Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
Confined at home, I’m reading the classics I should’ve read years ago
Liking to look on the bright side of things, I’m hoping it could be that this coronavirus pandemic works out rather well in the end. That’s if you survive, of course. And even the gloomiest projections suggest that most of us will.
I once asked the great Dr Anthony Clare (he of the radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair) why it was that my father, and others of my parents’ generation, often spoke about the Second World War as the happiest time of their lives. At home, bombs were falling. At the front, those who were in the forces, like my dad, were risking their lives on a daily basis.
‘That’s easy to explain,’ said Dr Clare. ‘During the war there was a sense of common purpose – that makes people happy. And the servicemen who were putting their lives on the line were also being tested by the war – and being “tested”, being challenged by life, is essential to being happy. You very rarely find happy people sitting around not doing very much.’
Well, this self-isolation is certainly testing us oldies, eh? We do have a shared sense of purpose: we will survive! And, given our improved hand hygiene, we are likely to survive longer than we might otherwise have done. What’s more, we are rising to the challenge of selfisolation – reading War and Peace at last, memorising The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (all 143 verses), learning to play the piano from scratch online (there are virtual courses on virtually everything online), building a model of the Shard with matchsticks, finally writing that long-awaited family memoir, doing any number of the things we’ve been saying for so long we were going to do if only we had the time. Now we do, so there’s no excuse.
It is exactly ten years since my mother died, aged 96. Were she still here, she would be reminding us all that she survived the Spanish, Asian, and Hong Kong influenza pandemics of 1918, 1957, and 1968. She left behind 15 greatgrandchildren, a host of happy memories and a mountain of clutter. Much of it has been in trunks and cardboard cartons in the garage for the past decade and only now, in self-isolation, am I getting round to sorting it out. Packets of Christmas cards, balls of knitting wool, unopened boxes of Camay soap, her favourite lime-green cardigan – they’re all there and bringing her back into focus.
These things shouldn’t be rushed. Margaret Thatcher told me that when her beloved husband Denis died, she felt she should go through his clothes straight away and send them over to the local charity shop. She did just that – only to find her son, Mark, arriving home the next day, enquiring, ‘What’s happened to all the clothes I left here, mother? Where have they all gone?’
Roy Hudd was a lovely man. I knew him for 50 years and I don’t think I heard an unkind thing said about him ever. We shared an interest in the history of music hall and pantomime in general, and in the life of Dan Leno in particular. Leno, once champion clog dancer of the world, star of the Drury Lane pantomimes, billed as ‘the funniest man on earth’, was, after the King, probably the most famous man in the country when he died, exhausted and insane, in 1904, at the age of 43. The three and a half miles of his funeral route were lined with people standing three deep all the way.
I wrote a biography of Leno (available on Amazon, 1p + postage). Roy chose Leno as his specialist subject when he appeared on Celebrity Mastermind. Roy told me how as a boy, from about the age of 15, he had a recurring dream about a house where he always felt at home.
Years later, when he was in his late twenties, two friends invited him over to their house in Brixton. As Roy drove into the street he realised this was going to be the house from his dream. Before he went into any of the rooms, he was able to describe it in perfect detail. The house, needless to say, had once been the home of Dan Leno.
My self-isolation self-improvement programme includes reading all the classics I have not managed before. I have started with The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, both because I thought a novel set in the Great Depression might be timely and because I have long relished the story that’s told of Elaine Steinbeck, widow of the Nobel laureate, travelling to Japan and asking, through an interpreter, in a Yokohama bookshop, if they happened to have anything by her late husband. ‘Oh, yes,’ she was told. ‘We have several copies of The Angry Raisins.’