Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Mr Lloyd believed in mixing up plants that had never been together before. His ambition was a closely-woven tapestry of colours and textures in which foliage – matt or shiny, grey or variegated, grass or coniferous – was as important as the flowers. In the borders at Great Dixter banana trees grew with verbena, and spiky agave with dahlias. Climbers, annuals, perennials and shrubs all clambered about, “helping each other”, as Mr Lloyd liked to say, with their sheer differences of habit. His borders were a paean to desegregation. When he showed slides of them at his lectures, audiences would sometimes gasp with horror.

  His iconoclasm went beyond colour and arrangement. He believed that plants should go their own way in gardens. If a

  yellow spike of mullein decided to grow in a clump of bright pink phlox, he welcomed it. (“Hurrah for vulgarity!”, as he wrote once.) He was delighted that lichens made patterns on his York stone paths, and that wild birds-foot trefoil colonised the Sunken Garden. These gave him ideas.

  Two small lawns at the front of the house were always left unmown until the autumn. Mr Lloyd wanted orchids and fritillaries to grow there, but also hoped to enjoy the wind and light in the grass. Once he allowed a rambler rose to get so out of hand that it killed two holm oaks and made a gap in a hedge; but Mr Lloyd so liked what he saw through the gap, the twisted trunk of a crab-apple tree framed in ilex leaves, that he made a feature of it, underplanting the crab for good measure with bright yellow Epimedium pinnatum.

  Certain flowers he loved especially. He would brake violently for poppies seen at the roadside, and gloried in lupins and clematis. Hydrangeas, on the other hand, were “anaemic” and most salvias “rubbish”. Roses and lavender he had little luck with; his clay soil was too heavy. He had a special fondness for the white Japanese anemones that backed, calmly and blankly,the psychedelic annuals he tried out in his beds.

  His greatest appreciation, however, was for the hedges and trees that gave architectural structure to his garden, and held its history. The winding yew hedges at Great Dixter had been planted by his father, who had bought the house with his printing fortune. For Mr Lloyd they had “a presence”, seeming to inhabit his garden rather than grow there. He treasured the fig trees introduced by Lutyens – their huge leaves so useful in his plantings – and the few pear trees left from the original farm orchard. On the western boundary stood a line of ash trees that he wished, in dictatorial moods, to cut down, because they filled his garden with seeds. But then freedom and joy prevailed: there was nothing quite like a sunset seen through their faint feathered leaves.

  Ronald Lockley

  Ronald Mathias Lockley, a protector of nature, died on April 12th 2000, aged 96

  The danger of writing about Ronald Lockley is of presenting, probably unfairly, a portrait of an oddity. He believed he had a gift of communicating with animals. Writing in The Economist in 1979, an exasperated reviewer of one of Mr Lockley’s books said he “should have kept off imaginary conversations with dying killer whales”. But the old whale Mr Lockley befriended did have some strong points to make about polluted oceans. And if it was odd to talk with whales, and indeed with many other creatures, it was an affliction that Mr Lockley shared with Aristotle and Plutarch, to drop a name or two.

  Anyway, Mr Lockley had pretty convincing proof that giving human characteristics to animals was fairly widespread. In 1964 he had published “The Private Life of the Rabbit”. This study of the habits of the wild rabbit gathered by Mr Lockley persuaded Richard Adams to write “Watership Down”, a kind of Disney story for adults, which became an immediate bestseller. Anthropomorphism, as it is bleakly known, was decreed to be free of health risks.

  The two men became friends and went on an expedition together to the Antarctic. “I can’t recollect that we ever had a disagreement,” Mr Adams said last week. However, “Watership Down”, which gave rabbits human characteristics and humanlike problems, was far removed from Mr Lockley’s view of the animal world. “Watership Down” is a novel, a thriller set in the mean streets of the warren, requiring considerable suspension of belief. Mr Lockley’s request was more subtle: for a suspension of hostility by man towards nature. Like humans, he said, other creatures had “a measure of reasoning and individual action”. A lecture Mr Lockley gave from time to time was entitled “The seabird as an individual”. One of his books (he wrote about 40) was “Man against Nature”, in which he chronicled the destruction of animals and plants in Australia and elsewhere in the South Pacific.

