Gone

My cousin Belinda, with whom I spent huge amounts of my childhood, died suddenly last week. She was part of the fabric of my life.

While many people approve of the saying, "God made our relatives, thank God we can make our own friends", I have a different perspective. I thank God for giving me relatives, as the bond between my relatives and me seems to me more durable and often more truthful than the bond of many of my friendships. Additionally, precisely because my cousins haven't been chosen by me from my own private bubble, but are mostly people who have quite different outlooks from mine and who lead lives quite different from my own, they broaden my horizons. My life is enriched through being in contact with them. 

And I'm especially grateful that I was given Belinda as a cousin, because I know she would never in the normal course of events have chosen me as her friend - I wasn't very good at riding, I was rather serious and gloomy, and I was younger by almost two years. Yet she was stuck with me and somehow between us, though neither of us would normally be soppy enough to admit it, an unlikely but deep and lasting bond was formed.  

My childhood memories of Belinda are almost exclusively in horse related settings. She was a skinny little girl with buck teeth who lived almost constantly in jodhpurs and blue aertex shirts. She had a wonderful Welsh mountain pony called Charlie who was so reliable that at the final stop during a dressing-up race at a gymkhana when I, to Belinda's shame in front of her pony club colleagues, leapt on in great haste and realised too late that I was facing backwards, Charlie cantered genially to the next stop, without blinking an eye. Charlie's replacement after years of solid service was a skewbald called Harlequin and, making up the numbers was a huge bay hunter called Trilee. She belonged to my aunt, Belinda's mother, but, before the arrival of Harlequin, when I was staying, I would ride Charlie and Belinda would ride her mother's horse.

If the weather was good - that is to say, if it wasn't actually pouring - Belinda and I could be found either at the stables, attending to the ponies with dandy brushes, currycombs, hoof picks and all the other things that transformed grooming from the mere process of brushing a horse into a recondite art which only initiates could practice, or riding through the shady Hampshire lanes, or hurtling across fields, often, if Trilee was involved, not entirely in control.

There were also winter dawns when an enormous truck would arrive and the horses would be loaded, ready to be taken to a meet of the local hunt. Not that I was anywhere near brave enough to go hunting. I was a total amateur, while Belinda was fearless and rode like the wind. 

If the weather was bad we would either pore over books about the Spanish Riding School or a treasured volume called Horses of the World or play with the greatest toys ever made, Julip ponies, which could only be bought from one place, a small shop in Beauchamp Place in London. They had manes and tails of real hair and tiny exquisite saddles and bridles and rugs. They had owners, but their faces and features were never as carefully rendered as those of the horses themselves - which was exactly as it should be. 

The horses were handmade from some kind of rubber that, sadly, perishes. As a result, Belinda and I each discovered years later when we went to find our beautiful toys, planning to hand them on to our children, that our much loved horses had turned into rather revolting, misshapen objects that would only terrify a child. 

Away from both live and toy horses, we were capable of other pastimes. At granny's, after one visit when our brothers, having tricked us into believing they would play horses with us, instead tied us both to a tree with our skipping ropes, we learned to divert our attention from equine things. Instead we would head either to the compost heap, where we spent astonishing amounts of times imagining the dead flowers we found there were ballet dancers, or to a little bridge over the river Itchen, which ran along the bottom of granny's garden, where we spent whole afternoons playing pooh sticks. Talk about simpler times. 

In Trebetherick, in Cornwall, where Belinda's parents had a holiday place, I remember running round and round the house, imagining we were in some complicated adventure involving the kidnap and rescue of Cattie, Belinda's beloved companion, a small oddly shaped and frankly fairly hideous thing that appeared to have been fashioned from a knitted string dishcloth - I doubt if there was ever a more underserving object of affection. And of course there were races up Brae Hill, and trips to the beach at Daymer Bay or Greenaway - but only after the grown ups had amused themselves by getting Belinda to mention her Wed Wubba Wing at least half a dozen times, (she never was able to say R). 

