by Jan Morris
But PS, apropos of the Churchillian word, I remember from long ago a dubious naval story, the text of which I have long forgotten, but whose punchline I still find funny: ‘You could have buggered me through me oilskins.’
DAY 23
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Some time ago, I recorded a radio programme for the BBC which was intended to express my own feelings about the USA. It was the time of the Pax Americana, of the Special Relationship between Britain and America, and I had written a lot around the subject, so the programme was partly affectionate memoir and partly appropriate music. People seemed to like it, so I was invited to do a sequel, this time concerning another preoccupation of mine: the late British Empire.
Choosing music to go with the American programme had been easy enough – anything from ‘Shenandoah’ to Thelonius Monk – but orchestrating an equivalent response to my feelings about the British Empire was another matter. I had called the programme itself ‘An Equivocation’, and I needed a selection that reflected a similar abstraction – for if I am proud of lots about the British Empire, of course I know there is much to be ashamed of too.
Well, I had Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, of course, first in stately grandeur and then in Jingo degradation at the Last Night of the Proms, and I had some pompous coronation music (Walton’s ‘Orb and Sceptre’) and some self-mockery (Gilbert and Sullivan), and the programme ended with that sad old hymn about Proud Empires Passing Away. But the music that provided a happy surprise of equivocation, halfway through, was the Kipling ballad ‘On the Road to Mandalay’, with its robust imperialist refrain: ‘Come you back, you British Soldier, Come you back to Mandalay, / Where the dawn comes up like thunder out of China cross the bay …’
I love the old song anyway, and I was especially pleased with the rendering of it that I found for my programme, because it was elegantly performed by a citizen of a country that had once been part of the British Empire itself but had long since thrown off the colonial coils.
The former colony was the United States of America. And the singer (‘Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst’)? The singer was Frank Sinatra.
DAY 24
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It was a glorious morning today, but unreliable. The sun shone, the sea was cobalt blue, the birds sang and my old darling thought it was just the day for an old-school picnic lunch – you know, like the ones we used to have.
Aha, but I knew better than that. I recognized the extra tinge in the wind that spoke of sudden showers, and so I decided instead upon a twenty-first-century picnic.
This is what we did. We went down to the supermarket and bought ourselves two platters of sushi, clean, cold, glittering from the ice box and with chopsticks, to go. And around the corner at a place called Bargain Booze we acquired two plastic cups of steaming coffee out of a humming machine.
We then we drove to a green, grassy spot at the edge of the sea below the castle, looking out across that cobalt blue to the green hills beyond our bay, and there we parked the car, all alone, and sat in it lordly, as though we owned the place. We switched the engine off, we turned the radio on to Classic FM, and sure enough – didn’t I say so? – just as we started on the sushi the first traitorous raindrops began to fall.
Oh, there’s a lot to be said for modernity! I myself have never been an eager picnicker, but really, what could have been much better than our lunch there today – that marvellous view in front of us, familiar melodies on the radio, the snug, warm, comfortable seats of the old Honda, the gentle pitter-patter of rain on its roof, Bargain Booze cappuccino still steaming and delicate morsels of raw seafood, icy and pungent, straight (well, more or less straight) from far Japan?
Wasn’t it better than the crumbly sandwiches, lukewarm tea and biscuits that we might have been having in the old days? I certainly thought so, but I fear my beloved was still pining for the picnics we used to know and didn’t even finish her pickled eel and tofu. The rain blobbed all over the car as I drove home, but bless her dear heart, I knew better than to say I told her so.
DAY 25
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Today I offer you, by permission, an introduction to a language, Desperanto, which my collaborating son Twm has introduced me to. This is a page from an instruction book, Desperanto Made Easy, entitled ‘Lesson 7, In the Café’, and to get the hang of it you must imagine the specimen Desperantian dialogue being spoken by an instructor whose native language is a rather curious, semi-accented, slightly Australian sort of English. Here we go:
L.O.
L.O.2.U.2.
I.C.U.R.B.C.!
S.
F.U.N.E.M.?
A.?
I.Z.: F.U.N.E.M.?
O! S.I.F.M.N.I.F.X.
I.8.X.! F.U.N.E.T.?
S., I.F.T.
L.F.M.N.T.
OK.
Key to Lesson 7 tomorrow! Can you wait?
DAY 26
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By now you probably have a better command of Desperanto that I have myself, but just in case, here’s a plain English translation of yesterday’s dialogue – in a café, you may remember:
HULLO.
HULLO TO YOU TOO.
I SEE YOU ARE BUSY!
YES.
HAVE YOU ANY HAM?
EH?
I SAID: HAVE YOU ANY HAM?
O! YES, I HAVE HAM AND I HAVE EGGS.
I HATE EGGS! HAVE YOU ANY TEA?
YES, I HAVE TEA.
I’LL HAVE HAM AND TEA.
OK.
