To the power of 8

This piece has been written today at the request of a member of our local amenities society, who is most kindly putting the sundial on our house forward for a prize for the best recent embellishment of the town of Buckingham.

At the beginning of 2008 I started looking forward to a milestone birthday – my seventy fifth – which would fall on the eighth day of August. I began to think of ways that this event could be suitably celebrated.

The number eight is a lucky one in China because the word eight sounds similar to the word which means "prosper" or "wealth", and therefore the date 08.08.08 would be a particularly auspicious one in that country. After arranging that my birthday be marked by the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, I tried to think of an equivalent event at a parish pump level.

Our house comprises a couple of old two-story cottages with a third floor probably added shortly after the canal arrived in Buckingham in the early nineteenth century and with a Georgian façade put in front to give the once-humble building a suitable aura of gravitas. Above the front door and between the two windows on each of the upper floors were a couple of niches, doubtless put there to resemble the blocking-up of windows done on more stately houses to avoid the eighteenth century Window Tax. The lower of these, I thought, would be just the place for a sundial.

I began the search – online of course – for a suitable builder. I found a handful of craftsmen who seemed to offer good work and good value, but I was deterred by the fact that I would have had to do the measuring of the alignment of the façade and the determination of latitude. I felt that, if a mistake were made, it would be better to have somebody else than myself to blame.

My search increasingly centred on one David Harber, particularly because of the excellence of his website: for me, as a one-time website developer, this was an important factor. His list of commissions was impressive, too: Oxbridge colleges, stately homes and international corporate HQs featured prominently on the site. Obviously expensive, but probably worth it, I thought.

My initial contact with David's company confirmed the likely expense but also reassured me about quality and service. The latter included Latin motto translation, provided by a retired bishop, the Right Reverend Stephen Verney, who lived near David's workshop. On the strength of his reputation as a classicist, the bishop – as he then was not – was enticed into the SOE during the war and spirited into Crete, where he formed a partisan unit whose success led him to being awarded the military MBE after the war. David would exchange a bottle of fine claret for devising or revising a suitable Latin motto for a sundial.

I wanted a motto to do with the house, which stands at the foot of Bristle Hill. I thought of the words in the funerary mass, Lux eterna luceat …, "Let light eternal shine …", and transformed this into "Let the sun always shine" (Semper luceat sol …), ending (or beginning) with "upon 7 Bristle Hill". This was the tricky bit. I looked up "bristle" and got saeta, so I submitted to the bishop Super collem saetae ("of the bristle") septem … I got back Super septem (before, not after, the street name) collem saetigerum ("bristle-bearing").

Happily, we were about to set off on a trip to Naples and I believed that I could find the correct position of the number seven during a visit to Pompeii. Alas, the citizens of that town didn't apparently use numbers at all for addresses: this was a new-fangled Greek idea, which might be all very well in Alexandria, but really wouldn't do for us Romans in Campania. Therefore, on the basis that the modern Italian method of putting the number after and not before the street name was probably based on some form of Roman precedent, I defied the bishop and did likewise.

On the matter of "Bristle", however, the bishop was supported by an American foster great-nephew of my wife who had just won a classical scholarship in his second year at his Oxford college. This forming of adjectives from nouns by adding "-bearing" in cases such as this was, apparently, common and was based on imported Greek practice.

So we arrived at a reasonable Latin motto, but I felt that, because the good burghers of Buckingham would not be able to understand it since the Royal Latin School had stopped teaching the language some while ago, a translation should be included in small print at the bottom. Here I used the desire to produce a rhyming couplet my excuse to render semper ("always") as "still" (=continuing until this time), thus enabling "Upon Seven Bristle Hill // Let the sun shine still".

The reason why I chose the typeface Trajan for the wording on the dial, and what I did about the absence of small caps in that font, will be obvious to typographers and need not be said. To non-typographers the matter is unimportant and can therefore be left unsaid.

The day for installation finally arrived. David attended in person with his team. Afterwards, chatting, he told me of a recent unveiling at which his young daughter had been selected to offer a bouquet to the Queen. The little girl approached Her Majesty and said "You're not a queen: you're a granny!" "You're quite right, my dear," said our sovereign lady, "I am a granny – but I'm also a queen."

I asked David whether he has customers or clients: I enjoy teasing tradesmen who try to pass themselves off as professionals by talking about their clients rather than customers. David side-stepped this trap adroitly. "I have patrons", he replied.

We all looked up admiringly at the sundial before it was draped to await the official unveiling. "It looks great", I said, "but it really shows up the empty niche above it. Any suggestions?" He thought and then said "I could build you a weather cock on the chimney which would link through gears to a pointer on a compass rose in the niche. This birthday you're tracking the sun: the next big one, track the wind!"

Roll on my eightieth: only some eight hundred and eighty eight days to go!

The M-Word Manifesto

I propose that writing one's life story in a thousand words is something that each of us might consider doing. I have just done so, and I want to say why I did it.

One reason was as an antidote to having to write one thousand words or a bit more about someone else, as part of the university course I am doing. This piece of writing has to follow the formal structure of entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, starting with details of when and where the subject was born and who his parents were, proceeding through his achievements and ending with a brief mention of his family, where he was buried and how much money he had left his heirs.

The formula varies little from that established for the first edition of the Dictionary, published over a number of years in the late nineteenth century. It reflects the outlook and attitudes of that time, one aspect of which had been memorably summed up by Byron earlier in that century when he wrote "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence".

This formula may seem, from one perspective, a reflection of Victorian male chauvinism, but from another it is eminently practical. It is (relatively) easy to dig up facts about a man's work: it is (exceedingly) hard to do the same about his relationships. Besides, it is easier to write about what someone did rather than how someone felt.

So it was that when I started writing an outline of my life story I found it very hard to write about my relationship with my two wives, particularly the first. I found it slightly easier to do so by writing about this by dropping the word 'I': omitting the personal pronoun enabled me to write much more dispassionately. Writing in staccato, disjointed phrases also helped. So it was that I ended up with something similar to that which used to appear at the start of chapters in many eighteenth and nineteenth century books, a series of phrases succinctly describing a topic or incident, separated by em dashes.

By the time I had finished I found that I had written just over a thousand words and had what might be called a Eureka moment. If I could edit it to make exactly one thousand words it could be the pattern for other people to write their own stories and we could be witnessing the genesis of a whole new genre. I have had many eureka moments in my life and most have turned out to be flashes in the pan than bull's eyes but, as I believe Cicero once wrote, "Dum spiro, spero": while I breathe, I hope.

In an earlier post to this blog I said why I wanted to do this: I felt that, because of the lack of opportunity for students on our course to get to know each other, I would write briefly about myself, let my fellow-students know I had done so and encourage them to do likewise. After writing it I found that the exercise was of far greater personal value. I found that I had written something that my grandchildren could read when they are older which would tell them about the life and times of their grandfather: I would that my grandfathers had done the same for me. I felt also that I had put, however faintly and however briefly, my footprint upon the sands of time.

This is why I am writing this manifesto with its alliterative title containing the Latin way of writing a thousand to reflect the length of my micro-autobiography and, perhaps, of other people, not just in the evening of their lives but also at their high noon.

It would be great fun for me to start another blog – say, M-autobiographies.blogspot.com – on which I could publish this and other life stories – like yours? C'mon, tell the world what you've done and how you've dealt with those two imposters, triumph and disaster: a thousand words is worth far more than a picture!

A Thousand Words is Enough for a Life Story

1933: born into Quaker family, third and youngest of three children – seven years after last sibling – home suburban Woking.

Father passionate gardener – prizes galore for hybridising irises – day job in electricity supply – post-nationalisation Chairman of London Electricity Board.

Sent away to boarding school in deep country one month after Dunkirk – fulfilling hobby-oriented school days – at prep school stamp-collecting, which sparked an interest in what happened when and where – started A History of the British Empire, Told on Stamps – at Leighton Park public school bookbinding and printing – bought Adana platen printing press aetat 14 for £4.17.6 (first "business") – won Minor Scholarship (worth a munificent £30 p.a.) to Trinity College, Oxford (exam having been taken to shorten National Service).

1952: RAF conscript – at Aircrew Selection Centre when KGVI dies – flying training in England and Scotland – basic training on Tiger Moths and Chipmunks – Oxfords (twin-engined advanced trainer) – skiing in Cairngorms – “wings” – Pilot Officer Randall – Meteors and Vampires (jets) – grounded after Korean Armistice – brief spell with Education Branch in Germany.

1954: hitch-hiking round North America – NY > Connecticut > Florida > Oklahoma > Highway 66 > California > Canada – spent 21st birthday watching Bannister beat Landy in Vancouver – Dreaming Spires – won (unofficial) University Shove Ha'penny Championship in the White Horse – read Modern History, intermittently – special subject Clausewitz and "Great Britain in the Mediterranean, 1797-1802".

