LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has been an artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
Devonshire
Staggering amidst a floodtide Heavitree
of happiness embalmed in memory sudden frost children
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
The first in a series of stories from Bin Ends by X. Trapnel, Anthony Powell’s great lost novelist, as found and transcribed by NICK BOOTH
Billy the Tie told me to go and fetch Lavender Ray’s suitcase. ‘Do us a favour,’ he’d said. ‘There’s something in it which will get us all into trouble.’ I’d a hard-edged hangover of the type where you’re not sure of your stomach or your sanity. It was not long after opening time at the Black Dog and I’d just accepted from Billy a verbal promissory note of a tin of fags to be collected that afternoon. He was apt to make gifts and all of us who lived on the straight side of the fence knew not to accept them as a rule. However, the Blitz was on and there were bombs night and day. For most people life was difficult, but Billy had come into easy street: thieving and fiddling in the blackout was, as he put it, ‘extra-easy’. Soho talk had it that Billy had even done people in but the prospect of having a lot of cigarettes to play with was too much in my weakened condition so I gave in. ‘You’ll have fags galore, boy,’ he’d said.
I had not expected a favour to be called in so quickly. My stomach knotted tighter into a ball of acid. The pain in my head flared. The stale beer-and-fags morning scent of the Black Dog, usually rather enjoyable, oppressed me. Gingerly I drank a farty half of Bass. I noticed my hand was shaking slightly. The fear, sadness and regret of the serious hangover bit deep. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ said Billy.
I said I didn’t mind, of course I didn’t mind. On the contrary, it would be a pleasure, I said.
‘I shouldn’t think it’ll be a pleasure,’ said Vernie wryly. Vernie was Billy’s sidekick. Tall where Billy was slightly under. Both wore pinstripe suits (Billy’s smart dress sense was the reason for his nickname). It seemed their ambition was to look like the cream of society instead of rats: the tribute vice pays to virtue. However, the effect was more suggestive of a variety double-act. Vernie took an ostentatious sip at his double pimple and water, to show off he was drinking one. Pimple-and-blotch: scotch.
‘Come on now, Bill,’ said the landlady, Ada. ‘Neville’s a painter. He’s not part of all your lot.’
‘Ain’t you in the war effort, boy?’ asked Vernie in way that was avuncular yet sinister. I said I was waiting to be called up. That was a lie. I’d been deemed unfit for service.
‘Never mind all that plop,’ said Billy, his voice as coarse as a burglar’s file. ‘You go and fetch me Lavender Ray’s suitcase.’
‘What’s in the suitcase,’ asked a little fish-faced man they called Cod’s Eyes who pushed sack barrows about for his living. ‘It ain’t that tart’s head, is it?’
‘Cheese it,’ said Billy. He fixed me with his blue eyes, cold as winter dusk. ‘It’s easy as wink,’ he said.
‘Is Ray dead, then?’ asked Vernie disinterestedly.
‘Word come to me last night that he’s dying, at death’s door. His landlady had the doctor out to him – who paid I don’t know: Ray’d never cough up for a doctor anyway. ‘Ere Vernie, “cough up”. Did you hear that? Well laugh, then. Tops up the quack says it ain’t no good. Ray’s finished. Lungs or summink.’
I felt finished too, and hurried to the gents where I was violently ill. Why had I agreed to the errand? When I came back I drank off my Bass, cross-eyed for a moment watching the brown river of beer flow into my mouth while Billy wrote Lavender Ray’s address on a strip of the Greyhound Express. ‘There’s a key on a bit of string in the letterbox of the street door. His room’s at the top of the house. There’s two doors on the landing. Ray’s is the first one. Don’t sod about. Bring the suitcase back here,’ he said softly. ‘If I’m not here and neither is Vernie, just wait till we are. On no account leave the suitcase here or anywhere else, got it. That tin of fags will be waiting.’
‘Tart’s head?’ asked Ada rhetorically.
‘Some dead tart was found,’ said Cod’s Eyes. ‘I see it in the paper.’
‘Why would her head be in Lavender Ray’s suitcase,’ said Vernie.
‘Cheese it, will you,’ said Billy. ‘You’ll go frightening the boy here. Now, you run along and them fags is all yours.’
I turned out of the door of the Dog. It closed slowly. I heard Vernie say, ‘You’ve sent a boy on a man’s job there. Look at the state of him. I bet the army told him to fog off.’ There was general laughter. ‘I bet,’ added Vernie, ‘they said come back next year when you’ve got some hair on your chest.’ There was more laughter.
*
Outside I took a deep breath, which didn’t help. Cod’s Eyes came out of the other door and walked over to me. He was grinning. ‘You’ve got that all round yer neck, intcha. Why d’yer do it?’
‘I wanted the fags. I didn’t think – ’
‘You didn’t think,’ interrupted Cod’s Eyes elongating the words with a contemptuous tone. ‘You know, you don’t half look queer.’
‘I feel queer.’
‘Want a fag?’
We lit up Cod’s Eyes’s Players. ‘There could be anything in that suitcase,’ he said. ‘Might be a shooter. There was a bloke shot in the West India Dock Road the other night, right through the heart. Foul murder. If the gun’s in that case you’ll be an accessory, kid. Enough to put a rope round your neck.’ He paused and looked at me searchingly through his murky protuberant eyes. Any friendliness vanished. ‘You mug,’ he said. He chipped his fag and stuck back in its box. ‘Stick to drawing pictures next time.’
He started off across the road but quickly turned back and said: ‘How you make a living doing that?’
‘Once in a while someone buys one,’ I said. My voice sounded forlorn. Cod’s Eyes walked on then turned round once more and yelled: ‘If that’s tart’s head’s in it, you’ll swing for that an’ all.’ Then he seemed to remember he was shouting Billy the Tie’s business in the street. He looked round fearfully and stalked away.
I walked out of Soho feeling weak at the knees. Then I got the Tube east.
*
I emerged not far from the river. The whole district had really copped it in the raids. I entertained a wild hope that Lavender Ray’s lodgings had been bombed flat.
The streets were full of dust. Kids searched for shrapnel and looked well pleased at the new anarchy of war. A broken-down bus was pulled up round one corner. Its driver was sitting on seats at the back. Somehow he had got a mug of tea. As I passed he raised the chipped vessel in an ironic toast and winked. In the distance I could hear falling bricks and the sound of a lot of broken glass being swept. I walked for a few minutes and asked the way more than once. At last I came to an old street with a factory wall on one side and tall knocked-about houses on the other. Outside one a woman with a beaky nose in a housecoat was smoking a cigarette and watching another woman in a hairnet scrub the front step. ‘Raymond?’ she said in answer to my query. ‘Next house, top floor. I hope you ain’t going that way, sonny.’
The woman wearing the hairnet craned her head round from the step. She looked chinny and pompous. ‘We don’t want all that round here,’ she said. I walked on. I heard the woman with the beaky nose say, ‘Ought to be in the bloody army.’
I climbed three steps to Ray’s lodgings and felt in the letterbox for the key on a bit of string. It was there. I turned the key and pushed at the door, which seemed stuck. ‘You have to give it a shove when it’s hot,’ said the woman in the hairnet. She’d come down the street to look at me. ‘Push it, boy. Ain’t you got no strength?’
I duly pushed harder. The door, which was rough and splintered at the bottom from untold coaxing kicks, swung open. A vague smell of cooking and fags came out like a silent belch. My crapulent stomach turned a little. Everything inside was brown: tea brown walls, gravy brown stairs, brown windsor lino. I started up the stairs. The ancient stair-carpet was a dirty old brown. An archaeologist might have found a pattern in it. Each landing was the same brown study but a little smaller each time. All was silent but for the sound of a wireless behind one of the doors playing cheery light music. I looked out of a window and saw a brick wall with a yard below. Some washing was pegged out by a privy. The top staircase wound up to a small landing.
I raised my hand to knock but hesitated. Leave now, I thought. Run. I would, I thought, have to avoid Soho thereafter but even going to ground would not protect me from Billy the Tie if I welshed our arrangement. It was folly to think otherwise. You’re in it now, I thought. I’d a lousy headache and felt sweat on my temples. My stomach seemed to have fallen away like so much bombed brickwork. I knocked. Nothing stirred behind the door. I knocked again. Then the other door opened and a tiny old man in a crumpled too-big suit and a soup-strainer moustache appeared. ‘He’s dead,’ he said. ‘If you’re here to thieve, I doubt there’s any money in there. I expect the quack had all that last night. Mug if he didn’t.’ The old man’s voice was like a hinge in need of oil. ‘Got a fag?’
I shook my head, knocked again and then went in.
It was a tiny servant’s room in which everything seemed grey. Behind a menthol atmosphere there was a vague unpleasant smell. The covers were pulled over a body on the bed. A suit hung on the front of a tallboy. The suitcase stood by the bed. In keeping with the hallways it was brown, with leather corners. I lifted it an inch, then put it down. It was heavyish. ‘Any booze?’ said the little man with the moustache. He was hovering on the threshold. I told him there wasn’t any. At this, the corpse’s hand appeared from under the bedclothes and snatched away the covers. A bony face was revealed. I jumped back. My heart was going like a jazz set. ‘I’m not blinking dead – yet,’ rasped Ray. ‘I was shamming ‘cos I thought you were – ’ He stopped. What little colour that had been in his face drained away. He closed his eyes. I looked out at the old man on the landing, who drew his finger across his throat and sadly shook his head. Ray opened his eyes again. ‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘What you want that suitcase for?’
