At Last

Delighted to hear that P.G. Wodehouse, our greatest comic writer of the 20th century, finally has a memorial stone in the South Quire Aisle of Westminster Abbey, where the dead poets and other creative types congregate. As with Philip Larkin, it's been a long wait – in Larkin's case because of a silly fuss about the attitudes revealed in his biography and letters, in Wodehouse's case because of an equally silly, but very damaging, fuss about some broadcasts the author foolishly made for the Nazi occupiers of France in 1941. It took many years before the absurdity and injustice of claiming that Wodehouse was in any way a Nazi sympathiser became fully apparent, though many tried to keep the slur alive long after the war.
 At the unveiling ceremony in Westminster Abbey on Friday, Alexander Armstrong (who also gave the address – he's President of the P.G. Wodehouse Society) read from The Code of the Woosters, the novel that features the appalling Roderick Spode and his paramilitary Black Shorts. There were also readings from The Mating Season (one of the very best) and a Blandings story, and performances of a couple of Wodehouse songs. One of the most enjoyable unveilings, by the sound of it – and a nice, jolly plaque.

From Mann to Mog

Browsing in my latest charity shop purchase – 1913: The Year Before the Storm by Florian Illies ('The International Bestseller', translated from the German) – I came across a name that rang a surprising bell.
 1913 is, as the name more than suggests, one of those books that paints a picture of a single year – in this case month by month, in a series of little vignettes: it begins, strikingly, with the 12-year-old Louis Armstrong being arrested in the first seconds of the new year for firing a stolen revolver. Later in January we find Thomas Mann reluctantly attending the first night of his play Fiorenza, which he fears will be a debacle, not least because he knows that 'Germany's greatest critic and vainest popinjay' will be in the audience, sharpening his pen and waiting to get his revenge on the rival who stole his love object, Katia Pringsheim, now Mrs Thomas Mann. The name of the critic and popinjay is Alfred Kerr – and that name was familiar to me because he is the same Alfred Kerr whose daughter Judith, the writer and illustrator who died earlier this year, wrote about him in her semi-autobiographical Out of the Hitler Time trilogy (When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, etc).
 What is surprising is that Judith Kerr's father was established as 'Germany's greatest critic' as early as 1913 – but he was then already in his mid-40s (born 1867). He was over 50 when he married for the first time, a much younger wife whom he lost in the influenza epidemic of 1918. He married Judith's mother, the distinguished musician Julia Weissman, in 1920, and in 1933 he wisely fled Germany to escape imminent arrest by the Nazis. Eventually the whole family ended up in England, where Alfred and Julia's son Michael rose to became a prominent English lawyer, and their daughter Judith became, well, Judith Kerr, author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog books, and an English national treasure. The time span from Alfred Kerr's birth to Judith Kerr's death was a remarkable 152 years.

Footnote

Oddly enough, The Ballad of Pekham Rye has, like Praeterita, an unexpectedly beautiful closing paragraph:

'Humphrey drove off with Dixie. She said, "I feel as if I've been twenty years married instead of two hours."
 He thought this a pity for a girl of eighteen. But it was a sunny day for November, and, as he drove swiftly past the Rye, he saw the children playing there and the women coming home from work with their shopping-bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this.'

It was on Peckham Rye that the eight-year-old William Blake saw 'a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings spangling every bough like stars'.

Ruskin's Fireflies

'I walked with her to Camberwell Green, and we said good-bye rather sorrowfully at the corner of New Road; and that possibility of meek happiness vanished for ever...'
That's John Ruskin (writing in Praeterita), and I came across the quotation in the unlikely setting of Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye. It's quoted, a propos of nothing in particular, by the devilish protagonist, Dougal Douglas, who has landed a 'job' at not one but two local firms, each of them desperate to have 'an Arts man' on the payroll to shake things up and inject some fresh thinking. Dougal does no work for either of them, but spends his time on what he calls 'social research' into the neighbourhood, which consists largely of swanning around charming (and sometimes alarming) the locals and sowing trouble. He is, you might say, an early adopter of the now commonplace 'bullshit job'. But he does do some reading along the way – hence the Ruskin quote.
  The girl Ruskin walked to Camberwell Green with was one Charlotte Withers, and she was but one of several with whom a potential romance was nipped in the bud by Ruskin's excessively controlling parents, who dominated his life for many years. 'Charlotte Withers,' Ruskin recalls, 'was a fragile, fair, freckled sensitive slip of a girl about sixteen; graceful in an unfinished and small wild-flower sort of a way, extremely intelligent, affectionate, wholly right-minded, and mild in piety. An altogether sweet and delicate creature of ordinary sort, not pretty, but quite pleasant to see, especially if her eyes were looking your way, and her mind with them. We got to like each other in a mildly confidential way in the course of a week ... If my father and mother had chosen to keep her a month longer, we should have fallen quite melodiously and quietly in love; and they might have given me an excellently pleasant little wife. Charlotte went away at the week's end, when her father was ready for her. I walked with her to Camberwell Green...'
  Praeterita (which begins with a chapter titled The Springs of Wandel, of which the first sentence is 'I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school...') is the most extraordinary autobiography. In a long essay on that invaluable website The Victorian Web, Elizabeth Helsinger describes it as 'a strangely self-destructive autobiography ... evidently written by a man who did not like himself'. True enough, and as an autobiography it conforms to no known pattern. Though there is recognisable structure to the earlier parts in particular, it does not, as we expect an autobiography to do, follow the life of a person through its succeeding stages, tracing the principal events; what it presents is less a person than a particular sensibility – a sensibility, what's more, that cares for and responds to places (and of course to art) rather than people. Ruskin entirely omits major events and major figures from his life, focusing rather on some of the lesser characters and following curious byways. The narrative, such as it is, becomes more and more diffuse and meandering as it nears the end, perhaps as a result of Ruskin's failing mental powers – but he pulls it all together to give his sui generis autobiography a final paragraph of quite astonishing beauty. In it he recalls his last visit to Siena, with his American friend and correspondent Charles Eliot Norton, and he remembers the fireflies...
'Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly gold sky calm behind the gate of Siena's heart, with its still golden words, "Cor magis tibi Sena pandit," and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.'

