The Old Un’s Diary
I’ve been to the United States to spread the word about The Oldie, having been told that most Americans had never heard of it. People warned me that its name would distress them because no American, however old, likes to regard himself or herself as such; and I remembered that the magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) used to be called Modern Maturity, under which ridiculous euphemism of a title it was sent to more than 22 million subscribers, making it the magazine with by far the largest circulation in the country. But I was pleasantly surprised. Nobody on hearing what our magazine was called looked embarrassed or wrinkled their noses. Perhaps people were just being polite, as Americans usually are. But I don’t think so. I think they found the title rather refreshing, for they might by now be getting tired of euphemisms. And when I explained to them that The Oldie wasn’t about pretending that old people were as fit and perky as everyone else but recognised that old age was a perfectly normal condition full of possibilities, even if these might not include running a marathon, they tended to smile and nod in agreement. And when, furthermore, I told them that The Oldie wasn’t principally designed to be of practical use to old people but rather to stimulate, amuse and entertain them, even the young looked rather interested. My odyssey from New York down the east coast of America involved a lot of plane-catching and security checks, and I was about to go through the metal detector at Washington’s Ronald Reagan airport when the security man stopped me and asked: ‘How old are you? Seventy-five? Have you got a pacemaker?’ I felt initially affronted, for 75 is exactly what I am. Couldn’t he have said 73, or even 72? But then I felt ashamed, because the last thing that a representative of The Oldie should be is embarrassed about looking his age. So I congratulated the security man on the accuracy of his estimate and told him that I hadn’t got a pacemaker. Then he beckoned me through the metal detector and, finding me ‘clean’, bade me farewell with the words: ‘Well, that was easy then, wasn’t it?’ That did feel a bit patronising. Are 75-year-olds expected to find everything difficult?
As the plane prepared to take off for New Orleans, an air hostess – or maybe I should say flight attendant? – asked if I were willing to help out in an emergency. I was puzzled by the question – why me? I wondered – but said that I didn’t think I would be the ideal person for that kind of thing. In that case, she said, I would have to move to another seat because I was sitting next to an emergency exit. If that were so, I replied, I would be only too happy to help, because I didn’t want to move. This seemed to satisfy her. Down in Hudson Street in Manhattan’s West Village there is a British grocery shop selling not only Marmite, porridge oats, digestive biscuits and all the other packaged foodstuffs for which expatriates nostalgically yearn, but also freshly made sausages, pork pies, Scotch eggs and steak and kidney puddings. The shop is called Myers of Keswick after its founder and proprietor, Peter Myers, a native of Keswick in the Lake District and descendant of a family of butchers in the town. Myers came to New York on holiday in 1972 and never left, finding work first as a barman in a pub and then, after learning that there
were 250,000 British expats living in and around the city, opening, in 1985, his patriotic Union Jack-bedecked shop. Now semi-retired, having handed over control of the family business to his daughter and son-in-law, Myers spends half the year in Keswick and half in Manhattan, finding this a perfectly natural arrangement. And he has developed a new interest in promoting The Oldie and selling subscriptions to his customers. He has instructed his staff to press the magazine on any customer looking over fifty years old, and they are reportedly doing so with some success. At The Oldie we like champagne, believing, like Churchill, that ‘a single glass imparts a feeling of exhilaration’. The great Evelyn Laye, known as ‘Boo’, used to sing a narrative song called ‘Only a Glass of Champagne’ about an innocent maiden ruined by a viscount after being plied with a single glass. But Miss Laye would also tell a story about her theatrical mother – Eva Stuart, the celebrated Edwardian principal boy – on her deathbed in Eastbourne. The doctor prescribed a halfbottle of champagne, Boo ran like the wind to fetch one, and her mother lived for another eleven years.