1957: joined Shell on marketing side – fell in love before departing for year in Argentina – then Kano (edge of the Sahara in Nigeria) – visit by fiancée – jilted – sent roses and wrote sonnet – re-wooing unfortunately successful – married – Port Harcourt – six months later deserts – quit job – divorce proceedings start.

1961: Insead (business school in Fontainebleau, France) – jobs in consultancy in the UK (Sales Audits and Glacier Metal) – meet a better Julia in the Alps.

1965: at Jordans Quaker Meeting House (where Penn, founder of colony where Julia spent the war, buried) – "Friends, I take this my Friend Julia to be my wife, promising through divine assistance to be unto her a loyal and loving husband until it shall please the Lord by death to separate us" – started first company, Trenchermans (mail order delicatessen) – two daughters born – company highly seasonal and ultimately unprofitable – joined Rentokil to start French branch – during UK training successful in selling their new washroom hygiene service – French offer revoked – resigned, to start Waterloo Services Company – "where there's muck, there's brass" – third daughter born – moved from flat in Richmond to big house on the hill – seven years surveying washrooms in City offices – tedium relieved by starting Richmond in Europe Association – goal to twin Richmond with Fontainebleau – success after four years – followed by only foray into politics: chairing trans-party campaign in referendum to keep UK in EU – Richmond has highest percentage "Yes" vote in London boroughs.

1977: read about phototypesetting and prospects for small companies in The Economist – exploratory trip to USA – buy first Compugraphic machine and start Randall Typographic – over-trade – during civil servants' strike use tax money to keep going – Nemesis – but clever accountant ensures that key equipment saved from clutches of Inland Revenue bailiffs – all RT's trade creditors eventually paid in full – Waterloo Services continues as reliable cash cow – typesetting continues as Electronic Village Limited – with beginnings of personal computing and word processing, endeavours to find ways of turning authors' keystrokes into type without rekeying in composing room – ASPIC (Authors Standard Prepress Interfacing Codes) devised and promoted as The Way Ahead – unsuccessful with publishers, but principles adapted to dealing with tabular matter in tour operators' brochures and stockbrokers' publications, at time that modems were first being used for data transmission – highly profitable contracts with Thomson Holidays and Quilter Goodison.

1970s and 80s: family holidays either on narrow boats or camping in France, usually Britanny – Mirror dinghy on top of Danbury – then Volvo and trailer for Avon inflatables and outboard – one great trip aqua-camping down Dordogne, crew in one Avon, camping gear in other one, lashed alongside – three more going daily from campsite on Côte de Granit Rose to uninhabited offshore Ile Moléne. Not all sunshine and laughter, though – business downturn resulted in being unable to pay school fees – pain – periods of Julia's illnesses – general family grief – six month rift in marriage and separation healed by Relate.

1990s: business decline and fall – arrival of the laser printer and desk top publishing undermines phototypesetting companies, just as they had undermined hot metal ones fifteen years earlier – attempts to carry on single-handed in our empty-nester house, on the edge of Richmond Park – found keyboarding company in New Delhi to key manuscripts with ASPIC codes inserted – delays in freighting papers out and disks back made turn-round unacceptably slow for book publishers – abandonment, and start of frustrating attempts to develop electronic flashcards for foreign vocabulary learning in collaboration successively with Hungarian count, blind physicist and Greek Etonian – sold Waterloo Services to Rentokil – take in students at local English school to plug income/expenditure gap.

On holidays used to go as the cicerone, cavaliere serviente and chef for Julia and painting class ladies who took villas in Britanny, Andalucia, Tuscany and Provence – marketed and cooked while they painted –sat silently at dinner listening to their talk – what not known about stretch-marks scarcely worth knowing

2000s: Calliope CALL software developed with Muscovite company – but "with so much language learning stuff freely available on the internet, why should we buy yours?" – final throw of the dice with attempt to get EU funding for improved version fails at final hurdle –

2007: sell Richmond house to meet pension inadequacy – "More bricks for the buck in Buckingham" – develop web sites gratis for local organisations – take over cooking, to compensate for reluctance to do any of the cleaning of new house (had done enough cleaning to last a lifetime while running Waterloo Services).

Now: MA in Biography course at University of Buckingham – genesis of concept of From Clay Tablet to iTablet – "Death closes all: but … something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done, / Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods" (Tennyson's Ulysses) – excelsior!

My RAF diary

I started my National Service in January 1952. I chose to go into the RAF and to volunteer for flying duties, on the simple grounds that my father had been an RFC (Royal Flying Corps) pilot and my elder brother was an RAFVR (RAF Volunteer Reserve) one. I passed the tests for suitability for pilot training at RAF Hornchurch and then passed the 12 hours of "grading" (basic flying assessment) at RAF Cranwell on Tiger Moths, the venerable de Havilland biplane on which almost all wartime pilots had done their basic training.

As a cadet pilot I was now posted to Initial Training School at RAF Digby for square bashing and ground school instruction. We were informed that, after completing ITS and our basic flying course, our rank would change from AC2 (Aircraftsman Second Class) to Acting Pilot Officer and that, on successfully completing our advanced flying course, we would be commissioned as substantive Pilot Officers. We were all required to keep a diary which would be read by our flight commander and used in his ongoing assessment of our OQs (Officer Qualities). On Wednesday, March 5, this is how my diary begins.

I have only just received this note-nook, so I must endeavour to recall all the events of interest and importance that have occurred since my arrival at Digby, over a fortnight ago.

First arrivals at a station are always apt to be mortifying, especially as they always seem to coincide with a domestic night. …

I find it extraordinary reading through the diary today how very few of the incidents detailed in it I can now recall. In general terms I remember what a "domestic night" was: it was when you got boots and buttons especially shiny and when you laid out your clothes in your locker in a specified manner, shirts and underwear folded over cardboard templates to produce a symmetrical façade, ready for a barrack and kit inspection the following morning. My diary says nothing about the techniques of getting your boot caps mirror-bright and putting knife-edge creases in your uniform trousers. It's curious that these are the things I do remember, and one day I will write a post about these arts of which most people are (mercifully perhaps) unaware.

Of course it's very clear that these note-books do not constitute a diary in the generally-accepted sense, because you know that what you write is shortly to be read by somebody else, someone with considerable influence over your future. Any critical comments you do make must be of the mildest, written in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, such as the entry on Friday, March 14.

[…] I looked at the Minutes of the S.M.C. [Station Messing Committee] and noticed that a proposal had been passed for serving 'curry'. To-day at lunch the proposal bore fruit.

I recollect that the Catering Officer, among other duties, is responsible for the training of cooks. He should inform them, therefore, that curry is not made by adding a token amount of powder to a sultana-and-meat hash. The result of this process may be palatable, but by no stretch of the imagination could it be called curry.

We were instructed that our diaries should demonstrate an awareness of what was happening in the world. As a keen young cadet I did so a lot, as on Sunday, March 30.

[…] the South African situation. It is indeed confusing, what with the racial differences, the antithesis [sic: presumably 'antipathy' intended] of the two Malans, the legal casuistry of the Premier's lawyers in attempting to justify their clearly unconstitutional action of removing the Cape Coloureds from the electoral rolls without obtaining a two-thirds majority of both Houses in joint session, and the obvious inability of Strauss, the Opposition leader, to fill successfully Smuts' place. The 'Apartheid' policy, if carried out, threatens not only native rights but also the equality of the English as perpetuated by the South Africa Act.

I am glad to see you have taken an interest in Current Affairs last week. G Cutler FG. OFF. 31-3-52

This is by no means the only reference to the South African situation in the diary. I am particularly interested in re-reading this now, in light of the reading I have done this term about Apartheid (a word which I enclosed in quotes in 1952, emphasising its newness) and about the two men who above all were responsible for its demolition.

My entire entry on Wednesday, 28 May, is devoted to the problems of writing this particular kind of diary.

The diary-writers on this camp have none of the advantages of their fellow diarists elsewhere. In the first place, the latter can be presumed to doing something each day of sufficient interest and importance that can be recorded for their own amusement. But to write with a lively pen about a monotonous daily routine is difficult at the best of times, and often is well nigh impossible. Then again, Messrs. Pepys & Evelyn wrote down shrewd and often biting comments on their acquaintances, and recorded their deepest and most intense emotions, secure in the knowledge that only they would read those lines during their lifetime. We are encouraged to write just these things, but I regard my innermost thoughts as sacred, and for them to be scanned by anyone else, sacriligious [sic]. As for recording impressions of people, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to write in a private diary a character sketch of my superiors. But a favourable description of my Flight Commander might be regarded by him as fulsome, and an unfavourable one might cause him to take offence, the very last thing anyone wants to do.

