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REALMS OF DELIGHT*

24th June 2022 / Esther Menell

From Cicely Mary Barker and the Flower Fairies to Robert Mapplethorpe is a far cry, and the sudden appearance of the latter in a review of an exhibition of his flower photographs when I had been thinking of blogging about the former, has thrown me.

I had come across this old Flower Fairy postcard and been thinking how much the gifts of flowers during the months that R was at home, waiting peacefully to die, had come to mean to us both. And how flowers had now become a habit.

Unused to spending money on anything except necessities (in a first world sense) I now treat myself to a bunch of something every time I pass our local Lidl.

They have become as necessary to my life as they clearly were to Cicely Mary Barker, a pious Anglican, living with her sister in Croydon where they, the daughters of a seed merchant, had been born.

It is easy enough to see where Mapplethorpe got his inspiration (for copyright reasons I dare not reproduce any of his beautiful, suggestive photographs here but they can easily be found online), but I could not have guessed that the models for Miss Barker’s fairies were the children who attended the kindergarten that her sister had established in their home. This much-loved artist — belonging by upbringing and temperament more to the homely world of the ‘flower ladies’ we met in the several hundred churches I visited with R during one of the happiest times of his life* — evokes a kind of Englishness that no foreigner could ever aspire to. And how much more desirable than the razor-sharp beauty of Robert Mapplethorpe’s black and white studies which mirror his private obsessions.

Here I have to remind myself that R loved not only the common or garden flowers of garden, park and hedgerow which translated so happily into little children with butterfly wings but also orchids, the feral denizens of the flower world.

Entranced by their complexity, he began to collect them and every time we needed to go to Ikea (they were the lure to get him there) meant one more for him to cherish. As for our expedition to the Orchid Festival at Kew, what a different experience from our harmonious church visits that turned out to be. In the steaming heat of the tropical glass house we lost each other.

Glued to a particular bloom, he hadn’t noticed that I had moved on and I hadn’t noticed he wasn’t still following. For more almost an hour I sat at the exit until one of the kind guards who had joined in the fun (for them) of R’s disappearance managed to find and deliver him.

Memories, memories. What else does old age comprise? I remember that flowers were a part of my mother’s life, and will never forget the sight and scent of the freesias, bought off a market stall in the Portobello Road, with which I covered her coffin.

* See R. Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, Foreword.

** Almost every one of the thousand or more churches that he visited evoked a rapturous response. He so loved ‘dark plaster, faded colour, crumbling stone — perishable materials perishing . . . . ‘ (from the Introduction to English Parish Churches). For R, to ‘assimilate more and more to the realm of delight’ was what life was about.

OUT OF JOINT

27th May 2022 / Esther Menell

I have never felt more at odds with the world than these last few days. It began with finding that the acronym d.v. (‘god willing’) which litters my father’s wartime letters to my mother is now more commonly used as an acronym for Domestic Violence, and then hearing that it can now be OK to use the word ‘queer’.

I feel like the characters in Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint who are described as feeling that the world is unravelling around them. Of course, Shakespeare got there first. It was Hamlet’s words that have been haunting me as the world becomes more alien than ever. Gender issues, bitcoins, naked dresses . . . Of course, the photograph of a young woman walking down a busy street looking as if she isn’t wearing anything – her skin-tight dress picturing breasts and highlighting the crease of her buttocks – isn’t going to disrupt anyone’s life or bankrupt them, but it is all part of this unreal world in which I feel I have no place.

It doesn’t help that I can’t, or prefer not to, recognise myself in this person who can no longer get up off the floor or bend down to plant a bulb and forgets to put water into the poacher so that the egg melts into the plastic and the plastic melts into the tin and the kitchen almost goes up in flames. Like all people my age who live on their own, I am a bit of a threat to myself and to everyone else, but not as much of a threat as climate change and the war in the Ukraine are to us all.

And I am, at least, taking measures. I am for ever muttering: More haste, less speed and advising myself not to try and do – or carry – two things at once. But it is hard to change a lifetime’s habit in which for so many years it was necessary, as it used to be for most women, to do at least three things at once. R could never understand the rush.

But things have changed and it seems that in my son’s generation, husbands are as likely as their wives to ‘multi-task’. But what won’t change is what ageing does to us all and among my favourite reading now is The Oldie which is full of information about gadgets which make life easier and I am reassured at finding I am not the only person who doesn’t know how to zoom or use a smartphone, nor the only person who remembers Laurence Harvey and Patricia Roc, and gets a thrill from getting upstairs and finding they have remembered to make the bed.

EASY DOES IT (OR DOES IT . . . )

25th April 2022 / Esther Menell

Before posting this, I had to remind myself of this principle, first expressed when writing about Diana Athill, after her death.

. . . the principle of my blog is to talk about what concerns me at the moment of writing, or has interested or concerned me in the past.

Today’s post, about last week’s experience, ticks all the boxes.

What the Managing Director of the company that laid my new artificial lawn failed to mention when he sent me these images, designed to impress upon me what a transformation his company had brought about in my garden, is that the one on the left was taken after two of his workmen had spent a couple of hours tearing up my original lawn, before one of them got bitten by an insect and they walked off the job.

I was cowering in a back room as the men went back and forth, unmasked, carrying bags of what had been my garden through the house, when suddenly the rhythm changed. They stopped, tapped on the window and the one with more English, said: PROBLEM. What the problem was he couldn’t or wouldn’t divulge. They walked out of the house and joined the driver of the flatbed lorry that had just drawn up, leaving me and whatever had so frightened them behind.

Frantic at being left with the garden in this state and imagining they must have raised a hornets’ nest or come across human remains, I closed all the windows and rang friends for help. I also pleaded with the men to stay until we got further word from Head Office. So far, I had simply been e-mailed this photo and told: ‘They believe this is a flea . . . the message concluding: All members of the team have been bitten . . . I am speaking with them now regarding a solution.

As for what had frightened them, there was no sign of anything when, a few minutes later, my friend Leo arrived and we went out to look. No hornets. No corpse. No nothing.

What happened next was not the arrival of someone experienced in crisis management, but another e-mail to say that the company would not return to finish the job until the garden had been thoroughly disinfected. So, here I was with a churned up garden and no alternative but to let Leo go off and buy a flask of some kind of poison with which he watered the innocent earth of the garden I have cherished for almost sixty years.*

Satisfied that their workmen would now be safe, if unaware of the neighbourhood’s amusement at this very public event, the day-after-next was set for the replay, along with the promise to send a different ‘team’.

Different, but not different enough. They, too, walked off the job, the taller of them, breathing down on me (again unmasked), tried to explain in his broken English that he was fearful for his baby’s health.

There followed a photograph of a black speck on his trouser leg.

Fast forward. It is now late morning. The MD and my friend Nicky, who has come to lend me support, are coming towards me. I am sitting on a chair in the exact spot the men had indicated, trying to get bitten. I have not succeeded. Nor does the MD succeed in photographing any insects, although he does opine that I have an ‘excessive number’ in my garden. We later conclude that the barely visible flying things are probably fruit flies, attracted by the compost heap at the end of the garden. As for the putative flea, we do have a visiting fox . . .

In avuncular mode – possibly uneasy at hearing that I had a stress-induced heart attack a few years ago – the MD now told us to have no further worries and congratulated me on having such a high degree of biodiversity in my garden. He would sort everything out, even if it meant that he and his brother had to come and do the job themselves.

He was as good as his word. But it wasn’t the MD and his brother, it was the original team. They arrived on Good Friday, wearing gauntlets and armed with incense sticks.