In her early teens, while practising dressage in a field where no one would easily hear her, Belinda fell from Harlequin when he shied at something. Terrifyingly her foot caught in the stirrup and she was dragged for some time. In the end, a man in the next field turned off his tractor and heard her screams, but by that time she needed to go to hospital, where she spent quite some time. When she came out, horses had lost their charm. 

Around the same era, Belinda started to come to stay at our house in London. She was always absurdly excited by being in the city. Each year we would go together to Olympia to visit the Daily Mail Boys' and Girls' Exhibition, which was actually a complete swiz, full of stalls selling total trash, with just one or two gimmicks, such as the chance to see a Dalek, to attract the crowds. Somehow we had a great deal of fun there all the same. We saved up our pocket money for it and we spent masses on the most hopelessly stupid things. I suppose the worst of our universally dreadful purchases was the can of spray-on hair colour which turned out to be a kind of pink paintlike substance that dissolved much of the hair on which it landed. The highlight of all our annual visits was seeing inside a Dalek.

After my mother returned to her native Australia and took me with her, I saw less of Belinda for a while, although we always met up in London when I came back to see my father - we would go to a film, (most notably, we saw Cabaret and Fellini's Roma together) and afterwards to whatever was the latest London fad, eg The Great American Disaster

When Belinda finished school, she was sent off to learn something called Speedwriting, so that she could become part of that now long gone but at the time thriving species, the hilariously hopeless female secretary. As spelling was very much not Belinda's strong suit, she found it extremely difficult to read back her misspelt shortenings of already misspelt words. I don't know how it came about but an unsuspecting military historian was her first client. She went off to his house in Carlyle Square each day and took pages and pages of Speedwriting notes as he dictated his forthcoming book. When she had typed these up, she presented him with a manuscript in which he set out his theory that Napoleon's initial successes were the result of a combination of heavy duty candelabra (cannon), huge numbers of sausages (soldiers) and the skilful deployment of large bananas (battalions) across the battlefield. She wasn't asked back to Carlyle Square, but other work was always available. I remember visiting her in an office near Fenwicks, where her only role seemed to be to make her bosses laugh. It was a gentler age, before the advent of management consultancies - although luckily for everyone Belinda did eventually find a vocation more suitable to her talents when she discovered the craft of gilding.

When I came back to Britain and decided to live in London, Belinda was quite extraordinarily hospitable to me. She slotted me into her social life as if I'd always been there and any time that she was having people for dinner or a party - often - it didn't seem occur to her that I shouldn't come along. Although some of the people I met through her would not pass muster in today's woke culture - (a man known as the Groper who always wore a purple rubber glove springs to mind) - I am overall endlessly grateful to her.  My life in London could have been extremely lonely, had it not been for her kindness 

Which is not to say that Belinda was an old softie by any means. Like all of my family, including me, she was extremely impatient. Which was why, when she mentioned that she was going to do Bed and Breakfast at her house, I had my doubts. While sociable, none of us, not me, not my father, not Belinda, are full of good cheer at all times, and particularly not at breakfast. When I inquired some time later how the venture was going, she asked me if I thought that she was unusually formidable. I replied by asking why she was asking. She explained that at the end of a week-long stay, she had asked one American couple if they had enjoyed themselves and they had said they had but then, very nervously, had admitted that there had been one small problem - they hadn't been able to find the switches on any of the lights (presumably they were not familiar with the British habit of having the buttons on the lamp's stem) but hadn't dared tell her. Additionally, after the departure of some guests who she had not liked and felt she had been particularly tolerant and gracious to in the circumstances, she had been unable to find the brand new towels she had provided for them, bought from Peter Jones two days before their arrival. She had assumed the couple had nicked them and had gone about feeling livid for several days. But then she had discovered the towels, in the linen cupboard, still in their cellophane wrapping, inside their Peter Jones carrier bag. At which point she realised that the couple she thought she had been so kind and hospitable to must in fact have been so utterly terrified by her demeanour that they had preferred to dry themselves on loo paper or the curtains or who knew what, rather than approach her to ask if they could possibly have even a single towel. 

