August 2008 Archives

Death seems to have been depressingly evident over the last few weeks.

I was in the train on the way to London the other day and all seemed to be going smoothly when we suddenly came to a juddering halt about two miles west of Exeter St. David's. Five minutes later the train manager came on the Tannoy to tell us that there had been an "incident" as a result of which there had been a fatality. I presume it was a suicide. The railway police came on the scene, cups of tea were dispatched to the drivers, we all sat tight in a very British fashion until we finally limped into the station and eventually left for London on another train past the chilling sight of our abandoned one with a large hole immediately under the driver's cab. It had presumably been caused by the fatal impact.

            I was almost, but not quite, late for my talk at the English Speaking Union's HQ in Mayfair and found myself battling with the conflicting emotions and sentiments which I guess one always feels on occasions such as this. On the one hand I was exasperated and concerned about being late, worried about whether or not I should call ahead on my mobile (I decided against), wondering how many people would turn up and how far they would have come and generally I was feeling irritated. On the other hand I was sad by the death and by the depth of the depression which had, I presumed, provoked it. So I managed, at the same time, to be trivial and selfish and also concerned and upset. I suppose it's always like this.

            I was much less ambiguous about the death from lung cancer of my friend Kate Mortimer. You can read my obituary in the Independent of July 21^st. I hadn't seen Kate for a few months but had known her since first meeting her in Oxford in the sixties. Her brother, Edward, was a friend and contemporary. I helped out with the obits and was glad that the Guardian ran a lead by Kate's old friend Emma Rothschild together with a wonderful Jane Bown photograph which Jane took at my behest when, in 1990, I was writing the Pendennis Column for the Observer. Other obits were less personal but Geoffrey Wheatcroft devoted his entire Spectator diary to some glum reflections on the relatively early deaths of friends and acquaintances. Kate was 62.

            The funeral was at Sampford Courtenay where Kate was a churchwarden. The service was simple and straightforward in a robust C of E sort of way with readings by her son and nephew, an address by Edward and also the vicar. We finished with "The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended" which I remember Mrs. Hoyle, wife of the Connaught House School headmaster, belting out on the organ in the Music Room at the end of Going-out weekends. Not many dry eyes, then or now. Kate was buried in the churchyard and there was tea for the mourners in the church hall. The sun shone and it was very sad.

            My obituary provoked a number of responses. Some were from shocked strangers who hadn't heard the news and who had known Kate in an earlier life at N.M. Rothschild and Sons or the Know How Funds. At least one was from an old university friend I hadn't been in touch with for the proverbial forty years.

            I would like to think there was some moral to be derived from Kate's death and from that of the person who threw himself under the train but I can't think of one and I certainly can't think of anything original. I suppose that in the overall scheme of things making it into one's sixties is an example of longevity and it is a sign of the times that 62 nowadays seems tragically early. A lot of people will miss her for she really was life-enhancing and had a rare capacity for cheering one up. As for the suicide who knows but in what is for me a quite different way that too was sad.

            Meanwhile we chunter on. A number of local friends came to dinner and Edward Oakley, the carpet-maker from Mirzapur and his cousin Sally, whom we met while I was lecturing on the high seas for Cunard, came to lunch one Sunday with cousins from Tavistock and we all sat outside and gazed at the harbour. We felt rather smug.

            The month began, I realize, in France, where I was attending the annual conference of AIEP, aka the International Crime Writers Association. I have written it up for the Crime Writers' (UK) magazine, Red Herrings and this has already appeared. I have also done it for the Spectator's new Business Monthly in a more general way. You should be able to clock it on their web site soon. If that doesn't work it's susceptible to googling. After the conference which felt depressingly rump-like, it being so sparsely attended, we took the train down to Agde where were picked up by Peter Glyn Smith whom we had met on one of Jeffrey Rayner's Star Clipper jaunts sailing around central America. He and his French wife, Dominique, live in a fabulous place just outside the beautiful small Languedoc town of Pezenas so we spent a brief time with them and made an excursion into Cathars country to suss out at least one castle. We did the very last Cathar strongold, - Queribus, an impossibly craggy fortress on top of a mountain. Peter had promised to show us something of the Cathars when we were in Honduras or Belize clocking Mayan stuff. And here at last we were. It was suitably awesome and afterwards we found the perfect village with the perfect terraced restaurant with the perfect view and I ate the perfect stuffed pig's trotter.

