LONDON TIMES

I am fortunate that I have never been entirely desk bound. Even today I still have occasion to make the occasional foray to London or elsewhere and so it was this week. I’d been at a meeting in one of those elegant houses just off The Mall, where Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone lived in his hey day 150 years ago. He would cross St James Park on the brief walk to Downing Street and this week I found myself retracing his habitual steps only realising afterwards - when I saw his portrait - that this is what I had been doing.

It had been a good meeting as meetings go. Mostly they are tedious and boring and the only sensible work gets done anyway in what these days are called ‘the margins’ in private and informal conversations as you take your coffee or put on your coat to go home. So I was in buoyant mood descending the great steps to the Mall and crossing into St James Park which looked as fine as ever I had seen it, thronged with exotic vegetation and waterfowl.

Early in my career I used to work here - not in the Park, though I must have brought papers out, I suppose, now and again, and sat in the sun eating my lunch - but in the Old Admiralty Building that forms one side of Horseguards Parade.

Shortly after I arrived there new telephones were installed and I was delighted to find I had been given extension number 3. This caused endless amusement. I used to say that extension 1 was the Prime Minister (Edward Heath at the time); extension 2 was the Head of the Civil Service and extension 3 was the next most important person in the government.

Anyway important or not they let me park my car on occasions on Horseguards Parade and for several years after I had moved down to Wales whenever I drove up to town I would park on Horseguards and slip into the office where the girls would write out a permit for me. And then I could park all day in the middle of Central London without a penny to pay.

My mistake was not doing this sufficiently often. For one day they twigged that I no longer actually worked in the building. Security was of course becoming a lot tighter and the easy-come-easy-go days fast becoming a memory.

Today the whole of Horseguards Parade is cordoned off: protected by large steel bollards against, I suppose, lorries packed with explosives. How sad. Nevertheless the bollards are painted a tasteful dark green and outlined in gold and do look as though they belong.

As I didn’t have a car - I can’t remember the last time I ever drove into Central London - the bollards weren’t a problem, so I strolled across the Parade ground and through the archway past an extremely young looking trooper trying to remain motionless as a throng of tourists clicked and snapped in the semi-darkness.

He was dressed of course as for the battle of Waterloo. We have a fascination for that late Georgian period. The time of Pitt and Napoleon, of Talleyrand and Mad King George. The Queen lives in an eighteenth century palace, rides in an eighteenth century coach, escorted by eighteenth century soldiers to the accompaniment of eighteenth century music and along boulevards laid out in the eighteenth century. The French do much the same thing. Indeed swop the troops at the Elysée Palace for those at Horseguards and I doubt anyone would notice the difference.

In my day there were fewer tourists and (possibly the two are correlated) fewer pigeons. The visitors scrummed around the two mounted guards on their shining black horses. Above and behind the horses is the old Admiralty Boardroom with its famous table, a concave segment cut out to accommodate one particularly fat Sea Lord and across the way is Great Scotland Yard, once home to the Metropolitan Police, where the IRA exploded a car bomb in the early seventies. It always was a dingy backstreet and not the romantic sort of place portrayed in police thrillers. I am wondering whether the Quai des Orfèvres in Paris is equally forlorn.

With an hour to kill before leaving to catch my train I crossed Trafalgar Square, up past the statue of Edith Cavell, executed for treason in 1915 by the occupying German forces in Brussels, to the National Portrait Gallery.

I hadn’t been there for years and what a fascinating place it is. Here are Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen, Disraeli and Gladstone, Churchill and Queen Anne. Yet what struck me looking at the miscellany of faces was how the men were all recognisable. Take a modern man and stick him in an absurd wig and costume, let him pose for the artist and you will have an eighteenth century portrait. Not so the women. The women’s faces are bland, without character and mostly with charm. They are not so much real faces as an imagination of a face. Why?

Is it because most of the artists were men; or did women really carry that far away ‘lights-on-but-no-one-at-home look?’ A modern woman’s face would fit oddly on the shoulders of Queen Anne, say, or the Duchess of Devonshire, or even of Queen Elizabeth. And she was most certainly ‘at home’ even when the lights were off. Is this a general perception or is this just me? Compare Queen Anne with the photograph of Edith Cavell.


Main Picture is of Horseguards Parade.