Belinda was a mother of four, grandmother of four more, a very good amateur painter, a brilliant cook and able to transform any house she lived in into a haven of comfort and charm. These are achievements that are of more value than many of the things for which people become famous and celebrated nowadays. Belinda was also always much better at having fun than I am - and shrewder, more practical and possessed of far more commonsense. In an antic frame of mind, she could be very naughty, enjoying nothing more than trying to make me burst out laughing on occasions when that was the last thing I was supposed to do.

I wish I'd had a chance to say goodbye to my cousin. I already miss her presence in the world.

First As Tragedy

It's not true what they say about history repeating itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. It's tragedy and then more tragedy really. 

I realised this when I came across a passage in Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh. It's a novel I started to read decades ago, but somehow lost sight of; consequently, I am having the infinite pleasure of reading it for the first time now. 

The passage that caught my eye concerns the government's requisitioning of a big house to turn it into a hospital for air-raid victims. The result seems to me to parallel exactly the idiocy of the UK government during this pandemic, focussing solely on those with the current virus, forgetting the care they owe to those with other ailments:

"So there was the house ... and the government moving in to make it a hospital ... It's full of beds and nurses and doctors waiting for air-raid victims and a woman in the village got appendicitis and she had to be taken 40 miles to be operated on because she wasn't an air-raid victim and she died on the way."

I wish we would learn things.

(Oh, I've just looked up the "first as tragedy quote". No wonder it's wrong - it's from the single most destructive lunatic the world has ever seen, and the nastiest piece of work personally: that is to say, Karl Marx.)

Creeping Socialism

One night recently, having explained to my husband that I really could not stand another episode of the BBC News, with its nightly tide of tabloid tearjerking and government sponsored panic-stoking, he compromised and put on an episode of Spectator TV. 

At the start of the episode, there was an interview between Andrew Neil and  a statistician called David Spiegelhalter. During the interview Spiegelhalter expressed himself extremely proud and deeply moved by the fact that no-one in the United Kingdom can obtain a vaccination against coronavirus by paying for one.

"You can't buy it", chimed in Neil, and both men seemed to find this a reason for rejoicing.  The exchange has been puzzling me ever since. Here it is:

I was under the impression that the United Kingdom, like all European countries, worked on the principle of free enterprise. While the United Kingdom does seem to be showing unwonted efficiency in ensuring its citizens are vaccinated (and in that context has anyone else noticed how none of his colleagues ever seem to mention Nadhim Zawahi, the minister responsible for this success, or hand him a crumb of praise), I bet the whole process is costing a pretty penny. As for the rest of Europe, don't get me started: the vaccination process, run by various governments, with the 'help' of Brussels, but completely unsullied by any assistance from free enterprise, is an absolute total mess.

Where would the harm be if private enterprise was allowed to run in tandem with national government-run and -funded health services? I'm not suggesting that anyone should be deprived of the right to get vaccinated at government expense, but what if they were also allowed, should they choose, to remove the burden of their individual vaccination from government and pay for it to be done elsewhere? How could that be immoral? It wouldn't be pushing anyone out of the way; it would be turning to an alternative source and lightening the burden on the government. If the health services aren't a dreadful drain on the government, why did poor old Captain Tom Moore feel the need to stagger up and down his garden to raise money for them? 

Yet in the health provision area anything involving offering payment for service, if you can afford to, is considered shocking and grubby and vile. Thus when a clinic in the north of England found that from time to time it had leftover vaccine that needed using up at the end of the day, the people running it decided it was perfectly okay to give the extra vaccinations to friends and relations of the staff; doing anything enterprising with them, such as selling tickets in a money-raising raffle that would give the right to anyone whose ticket was drawn to expect a call to come in immediately and get a leftover shot would have been seen as outrageous and vile. 

