End of another chapter
Well my ancient Mama finally left this mortal coil. I had just left on a travel assignment and was stumbling about the Aracena area on the Portuguese border of Spain. I spoke to my cousin who broke the bad news just before a delicious lunch of sweetbreads in a restaurant in Linares which is widely said to have a Michelin star but which its owner/chef/ patron hotly denies. Oh dear. On the one hand she is better off out of it but on the other I already miss her terribly and reproach myself constantly for not doing more. And for quite enjoying lunch.
At the moment I am scurrying about organizing cremations, memorials, burials, trying to make everyone feel happy and wanted, and generally being useless. When the dust has settled I may make more sense but at the moment I am mainly confused. The travel trip was organized by Julia Spence and Inn Travel. I can recommend both and we had a good time which in the circumstances was pretty amazing. Lucy and Angel run a hotel in Alajar which is a small white town in Andalucia. It felt much like staying with very understanding old friends. Lucy is English and comes from Bolton; Angel is Spanish and once taught in Hull. They met in upstate New York, are green and do everything themselves which sounds like open toed sandles and nut cutlets but isn’t at all like that. Breakfast is home made which means pate, another pate, butter, honey and home-made peach jam; at least two sorts of home baked bread and a hundred and one sorts of olive oil. Outside there is a lawn, herbs, a trampoline (mainly for the angelic small daughter of the house), a brisk pool and views to die for. All this in the middle of Iberian pig country. And cork. And acorns, pigs for fattening.
We went for walks in the countryside and saw pigs – sleek,pointy-toed, running around, happy-seeming animals. I have always liked pigs and never thought of them as slothful,indolent let alone dirty. The pigs bore out my prejudice. I liked them. We also saw the donkeys who heralded breakfast with their braying, mules, horses – grey and motionless apart from the odd flicker of the tail, sheep and belligerent dogs guarding them along with wethers with real bells at their necks. And cows and shepherds in vans or on quad-bikes. All this wild-life in empty countryside with oak (quercus) and olive not to mention views. Everywhere there were stunning views the only serious drawback being that the tracks along which we were walking were often as not old river beds with rocks to match, so that you had to watch your feet and could not always enjoy the spectacular scenery.
The people were good too. Really spitty old men in bars or playing dominoes while wearing check tweed caps firmly planted in the middle of the head and at no angle rakish or otherwise.. There was a pervading sense of timelessness or maybe history. The moors were here, and the Romans. Not many, of course, for it seems an almost empty landscape even in Aracena at a fair devoted to the Iberian pig where men and women drank wine and ate various sorts of jamon and lomo. Penny bought some and Lucy laughed when we showed her because it came from far away places such as Cordoba.The area was remote and no-one spoke English – except for Lucy and Angel. Despite everything we loved it.
Back home I went to see a former headmaster near Haywards Heath the other day and didn’t go to the loo on the grounds that there was bound to be one at the railway station on my return journey. Predictably, however, the loo was out of order when I needed it and the one on the train was also “out of order”. I therefore had to hang on, cross-legged and stiff-upper-lipped to Clapham Junction where, thank God, the men’s WC, was functioning.
On another day I was very much looking forward to dinner at a strange house near Wiveliscombe in Somerset. We set off in plenty of time but failed to find it; the mobile phone did not function; the only visible human being in the South West spoke no known language and did not know where we were heading for; and my wife and I returned home, chastened and disappointed.
I know, I know, both were idiotic. One should always take every opportunity to have a pee; one should always have a map and a land-line when invited to dinner in an unknown place. I know, I know. And I wish I could say that I have learned my lesson and that it won’t happen again. On the other hand the lesson of life is that one never learns and is constantly surprised by the non-functioning loo and the elusive destination.
Fact of life. On a more dramatic and important level the lesson is the same. Take Liam Fox. History always repeats itself. People never learn. And in any case God and his little helpers are in business to have a jolly good laugh at mankind’s expense. We all repeat our mistakes while muttering the nonsensical mantra about having learnt one’s lesson. Rubbish. One seldom if ever learns and it serves us right.
As I keep saying, I have a lot of books out this year. I wish one could regulate such things but authors are the last people in the world to lead organized well regulated lives. It is so much easier to do almost anything else. There is a tendency, of course, to think someone who basically approves is amazingly sage and experienced and that people who differ are just silly, but I am struck, as always, by how self obsessed most people are.