‘Billy sent me for it,’ I said. ‘Billy the Tie.’ Ray looked furious.
‘You tell Billy to …’ He raised his head to spit out the last words but now it fell back. Ray closed his eyes and opened them. ‘ . . . to mind his own business.’ He seemed to have fallen asleep or have passed out, or died. I looked at my watch. Of course, it had stopped.
‘Don’t sod about,’ I remembered Billy saying. I picked up the suitcase. I noticed there was in fact some booze: half a bottle of scotch on the washstand. I decided not to inform the old man of its existence. On the landing he stood back for me to pass. His eyes were wild. ‘You thieving that suitcase, boy?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m to take it to its owner.’ I started down the stairs. The old boy leant over the banisters and yelled, ‘You’re a tea-leaf!’
I’d done myself no good saying I was taking the suitcase to its owner when its owner was dying in bed upstairs. It was at this point I began to see a courtroom, a trial, a judge, indeed a judge with the black cap on . . . ‘But you took the suitcase,’ the judge said with an echo. ‘You are implicated in a capital offence, my boy.’ He was old; he looked rather like Lavender Ray.
‘You’re a bloody tea-leaf!’ yelled the old man again.
I careered down the stairs and out of the front door. The two women watched me go past. The beaky one said, ‘Where you get that suitcase?’
A window opened above. It was the old boy again bawling through his soup-strainer. ‘Stop thief!’ his whingeing voice cried. I sped up and looked behind me. The two women were chasing me. I wanted to stop and argue but my credentials were hardly convincing.
Now I was in a sort of comedic silent film chase. Up a street and down a street – up a ladder, down a snake, I’d thought – with the two women chasing me. I lost my bearings. Now, I thought, the police will be looking for a young man with a suitcase.
I turned a corner and the broken-down bus was going again. I caught the driver’s eye and, trying to sound calm, asked him where he was going. ‘Central. Jump on chum, if you’re going that way. I’m heading towards Tower Hill.’ I said I’d enjoy the view and so went upstairs. God knows what had happened to the conductor. I looked back at the street corner. At any moment the two harridans would come storming round it shouting the odds. The driver was revving the engine, as if to make sure the bus had the guts to last out the journey. Finally it lurched forward. I kept my eyes back on the corner, but no one came round it. My attention switched to the suitcase. It smelt vile.
*
The hangover had reached a weary late stage. It would quietly stop soon. My head felt old, sore, wooden. I had that woeful inner climate that interprets the sight of a scrap of newspaper blowing down the street as a powerful symbol of the futility and transience of life. On top of that, the suitcase was now a stinky reminder of my foolishness in accepting Billy the Tie’s promise of fags. Then I thought how much I’d like a fag now. I fought back against fear by reminding myself that I’d simply done someone a favour. ‘How was I to know there was the head of a corpse in it,’ I said to the Old Bailey of the mind. The judge spoke again: ‘Do you expect this court to believe you did not know who Billy the Tie was? You, a denizen of Soho pubs, a familiar face? Boozing your days away when better men are fighting for their country?’ Meanwhile, the bad smell came in waves from Lavender Ray’s suitcase. I counted barrage balloons to take my mind off it.
I got off just before the bus terminated at Tower Hill and thanked the driver, who said watch out for Jerry. ‘The Nazzies will have this city to rubble if we’re not careful.’
‘That’s conchie talk,’ I said jokingly. Conchie talk, yes, I thought, like me imagining that picking this old suitcase up could land me in the slammer. But then fearfully I slipped back to thinking of ways that it could.
I walked slowly through the city. By the time I was in Cheapside I was craving a fag. It was a fine day, and for some reason I fell to thinking how wonderful it would be if there wasn’t a war on and if I hadn’t got to lug this suitcase across town. I bought a single fag from a miserly tobacconist who wanted a penny for it and sat down by St Paul’s churchyard to smoke and think. The suitcase stood in front of me. I stared down at it. It didn’t smell so bad in the open air. Should I open it? Should I not? After a while I was lost in thought, staring at the shops in front of me. The courtroom, the judge, the old boy with a soup-strainer, Lavender Ray, Billy the Tie, Vernie, Ada, Cod’s Eyes, they all appeared in my mind. Fear rose in me. Great fear. Then two things happened in short order: I heard the air raid siren start up, that queer bellowing whine, the siren call of a sea monster I’d called it in a poem I hadn’t finished – and someone pinched the suitcase and ran off.
*
The thief was short and wore a cloth cap. I ran after him. I was shouting but pedestrians were coming out of shops and offices and hurrying to shelters. They took no notice of this youngster shouting over the siren. Soon enough I was gaining on him and at the bottom of Ludgate Hill I ran him into a wall via a sort of rugby tackle. ‘All right, all right!’ he shouted. He was in his forties by the look, and now had a rip in his trousers. ‘I thought you was finished with it,’ he said angrily. ‘I mean I didn’t think it was yours: I had one just like that pinched off me yesterday; I bin looking for it ever since.’ I was dusting myself down and listening for bombers.
‘Oh really,’ I said sarcastically.
‘Don’t call in the law,’ he said as he got up. His anger melted away to a pleading appearance. He looked tired, thin and crumpled. Small intelligent brown eyes, rather dog-like, watched me carefully.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t,’ I said. He brightened up at this. Now we were just two people passing the time of day in an air raid.
‘What’s in it?’ he said.
I swore as I picked the suitcase up to walk on. ‘What’s it got to do with you,’ I said. ‘You’re a tea-leaf,’ I said, remembering the old boy’s jibe.
‘I just like to know what I’ve missed out on.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I don’t actually know.’
‘Wot!’ he said. He was walking beside me now. I was thinking how stupid I’d been to chase him. Providence had stepped in to my problems; a veritable deus ex machina had dropped from the sky instead of a bomb and now I was saddled with the suitcase again. Mind you, would Billy have accepted that I’d had the case pinched off me? I gave the thief the gist, shouting above the sound of bomb crumps coming from near the river. ‘I’d open that up if I was you,’ he said. I kept on walking. ‘If you don’t want what’s inside, I’ll have it off you.’ I kept on walking.
‘You can tell your mate who sent you that you lost the case in the air raid.’
‘Yeah,’ I said without turning to look at him, ‘and then get razored in an alley.’ But I knew he was right. I felt sweat running down my temples. I knew I couldn’t take that suitcase back to Soho without looking in it and I knew I had to get away from the thief before he had another go at taking it. Now I started to run and he was chasing me.
We were near the river, in an alley at the bottom of some steps when I tripped and fell. The suitcase skidded ahead. The thief dashed past me and picked it up. I yelled at him to open it. ‘What – and finders keepers,’ he said. I grunted agreement. Breathing heavily he squatted and flicked up the suitcase clips. He lifted the lid. I walked over rubbing my throbbing knee. He stared at the open case and rolled his eyes. ‘Gor christ,’ he said. ‘The stink!’
In Lavender Ray’s suitcase was an assortment of meat and a chicken, all going rotten. The thief grinned. ‘They won’t ‘ang you for that,’ he said and walked off. The crumps in the distance had stopped.
I closed the case and carried on walking slowly back to Soho. The hangover, like the air raid, was fading out.
*
‘Well done,’ said Billy the Tie. We were in the yard behind the Black Dog, which had just opened for the evening. He placed the suitcase on a dustbin, opened it and grimaced at the smell. He tipped the rotten meat into another dustbin then he reached into the suitcase, released a catch and pulled out a section of lining. It was a false-bottomed suitcase. He took out an envelope and from this he drew a wad of money. More banknotes than I’d ever seen. There were big five-pound notes, pink and mauve one-pound notes and even ten-shilling notes. He tucked the money back in the envelope without counting it and stowed it in the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket.
The thief had let a great prize go. ‘You haven’t seen any of this have you, boy,’ said Billy without so much as looking at me. I agreed I had not. He threw the suitcase over the wall into an area where barrows were kept overnight. We walked back to the public bar. Business seemed concluded so far as he was concerned. Vernie, leaning on the bar, took a cigarette from a silver case and lit it, eyeing me. ‘That boy looks like he’s sickening for something,’ he said. Billy had a sly smile but then he saw Ada looking indignant on my behalf. ‘Oh yes,’ said Billy. From a voluminous pocket he produced a tin of fags. I took them, almost snatched them, with no thought of law, of coppers, of courts, nor of judges. I looked down at the lid: CRAVEN PLAIN. I felt sad and a little ashamed. Ada gestured to me and I followed her to the other end of the bar. ‘I hope you’ve learned to stay away from them lot,’ she said in a fierce whisper. ‘Join the bloody army too while you’re at it. It’s an honester life than this.’
