MALLORY'S PIPE

I've been reading Robert Graves' autobiography (lower photo) over the past couple of days and, for a moment, in a story about George Mallory (upper) - at that time one of Graves' masters at Charterhouse School - had a sense of literary déja vu. Mallory, you may recall, was the man who disappeared near the summit of Mount Everest in the mid 1920s. There are some (I am among them) who believe he and Irvine climbed the mountain and were lost on the way down. The consensus, however, is that because of the position of the bodies (or body - I can't remember whether both have been found)- they seemed to be ascending as death overtook them.

However, this is not, as they say, à propos. My sense of déja vu came from an earlier tale about George Mallory as a young man and I now remember I read it first in Newby's book, "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush" before seeing it again, in Graves' book, this morning. Of course repetition doesn't necessarily make a thing true, but it's a good story:

"My friend George Mallory, for instance, who later disappeared close to the summit of Mount Everest, once did an inexplicable climb on Snowdon. He had left his pipe on a ledge, half-way down one of the Lliwedd precipices, and scrambled back by a short cut to retrieve it, then up again by the same route. No one saw what route he took, but when they came to examine it the next day for official record, they found an overhang nearly all the way. By a rule of the Climber's Club climbs are never named in honour of their inventors, but only describe natural features. An exception was made here.

"The climb was recorded as follows: Mallory's Pipe, a variation on Route 2; see adjoining map. This climb is totally impossible. It has been performed once, in failing light, by Mr G.H.L. Mallory."

A Badly Foxed Memoir

I have just read James Lees-Milne's memoir, 'Another Self'. It's a well written piece about life before and, in part, during the second world war but I found myself totally at odds with Mr Lees-Milne - either with his characterization of himself in the book, or worse with an accurate picture of himself that the writing reveals.

Lees-Milne had all the advantages and, despite himself, did all the right things - Eton, Oxford, Brigade of Guards - but flopped about enjoying nothing and contributing little. True, he was a virtual founder of the National Trust - that institution where all buildings under its care are reduced to looking and feeling exactly the same no matter from which period of history they derive - and has a few sad things to say about how much of Georgian England was torn up after the war.

But for the rest, I found him an egregious toss-pot, a dropper of names few have heard of now (and I suspect, few had heard of then), a fantasist whose strongest relationship, by his own description, was unrequited telephone sex with a woman who he 'met' via a crossed-line and whose name he never knew (inevitably, he calls her 'Egeria' after an elusive nymph).

Slightly Foxed is a publisher of a quarterly magazine and occasional memoirs many of which (there are currently eight) have proved to be revelatory and excellent. As I said, this book is no exception but I would not have wanted to know the author - one who would have fought for General Franco in the Spanish Civil War to halt the ravages visited on the Roman Catholic church by the republicans.

In the introduction, Lees-Milne is described as a "tall, slightly etiolated young man, diffidently patrician and dandyish". At another point, tocsins sound when he is congratulated on writing this "delicious memoir". I think 'Curate's Egg' rather than 'delicious'.

Consider this (failed) attempt at a Proustian description following a huge raid on Piccadilly in, I think, 1941. Lees-Milne's opening descriptions of the damage wrought on the area are, at the same time, fascinating and horrifying:

"We could not walk up Piccadilly because a stick of bombs having fallen from the Fifty Shilling Tailors to St James's Church had penetrated a gas main. Tongues of flame were belching from craters in the road. We could not walk down Jermyn Street which was blocked by rubble from collapsed houses. Here I noticed the stripped, torn trunk of a man on the pavement. Further on I picked up what looked like the mottled, spread leaf of a plane tree. It was a detached hand with a signet ring on the little finger."

But then we get:

"Tha pale windows of Arthur's Club in St James's Street were aglow with the reflection of yet another fire. For a moment I thought this fine classical building was blazing. Then I realized that the light was not Pepys's 'horrid malicious bloody' sort, but borrowed and deceptive, the sort of light that greets one from the flickering log fire of a hall seen through the crinkled panes of a country house, as one returns before curtains are drawn after a long autumn walk, having crossed the park, about to tread the mossy lawn, late for tea in the Midlands."

Puleeease.

May I commend you, instead, to the works of Hector Bolitho.

CLARKSON and MANDELSON

I neither claim nor would accept any responsibility for the following which is the text of an article that appeared in the Sunday Times a few days ago. All I will say is that I wish I could write as well as this - and to such good effect.

