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In Johnson’s Footsteps

In Johnson’s Footsteps

‘We’re thinking of moving,’ announced our son one evening last year. ‘To Lichfield.’ Lichfield! The name was music to my ears. I have long had a soft spot for that little gem of a cathedral city, once the ecclesiastical capital of Mercia, now a delightful Staffordshire market town. I would be more than happy to follow the son, daughter-in-law and three of the grandchildren to Lichfield (and my wife, less familiar with Lichfield, would follow them wherever they went anyway).
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Before Darkness Fell

Before Darkness Fell

In the summer of 1939, my grandfather Erich Haugas took part in an international agricultural conference a thousand miles away in Budapest. He was 38 and his professional pride was flattered. As a chemist he was in charge of the Dairy Export Control Station laboratory in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. To his untravelled eyes this was the trip of a lifetime: Budapest was the last stretch of Western ‘civilization’ before the East and the closest to a west European capital that many east Europeans would get. No direct train went to Budapest: my grandfather had to take three trains through Latvia, Polish-occupied Lithuania, Poland and the Nazi vassal state of Slovakia: a round trip of 2,300 miles. Europe was very close to war, but to my grandfather the rumours of war were just that: rumours.
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A Stroll down Sinister Street

A Stroll down Sinister Street

A while ago on my bookshelves I came across an old copy of Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie. Its cloth binding had faded and the yellowing pages were so fine that I sometimes had to blow on them to open them as I read. Edmund Gosse believed Sinister Street was on a par with Swann’s Way by Proust, published the same year, 1913. I might well have agreed with him had I ever read any Proust. However, I do know that Swann’s Way was rejected by many French publishers and Proust was obliged to publish it at his own expense. The reviews were bad. By contrast, Sinister Street was greeted with acclaim. One work became a world classic. The other is barely remembered.
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The Tiger under the Bed

The Tiger under the Bed

There are now nearly a million people suffering from dementia in the UK, and I feel as if most of my contemporaries have had some involvement in the affliction either through parents or friends. With my father, it came on very gradually, beginning with odd lapses of memory, repetitions in speech, loss of bearings, groundless anxieties. It was exhausting for my mother, so one afternoon we suggested we take her out for a break and arranged for one of the grandchildren to stay with my father for the few hours she was away. When we told him of this plan, my father was furious: he did not need watching over; he could perfectly well look after himself. Anger is common in the early stages of dementia, and it is fuelled by fear: a mental unravelling has begun, and from now on it will only gain momentum.
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Wilderness Years

Wilderness Years

Somewhere in the badlands of Utah is a canyon called Davis Gulch. Centuries ago, the Ancestral Pueblo carved a dwelling in its rock, now inscribed with the words ‘NEMO 1934’. This is the last known signature of the vagabond Everett Ruess. The epithet ‘vagabond’ was his own, and rarely has the term been so richly deserved. An aspiring artist and writer from a bohemian home in Los Angeles, Ruess set out at the age of 16 on an uncompromising quest to seek out beauty and solitude in the rugged wilderness of the American south-west. Over the next four years he travelled the mountains, deserts and canyon-lands of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, alone but for the company of his burro and occasionally a dog. At the age of 20 he disappeared. ‘NEMO’ might have been a reference to Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – another notable seeker of solitude – or else the Greek for ‘No Man’, as employed by Odysseus.
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In Love with the League

In Love with the League

I once had what I thought was a pretty good idea for a spy novel set in the 1920s. The hero would be a shell-shocked war veteran who winds up in a clinic in Switzerland being psychoanalysed by someone vaguely like Carl Jung. A fellow patient is an attractive woman working for the brand-new League of Nations in Geneva and, as they start an affair, he discovers she – and the League – possess a secret on which the future of world peace hinges . . . I was vague on the details.
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See also Tortoise

See also Tortoise

‘It’s like Pokémon,’ said my husband Andy, standing in the cool of a church in San Gimignano on our very hot honeymoon. And yes, I suppose saint-spotting is a bit like Pokémon, the creature-collecting game invented by Nintendo in the Nineties. Slogan: ‘Gotta catch ’em all.’ We weren’t hunting for Pikachus or Bulbasaurs, but for St Catherines and St Antony Abbots in fresco cycles and altarpiece panels. Catherine you’ll know by her wheel, instrument of her martyrdom, St Antony by his bell and his pig. A friend speaks fondly of childhood holidays with his church-crawling parents. He and his twin sister would be sent off to play saintly bingo. Could they find a St John the Baptist (lamb and sheepskin gilet), a Mary Magdalene (jar of unguent), an Apollonia (tooth and pincers)? Off they would go round cloisters, into side-chapels, standing on tiptoe for a better look at stained-glass windows. As with Pokémon, they knew their saints by their markers. Gotta catch ’em all.
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Hooked on Fish

Hooked on Fish

Because they live on an island laced with rivers, ponds and streams, the British are obsessive anglers. Fishermen – and most of them are men – make up a large but secretive society cut off from the rest of us by strange language, obscure controversies and complex motives. Most books about angling are written for specialists: coarse fishers, fly-fishers, sea-fishers. But in Blood Knots (2010) Luke Jennings has broken with convention and employed his great gift for words to explain to baffled outsiders what angling is really about. This is a memoir written for everyone.
A Familiar Country

A Familiar Country

In a cardboard box I put the essential objects we would need in our rented cottage, until we got the keys to our new house in Norfolk: my infant daughter’s stuffed monkey, some paperwork, Cash’s name tapes for the boys’ new schools and the books we were reading at bedtime – Five on a Treasure Island for the boys, and for me my mother’s tatty copy of The Go-Between, a still of Julie Christie from the film on the cover, which would date it to around 1971.
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Period Piece | Chapter VII: ‘Aunt Etty’

Period Piece | Chapter VII: ‘Aunt Etty’

I have defined Ladies as people who did not do things themselves. Aunt Etty was most emphatically such a person. She told me, when she was eighty-six, that she had never made a pot of tea in her life; and that she had never in all her days been out in the dark alone, not even in a cab; and I don’t believe she had ever travelled by train without a maid. She certainly always took her maid with her when she went in a fly to the dentist’s. She asked me once to give her a bit of the dark meat of a chicken, because she had never tasted anything but the breast. I am sure that she had never sewn on a button, and I should guess that she had hardly ever even posted a letter herself. There were always people to do these things for her. In fact, in some ways, she was very like a royal person. Once she wrote when her maid, the patient and faithful Janet, was away for a day or two: ‘I am very busy answering my own bell.’ And I can well believe it, for Janet’s work was no sinecure. But, of course, while Janet was away, the housemaid was doing all the real work; and Aunt Etty was only perhaps finding the postage stamps for herself, or putting on her own shawl – the sort of things she rang for Janet to do every five minutes all day long.
My Years as a Pony

My Years as a Pony

Between the ages of 8 and 11 I thought I was a pony. I was not alone: my friends were in the grip of a similar delusion. We created fantasy mounts called Daybreak or Nutmeg, then became them. We never ran when we could gallop, at all times slapping our sides for greater verisimilitude. Jumps were constructed and then scrambled over or refused with much rearing and neighing. Fortunately our brothers were still pretending to be Spitfires, so our behaviour, on the whole, passed unremarked.
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