So it can be understood why I write of nothing today. And very successfully too!

I am happy to record that my writing had the desired effect of getting a tick in the appropriate box on my OQ assessment form.

A very good diary – fully up to the standard required, and enjoyable reading.
4 Jun. 52 E MH Browne, Flt. Lt.

I am less happy to record that the diary I kept for most of my advanced flying training course at RAF Dalcross from September 1952 to April 1953 went missing at the time, and it resumes only fitfully from that Easter. It would have been interesting for me to read now what I wrote then about two incidents during a Scottish winter that I remember vividly, about which I will write on another occasion.

At the moment the aspect of the diary that immediately interests me is what it tells me about my father's flying career, rather than my own. When I was home on leave he talked a little about what he did in the RFC, almost all of which I had forgotten. This is briefly recorded in the pages of the diary, which will enable me to write the preamble to the story of How My Father Shot Himself Down.

Sergeant Randall

My father wrote nothing and said little to me about his activities in the Great War. My understanding is that at its outbreak in August 1914 he was working as a clerk in the Company Secretary's office in the City of London Electric Lighting Company (CLELCO), joining it on leaving a small Quaker boarding school in the Cotswolds at the age of 16.

I remember him talking approvingly of John Braithwaite, a stockbroker, descendant of a John Braithwaite, a seventeenth century Cumbrian farmer and one of the earliest Quakers. The official history of the firm Foster & Braithwaite describes its founding after Waterloo and how later in the century it took a role akin to that of a merchant banker today in promoting new companies, especially in the burgeoning electricity supply industry. One of these companies was CLELCO, of which a Braithwaite was Chairman until nationalisation of the industry in 1948. It must have assisted the career of an ambitious young man to have the same faith as the chairman of the company.

When Great Britain went to war with Germany many young Quaker men were uncertain about what part if any they should play in it. The Society of Friends had from its outset held pacifism as one of their central tenets, but this war seemed to be different from any other. To hold back entirely and have nothing whatsoever to do with the conflict seemed to many to be an inappropriate.

Philip Baker was the most prominent young Quaker of his generation, having been President of the Union at Cambridge and a finalist in the 1500 metres in the 1912 Olympic Games. He was chosen by a group of senior Friends to propose a middle course between pacifism and belligerence; this he did in a letter published in the periodical The Friend on 21 August 1914. In it he suggested that "young men Friends should form an Ambulance Corps to go to the scene of active operations, either in Belgium or elsewhere": the full letter Is shown at the bottom of this post.

My father was one of the young men who responded to this call and I think that he joined others at a camp organised by Baker at Jordans, a Buckinghamshire village with a Quaker Meeting House where William Penn, the founder of Philadelphia "the City of Brotherly Love", is buried. It was at Jordans, half a century later, that Julia and I married each other.

It seems that there was concern that if the unit went to Belgium it would be too heavily involved with the command structure of the British army, and so it was proposed that it went to Serbia, at that time being invaded by Germany's ally Austria-Hungary. The Serbian situation was precarious, however, so this plan too had to be abandoned. Baker told the men to return home and await events.

It seems my father did not want to wait and that he therefore enlisted in the non-combatant Royal Army Medical Corps. The sole hard evidence I have of what happened next is the inscription in a full morocco-bound edition of Milton's verse on my book shelves.

Sargeant [sic] Randall
A token of appreciation of the hard and very efficient work done as section commander of J Section T Coy RAMC
J Gordon Fleming
Lt RAMC
Llandridnod Wells, May 7th 1915
Best wishes for your welfare on active service

The choice would not have been accidental. As a gift to a young man of half-formed literary tastes and austere spiritual cast of mind, a book including an epic poem which sets out to "justify the ways of God to men", by a contemporary of the proto-Quaker George Fox, was singularly appropriate. Today though, almost a century later, it is difficult for us to envisage any officer giving any NCO a book of verse before his departure on active service to Afghanistan.

Sergeant Randall did not serve on the Western Front: he was sent to the Mediterranean theatre. The photograph shows him after he had been commissioned. Sometime and somewhere out there he concluded that stitching soldiers up so that they could fight again was morally no different from fighting oneself, so he abandoned his non-combatant status and enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps.

What happened later

John Braithwaite served with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, became Chairman of the London Stock Exchange in 1949 and was dubbed Sir John Braithwaite in 1953.

Philip Baker led the first Friends' Ambulance Unit to Belgium late in 1914 and was adjutant of the Unit in Italy 1915-1918. He won a silver medal in the 1500 metres at the 1920 Olympic Games, assisted in the forming of the League of Nations, entered parliament as a Labour MP and, as Philip Noel-Baker, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959.

Harry Randall rejoined CLELCO on demobilisation in 1919. More incidents in my father's life will be told soon. Stories in draft form are
How my father shot himself down
How my father built the Tate Modern

Christmas lunch: more

Twelve of us sat down to lunch, eleven women and one man. Over pudding JMJ asked me, "How do you feel, being in a minority of one?"

"Well, actually, I feel very easy about it. Some years back I used to go with Julia and a bunch of her friends to be their cook in the villas they rented. I'd sit quietly at dinner and listen agog while they discussed all sorts of things I'd no idea about. You see, with no other men present I felt absolutely no need to try and compete: I could just sit back and relax."

We went to Britanny, Andalucia, Tuscany, Provence. I saw myself as their troubadour, their majordomo, even (in my wilder flights of fancy) their cavaliere servente: the sisterhood saw me as a superannuated male Cinderella, whose place was in the kitchen.

I did get out of the kitchen quite a lot, though. In Provence the landlord of the village houses we had rented was a retired air force officer who had flown in the Patrouille de France, the French equivalent of the Red Arrows. He took me to see his microlight aircraft in a barn at the edge of a field nearby.

It had a tiny, egg-shaped fuselage with a single-seat open cockpit . This was mounted on a tricycle undercarriage and had a small two-stroke engine driving the propeller behind it. A fabric-covered triangular wing sat atop a short pylon behind the cockpit. From the wing hung an aluminium triangle, pushing and pulling which provided the sole means of manoeuvring the aircraft.

"Would you like to fly it?" he asked. The question dismayed me. I hadn't flown solo for years. They say that flying is like cycling, once you know how you don't forget, but even so … Remember, this was a Frenchman asking an Englishman, so national honour demanded that I reply "Bien sûr!", whatever may have been my not inconsiderable misgivings.

He motioned for me to get in. I did so, fitting snugly in the cockpit. "Quelle est la vitesse d'atterrissage?" There were quite a lot of other things I wanted to know, but finding out the landing speed seemed the most important at the time. He didn't reply. Instead, he gesticulated for me to get up and sit on the rear rim of the cockpit. I did so, with my bottom seemingly just inches from the propeller. Only then did I realise, with a spasm of relief, that he was getting in too: only then did I notice that there were safety harnesses for two people.

The flight was fun. Cruising in the sunshine at two thousand feet with the Provençal countryside unfolding slowly below: what's not to like? But I reckoned that it would be a bit boring after a while so that, although there's a microlight field at Finmere just down the road, cruising over soggy north Buckinghamshire doesn't cut the mustard in quite the same way.

When we were in Brittany I used to sit quite a lot in a café overlooking the little harbour at Camaret and idly read a bit write a poem about the lady painters. I'm told that this is framed and in the downstairs loo at Ar Sparfel, the house where we were staying nearby and which was owned by one of them.

The Ballad of Ar Sparfel

Upon a Breton headland bare
There stands the house called Ar Sparfel:
Full seven dames were gathered there,
To gossip and to paint pell-mell.

With brushes cleaned and dishes cleared
Then chins did wag a-main,
When above the chat was faintly heard
A tapping at the window-pane.

`What can it be?' the beldames crowed
And 'neath the casement made a gap
Through which there slid a slimy toad
A-hopping straight on Bella's lap.

Full well she knew the fairy tale,
So swift she kissed the toad herself:
Before her stood, in coat of mail,
A doughty, comely, princely elf.

`From thrall of Morgan's curse, fair dame,
Your transforming kiss has rescued me:
Now, come ye all to my father's haem
Across the deep and silvery sea.'

So with the prince the seven dames flew
Up through the shining star-filled night
And all the horns of faerie blew
A welcome fanfare of delight.

Straight within the King of Elfland's hall
Went they, their aerie journey done.
`What boon shall I grant each and all,
For bringing back my only son?'

`O puissant king,' quoth Annabel,
`To catch the hues of earth and air
And limn all forms and patterns well
In paint upon a canvas bare –

This is the quest upon which we're bound:
Yet still our daubs go oft awry
And shape and colour we confound
Despite whatever tricks we try.'

'This is a goodly boon, I ween,
And now I cast the painting spell –
Just as long as you keep clean
The dining hall of Ar Sparfel.'