The enclosed article by Jeremy Clarkson was in this week's Sunday Times but has since been 'pulled'.


I've given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I'm afraid I've decided that it's no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I'm afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn't alive any more.

He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country's top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels,because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt

I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn't bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he's resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.

There's talk of emigration in the air. It's everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can't see the point because she won't be going to university, because she doesn't have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don't live in America.

Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can't stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can't understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation's capital. They can't understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can't understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it's racist.

And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn't understand because he's a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, "I've
had enough of this. I'm off."

It's a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained,Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral,trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can't go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can't go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don't sweep your lawn properly, and you can't go to Italy because you'll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse's head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for "organising" a plumber.

You can't go to Australia because it's full of things that will eat you, you can't go to New Zealand because they don't accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can't go to Monte Carlo because they don't accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can't go to Spain because you're not called Del and you weren't involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can't go to Germany .. because you just can't.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you'll end up like all the other expats,with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it's okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can't go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

Canada's full of people pretending to be French, South Africa's too risky,Russia's worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn't help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you'll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.

I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it's been for decades, but the lunatics who've made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit.

So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it's a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit in the meantime.

McKinnon's Extradition

Gary McKinnon is British and lives in the UK. He also suffers from Asperges Syndrome. Some seven years ago, it is alleged he hacked into top secret US defence and security computers and for this reason, the US authorities wish to have him extradited to stand trial for these offences in the USA. As I write, the Home Secretary is not opposing this extradition - unsurprisingly, McKinnon's lawyers vehemently disagree with this inaction.

For me, the interest here is the implied - sometimes stated - claim that a British man with Asperges Syndrome will not be treated as well in the USA as he would be in the UK.

Of course I am not qualified to judge the degree, if any, to which McKinnon will be disorientated by transportation to the USA and if this in will in any way prejudice the ideal of a fair trial but I am interested, on a more general basis, by yet another outbreak of that jingoistic condition which I define as "Ill on Holiday Abroad" or "IHAb".

At its simplest IHAb relates to the fact that a Frenchman who becomes ill while visiting the UK will immediately hot foot it back to the shores of France where they have the only medical teams capable of dealing with Gallic ailments. Ditto an Englishman holidaying in France.

And as the McKinnon case shows, this is not just about an almost total distrust (rarely born out by the facts) of foreign medicine but also of foreign law. I find it difficult to imagine that the enthusiasm with which US lawyers engage in litigation to right wrongs (or at least to seek compensation for them) would not defend Mr McKinnon at the highest level, should he require it. And I would hope British lawyers would do the same (as I am sure they do) for Americans and all others for whom they have responsibility.

Homage to Sebastian

I am reading, I suspect 10 years later than everyone else, Sebastian Faulks' 'Birdsong', his novel circling around and focusing on the First World War and, in particular, the Battle of the Somme. For a while, maybe for the first two hundred or more pages, I found it hard to comprehend the structure of the book with sections from different eras, linked as it were by emotion and circumstance rather than - as I thought - by a more coherent thread.

I am now beginning to understand that this is, as Faulks himself says in his introduction, an 'operatic novel' dealing with issues of love and loss, of death and survival and the fact that none of these leaves any of the players unchanged.

Faulks' description of that dreadful day, 1st July 1916, is as good as I can or could imagine. Unlike his character, Elizabeth, I have been to the monument at Thiepval on more than one occasion and I know something of the scale of the loss. But Faulks adds to this with vignette and with the broad brush strokes of a much bigger picture.

For example, I did not know that the slaughter was so great that some German machine gunners refused to keep firing, unable to accept the massacre they were inflicting. I did not know that two generals committed suicide when it became clear what carnage the day had reaped. But consider this passage on the bigger scale, and coming, in Faulks' narrative, at the end of that bloody day.

"It was dark at last. The night poured down in waves from the ridge above them and the guns at last fell silent.

"The earth began to move. To their right a man who had lain still since the first attack, eased himself upright, then fell again when his damaged leg could not take his weight. Other single men moved, and began to come up like worms from their shellholes, limping, crawling, dragging themselves out. Within minutes the hillside was seething with the movement of the wounded as they attempted to get themselves back to their line.

"'Christ,' said Weir, 'I had no idea there were so many men out here.'
"It was like a resurrection in a cemetery 12 miles long. Bent, agonised shapes loomed in multitudes on the churned earth, limping and dragging back to reclaim their life. It was as though the land were disgorging a generation of crippled sleepers, each one distinct but related to its twisted brothers as they teemed up from the reluctant earth.

