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Articles & Extracts

Christmas Holidays

Christmas Holidays

We three children were looking forward to Mother’s birthday, which was December 18th. December was ‘our’ birthday month, Cyril’s on the 20th, mine on the 10th: but the 18th was by far the most important. With a view to deciding what was to be done, we gathered round the schoolroom table, each armed with a statement of his or her financial resources. My assets were contained in an old purse that I kept hidden in a corner of the writing desk. This I emptied on the table. The contents were: one silver sixpence, one silver threepenny bit, and an assortment of coppers – total one shilling and tenpence halfpenny. Cyril was not in a much stronger position, and it remained for Ethel to retrieve the situation, which, I have to admit, she did most nobly. Lucky enough to have a godmother who sent her postal orders she was able to produce nearly ten shillings. Most magnanimously, she suggested that we pool our resources and give Mother one really nice present rather than three inferior ones. Cyril and I volunteered to draw and paint a birthday card between us, and we left it to Ethel to decide on the nature of the present.

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There was one day that fell in early December, more exciting than Christmas itself . . .

There was one day that fell in early December, more exciting than Christmas itself . . .

Always on this occasion my father’s firm provided sandwiches and drinks for all comers: dealers, smallholders, cowmen, shepherds, drovers. (The more substantial farmers were entertained to luncheon at the Swan.) Great were the preparations on the day before the market. Enormous joints sizzled in Old Cookie’s oven; baskets of loaves lay everywhere about the kitchen, huge pats of yellow butter, tongues, sausages, pasties. Maids were busy all day cutting sandwiches, which were piled on dishes and covered with napkins. There was an air of bustle and festivity all over the house . . .

Taking the Short View

Taking the Short View

When Sydney Smith, a reluctant cleric, was given the living at the remote village of Foston in Yorkshire, this most urbane of men described his predicament as being ‘twelve miles from a lemon’. The country, he thought, was a ‘healthy grave’.

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The Idol of the Odeons

The Idol of the Odeons

Who remembers Dirk Bogarde? Doctor in the House? Or was it Summer Holiday? Even when his boyish good looks aren’t muddled with those of Cliff Richard, Bogarde is decreasingly likely to be recalled for the successful books he wrote.

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One of the Few

One of the Few

The great Australian cricketer Keith Miller was once asked how he coped with the pressures of Test cricket. ‘Pressure’, responded Miller, who’d flown a Mosquito during the war, ‘is a Messerschmitt up your arse.’ I was reminded of this by something Geoffrey Wellum said in an interview: ‘If you were in one-on-one combat and you could see the man behind you trying to shoot you down, you knew the meaning of the word fear.’

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost

The other day, I had what I like to think of as a ‘George Bowling moment’: I had been looking at the face reflected back at me from our small bathroom mirror, telling myself that age had been, so far, not unkind to me, when the sun emerged from behind a gloomy- looking cloud on the horizon and illuminated a broad expanse of scalp through my thinning hair. Within the hour, I had booked myself an appointment with my hairdresser, and within the week I had adopted, on their advice, a more flattering haircut for a man of my age.

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Extract from The Wine Lover’s Daughter | Chapter 1

Extract from The Wine Lover’s Daughter | Chapter 1

My father was a lousy driver and a two-finger typist, but he could open a wine bottle as deftly as any swain ever undressed his lover. Nearly every evening of my childhood, I watched him cut the capsule – the foil sleeve that sheathes the bottle neck – with a sharp knife. Then he plunged the bore of a butterfly corkscrew into the exact center of the cork, twirled the handle, and, after the brass levers rose like two supplicant arms, pushed them down and gently twisted out the cork.

Extract from Hons and Rebels | ‘A marvellous idea flashed into my mind . . .’

Extract from Hons and Rebels | ‘A marvellous idea flashed into my mind . . .’

The oddly chosen battleground of Nancy’s generation was that of the Athletes versus the Aesthetes – sometimes called the Hearties and the Arties – and the newspapers were full of accounts of pitched warfare staged at Oxford University between these opposing forces.

At England’s Edge

At England’s Edge

As A. E. Housman had it, ‘Clunton and Clunbury/ Clungunford and Clun/ Are the quietest places/ Under the sun.’ The villages are dotted along the valley of the River Clun, down in the south-west corner of Shropshire and nestled up against the border with Wales. Like many Midlanders, I find my weekends often turn westward, along the A5 through Shrewsbury and up into the hills that look across to Wales. Walking guides and maps will take you so far, but it was a joy to discover an overlooked little book which digs so much deeper into this country at the edge of England.

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‘Credendo Vides’

‘Credendo Vides’

Books should be officially declared an invasive species. They have been accumulating in our present home for forty years now, adding to those which had gathered over the previous forty. They tend to group themselves into sub-species; basically by subject or author, but without the pernickety precision of Dewey or the Library of Congress – they have their own priorities. For example, many years ago I inherited some little leather-bound volumes from my grandmother, and Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and Arthur Conan Doyle still share a shelf as old friends. On the bookcase beside my bed is another self-selected settlement: an eclectic collection of books I pick up when I am tired and want to read a chapter or so before falling asleep, including Elizabeth Goudge, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov. I wonder what they talk about among themselves?

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The Glory that Rome Wasn’t

The Glory that Rome Wasn’t

I once found a library that no one else ever seemed to visit. It was devoted to Scottish Literature and works of reference, unstaffed and on the first floor of a terraced house belonging to the University of Glasgow. I’d gone there initially to look up some words in a rare dictionary of medieval Scots and was so taken with the place that it became a favourite haunt. During my subsequent visits – long afternoons of essay writing, dozing and dreaming – I never encountered another soul.

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The Novel that Wrote Itself

The Novel that Wrote Itself

There used to be a rumour among Essex booksellers that the crime writer Margery Allingham was always keen to know if copies of her own first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, had come on to the market. If they did she would buy them, then destroy them.

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An Epic Undertaking

An Epic Undertaking

When I told my wife that I was going to write about Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–6) for Slightly Foxed, she commiserated. She had read Book I at school, with the juicy bits cut out, and had found it boring. I was now embarking on rereading the entire work, all six books of it, plus a fraction of a seventh, amounting to over 36,000 lines of verse. More fool I.

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Call It What You Like

Call It What You Like

Two sisters awake in the depths of an African night. They are scared of what might be outside. They are scared of what might be inside. But they are forbidden to creep into their parents’ room for comfort because their mum and dad keep loaded guns on their bedside rugs and, if startled, might shoot them by mistake.

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Always the Same River

Always the Same River

At my twenty-first birthday party, in a cheap north London pasta restaurant, a friend gave me a copy of Graham Swift’s Waterland, telling me that everyone who studied History should read it. Studying was perhaps a grand word for my efforts at university, but I was intrigued. My choice of subject meant I’d read very little fiction; I was busy reading historians who had initials instead of forenames – C. V. Wedgwood, E. H. Carr, A. J. P. Taylor and my patient tutor, H. R. Loyn – and had found time only to read a smattering of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. To be given a contemporary novel was thrilling.

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Over the Moon

Over the Moon

At an impromptu party a while ago, it turned out that one of the other guests had walked on the Moon. We couldn’t have been more amazed if Apollo himself had turned up in a taxi, but in fact he was affable and modest, heroic only in treating our naïve questions with kindness and making it seem as if he’d never been asked them before.

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