As from a dream those dames awoke
And to their easels flew everyone:
Such wonders came from every stroke
As each their master-work begun.

Such colours flowed from Bronwen's brush!
Priscilla, Joseph's coat surpassed!
From Renate's palette did rainbows gush
And Julia the spectrum on her canvas cast!

Such pictures were not ever seen
By mortal eye before,
Each capturing some Breton scene
In wondrous hue and form.

***
Two gallant youths from Albion sailed
(Each to each was like a brother)
By the porter they were gladly hailed;
Charles the one and Caspar the other.

Eftsoons Annabel and Frances then
Their sons did welcome well:
`O well arrived, bonnie young men,
To our hall of Ar Sparfel.'

A festal banquet then was laid,
And on the table spread:
But when the final toast was made
They all went straight to bed.

***
With woeful heart the elfen king
Did lift the painting spell:
Artistic skill is now the only thing
Found not at Ar Sparfel.

The moral of this tale is clear:
Be certain, when you sit to sup,
It's fine to revel wïth good cheer
If you don't forget the washing-up !

Crisis? What crisis?

Julia read my post Perilous poems in draft before I published it and ruefully remarked "You've never written me a poem!"

She forgets. On one of a pair of Georgian wine glasses in the cabinet in our front room I had this couplet inscribed about thirty years ago:

A richt guid wine, man's gleefu' for a day
But wi' a richt guid wife, for e'er and aye

"But that's frivolous! What about something serious?" As I left the table to go to my office she said to our granddaughter Izzy, newly-arrived from South Africa, "He's gone upstairs to write something!" Within moments though I came back with a poem typeset by me in Bembo, dated 25.12.98, signed AGR pro JMR scripsit and unromantically entitled The Battle of Maldon: a retrospective.

She could not recall my showing or giving it to her; I cannot recall why I wrote it; judging from the last four lines something was going badly wrong and I needed something to stiffen both our backbones. Most of the poem is a rewriting in verse of an English prose translation of the incomplete Anglo Saxon poem about the battle fought in 991 between the Englishmen of Essex and a marauding Viking host. My verse ends thus:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Then Byrhtwold, the earl's old friend,
To raise our flagging hopes before what might be the end
With axe aloft moved towards the battle's closest press
And to us few remaining cried, Yet, as our might grows less,
Our will shall be the harder; our heart the keener,
Our valour greater: such shall be our troop's demeanour!

Ten centuries later you and I find ourselves at such a place,
But armed with knowing what our forebears did. Your grace,
Your grit, your strength – my friend, my lode-star and my bride –
Ensures our final vantage, sanctioned at this Christmastide.

But what was this place in which we find ourselves? What is the crisis? There had been some fairly serious health problems, but surely these had been overcome by then; on the business front I was continuing to try to make money from web-based language-learning software, but the losses I was incurring were not crippling; our daughters were all alright. We are both baffled.

I tell the story to demonstrate a problem of biography-writing about which I have seen nothing written in my background reading on this course: what if the interviewee can't remember? Imagine that I'm faced with an earnest young American PhD student and he shows me this document and asks me to explain its significance. Am I going to say I've forgotten, indicating I'm going gaga? Or am I going to make up something plausible? I suspect I'd do the latter.

Post script
Of course, it just could be that the dreaded Alzheimer's really is taking hold, but as long as I can remember the first name of the good doctor I'm OK. It was … It was … Alois! And I didn't even have to google it!

Perilous poems

The biography conference I went to a couple of Saturdays ago started with an address which included Auden's sonnet "Who's Who": A shilling life will give you all the facts…

This took me back over half a century to the occasion of the inaugural lecture which Auden gave on becoming Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1956. That craggy, lined face which is so familiar from photographs looked even craggier in the flesh. In his smoker's voice he said some memorable things about poetry and its writing.

By singular coincidence the following Thursday the local U3A's Poetry Group was to meet, in our house, to hear about Auden from a semi-retired Eng. Lit. teacher. I contacted the teacher to suggest that the sonnet could be a perfect introduction to giving a potted biography of the poet, something that is always done at these meetings, and should be added to the list of poems on which he was going to expound. I also suggested that I contribute my recollections of his lecture and read one of the poems he cited when talking about what makes a poem. However he chose not to accept the suggestion, as his lecture was already planned, and so, like the protagonist of "The Shield of Achilles", one of the poems on his list, I chose to sulk in my tent.

My blog is of course a perfect place on which I can record my recollections and which the group members can if they wish read an outline of what I would have said at that U3A meeting. I can remember just three points Professor Auden made.

One of the elements, he surprisingly argued, that can make a poem is a list of names. He cited the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad and the roll-call of warriors’ names in Henry V’s Agincourt speech. Another example he gave, which I remember because of my liking for Kipling, is his Mine Sweepers. The poem deals with an incident in the Great War when enemy mines are laid off the Kentish coast. Each of the three verses ends with this, or a slight variant of it:
"Sweepers – Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain."

He also talked of his ongoing lack of confidence in his Muse. Only when he was actually writing a poem, he said, could he actually say that he was a poet and of course while he was writing it he was thinking of other things. When he had finished he would wonder whether he would ever again be able to write another one. He tolerated being called a poet by other people because they wouldn't understand what he was talking about if he were to deny it and besides, it was quicker and simpler to do so.

The final point I recall was his saying that when writing about The Belovéd a poet is not actually thinking about her (or, I suppose, in his case him), but about himself. It is his feelings he is considering, not hers: she may be the cause of those feelings, but she is not the real subject of the poem.

I have just Googled [auden "inaugural lecture" oxford] and find that the lecture has been printed under the title of Making, Knowing and Judging, but sites which refer to it seem to be password-protected. It'll be interesting during the vacation to look at the transcript and see whether what I recall is correct, and what much more important insights I have totally forgotten.

That final point was not in my mind when four years later I wrote a sonnet to a young woman who had just broken off our engagement. I was still in Kano, where I had been peddling paraffin for Shell for a year and whither she had come from London to visit me. I do not remember how or why the bizarre idea emerged that for the Easter weekend three of us should go to Fort Lamy in a French colony adjacent to Nigeria; nor (happily) do I remember the events which resulted in my driving back recklessly and alone along four hundred miles of dusty laterite roads, with the accelerator of my VW pressed to the floor; nor what happened when the day after she left for England.

Nor do I remember why on earth I thought that our relationship could – or even should – be revived. I can only suppose, with the benefit of five decades of hindsight, that I was envisaging a future being spent in black Africa where single white women were scarce and unalluring.

So, the sonnet was sent, despite its limping scansion, to accompany a bouquet of Interflora's best red roses.

They were too small, too slight a thing to give,
Those roses: they fade and wither with the day
And die tomorrow, while the thorns survive
The flowers' ephemeral beauty, fresh as May.
Is this not like our lives, a Janus face
That smiles, but turns to frown, the flower, the thorn?
The one, those fleeting moments of glad grace,
The other, hurt of man, alone, forlorn.
But no: the flower lives, the thorn it dies.
The thorn is torn away to make the pyre
From which the Phoenix soon will stir, and rise
On reborn wings, with youth and strength entire.
Despite the twists our lives do run,
The ending's well, where 'tis well begun.

This flamboyant gesture led to my seeing her again when I returned to England on leave in July. I suppose that it was a combination of injured pride on my part and guilt on hers that led to us getting married in St John's Wood in September. Somewhere there is a picture of me and my Best Man standing beside the porch of the church and on the wall behind a placard exhorting passers-by to TAKE A CHANCE. At the time it did not seem like an ill omen.

Bon Viveur II and biography

The tutorial this week clashed with the AGM of the boat syndicate we belong to, so I went to the former and Julia to the latter.

The picture above shows the boat, Bon Viveur II, completed in 2006, which lives on the Canal du Midi in the spring and autumn and the Canal de Bourgogne in the summer. The syndicate comprises a dozen couples who jointly own the vessel, with each couple having the entitlement to use it for the same specified period each year: we have the first cruise of the year, in the first fortnight in April.

The annual general meeting this year was more upbeat and positive than in previous years, primarily because the boat builder and sponsor of the syndicate had finally ended his connection with it. The responsibility for ensuring that the vessel was ship-shape at the beginning of the season had not been properly established at the outset, which resulted in our misfortune last year in going on board, in the evening and at a mooring in a remote village, to find that neither the water system nor the electrics were working. But, as they say, worse things happen at sea.

The syndicate management could now organise things on a properly business-like basis and the agenda was dealt with briskly and efficiently. At lunch afterwards Sue Hill, our redoubtable Hon. Sec., knowing that I was absent because of the course I am doing, told Julia that she has the diary of a great-uncle of hers in which the last entry records his premonition that the following day he would meet his death: he did.