  Ronald Lockley felt most comfortable on an island. In 1927, when he was 24, he rented Skokholm, a small deserted island off Wales. It had few material comforts. The reason it was deserted was because the previous inhabitants could no longer stand the battering of Atlantic gales and the loneliness. Even fishing was hazardous off the rocky coast. But Mr Lockley and his wife repaired a farmhouse, using timber from a wrecked schooner, and coal from her cargo to keep warm. Fresh water was mostly provided by the relentless rain. Before coming to the island he had worked on a small farm, and was used to improvising.

  He studied the real owners of the island, the seabirds, and wrote books about them. One was called “Dream Island”. In 1933 he founded Britain’s first bird observatory on the island, where migrating birds were trapped, ringed and released. Skokholm, and Mr Lockley, became mildly famous. Scientists arrived to peer at the shearwaters and puffins. A film was made about the life of the gannet and won an Oscar as the year’s best documentary. Princess Elizabeth, later to become the queen, thought she would like a pet razorbill. Mr Lockley brought one

  to Buckingham Palace, and on television was seen being attacked as he opened its basket. The king of Bulgaria turned up at the island, accompanied by a servant who carried a chair in case of royal exhaustion.

  Mr Lockley inhabited his dream island until the second world war when he joined the navy and thought up ways to track submarines. After the war he bought a house on the mainland of Wales, where he did his study of wild rabbits. The problem was to get close to them. There had been rabbits on Skokholm, but they had resolutely kept their distance. Mr Lockley’s solution was to fit glass panels to a warren, and for four years he studied such matters as overcrowding, the effects of myxomatosis and how the males defended the warren against stoats.

  He thought he would like to live on an island again. But not Skokholm or any Welsh islands. Wales, where he was born, was, he judged, no longer protecting its environment. He tried to stop an oil refinery being built in western Wales, was unsuccessful, and that was that. He visited many islands that seemed interesting, from the Kuriles to French Polynesia. He settled in New Zealand. The country is overrunwith rabbits, and the New Zealanders hopefully asked Mr Lockley if he could advise them how to get rid of the pests quickly. He could not. Rabbit-killing viruses were cruel and did not work, he said. Try to control the rabbits by traditional methods and be patient, he said.

  Most New Zealanders are happy to be impatient and like to think that they are as modern as tomorrow, but outsiders insist that they are not, and that is their charm. Mr Lockley said that New Zealand was the last place of any size to be colonised by humans, and it was still in the happy position of having to catch up. “Go slow, New Zealand, go slow,” Mr Lockley told his adopted country. It won’t, not willingly. But New Zealanders liked Ronald Lockley, admired his reputation as a protector of nature, and would never laugh at him just because he talked to whales.

  Bernard Loiseau

  Bernard Daniel Jacques Loiseau, a French chef, died on February 24th 2003, aged 52

  Driving from Paris to Bernard Loiseau’s restaurant, La Côte d’Or, in the Burgundy village of Saulieu, took about three hours, assuming no hold-ups. If it seemed a long way to go for a meal, the reward at the end was nothing as ordinary as the mere appeasement of hunger; it was to experience, Mr Loiseau said, “an explosion of taste in the mouth”. His sauces were said to be among the finest in France, which for many serious eaters meant in the world.

  France is fie
rcely proud of its restaurant and hotel industry. Bernard Loiseau’s name “evokes all the perfection of the culinary art and the art of living”, said France’s culture minister. When he was president, François Mitterrand pinned the légion d’honneur on the overalls of Mr Loiseau, having first personally confirmed the quality of the chef’s frog’s legs in parsley juice and garlic purée.

  As important to Mr Loiseau was being given a top rating of three stars by the Michelin guide, which has a reputation for honesty rare in the catering business. In Britain and the United States many guides carry reviews of restaurants and hotels that they pay for, while newspaper critics tend to be known among restaurateurs, who take care not to poison them. But Michelin, also a tyre manufacturer (19% of the world market), solemnly guards its godlike reputation as the bible of the catering business. The company insists that its 100 or so inspectors remain anonymous and that they are primarily interested in “what is on the plate”.

