by Jan Morris
What trouble she had taken, rooting among her drawers to find something to please a small child! How carefully she had cleaned it and wrapped it, and with her shaky old handwriting addressed it for the post – never once, in her life or in mine, to cut an apple.
And I am recalling it all the more vividly today because tomorrow is the ninth birthday of our granddaughter Begw, and temporarily bedridden as I am, and extremely old, I have thought of nothing better to give to her than a silly little rhyme I’ve thought up and a comic hybrid postcard I’ve stuck together, half of Stonehenge, half of Cricieth …
Will she be amused? Perhaps, but disappointed too at getting nothing better. Will she be grateful? Bless her heart, I am sure she will, and she will understand, as I did as I struggled with Great-Aunt Agatha’s penknife, that the old lady’s done her best.
Happy Birthday, Begw darling, and forgive me!
DAY 118
Well, dear friends, if ever there was a day that I felt like opting out of everything, it is today, 29 June 2017. Every single piece of news that reaches me from the wide world, here in our remote corner of Wales, speaks of conflict, disaster, deceit, tragedy, sadness, pathos. From Brussels to Brazil, poor old America to pathetic London, Trump to Kim Jong-un, Qatar and Yemen and Uganda and Mosul and Hong Kong, almost everywhere seems as irredeemably unhappy as everywhere else. It is astonishing to me that people have the stamina to engage in lifelong political or economic rivalries, and my guess is that millions like me, everywhere on the planet, sometimes feel like giving up.
To cap it all, in my own case, I watched on television yesterday the elaborate traditional ceremony in which the Queen of Great Britain and her dominions across the seas announces at Westminster her elected government’s policies for the next session of the Mother of Parliaments. The elaborate style of this occasion, the historical allusions, the trumpets and the tapestries and the uniforms, the massed guards, the crown itself on its tasselled cushion and the aged monarch gamely reciting the manifesto are a deliberate demonstration of a nation’s ancient traditions.
Not so very long ago it would have been the moving enactment of a great historical presence, too, presenting as in allegory, like it or not, the culmination of an immense and unique national achievement. Yesterday all its ancient splendours seemed to me at best nonsensical, at worst downright pathetic.
I turned off the television in sad despair and as an utter antidote played instead a cracked record I have of a song from an Australian musical comedy from long ago. It is raw, simple, honest, almost out of another age and another world. ‘Blimey,’ the song goes, ‘I tilts my lid to yer, sweet Doreen, I’ll be your bloke if you want, Doreen, you’re the best kid that I’ve ever seen, I tilts my lid to Doreen …’ – set to a boisterous old Aussie tune that I would whistle to you now, if I could, to cheer you up as it did me.
But no, you would probably only laugh bitterly, as would the poor old Queen, I suppose, or Kim Jong-un, or quarrelling politicians, or grasping financiers, or bigots and cynics and terrorists across the world.
What’s the use of whistling? Hardly anyone does it nowadays.
DAY 119
How I wish – I really do – that I could appreciate contemporary rap music, if that’s what it’s called. It is at this moment, via my radio, reaching me from the Glastonbury Festival, and I can’t make head nor tail of it. Is there meaning to it? Is there melody? What about it inspires its vast audiences to such instant rapture? I don’t for a moment denigrate its worth; I only wish I could understand and share in it.
It’s obviously a generational matter, and millions like me, I have no doubt, last really enjoyed the mass music of the day with the Beatles. But at the same time we were all moved and inspired by the art and intellects of people like Dylan, Bowie and the enigmatic Leonard Cohen, interweaving, as it were, the paving stones of Abbey Road. Do they have their equivalents today? Am I missing some musical exegesis of the times, to tell me how the light gets in? Is it me? Am I the Philistine?
Perhaps that cacophony of Glastonbury is a truth in itself, its own loveless zeitgeist. Or, please God, will the times soon be a-changin’?
DAY 120
I don’t know if I have mentioned before my envy of Ovid. Having read about his exile from Rome by the Emperor Augustus in AD 8, some years ago I resolved to make a detour to the Black Sea town of Tomis, in Romania, where he spent his last years and wrote much of his immortal poetry. It is called Constant¸a nowadays, and I loved it. I thought then that, really, if one has to be exiled, what better than to spend one’s last years writing poetry in a garden beside the sea?
Well, Ovid has entered my thoughts again now because I have entered a sort of temporary exile myself. Incapacitated by sickness, overwhelmed by worries material, familial and philosophical, I have declared myself hors de combat for the time being, declining commissions, fighting off visitors and going nowhere. And I was right! It has been delightful! I now know our own garden, as Ovid doubtless knew his, better than I have ever known it, in detail as in the whole, from the sweetest violet to the grand old sycamore that dominates the scene; and the blackbirds that frequent it, the pigeons, the elegant naughty magpies and the squirrels seem more than ever like family friends.
All I do all day is record these occasional thoughts, in my own time, to my own length. I earn practically nothing, but then I don’t spend much either. I am like the vestal virgins of old, the world forgetting, by the world forgot.