To reiterate, I am not suggesting that anyone should miss out. I am not suggesting that the most needy shouldn't be given for free everything that the service is able to provide. What I am suggesting is that, if some people have money they want to spend on getting a vaccination, why should anyone feel proud that there is no opportunity for them to take pressure of the government-funded health service by getting themselves vaccinated at their own expense? Why would it be a sin to save taxpayers' money and speed up the process, so that everyone could get back to normal life more quickly? Isn't government having sole control of the supply of any substance anathema in a free enterprise system? Does no one else think the most urgent thing we need to achieve is to get each of our nations back to normal as quickly as possible so that businesses currently shut down can reopen and the economy can be dragged back from the brink of total collapse? Have I missed some important event, such as a Bolshevik revolution? Are we all socialists now?

Around the World

I read the perfect book for lockdown and wrote about it for Australia's Quadrant  magazine. As it is behind a paywall, I'm reproducing it here:

Around the World in the Cinemas of Paris by Theodore Dalrymple, Mirabeau Press, ISBN: 978-1-7357055-0-7, available through Amazon, £9.94 

A year or so ago while in Paris, where his wife's mother was convalescing from an operation, Theodore Dalrymple started going to the cinema a couple of times a day. Such an unusually wide variety of films was on offer there, he realised, that it would be possible to travel around the world cinematically without ever leaving town. He decided he would take this stationary journey, and in his delightful new book, Around the World in the Cinemas of Paris, he describes how it went. Although he can have had no idea that a pandemic was approaching, with its accompanying array of restrictions, now that travel is out of the question and cinema-going problematic, his project seems perfectly timed. With the book in hand, the reader at last has an opportunity to visit a variety of cinemas, at least vicariously, and to indulge in travel, even if it is only of the armchair type.

The films viewed for the book were chosen purely according to their location, Dalrymple tells us in his preface. He excluded France, Britain and the US, because he felt he knew them too well to watch films made there with fresh eyes, and he decided to only "visit" any country once. His interest, he says, was not that of a student of cinema but of a traveller. "It was the depiction of the countries that interested me", he explains. He then proceeds to describe what it was like to watch 33 films (almost all made in 2017 or 2018), set in 34 countries, over the course of one year.

Many readers will already be familiar with Dalrymple’s writing. In this book, as always, he proves himself to be perceptive, thoughtful, largely undogmatic and often very funny. He asks unusual questions, refuses simple answers and admits that there is much he does not know. "Irrelevant questions enter my mind as I watch films, sometimes with the persistence of an obsessional idea,” he confides, adding that sometimes he feels “like the man who visits Versailles and wonders how they polish all the mirrors.” Thus, while watching a film from Lebanon, his mind hooks on the question of whether or not helmets really save the lives of construction workers, or whether they are “more magical incantation than genuine protection”. It is a question that seems surprisingly relevant in this era of face-mask debate. Even more apposite are his remarks following his viewing of an Indian movie called Hotel Salvation: “The supposed right to health, frequently advocated, makes of death an infringement of rights; but, while individual deaths may be unjust, Death itself cannot be...Death is always victorious."

Most of the films covered in the book are, I suspect, far more interesting and amusing in Dalrymple's accounts of them than they might be if one actually had to sit through them in person. Certainly his explanation of the only film among the selection that I have seen myself, The Square, made much better sense of the film than I had managed to do on my own. When reporting on films from countries he has some familiarity with, he intertwines his accounts of them with his own memories, and in all his accounts he includes the more interesting of the thoughts and questions that the films raise in his mind. Thus a film from Burma provides the opportunity to reminisce on the experience of being set about with an umbrella by a Buddhist monk when he visited that country and to ponder the guilty pleasure many travellers from better-off, freer countries experience when visiting somewhere that is deprived in comparison to where they come from. As Dalrymple points out, while modernisation is naturally to be wished for, it also means "another step in the destruction of difference". Frontiers, a film that takes the viewer through Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and Nigeria, evokes memories of his own travels in that region, and helps him to understand that what he thought he saw there was not always what was really going on.