Sue said that she would be happy to lend the diary to me. I've been wondering whether such a fragment could possibly be built up into a mini-biography, if there are no other papers or records about him. I believe it could, if there was sufficient of interest within the diary. It could, perhaps, be done at three levels: the campaign, within the context of the war on the Western Front as a whole; the regiment, and the training of troops; and the battle, and the death.

Now, if this were something that a dutiful kinsman would like to see produced as a limited edition, using on-demand printing, for circulating to other relatives, then this is something that I could consider doing as a preliminary 20,000-word thesis since it would provide a personal example to illustrate my major thesis, The Impact of New Technology on the Creation of Biography. I'll e-mail Sue about this tomorrow.

Maybe I'm running the risk of biting off more than I can chew: but "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Reading for week seven

The Liberated Women whose autobiographies have been prescribed for this week's tutorial are Diana Athill, author of Stet, and Lorna Sage, author of Bad Blood. Much will be said about them today [i.e. Tuesday: this was started on the train to Marylebone, and only completed on Saturday] and the discussion will carry on from last week about what they were liberating themselves from and how far they succeeded in doing so. I want in this post to look at the entrepreneur in each of the books and to consider whether I shared any of his characteristics during my career.

Diana Athill worked in publishing all her life. Her particular talent lay in editing, which at its highest level involves helping an author to produce coherent, grammatical and readable text. Although she was for a long time a director of the firm she worked for, she never calls herself a publisher. That role was firmly exercised by her megalomaniac boss, the émigré Hungarian Andre Deutsch.

He started the first of his companies just after the war on a shoestring, a fifth of the amount normally reckoned the minimum to set up in publishing. Because of this, he controlled costs ferociously, from insisting that the light was switched off if there was no one in the office to cramming as many desks as he could into it and delaying moving into bigger premises until it was absolutely necessary. Employees, especially the women, were paid even less than elsewhere in the poorly-paid industry. When, after years of being a director, Diana asked for a company car, Andre tried to fob her off with a Deux Chevaux, seeking to sell it on the basis of its bohemian chic.

When he started he already had considerable sales experience and he soon perforce gained expertise in all the nitty-gritty in making books and turning them into cash. He knew best: he didn't think he knew best: he knew he knew best. One of the tasks which Diana had to undertake, one which she considered was a bore and a chore, was advertising their wares, but if an ad was placed in a paper too far away from the main text, it was Andre who would ring up and complain and ask for a better position next time.

His first make-or-break venture was publishing the UK edition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. It was savaged in a preliminary review in the Sunday Times which called for a ban on publication because of its perceived obscenity: such a ban would have bankrupted the company. Andre woke Diana up, much to her annoyance, at eight thirty on Sunday morning and insisted that they write a letter to the most influential critic in the country, begging him to write a review saying that the book was not obscene, and drive round to put it through his letter box at once. "In retrospect," Diana writes, "the chief value of our outing was that it was something to do in this nerve-racking situation."

The principal male character in the first part of Lorna's story of her childhood and adolescence is her appalling grandfather, vicar of a village on the Welsh border. His daughter married Eric Stockton, son of the local coal merchant early in the war. He comes as a stranger into Lorna's life after the war, returning after rising through the ranks to become an infantry officer in Normandy and Germany. His talk, both at home and in the business he had taken over from his father, was all of discipline and efficiency: as she writes, "to Knock the Business into Shape he had to work all hours and do nearly everything himself. … This was the price he paid for a job in which he could Be His Own Boss."

These two men I understand perfectly, even though I never had to go through such gruelling times myself. A loan from my American foster-brother-in-law enabled me to start a capital-intensive phototypesetting company in 1977 after seven years of slow but steady growth of my increasingly unchallenging washroom hygiene company. The loan was repaid before over-trading resulted in the Inland Revenue bailiffs entering my composing room in 1981: but this story, and how I shared Andre's drive to action in a crisis and Eric's drive to impose order, must wait for another post.

Likewise I am reluctant at this stage to write about my besetting fault: like Andre, I think I know best. This has created problems both early in my career while I was still employed and employable and after I finally retired and moved to Buckingham. I hesitate to write more.

Autobiography through a hundred pairs of eyes

What would you do if your Significant Other terminated your relationship by e-mail?

When a middle-aged French artist was jilted electronically she turned to the Sisterhood. She asked scores of other women to examine the words of the message, each through the prism of her own expertise. The sum of this is Sophie Calle: talking to strangers, a multimedia exhibition now showing at the Whitechapel Gallery.

The focus of the exhibition is a bank of video screens, a giant one flanked by 3×3 on one side and 3×8 on the other. On each of the smaller screens is a woman soundlessly interpreting the message: read in French, English, German, Italian and Spanish; sung to the tune of a baccarole; sung as a fado; read/performed by a clown. On the larger one each of the 33 is successively displayed with sound. Around the gallery are dozens of graphical displays, with the woman's name and her speciality above each one.

Here is the message.

Sophie,

I have been meaning to write and reply to your last e-mail for a while. ... [ "It's not my fault", repeated a dozen different ways] ...

But it would be the worst kind of masquerade to prolong a situation now when, you know as well as I do, it has become irreparable by the standards of the very love I have for you and you have for me, a love which is now forcing me to be so frank with you, as final proof of what happened between us and will always be unique.

I would have liked things to have turned out differently.

Take care of yourself.

X

Here are extracts from the reactions of some of the 107 women who variously interpreted the message.

TRANSLATOR

Sophie,
The problem starts straight away! In English we still tend to use the word "Dear" even in e-mails, or we cut the salutation right down to "hi". Putting the name by itself sounds quite curt in English. It doesn't have the same impact in French: the French tend to do this in e-mails. I've decided to leave it in the hope that it sounds serious rather than abrupt.

But it would be the worst kind of masquerade … and will always be unique.
This is another of his convoluted emotional sentences. It could be reworked any number of times but I am keen not to iron out the way he strings together clauses; it is a sign of his emotional state when he is writing, with ideas piling on top of each other.

X
This is not really a translator's comment but a more general one. I am intrigued by this "X". Is it a kiss, or the writer's initial? It would be so much more tender to end with a kiss ... but there is something rather presumptuous about leaving just a kiss or a simple initial at the end of such a solemn and final letter perhaps I am reading too much into this "X": it may be a simple device used by Sophie to hide the letter-writer's identity.

LATINIST

Sophie,
Ignotus vir Sophiae s.d.
The Latins named themselves at the beginning of a letter, not at the end. I have used ignotus to translate "X" being, as in Harry Potter, one whose name must not be spoken ... cuius nomen non dicendum est.

I have been meaning to write and reply to your last e-mail for a while
... nuntio electronic tuo ...
Since the word "email" obviously does not exist in classical Latin, I have adopted the translation adopted in the Lexicon Recentis Latinatis, published by the Vatican (Libraria Editoria Vaticana)

[But it would be the worst kind of masquerade … and will always be unique.]
This succession of subordinate (and often relative) clauses is in the text. I feel obliged to reproduce it, even though I don't think it is very felicitous.

[I would have liked things to have turned out differently.]
The unreality of the past, or an attenuated affirmation? I plump for the unreality.

Take care of yourself.
The Latins always ended their letters with vale (keep well). It is rather amusing that the gentleman should echo our formula of farewell. I cannot help thinking of the seal with which Rodolphe secures his letter of separation to Emma Bovary, and which bears the motto: Amor nel cor [love in the heart]

CRIMINOLOGIST

Analysis of an anonymous letter

... He is an authentic manipulator, perverse, psychologically dangerous and/or a great writer.

To be avoided at all costs.

HEADHUNTER

... applicant with a convoluted form of speech.

ACCOUNTANT

Total assets: I will always love you

Total liabilities: I can never become your friend

EXPERT IN WOMEN'S RIGHTS

PHEW!

Added 26 November

I have searched in vain this morning for the complete original text: it was not displayed at the Whitechapel and I have not been able to find it via Google. Curious!

Oxford Landing

After Tuesday's tutorial I took the 205 bus from Marylebone, where tutorials are now held, to City Road, close to Henny's home in Clerkenwell. I popped into the newsagent cum off licence next to the bus stop to get a bottle to accompany the promised shepherd's pie. The range of the wines on offer was small but included a couple of good Aussie brands, Hardys and Oxford Landing: I chose the latter's Shiraz.

On my desk back in Buckingham I have a 5" x 3" plaque of black bakelite, with white lettering embossed on it.

The plaque was originally on the instrument panel of an Airspeed Oxford, the plane built by the company founded by Nevil Shute, a man much more widely known as a novelist than as an aeronautical engineer. The Oxford was the twin-engined aircraft on which I did my advanced flying training at R.A.F. Dalcross (now Inverness Airport) in 1952–1953.