‘All right, Ada. Give us a Bass please,’ I said. I hugged the cigarette tin. I opened it. It was full. I sniffed the toasty aroma of fresh cut fags. Good old Billy I even thought.
I was about two mouthfuls in to the Bass, which was less farty than the morning’s, when the door opened behind me. ‘Where’s my bloody suitcase,’ yelled a cracked voice. It was Lavender Ray. Lavender Ray bold as brass, as Cod’s Eyes would always say when telling the story.
Vernie laughed. Ray was in the suit that had been hanging on the tallboy and was in a rage. ‘I been burgled,’ he shouted. The smattering of early-doors drinkers turned to look. A naval officer who’d strayed into the public bar looked very disapproving, as if he’d trodden in a dog turd.
‘Calm down, Ray,’ said Billy. ‘You look rough. Cheese it.’
‘You’re supposed to be dead,’ said Vernie affably.
‘Dead drunk more like,’ said Billy. But he looked wary.
‘Dead? I bloody ought to be. I got up,’ said Ray, ‘I drank half a bottle of pimple and I come down here for my suitcase.’
‘Too bad about that suitcase, Ray,’ said Billy carefully. ‘We thought you wouldn’t be needing it like, and well, you’d rather your money went to a good cause and not the policeman’s ball, wouldn’t you.’
There was a tremendous scene at this. Ray said he hadn’t made a will and if he had Billy and Vernie would not be in it. Then he sprang at Billy yelling something about his tie which he savagely tightened to throttle Billy. It was a neat schoolboy trick here executed with demonic brio. Ray might have been at death’s door but he seemed as strong as a lion. Billy was choking when Ray delivered an uppercut that sent him sprawling into the fireplace, which was unlit. Vernie was next, taking a series of punches that left both his nostrils pouring blood over his greasy little pencil moustache. It all happened very quickly. Perhaps Ray had been a boxer. Ada was shouting; two drinkers, market sorts, grabbed at Ray. The naval officer kept saying someone should get a constable. No one took any notice of him. Billy got to his feet, loosened his tie, gasped a few times and gave Ray the envelope he’d taken from the suitcase. No fuss, no whining. The market sorts let go of Ray. Ray opened the envelope and gave its contents a brief look. Turning to leave he caught sight of me. His waxy nostrils flared. ‘The thief,’ he snarled and dragged me outside in an unbreakable grip. I was quite distressed to note that no one tried to stop him.
With whisky breath he harangued me. His face was alarmingly grey and he was slightly boss-eyed with drink. Passers-by looked at us as if we were both undesirables, which I suppose we were. I knew a punch was coming. Right in the kisser Vernie would have said. Maybe a lot of punches were coming. ‘So you think you can burgle my home, do yer! How dare you even think you can steal from a sick man!’ He interspersed each sentence with obscenities and swearwords. I realised that Billy had sent me into a lion’s den to steal, plain and simple thieving, and I’d done it in sweet ignorance: this man was so tough even Billy the Tie was scared of him.
Ray clenched his fist so I gabbled out an apology that did not make a great deal of sense and then I thrust the tin of fags at him by way of a gift (I’d held on to them like grim death). This stopped him. He took the tin of Craven Plain. He looked at it with surprise and something like appreciation. He looked at me. Then he punched me just the same. It felt like a cricket bat had walloped my mouth. I saw stars and tottered into a lamppost on which I steadied myself. I could taste blood. Ray opened the tin and extracted a fag from the tightly packed multitude therein. I was prevailed upon to light it for him. He drew on the fag. This triggered a ghastly coughing fit: he coughed with his head on one side, then on the other. He doubled over to cough. He expectorated violently on to the pavement. He pushed one nostril in and blew battleship grey and sea green snot out of the other. He wheezed horribly: his lungs were an old cracked squeeze-box. He coughed again horribly; he coughed lustily; he giggle-coughed; he guffaw-coughed. He coughed like an angry retort and then like a belch. His eyes watered profusely. He spat again. He turned light green. Then he took another long draw on the fag and walked off. Word came the next day that he was dead. I wondered if the old boy with the soup-strainer moustache thieved my tin of fags when Billy expired. I don’t know who got the money from the suitcase.
*
Billy the Tie hanged himself in 1944. Some said over underworld debt. Vernie also died in the war: choked to death on a black market pickled onion in an army camp somewhere. He was drunk at the time. Ada perished when the Black Dog copped it from a doodlebug. Cod’s Eyes fell in the Thames one night after closing time and drowned. Late in the war I remembered the inside of Lavender Ray’s suitcase when the thief opened it down by the river. I did a painting of an opened suitcase on a bomb-site with a living bird in it. It was exhibited in a West End gallery. A newspaper critic said it was the human spirit coming back after the cataclysm; something like that. I expect it’ll end up in the Tate.
STUART MILLSON reports from the English Music Festival – and reviews new issues of Shostakovich, Arvo Pärt and Rimsky-Korsakov
With funding for the serious, civilised arts in short supply in modern Britain (no Arts Council of Wales money for Mid-Wales Opera; the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, de-funded by Birmingham City Council) the English Music Festival – EMF – is an inspiration and hope in the face of general adversity. As one of the Festival’s regular conductors, Hilary Davan Wetton, pointed out, if this were France, the government there would be pouring hundreds of thousands of Euros into a French music festival – a contrast to our own political elite, with their freebies for Britney Spears gigs and obsessions with ‘diversity’. The nineteenth English Music gathering took place, escaping this year to that utopian, rural setting of Dartington Hall in Devon – a magnificent structure built by the first Duke of Exeter in the 14th century, and turned into a prototype agrarian and arts community in the 1920s by monied visionaries, Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. A College of Arts flourished here between 1961 and 2010, and traces of the Elmhirsts’ William Morris-type outlook still survive in this idyll of garden and performance spaces.
EMF Founder-Director, Em Marshall-Luck, welcomed for her late May Spring bank holiday extravaganza artists of the calibre of the London Mozart Players, the University of Exeter Chapel Choir and numerous soloists and chamber musicians, all performing in the impressive and resonant Dartington Great Hall.
The University of Exeter Chapel Choir. Image: Stuart Millson
Saturday the 23rd May was a day of brilliant sunshine and intense heat, so Festivalgoers enjoyed the coolness of the old mediaeval building, filled as it was by the ethereal tones of the Exeter choristers in works from the 1920s and ‘30s – Vaughan Williams’s, Lord, Thou Hast Been Our Refuge (the choir used to grand antiphonal effect); Holst’s meditative The Evening Watch; Edgar Bainton’s To Thy Name Above Every Name (a testing work for the singers, and one which, perhaps, should have been conceived with orchestral accompaniment); and Dyson’s Lauds, from Three Songs of Praise. The concert ended with a dip back into the late 19th century, with Elgar’s whimsical choral postcards from old Germany – his Songs from the Bavarian Highlands, the sort of good tunes which you could almost sway along to with a brimming Stein. Elgar and his wife, Alice, clearly relished the countryside of Garmisch, and were inspired by lines such as “Quaff the bright brown ale my treasure, Hark! What joyous sounds!”
The next day, a complete change of mood, with the morning chamber recital – given by violinist, Rupert Marshall-Luck and South African pianist, Peter Cartwright – devoted to music by Bliss, Rawsthorne, Holst, Delius and Howells. Lancashire-born composer, Alan Rawsthorne, is probably best known for his film scores (including that for The Cruel Sea) and his Second Piano Concerto with its carnival-like final movement, but Rupert and Peter have rediscovered for us and curated the composer’s extensive works for violin and piano, giving at this festival the UK premiere of his Theme and Variations for Pianoforte and Violin.
Rawsthorne’s taut, concentrated, challenging writing proved to be an excellent foil to the more romantic sonata, from 1914, by Arthur Bliss – an early work, yet one which any listener, new to the piece, would consider a work of mastery and maturity. With its lovely whirlpool moments, its combination of sunlight, melancholy, nostalgia, the sonata was (for me) the outstanding work of the concert, especially the heartachingly beautiful piano opening, played with such gently paced and slow shaping by Peter Cartwright. Rupert Marshall-Luck more than embraced all the virtuoso moments of the piece, especially the exciting passage where the soloist has every opportunity to out-soar even Vaughan Williams’s famous ascending lark.
Now to recorded music: a new CDs from Chandos Records, of Shostakovich’s great Stalinist era monolith (yet with the composer confusing the totalitarians of his country with cryptic ideas and sardonic snarls) – his Symphony No. 5. Played with great tension and power by the Greater Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic – the old ‘BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra’ to we old Radio 3-ites – the recording dazzles at all levels, the players giving everything they have for the Finnish maestro, John Storgårds, a musician renowned for his readings of Sibelius and Nielsen. Here in the Shostakovich is a darkness that any Scandinavian or Russian would recognise, yet we are in the world, not of the Russian steppes or the cold Baltic coast, but the labyrinths of Moscow and the artist, enslaved but never truly at bay. For those who know their Shostakovich recordings, the new version is extraordinarily similar in temper and timbre to the early-1980s interpretation by that Russian patriot-dissident, cellist-turned-conductor, the great Rostropovich. Some may still remember the pent-up power and bare bones of the Fifth, as performed some 45 years ago by the USA Washington National Symphony Orchestra under that magisterial maestro.