It was a very hot day. The smell of incense filled the air. They did not stop to eat. I began to worry. They might be frightened of small insects (which made it unlikely they were Ukrainian), but they were somebody’s father, husband, son. I found a couple of Mars bars and bananas and fed the workforce.

By mid-afternoon, the job was done, and done well.

The next day, having decided not to go legal but needing closure, I sent a note to the MD (as the men had implored me to do) to confirm my satisfaction with that last day’s work, but adding that I had not forgotten what had happened earlier. Apart from the stress, I had refused this lucrative job to a young man I know and like but who, working alone, had said that he could not get it done as quickly.

The MD’s friendly and jovial ‘all’s well-that-ends-well’ response, was to remind me that his firm does after-care and to send me those before and after photos.

*Memorialised by my husband in Eccentric Spaces, published in 1977. To quote:

‘One small homemade garden that I disagreed with off and on for two years while living in it and being naturalized by it matters more to me than the others . . . It was closed in and overgrown, a tunnel and not a tunnel where one felt overshadowed and impeded but more brushed and caressed by plants. We need these two homes, a green one and a brown one, a grown one and a built one, two worlds in tension.‘
Robert harbison

ON STEPPING INSIDE

23rd March 2022 / Esther Menell

How, I have been wondering, can I make people understand how wonderful this book is? I have just finished Evgenia Ginzburg’s Within the Whirlwind and I want everyone I know to read it. To experience it. It is no help to find it is out of print so I can’t, as my immediate impulse was, buy a few extra copies but, even then, as I know from the pile of unread books on my table, having a book is no guarantee of its being read and someone else’s liking it is no guarantee that you will.

Getting something read was a constant problem during my working life. Neither of my employers (André Deutsch and Tom Rosenthal) could wait to get their hands on the latest Mailer or Updike, but to get them to read something by someone no one had ever heard of . . . I still remember having to reject the then unknown Peter Carey, and if André had read either of Edmund White’s first two novels he might not have been so ready to reject A Boy’s Own Story, which made the author’s name and increased his value a hundredfold. With Tom it was a little easier: the trick was to point him towards any ‘dirty’ bits.

But though I spent thirty years paying attention to every book or manuscript (it was manuscripts in those days) that came into the office, and had the thrill of discovering some wonderful writers among the dross, I could be as obtuse as my two employers when left to myself. It took me several years to get round to reading the two books I now value above all others. Both looked forbidding.

Klemperer’s diaries had been among R’s books for years. The volume was immensely fat and the diary form wasn’t appealing. I don’t know what eventually made me pick it up, but I do remember it was in the early Trump days and how frightening it was to find history repeating itself. I also remember being unable to put it down, as one entry followed another and this love story, for that is what it is (among so much else) slowly unfolded. As for Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, that too waited several years before I picked it up for the second time. The first had been when I saw it lying on a blanket, along with a saucepan and a lot of trinkets, at a boot sale in the North Yorkshire village of Hutton-le-Hole.

Boot sales. Realms of the great unwanteds. I think the lady asked a pound for it. The same amount that I had paid a few weeks previously for an unblemished copy of the Times Atlas. But not quite as much as the £7 that I was to pay for a beaver coat with a slightly worn lining that now belongs to my daughter-in-law and helps keep out the New York winter cold. A treasure trove of discarded clothes, surplus crab apples, mysterious-looking tools – which our farmer landlord said were bound to be stolen – and pile upon pile of Catherine Cooksons. And among the rubbish, just as among the flood of words that reached me every working day, there might always be something.

On what proved to be a memorable occasion, the something looked particularly uninviting. The pages of the book-length cartoon sent in by an agent were not even in order and, with comics being one of my several blind spots, I was tempted to return them unread. As it was, the moment I pulled myself together and stepped inside, I was spellbound. What I had in my hand was Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

I wish I could say that that experience has made me any more open to graphic novels. It hasn’t. But it was graphic novels which, indirectly, led me to Within the Whirlwind, for I came across it as I was scouring R’s shelves for anything Japanese – novels, films, whatever – for my thirteen-year-old grandson, a veritable scholar of manga. The manga exhibition at the British Museum had been the high point of his last visit to London and the last thing he was to do with his grandfather who, unlike me, was ready to enter an alien world.

My own reluctance suggests that a venture I heard about the other day will fulfil a real need. The aim of the London Literary Salon is to help its members come to grips with those difficult books they have always wanted to read but never had the courage to tackle. The hurdle is unlikely to be the title itself – though Praeterita stopped me in my tracks for years – but size and reputation. If Toby Brothers’ encouragement can get people past the first post, never was being lost in a big, long, ‘difficult’ book a better place to be.

WHAT ABOUT SALLY . . .

24th February 2022 / Esther Menell

It was coming across Rory Stewart’s choice description of Boris Johnson as ‘a terrible prime minister and a worse human being’ which prompted me to listen again the other day to his, Rory’s, Desert Island Discs, and this reminded me of something I had never understood, which is why we were always hearing so much about Rory Stewart’s father but never a word about his mother.

Why am I interested? Well, Sally and I had been in the same year at Oxford in what was then a women’s college and met up, fifteen years or so ago, at one of those overnight college get-togethers, particularly memorable because the electricity failed and my expectation of hot cocoa and gossip went for a burton.

But we had been seated next to each other at the evening meal and it was then I learnt that we had sons of much the same age and now that I know how very remarkable Rory already was, she did not make a production of this. But that was Sally. She had always been exceptionally well-mannered and discreet.

*St Hilda’s 1954 intake. Sally, front row, 5th from left. Me, front row, 2 1/2 from right.*

Most of us in that mid-‘50s intake had very quickly paired up, even ganged up, and spent at least as much time talking about ourselves as we did about Chaucer or Milton or whatever; but Sally, though courteous to all, wasn’t a joiner and, thinking back, the only thing we knew about her home life was that she lived in Wimbledon. To discover – in a long New Yorker piece which did mention Sally – that her father was Jewish, was a surprise.

And, hadn’t there also been an earlier husband? I can’t be sure for – with the exception of a couple who had been joined at the hip since day one – none of us actually got married before we went our separate ways. But the pressure to be married, when we were young, led to a lot of false starts. If you didn’t find a husband then, when would you? So it wouldn’t be surprising if, like me, she was on her second husband.

Whether or not, I had a hazy memory of a very tall, very English man – an engineer, a builder of bridges, and talk of foreign lands . . . And any time I thought of Sally, I imagined her leading a Somerset Maugham kind of life in some faraway place. Not a bad guess, as the one fact that googling ‘Rory Stewart’s mother’ reveals, apart from her full name, is that her son was born in Hong Kong.

If my attempt to get Rory’s books out of the local library hadn’t failed (see Now What?) no doubt all would have become clear. As it is, I will always regret that we haven’t seen him in Downing Street over these past few years. And it remains hard to understand why there has been so much in the media about his father and nothing about his mother. Can it really be that in this day and age mothers*, including women like Sally who have careers of their own, are still not considered worth mentioning?

*Our year excelled in mothers. Hugh Grant’s mother is also in that photo (3 rows down and 5 across) and, like Sally and me, she spent her first year living in digs way up the Iffley Road.

OF PLACE NAMES, CHURCHES, TEMPLES AND REMEMBERING JAMES

30th January 2022 / Esther Menell

With R, who for forty years had never had anything worse than a cold, registered as high risk – having never fully recovered from the pneumonia which felled us both a couple of years before – Covid spelt the end of life outside the four walls of our house and beyond the rickety fences of our back garden. But, after one lengthy argument which ended in his reluctantly agreeing not to go to the recently opened Aubrey Beardsley exhibition¹, we both gave in to the inevitable and, like everyone else, found ways of making this new life liveable.