Click here to go to the last paragraph of this post if you are profoundly uninterested in how to land an Oxford.

Flaps are lowered when you are preparing to land your aircraft. You lower them when you are on the downwind leg of the circuit prior to turning onto your final approach and when your Oxford is flying at a speed lower than 120 miles per hour as shown on the Air Speed Indicator. This has the effect of lowering your stalling speed, the speed at which your aircraft starts falling out of the sky.

A way in which you can demonstrate to yourself the principle of flight is to find a large spoon with a hole at the top of the handle through which you loop a piece of string. Holding the string, turn on the tap on your kitchen sink and draw the spoon towards the flowing water with the concave side towards it. Common sense suggests that, if you were to swing the spoon into the water it would be pushed away by the little torrent. You will find that this is not so. The opposite thing happens: the spoon is drawn further into the torrent.

What's happening is that the water is speeding up as it flows over the convexity of the spoon and in so doing the water pressure becomes less than in the flow on either side of it so that the spoon is, as it were, sucked into the torrent. If you understand that air behaves like a liquid, but in gaseous form, and if you realise that the cross-section of the convexity of the spoon is roughly the same as the cross-section of an aircraft's wing, you will begin to see how it is that an aircraft stays airborne.

In aeronautical terminology this suction is the force called lift. The force that propels the aircraft forward, causing the air to flow over the wing is called thrust, while the one that imposes an upper limit to its speed is drag. When the upward force lift is balanced by the downward force weight, and the forward force thrust is balanced by the backward force drag, the aircraft flies at an even speed, neither ascending nor descending.

If you are flying that hypothetical aircraft and you throttle back slightly so that you reduce your thrust, then the decrease in pressure in the flow of air over the top of the wing and your lift reduces as well. The nose of the aircraft drops slightly and you lose height. You can counteract this by pulling your stick (the column between your knees which controls the ailerons on the wing and the elevators on the tailplane), thus bringing the nose up slightly. The air now has to travel slightly further, pressure is decreased, lift is increased and equilibrium is restored. There comes a point, however, beyond which you can no longer safely pull the nose up.

You will have observed how water in a stream behaves as it approaches and then enters a rapid. The flow is smooth to begin with but then as it gets even faster the current breaks up into whorls and eddies. The flow has gone, in science-speak, from laminar to turbulent. Exactly the same thing happens to air flowing over a wing. At the moment that the air current becomes turbulent, the lift generated by the decrease in pressure is suddenly lost and the aircraft falls.

This, in essence, is what happens when you make a landing in an aircraft with two wheels in front and a smaller one under the tail. As you make your approach to the runway or landing field, you start by lowering your flaps which effectively increases the wing area and thus the lift that is generated. As you slowly throttle back, so the aircraft descends; as you gradually lift your nose, so the speed drops off. If you have judged things correctly, your aircraft is very close to the ground with the wheels in front and behind parallel to the ground. At that point you throttle back completely and pull the stick back into your stomach so that the speed falls below the stalling speed and your aircraft drops out of the few inches of sky left beneath it and you feel a tiny bump and you hear a slight squeak, as the rubber on the stationary wheels suddenly begin to rotate rapidly, and you feel a moment of triumph for pulling off a perfect three-point landing.

That is the theory. In practice, this is hard to do. One of the tests we had to do in April 1953 during our final assessment before being awarded our wings was carrying out a spot landing without power, which is to say that I was expected to throttle back fully at the end of the downwind leg of the circuit and then touch the aircraft down within x yards of a spot marked on the runway.

Now, throughout all my previous assessments I had been rated just an average pilot and spot landings are hard enough at the best of times, even if you are an excellent one. Therefore I devised a devious scheme to ensure success. I determined on doing two things. One, I would not throttle back entirely at the end of the downwind leg but leave the engine ticking over slightly above idling, so that when I did throttle back (with the difference in engine noise undetectable, I hoped, to onlookers) speed and so lift would be reduced. Two, I would when I was just in front of the spot raise my flaps so that lift would be further reduced. This is what I in fact did, and it worked. The only trouble was that my approach had been slightly too high, so that when I simultaneously throttled back completely, raised the flaps and pulled the stick hard back, I was several feet above the runway and the aircraft fell to ground with a spine-jarring thud.

This story of my Oxford Landing has a happy ending, though. I did touch down sufficiently close to the spot to pass. And Mr Shute did build his aeroplanes to be sufficiently robust to survive unscathed abuse from pilots such as me.

History, Mystery & Myth: 2

Read something about the conference at which these papers were given here.

Describing a boat race, Baroness Ouida is alleged to have written, "All rowed fast, but none so fast as Stroke". The same may be said of the papers which were contributed to this conference. For reasons of space and time, however, I am selecting just six out of sixteen about which to write in telegraphese, primarily as an aide memoire to myself about those that particularly interested me.

Rebecca Pinner (University of East Anglia):
How to Make Saints and Influence People: Biography, Myth and Memory in the Cult of St Edmund
Protagonist most mythic of all those featured in conference – all that's definite is (i) AS Chronicles of 870 ("Last year King E [of East Anglia] slain by Danes") and (ii) handful of coins – next (known, written) account c.987 (Abbo of Flury Passio Sancti Edmundi) based on report by E's ancient armour-bearer – next c.1090 (Archdeacon Hermann De Miraculis Sancti Edmundi) based on "confiding testimony of living persons" (what? after 200 years? – Ed) – next c.1150 (Geoffrey of Wells De Infantia Sancti Edmundi) based on tales told by monks associated with Bury St E – myth is the slow accretion of stories. Myth still has potency – recent campaign to replace foreign (fictitious?) St George as England's patron by native St E (but what about St Alban? not E/Anglish – Ed) – superstition about not crossing certain Norfolk bridge when going to get married.

Leo Klein: Biography or Pornography?
Concern about motives for her writing biography of UK's (almost) last public hangman, Albert Pierrepoint – conflict between her abolitionist/ liberal views and central topic which "emits the strongest of all the stinks" (R West on Nuremburg Trials) – problem about paucity of material about AP – pain at interviewing some of AP's acquaintances – inability to confront AP's "equipment" (the tools of his trade, kept under the marital bed, about which his wife never enquired) – writing about some he hanged (WW2 German spies, traitor Amery, halfwit Bentley, lover-killer Ellis) and reading last letters – current project not dissimilar (women, esp. mothers, in Broadmoor [asylum for criminally insane]).

Marek Pawlicki (Jagiellonian University, Cracow): Writing about the 'happy never-returning time': truth and manipulation in autobiography
The narrator and the protagonist – the teller of the story and who the story is about – one and the same in Autobiography? Yes, but. Time has elapsed between the incident and writing about it – the former about a child, the latter by an adult, as in Tolstoy's anecdote (in trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth) of failing to be able to read out poem on babushka's Name Day – authority given to story by writing in First Person, Past Tense. Compare this with J M Coetzee's tale (Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life) of failing a Boy Scout test – written in Third Person, Present Tense – the writer thereby throws off the authority of the author. This becomes (using JMC's neologism) an autrebiography.

Kirby Joris (Université Catholique de Louvain): Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries (2007-): When Myth Becomes His-Story
GB has written 3 out of projected 9 whodunnits with OW the sleuth – attempt by GB to give accurate depiction of OW via fictional incidents in his life – these interposed within real incidents, e.g. visit to USA, Paris &c – narrated by third person, the real Robert Sherard (OW's friend and first biographer), writing fictionally – "I kept a journal … I was there: I was the witness" – supposed journal embargoed (c.f. last week's tutorial) for 50 years. GB claims "tried to be as accurate as possible" – yet Vol 1 starts with traditional disclaimer: "Any resemblance … purely coincidental".

Amber K. Regis (Keele University): Definitive Lives? Portraits of Vita Sackville-West
Biography's "primal scene" (as described by KH in opening address, as when the trunk in attic creakingly opened and dusty bundle of letters finally reveals The Truth) of VSW's memoirs being found in slit-open Gladstone bag in tower of ancestral Sissinghurst – prefaced by family tree of VSW m. Harold Nicolson, begets Nigel, begets Adam – each writes different (but overlapping) accounts of different aspects of VSW's (and others') relationships – 50 lesbian lovers (one Virginia Woolf [v briefly], hence overlap with Bloomsbury outpourings), yet a happy marriage, claims NN – "It's like a family of butchers, you know, butchers chop up pigs, we write books", states AN – and see his interview on identitytheory.com - and remember the various TV shows. The story/ history/ biography becomes a palimpsest (parchment/ vellum erased and overwritten, but old text still detectable) – R Holmes' conclusion: "definitive life a Chimera". Plea from floor not to forget marginalised/ demonised Violet Trefusis.