It doesn’t sound like much of a café, does it, but then I suppose Lesson 7 is only for relative beginners.
DAY 27
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Another Glimpse of Literary Life
The arrival of a letter concerning royalties is always a pregnant moment for authors. Will it be encouraging or dismaying, urging them to yet higher accomplishment or making them murmur in despair over their computers, ‘Dear God, what’s the use of trying?’ This morning I received such a challenge, concerning a modest book I wrote years ago about my house in Wales, and this, in brief, is what it told me. The little work, I was gratified to learn, had lately been published not only in the United States as well as in England, but also in translated editions in German, Japanese, Dutch, Spanish and Taiwanese. All had been gratifyingly recorded in the left-hand column of the statement, and my eyes slid expectantly to the right-hand column, where the financial proceeds were analysed. The list took into account, of course, exchange rates, agents’ fees, publishers’ advances, direct marketing and Electronic Books Escalation, and concluded with the following stately assessment of total profits from my book: £000.00.
DAY 28
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Forty-three per cent of Quakers, I learn from one of the more esoteric of recent statistics, ‘are unable to profess a belief in God’. Bravo, say I, because you can be quite sure that they are decent, intelligent people, and not atheist nutters.
I speak with feeling, because there are Quaker strains in my own hybrid origins, and I have always admired the element of restrained mysticism in their religious attitudes. I occasionally look in on their meetings, and shall never forget one in particular. It was in Oxford, on 23 November 1963. On the previous day President Kennedy had been assassinated, and that morning I looked in at the Quaker Meeting House in St Giles’ Street. It was packed with Friends, sitting silent and thoughtful there, and only one solitary person rose to speak.
He was the head of one of the Oxford colleges, an eminent former diplomat, and he offered a prayer on behalf of the assassin.
DAY 29
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A hideous day’s news greets me this morning, of wars and rumours of wars, of sleazy capitalism and dubious diplomacy, democracy coarsened, loyalties abandoned, religion
s squabbling, footling gossip and squalid accusations. ‘What’s the use?’ I say to myself, aloud and in the general direction of nowhere. I give up. Count me out. If I had a newspaper, I would scrumple it up and throw it in the fire, if I had a fire. As it is, I switch off the damned computer, curse a curse and compose this thought for the day.
Outside my window a soft wind is stirring the trees – themselves gently mutating into the green of a new summer.
DAY 30
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Rather a creepy contribution today. I went to bed late, after a light supper and only a small glass of local cider, and switched my light off at midnight exactly, doing without my usual fascinating chapter of Anna Karenina. Instantly I went to sleep, and after a night’s perfect, dreamless slumber, woke up this morning to the absolute conviction that it was my birthday, 2 October.
It was nothing of the sort, being in fact 13 May, but I was perfectly sure of it, and very nearly rang my neighbour at the farm, who shares a birthday with me, to swap mutual congratulations. Luckily I didn’t, realizing just in time that I was in hallucination, but instead it strangely dawned upon me that although it was certainly not my own date of birth, it really was the birthdays of my two musician brothers, who both entered the world, though two years apart, on 13 May.
They both died long ago, and I can only suppose that they were playing some kind of celestial joke upon me, with merry incidental music from Gareth on his flute and Christopher upon his organ at St George’s Hanover Square.
Ho, ho, ho! Happy Birthday, Bros!
DAY 31
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The media are warming up for the Royal Wedding jamboree next weekend. While I rather like what little I know about Harry and Meghan, and wish them well, as a long-confirmed Welsh republican I cannot resist resurrecting two letters I wrote to The Times years ago concerning previous such goings-on. Here they are:
29 July 1981
Sir, I would like to put on record one citizen’s sense of revulsion and foreboding at the ostentation, the extravagance and the sycophancy surrounding today’s wedding of the heir to the British throne.
22 April 2011
Sir, At the time of the last royal wedding you kindly printed a letter from me complaining, as I remember it, about the preposterous flummery, extravagance and vulgarity of the event.
This time words fail me.
What shall I be writing next week? WATCH THIS SPACE!
DAY 32
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In the welter of botanical encomia, popular at this time of year, glorifying the bluebell, the buttercup, the cowslip and the budding rose, I fail to find a single line or lyric in praise of the dandelion. Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth and even Rupert Brooke evidently ignored it. It was hardly worth noticing, it seems, at Gilbert White’s Selborne, and the most interesting thing that William Rhind’s History of the Vegetable Kingdom could say about it in 1856 was that older physicians recommended it in the treatment of hypochondria.
Well, as a loyal hypochondriac myself, here I am to stand up for this grand old botanical character, which for many centuries has provided food, medicine and arcane legend to peoples around the world. At one time of its life, when it is young, yellow and friendly, the dandelion sings a bold bass to the sweet contraltos and trebles of the cowslips and the primroses. Later, it veils itself in mystery, and the powder puffs of its virility are silently scattered across fields and gardens everywhere.