Another famous conductor was Sir Thomas Beecham, founder of both the London and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. Beecham had a wide repertoire, and it is perhaps hard to pin him down: Wagner and Berlioz, and the lush, heavy tone-poems of Richard Strauss appealed to Sir Thomas; Delius, too, and Handel – and opera. But so did orchestral favourites, French ‘lollipops’, and Russian romanticism. New from Siva Oke and SOMM comes a full-blooded, orientally-shimmering account, recorded at a packed Royal Festival Hall in 1957 of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade – an irreplaceable capturing of a style of playing which we often do not hear today; in which the orchestra heaves with turbulence and colour, and section leaders play like virtuoso soloists. Rimsky-Korsakov’s piece is a work steeped in the legends of an imagined Arabian world of magic – of a clever princess who outwits a despotic ruler, by beguiling him with stories which she tells, night after night. (One could almost see Shostakovich in a similar dilemma, using his musical powers to keep one step ahead of the hammer of doom.)
Arvo Part. Image: Woesinger, Wikimedia Commons
Finally, a return to Chandos Records and their new CD of Estonian musical magus, Arvo Pärt (born 1935) – the complete symphonies (1-4), performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra under Eva Ollikainen. “Worlds ahead for clarity” was a one-time sales slogan of Chandos, a choice of words which fully applies to this living-presence, revelation-of-detail recording made a year ago in Reykjavik; a presentation of a symphonic progression from the 1963 ‘Polyphonic’ – just over a quarter-of-an-hour in length, to the harp, timpani and percussion of the 2007-08 Fourth Symphony, subtitled Los Angeles – and dedicated to the Philharmonic Orchestra of that city. Essentially, Pärt’s music is concerned with the spiritual, with pure belief – orthodoxy, credo (‘Credo’ was a name of one piece from the late 1960s). In this collection, it is possible to find a rooted hope for music and for our world – every bit as reassuring as the mediaeval stonework and arches that we found earlier at Dartington Hall.
Recording details: Alan Rawsthorne, the complete works for violin and piano, and the Violin Sonata by Sir Arthur Bliss, available from EM Records, via em.marshall-luck@em-records.com; Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 (with Second Symphony), CHSA 5378; Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, RPO, Beecham, SOMM-Beecham 34; Pärt, Complete Symphonies, CHSA 5372
IAN C SMITH’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, Stand, & Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island
Correlations
In March 1790 Bligh reaches England the same day as his letters describing the Bounty mutiny written five months earlier, Bligh aboard a Dutch vessel from the East Indies, his cannon shot news via France which seethes with its own uprising as does he with his need for vindication.
A new luminary deriving from his account of the miraculous feat of seamanship in the open launch, Bligh both seethes and basks at first. But questions soon arise suggesting all is not quite right with this talk of the town exploit, and Fletcher Christian is better connected than many in England, including Bligh. His clan numbers bishops, MPs, and university alumni, one brother a lawyer, another, a doctor.
Unable to defend himself, Fletcher of the tattooed arse constructs huts of vegetation and yard, cultivating his semi-tropical garden in a mutineers’ allotment on a little known and maddeningly more difficult to find island of the remote Pacific in residence with one of several native women and various scoundrels. Even from that distance he has allies with clout.
Rumour, gossip, abounds. We all love a mystery, each with an opinion. Nobody knows where Fletcher and his makeshift mob are, nor has heard from Bligh’s launch crew. Some scoff at the idea of so many ordered into an open boat, armed and provisioned, allowed to make their way home, however hazardous, without putting up a fight, the shame of this.
Several survivors of the incident-riddled launch odyssey are silenced, dead in the East Indies where tropical diseases scythe Europeans. Others stranded there by Bligh who couldn’t wait to be disencumbered of them are now debauched, drunken, threatening, even mutinous. Bligh writes to families of some of the original crew, expressing his feelings towards these shocked innocent people’s loved ones, whether calumnious or praiseworthy.
Fletcher’s fame, or infamy, puts Cockermouth on the map. Bounty’s voyage was financed to cultivate breadfruit as a profit-skimming basic slave diet. Political radicals sympathise with the French revolutionaries, among these the young Wordsworths in this time of a burgeoning anti-slavery movement. William attended the same school as Fletcher whose brother, Edward, shall later help the Wordsworths receive their rightful inheritance.
By 1808 when news of the discovery of the isolated Pitcairners – a tribe now with their own language – spreads, the South Pacific is well-charted. Illegally deposed as Governor of New South Wales during the Rum Rebellion after rubbing rogues the wrong way again, Bligh has nine years of life left.
In the heat of the mutiny he reminded Fletcher that he had dandled the Bligh children on his knee. His wife remaining in Lambeth where their twin sons are buried, Bligh’s married daughter deputised as his first lady in Australia. Did she captivate Sydney’s fledgling society with her childhood memory of Fletcher Christian?
Theatrical extravaganzas, prequels to future film flimflam, made much of Bligh’s dramatic days during his extraordinary life. Today, some still believe Fletcher found his way home to England, or vanished into America’s melting pot. In Hobart, anxious to clear his name again, did Bligh learn of the mutineers’ island descendants? Were these days of regret, of trembling sorrow?
IAN C SMITH’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, Stand, & Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island
My Auntie Audrey used to cut the edges of her lawn with scissors. The grass was bowling green standard and a source of great pride, labour and constant concern. Her garden reflected her personality – meticulous attention to detail and a capacity to work endlessly to maintain her own high standards. I cannot remember her actually sitting in her garden, taking in the scents and views. The esteemed editor of this magazine takes a different view. Let nature do its magnificent work whilst I lounge with a glass of something refreshing. Both approaches to gardening were to some extent on display at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. The event has become a high societal event akin to strawberries at Wimbledon and flags at the Proms.
The best show garden this year was judged to be Sarah Eberle’s ‘On the Edge’ garden for the Council for the Protection of Rural England (see picture above). “Some of the best landscapes are where people and nature coexist in harmony…It’s about how it makes you feel. It’s almost a homecoming, an embrace, a hug.” A central feature of this extraordinary garden is a fallen tree sculpted into the guardian figure of Gaia or Mother Nature. Her willow hair forms the top of a dry- stonewall that weaves through the copious, verdant planting. Weeds are reimagined celebrating our native flowing plants. There is a rusty corrugated tin fence suggesting a barn or tumbling warehouse where the countryside and development meet. Sarah Eberle’s guiding philosophy is for all gardeners to work with what they have. A boulder or tree stump can become a feature rather than a problem. She advises that we browse second-hand shops for weathered metal or wooden furniture. Beauty, she reminds us, can exist in the ordinary. The design encourages us to sit and ponder and do nothing.
The Tokonoma Garden
Contrast all this with the Tokonoma Garden designed by Kazuyuki Ishihara where Auntie Audrey’s scissors would definitely come in handy. Everything is finely honed, brushed, choreographed. Everything has its defined and delicate space. It is the garden almost as a film set guided by well-defined Japanese traditions of harmony and beauty. Weeds and corrugated iron are not welcome here. Nature has been squeezed and shaped into exquisite arrangements. The effect is stunning for very different reasons. In the CPRE garden you take off your shoes and socks and stretch out languorously. In the Tokonoma Garden you straighten your tie or adjust your fascinator. Two styles, two approaches, two designs that are different in almost every aspect in that one embraces nature and the other shapes it.
The Garden for Every Parkinson’s Journey
There are also show gardens with an explicit narrative, a message to convey. Such as the Garden for Every Parkinson’s Journey. We will ignore the overuse of the word ‘journey’ in current human experience. This garden is wonderful. A smoothly carved handrail weaves through the planting, offering stability and sensory experience for those afflicted by Parkinson’s. Its designer, Arit Anderson, has a sister who lives with the disease. The garden offers a safe space to relax for a moment or two away from the constant challenges of living with Parkinson’s. It is also a soothing night garden as many people with the disease have difficulty sleeping. One can see so clearly that Arit Anderson has designed the space for her sister. It is personal, empathetic, emotional. It underlines the immense beneficial impact that our gardens can have on both our mental and physical health. This has become a common topic for discussion: our garden ‘journey’ for mental wellbeing. And whilst being sometimes overblown, it is not new. For centuries we have known that being in nature is good for us even if it is well trimmed and intensely weeded.
My own garden journey was interrupted by an overheard remark: “Well, I must say that is the neatest lady garden I have ever seen.” Gardens never fail to surprise. I was now in front of the Lady Garden Foundation show garden. The information leaflet informed me that 21 women die every day from gynaecological cancers most people cannot even name. This ‘Silent No More’ garden was designed, somewhat disappointedly, by a man, Darren Hughes. It contains five sculptures to signify the different cancers – ovarian, uterine, cervical, vaginal and vulval. It is an unashamedly propaganda garden with a clear, vital message. At first, I was a little uneasy with the idea but slowly as I took in the planting and the message, I understood. Two ladies were chatting about a hysterectomy one had and the discovery of an undiagnosed cancer. It had got people to talk although its underlying message was skipped over by the BBC in their filming of their evening show. The idea for the garden came from Lady Garden Foundation ambassador Emily Plane who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of 23 and died five years later. A highlight for me was the contrasting ideas of planting to encourage both private and group conversations. The garden will be dismantled and rebuilt across multiple sites in Jersey and Cornwall.
