May 2009 Archives

            The woods on my walk the other day were an absolute riot of primroses, bluebells and wild garlic and made my feel positively fotherington-thomas-like. Hello flowers, hello, sun, hello spring! I don't know really why one bothers to go anywhere else especially at this time of year when everything except the morning paper seems to be full of blossom and hope. The organic vegetable people who send us boxes of delicious, muddy food, say that this is a better-than-usual spring but they have also just acquired a French farm in order to bridge the apparently usual six week hiatus in the British organic vedgie scene. This comes around now and represents the gap between the last of year's sowing and the first of next. Real-life green shoots all round and maybe it's OK to feel a bit like fotherington-thomas.

            I spent a week of the most glorious weather in the beautiful city of Oxford which was looking particularly resplendent - all glowing burnished yellow walls and luscious green lawns. Unfortunately, however, much of my time was passed in libraries of one sort or another. These, while admirable in their way, are not the most appropriate places to while away some of the few bright days of the British year. My main objectives were the letters of my friend and former tutor Richard Cobb. At their best these are wonderful. My favourites on this visit were ones in the Merton College Library to two other historians of the French Revolution, John Roberts who was Warden of Merton (and once when Master of the Postmasters at a party of his threw me over his shoulder when I questioned his qualifications for a Judo black belt) and John Bromley, who was Roberts' tutor at Keble College. John Roberts is dead now but has written a glowing encomium about the Bromley papers. My favourites among these caches were a short one recalling the visit of Cosmo Gordon Lang when college visitor and Archbishop of Canterbury - the two go together! - which he wrote to John Roberts and two to Bromley, one describing Richard's first visit to India, which he adored, and the other about a stay in a public ward at the Royal Free Hospital following an alcohol-assisted fall and limb breakage. All three are, I believe, classics.

            My other task was to meet Thomas/Tom Braun's brother, Christopher, to further our plans for a collection of  T's writings, particularly his verses, some of which appeared in the Oxford Magazine. These too are wonderful. The light stuff strikes me as similar and just as good as A.P. Herbert and the translations particularly from German and Greek strike me as very fine and, of course, a lot more serious. I was very fond of the writer, who died tragically after a car crash last year, as well as being in some awe of his erudition and scholarship. He could evidently be an uncomfortable colleague - he was a Fellow of Merton College for most of his adult life - and sadly never published a book, but he always struck me as being a quintessential Oxbridge don of the very best sort. I fear people like him, if there are any, are going to become the victims of progress and efficiency. But then I have just been reading the autobiography of a Corinthian scholar and cricketer, R.C. Robertson-Glasgow who expressed similar apprehensions more than six decades ago. I suspect elderly fuddy-duddies have been similarly worried for centuries and mercifully the fears are never entirely realized.

            I was, however, depressed to read a piece in Saturday's Guardian by Ian Jack saying, in effect, that the days of the professional writer were over. According to him it had been a relatively short period in any case and historically authors were amateurs or at least part-time professionals. Nowadays the internet (and blogs such as this) are the prerogative of all and the days when people like him and me could base their whole lives on writing  are over.

            I was reminded of a piece I wrote about Bristol in the Spectator a few months ago. I recalled that in the 1970s my father's last job was working with WD and HO Wills, the Bristol based tobacco company. They were immense and apparently indestructible. Now, however, although they still pay my  mother a pension from their Imperial Tobacco office people in England have virtually kicked the smoking habit and the firm which once permeated the whole of Bristol society has ceased to exist in any recognizable sense. A few decades earlier my mother's family owned a company based in the small Somerset town of Martock - maybe it's a large village, I'm not sure. Then quite suddenly people in this country stopped wearing gloves. The company no longer exists.

            At the time of my father's death I had just left the Daily Express and had my first book published by Hutchinson. Both the paper and the publisher still exist but they have changed beyond real recognition and Ian Jack is writing an article saying that the trade or profession that I entered all those years ago as an optimistic young graduate has in effect become no longer cable of supporting life.

            Well, I suppose life changes all the time and this is part of its appeal. It is extraordinary, however, that my family have been intimately involved in three facets of British life that have declined so absolutely. Glove-wearing, and smoking cigarettes, and producing words on paper have all gone, are going or, depending on one's point of view, about to go. It is also a fact of life, I believe, that as one gets older one is less comfortable with change and unfamiliarity. So I feel uneasy and threatened for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the alleged credit crunch or pig flu.

            Looking back over the last month I see that it began with a few days in London, a coffee with the re-incarnated books supreme at the Daily Telegraph, a tour of Godolphin House with the local branch of the Art Fund and a visit from friends from Australia. I am keen to make a little pilgrimage in my father's foot-steps  during World War Two when he won a Military Cross in the landings at Salerno and fought his way up Italy until being halted on the Gothic Line where he won an immediate Distinguished Service Order. Life was rather different then and maybe one shouldn't look back to distant days. I feel, however, that this is something that should be done. I have started planning; have a reading list; am talking to Raleigh Trevelyan who was at Anzio where my uncle was killed and who wrote about it all; am about to write to Professor Amedeo Montemaggi, the leading authority on the battles of those days. And so on.

            So watch this space.

            Meanwhile I shall go for a walk and enjoy the wild garlic and the wrong sort of blue-bell which looks, from a distance, much the same as the right sort, and has the desired effect of lifting the spirits no end.

            And Krystian Zimerman is playing Schubert as I type.

            Life can't be wholly horrible.

            Outside, yachts are sailing out to sea and inside I shall now proceed to the relevant web-site and try to post this blog.