THE OLD MONEY

I loved the old money and my weekly half-crown pocket money - a big heavy silver coin that almost seemed too perfect to spend. In those days some of the coins, and the florins and shillings had real silver in them and so they wore down and became quite smooth. It was comforting to see the different designs and to trace the kings and queens - Victoria, Edward, George, George again and then Elizabeth.

The money was very heavy of course and the poor conductors on the buses used to carry a weighty satchel full of 'coppers.' I used to take the bus from the station to get me to school and I would ask for 'a penny-halfpenny half' - in those days children used to get half-fare until the age of fourteen. The farthing (quarter penny) had gone by the time I started to spend money - as had the silver threepenny bit - but there were still plenty about. I remember in Glasgow offering two farthings for a half-penny when we were short of change to buy some potato scones, but the shop woman wouldn't accept them. They had ceased to be legal tender as had the silver threepennies some time before. So we had the 12 sided yellow coin with daisies on it, or later a portcullis, instead.

I lived near a railway and we loved putting these old coins on the line and letting the massive steam locomotives run over them so that they were flattened and rolled out like pastry. Pennies were all right but the railwaymen used to get very cross with us for trying to flatten threepenny bits. (I don't know why they were called 'bits,' nothing else was - except, I suppose, in America where they talked about cheap things as being 'two-bit;' but I never knew what that meant either) Apparently threepenny bits damaged the locomotive's 'tyres.' Now I didn't know that a locomotive had tyres but I suppose it is logical. They must wear and if you didn't take the outside of the wheel off occasionally and replace it with a new one then the engine would be running on the spokes of its wheels. Or so anyway I reasoned. So we didn't put threepenny bits on the line and we were too poor to afford to waste silver coins in this way.

Bank notes were far bigger than they are today. They really were bank notes then and you felt proud to own one. A pound note was the size of a business envelope and the five pound note the size of a small flag. Neither carried the Queen's head (or even the King's head when the King was alive. He smoked heavily and died of cancer but it didn't stop me or anyone else smoking when I was young. Even my great aunt smoked occasionally, insisting on a cigarette called 'Passing Clouds' - made by Wills, I think, like the Woodbines, whereas my step-mother, who didn't like smoking but did so to be fashionable, smoked du Maurier after the novelist, but only at parties. My father smoked cheroots, but not very often. My aunt made me buy him a packet every Christmas. They sounded very sophisticated. But I didn't smoke any of these when I grew up. I think they had gone out of fashion by then, like the money).

You could buy a great many cheroots for £5 in those days but the Bank of England dispensed with the old £5 note because it was so easy to forge, even with all its lovely black swirly writing which made it look more like a letter or contract than a banknote. Something big, blue and square with a picture of Britannia took its place. And the £1 note was similar but in green and then there was a ten shilling note (that was half a pound) in a reddish-brown sort of colour. The notes became smaller as the money lost its value and the design changed. That's when they put the Queen's head on it - as if that might stop the money losing its value. Then the notes disappeared altogether. First the ten shillings and then the pound and today's five pound note will disappear very soon as well I imagine.

Money has lost a lot of value. When I first went to France more than 50 years ago you could get 14 francs to the pound. That would be more than 2 euros. You could get 10 deutsche marks to the pound - that would be about 5 euros and you could get 2 dollars and 80 cents if you wanted American money. I know this figure because it was fixed. Fixed that is until the pound was devalued and the figure became 2 dollars 40 cents.

I still have a collection of the old money and some of the old notes and I suppose everyone thinks wistfully of the pounds shillings and pence that we used to think so logical and which so bemused visitors from overseas. We had a lot of visitors when I was young and I felt so sad for them when a shopkeeper would demand 'three and sevenpence ha'penny' They hadn't a clue what this meant and would just hand over a note or a purse full of change and invite the shopkeeper to take whatever she wanted. So in some ways things have improved. Though the money isn't what it used to be. In any way at all.

NONE NICER THAN NUNNEY

We had gone to stay with Elder Daughter whose husband had taken himself off to the London Film Festival as he does every year, he being a bit of a film buff. So the rest of the family moved in. Like mice. There was then a question about what we might do.

To tell the truth I didn't feel much like doing anything for I was ill, feeling really off colour and with little appetite. The dreaded stomach lurgi doing the rounds had stopped at my door. Still, one must battle on. Fly the flag, especially when there are those around whose health is far less robust, even if at the time I did wonder whether my own ailment might be the beginning of some mortal malady, you know the type of thing at which the black frock-coated gentlemen shake their heads and advise against the commencement of long books. Having just read Phillippa Gregory's 'The White Queen' I recognised my symptoms as just the ones that carried off King Edward IV, and he considerably younger than me, too.