With an equally therapeutic ambition is the Breathing Space Garden from Asthma + Lung UK. The design of the garden by Angus Thompson draws on the Japanese aesthetic of yohaku no bi – the beauty of empty space and ma – the beauty of empty time. He was giving an impromptu talk as I arrived. The aim was to create a tranquil woodland-edge retreat to help visitors to slow down, breathe more deeply and reconnect with the restorative qualities of nature. Despite visiting on a day when 30,000 others crowded across the site, I stared at the space and felt transported to a quieter place.
That is the power of gardens. Ultimately it is not about skilled design, strong messaging, striking architecture but discovering a space where you can breathe deeply and relax profoundly. And if you are lucky enough to have Gaia carved out of a fallen tree then all the better. One hopes that given these circumstances even my industrious Auntie Audrey (who now gardens in a higher place) would put down her scissors.
Barnoldswick and nearby Yorkshire from Weets Hill by Dominic Nelson. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that made the Modern World
Chris Moss, London: Old Street, 2026, hb., 364pps., £25
DEREK TURNER admires a survey of an amazingly inventive and influential county
In his classic 1902-1904 Collecteana, folklorist Vincent Stuckey Lean cites a proverb which has since passed into cliché – “Lancashire thinks today what all England will think tomorrow”. Travel writer Chris Moss’s task in this highly personal book is to show how his home county helped make modern England – and so the wider world.
Until late medieval times, much of the future Red Rose County was remote and sparsely inhabited, its moors and uplands unsuited to agriculture, and too near Scotland for safety. In the Domesday Book, the county was referred to as merely the land “inter Ripam et Mersam” (between Ribble and Mersey), and accounted under Cheshire; it was not named until 1182. But the Dukedom of Lancaster, first created in 1351, became increasingly powerful and was ultimately merged in the Crown in 1413. There was even a folk-tradition that King Arthur had been Lancastrian, Lancashire supposedly a corruption of ‘Lancelotshire’. The combative nature of the inhabitants is suggested by an anonymous fifteenth century poem ‘The Shires’, listing the supposed characteristics of each county, which describes Lancashire as “a fair archer”.
By Tudor times, the county was increasingly integrated into the national mainstream, despite a reputation for Roman Catholic recusancy. The mother of William Camden, author of the nation-shaping 1586 chorography Britannia, came from Poulton. Alexander Nowell of Read was Dean of St Paul’s during Elizabeth’s reign – and the inventor of bottled beer! As Archbishop of Canterbury, Farnworth’s Richard Bancroft oversaw production of the King James Bible.
Michael Drayton hymned Lancashire in his 1612 loco-descriptive poem Poly-Olbion for its cattle, the “deepest mouth’d” of hunting hounds, silvery rivers, and women “who beare away the Bell” for beauty. There were seventeenth-century sayings alluding to regional power – “The North for greatness” – and cleverness – “He’s too far North for me”. The county was nevertheless rent by the Civil Wars, its north and west for the King, the rest for Parliament. The 1648 battles of Preston and Winwick were the last of the Second Civil War, and Preston would also be the locale of the last battle on English soil, during the 1715 Jacobite rebellion.
But Lancashire’s most important days began with the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was largely a Lancastrian creation. County inventors, speculators and visionaries yoked steam power to an array of new technologies and new thinking that would galvanise the globe, and give rise to vast questions which even now remain unanswered.
The world knows of Liverpool, Manchester, the Pendle witches, Stephenson’s Rocket, Lancashire cotton, St Helens glass, the Peterloo Massacre, Frederick Engels, the footballers of Everton, Liverpool, Manchester City and United, the Beatles and the Smiths. There was, or sometimes still is, also steel at Nelson, paint-making at Burnley, brickmaking at Accrington, wire at Warrington, beer at Blackburn, aerospace at Samlesbury (where Donald Campbell’s Bluebird K7 was constructed), submarine-building at Barrow-in-Furness, and fishing at Fleetwood. Peter Paul Roget compiled his Thesaurus at Manchester’s Portico Library.
Within the UK, Lancashire also conjures images of L. S. Lowry, Blackpool Tower, George Formby, Liverpool’s “Three Graces”, black pudding and pies, Eccles cakes, treacherous but magnificent Morecambe Bay, Coronation Street, Boys from the Blackstuff, Anthony Gormley’s Another Place, Bernard Manning, Les Dawson, Peter Kay, and a host of other bands, from Gerry and the Pacemakers to Joy Division.
It also connotes decline, division, ugliness, motorways (England’s first motorway was the Preston Bypass), harsh weather and a proverbial dourness of temperament. The author acknowledges that the county is often not conventionally beautiful, with exceptions like the Forest of Bowland, but even its least prepossessing locales “engage the mind”.
He is acutely aware of the hardness of life for many Lancastrians both during the Industrial Revolution – famously fictionalised in Hard Times – and in its wake – as documented in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. As he observes, “Lancashire was the first to turn the engines on, and the lights out.” Dickensian-style Gradgrinds, grasping though they were, at least sometimes gave back to their communities, leaving many magnificent public buildings, museums, schools, charitable bequests and a bittersweet memory of gritty civic pride. Later neoliberals merely shuttered still viable industries, hollowed out communities, and filled characterful quarters with soulless glass and steel.
Social suffering accounts for local traditions of radicalism – from seventeenth century Dissenters and Enlightenment intellectuals like Joseph Priestley via the Luddites and Chartists to the beginnings of Mass Observation (in 1930s Bolton), the first meeting of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (in 1971, in Burnley) and contemporary anti-racism. Moss sees radicalism as a key county characteristic, although perhaps not every reader will share his admiration of the decor of Roughlees Clarion House, a country hostelry furnished with photographs of Labour MPs, copies of the Morning Star, and a banner exhorting “Workers of the World Unite”. But unlike some enthusiasts he realises the impossibility of erasing inconvenient facts (like slave-trading legacies) from cultural memory. He is open to all, but never uncritical.
The book is filled with little-known facts – such as that the American Civil War really ended on 6 November 1865, when the sole remaining Confederate Navy vessel, CSS Shenandoah, surrendered at Liverpool Pier Head. He also honours now unjustly forgotten local dialect poets. The Lancashire dialect was the first English dialect to be treated with cultural seriousness, thanks to writers like John Collier (‘Tim Bobbin’) whose 1746 comic tale View of the Lancashire Dialect, by way of Dialogue between Tummus o’ William’s o’ Margit’s o’ Roaf’s and Meary o’ Dick’s o’ Tummus o’ Peggy’s was one of the first books of its kind. Another was “the Lancashire Burns” Edwin Waugh, who sold shoes on Rochdale market and resided in a cellar, but whose 1855 Sketches of Lancashire Life and Localities impelled Thomas Carlyle to pronounce him “a man of decided mark”.
Moss greatly regrets the brutal truncation of 1974, when two-fifths of the historic county was reallocated arbitrarily to Cheshire, ‘Cumbria’, ‘Greater Manchester’ and ‘Merseyside’. The rump became a backwater, notwithstanding a richly suggestive – even sacral – heritage. Gawain sought the Green Knight in nearby Wirral Forest. An early seventeenth century sect called the Grindletonians was sure the Ark of the Covenant was hidden in Grindleton Chapel. George Fox, founder of the Quakers, climbed Pendle Hill in 1652 and was enraptured, writing in his journal: “When I was come to the Top of this Hill, I saw the Sea bordering upon Lancashire: and from the Top of this Hill the Lord let me see, in what places he had a Great People to be gathered”. The 1961 film Whistle Down the Wind, in which children mistake an escaped convict for Jesus, was shot in the Ribble valley. The ghosts of Scottish Royalists killed in 1651 have been ‘seen’ on the M6.
So long a stranger to his shire, the author ‘finally’ wanders closer to home and his heart – finding his own past amid landscape irreducibility and a septentrional poetry of placenames – Fair Snape, Goosnargh, Hail Storm Hill, Oswaldtwistle, Prickshaw Slack. He closes with conflicting feelings – “Lancashire lets me down, but I can’t compare it with anywhere else”. This is not just an overdue survey, but an unusually enquiring one – an admirable examination of an incomparably important county.
This review first appeared in Country Squire, and is reproduced with permission
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
STUART MILLSON ranges from Manon Lescaut to Mystical Songs
Sumptuous sound – yet with pin-sharp detail – is the order of the day in the new Chandos issue of orchestral works by Puccini. Scaling the heights of dazzling audio-demonstration-level engineering, the Chandos engineers bring John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London into sharp focus – highlighting the brilliant solo playing of sections and section leaders (musicians all handpicked by the conductor) and the sheer unanimity of a sound that truly gels and sparkles. Puccini is just the right choice of composer for artists who set out to re-create what is, possibly, a lost style of orchestral playing – or at least, that resonant richness associated with the large London ensembles of the 1970s and ‘80s.