Catalina Botez (University of Konstanz) Primo Levi's The Periodic Table or the Story of a Carbon Atom
PL distinguished chemist, Italian Jew, Auschwitz survivor, eventual suicide, wrote autobiog with chapter named after an element, starting with Argon (inert) and ending with Carbon (life prerequisite). Enchanting tale unfolded by delightful lady but (like, alas, others, esp. Chair of this session) auricular sense challenged: next time, please, microphones or pre-conference instruction to speak up.

Daughter Number One’s labola

Roz Cryer, née Rosamund Mary Randall, lives with her husband Paul in KwaZulu Natal. They got married on 10 July 2004 and the final part of the ceremony, which took place in our house in Richmond, is described in the words I then spoke. I tell this story to explain why I have an interest in South African history which will manifest itself in the presentation I am having to give at our tutorial on Tuesday.

In that part of South Africa where Paul comes from, arranging a marriage is a long and complex business. In Zulu society an uncle of the would-be groom goes to an uncle of the would-be bride to start the process of finding out what the labola will be. Labola is the amount, usually payable in cows, which a groom must pay to the bride's father before a marriage can take place.

The first stage of the process is establishing what preliminary goods the bride's father wishes to receive before he reveals what Iabola he is seeking. There will be a number of things on this list of goods, but almost always it will include a phutu [maize meal porridge] pot: you can see over there the pot which has been given as part of the current proceedings.

Once the goods have been given, then the real business of horse-trading (or, rather, cow trading) begins. A delegation of uncles and brothers of the groom meet a group of uncles and brothers of the bride to learn what labola is sought. A typical labola is 11 cows: for a princess it is 19 cows.

In this case, because of the distance between Durban and Richmond, the parties agreed that negotiations would be carried out by e-mail between the principals. I accordingly let Paul know that, although Roz is not of course an actual Zulu princess, as far as I am concerned she is worth the same as one, and that Paul would therefore have to give me 19 cows in order to be allowed to marry my daughter.

The e-mail I received back frankly astounded me. Far from accepting with alacrity the hand of our Sweet Lass Of Richmond Hill, he came back with a derisory counter-offer. Firstly, Paul said that, because Roz doesn't know how to brew beer, her worth is halved to 9 cows. Then, because Roz would refuse to allow him to have more than one wife, her worth is reduced to 4 goats. Then, because Roz knows nothing about farming, her worth is reduced to a single chicken. Finally, because Roz is likely to answer him back the whole time, he feels her worth to be no more than a Kentucky Fried Chicked drumstick and a Diet Coke.

My problem at this stage of negotiations was that Paul was right on all those charges. All I could do was counter-attack. Firstly, I told Paul that, because he can't speak Zulu very well, his worth as a groom is halved. Then, he never combs his hair and only shaves once a month, it is halved again. Then, because he will be spending half his time away from the matrimonial kraal, gallivanting off through the bush, it's halved yet again. However, I concluded, as a gesture of goodwill and in no way admitting that Roz is worth an udder less than 19 cows, I was prepared to reduce the price to 17 cows.

This price was agreed, and so the ceremony which many of you have just attended was able to take place. But one thing remains to be done, and that is the payment of the labola. This is done after the father of the bride formally addresses the groom.

For seventeen kine this woman shall be thine:
Let thy brother now deliver!

[17 cut-out cardboard cows were now pulled into view by Stuart Cryer]

I accept these seventeen kine:
Now this woman is truly thine!

A false move: reading for the bar

Warning In my post Online Autobiographies I stated my intention of using this blog to write something about my earlier life when something that happened recently reminded me about it. Today's post is about an incident or a period in my past, and not about what appears at the top of the page, On the Biography Course at the University of Buckingham. It is written so that it can be put together at the end of the course with other similar posts to be my rough-and-ready memoir: these will be of possible interest only to my kith and kin.

I had an e-mail from Vicki on Monday in which she wrote

I am having a lot of pleasure reading your blogs, loved the recent one about Jonny on the 5/11. I was grateful at his funeral for you explaining the REAL Jon to his friends in the congregation. Everyone asked me if you were a barrister... which Jon thought you would be.

This recalled to me my abortive effort in my early forties to become a barrister. Now that I sit down to try and write about it I am dismayed about how little I remember about that time. Browsing through Alan Clarke's The Last Diaries yesterday evening in preparation for today's tutorial I was comforted to read I am not alone in this. He wrote

Earlier I had done a teeny home movie on 'Eton during the war', masterminded by a boy/beak team. And was disconcerted at how thin were my memory and my recollections

I had by 1975 been running my washroom hygiene company Waterloo Services for five years and I was getting bored. I had developed the method of selling contracts for our quarterly treatments sufficiently well so that I could employ others to take over the sales function. Turnover was building up nicely and I convinced the company's reluctant chairman that I could administer the company's continued growth and read for the bar at the same time.

I got a couple of barristers (my neighbour and boon companion, SKO'M, and the cox of the college boat when we were both up at Trinity, WKT) to propose and second me for admission as a member of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, enrolled for a correspondence course with the College of Law at Braboeuf Manor, ate the first of my obligatory dinners and began to read Cheshire and Fifoot's Contract Law.

At this point I am going to stop. My excuse is that I need to get my things together and drive to Bicester North to take the train to London* Marylebone for our weekly tutorial, but perhaps the truth of the matter is that I find it difficult to write about such an unsuccessful episode in my life. At least I've admitted that I didn't cut the mustard as a would-be barrister. Perhaps I'll be able to come back to this later, like a dog to its vomit, and add some further words about this failed venture.

* Sutton's Law must explain why a couple of the University of Buckingham's postgraduate courses now carry out their teaching in London and not on campus, ten minutes' walk from home. Sutton's Law is named after the bank robber Willie Sutton, who reputedly replied to a reporter's inquiry as to why he robbed banks by saying "because that's where the money is." Wikipedia reports that in his ghosted autobiography Willie denies ever having said it. Who's to say?

Remembrance Sunday

Julia and I have just observed the Two Minutes' Silence, sitting late over our breakfast. We had decided not to go to our Buckingham church of St Peter and St Paul, just three minutes walk up Bristle Hill and then right along Castle Street. She will be going on Wednesday to Friends' Meeting in Aylesbury on the actual eleventh day of the eleventh month when the armistice ending the war was signed. Then it was known as the Great War and dubbed The War To End Wars. Only after an even bloodier war was it renamed World War One.

Her father's eldest brother, Claud, was killed on the Western Front serving in the Royal Naval Division. Most unusually, none of my close relations were killed. My father joined the fledgling Friends' Ambulance Unit in 1914 but, when it appeared that there was nowhere it could usefully serve, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and in 1915 was shipped off to the Mediterranean theatre. After a while he reckoned that stitching people up to fight again was morally no different from fighting himself, which is why he joined the Royal Flying Corps in Egypt. Many young Quaker men went through the same process, reckoning that their pacifism had to be put aside because this was a Just War. I never asked him more about all this. I still wonder how much he made these changes on moral grounds rather than because he was just attracted by the life of action of a pilot.

My thoughts turned during that silence to the poem For Johnny by John Pudney, written on the back of an envelope during an air raid on London in 1941.

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.

Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.

Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.

JFR aged 27: AGR aged 20

This led naturally to my thinking about my brother Johnny and how I had used this poem at the end of the address I gave at his funeral in January 1997. This eulogy is not the only thing I want to write about this splendid chap whose life was blighted by Parkinsons at an unnaturally early age. He started writing an autobiography about this which he titled with typical wit A Hole in the Head – a reference also to the trepanning operation that temporarily halted the disease's inexorable impact. I must ask Vicki whether the manuscript still exists.

John Fisk Randall 1927–1996

We are come together in this quiet country church [Motcombe, Dorset] to say farewell to Johnny, the husband of Vicki, the father of Sali, Simon and Jamie, the grandfather of Jake, Ben and Jas, the son of Harry (widely known as George) and Elsie (widely known as Katie), the brother of Pushie and me, and the relation or friend of many of us gathered here today.

Those of you who only met Johnny during the second half of his life can have little idea of what manner of man he was during the first half of it, before he was afflicted by the cruel disease from whose clutch he has now been mercifully released. Let me therefore tell such of you something about Johnny Randall in his prime.

As he was growing up he was active in all the sorts of ways that you would expect of a lively and spirited boy. His activities with Meccano were a foretaste of what he would achieve later as an engineer and a formidable tinkerer with cars. George encouraged his interest in photography, something with a natural appeal to someone who combined an artistic temperament with mechanical aptitude. This interest developed alongside his early interest in astronomy. He took this very seriously. I remember him seeking to persuade George to let him remove a portion of the roof of Sandilands, the family home, so that he could create his own observatory in the attic, and being most indignant when this (in his view, perfectly reasonable) request was turned down. Despite this setback, he became the youngest member of the Royal Astronomical Society and maintained an interest in stars in their courses throughout his life.