For R, the first step was to order the Beardsley Catalogue Raisonné, a book so heavy that I can barely lift it. For me, the first step was to get out a set of ivory-layered dominoes, bought at a boot sale but never until now used, and begin the search for the instructions to a mah jong set. These I never found. And, though I remembered tales of an ex-uncle-in-law’s obsession with dominoes which, when his job as a GP allowed, he would play for money in Soho cafes, its possibilities seemed quite limited to us and this and all other games soon bit the dust.

But there were, of course, books. Some two thousand or more of them. And also the place-names game of which we never tired. This memory-laden game, which required no more than a piece of paper and a pencil, had for years been reserved for birthdays and New Year’s Eve, but we now allowed ourselves to play it any time we felt particularly low.

This all came back to me at gale force yesterday when I came across a clutch of these lists in a copy of one of my favourite of R’s own books, his Guide to English Parish Churches. It was to its index that we would so often turn to see what names – what places – we had forgotten.

There were no rules to the game, except that we should both have been there, but we did have to try to curb our enthusiasm and stop at two or three letters, so as not to use up the alphabet too quickly. We had to leave time to forget again before the next time.

Of course, it wasn’t only English names – Abbeydore, Beeston, Crewkerne . . . though they predominate. It was also Bari, Cromarty, Delft . . . Bari where, finding I had forgotten my sleeping pills, I relied on wine to get to sleep. Even as I write the words, the memories pile in. Melk, Narva, Oberlin, Palafrugell . . . The bright orange bathing trunks that R, who hated shopping, had to go out and buy in Melk so he could swim in the Danube. The three sex manuals² that were almost the only books in the pretty little apartment we had rented in Palafrugell . . .

Oddly enough, we hardly ever seem to have come up with the names of places we had passed through when taxi-ing around India in the company of James and his schoolfriend Sanjay (brought along to give James company on the 800-mile drive from Goa to Bhopal to meet us). Travelling with these two exceptional youngsters – one a Catholic, the other a Hindu and, between them, versed in stuff you could get from no travel guide: the crops, the wildlife, the food, the customs of this ancient land – life was a daily miracle. And, for R, the temples of India remained a life-long passion³. It was with great sadness that I learnt, a few days ago, that James, now the father of two beautiful young boys, has died of Covid.

R has been spared this news. And I return to find solace in those lists, which are a reminder of the best of times.

1. See R on Beardsley here.

2. Alex Comfort hit the mainstream in the ‘70s.

3. See R on Hindu temples here.

CHRISTMAS THEN

24th December 2021 / Esther Menell

One of the first things I learnt about R, when he became our lodger, was that he loved Christmas, and especially Christmas trees. My son was five years old then and R, having recently failed to get tenure and me having recently become a single mother, we were both on the lean side financially. Which is why we made our own decorations.

We brought petals in from the garden, made strings of cranberries and popcorn and golden sultanas, pasted children’s drawings onto bits of cardboard and filled every dark hole with a glowing orange tangerine, suspended on sewing thread or, when we ran out of these, with gaudy Quality Street toffees which led to the tree rocking dangerously as small children made a bee-line for them. To these home-made devices was added one shop-bought ornament: a very small green felt sock, covered with glitter.

All but the edible still survive.

On his first return from Carlisle, PA, where he had been to visit his parents, R brought a box of ornaments dating back to his own childhood: little angels in crescent moons, metal fruits, glass balls. And every time we went anywhere over the next forty years we brought something back with us: shiny metal baubles from Mexico; from Moscow, a silver pasteboard parrot; seaweed from Pacific Valley; lace from a sleepy little town in Czechoslovakia where we didn’t know everything closed early on New Year’s Eve and had nothing to eat except a bar of chocolate.

R is no longer with us, but he lives on in his books which will still be around when I am gone too. And here he is, talking about Christmas . . . in the opening words of the first chapter of his one book about books, Pharaoh’s Dream: the Secret Life of Stories.

The strangeness of finding such a thing indoors continues to cling to a Christmas tree through its life, even though the accumulation of offerings changes it from wildness into art. It is constructed from the building blocks of the universe, or at least of the imagination, reduced to doll-forms accessible to a child.

Like illustrations in a wordless book or examples in a grammar for foreigners, objects on a Christmas tree correspond to a simpler view than we usually take, as if the enterprise has caused us to ask, what comes first? and to answer: animals, birds, nuts, shells, stars, bells, hearts, spheres, adding a few parochial references to winter and plenty of shrunken versions of ourselves wearing wings or red caps.

From humble origins in afternoons of glueing, tying, and stringing, these objects are raised to a consecrated state like the equipment of an Egyptian tomb, some of it usable, but not meant for our use, some of it only a replica of the usable or edible. Towards the end of the tree’s life some offerings begin to look less desirable: cranberries shrivel, popcorn shrinks, oranges turn brown or even black in places. As time goes on, children, less awed by the spectacle, take bites out of cookies or extract a toffee from its silver paper, leaving the dented husk weightless on its string.

Like ex voto limbs, many of the unsightly throng on the tree commemorate specific times and persons, were made by a friend who has vanished or bought in a shop that has closed. Altogether this custom makes the most telling exposition of yearliness, of a spot returned to at unlengthy intervals to be reminded of the chain of visits stretching back into the distance. One is most lonely for the past when brought vividly into its presence like this, and the gaps between the objects only serve to heighten this private rite. They give it a kind of mosaic glitter, jumbled syllables of lost story, like Gaudi’s sinuous bench clambered over by the uncongnizant.

A crucial difference between one’s worshipful searches of a Christmas tree and the observances of primitive religion is the self-willed nature of the former, though it is true that if the tree were changed too suddenly it would lose its power like a newfangled liturgy.

However great one’s allegiance, luckily it has little chance to go stale. Like an author fearful of tiring the reader the tree-custom brings disrobing hard on the heels of dressing up. Treasured and then outcast, the tree seems an emblem of myth’s current place. Myth survives in pulverized and babified form and in two weeks feels exhausted to all of us.

Ars longa, vita brevis

THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER

12th November 2021 / Esther Menell

Confused, as I often am nowadays – only yesterday I took my valerian drops in the late afternoon, thinking I had woken in the middle of the night – I am having trouble distinguishing between Snow White’s seven dwarves and the Seven Deadly (or Cardinal) Sins. What I am looking for is a way to describe the sensation that overwhelmed me when, not long ago, a friend told me had had spent the last month, during which I had been no further than the corner shop, bowling across Europe with his gorgeous new lady friend.

It was not envy I felt as he rattled on, but full-blown jealousy. The green-eyed monster had me in thrall and, as I shut the door on my erstwhile and soon-to-be-again friend, it would not have surprised me to find I had turned green.

But, wait a minute, I told myself. Remember your age. When you were in your sixties, as he is now, you weren’t only bowling around Europe, you were also in Turkey and Egypt and Mexico and taxi-ing around India, and had a home-from-home in a farmhouse on the North Yorkshire Moors.

The view from our window there surpasses even the sight of the Taj Mahal at dawn, and sitting in front of that window with R, listening on the radio to Seamus Heaney reading Beowulf, is one of the most precious memories in the memory bank that now sustains me.

