by Jan Morris
DAY 70
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Don’t you ever feel that Nature itself is stacked against us in conspiracy? I felt downright resentful today when it seemed to intervene in my daily physical enterprise – the thousand paces along our lane, which I think of as a sort of spiritual exercise too. It was a boisterous morning, with a fierce north wind blustering directly into my face down the line of the lane, and I took this as a cheerful challenge.
My marching phrase of the day was, ‘I’m old-fashioned, and I don’t mind it, so long as you’ll agree to stay old-fashioned with me,’ and I dedicated it to the North Wind as I hummed it in my mind. If Nature played fair with me, I would respect its grandeur in return, and after all, I reasoned, when I turned back at the end of the lane the good old wind would be merrily helping me home!
But did it? Did it hell! Nature at that very moment decided to give the North Wind a rest and release the South Wind from its restraints. Fiercely, reproachfully, resentfully, this unpleasant zephyr howled directly up the line of my walk into my poor old nonagenarian face, and as I struggled home I shouted out loud, believe me, a very different ditty.
PS Yes, I know, I know, a zephyr is a west wind, but I like the word, and I’ve never had a chance to use it before.
DAY 71
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I’m always disappointed when people don’t notice my dark blue blazer, which is one of a kind, and which I am always eager to elucidate. As a blazer it is nothing extraordinary, but on it there are two quite different badges, and as I am longing to tell you now, only two people in the world are qualified to wear both of them. One is the friend who years ago gave me the blazer as a Christmas present. The other is me.
Everyone – well, come on, nearly everyone – knows the badge on my left breast. It is the crest of Christ Church College at the University of Oxford, ancient, grand, proud, founded by Cardinal Wolsey in 1525, where thirteen prime ministers of England have been educated, not to mention Lewis Carroll, King Edward VII, John Locke, W. H. Auden, John Ruskin, William Walton and a thousand assorted divines. The Christ Church insignia, with its tasselled cardinal’s hat, must be one of the best known of all academic totems, and I am proud myself of having been a member of the House, as we call it, from 1936, when I became a child chorister there, and from 1945, when I was an undergraduate there, to this very day, when I am an Honorary Student (i.e. Fellow) of the place.
But to my mind my other badge is just as appealing, and more subtle in its appeal for me. It is the regimental crest of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers of the British Army, born as Wynne’s Dragoons in 1715, and proudly active through countless campaigns until its loss of identity in 1960 – not for nothing was the regiment’s Latin motto translated as ‘We do not retreat’. I had the good luck to join this famous regiment in Italy just at the end of the Second World War. I went on to serve as its intelligence officer in the Middle East, and I loved it from the start.
Loved it? Yes. I loved its easy style, its grace, its humour and its sense of friendship and community among all ranks. As a very un-soldierly sort of subaltern I found myself oddly at ease in its company. After all, one 9th Lancers officer had taken his cello with him for a campaign in China in 1840, and another had not only discovered a species of Himalayan poppy, but had translated into idiomatic English the odes of Horace. My own first commanding officer came from one of the most delightfully unorthodox families in all Wales, whose members invented the sheepdog trial and brewed the first Welsh whisky, and one of whose patriarchs, a successful betting man, wrote his own gravestone epitaph thus: ‘As to my latter end I go, To win my Jubilee, I bless the good horse, Bendigo, who built this tomb for me.’
All in all, this jumble of regimental traditions and suggestions was very much to my taste, and one of the most prized books in my library is the two-volume regimental history presented to me by the last commanding officer of the 9th Lancers when the regiment marched into extinction.
And that is why the only other living person, so far as I know, who has been both an officer of the 9th and a member of the House gave me my blazer for Christmas, and it’s why I love to show off its twin badges.
DAY 72
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Ha, ha!!! I laugh at the spectacle of myself today! It’s a perfectly ghastly morning here, a howling hurricane wind shaking the old house, storm warnings on the radio, everything rattling and shaking, and outside our windows the trees madly toss. The sea is a grey and nasty smudge, and there is no sign of life out there, not even a huddled cow.