So there! Gardening snobs and ignoramuses may dismiss Taraxacum officinale as a mere vulgar weed, but I honour it as a heroic fellow citizen of the world, part dandy, part lion, part mystic and all jolly good fellow!
DAY 33
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I hate to brag, but I cannot help thinking myself prescient with my comment on the engagement last year of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle – consummated the other day, as all the world knows, in a spectacularly publicized wedding. As a whole-hog Welsh republican, I had cynically sneered in the columns of The Times at two previous royal weddings (vulgar and sycophantic), but I rather liked the sound of Harry and Meghan, and when I heard of their engagement I wrote in my diary of the time that their example might ‘conceivably persuade us cynics that family monarchy as a device of government is irrationally worth preserving’.
Well, we shall see, but at least I could tell readers of The Times in May 2018 that this latest royal wedding ‘seemed to me a very wise delight’.
DAY 34
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The most deceptive of the human faculties, I am beginning to think, is memory. We must nearly all find, I’m sure, that the older we get, the less reliable our memories are, but in many different aspects – forgetting names or forgetting faces, forgetting appointments sometimes, or even forgetting what we came upstairs for. In my own case, though, I am beginning to find that my memory is actually misleading, inaccurate, warped and sometimes harmlessly false.
I suppose it is partly the fault of my trade. All my life I have made professional use of my memory, using it, above all, as a chief instrument of what I presumptuously call, with a capital letter, my Art. It’s not a very high-flown art, but it does depend largely upon the sounds and rhythms of words and sentences, which is why I like to read all my stuff aloud, preferably in my bath for resonance. And by the nature of things I suppose my memory instinctively moulds the nature and relevance of my recollections.
Could it be, I have begun to wonder this morning, that over the years this technique has been leading me towards untruths? A splendid old friend and contemporary of mine came to visit us yesterday, for the first time in many years. We soldiered together in the last days of the war and had ended up sharing a requisitioned house in Allied-occupied Venice. He was a professional soldier, born to it, and he went on to a distinguished career with his famous cavalry regiment. I was, then as now, at heart only a writer. How I enjoyed his company and his memories yesterday, after seventy years of friendship, but it dawned upon me, all the same, that our recollections of that distant Venice were different in kind.
Both our stories of recall were genuine, but they had been moulded and tempered, down the years, by the experiences of two different lifetimes, the very different lifetimes of two old friends, marching or stumbling our separate ways through time’s tangle, and nurturing our memories accordingly.
DAY 35
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A lovely day today, on a bank holiday weekend, so instead of taking my exercise up our leafy lane, I popped down to the waterfront for a brisk thousand paces along the promenade. It was exhilaratingly full of life – not crowded life exactly, but speckled life. Ours is a pebble beach, so there were no jam-packed sunseekers and sandcastlers, but clumps of people were scattered all across the foreshore, celebrating the sunshine in different ways. There were bathers, of course, and solitary scavengers I took to be fossil-hunters, and children at rock pools who were almost certainly looking for crabs, and lovers, of course, in the secluded lee of the promenade. Far away, almost out of sight, I could see bravos wading in twos and threes, and many dogs running towards the blue-green tide, and brilliantly across the whole waterscape a solitary windsurfer was storming and swishing and showing off his skills among the waves of the bay.
I thought it was all just wonderful, and to engage myself with that happy concourse I used a few brazen techniques that have served me well during a writer’s lifetime. For instance, ‘I could do that once,’ I might like to remark of a child precariously wobbling along a parapet, and instantly I am en rapport with its parents – ‘Couldn’t we all! Those were the days!’ Or if, passing a woman with an ice cream, I appeal that she give me a lick, we often end with her and her friends in hilarious comity.
And so on. The thing is that nearly all of us, old and young, on such a day, on such a beach, in such shared exhilaration, only want to be
at one with the world, and welcome even the tiresome conversational devices of elderly literati.
DAY 36
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A peculiar noise disturbed me this morning, a sort of insistent regular clicking somewhere or other in the house or yard. It made me fear that something was going wrong with the oil heating system, or the electrics, or the waterworks, or even with my venerable computer. But no, when I looked out of my downstairs window, this is what I saw:
Underneath a wooden table in the garden there crouched a ginger cat, an occasional visitor from a neighbouring household. It was not spitting or making that noise, though, just crouching and quivering there, but a foot or two out of its range, looking it straight in the eye and, yes, loudly and electrically clicking, a large, very handsome magpie was expressing its genetic opinions.
They were evidently not very liberal views, but felinophile that I am, I thought it had a point. That cat had no right to be there: that magpie’s family had nested there-abouts for generations. I did not, of course, intervene, and left them at it, only relieved that there was nothing wrong with the lavatory system, and the last time I looked there was a sort of stand-off out there, the cat ostentatiously licking itself, the magpie withdrawn to a safe distance and rather morosely clicking.