It is a consolation to find other friends of my age have been shocked by the strength of their feelings when hearing of things now beyond their reach. It is not the wistful longing of one who has made the wrong choice at a high-end restaurant. It is something more akin to those other hard-to-distinguish Capital Vices (yet another name for the deadly sins) Greed and Gluttony: desire for more of what one has already had.

We seem to have pretty much forgotten the turmoil of love affairs and marriages and the ups and downs of a working life when we envy friends in early middle age as they take off for Sicily, Thailand or wherever, disregarding the fact that we now have trouble getting up off a chair and would find it hard, if not impossible, to put up with the discomforts of serious travel.

Best to remember the biblical warning that ‘envy makes the bones rot’ and, to be grateful that when we were travelling the world was not generally known to be hurtling towards extinction.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY . . .

6th October 2021 / Esther Menell

A few weeks before R died, a friend of ours and the very last person in the world anyone would take practical advice from advised me to take a few thousand pounds out of the bank and buy a small safe. I didn’t. I didn’t because I didn’t then know that on the day someone dies (or very soon after) all their accounts are frozen and in an old-fashioned marriage (such as that of our friend’s mother) a widow is left with nothing but the loose change in her purse.

Luckily, R and I didn’t have that kind of a marriage and I had my own bank account. We had the kind of marriage which has more to do with impending death duties than with a need to feel comfortable about living together, which we had been doing happily for forty long and precious years.

It was a shock to think of the number of married women, fortunate enough never to have had to think much about money, suddenly finding themselves – albeit temporarily* – penniless.

What about those women and men who don’t have any money in the bank? How do they find the four thousand pounds plus which, I was to discover, is the price of the average funeral?

For a funeral, and for that purpose alone, money can – where it exists – be extracted from a partner’s frozen account. But not, in my case, extracted fast enough. To my surprise, the funeral director wanted to be paid in advance. To his surprise – and mine too, I had been far too preoccupied in the weeks leading up to R’s death to keep a check on my bank balance – the cheque that I gave him bounced. I am happy to say there were no recriminations from the recipient, but my dealings with the bank throughout this period were a source of additional stress that I could have done without.

I was left wondering, do the many people unable to borrow or to organise crowdfunding find the money to bury their dead?

The answer is that they don’t. The State steps in and provides the modern equivalent of a ‘pauper’s burial’.

*The average time for Probate to be completed is nine months.

AN APPLE A DAY . . .

28th April 2021 / Esther Menell

In the habit of blogging, once a month, I am resurrecting the March post (which I took down almost as soon as it went up) with additional narrative to bring the story up to date, for it is now more pertinent than ever. The only significant change is that the number of GPs who have failed us has risen from seven to nine.

It was the 23^rd of November, eight months to the day since the start of Lockdown. We were taking our regular early-morning walk in Regent’s Park in preparation for yet another housebound day ahead, when R’s legs gave way. Able to move but frighteningly unsteady, he made it back to the car and I drove us home. And thus began a living nightmare which we have only just survived intact.

No one could have prevented the onset of what we were eventually to learn is a well-known condition, but there were myriad opportunities for diagnosis, had we ever seen a doctor. As it was, during those interminable weeks (which stretched into months) when we initially had no idea what was happening, were then allowed to think it was Parkinson’s Disease, and at no point knew how best to handle it – we did not see a doctor once.

Parkinson’s came into it for this reason: R was, indeed, being treated for it, but it was at such an early stage that we had been told, convincingly, that death was likely to upstage it: one of the benefits of old age being that one may outwit the slower-paced killers.

Looking back now that R has started to recover spontaneously, it is hard to believe there was a time I didn’t know that a sudden loss of mobility is almost certain to stem from the spine. The writer of Dem Bones, that spiritual inspired by the book of Ezekiel and set to music by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) would have been less easily fooled than we were. Dem Bones, with its jaunty ‘. . . the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone . . . ‘ says it all.

No, it was not Parkinson’s. It was something called Lumbar Spinal Stenosis, which I now know to be a narrowing of the space between the vertebrae, very common at our age and generally due to the dehydration of the discs and years of bad posture.

Why did no one think of this or of NPH (Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus) which also causes sufferers’ legs to suddenly give way? But, as NPH is often mistaken for Dementia, it was perhaps lucky no one did think of it, as R has always said he would rather anything than lose his mind. I, on the other hand, would rather prefer (as my multi-lingual Italian aunt would say) to be permanently befuddled than in constant discomfort. We were better off thinking he had galloping Parkinson’s than that he was losing his mental faculties.

As to why no one thought of it, the answer is simple. They never saw him. They were just voices on the phone. Not one of the seven doctors I spoke to had suggested – or, when asked, been willing to make – a home visit. It was not until a routine hospital appointment that, almost nine weeks after that fatal walk, R actually saw a doctor, and that doctor, seeing the way he walked, referred him straight on to the Department of Spinal Neurosurgery.

It is not surprising that the one medic who had seen R – a young male nurse who arrived to take a blood sample a few hours after my initial call to our GP practice – did not have the experience or training to recognise the symptoms. He came from an organisation (Rapid Response) whose dual function is to try and keep patients out of hospital (a laudable enterprise at all times, and the more so during a pandemic) and to lighten the GP’s burden by carrying out simple but essential procedures.

To lighten the GP’s burden . . . how my doctor uncle (one of five Estonian-born doctor siblings) would have welcomed that!

But how he would have scorned the idea of treating a patient without seeing him. And surely no one of my age can forget the tongue out, hands-on procedures which almost any visit to the doctor once entailed.

Of course, there is nothing like having grown up with a doctor in the family, and I was to acquire two more on my marriage.

But what one really wants, of course, is not a doctor uncle and a doctor father-in-law (both long since dead) but every Jewish mother’s dream, a doctor son.*

And what one wants from one’s GP, when things are serious, is his or her physical presence.

*The greatest comfort I had during those stressful weeks, from anyone in the medical profession, were unhurried phone calls from the newly qualified doctor son of a concerned friend, now working on the wards of a Scottish hospital.

To bring the story up to the present:

When, in early April, R suddenly developed new and terrifying symptoms, Dr 8 did not offer to visit, but he did arrange for someone to come ‘later in the week’ to take a blood sample. There was, I think, one more inconclusive phone call with a Dr 9 before, three days later, the ‘someone’ arrived. But we no longer needed him for we had a last reached a doctor – Dr 10 (acknowledged below) – who responded at once to my desperate after-hours-call and stayed with us until R, now barely alive, was rushed to hospital.

As I write this coda, on the sixth day of R’s return following nearly three weeks in hospital and the diagnosis of a new and unrelated condition, I want to record that although the GPs let us down, I can’t find the words to express appreciation for what the NHS has done and is doing for us.

We are being looked after at home – as we were in hospital – with a degree of diligence and loving care by absolutely everyone, from the most senior doctors to the cleaners (who never complained that I was in their way, even though I most surely was).

Back at home, with a constant and welcome stream of nurses, carers, occupational therapists, et al arriving at our door, only the GP practice (our ‘primary carer’) has yet to make contact. In contrast, the two organisations responsible for providing our seamless 24-hour ‘care package’, have provided me with weekday and weekend phone numbers, and a real person comes to the phone, at all times of the day and night.

Our GP practice asks for calls to the Duty Doctor – that is to say, calls about something that can’t wait for an appointment – to be made before 11.00 am (only on weekdays, of course).

When, in a time that now seems aeons ago, I banged saucepan lids for the NHS, I had not given a thought to how very much more than Covid the doctors, nurses and ancillary staff were dealing with every day and every night.

The ambulance men were the first in a long series of ancillary workers and hospital doctors who (along with Dr 10) have entirely restored my faith in the NHS.

