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Extract from Life in Our Hands | Chapter 2: Relief and Reflection

Extract from Life in Our Hands | Chapter 2: Relief and Reflection

It was good to lie in bed stretching my legs against the rough blankets, aloof from the rattle and prattle of the unit beginning a new day. I watched Tait washing a pair of socks in the portable washbasin. Scottie was already asleep, her two dark plaits falling over the edge of the low camp bed on to some crushed yellow trefoil and her underclothes lying like a pool on the grass floor of the tent. Her shirt and trousers were carelessly thrown on to the only canvas stool where lay a copy of the unit’s ‘daily orders’ and unopened letters.

Terror among the Wheatfields

Terror among the Wheatfields

When the BBC asked me to make a radio programme about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), I had not yet read it, and didn’t want to. I’d mentally filed it in the same category as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and American Psycho: books that I might have liked in my teens and twenties but that now seemed insufferably macho. I’d not that long ago had a baby and I had no interest in reading about a family being murdered in their beds.

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Hungry for Love

Hungry for Love

The past is a foreign country: they eat things differently there. At a picnic, for example, they might decant a tin of slimy boiled ham on to a dinner plate and eat it with a knife and fork, along with Heinz Salad Cream served in a sauce boat. They consume jelly with evaporated milk, cucumber slices in vinegar, plates of reformed cow’s tongue – and on special occasions they might serve them all at once on a wheeled trolley. Instead of vegetables they buy instant dried peas in cardboard boxes. They grill grapefruits. They’ve never heard of hummus.

At Home With Mrs Thrale

At Home With Mrs Thrale

For those of us who cannot get enough of the Georgians, Hester Lynch Salusbury, who became Mrs Thrale and later Mrs Piozzi, is indispensable. At a time when Samuel Johnson was the greatest planet in the emerging literary firmament, she was one of his most important satellites, in fact more than that: a prop and stay without whom he might well have foundered. When they came to characterize themselves however, they were less portentous: Johnson was an elephant to Mrs Thrale’s rattlesnake. With his trunk he could ‘lift up a buffalo or pick up a pin’, she said, while he claimed, ‘Many have felt your venom, few have escaped your attractions and all the world knows you have the rattle.’ This last is a reference to her delight in conversation and her skill at maintaining its flow, what Johnson called her ‘stream of sentiment enlightened by gaiety’.

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The Prince, the Showgirl and Me

The Prince, the Showgirl and Me

Mr P is a tall, thin, gloomy man with black-rim spectacles. His sparse black hair is brushed back and he has a black moustache. He puffs a pipe continually

Shaving with My Father

Shaving with My Father

Bernie Taupin and I have one thing (and only one, I suspect) in common. Catching an interview with him on the radio recently, I discovered that the man who wrote the words for all those Elton John hits was, like me, reared on recitations of stirring narrative verse, mostly from the Victorian age.

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Into the Wilderness

Into the Wilderness

One day a few years ago, in my local independent bookshop, staff member Sallie and I were talking about books, and she took from the shelf a slim, newly published hardback novel, West (2018) by Carys Davies, and told me how much she loved it.

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Academic Angst

Academic Angst

In one sense Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) is very much a book of its time; but in another sense it is timeless. When I came to reread it recently, I feared it might not have worn well. It was, after all, published seventy years ago; it was received then as a satire on the stultified and snobbish society of 1950s provincial Britain. I first read it in about 1970 when I was in my teens, and it still seemed relevant then; but attitudes have changed considerably since, just as I have myself, alas. I need not have worried. The tone of the book still rings true today. And it remains very, very funny. Take, for example, Amis’s famous description of a hangover:

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Looking on the Dark Side

Looking on the Dark Side

One morning, many years ago, I was lying in bed in my grand-parents’ house when something big and black fell down the chimney, landed in the empty fireplace and scattered the ashes. Instantly, I pulled the duvet over my head and breathed as quietly as I could.

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Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost

Long before my home county became fashionable – after the Freuds had colonized Walberswick but before the county began to feature in the weekend colour supplements – Suffolk only seemed to pique the public consciousness through the work of two local grandes dames of crime writing.

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Getting it Right

Getting it Right

It’s a little unsettling, after a rewarding reread of Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword (1966), to take to Wikipedia and see the book’s author, pipe-puffing public-school housemaster Derrick S. Macnutt, described by a former pupil as ‘a bully and a brute’, ‘widely known for the pleasure he obtained from caning the boys in his charge’.

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Ingerlond Their Ingerlond

Ingerlond Their Ingerlond

Not long after I first became a literary editor (at the New Statesman), I ran a glowing lead review of an incendiary first novel: Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. This, I thought, should be the essence of the job: to find and praise fearless new voices and, along the way, annoy the fogeys and the fuddy-duddies.

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The Hard Stuff

The Hard Stuff

The beginning of my teens came ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’. I regard it as highly appropriate that Larkin made the first of those milestones a novel, because it wasn’t only sex and rock and roll that had begun. Penguin Modern Classics, in their distinctive slate-grey livery, had also arrived, providing us hungry young readers with a list of books to grow up by. In due course PMC introduced me to Kafka, Joyce, Hemingway and Camus – and, later, Gide, Hesse and Sartre – offering the chance to luxuriate in amoral existential disgust, in contemplation of the meaning of meaninglessness.

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Something in the Dust

Something in the Dust

Towards the end of my first day at Weymouth College in Dorset, where I had been accepted on a stone-carving course, I wandered over to the library. Several hours in the workshop hadn’t eased my sense of discombobulation; neither had my tutor’s missing finger.

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Grace and a Great Heart

Grace and a Great Heart

I am not a frequenter of churchyards, but there is one grave I wish I could visit. It belongs to a London charlady who died in 1964 at the age of 42. She worked in the posh houses of Ladbroke Grove and South Kensington, and was a devoted mother and a battered, and then abandoned, wife. She could never make ends meet, and her health was poor. She shed more tears in her short life than most of us who live for twice as long. Her name was Lilian May – ‘Lily’ – Johnson. She was a heroine.

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As Old as the Hills

As Old as the Hills

Like space, the past is always nearer than we think. As a boy, I knew a woman who once cut Thomas Hardy’s hair. For his part, Hardy knew an old countryman who had set eyes on Napoleon when the Bellerophon put into Plymouth Sound, en route to St Helena. The Napoleonic Wars are just three human lifetimes away and if you get to my age you will know that a lifetime is no vast span. Anthropologists have a thing called the ‘long generation’ – the era extending from the birth of one person to the death of the latest-born person that he or she could have met. This is where it gets hair-raising. As James Hawes puts it, in the foreword to his exhilarating The Shortest History of England (2021), ‘Seven long generations . . . the old and the young holding hands – and we are back at the Battle of Hastings.’ This inspires the same sort of vertigo as the knowledge that standing in central London you are nearer to outer space than you are to, say, Market Harborough.

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