            Peter had also waxed enthusiastic about Montpellier so after our stay with Peter and Dominique we took the train back up to the city and booked into a quiet hotel in the old town and enjoyed a final twenty four hours in what seemed like a perfect French mixture of ancient and modern, charming shuttered, plane-treed squares and modern cutting-edge trams, public libraries and Olympic swimming pools. Then after a sybaritic saunter around we caught the TGV and thundered home across the countryside punctually, speedily, comfortably and affordably. O Beeching! O Mores! Or whatever. It very emphatically did not make you proud to be British.

            The following evening however we went to the National Theatre to see Jeremy Irons starring as Harold Macmillan in the Howard Brenton play Never Had it So Good. Almost as strange as death to see one's own past transmuted into theatre. I saw quite a lot of Macmillan at one not so enormous remove and I interviewed and got to know quite well his wife's lover, Bob Boothby. It was an oddly old-fashioned play and surprisingly sympathetic to a Conservative Prime Minister coming as it did from a left-wing playwright. But we enjoyed it even though, for me at least, it had a curiously personal poignancy.

 

            Home at last, by train, pausing in the Cotswolds for a friend's significant birthday party in a prep school which was also peculiarly nostalgic. Honours boards, games pitches - sadly out of bounds because of the perpetual downpour - and a vague sense of chalk, Kennedy's Latin Primer, French irregular verbs and headmaster looming. Enjoyable party though.

 

            Then it was head down on the work front. The return of Simon Bognor is done and dusted and safely delivered to Caroline Michel at Peters, Fraser, Dunlop. Fingers crossed. Ditto the proposal for an amazing royal book to mark a significant anniversary. It is taking years to find a publisher for this and it fills me with foreboding. I know there is a huge book to be written and a lot of money made but I also have the sinking feeling of a boat being missed and of someone else scooping and/or pre-empting me, doing something less good, and leaving me beached and stranded. Oh well, don't complain. I finsished an interim Richard Cobb letters. A lot of edited link and footnote and although there is still stuff to be done there was enough for me to take up to London and deliver by hand to John Nicoll, the publisher over a delicious lunch of grilled eel at Pan e Vino, the Sardinian restaurant opposite Kentish Town tube. I am now embarked on another Bognor crime adventure - set in a literary festival this time and I have been sweating some blood on the Jardine Tour of India 75 years ago which I am doing for Methuen.I could do it now but it would still be a - very superior of course - cuttings job. I am determined to get to India to tread in DRJ's footsteps, smell the smells, see the sights and so on. But financing it is a problem. The trouble is that it's a chicken and egg situation. However I have applied for a grant/scholarship so fingers crossed. I feel certain it will be worth the delay.

 

            And, er, that's it for now. The Barbara Cartland TV production with me as a consultant is going ahead for the BBC. Watch this space. I have accepted invitations to talk about cricket in Glasgow and Edinburgh next year which is mildly surprising and about "Writing as a job" to the Governors of the putative university in Falmouth. I have updated a radio obituary of Prince Philip - don't tell him, he'd be furious! - and I have been going through some of Plum Warner's papers at his grand-daughter's. And now I must go up to the cricket ground for a meeting about the amazing Marie Curie charity match I'm helping organize. It's on Saturday September 6^th. Come along: terrific raffle prizes; music; cricket; a good cause.

           

Which I suppose brings me back to the melancholy business of death. Oh well. Carpe Diem!

            

Hello All,

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