It was as an athlete, though, that he really made his mark. At Leighton Park, the Quaker school he went to, there was an outstanding gym teacher, known and revered by generations of Leightonians as Hoppy. He was a peppery little Welshman who exhorted us to impossible gymnastic feats. Johnny responded enthusiastically to these exhortations: although he was large in stature for a gymnast, he twice won the school gymnastics championship. I remember him and a friend, during the summer holidays, competing to see who could do the highest number of consecutive flick-flacks up and down the lawn at Sandilands.

On this same lawn I remember him batting in the nets to the bowling of a couple of local lads that George had hired to help develop his cricketing talents. They were twins: they were Alec and Eric Bedser, who went on to great heights wearing the chocolate brown caps of Surrey and the white one of England.

These scenes epitomise the memories that I have of Johnny as he was growing into young manhood and developing into a stylish and versatile athlete.

• Put a cricket bat into his hands, and he transforms it into a willow wand wafting the ball past cover point to the boundary: Johnny captained the 1st XI at Leighton Park.
  
• Tie a pair of rugger boots to his feet, and he is a vigorous, mauling wing forward: Johnny played in the 1st XV for his school and for his college.
  
• Let him get hold of an oar, and he is rowing up the Cam in the power house of the King's College Rugger Boat: the crew dubbed themselves 'Poetry in Motion' which may have been some consolation for being bumped more than they bumped-but bumped, let it be said, by full-time wet-bobs.
  
• Give him a racket, and he is volleying and smashing on the lawn tennis court: he played for the King's 1st VI.
  
• Strap a pair of skis to his feet and he is sinuously sliding clown an alp with his skis perfectly parallel: well, pretty parallel!
  

In the athletic sphere, it can truly be said of Johnny that Nihil tetigit quem non ornavit: he touched nothing that he did not adorn.

This list of his athletic accomplishments should not lead us to ignore his academic achievements. He read engineering at London University and economics at Cambridge, although I am sure that Johnny would wish me to state on his behalf that he would never let his studies come between him and a party.

Johnny loved parties. Johnny was gregarious, Johnny was charming, Johnny was witty: the phrase, the life and the soul of the party, was doubtless first coined for some medieval or renaissance Johnny who would have rejoiced at seeing his worthy successor in full revel. I see several in the congregation today who partied with Johnny much more than did I – John Dalrymple, Mickie Chater, Mike Bate – and they will be able to regale you afterwards with details of some of the memorable thrashes they had together.

And Johnny loved motor cars. His first car, a 1933 Austin Seven, was too small and too slow for someone of Johnny's temperament, so he acquired a 1926 Ballot brougham. Those of us who are not car buffs won't necessarily know that Ballot was a French marque, and that its brougham was built as a kind of bourgeois Bugatti Royale, a huge high-performance tourer. But, as a brougham, it didn't quite mesh with Johnny's dashing image. So, what does he do? He converts it into a convertible. Even car unbuffs will know that a convertible is a car with an open body and a retractable roof. Well, Johnny manages the first stage of the conversion just fine: he removes the original coach work. It was the second stage that was the problem. We will never now know for sure whether the decision to dispense entirely with any form of protection against the elements was dictated by financial or aesthetic or practical considerations. But what we do know is that, when planning his first continental expedition in the Ballot, he found that the car ferry charges – which of course are based on length – were almost as much as he had paid for the beast in the first place. Lesser men would not have cut this particular Gordian knot in quite the same draconian manner. What does he do? He simply cuts the chassis in three, throws away the middle bit, welds together the bits left over and postpones sine die the retractable roof!

The expedition finally set out: 75% of its members are in this church today. The survivors will be able to tell you what it was like to travel in an open car in mid-winter to the Alps. Pushie will be able to tell you about other design features that made the expedition memorable. For a start, there was – of course – no heating. Secondly, there were no seats in the back. Thirdly, there was no boot, and – of course – no luggage rack. Johnny solves all three problems with characteristic simplicity and directness: get the girls to sit on hot water bottles, and then pile the luggage on top of them, and then – as the cherry on the cake – crown it all with the spare wheel! I leave it to you to judge how successful this solution was by citing the fact that Pushie has never since travelled to the Alps by car: once frost-bitten, one might say, twice Pu-shy.

This portrait I have painted might lead you to suppose that it was difficult for me to grow up as Johnny's younger brother, in his shadow: not so, even though I could never reach his athletic standards. It is the nature of a natural leader like Johnny – he was Head Boy at The Downs, he was a School Prefect at LP, he held Her Majesty's commission – to inspire others by example and to show that a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? Thus it was that, in January 1952 at the Aircrew Selection Centre at RAF Hornchurch, when I was asked the question, 'Why do you want to be a pilot?', I was able to give the simple but convincing answer 'Because my father was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps and my brother is learning to fly in his University Air Squadron.'

This heralded the time in our lives when he and I worked and played a great deal together. Because he had not done his National Service before going to university, it happened that he started it shortly after I had started mine. We then started our Wings courses at virtually the same time, I being posted to RAF Dalcross (now Inverness airport) to fly twin-engined Airspeed Oxfords and Johnny to RAF Cottesmore to fly single-engined Boulton Paul Balliols.

Let me read what they wrote about Johnny in the RAF Spittlegate newsletter at that time.
Officer Cadet John Randall left us a few weeks ago to join his new unit at Cottesmore, when his long-awaited transfer to the General Duties Branch came through. Johnny was a most popular member of the course and combined a remarkable number of qualities: he was a fine sportsman, a skilled technician and an excellent speaker (unrivalled as a raconteur), as well as being the holder of two university degrees and the possessor of a very wide knowledge of varied topics. Above all he was a good companion. We miss him, and wish him the very best of luck on his new Course.

The Balliol which Johnny flew at Cottesmore was exactly the right kind of aircraft for a pilot of Johnny's temperament: it was powered by the Rolls Royce Merlin, the engine that powered the fighters that won the Battle of Britain and it was highly manoeuvrable. As a gymnast, Johnny took naturally to slow rolls, stall turns and the like and went on to win his course trophy for aerobatics. However, he was less excellent at instrument flying: he failed to get his White Instrument Rating Card at his first attempt, which led me to tell Johnny that he was a better pilot upside down than the right way up.

You can imagine the spirit of friendly rivalry that there was between us. He was brotherly enough to fly up from Rutland to Scotland to attend my passing-out parade, but this did not stop me from crowing for the next fortnight at his wingless state. His magnanimity was such, however, that he did not crow over me when I was transferred to the RAF Education Branch, while he reached operational status on a Gloster Meteor fighter squadron, in the country's front line of aerial defence. Our rivalry extended to every area of life, and sometimes reached ridiculous lengths. Thus, when I received a telegram from him in 1955 saying 'Have got engaged', I promptly proposed to my then girl-friend and telegraphed back, 'Snap!'.

Johnny went on to marry Vicki, and a life that was all too soon to be blighted by the onset of Parkinson's Disease. During his gradual but inexorable physical decline, two things struck everyone who met him.

Firstly, this athlete who had rejoiced in his physical prowess never railed against his misfortune. He was a veritable Mr Standfast. More than anyone I have ever known, he was able to meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same.

Secondly, the comfort and support that his wife gave him throughout his illness is beyond any words of mine to praise. Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her ... she will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. Such a virtuous woman was, and is, Vicki.

Now Johnny is dead. For all of us who loved him and thought highly of him, this is a time of grief and yet it is also a time of relief, now that he is at last at rest. Let the verses I am about to say – written for another Johnny, another pilot, long ago-speak for all those who grieve for Johnny this day.

Do not despair / For Johnny-head-in-air: / He sleeps as sound / As Johnny under ground.
Fetch out no shroud / For Johnny-in-the-cloud; / And keep your tears / For him in after years.
Better by far / For Johnny the Bright Star / To keep your head / And see his children fed.

John Fisk Randall was, truly, Johnny the Bright Star. During his long illness he proved himself to be Mr Standfast: throughout his life he was also Mr Valiant-for-truth. So let me end this eulogy by telling of the death of Mr Valiant-for-truth at the end of The Pilgrims Progress.

He called for his friends and ... said he, I am going to my Fathers, and tho with great Difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the Trouble I have been at to arrive where I am.

My Sword, I give to him that shall succeed me in my Pilgrimage and my Courage and Skill, to him that can get it. My Marks and Scarrs I carry with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought his Battels, who now will be my Rewarder.

When the Day that he must go hence, was come, many accompanied him to the River side, into which, as he went, he said, Death, where is thy Sting? And as he went down deeper, he said,
Grave where is thy Victory? So he passed over, and the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side.

Ave atque vale, Iohannes! Hail and farewell, Johnny!