Listen out for the immaculate, tenderness of the woodwind at the opening of the Act II Prelude to Manon Lescaut, with graceful violins leading us on to the emotional blaze at the height of the piece. Likewise, a soft breeze from the Italian coast wafts through the Prelude to Act III of Edgar, a Puccini opera we hear very little. An old-world charm, reminiscent of Grieg’s Holberg Suite, is to be found in the Tre Minuetti (from about 1881, revised seven years later). This gem of a sequence started life in string quartet form, but John Wilson saw its potential for larger forces and so duly orchestrated it. From the thrilling, orchestral ‘attack’ in the short Scherzo (18812-83) to the famous, nostalgic, sepia, bittersweet Crisantemi, the Puccini collection will greatly appeal even to those who are not naturally followers of opera, but who nonetheless relish a tug of the heartstrings.
In a different era of recording, yet with an equally striking sound, but finely remastered, is SOMM Records’ Sir Thomas Beecham archive. Sir Thomas was one of a group of great inter- and post-war British conductor-knights, often known for their biting wit and somewhat authoritarian presence on the podium. At one rehearsal with the Royal Philharmonic, the position of the chair and music-stand on the conductor’s rostrum was not to Sir Thomas’s liking, and he became a little irritated by the arrangement. “Do you think I’m Samson?” he remarked, as he tried to adjust the heavy podium apparatus. “Sometimes, we do wonder, sir?” replied a brave member of the orchestra. Beecham saw the funny side, fortunately. Yet the conductor was a musical titan, as can be heard in Richard Strauss’s grand symphonic odyssey and autobiography, Ein Heldenleben.
For Strauss, his music rooted in Wagnerian willpower, the ‘Hero’s Life’ of the title referred not to a sword-wielding Siegfried, but to the German artist himself – fighting battles for recognition, for artistic truth, against sniping and snarling critics (Das Helden Widersacher – The Hero’s Adversaries). Heldenleben is, perhaps, Strauss’s version of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, although the work ends not in exultation, but in the sense of the artist having satisfied many of his desires. Sir Thomas Beecham revels in the almost operatic texture of the music – the grand sound of French horns and martial trumpets; the music striding on as if accompanying both Zarathustra and Don Juan, all in one. Once again with SOMM, Lani Spahr’s audio restoration leaves us in no doubt as to the mission of this record label: to establish for all-time, one of the most remarkable conductors’ and composers’ sound archives to be found anywhere in the catalogue. Also on the CD is Beethoven’s Eighth, a work of beauty, lightness, diversion – a recapitulation of all the good things we find in the Symphony No. 1 – and just the prelude needed before the mighty Ninth, the Choral Symphony. Lovers of vintage records will enjoy the mid-1950s sound, and it is truly enriching for us to be able to reconsider and re-assess the legendary musicians of 70 years ago.
But SOMM’s musical exploration of the past goes even further back in time: their first volume of Elgar from the Archives presenting two recordings from the 1920s of the Enigma Variations – one conducted by the composer himself; the other by the founder-conductor of the Proms, Sir Henry Wood. Given that the recording techniques here involved the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra – and Wood’s own Queen’s Hall Orchestra – performing in front of what looks like a large Trinity House foghorn, the sound quality is remarkably clear. Again, sound-supremo, Lani Spahr has done a wonderful job of “French-polishing” this (English) music, and because of it, we can enjoy the glorious playing of the orchestras’ woodwind and string principals in this most famous symphonic warhorse.
The Elgar disc is completed by delicate and sensitive recordings of the Violin Sonata and String Quartet, both works the products of Elgar’s stay in the woodland of West Sussex at the end of the First World War. For Lady Elgar, the slow movement of the Quartet captured the essence of sunshine; and Sir Edward’s chamber music from this southern sojourn was often generally referred to as showing a mysterious “wood magic”. Marjorie Hayward, violin, and Una Bourne, piano, are the soloists in this 1919 acoustic recording, while the String Quartet in E minor recorded two years later, shows the virtuosity and understated English emotion of the London String Quartet.
Finally, again from our own land, the words and music of Easter, and poet, George Herbert, set by Ralph Vaughan Williams. In Five Mystical Songs we sense the growth of flowers, of the daffodil – the Lent lily – and experience the quiet revelations of resurrection and renewal, although not through the usual choral and orchestral forces associated with the work, but in the composer’s own arrangement for baritone, piano and string quartet. The songs were first performed in Worcester at the 1911 Three Choirs Festival, that gathering so associated with such masters of our musical renascence as Howells, Elgar and ‘RVW’ himself. On a new recording from Albion Records and the Vaughan Williams Society, Roderick Williams, baritone, gives a warm-hearted, clearly-articulated interpretation of the songs, accompanied by the Sacconi Quartet – a performance of intimacy and reflection, reminding the listener a little of the atmosphere of Butterworth’s song-cycle A Shropshire Lad. Here, England at Easter-time lies before us: “Rise heart, thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise without delays, / Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise, / With him may’st rise…”
A Town Destroyed, Poplar 1941, by John Minton. Art.IWM ART 15910
Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art
Imperial War Museum, March 20 – November 1
NICK BOOTH is impressed and moved by images of London under attack
Critics tend to rush by British art of the Second World War: for them there is no contest with the art of the First World War, which was revolutionary and packed with their favoured ‘isms’ – futurism, vorticism, cubism, the aesthetic fallout from Roger Fry’s post-impressionist movement in the years before Western civilisation’s headlong dégringolade to slaughter in 1914.
The art of the 1939-45 war has been judged unambitious and even, in the case of Edward Ardizzone’s work, ‘cosy’. This is unfair. This rather too small exhibition at the Imperial War Museum makes no effort to mount a counter-argument but nonetheless contains many good and affecting things. Probably there wasn’t space to lay out key conversions away from abstractionism and surrealism in the interwar period: that having hymned the world of machinery and progress some artists recoiled from the realisation that technological advances could have very nasty side effects. Thus the world of humans and nature came back into focus.
Then the war cut off Britain from the Continent, and her artists inevitably fell back towards an English tradition for the particular and the romantic. Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art settles for paintings as record, sometimes almost as journalism – but many of the works operate on a much higher level. The show is worked up from Suzanne Bardgett’s excellent Wartime London in Paintings, which came out a few years ago and which is worth getting hold of if you are interested in this subject.
Two beautiful John Minton ink drawings appear early, A Town Destroyed, Poplar, and Looking Down on a Bombed Building by the Thames, Poplar 1941, are small and dreamlike, taking blitzed London and turning it into an inner landscape of melancholy emotion, a sort of visual analogue to Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime stories such as Mysterious Kôr, in which wrecked London ‘is drenched in moonlight’ and looks like ‘the moon’s capital, shallow, cratered, extinct’, and The Demon Lover, in which the evil ghost of a soldier – symbolic stand-in for the malign spirit of war visiting twice in a life – terrorises a woman in her closed-up London home.
A Concert in a Shelter, St. Pancras Borough (1941) by Olga Lehmann. Art.IWM ART LD 1900
A Shelter in Camden Town under a Brewery: Christmas Eve, 1940 by Olga Lehmann. Art.IWM ART LD 1899
Two ink-and-wash paintings by Olga Lehmann portray the subterranean experience of sheltering from air raids. In the swift, brilliantly realised A Concert in a Shelter, St Pancras Borough (1941), the distant stage is a flash of colour in dark, overcrowded cellar. You can almost hear the ‘shelter cough’. Lehmann’s A Shelter in Camden Town under a Brewery: Christmas Eve, 1940, evokes the dingy grimness and looming terror endured under the streets.
Incendiaries in a Suburb (1941) by Henry Carr. Art.IWM ART LD 1518
The prolific, technically brilliant and now largely forgotten Henry Carr gets a good showing. St Clement Dane’s Church on Fire after being Bombed crackles away – Carr lights up the Aldwych with the eerie glow of a big blaze. The newspaper publisher Cecil King saw the church burning on the night of May 10, 1941, and said the flames and sparks shooting from its spire was “an odd and rather beautiful spectacle”. Familiar Silhouettes shows squaddies lighting up fags in Piccadilly Tube; A Railway Terminus, a tour de force rendering of St Pancras Station vast and dimmed for the blackout, is blown up to wall size; and Incendiaries in a Suburb conveys the horrific surrealism of war without recourse to actual surrealism. There are the silent, blacked-out, deeply usual London homes but the horizon is orange with a demonic inferno, a searchlight roams the sky in which snarls AA fire, a church and its crucifix stands in silhouette, and piercingly bright alien incendiaries land in gardens, the UFOs of 1941. Humans scramble in the gloom. It is more strange and affecting than Magritte’s Empire of Light.