I am all alone, and it is time for me to take my daily exercise: my statutory thousand paces of brisk walk. I have never once failed in this discipline, not once. If I’m away from home, I’ve walked some other route, but always with the same obedience to rhythm and mental music.
And today? Today I survey the scene out there despairingly. Must I really go out into that maelstrom? Would the gods forgive me if just once, just this morning, I failed them? Would my cheerful whistle falter at last, and even ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ stumble? I was ninety-two years old last week, after all, so could I not be excused, just this miserable once? But no, I was not strong enough to go out, but not weak enough to give up, and so fell into compromise. Surely, I reasoned to myself, a thousand paces up the lane was no worthier than a thousand paces inside the house, and so I set about marching rhythmically around the densely cluttered two floors of Trefan Morys, Llanystumdwy, Wales.
At least it was funny! Round and about the sofas I whistled my way, never pausing, through and among the island bookcases, perilously up the spiral staircase and down the wooden one, left, right, left, right, knocking over a vase and a couple of standard lamps, making the portraits swing, never pausing, never missing a beat, counting the paces on my fingers and sometimes bursting into song, until at last, breathless but triumphant, I reached the millennium on my thumb.
‘Snubs to you,’ said I to the howling winds outside, and put the kettle on for coffee.
DAY 73
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I bet none of you had a better tea than the one we have just enjoyed here at Trefan Morys at the end of the weekend. The weather is still foul, but the old Norwegian stove upstairs is well stacked up with wood, and I have to admit feeling rather smug when I thought of all the poor tourists in their cars labouring homewards through the wet dusk. We don’t go in for nostalgic teas, mind you, no Rupert Brooke ten-to-three nostalgia here. The five o’clock menu we enjoyed today was more Browning in style, and here’s what we consumed, in mixtures to personal taste:
1. Earl Grey Indian tea, with fresh milk.
2. Olive-oil breadsticks.
3. Fresh Welsh butter.
4. Welsh blackberry and apple jam.
Eaten at greedy leisure, but with napkins always at the ready, because the jam tends to run, and if you sit too close to the fire the butter melts. As Browning might have put it:
O to be at Trefan, now it’s teatime there,
And who ever crunches breadstick
Finds that butter, unaware,
Is blending with the apple jam and mixing with the milk
To make a magic substance as evocative as silk,
While the kettle boils and the laughter rings
At Trefan now!
DAY 74
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Rather less buoyant contemplations today. Some time ago, a particularly charming journalist came here from London to interview me. We had an agreeable lunch together, and I was grateful for almost everything he wrote. I was not grateful, however, for the particularly unflattering cartoon-style sketch which accompanied his piece, and which was somehow to be reproduced all over the place as a sort of documentary reference – there it would be glaring back at you, looking part ravaged, part decadent and altogether unappealing. I tried unsuccessfully to have it discarded everywhere, but n
o, there that image still remained on public view on the Web. One or two of my friends expressed their indignation, others rightly said it didn’t much matter, and over the months I got used to it anyway, until …
Remember Wilde’s story about the picture of Dorian Gray, in which the figure in a portrait hideously ages over time, while the subject himself remains unchanged? Well, the opposite is happening to me. My picture remains the same, me it is that changes! The darkly accusatory look in the newspaper cartoon, the faintly malignant suggestion, the dark marks under the eyes, the brooding stare – all is there in the life now, whenever I look in the mirror.
I can’t remember how Wilde’s parable ended – can you? – and I think on the whole I’d better not know!!
DAY 75
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The old, lost British Empire is still in the news these days, as its varied critics and protagonists, most of them unborn when its final Last Post was sounded, continue to debate its memory.