RING A DING . . .

19th February 2021 / Esther Menell

As a very late and reluctant-comer to mobile phones, I wonder whether I will ever learn to tell their ringing from the ringing of the real phone – the one that stays

in one place and you see in those wonderful old black and white movies, like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

And how will I learn to distinguish its ringing from the doorbell itself?

By the time I had got it out of my back pocket yesterday morning – for once it was actually there, and not still in some other pocket – and realised it wasn’t ringing at all, whoever had been at the front door had decided I wasn’t in: a cruel joke, as I have been in for the last ten months.

And how do people manage it when their land lines and their mobiles ring at the same time? I immediately go into panic mode: shouting ‘I can’t talk now’ down the receiver while fumbling for the mobile, only to find the person has given up and left me a message which now joins all the other unread messages, as picking up messages and texting are both skills I don’t yet have.

The apotheosis was reached the other day when, happily lost in an episode of that brilliant French soap opera, Call My Agent, I tried to answer a fictional call.

It was neither the real phone, nor the mobile, nor the doorbell. What I had heard and tried to answer was a phone (the smartest of smart phones, of course) belonging to one of the characters.

It was easy enough, to catch up on what I had missed while, inadvertently, taking part in the action. But much as I love Andrea, Gabriel and Jean Gabin (at least I can recognise barking, for what it is) I do still regret the days when even agents could carry out their mostly nefarious business without the soulless machinery of modern life.

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

25th January 2021 / Esther Menell

Not long ago, in a rather heated discussion about bike lanes, a friend who I had always valued for her good sense asked me, in all seriousness, whether I preferred cars to children.

It turns out that she is a passionate advocate of a car-free city, an idea which makes no more sense to me than the idea of a forest without trees.

Perhaps the fury that the whole bike issue engenders is some kind of displacement: what we are really furious about is the turn life has taken through no one’s fault – or everyone’s fault, if you prefer that version – and yet, even as I say this, my hackles rise as I remember that particular conversation.

I had been lamenting the disruption caused by the introduction of bike lanes on the road where, in my cycling days, I had never felt a need to be protected from the rest of the traffic, and where now confusion reigns.

Left to right: pavement, bike lane (interrupted by zebra crossing), more pavement, more zebra, mysterious section of road with bike symbol (just visible) and, not visible (because a few feet to the left of the picture), legal parking bays between the bike lane and open road!

In their enthusiasm for thwarting the driver and prioritising the cyclist, the Council has lost sight of the needs of the pedestrian, as can be seen in the now iconic snapshot of an elderly lady sitting on a bench in the middle of a bike lane as she waits for a bus. The Council had neglected to move the bench when they moved the stop.

Bench in bike lane (without elderly occupant)

What, I asked my friend, have these measures achieved except waste public money and raise a storm in the local press? Instead of (or as well as) cars endangering cyclists, cyclists now endanger pedestrians, and if the streets were to become children’s playgrounds, wouldn’t their games be very different from those of yesteryear . . . ? The cheerful little girl, hiking her frock up with one hand as she dances in the street is no longer among us. Her great-grandchildren would not be playing hopscotch. Not long ago, at the other end of our street, a boy was deliberately run over by his mates, in a stolen car. Kitchen knives are kept out of sight in the local shops.

To think that city streets were meant as playgrounds is on a par with town-dwellers complaining about the mud in country lanes. Cities are cities. The only reason that little girl was dancing in the street is that she lived in a slum and there was no park nearby.

Much has changed since then. The war created a lot of open spaces, and enlightened councils have provided many more. It does not surprise me that the blocked-to-traffic side roads are deserted. As I go for my Covid constitutional, I have never seen any children playing in those empty streets.

The way it used to be in some of the less prosperous areas of the city

No, I don’t prefer cars to children, but I do think that cars belong on the road and children don’t. And though I sometimes think longingly of the years spent in a remote part of North Yorkshire, where you recognised every vehicle that passed, I don’t want or expect Kentish Town to resemble it.

Londoners using what my father used to call ‘Shanks’s pony’

Like any reasonable adult, I think city-dwellers should use public transport or their legs whenever they can but, as one gets older, one comes to realise the very real benefit of four wheels and to dread the day when one will no longer be able to manoeuvre one’s ageing body into the driving seat, putting so much that is precious for ever out of reach.

As I fill in a Camden questionnaire on ‘traffic solutions’, and wonder why on earth they need to know my ‘sexual orientation’, I am also thinking, with some satisfaction, of the day in the future when the fit young things who spearhead the powerful cycling lobby will be old themselves (if they have survived the killing fields of Chalk Farm Road*) and may come to regret what they have done.

*In its wisdom, the Council has just introduced bike lanes on this road which is being used by all the heavy traffic serving a major building development scheduled to take six years to complete.

REMEMBERING KEMAL

10th December 2020 / Esther Menell

It is not hard to remember someone you could never forget.

I am riffling through some of the many, often enigmatic, messages I got from Kemal during the four years that I was sending him second-hand paperbacks for the shelves of his little bookshop in the back streets of Antalya.

This, one of the earliest, is typical:

You have time do box of fiction?

Good evening

I must pay you

Kemal

Luckily, I did have time and those four years, when life was one long treasure-hunt, were among the most carefree ever.

The timing could not have been better. Retired by then from a life working on other people’s as yet unpublished books, I had just given up on the last of several attempts to be useful, and was ready for something new. And so it was that I stopped the numbingly useless attempts to improve literacy in prisons (the bureaucracy, not the prisoners, proved the sticking point) and plunged happily into finding reading for the English-speaking walkers of the Lycian Way in the seaside town of Antalya.

It is said that it was the paperbacks, abandoned by tourists – and found by Kemal while working on the buses – that had propelled him, a young man with little formal education but a passion for books, to start his own bookshop.

Of course, even if this is true, there must have been other steps along the way, and those of us who came to know Kemal have spent many hours trying to reconstruct his past life. It is only very recently that I heard the bus conductor story: a little more likely than the fantasies prompted by signs of a bullet wound on his shoulder.

I never saw his shoulder. We were not in Antalya long enough to join him for his daily swim.

. . . only the dead know Brooklyn by Thomas WOLFE . . .

Take care

I swim every morning

Kemal

and, having told him, almost as soon as we met, that I had a husband, I like to think it was only this that kept him from inviting me to spend a lot more time with him. For Kemal loved women almost as much as he loved books.

One of the many women lucky enough to cross his path was already a friend of mine. Another became a friend. Both treasure his memory and share with me their grief at the news of his death. Which occurred exactly one week before, unknowing, I included one of my own Kemal memories in my September blog.

It was he who hauled that hideous bowl (which I now know was a choice example of Palissy ware) to Sotheby’s, and it was the young woman who had collected it from me who, all these years later, unearthed my address and let me know he was, by his own hand, dead.

. . . next summer I will built my own spulcreve in my willage . . .

wrote Kemal almost exactly nine years ago.

What is all this about a sepulchre? Surely it is a bit early to be planning

your tomb . . .

I wrote back. I had no premonition of what was to come. Nor did he. He had simply found a sculpture (cat sculpture seal by French sculpcure) that he wanted for his tomb, and I can only suppose that now he had left the house with its large garden where he lived when I first met him, he had nowhere to put it. So he took it to where it would finally belong.

No one I know has been to his village, or even knows its name. I hope someone who was around when he died knew what he wanted, and made it happen. I hope too that they knew what kind of a send-off he would have wanted. Here again, we can only guess. That he was a Christian at birth – another of the stories about him – seems unlikely. I know for certain that at the sound of the muezzin he would close the shutters; and everything about him suggested this was not only for the sake of his eardrums.