  Not long ago, according to a member of Mr Loiseau’s staff, he anxiously asked Michelin if his restaurant was likely to keep his three stars. God declined to say but kindly advised him to “be careful and stay in your kitchen and don’t do too much business”. The restaurant kept its stars in the latest guide, but another French guide, GaultMillau, reduced its rating and has been blamed by some of Mr Loiseau’s colleagues for driving him to suicide.

  That is speculation, but what Mr Loiseau’s sad death has made clear is that staying at the top in the restaurant business is cruelly demanding. “There is suffering and fatigue behind the façade,” said a fellow chef.

  Bernard Loiseau’s restaurant had started out as a coaching inn in the 19th century. In the 1930s under Alexandre Dumaine it became one of the best-known restaurants in France, gaining three Michelin stars, all of which were lost when he retired. Mr Loiseau arrived at the now rundown restaurant in Saulieu in 1975, aged 24, “with nothing but my toothbrush”, having worked in various restaurant kitchens since he was a boy. To begin with he provided meals based on what Dumaine had called “the honest elements of French peasant cuisine”. But he was drawn to nouvelle cuisine, favoured by GaultMillau (which may have made its recent criticism hard for him to take). He devised the sauces that helped to make him famous that were lighter than those made with butter and cream. Mr Loiseau’s weightier customers were especially appreciative. In 1977 his restaurant gained its first Michelin star with Mr Loiseau as chef, in 1981 a second and in 1991 a third, putting him among the 20 or so top chefs in France.

  By then Mr Loiseau had become the owner of La Côte d’Or and set about an ambitious transformation of what had been a fairly modest establishment, adding hotel suites, a pool and private dining rooms, and expanding his kitchen. At the end of a meal Mr Loiseau’s guests could recall the pleasures of the tummy while strolling in an English-style garden. Before they left they were encouraged tobrowse in the restaurant shop, where food, wines, kitchen equipment and books of Mr Loiseau’s recipes were on sale. At the time Mr Loiseau was said to have borrowed $5m to pay for the work.

  He expanded further, buying three bistros in Paris. He licensed his name to mass-market frozen foods. He was, he said, like Yves Saint-Laurent: “I do both high fashion and ready-to-wear.” He became a familiar face on television and on magazine covers. His culinary business traded on the French stock exchange, and its price has been sinking in line with other luxury businesses.

  Was Mr Loiseau, so meticulous in the kitchen, an innocent at business? He told a reporter in 1997 that La Côte d’Or had to be full every night, in the restaurant and the hotel, to make any money. Since then luxury businesses have been hit by tighter purses. The current slanging match between America and France may raise a smile when French fries are renamed freedom fries. But it becomes serious when the American tourists who packed a Michelin guide in their luggage are less inclined to visit a country opposed to their government’s policy on Iraq.

  Yet to remain desirable, a top restaurant dare not be seen to economise. A Paris restaurateur remarked recently that his high fixed costs of maintaining an appealing establishment with a large staff meant that every customer costs him $70 before he eats or drinks anything. No wonder Mr Loiseau was worried about the possibility of losing one of his precious stars, and a consequent drop in custom. Stick to your kitchen, Michelin had told him. It wasn’t bad advice.

  Cardinal Lustiger

  Aaron Jean-Marie Lustiger, cardinal and archbishop, died on August 5th 2007, aged 80

  AT THE funeral of Jean-Marie Lustiger, at Notre Dame de Paris on August 10th, his second cousin Jonas Moses-Lustiger read a psalm in Hebrew and placed on the coffin a jar of earth that had been gathered on the Mount of Olives. Then another cousin, Arno Lustiger, bent over the coffin to recite Kaddish. Only when those things were done was the body of Cardinal Lustiger carried inside the cathedral, where Catholic panoply took over.

  There was no question of mixing the rites; the cardinal, said his staff, would not have liked that. Yet they were mixed in himself. He was a Jew by birth, instinct, emotion and devotion; he was a Catholic by conversion and conviction. He cracked Jewish jokes, and put on a suit and kippa to go to synagogue, although the evening would find him in his soutane again. For him, Christianity was simply the fruit of Judaism; his first religion came to completion in his second. Christ, in his eyes, was the Messiah of Israel, his cross worthy of a yellow star. And since the mission of Israel was “to bring light to the goyim”, preaching the gospel became his own mitzvah.