The emperor never did relax his sentence, but my own Ovidian experience will presently come to an end, like my illness and my incapacitation, and I shall no longer be vestal virginal. The telephone will ring again, the Internet will baffle me once more and all the world’s corrosions will resume their whittlings. Goodbye, magpies, you dear scoundrels! Au revoir, Sir Sycamore!
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Yes, yes, I’ll call you back. Monday morning, did you say? How many words? Hang about – someone at the door. Great to hear from you – I’m sure we can work something out. You’ll let me know? Keep in touch. Tuesday, did you say? Drop me an e-mail. What? Who? How d’you spell it?
DAY 121
A PS from yesterday, especially for anyone who has suffered the same kidney attacks as I lately have. A strange thing happened while I was recently in hospital. I was waiting for an available bed in a ward, and in the meantime loitered about in the crowded public spaces. During the evening, two elaborately antique horse-drawn coaches made their difficult way through the rooms towards the rear, obviously on their way to some sort of festival or exhibition.
Nobody could tell me what they were, or where the show was to be, and next day, when I was comfortably in bed in my ward, I asked my kind nurse what the occasion had been.
There was no occasion, she said. There had been no ornate horse-drawn coaches. It was all hallucination, a phenomenon not uncommon, I now know, among the multiple symptoms of kidney trouble. So don’t be surprised, my dear fellow sufferers, if baby elephants infest your bathroom, or you get a letter from the Queen of Sheba. It will pass. They are but kidney-dreams.
Drop me a line about them, if you like, c/o my cousin Abraham Lincoln, Arsenal Football Club, Llanystumdwy, Wales.
DAY 122
Today the Prime Minister of Great Britain is off to Hamburg, to a meeting of her international peers, the so-called G20 group of the world’s chief nations. How I pity her! Not so long ago it would have been her duty to represent before the world an ancient State of unparalleled experience, confidence and prestige, rich, powerful, influential – a country like no other, playing a part in history’s drama that was unique and dramatic. Alas, poor Mrs May, as she takes her place today among her contemporaries. Gone is the charisma that would have attended her predecessors, and which indeed attended all her compatriots, me included, in the days when we thought of ourselves as pioneers and champions of democracy, and a victorious people too, a people with a mighty past, a great manufacturing people, an innovative people, the people of Churchill a
nd Shakespeare, Oxford and Cambridge, world-celebrated scientists and sportsmen, a nation famous at once for its humour and for its poetry! How much of all that will attend poor Mrs May, as she takes her place among the virile modernist States of today, the Americans and the Germans and the Chinese and the Russians, whose finances rule the world now, and whose ambitions are boundless?
It is not that the United Kingdom (née Great Britain) has disgraced itself. It has simply, it seems to me, lost the gift of greatness. Almost deliberately, by its own actions, it has relegated itself to the minor ranks of the nations, and ensured, I suspect, that when Queen Elizabeth’s prime minister addresses her peers in Hamburg this week, some of them will be a little sorry for her too.
Sorry for the British! Dear God! What have they come to?
DAY 123
Did you hear me crying yesterday? I really was reduced to tears by that unwitting instrument of harassment, my computer. During the morning a man called me out of the blue to tell me what I must urgently do if I wanted to keep it working. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with it, but the man explained that there were technical faults in our area that needed urgent attention to prevent my computer service being switched off altogether. He was gently polite, and helpful, but spoke in so extreme a foreign accent that I could not make out just what he wanted of me – what I must do to keep online (e.g. press the CTRL button on my keyboard, while simultaneously pressing the buttons E and PGDN), or why I must please stay online while his technical colleagues put things right. He himself was always there to help, he said.
All day long – literally! – that man and various anonymous assistants pestered me, hour after hour, with telephone calls and numerical reminders and obscure technical warnings. They never let up, until in the end I was exhausted, reduced to tears and defeated. Limply and ridiculously, against all my better judgement, I told them details of my economic circumstances that I (I and you too, I expect) had been specifically warned never to reveal. I told them everything they wanted, almost as though I had been hypnotized. Perhaps in a sense I had?
During the night I realized what I had done, and this morning I rang everyone to cancel everything. With luck, please God, touch wood, no harm has been done. I had woken from my lachrymose trance in time to reproach myself for my foolishness, and to curse those villains, whoever and wherever they are, for taking cruel advantage of a harmless old soul like me.
They rang again this morning, but now I answered them differently. May they rot in their own cyber-shit.
DAY 124
An elderly lady sitting in her wheelchair on the pavement this morning solicited my contribution to whatever worthy charity she represented. I had no notes in my purse, and I regretfully told her so, but when I had walked on a few yards I did find a few coins in the bottom of my bag. I went back to put them in her collecting box, and apologized for their meanness. I honestly had no more, I told her – honestly!
Did she forgive me? Did she say thank you, anyway? Did she even smile? She did not, the old grumps. But there she was, sitting there in the morning cold, serving a good cause, and I was on my way, as a matter of fact, to treat myself to an excellent cappuccino, for which I would pay with my credit card. So on the whole I think the balance of merit was hers, don’t you?