The writer and illustrator John Burningham’s sparkling new book, Champagne, where you will find the Churchill quotation above as well as some lovely Burningham drawings and a rapturous introduction by Joanna Lumley, was launched in style at the Chris Beetles Gallery. The actor Nickolas Grace bounded onto the podium, mincing and stammering, reprising his fondly remembered role as Anthony Blanche in the 1981 televised Brideshead
Revisited. But fond as we are of champagne, Grace pointed out – waving a glass of Dumangin, the sponsored brand of the evening – it was not Anthony Blanche’s beverage of choice: what he preferred was a b-b-b-b-brandy Alexander. Whatever you may think of Jeremy Corbyn and Martin Amis’s much-discussed attack on him, the novelist’s scorn of his lack of education (two Es at A-level) seems particularly inappropriate. For Amis himself had a lamentable academic record and boasted about it. He went to several different schools, in state and private sectors. In his teenage years he was prone to spend his days like a street urchin, smoking and playing pinball machines, until his father’s second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, took him in hand and directed him towards Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice. In 1967, when he was eighteen, at a Brighton crammer (Sussex Tutors in Marine Parade), young Amis was cramming Shakespeare, Donne and
Marvell, Coleridge and Keats, Jane Austen, Wifred Owen, Graham Greene ‘and possibly old Yeats as well’ for his Oxford entrance. He might, he said, in a letter to his father and Jane, get an interview at Christmas. Lucky Martin got a place at Exeter College. Doctor Tomasz Fryzlewicz, an NHS doctor from Poland, was recently warned to improve his English by a medical tribunal. Colleagues of Dr Fryzlewicz said they
were never sure he understood what he had been told. Since the doctor was not struck off because his clinical record was exemplary, it must be concluded he understood well enough. But in the daily hurly-burly one can see his colleagues’ problem. One of the doctor’s mistakes was to send a ‘massage’ saying ‘I still don’t get answer and nobody contact with me’. To the tribunal he blamed his English exam, which did ‘not give the true knowledge of English’, especially ‘as every day to my home the Wall
Street Journal comes’. It was a reminder of the glorious confusion caused in 2006 by Guy Goma, originally from Brazzaville, who was waiting in BBC reception to be interviewed for a job as a ‘Data Support Cleanser’ in the Corporation’s IT department but was then interviewed instead for a news programme on the outcome of Apple Computer’s court case against the Beatles’ record label, Apple Corps. He had been mistaken for a technology expert with the same Christian name. Finding himself in a TV studio and introduced on air as the editor of Newswire
less Mr Goma looked understandably horrified.
Karen Bowerman: ‘Were
you surprised by the verdict today?’
Guy Goma: ‘I am very surprised to see … this verdict to come on me, because I was expecting that. When I came they told me something else and I am coming. “You got an interview”, that’s all. So a big surprise anyway.’ KB: ‘ A big surprise, yeah, yes.’ GG: ‘Exactly.’ Long live Dr Fryzlewicz and Mr Goma. Life would not be half as funny without the bewilderment they provoke. The incongruous sight of a wrecked Ford Cortina has been entrancing visitors to Hampstead Heath. It came to light when the Boating Pond was drained so work could be done on the dam. The rusty car sits on the mud, looking like a prop from a gangster movie. It has probably been there since the early 1970s, for this type of Cortina, the Mark III, came into production in 1971, and in 1976 railings were erected along Millfield Lane, about a hundred yards from the pond, after which it would have been much more difficult to get a car off the road and into the water.
So how did it get there? The Camden New Journal has spoken to an angler who used to fish at the pond in the 1970s. He refused to give his name, but told the paper: ‘Me and my mates would spend every summer up there. I had a friend who came night after night – but it was really an excuse for him to visit a lover. He’d tell his wife he’d be up the Heath and we’d cover for him. He’d spend a few hours setting up his tackle, then slip off for a bit of time with his girlfriend.’ He would always come in his Ford Cortina.
One evening, his wife came looking for him at the pond. ‘His game was up,’ the angler told the paper. ‘We tried to cover for him but it was the fact he would go fishing wearing his best shirt that raised her suspicions.’ A few days later, the Cortina vanished without trace. But, the angler went on, ‘Years later, I was at a party with his brother-in-law and he said the man’s wife, part of a big family in Kentish Town, had stolen it with the help of her sisters. They had driven it up there, trashed it and then rolled it into the pond.’ There are so many excellent charities to choose from this Christmas, and everyone has his or her favourite. Mine at the moment is the Mulberry Bush School in Oxfordshire. This is not to be confused with another admirable institution, the Mulberry School for Girls in the East End of London, from which pupils, largely Muslims of Bangladeshi origin, have been invited by Michelle Obama to visit the White House in Washington. The Mulberry Bush School, on the other hand, exists without state support and is dedicated to the care, treatment and education of severely traumatised children, aged five to thirteen, who have experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse. It was founded in 1948 by Barbara Dockar-drysdale, a pioneer of therapeutic childcare, who took children evacuated from the London blitz into her own home. She realised that many had huge emotional problems that made them difficult to look after or educate in normal schools. In this time of horrific child abuse, its work is needed more than ever. It is a unique national resource, which, unlike any other provider, offers care, treatment, education and family support for abused children from all over Britain until they reach a stage when, possibly for the first time in their lives, they learn to trust and respect themselves and others, to establish ordinary human relationships and to begin to learn. The success rate of the school is very high: 100 per cent are re-integrated into an appropriate school and 93 per cent into an appropriate family. Donations should be made by cheque to The Mulberry Bush Organisation and addressed there to Jane Smiley at Standlake, Witney OX29