  The theology was complicated, despite the jut-jawed charm and aquiline intensity with which it was expressed. Many on both sides did not understand it. The Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel called Cardinal Lustiger a betrayer of his people; the Jerusalem Post denounced him as an apostate. On the Catholic side, arch-conservatives lamented that their archbishop was not “truly of French origin”.

  In one sense, this was correct. His father and mother were Polish-Jewish immigrants, keeping a hat-and-drapery shop in Montparnasse, in Paris. The young Aaron had been protected from Christianity, kept inside during Christian festivals and made aware that his grandfather had been a Yiddish-speaking rabbi in Silesia. But he had found a New Testament at his piano teacher’s and discovered, as he read it, that he seemed to know this story already.

  The moment of conversion came at 14, in Orléans, where his family had taken sporadic shelter in a Catholic household during the war. On Holy Thursday he stole into Orléans cathedral to find it blazing with candles and flowers. The next day, Good Friday, he found the church stripped as a sign of desolation. Christ’s presence, followed by Christ’s absence, impressed him so deeply that he asked to be baptised. Explaining to his parents was “unbearably painful”; outraged, they called in a rabbi, but the rabbi seemed to think their boy was either deluded, or sensible. Fourteen years later he was ordained a priest.

  The future cardinal was convinced, even then, that he had not abandoned one iota of his Jewishness. To say he had, he once explained, “is like denying my father and mother, my grandfathers and grandmothers”. He had kept the name Aaron as his first name at baptism, only adding Christian ones. At the same time, those who thought this a conversion of convenience, to save his hide, were wrong. He had not wanted to save his hide. Like most survivors, he constantly mourned the members of his family who had died in the camps, especially his mother, who was transported to Auschwitz in 1942. He would say Kaddish for her on her death day, and

  on his first visit to Auschwitz, in 1983, he slipped away to kneel in the grass among the barracks, in his archiepiscopal robes with his scarlet skull-cap, and cry.

  Possibly because that wound had never healed, possibly because melancholy kept dogging him, he pursued his career as a priest with a wild, frenetic energy. As a chaplain in the Paris universities, a post he held from 1954–69, “Lulu” was remembered in sharp black corduroys and black loafers, tearing round the Latin Quarter on a motorbike. As Archbishop of Paris, in 1984, he led a demonstration of a million peopl
e to protest against François Mitterrand’s attempt to secularise Catholic schools. He set up Radio Notre Dame and a Catholic TV station; in his 70s, in 1997 and 2000, he organised joyous World Youth Days in Paris and in Rome. Fervent for evangelisation, “the Bulldozer” gingered up all his 106 parishes in Paris, summarily shifted clergy who failed to perform, and founded his own seminary, which eventually provided about 15% of the city’s priests.

  Though a new broom and a gale of fresh air, unafraid to shout “Merde!” if a crucifix fell over, he was intellectually conservative. Most of the world’s wrongs, including fascism, communismand anti-Semitism, he traced to the Enlightenment and the cult of reason. Relativism and the collapse of moral values he blamed on the student riots of 1968, “this bedlam”, in which he had refused to take the students’ side. All his instincts and emotions, as well as his Polish background, endeared him to John Paul II, and it was under the mantle of that friendship that he rose first to bishop of Orléans, then to archbishop, and finally to cardinal, all within five years.

  But he never forgot. He taught himself Hebrew in readiness for his aliyah, or formal return to Israel. Every detail of his funeral, with its two rites, he carefully arranged himself. Then he wrote his epitaph:

  I was born Jewish. I received the name of my paternal grandfather, Aaron. Having become Christian by faith and baptism, I have remained Jewish. As did the Apostles.

  Lillian Lux

  Lillian Lux, star of the Yiddish theatre, died on June 11th 2005, aged 86

  FOR homesick Jewish immigrants in New York in the early decades of the 20th century, there were few better places than the theatre. There, in a small closed space, in the dark, they could recreate the neurotic, loving, oppressive atmosphere of the shtetlekh they had left behind. In that world, lost in the steppes of Russia or the forests of Poland, the fathers were tragic and the mothers scheming; the daughters were pretty and dangerously marriageable; their suitors were Talmudic scholars; and after an hour or so of singing, dancing and fallings-out, it would all end in hugs and tears under the wedding-canopy.