DAY 125
At the entrance to our village of Llanystumdwy, on the north-west coast of Wales, a sign directs the traveller to Lloyd George Grave. I often wonder how many strangers, especially foreigners, know what it means. Lloyd George Grave? Who was he? What was he? He was a politician, and the reputations of politicians are not always as eternal as they may have hoped.
I fear David Lloyd George, one of the most famous of all Welshmen, may be an example. He is certainly not forgotten in Llanystumdwy, but to the motorists hastening by down there, how much does the name mean to them, as they hurry by our signposts? A thousand actors and actresses are better remembered – today’s Sun newspaper, as it happens, actually leads its front page with the headline that a woman is to be the next Dr Who of the TV series, far outranking any news of war, politics, economics, command or statesmanship!
Nevertheless, dear reader, whether you be from Reykjavik, Miami or Leatherhead, if you pass by our village do take a moment to visit Lloyd George Grave. It is the peaceful resting place of a man who was once tremendous. In a kind of grotto the Welshman David Lloyd George lies, beneath a boulder beside our little River Dwyfor where he liked to sit and meditate. As you pause there yourself you may remember that he once dictated the fate of armies, of nations even, in the days long ago when a prime minister of imperial Britain commanded much of the world, and decreed the fate of millions.
Lloyd George grew up in a little cottage up the road, but he became one of the most famous men on earth. I don’t suppose much of his dust is still floating around his grotto there, but you might perhaps recall, before you saunter back to your car, what another visitor murmured at another burial place: ‘Imperious Caesar, dead, and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’
*
PS In my library I have Lloyd George’s signed copy of an Atlas of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land (London, 1915). As prime minister, in 1917 he gave another copy of it to General Sir Edmund Allenby, to encourage that officer when he set off with his British imperial army to capture Jerusalem from the infidel Turks. The wind blew there too.
DAY 126
The longer I live, the more I love my library, and this is lucky, because it is a terrible time-waster. I enjoy nothing more than just pottering about in it, picking out a volume now and then simply to renew its acquaintance, or in the hope of finding a letter from an old friend tucked in its pages, or to remind myself of a phrase I remember with particular pleasure or an observation that maddened me forty years ago – will it madden me still, or was it a callow judgement? I love just handling my books, sorting them a bit better by subject or by size, or apologizing to one when space or shape obliges me to stack it flat on its side in a bookshelf instead of standing tall – such a demeaning destiny, I always think. Waste of time, certainly, but now that I have, as it were, half withdrawn from the world, what an infinite pleasure to have such a host of old associates in the house – and new ones too, for one of the few perks of the writer’s life is the endless supply of books that want to be reviewed! (There used to be bookshops in London that specialized in buying used review copies from impecunious young critics. I wonder if there still are – perhaps impecuniosity is not what it was?)
Not many of my books are very valuable, anyway, but they are great companions, and they are mine! Only a few have I inherited: some of the old classics, Huck Finn and the King James Version and a Dickens or two and a set of Balzac and the mildewed memoir about his Egyptian experiences that my great-great-grandfather privately published in 1877.
All the rest I have acquired for myself, and as I have always written in them where I got them and when, they have become an intimate kind of record of my life – a grand reminder, if you like. As a visitor to our house observed long years ago, they are like so many friends sitting there in their stacks, and they have matured or declined along with me – when I laugh they laugh, when I cry they shed a tear, they can be as maudlin as I sometimes am and just as cheerful too.
And if they are often out of date, well, bless their hearts, so am I.
DAY 127
In a miserably naughty world, here most decidedly is a doer of good deeds. A lifelong friend and neighbour of ours dropped in last night to tell us about her recent journey to Australia. She had undertaken it because her husband badly wanted to see his own expatriate brother once again, and the snag was this: that her beloved husband himself, recently rescued from death by drastic cancer surgery, has no stomach and can be fed only via injection.
Did this deter our doer of good deeds? Did it hell! From Wales the two of them took the train to London, from London they flew to Dubai, from Dubai to Perth. It is almost 9,000 miles as the crow flies, a
nd they flew economy class – there and back! Can you imagine the misery of it? The airport queues, the immigration checks, the baggage inspections, the boarding of buses, the getting of taxis, the queuing at counters, the fumbling for passports – and every now and then, I can only suppose, that remorseless but life-preserving syringe.
They got home safely, anyway, and here was that dauntless old friend telling us about the journey as though they had just been down to Cardiff to see the rugby. God (if there is one), take note.
DAY 128
Birds puzzle me enough, heaven knows (and even mystify ornithologists, when it comes to migrations), but I am still more baffled by butterflies. What are they about? We have only a fairly ordinary selection of them fluttering about our place, and as it happens the kind that particularly intrigues me is the most ordinary, the common-or-garden white sort. I take this to be the Cabbage White listed in W. S. Coleman’s British Butterflies (1896, downstairs in my library, next to The Dodo and Kindred Birds), if only because Cabbage White seems the right sort of name for the run-of-the-mill insects I am talking about. The more elegant specimens that sometimes visit our garden, which I take to be Red Admirals, or perhaps Painted Ladies, appear to comport themselves in a logical way as they move from plant to plant for sustenance; it is the Cabbage Whites that seem to me to be bonkers.