Priscilla Thorneycroft’s tiny ink drawing from the London Underground, Soldier with Child in the Tube (1940-1941), shows the weariness and strain of the Blitz in the soldier’s face. Kenneth Rowntree’s CEMA Canteen Concert, Isle of Dogs, London, E14 (1941), memorably records the tea-and-sandwiches collectivism of wartime entertainment. Graham Sutherland’s The City: A Fallen Lift Shaft (1941) is more fascinating in the flesh than it ever is on the page. When he saw the broken shaft in a ruin near St Paul’s Cathedral Sutherland said it “suggested a wounded tiger in a painting by Delacroix”.
With a collection as large as the IWM’s it seems strange the show is quite modestly sized. Space should have been found for Charles Mozley’s vivid The Thames Embankment (1940) a favourite of mine. Through misty blue winter London light, we see the view from the Savoy above Embankment Gardens with the National Liberal Club and Parliament in the distance underneath insect-like barrage balloons. A tram whirrs up the road, in the gardens below another barrage balloon is tethered, and to the right looms the ghostly dome of the National Gallery. This was London at the start of her agonies. The pre-war city would take many terrible blows and sustain heavy losses in every sense of the word. Mozley’s ‘monument to a moment’ in time, to use the great David Bomberg’s phrase, is the beginning of the end of the old capital, the city that was so brilliantly brought to life in Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony. The absence of Mozley’s painting is a glaring omission. You can see it here: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/19851
The Haberdashers Hall, 8th May 1945, by C. Eliot Hodgkin. Art.IWM ART LD 5311
Eliot Hodgkin’s wonderful The Haberdashers’ Hall, 8th May 1945, appears, though not at the end of the exhibition where logically it should be. This quiet, almost ironic view of the ruins of the hall with the lantern of St Paul’s rising behind is a sort of understated companion to Paul Nash’s 1918 We Are Making a New World. In Hodgkin’s painting here is the end of the European war, the last day; overgrown with weeds and littered with rubble and bent iron; huge and terrible things have happened; nothing will ever be the same again; meanwhile there is silence save for, perhaps, the faint merry singing of VE Day celebrants in the distance. The future will be along in due course.
On that point it’s a shame the IWM does not possess Carl Giles’s prophetic cartoon from the Sunday Express, August 5, 1945, (the uranium atom bomb ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima the next morning) called It’s Quicker By Rail showing the first appearance of his soon-to-be-famous Family trudging towards or back from their first peacetime holiday along a trainless railway track. https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/specialcollections/files/2020/08/ga5447.jpg The British were moving out of the ruins and into new challenges.
[iii] From 1945 – 1975: arguably the maximum period of post-war hope – during which (for one example) ecological concerns were fully realised but insufficiently acted upon. During which, global corporations became too powerful and greed became a virtue.
“It is the purpose of this paper to interpret the legend of St. George and the Dragon in terms of alchemical symbolism. While the victory of the Christian hero over the Dragon is traditionally interpreted as symbolic of the triumph of good over evil, it is argued that both combatants represent the four alchemical elements: air, water, earth and fire. Instead of a duel of opposites their combat transmutes the coiled-up energy of the dragon into solar light, which manifests as the beautiful princess of the myth. The conclusion is drawn that there is a dialectical movement of force in the battle between St. George and the dragon. The hero releases the antithetical power of the dense, dark matter symbolised by the dragon so that the elements of a polarity do not remain contrasted but are resolved creatively.”
[xi] Link Span, BTF film of 1956, directed by Michael Clarke. See: www.imdb.com/title/tt1754135/ “This documentary from British Transport Films, follows 24 hours in the life of three British Railways Channel ferry services.”
[xii] Colin Wilson paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee in Religion and the Rebel (1957) reprinted by Aristeia Press in 2017, page 130.
[xiii] Charlton village is the one here of many.
[xiv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Sutherland While Sutherland’s Pembrokeshire landscapes may not be “realistic”, personally, I wouldn’t think of them generally as “surreal” – which word to me indicates an element of attitude, even a degree of literary willing, more evident in (for example), Paul Nash’s gently surrealist, Landscape from a Dream, or in Dorothea Tanning’s, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/tanning-eine-kleine-nachtmusik-t07346
Sutherland’s best Pembrokeshire work celebrates the mystery and reveals the hidden power and primeval qualities of the landscape. However, I can see how, given that his landscapes are often ‘more real than reality’, this can easily be associated with surrealism, and at times he does utilize a more surreal approach. In fact, it could be argued that the most relevant aspect of surrealism, is not the exaggerated drama of melting watches and so on, but simply an ability or a moment in which one sees and notices things more vividly. Walking through a suburb of Heysham yesterday, gradually moving into a heightened sense of seeing, I was reminded how ‘surreal’ so many houses and gardens can look in bright daylight, the layout of shrubs and pots, the window surrounds and porches etc – all those aspects of daily life it is so easy to take for granted or disregard. Down on the prom, I was reminded of Paul Nash’s short essay Swanage, or Seaside Surrealism published in The Architectural Review (Volume LXXIX, April 1936, pp. 161-4). Nash himself distinguished between the work of artists belonging to a Surrealist group, distinguishing their work by a capital ‘S’, and “artworks, situations, objects or locations that have a dreamlike character or incongruous settings that evoke disquiet or the uncanny. These, he describes, as surreal with a small ‘s’.” See: www.paulnashdorset.co.uk/timeline/1936#
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD anticipates some of this year’s likely literary successes
As I write this it’s the tail end of January, and I sit at home on the edge of a Pacific Northwest rainforest, which means that it’s one of those times when the miseries of the world threaten to engulf us and the precariousness of the human condition, far from appearing a worthwhile and even noble struggle, seems an infinite rebuke.
Meanwhile, we’ve collectively at least survived the traditional blizzard of Christmas review roundups, and no doubt – unless we’re all blown to smithereens in the meantime – we’ll soon have the inevitable Easter reading recommendations and summer beach-book lists in our sights, until before long the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness rolls around once more, and with it yet more critical effusions, and so on, ad infinitum.
If for no other reason than to get a head start on the whole craze, I offer here a brazenly subjective midwinter lineup of half-a-dozen worthy candidates culled from among the many thousands of our publishers’ new or forthcoming titles, any one of which is guaranteed to warm the reader’s heart in these otherwise unremittingly bleak days and nights.
Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
Like several million others around the world, you may know the basic outline of Haig’s breakthrough 2020 novel The Midnight Library. In short: the book’s protagonist, Nora Seed (even great writers sometimes struggle with names), in her mid-thirties, single and childless, feels useless. Her cat is dead, she’s alone, and she’s been fired. Late one night, she tries to kill herself. Unpromising, I know, but this is where Haig lifts the whole thing out of itself and into the sort of energetically sustained parallel universe that C.S. Lewis might not have disowned. Instead of death, what Nora finds is a library in which each volume represents a version of her life where she made different choices. All she has to do to step into that life is to open the book. You may possibly recognise some of the plot ingredients of the 1998 film Sliding Doors, itself a product of the so-called many-worlds theory in which a new universe beckons from our every choice and decision.
The whole enterprise possibly sounds a bit strained, but in Haig’s hands it delivers the goods as a serviceable get-away-from-it-all novel that works both on the level of a good yarn and a speculative rumination on what we’re really doing during our brief tenancy of the planet. What’s the best that can happen in your life, and what’s the worst? Those are the questions. Without spoiling the treat, The Midnight Train is broadly speaking in the same vein as its predecessor, only – as the title rather implies – translated from a library onto, well, a train. I’ve slightly furtively read about three-quarters of the new book in what publishers like to call uncorrected proof form, and I can confirm it’s well up to par with its distinguished prototype; both have interesting things to say about how hard it sometimes is for any of us to completely accept ourselves for what we are – and, like the eponymous train itself, it all rattles along at a brisk clip.
Canongate Books, April 2026, £20
Malcolm Galfe, Near Horizons
The author here knows his technology and he knows his psychology, and the two combine in seven wonderfully engrossing stories which themselves incorporate elements of horror, sci-fi, mystery, dystopia and good old-fashioned (it never seems to go out of style) human drama.
That said, I’m pleased to report that we’re not exactly in Stephen King, let alone Stranger Things country in Near Horizons. Without exception, Galfe’s tales have a rich, understated texture to them, weaving together a patchwork of tropes and allusions to create something that feels consistently exciting and new. He achieves his effects by tweaking our anxieties and using the suggestive power of good dialogue, not by the sudden arrival of a race of invading pod-people or their like. It’s the literary equivalent of the way in which the best Hitchcock films play with cinematic techniques to tease and torment us, and in its way just as delectable.
As a matter of fact, it’s not entirely illogical to review this title in close physical proximity to the aforementioned Matt Haig; both are neatly crafted, elegantly written, sharp, shocking and often mordantly funny. What raises Near Horizons above the pack of lesser tech-themed morality stories is Galfe’s wise and pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, his grasp of the elements of suspense, and the way he weaves fictional characters into recognisably true-to-life crises in consistently gripping ways.
