiless in its judgements. Doughty knights on their arm-girt steeds, noble ladies on their brocade-bridled palfreys, churl and chamberlain, serf and seneschal – all march side by side in this unforgettable panoply . . . [continues].

  FROM CHAPTER ONE: ‘ROMAN’ . . .

  Everywhere in this storm-tossed island, shorn of its last defenders, muscular, hairy-breeched barbarians came ravening upon the sorry British and put them to the sword. All were horribly murdered, often with considerable barbarity. A ravened upon and despairing people, these Romano-British perhaps exemplified the spirit that we associate with their more lusty descendants: quiet yet unyielding hope. But it was not to be . . . Hastings . . . Agincourt . . . ‘My Kingdom for a Horse’ . . . Good Queen Bess . . . Noll Cromwell . . . ‘We are not amused’ . . . [continues].