His enthusiasm – one chapter begins “It is rare that one has the opportunity to see a Paraguayan film, and I seized it with alacrity" and another starts with the equally keen "How could I resist a film that followed several market women in their journey across West Africa by bus?" - is endearing, but behind the apparent naive eagerness lies a razor sharp mind. When he reports on a film from Romania, he manages to encapsulate in one withering sentence everything that was wrong with the Communists who ruled that country so brutally: "They had nothing to recommend them and ruined everything they touched". While discussing a film from Germany, he observes that, "We sometimes forget that sincerity may be a vice worse than cynicism", thus encapsulating in eleven words everything it took Graham Greene the whole of The Quiet American to try to express. He reflects on the medium of film itself, raising interesting questions about its deceptive quality, its ability to alter preconceptions and about whether it is “best to leave something to the viewers’ imagination” or to show everything, concluding that choosing the latter option can be a mistake, "the explicit in film ... turns everything into spectacle, whereas the implicit works by insinuation into the imagination". When making no comment works best, he leaves well alone, introducing us to a character in a film who “is waiting in the station for a consignment of used limb prostheses”, without feeling the need to embellish the absurdity of that statement. When he uses analogy, he makes sure it is striking – "The glitter is that of a fish rotting by moonlight" he tells us, summing up a decadent but tawdry section of Brazilian society. 

Dalrymple seems to approach everything in life, including the films he describes here, with humour and an open-minded curiosity that is infectious, (if one can still use that word positively). He has above all a fascination for the strangeness of humanity - "How odd we are!" he says at one point. This exclamation could be an alternative title for this very enjoyable, amusing and thoughtful book.

February Books

Point Counterpoint by Aldous Huxley. 

I read this novel for the first time when I was, I now realise, a child. It was recommended to me rather grandly by my brother as a "novel of ideas".  I liked the book better that time round and perhaps it might have been better if I hadn't  gone back to it. It is interesting for its portraits of DH Lawrence and John Middleton Murry (Huxley clearly liked Lawrence, although his portrayal didn't persuade me that he wasn't tiresome; he clearly loathed Murry, but over eggs his description to the extent that I began to have my doubts about Huxley more than about Murry). His portrait of a British Fascist leader, is not as I had imagined, supposed to be Mosley, as the book was written before the emergence of Mosley. 

After an opening scene that dazzled me more when I was young than it does now, set at a party in a splendid mansion on Piccadilly, where we meet many of the characters, the book meanders along, switching from character to character and giving the reader a fair idea of literary and artistic London life between the wars. What I had somehow entirely forgotten is that it then develops a couple of quite startling plot twists that left me staggered and faintly sickened.

Slough House by Mick Herron

I didn't actually read this; I listened to Sean Barrett read it for Audible. He has recorded all of the books in the Slough House series, and I think he has done a marvellous job. I love the character of Jackson Lamb, who is a latter day Falstaff. Fat, dirty, greedy, with a great fondness for farting, in this fictional world he is the only senior figure in the British secret service who still retains a little integrity and loyalty.

The Last Word and Other Stories by Graham Greene

Over the last 18 months I have read several novels by Graham Greene and I am having a continuing discussion with a friend who opposes my view that Greene and Somerset Maugham are both highly diverting, very clever but, as Maugham claimed of himself, not first rate, only at the very first rank of the second rate.

My favourite Greene novels so far are:

The Human Factor

Brighton Rock

The Quiet American (once it ended; until I got to the end and saw the clever trick of it, I had been inclined to think it in some way cliched, or senselessly prejudiced about Americans)

The Ministry of Fear

Monsignor Quixote

The Captain and the Enemy

I was ambivalent about The Heart of the Matter and The Confidential Agent, although I liked them quite a lot. I was bored by The Honorary Consul and I thought Our Man in Havana was rubbish, because I thought the character of the daughter did not work. I also thought the characters in England Made Me failed.

I am reading The Comedians at the moment and enjoying it on the whole. 