There is so much we don’t know. And never will. For instance, where did the Palissy ware bowl and the many beautiful objects he sold or gave away come from? And what about the palatial house, with its garden full of antiquities, to which his little bookshop was an annexe? My guess is that it belonged to a wealthy foreigner: that Kemal was his manservant and became his heir.

If we seem here to be in the realms of popular fiction, or even crime fiction, so be it. Kemal, in his beauty (‘a Neptune arising from the sea’, is how one of his highly educated lady friends describes him) is a story-book creation come to life. How appropriate for someone who so loved books.

What kind of books? had been my first anxious question when, months after exchanging addresses, and never having expected to hear from him again, I got a scribbled note asking me to buy books for him, and saying that a lorry driver, already on his way to England, would come and collect them.

And so began the four years of trawling the charity shops for any book that cost no more than two pounds, was in good condition, and I would want to read myself!

Here is a page from the notebook in which I entered each purchase:

Joan Didion Where I Was From £1

Reginald Hill Death’s Jest Book £1. 50

Andrea Ashworth Once In a House on Fire £1

Rachel Cusk Saving Agnes 70p

Ian Rankin The Falls £1

Proust Vol 4 Sodom and Gomorrah £1

Don Delillo Underworld £1

Graham Greene May We Borrow Your Husband 75p

I hadn’t read them all, and still haven’t. But each author or title whetted the appetite. In the case of Proust, my own appetite had, in truth, been satisfied long ago by the end of volume 3, but the title of volume 4 seemed likely to attract a browser’s attention.

Whether it did or not, I will never know. Nor will I know what has become of the stunning collection of antiquities, dragged out of skips, gathered from building sites – ‘the dustbins of history’ (here Kemal was quoting Trotsky) – and now displayed amid the tangle of shrubs and flowering trees in that garden, which I had glimpsed that morning when I first entered the shop.

That same morning, my husband was looking at antiquities too. But in the local museum. Antalya was not a destination, but a stop on the way from the classical glories of the western coast to Beyşehir, a small town in Anatolia, renowned for its ancient wooden mosque.

There were no museums In Beyşehir, which we were to reach a day or two later, but this was to be the most memorable of all our stops. A faded leaflet pinned to the board in the only hotel showed something that looked like a well and claimed it dated back to Hittite times.

Wishing Kemal was with us, for no one spoke a word of English, we still managed to find it: a water hole in a flat, empty landscape, with a trickle of water issuing from a pipe which – such is the power of suggestion – appeared numinous in the gathering dusk.

Who knows how long we would have stood there in wonderment, if we hadn’t been distracted by the sight of a small crowd of women, approaching slowly across the scrub. When close, they emptied sacks they were carrying onto the ground and there were mounds of knitwear – sweaters, hats, gloves, scarves, in all the colours of the rainbow – spread out for us to buy.

It is a regret to this day that I did not have the entrepreneurial skills to have magicked that beautiful handwork into some Knightsbridge boutique and given much needed custom to that remote community. But this short-lived dream, which had Kemal as the middleman, lasted no longer than any other day-dream, and second-hand paperbacks remained the cargo which an increasingly unreliable lorry driver carried from England to Turkey.

In the long exchange of e-mails, the lorry driver makes many appearances:

Hope lorry driver doesn’t forget the books this time everybody seems to get alsemeir . . .

He is still in Italy . . .

Am I right in thinking we can’t expect lorry driver during Ramadan?

And then, inevitably

I am terribly sorry, but lorry driver is kaput

My memory lets me down there. Did K find another driver bringing cargoes of lemons to London? I think he must have done, because my ‘sales ledger’ tells me another year passed before things finally came to a stop. By then, I was haunting the charity shops not just for Kemal but also for my grandson, Zachariah, to whom I sent a book every month for his first five years.

Now 12 years old, Z is lost to me (though not to books) in the baffling world of Manga, and the charity shops, thanks to Covid, have long been out of reach. Those halcyon days are over when ‘buying for Kemal’ was a part of life and R and I would scour the high streets of market towns for Heart Foundation shop signs, and the back of the car was always full of books.

But the memories linger and they are not only about books. There was the time when Kemal came and stayed with us: the only time, except for that encounter in the shop, that he and I were in the same place at the same time. It was during this visit we discovered what a wonderful and willing cook he was. He loved food, as he also loved flowers: he recognised almost every one that was growing in our garden, and had grown many of them in his.

Was it an illness of mind or body that made this man, with his lust for life and love of beauty, die as he did? Or was it the increasing ugliness of the world that made him want to leave it? Whatever it was, it is over now.

Wherever you are and however you got there, Kemal,
rest in peace.

THE ACCIDENTAL PHOTOGRAPHER

12th November 2020 / Esther Menell

Five years ago, to my surprise and that of everyone else, including my husband who used to joke that I was a ‘folk-photographer’, a lot of snaps I had taken of him – mostly looking at buildings – were exhibited at the architectural school where he had been teaching and, not much later, and more surprisingly still, in a gallery in Rome.

It seems there is a category of photographers called Street Photographers, and that I counted among them. Worlds away in skill and subject (I did not have the nerve to photograph grown-up people), I nevertheless found myself in the same category as ex-nanny and one of the greatest of all street photographers, Vivian Maier.

The film about Maier*, made by the young man who came across crates of her abandoned work in an auction sale, is a joy on two counts: because it allows us to see a lot of her astonishing photographs, and because her life is as strange and unsettling as that of a character in a Ruth Rendell novel. Tall, plain, stiff (unable to unbend, except with children), this nanny-from-who-knows-where moved from one kindly middle-class family to another, with her ever-increasing number of suitcases and boxes, all hidden from view by her insistence on having a lock on the door of her room.

None of her charges came to harm. Many have good memories of her. And all of them will have been present when some of her greatest pictures were taken. As for the boxes, it was not until young John Maloof – thinking he might find something useful to illustrate a paper on local history – put in a bid and took them home, that their contents were revealed.

It was seeing this marvellous film that made me go back to my own heaps of photos, mostly taken before DoublePrint went out of business and I had to go digital. Almost all, I have now thrown out. But here are a few for which I have a lamentable fondness.

*Finding Vivian Maier: written, directed and produced by John Maloof

My husband’s ‘take’ on Vivian Maier can be found here.

LOST AND FOUND

27th October 2020 / Esther Menell

There it was. In the medicine chest. The book of stamps I thought lost for ever. But how did it get there, and does that mean I may still find the fifty-pound note my husband left me when he set off for the Lebanon: natural destination, in those far-off days, for a systems player who had been banned from every gambling club in London? That fifty pounds was to keep me and our baby son going while he was away. Careful, as ever, I put it away safely, and have never been able to find it.

And what about the unopened pack of poppadoms, the barely begun jar of marmalade, and those lacy headbands that hid my attempts to cut my own hair? Will I ever find those? All have disappeared so thoroughly that I am beginning to think there is a poltergeist at work in this house in which there have been no visitors for over six months.

Best to think about the things I have found instead. There is a favourite photo, lost for ever, I had thought, taken in a Gambian orphanage, and the long-lost letter from Mollie Keane’s agent which would have resolved, once and for all, the unseemly dispute about whether the manuscript of Good Behaviour had been sent to Diana Athill or to me.