But if Haig’s book stands as a just slightly over-manicured front lawn, complete with reassuringly familiar garden gnomes and even a fluffy household pet or two on hand, Galfe’s has an authentic touch of the jungle to it: it feels exotic and a little dangerous, often disarming the reader with a page or two of seemingly casual exposition before blindsiding them with a sudden plot twist. Or put another way: these are the sort of stories tailor-made for those of us who like to be both entertained and shocked, and perhaps also secretly comforted by the fact that it’s the characters in Near Horizons, not themselves, being manipulated in this way. There’s something inherently reassuring in the notion that nothing here could ever, surely, happen to us – an almost physically soothing sensation, like a welcome descent into a warm bath when the door is firmly locked and bolted against a storm raging outside. I confidently predict that we will be hearing much more of this supremely assured author in the future.
Woodbridge Publishers, November 2025, hardcover £16.12, paperback £13.05
Cheryl Hines. Image: David Torcivia, Wikimedia Commons
Cheryl Hines, Unscripted: A Memoir
This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 60-year-old actress, who, frankly, has never threatened to become a major film star – you may know her best as Larry David’s foil on the TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm – hardly sounds promising. Then there’s the author’s personal baggage. Since 2014, Cheryl Hines has been married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the raspy-voiced US cabinet minister who served as one of Donald Trump’s chief surrogates during his last presidential campaign. Rarely has a book been written that straddles the worlds of Hollywood and conservative politics, let alone those as embodied by the current administration in Washington DC. Yet, against the odds, Unscripted turns out to be an enthralling read.
Essentially, what’s on offer here is a well-told and often deftly comic account of a working-class Florida girl with dreams of doing something in life other than following in her father’s footsteps as the manager of a local Burger King outlet. In time, Hines goes on to catch the acting bug, makes her way to the Universal Studios in Orlando, and promptly finds herself staffing a sex chatline. Next she’s offered a part in a cable-TV show called Swamp Thing, where the script calls on her to do little more than emerge from a large manmade puddle on the studio floor and stand there for a while, topless. Another time she appears on an episode of American TV’s The Dating Game, but isn’t chosen to go on a date.
Life was a bit like that for Hines in the 1990s. This may have been her nadir as a working actress, but it’s the high point of her book, which passes over the serial rebuffs and setbacks in breezy, vernacular fashion, with none of the professional biographer’s tendency to choke the pages with a flat-footed account of names and dates. Things slow down a bit once we settle into the groove of Hines’s long and apparently blissfully untroubled run on Curb, and her equally happy marriage to RFK Jr., but the first act of the show is itself worth the price of admission.
Skyhorse, March 2026, £21.59
Sir Anthony Hopkins. Image: Elena Torre, Wikimedia Commons
Anthony Hopkins, We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir
According to its publisher, this book is a ‘raw, honest and moving account’ by one of our foremost living actors. It’s certainly raw. Hopkins lays out his early life in unsparing detail, as the son of a tough, hard-headed Port Talbot baker who didn’t have much time or sympathy for a son with an alarming tendency to slap on makeup and hang out with the local amateur dramatics society. ‘My mother and father were both prone to depression and black moods,’ we learn. ‘They fought and wept. My father drank heavily, which only fueled his heightened emotionality.’ Anthony Hopkins himself liked a drop in later life, to put it no stronger than that, and proved a less than stellar National Service recruit as a result, often brought up on charges of brawling with his fellow soldiers. The fractious reputation followed him back into civvy street, first in the world of semi-professional provincial theatre, and then the more refined halls of RADA in London.
Hopkins assesses his talent in these days modestly. ‘I could barely speak, and had the posture of a camel,’ he writes. But he worked hard, and never turned down a job. In time he came to the notice of Laurence Olivier, who made him his understudy in a production of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. After standing in for the great man one night, Olivier complimented him for having ‘walked away with the part like a cat with a mouse between his teeth.’ Even so, the young Hopkins was soon bored by the repetition of the stage, one of those people who always seem to want to be elsewhere, doing something else. ‘I began to feel that acting was just a by-product,’ he writes. ‘I wanted to find value in the rest of my life.’
As with the aforementioned Cheryl Hines memoir, this book most comes alive when charting the uphill struggles of the author’s early career, and rather settles into a holding pattern once we come to see him triumph in The Silence of the Lambs and all the rest. Anyone hoping for rollicking Hollywood scandal à la Bette Davis or David Niven may be disappointed, although Hopkins does allow himself a few disobliging remarks on the late actor Paul Sorvino, with whom he worked unhappily on Oliver Stone’s Nixon. In the absence of gossip, there’s a good deal of what’s-it-all-about rumination on the author’s part, some bits of it more compelling than others. The takeaway message of the book is of the essential strangeness of the acting profession, which, like any intelligent observer, the author sometimes struggles to take entirely seriously. For all the money and awards, I grew to feel quite sorry for Anthony Hopkins as I finished We Did OK, Kid. But that’s because he knows how to tell a story.
Simon & Schuster, November 2025, £25
Bob Spitz, The Rolling Stones: The Biography
Ah, the Stones. By now there have been almost as many books on the old devils as records and concerts by the lads themselves over the course of their sixty-plus year career. In no particular order, we’ve had the late Stanley Booth’s fly-on-the-wall account of the band’s notorious 1969 tour of the United States, ending with their disastrous concert at Altamont; an enjoyably gossipy romp through the narcotic days of the 70s by their factotum and sometime heroin dealer ‘Spanish’ Tony Sanchez; formidably brainy group biographies by the likes of the journalists Stephen Davis and Philip Norman; and, not least, the necessarily sanitised but still quite lively first-hand accounts by Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood themselves, all of them estimable enough in their own right, if perhaps betraying the hand of a ghostwriter. Back in the dark ages, there were even biographies of both Richards and Mick Jagger, and a third book (a glutton for punishment, that author) on the band collectively by a character named Sandford, but we needn’t linger on them.
Now Bob Spitz, an American journalist known for his previous works on pop-cultural figures like the Beatles and several lesser groups, as well as his juvenile nonfiction books (in so far as there can truly be said to be a difference between the two genres), brings us this ‘definitive’ account of rock’s bad boys, which he stretches out to the gatefold triple-album length of 700-plus pages. Does it actually say anything new? Yes and no. The basic story is present and largely correct: an initial eighteen months of struggle, followed by ten years of inspired music and personal debauchery – and in turn by five decades of meticulous decline management – might sum it up. Spitz is at his most engaging when he abandons the weary chronological plod, and instead follows the template of Ian Leslie’s triumphant recent dual-biography John & Paul in putting the Jagger-Richards relationship under the microscope. The author takes on the tired polarities – Mick as the uptight details guy, Keith the agreeably wrecked one – by reframing the story as a volatile bromance: ‘passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of love, riven by jealousy.’ However much they were at odds, seems to be the message, Mick ’n Keef were, or are, still an indivisible twosome, the driving force of the Stones, with the others, even the band’s original wayward genius Brian Jones, mere talented add-ons. The cast and basic plot may be familiar, but Spitz has at least succeeded in giving a recognisably human face to the whole star-crossed saga.
Penguin Press, April 2026, £26.14
1918 – Children play on a captured German field artillery gun exhibited in the Mall, London. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Alwyn Turner, A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars
It’s always good to find a readable and well-researched variant on the standard schoolroom account of events, which in this case would have had us see the UK of the years 1918-39 as a uniformly grim place, grey, soupily lit and generally austere, somewhere the Great Depression set in like a chill Channel fog and lifted again just in time for the arrival of the Luftwaffe. What’s most striking about Alwyn Turner’s new book, by contrast, are the similarities between those sepia-toned times, seemingly out of some vanished Jurassic social order, and our own. Consider that, in 1922-24, Britain managed to get through four prime ministers; that politicians as a class were said to be ‘uniquely unpopular’, occupying a place in the nation’s affections only slightly more elevated than that of child molesters; that London itself was a soiled, sad place whose inhabitants habitually murdered, stole, lied and cheated as they slithered around in a sea of immorality; that the UK was drowning in debt while simultaneously undergoing the Spanish Flu epidemic that killed an estimated 40-50 million people worldwide, roughly three times more than Covid; and that ‘tariff reform’ divided the nation much as Brexit did a century later.
For that matter, many of the products and institutions of our current daily lives entered service in the 1920s or early 30s. Among other goodies, Turner lovingly catalogues the new confectionery brands manufactured in Britain: ‘Aero, Black Magic, Chocolate Digestive, Chocolate Orange, Crunchie, Fruit and Nut, Kit-Kat, Maltesers, Mars Bars, Quality Street, Rolos, Roses and Smarties.’ That’s not to mention such establishments as the BBC, Butlin’s holiday camps, British Home Stores, NAAFIs, Wembley Stadium and London Transport, or the last’s iconic diagrammatic tube map and double-decker buses.
Maybe the book as a whole tends to be long on lists of this sort, as opposed to locating the human narrative that generally makes a social history come alive on the page, but, that minor cavil aside, A Shellshocked Nation is still a bracing and well-paced read, set against the ever-louder ticking clock of international events, which reminds us why the author’s devoted fans admiringly refer to him as ‘Page’ Turner. You could do much worse than to treat yourself to a copy this winter.