Well, I thought, as I lay half awake a little before six in the morning that being the hour my grandson Theo deems appropriate for life to commence, I may just have time to finish the biography of Talleyrand that I am reading. He and I will then succumb - for the biography ends as most biographies do with his death - he and I will succumb together, but I shall never get round to reading 'The Road Home' by Rose Tremain, which I had bought at the Cowbridge Bookshop when I had gone in to ask whether they might take some copies of Chris's 'Turning the Tide.' I had wanted to buy this book anyway so it wasn't a special purchase and it was the same price as Amazon and no delivery charges and a good conversation with the bookseller thrown in. So why do we insist on buying from Amazon? That is one of life's little imponderables, I thought.

Still even when one is ill and on the point of thinking about putting one's affairs in order, Elder Daughter still wants to know where to go. She's not going to have us hanging about the house all day; we need to mount an expedition. "We'll go to the Castle," I say, thinking this a fool-proof option, only to be told that Frome - the pleasant little market town in jolly Somerset where she lives - doesn't run to a castle.
"Why not?" I asked. "Everywhere else has a castle. There must be a castle if you look hard enough." But there wasn't - or isn't.

So eventually we settled for Nunney castle - a mile or two down the road and as charming a little castle as you might ever hope to find this side of the English Channel. I say this side of the English Channel because Nunney Castle is French. It is as though it has been dug up and transplanted like London Bridge from the sunny folds of the Loire valley to this quaintly named chocolate box village in Somersetshire.


It is a small castle - almost a miniature or Doll's House (Doll's Castle?) castle. Just four pepperpot towers which once carried conical roofs. And with a beautiful regular square moat around it in which to view the shimmering reflection of its stones. One could easily fall in love with such a place and indeed many who lived there can't have done anything else. For it looks not really like a military castle at all, but a gentle-little-fairy-tale-Rapunzel-holding-princess-and-the-pea-sleeping-family-residence-of-a-minor-Baron-probably-called-Ludwig castle.

You can hear harps in the building and if you're really quiet, the fish calling to each other in the moat as you gaze on the far hills from those broad picture windows and imagine children and young folk chasing each other up and down the staircases and hiding behind turrets and shooting arrows at the villagers' pumpkins.


Nunney Castle was built in 1373 and would today be as good as new, but for Oliver Cromwell and his (sadly not at all merry) men who decided that the castle was altogether too blessed with sweetness and light and therefore that it was in need of a good ruination.

So he ruined it - pulling off the conical roofs - and turfing the young folk off the staircases and out into the country lanes. Then he bombarded the four towers with cannon - not altogether successfully for you can see where the cannonballs bounced off - before deciding it might be easier just to blow up the connecting walls with gunpowder. Which he did - gunpowder not being in short supply in 1646 - and, like Jericho, the walls came tumbling down.

Still, that didn't stop the castle being as charming and welcoming as a Dowager Duchess short of visitors. Cross the little wooden footbridge over the moat (surely jumpable if you were any sort of athlete) and you are welcomed into the central hall into which the sunlight is already streaming and where you can imagine yourself sitting down to dinner in Elizabethan robes with Gloriana herself, the Virgin Queen descending the great staircase and muttering about Spaniards.

Ah well, that was all a very long time ago.


I was still feeling ill when we left Nunney to go to Laycock, another bit of the Cotswolds that remains pickled in aspic and costume drama. There Elder Daughter bought me a lunch which sadly I couldn't eat but we sat first under a Eucalyptus and then under a strange tree like a magical walnut (except it wasn't a walnut). Some say it's a lilac but do lilacs - even Persian ones - bear nuts in green cases? A woman was selling apples at £1 a bag from a wheelbarrow in the street and put the money please through the letterbox. I ate an apple and immediately began to feel better.

I leave you with an image of little Theo literally (though on his elders' part quite unforgivably) dancing on the grave of some noble Laycock antecedent. Still, if the apple doesn't work, and I'm not here next week, I hereby give permission to infants under the age of two to dance on my grave to their hearts' content. There isn't much, after all, that one can do for the young when one is six feet under.