And then there is a whole category of things, like the Estonian doll and my father’s prayer shawl, which weren’t actually lost, because I had forgotten they existed. These were among the things which surfaced as I rooted around in the massive, carved chest – shipped from some outpost of Empire by a mining-engineer friend of my father’s and still, after almost a hundred years, smelling of camphor.

Better still than lost things, are people newly found: those young relatives who, like me, are waiting to know what, if anything, they will be getting from an eleven-year-old will which came to light only recently. It is thanks to this I am now in touch with the daughter of a half-brother I never knew, and the son of a favourite cousin: both unearthed by an agency whose business it is to find Lost People.

That nothing is ever lost for good, I learnt as a ten-year-old when I dropped my precious Parker Pen on the sports field. Hours and buckets of tears later, I was allowed to go and look for it, though warned not to expect to find it. But I did, and I still remember the moment when I saw it, lying in the wet grass, momentarily as big as a small tree: an epiphany! My first and my last. Nothing, I remind myself, as I hunt for the marmalade, is ever lost for ever.

RELATIVE VALUES

24th September 2020 / Esther Menell

It is one thing discovering that some of your possessions have a value you never dreamt of*, and another finding out how to realise this.

Neither of my two experiences of selling provides a useful template. The first was when needing the money urgently for house repairs, I fished my mother’s few pieces of jewellery out of the breadcrumb jar (I had not been able to afford to insure them) and after consulting both friends and the Yellow Pages, took them first to one of the big auction houses, then (with an introduction) to the owner of one of the most prestigious Bond Street jewellers, and lastly, because everyone knows about Hatton Garden, to Hatton Garden.

The auction house was awesome. I remember being treated with icy politeness at the reception desk and feeling very out of place until someone slid into view and escorted me to a velvety little side-room, where I was able to get at the shoulder-holster under my shirt and to extract the jewellery, after which the separate pieces were laid on a felt-covered tray and borne away.

An hour or so, and several Tatlers later, I was given a rough estimate of what they were likely to fetch at auction, and told of the preliminary expenses which would include putting one of them – a brooch which a suave young man had recognised as of late-nineteenth century Russian origin – in their catalogue.

The expense of the operation and its uncertain outcome decided me to try my friend’s jeweller friend, and this time I also took with me a clutch of gold coins (legacy of an aunt who only trusted what she could see and feel) and my father’s gold cigarette case. Both, I was now told by X, a soft-spoken, lizard-like creature, should be sold as bullion. He summoned a minion, had them weighed, told me what they would fetch, and said he would be happy to take these off me now. The rest, he would like me to leave and collect in a few days’ time.

I don’t know what made me decide to stuff everything back about my person and say, rather grandly, that I would think about it, but I did, and now made my way to Hatton Garden. Here, I went into one small shop after another. In one of them I was told that the biggest stone (which eventually brought something like £700) was glass. In another, I was advised to take my gold hoard to a bullion house down the road, where I sold it across the counter for considerably more than Mr X had been going to give me an hour or two before.

In the end, not knowing who to believe, I went back to Bonhams and, some months later, got from that august establishment almost exactly what one of the little one-man businesses would have handed me in cash.

My second auction-house experience was when a Turkish friend, who looks more like a holiday-romance fisherman than an aesthete (rather as the recently departed British ambassador to the U.S. looks more like a hill farmer than a diplomat) asked me – he and his current lady love were staying with us – if I would go to Sotheby’s with him to take along a very large and untidy looking parcel that I had noticed among his luggage when he had arrived, unexpectedly, from Antalya. I was pretty sure that he knew what he was about, even though I would have taken the hideous pot he now showed me straight to the nearest charity shop.

Well, we made it to Sotheby’s and were greeted with that same blood-curdling politeness, which would not have bothered K, even had he not been preoccupied with emptying his pockets of various small hard, metal objects which (to my embarrassment) he now handed to the pretty young woman who had been sent to see what we had with us. To my surprise, she was ready to take these, as well as the pot, to be valued. And, before long, we were taken behind the scenes, to be told that they would be pleased to handle everything, but first we would need to establish provenance.

That was the clincher. Not that these were stolen goods. They weren’t. But we had had enough for one day. We walked up to Oxford Street, got on a bus, and came home.

As for the pot, it remained in our attic for many years and then, out of the blue, a phone call from ‘a friend of K’s’, asking if she could collect ‘K’s pot’. She came. It went. One of the small metal things is on the table beside me.

*I found out recently that first editions of Wide Sargasso Sea are now being sold for over £2,000.

MOSTLY HARRY

25th August 2020 / Esther Menell

It seems people are capable of collecting anything. I just heard of someone who collects the labels on eating apples. It is hard to imagine the satisfaction in that; easier to understand collecting something which you have pleasure in handling or looking at. Or anything where you can have all of a kind: say, the first 100 Penguins, or every edition of a favourite book. This would presumably give the same satisfaction as finishing a jigsaw puzzle, where completion can be such a pressing need that a friend, having mislaid two pieces of a just completed 9,000 piece puzzle, got out a fretsaw and carefully reconstructed them; only to find the originals, a few days later, down the side of the sofa.

I have never consciously collected anything, but have made up for this by never throwing anything away and therefore, you could say, collecting everything. Which is how I come to have every note that Harry – the poet Harry Fainlight – ever wrote me, only to find that these are now saleable. There are people out there actually ready to buy them.

None of the notes is substantial, quite a few are malign. One envelope, addressed in his unmistakeable hand, contained nothing but a page torn out of a book: the sepia photograph of his grandmother’s tombstone.

As for the writer of these strange little missives . . . he had arrived in my life through a friend, a lot wilder than me. She knew lots of poets. Through her I met – or had at least been in a room with – quite a few of them: Michael Horowitz, of course, (who hasn’t?) but also Gregory Corso and the spectre-like William Burroughs.

Not long back from New York, where acid had begun to unhinge him, Harry needed somewhere to stay, and the little garden cell I was letting for thirty shillings a week was vacant. He moved in, and so began the little stream (I now wish it had been a flood) of notes, left around the house for me to find in the mornings or posted, variously, from a London prison, a psychiatric hospital in Scotland, his parents’ home in Sussex, the cottage in Wales where he died a few years later.

I didn’t keep Harry’s notes because I thought I could sell them. Nor the letters from Jean Rhys. Nor the one from Simon Raven asking me (I was then his publisher’s secretary) to open any mail addressed to him (it was mid-December) in case there was a Christmas cheque in it. I kept them because I keep everything and now, having found people collect not only stamps but apple labels, alarm clocks and belt buckles*, I am no longer surprised that there is a lively trade in autographs – so lively, that I have been warned not to let the originals out of my sight.

What a pity George – George Andrews – who succeeded Harry, hadn’t been given to communicating on paper. His signature (if only I had kept a rent book) might have made it worthwhile having the house reeking of pot. A benign presence, the author of The Book of Grass was a man of few words. All I can remember him ever saying, as he padded about, arm uplifted in greeting, was ‘Hi, man!’, and brown rice is all I can remember him cooking, except for the hash brownies which he hoped would bring me – a non-smoker – into the fold . . . .

Looking round me, as I try to bring some order into a house crammed with things, I sometimes think enviously of those people who throw away anything they no longer have a use for. Of course, this can go too far. My erstwhile friend, Andrea, discarded people with the same ease as others throw out an old tea cloth. It was some consolation, years after she had dropped me, to find a character in one of her novels say that friends are like pot plants: they have a short life.