Of the short stories in the collection called The Last Word and Other Stories, I thought the one called The Lottery Ticket, in which a tourist buys a local lottery ticket in a poor country, wins the lottery and then donates the money to the administration of that country, is a perfect argument against untied overseas aid. In the preface, Greene says he decided to include a detective story he had written in the collection because reading it he couldn't work out who the culprit was; if he really couldn't, he must have been losing his marbles as it seemed obvious from the first page to me, and I wasn't the story's author.

Appleby at Allingham by Michael Innes

An enjoyable light detective tale in a series by Michael Innes about his detective who is called Inspector Appleby.

Operation Pax by Michael Innes

This is another Inspector Appleby story, but he appears very little as Innes was having quite fun trying his hand at a whiz bang, lots of action, gritty thriller, enclosed within his usual sleepy, sub-golden age, Appleby wrapping. Enjoyable and clever.

Memorial Service by JIM Stewart

JIM Stewart is the real name of Michael Innes (see above.) He was my brother's university tutor, which is how he came to my attention. I occasionally wonder whether anyone else reads him, apart from me. I like his tone, which is highly intelligent but entirely un-selfindulgent or showy. His novels are calming, even though some of them aren't entirely satisfactory.

This though is one of the best I have read by him, most particularly the wonderfully funny lunch scene it contains in which the guest is the gentle provost of an Oxford college and the host is a philistine county boor.

The novel is the third in a quintet. I wondered if Stewart was inspired to write a novel series by Anthony Powell, (not that the tone is similar to Dance to the Music of Time). I am wondering whether to go back and read the earlier ones or whether to simply plough on. Maybe I will leave it to the chance of what I find next time I am allowed into some English secondhand bookshops. If I find the earlier ones available, I will buy them. Similarly, if I find the later ones available, I will buy those. As a matter of fact, if I find another copy of Memorial Service, I will buy it as well, as the very cheap and battered paperback I picked up somewhere, came apart at the spine and fell apart as I read it.

Catholicism by Bishop Barron

This is a marvellous book for those interested in the Catholic faith. It is written clearly and beautifully and I loved it and learned a great deal from it.

Shirley by Charlotte Bronte

Having memories from school of finding large chunks of Jane Eyre dull and also having had the recent experience of getting stuck in the middle of Villette, I was surprised and delighted to find that I really enjoyed this, particularly the sly humour at the expense of the young churchmen and the perspective supplied by shifting forward in time at the close.

I also listened to quite a few Phil Rickman novels about Merrilee Watkins, while going for long walks. Although they follow something of a formula and the characters never really develop beyond a few tics, I loved the setting and enjoyed the very faint tinge of the supernatural.

California Snuffling

 I found this, from Tina Brown's Diary for the UK Spectator this week, surprisingly endearing:

"Just before Christmas, my daughter Izzy took possession of a three-month-old English bulldog, acquired from Linda’s Klassy Kennel in Oklahoma. I was dubious. Izzy is a documentary producer who travels a lot, I’ve always been a cat person, and a red-state bulldog would surely bark for Trump. But as a flow of snaps arrived of a splotchy pink-snouted puppy — a runty number four in the litter — I started to feel the excited stirrings of cross-species motherhood. Three days before Christmas we got the call. An RV van driven from Oklahoma would meet us in the car park outside an Anaheim 7-Eleven at 8 p.m. There, a bearded dude emerged and handed Izzy a small bundle. 

What else could it have been but love at first sight? Gimli, as Izzy has called her (after the wise dwarf in Lord of the Rings) is a ‘bulldoglet’ from heaven. Her soft corrugated nose immediately burrowed into Izzy’s shoulder. Every day starts with what we call Storming the Capitol. Gimli’s crate door opens and she bursts out, furiously wagging her stump of a tail and hurling herself at my bed. We have decided that she was sent to us by my husband. She has so many of his characteristics: dogged (literally) tenacity; fearless when wrestling with dogs three times her size; and never more content than when chomping through a manuscript."

What her late husband might have made it, who knows.