"Weir was shaking.

"'It's all right,' said Stephen. 'The guns have stopped.'

"It's not that,' said Weir. 'It's the noise. Can't you hear it?'

Stephen had noticed nothing but the silence that followed the guns. Now, as he listened, he could hear what Weir had meant: it was a low, continuous moaning. He could not make out any individual pain, but the sound ran down to the river on their left and up over the hill for half a mile or more. As his ear became used to the absence of guns, Stephen could hear it more clearly: it sounded to him as though the earth itself was groaning.

"'Oh God, oh God.' Weit began to cry. 'What have we done, what have we done? Listen to it. We've done something terrible, we'll never get back to how it was before.'

LES ARRETS DE LA GRANDE ARMEE

A couple of weeks ago a small group of us went to see some of the battlefields, cemetaries and memorials of the Great War or World War I. I think I've touched on this subject before but I am always concerned, when I visit such sites, about a conflict of emotions.

Take the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge, for example [pictured]. Here we have one of the most elegant of monuments, erected in the 1930s and recent having undergone an extensive renovation programme requiring a long-disused quarry in Croatia to be re-opened.

The result? Something achingly artistic, filled with light, beauty and with sorrow. The central image is of Canada crying for her lost sons.

But what are we to feel about this? Is it a celebration of heroism or of waste? A sort of Arch de Triomphe or Picasso's Guernica [picture]? History is of little help here because by the standards of that bloody 1914-18 conflict, the attack on Vimy Ridge was - after long months of planning and preparation - efficient with fewer than 4,000 Canadian soldiers killed. A horrendous number but when you compare it to the 20,000 the British lost on the first day of The Somme in July 1916 ...

Of course such comparisons are at once odious and meaningless but it is interesting to speculate on the meaning viewers will attach the the statuary and, within the graveyards, the symmetry of northern France and Flanders. Will a sense of this war fade or will these many symbols transcend one conflict to be symbols of the futility of all wars? One hopes so.

In the post a couple of days ago, I received a compilation of copies of The Wipers Times (and equivalent titles) published through much of the second half of the war, wherever the editor and sub-editor (both of whom survived) were posted. To them the last word (which has little to do with anything except the humour of those impossible times):

"The following is a true extract from a return of reserve rations from a certain garrison:-
Locality - Foxhall Kemp
Map Ref - P 67 X 19-32
Commodity - Bully Beef
Quantity - 1 Tin
Remarks - Not Full"

Dinner with the Grocers

Last night I had the pleasure of dining with a small group in one of the more elevated rooms of the City of London's Grocers Hall. Our host, Rory Macnamara, a Scottish gentleman from Putney, is set next year to become the head of this august livery company and was clearly starting out - in terms of entertainment - as he means to go on.

The wine, (I gather - not partaking myself) was fine, the starter seemed to have delved the very ocean-floor to collect the diverse crustacea on the plate and the pudding - I should really say dessert - reminded me in shape of one of those hats designed by Cecil Beaton for the 'Ascot Gavotte' scene in 'My Fair Lady'.

But we also had the chicken. There was an odd college feel about the chicken: first of all everyone had a leg and given there were forty of us this must be accounted a triumph for genetic modification; secondly there was an obligatory ladle-full of gravy; thirdly, and most peculiarly, the dining-room a couple of floors below was occupied by a large number of yahoos from Oriel College, Oxford and that set a studenty feel on the whole building.

Speaking of Cecil Beaton and sartorial trends, there was an odd feature to many of the men's shirts I had not encountered before - and I don't mean the red wine stain down the front of one of the 'Oryell' men. It was that showing buttons on evening shirts seems to have become de rigeur. And they were proper evening shirts with pleats and what-not - but with the buttons in full light.

When I was first wearing evening dress, having buttons glistening on one's shirt would have been worse than leaving one's flies open.

But while some customs fade others (excluding the chicken) remain. There were a good number of pairs of patent leather shoes on masculine feet, for example, and almost all the 'lovely lydies' wore black - most accessorized by good jewels (i.e. not Boodle & Dunthorne).

Thank you to Mr Mac and the Grocers, whose premises I had not visited before but which, I can now say, are only a little less grand than the true Grocers' Livery Hall in Piccadilly of Fortnum & Mason.