VENGEANCE OF THE WATER GODS

Before leaving the Mill I took a last wander down to the fairy pool where the river turns sharply north and flows deep under an overhanging and ivy-covered crag. It is where the silver salmon would lie, if there were salmon in the Célé, which perhaps there were once. It’s a magical place, where dappled sunlight shines and where the fairies congregate: the water nymphs and the tree nymphs, the elves and the pixies.

You’ll have to imagine it, I’m afraid, for to take its picture would steal some of the magic, but anyway this is the spot to which I always go to say goodbye. It had rained a deal in the night and the river was running high and coloured, swirling in foamy anger. In truth, had I a golden coin in my pocket I might have cast it into the pool and made a wish, for I was in one of those moods that afflict us all, I suppose, from time to time: reflecting mournfully on what remains to be done in life and the short time left to do it.

If I had made a wish it would have been to secure for myself that warm and instantly recognisable blend of charm, elegance and confidence that some of us have but most of us don’t. If charm, elegance and confidence come on a scale then, despite a lifetime of trying, I am way down at the bottom end. But I hadn’t a golden coin, or even a golden edged euro, and so had to content myself with throwing into the water some elderly and much crumpled receipt, the only thing left in my pocket.

But first I tore it into two halves, one about twice the size of the other and cast both wantonly into the water, where they hardly moved at all. I found that I had thrown them into slack water and began to feel silly. Yet, bit by bit, the current started to drag at them, first backwards towards the angle of the bend and then forwards into the flow. The smaller piece moved fastest, as if in a hurry, but then it was sucked under by a vortex. It surfaced a couple of times like a drowning man and then disappeared for good.

The larger piece seemed to take a more circumspect course and travelled far across the stream to within inches of the overhanging rocks. It, too, was sucked under from time to time but it came up again, no worse for wear and I watched it bobbing down the river, heading into the turbulent distance and the far off sea carrying my thoughts and dreams. Adieu, I muttered to myself, before turning to head towards the far off airport and my even farther off home.

Standing later in the security queue I remove bits of metal from about my person. It is a long queue so I have plenty of time to remove everything. You may think me unduly self-deprecating when I say I am at the bottom end of the charm, elegance and confidence scale. But you have only to watch a group of people at an airport who have been through security to know where on the scale they are placed.

You have, don’t you, a bag, hurriedly over-packed, from which you have removed your computer and your toiletries in their luminous yellow bag, taken off your jacket or coat together with your broad miscellany of jewellery, cards, keys, belts, phone, watch and the like. It's the same for everyone.

Then suddenly you are at the end of the line, in a confined space and a press of people, trying to assemble all this paraphernalia again into a semblance of tidiness. Elegant people can do this in a few seconds - deftly slipping this or that into a commodious handbag with an insouciance bordering on the miraculous.

I’m still fumbling five minutes later. Moreover, it seems my earlier prayers to the water gods to substitute my habitual maladroitness for a kind of effortless head girl competence have gone sadly unanswered.

Worse is to come. As I sit down with my book - The Glass Room, as you ask, lent to me kindly by Rosie and a most excellent read - I reach for my glasses. That’s when I find that in my confusion I have put my watch in the same pocket. The glasses hook on the strap and my watch sails out in an arc to burst into pieces on the marble floor of the departure lounge.

Perhaps it’s not that bad. The back has come off and the battery has sprung out, but I manage to reassemble the components. To my surprise the watch still works. Then the back springs off again. Something has warped.

Did I commit the crime of lèse-majesté by throwing a crumpled till receipt to the water gods? For now the heavens open and we have to struggle to the plane in a downpour. Then as we sit in the plane, wet, cribb’d and confin’d, with a loud party of ten year old school girls for company, comes the announcement that take-off is delayed for an hour an a half. Insult is piled on injury.

The next day, back at home, I fall out of the loft, landing painfully on my back and wondering, for a moment, whether I should ever walk again. Was this more water god vengeance? But of course one never knows, does one, whether it was really the displeased water gods tipping me out of the loft, or whether, having fallen through my own clumsiness, it was their little wings and flippers bearing me up that ensured I received no more than a painful bruise. Or, then again, it might have been my Guardian Angel, who has saved me from even worse fates before. Why don’t the gods leave calling cards? Or even till receipts?

And on that philosophical note I shall leave you to ponder.

Picture is ‘The Guardian Angel by Pietro Cortona 1656. Courtesy of Wikipedia. However, her wings look rather small. More like flippers don't you think?