Take Richard Cobb whose letters I have recently edited. The publishers are Frances Lincoln and reaction has been genuinely mixed..What seems to be a common thread, however, is a relative failure to assess Cobb as a letter writer at the expense of concern about whether or not one’s own letters have been included and whether one has treated the recipients with sufficient respect. I think there is a tendency in the book to play up his correspondence with Hugh Trevor Roper and to down play his letters (often better) to people of whom few people have heard. Like it or not, Trevor-Roper is box-office whereas John Bromley formerly Fellow of Keble College is not. Two of the finest letters in the collection are lengthy epistles to Bromley. One describes Cobb’s stay in the Royal Free Hospital, the other is an account of his first visit to India. I think these are classics and deserve to be remembered and anthologized. By contrast one or two of his “My dear Hugh “ letters are sycophantic and pedestrian. But the important thing is Richard.
Anyhow if you can’t stand the heat… and who cares about hostile reviews? It’s just sad when the reviewer is only interested in “me” and also when someone who you always thought of as well-disposed turns out to have been an enemy all along. Yet another example of lessons not being learned. I can hear my dear father warning me off the affable and Uriah Heap figures who were permanently and unconvincingly ingratiating. But one never learns.
Meanwhile I see that at the beginning of the month I attended a memorial in Oxford. And then that I attempted a couple of come-back games of Real Tennis at the Hyde. A nightmare. A combination of rust, stiffness and senility. My opponents in both cases were patient and understanding. If I were them I should have been neither but Real Tennis people are immensely nice and civilized.
The day after the first Tennis debacle I spoke in Cornwall and we stayed with an old friend. Seemed odd to be back in the Delectable Duchy. Lunch in Lostwithiel was enjoyable even though the acoustics were dire, one man had left his hearing aid at home and I insisted on reading from various books. It is always misleading when one or two people even in far corners laugh at one’s jokes and there was muttering from those who found me inaudible. Once again I am afraid I will never learn and I am far too old to be taught new tricks. Maybe one should invest in a travelling mike. Seems pretentious and I shall probably go on being unheard.
No such worries at the Cheltenham Literary Festival where I did a panel chaired by Ion Trewin and alongside Penny Junor and Valentine Low of the Times. We had 111 (lucky for some but an ominous number for Australian cricketers) and they could hear more than enough thanks to the usual sophisticated Cheltenham sound system. Everything seemed well organized in a typical Cheltenham fashion. We had dinner with the poet Wendy Cope and the Coldstreams – John was Literary Editor of the Telegraph and wrote about Dirk Bogarde. Oh, a gratifying number of royal “experts” came to hear us discuss “The Palace and the Press” including Robert Hardman whose book I had looked myself up in beforehand. Evidently I am quoted on page 72 but even though I read the page several times searching for myself I could find no sign. Hardman seemed upset when I pointed this out but I guess it served me right. Prima donna!
The other pleasant occasion was lunch given by Kate Lyall Grant and Edwin Buckhalter of Severn House to mark the simultaneous publication of whodunits by me and Simon Brett. Simon is a very old friend and when we both lived in East Sheen we were the Crime Writing Squash Players or maybe the Squash Playing Crime Writers. We were pretty bad but the main reason was the beer afterwards at the Victoria where we compared notes and griped about publishers. Later I introduced Simon to Real Tennis. We had no complaints about Severn House (though Simon courted disaster by boasting of his ‘other’ publisher, believed to be Constable) who took us to the Gay Hussar. Earlier I signed copies of Richard Cobb at Hatchards where the manager said he too had once been to the Gay Hussar with a famous author. The alcohol must have flowed freely since he was able to say little about it. We on the other hand had a thoroughly memorable time.
Anyway, a busy month. At the end of the week I enter the pulpit at St. Leonard’s Semley in eulogizing mode. I hope I get through it. The congregation will be watching, of course, but also heavenly hordes on clouds if you believe that sort of thing. There are almost as many people I know up there now as down here. It’s a salutary thought. Recent deaths include Geoffrey Lee-Martin an old New Zealand hack and in the Guardian today civilized green Jeremy Faull who ran the bookshop at Wadebridge in Cornwall. They were both in their eighties, my Ma in her nineties. The pages turn inexorably…