I wonder if Andrea’s letters, too, need to be put aside in case (she died only recently) they are saleable. She, who had written me into her will and then written me out again, would not disapprove. Not born to money, she valued it, and I felt a strong stab of affection when I came across this page torn out of the Radio Times. The caption reads: ‘I would find it very pleasant if the critics were to hail me as a genius. But if it was a choice between critical approbation with low viewing figures and audiences of 20 million**, it’s no contest.’

I am thankful that almost all the thousand or more letters that have been keeping the present at bay are from friends whose names are known only to those who actually knew them, so I can keep them or throw them out, or return them to the writer, or to the writer’s children, without any thought of foregoing some useful cash.

As for Harry, even if I sell his letters, my memory of him will stay intact for as long as I have a copy of his book and can still see him sitting at the kitchen table, one Christmas Eve, transfixed by the Frog Prince who appeared among the green metal leaves of a slowly opening water-lily, each time he spun the top I was waiting to wrap for my three-year-old son.

*See: What is it worth? 85 different things to collect: the ultimate list

** The television series which scored that vast audience was ‘A Bouquet of Barbed Wire’

ON THE HEATH

27th July 2020 / Esther Menell

This morning a young friend of mine (not that she would think of herself as young, but she is twenty years younger than me) flew to Greece with her family. Next week, another friend takes off for Italy with her family, having just (like Noah’s dove) returned from a scouting trip, to make sure the waters had receded. Which they had. Italy is now a safe place to be.

Here, in London, R and I are trying on face masks for the first time . . .

None of the statements put out by our government carries conviction. As we are no longer useful to the economy as workers (being long retired), nor as consumers (a role we now amply fulfil without leaving the house), we feel entitled to stay locked down: a decision made easier by living near Hampstead Heath, precious substitute for the countryside which was once a part of our lives. The serenity of the ancient heathland – its undergrowth and dark stretches of water – helps as nothing else can to quieten the unquiet mind.

It was to the Heath that we went on leaving the house for the first time in more than two months, and these are some of the people who were also enjoying the still unaccustomed freedom.

In a world of their own . . .

Keeping their distance . . .

In a bubble of one . . .

Carpe diem . . .

A TICKET TO THE MOON

22nd June 2020 / Esther Menell

Talking with a friend of my own age the other day, as we sat on kitchen chairs at either end of her small front garden, I heard, or thought I heard – still not acclimatised to the hearing-aid I should have learnt how to use before lockdown – that her late mother had once bought, and paid real money for, a ticket to the moon . . .

What else does one need to know about someone than that!

We were talking about mothers. About being them and having them. What we know about our own, and what our children and grandchildren know about us. Not an entirely comfortable subject when you reflect on those long-ago days when your child needed you, wanted only you and, for too short a time, thought everything you said and did a miracle of rightness.

How short a time those glory days lasted! I still remember my son, at a very young age, saying that I would claim an elephant was Jewish, if it was particularly clever. A wholly justified rebuke. My Jewishness, until recently, extending no further than often wondering whether someone was or wasn’t.

Not many years later, his self-assertion took more active form: overnight, this enthusiastic meat-eater turned vegetarian. A step guaranteed to disrupt family meals, the bedrock of family life. And a prelude to his untimely departure.

Of course, every child is different. Some are less impatient, more hesitant about breaking the ties with home, but each one of us needs to do it eventually, or become that sad creature, the child who never leaves.*

Myself, I took the easy way, as I discover now, rooting through old letters. I waited till there was distance between myself and my parents, and am ashamed at finding how seldom, now that I was enjoying myself at Oxford, I bothered to write home. My father’s frequent letters to me ended, almost always, with a plea that I write more often, for my mother’s sake. Her more laboured efforts (she never became fluent in written English) are more subdued. She found it harder to bear my neglect.

My son’s way of breaking free was more dramatic, but that only made his return the more wondrous, and I only wish that now, thirty years on, I could cook him his favourite roast-lamb homecoming meal. But an ocean divides us.

It was a funeral which woke me up to how much parents come to need their children. Infancy and old age have all too much in common. I could not see my husband being able to put on the carefully choreographed event from which we had just returned. Who, I asked him, is going to organise my funeral? His answer was anecdotal. It seems that when Bach’s wife died, his oldest daughter came to him and asked what they should do about her mother’s funeral. ‘Ask Mama,’ was his answer.

Of course, primitive peoples – poor people – have always known that the hordes of children whose births they could not, anyway, have avoided are not only going to till the fields but also look after them in their old age. We, on the other hand, with our 1.7 birth rate, have a bleak future. Which is why I liked the idea of spending my final years becoming acclimatised to dying, among people of my own age, and with help at hand But no one is going to sign up for even the plushest of care homes for a very long time to come and, with this escape route cut off, I envy my friend, with two grown-up daughters to look after her, whose adventurous mother had hoped to fly to the moon.

My own mother’s ambition could not have been more different. She longed not for an unknown future, but for the familiar past: to speak her own language, to see the friends of her youth . . .

*My mother (right) with a friend, some time in the 1920s*

Whether I will ever see my son again remains in the lap of the gods. But, whatever happens, whoever comes into this house when both I and my husband have left it, there, among the debris, they will find my seventeen-year-old mother’s diary, trapped for ever in fading Russian script.

Unable and unwilling to read it, I will never know what she was like then, any more than my son will know what I was like before I became his mother. And that is how it should be, or so it seems to me. Parents aren’t, like friends, for knowing.

*With apologies to the many young people who cannot now afford to leave home.

AND WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT . . . .

28th May 2020 / Esther Menell

. . . . that I would back away when our next-door neighbour reaches across the fence to hand me two brick-red eggs? It is the Greek Orthodox Easter and Bobby has been giving us two identical brick-red eggs for almost forty years.

And what about the other day when, taking it for granted that the sound of the bell heralded yet another unattended package, I opened the door to find someone standing there, hand-outstretched. He must have seen the alarm on my face and, stepping backwards, put down the arum lily he had been about to hand me. I don’t know which of us was more mortified by this encounter.

It is bad enough being frightened of packages but to be frightened of kindly neighbours or of the young medics, come to collect blood for some research project – the first and last people who have crossed our threshold for almost two months – is sadder still.

I don’t feel good either about how impatient I get on finding yet another week’s supply of free food on my doorstep. Can we get nothing right? The Scottish government lets those registered as high risk know they are entitled to this life-saving service, but only sends to those who request it. Here, these precious boxes are delivered willy-nilly, and I have spent more time trying to stop them than finding ways to get them to people who need them.

Conversely, who would have thought a time would come when I would have welcomed those erstwhile doorsteppers with their trays of seemingly useless bits and pieces? How glad I would be now of more cleaning cloths and odd containers and rubber bands. And how glad I am, too, of the small park at the end of our road: little more than waste-ground forty years ago, when our then neighbour Tessa Jowell, who spent her weekends in the Cotswolds, referred to it, airily, as ‘a lung for the neighbourhood’.

Tended lovingly by Camden Council, this long-neglected open space – once made brilliant use of by Ed Berman* and his merry troupe – now finds room not only for cheerful rows of daffodils, two football pitches and a playground but also a wild-flower garden and thriving orchard, planted despite the damage done to a previous stand of young trees, and showing serene (and let us hope not misplaced) faith in the essential goodness of man.

Perhaps, after all, we are ‘under the shadow of God’s hand’: this haunting phrase used by a reckless American Evangelical who flatly refuses to limit the size of her congregation. More haunting still (where would I be, without BBC Radio 4?) the notion, picked up from a lady astronomer, that we are all made of nuclear waste or, more poetically, if you prefer, from the residue of burnt-out stars . . . .

*Founder of Interaction, the City Farm in Kentish Town, and much else.

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