Phew...

Phew. I've been rather tied up these past few days, getting my 'eagerly awaited' book all checked over and ready for the printers. It's been a long and predictably rocky road, but I got there in the end. I even managed to do it all myself, but for one thing – putting together the elements of the cover (I'd designed it, but couldn't for the life of me work out how to make it ready for the printers, so I delegated that bit to them, and it looks fine). So, at this rate of progress, the book should be published and available (from Amazon, I'm afraid – I'm offloading all that side of things) in early October, DV.
 Meanwhile, with that taken care of, I shall resume proper (or improper) blogging very soon.

Sixty Years On

It was on (or around) this date 60 years ago that I arrived, a tenderly reared lad of but nine summers, in the suburban demiparadise where I have been securely rooted, off and on, ever since.
  My mother had secured me a place in the local state primary school, though the headmaster (a large plump man who, I noted, kept a hacksaw in his study) was clearly reluctant to swell the population of his already bursting-at-the-seams institution. I joined a class of 50-plus coevals, and soon discovered that I had a very strange curriculum to contend with. Having until now been educated at a cosy little prep school (whose uniform, embarrassingly, I was still wearing), I was used to learning Lat, Fr, Geog, Hist, Geom, Algy, ect, ect (as Nigel Molesworth would put it), but now I discovered that the most important thing, the one thing, the sine qua non, was to master the approved Surrey County Council italic script. And so a titanic struggle ensued, involving the purchase of a pen with a kinky nib to cope with my curious lefthanded grip, and much laborious copying out of words and passages. Eventually I was able to produce an acceptable semblance of S.C.C. italic and could embark on this next, rather undemanding phase of my education. 
 The huge class was presided over by a formidable woman of ample build and mighty bosom who, with the aid of a weaponised wooden ruler, singlehandedly maintained order and, greatly to her credit, managed to teach us to a level that, in some areas (grammar, punctuation, spelling) was about on a par with today's undergraduates. To my horror, I discovered that this strange curriculum also included, of all things, Country Dancing (Strip the Willow, etc). Such was my complete ineptitude in this essential life skill that I was finally allowed to sit it out and man the Surrey County Council gramophone.
 I passed through all this, as through just about everything else in life, in a state of utter bewilderment mingled with ear-burning embarrassment, but I went along with it, having no choice. And there were compensations – not least, Gurls! Yes, half my fellow pupils belonged, I was delighted to see, to a sex with which, until then, I had had all too little contact. I plunged into this new world of boys and girls with alacrity, making new friends of the opposite sex (we didn't have genders in those days, except in Lat, Fr, ect) and enjoying many a spirited game of kiss chase in the playground.
 But back to my first day. When the final bell rang out, I fell in with a little gang of boys who constituted a loose-knit 'tree climbing club' devoted to climbing all the trees – from veteran Spanish chestnuts to half-grown newcomers – in Carshalton Park. They knew every tree, had given names to many of them, and had worked out just how to climb each one and to what height you could go before things got really dangerous. They also knew where every bird's nest was (including, in those days, owls' nests) and where to find frogs, newts and other attractive wildlife. On a mellow sunny September afternoon, this all seemed to me like a little taste of paradise, and I arrived home at the end of that day happy to discover that I'd fallen on my feet. I just loved this new place.
 And, 60 years on, here I still am.

Good News (for now) on Butterflies

Like many, I'm listening to Radio 4's Today programme less and less (and generally avoiding all news programmes, especially on TV), but early yesterday morning I happened to catch a pleasantly surprising item on Today – a report on the state of the nation's butterfly population that was actually upbeat in tone. What was still more surprising was that a spokeswoman for those dismal Jimmies at Butterfly Conservation was in the studio sounding positively cheery and delivering only good news – not a word about threatened species or 'climate change'. What occasioned all this good cheer was the news that this summer has been a Painted Lady summer, with a huge influx of these beauties swelling the numbers of butterflies being seen and contributing to a very heartening Big Butterfly Count result. John Humphrys, who was doing the interview, seemed very happy about it all, and also seized the opportunity to launch a little tirade against people replacing their lawns with Astro Turf (quite right too).
  In my inbox this morning was the Butterfly Conservation report that led to all this jollity – and it is indeed an unusually upbeat document, which arrived with the label 'A Smashing Summer' (not the kind of language BC often uses). The picture it presents is actually quite mixed, with, for example, 'Whites on the Wain' (to quote a bizarre crosshead) – but there is more than enough to justify the 'smashing summer' label. No doubt by the time all the numbers are in, Butterfly Conservation will have found ample contrary evidence to justify their traditional yearly jeremiad.
 My own butterfly summer – which has indeed been pretty 'smashing' (37 of Surrey's 41 species spotted) – continued this afternoon with a stroll around Belmont Downs, where there was a fine abundance of butterflies. Most of these, admittedly, were late Meadown Browns, flapping around with a decidedly fin de saison air (though one pair had mustered the energy for a bit of lepidopteral how's your father, as we scientists call it). But I also saw several pretty little Brown Arguses and Small Heaths, a few late Common Blues and the odd Speckled Wood. Earlier in the day I'd also seen several Red Admirals, a Peacock and a lovely, burnished Small Copper. So yes, a good season – and it's not over yet...