I stand, an ancient memorialist of the phenomenon, athwart the arguments. The intellectual and artistic centrepiece of my life was the Pax Britannica trilogy, which was published in the 1970s. It was, above all, an aesthetic view of the British Empire. I recognized the arrogance of it all, the cruelty and the unfairness, but I responded to the beauty of the thing too, the pathos of its mixed intentions and genuinely useful achievements. My view of it, in short, was equivocal, and so it remains to this day.
All this has cropped up this morning because there has arrived through the post the latest edition of the Hong Kong annual report, which has been sent to me ever since I wrote about the old British colony in 1988. This year’s edition is especially interesting because it commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to the Chinese as a Special Administrative Region (HKSAR).
The volume looks as elegant as ever and contains the same sort of classified information – Structure and Development of the Economy (HK’s stock market was the third largest in Asia in terms of market capitalization), Health (the number of patients waiting in HK for double-lung transplants stood at twenty), Transport (the HK railway system carried some 5.5 million passengers on average every day). The book’s beautifully reproduced colour photographs illustrate, as always, Hong Kong’s versatility in the arts and sports, portray varied important visitors and commemorate, as usual, the docking in the port of a spick-and-span grey warship, its crew parading, as crews of the Royal Navy have paraded here for generations, in immaculate discipline on its deck.
Since this is a twentieth-anniversary celebratory edition, the book’s binding is more light-hearted than usual, picturing as it does scores of the citizenry enjoying life terrifically in the Special Administrative Region, but one thing in it did take me sentimentally aback. The warship that is pictured visiting the port, as warships of the Royal Navy have been fraternally visiting Hong Kong for generations, looks as smart and professional as ever, but does not fly the White Ensign. That’s because it is not HMS Queen Elizabeth or Ark Royal, but the aircraft carrier Liaoning of the PLAN, the People’s Liberation Army Navy, 43,000 tons and carrying some forty Chinese-built jet fighters and helicopters.
Her crews, by the way, were partly trained by experts not from the Royal Navy, as they once might have been, but from the Brazilian navy; and come to think of it, if you were a stranger thumbing through the Hong Kong annual report for the year 2017, you would hardly know that the British had ever been in Hong Kong at all!
DAY 76
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I don’t know about you, but as a matter of principle I won’t expose myself to the awful phenomenon called reality TV, and except for the news there generally isn’t much on the public channels to justify the TV licence. So when the other day, in the course of an interview, I was asked what were my favourite TV programmes, I had to admit that the only two I regularly looked forward to of an evening were both frankly vulgar.
The Irish Mrs Brown’s Boys is a domestic comedy which indulges itself, non-stop, in bad language, sexual innuendo in several shades of subtlety and the crudest kind of humour, the whole presided over by an overwhelmingly comical male interpreter of Mrs Brown herself, knickers and all. It is so frank as to be innocent, and the whole is played with such gusto and self-amusement that it never fails to cheer me up.
My other favourite is a very different kind of entertainment. It is the American comedy Two and a Half Men, and it is really dedicated entirely to matters of sex, as experienced, exploited and confronted by a couple of young men. This protracted, farcical anecdote is too much, and too crude for me, and the only reason I watch the thing is the quality of its acting, which seems to me comedy performance of near perfection. I don’t know if its two stars find the script itself very funny, which I generally don’t, but I admire their professional techniques as I enjoy really polished Shakespearean acting.
So just those two programmes make my television licence worth paying for, whatever you may think of my taste (and actually, being so immensely old, I don’t have to pay for it anyway).
DAY 77
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Every year for many years I have received from America, out of the blue, the present of a curious and often beautiful objet d’art. Over time it has variously been, for example, a Japanese figurine with a music disc in its innards, a gracefully distorted trompe l’oeil china cup and saucer, a handsome doll’s house, lavishly furnished and complete with catalogue, a musical box, a blanket, a cut-out figure of a scorpion and a wooden puzzle called a tangram, which took a year to make and in my experience at least another year to solve. All – and there have been many more of them – are original works of art, intriguing and delightful too.
Scores of this munificent Christmas box have doubtless been distributed to recipients around the world, and I like to think that our benefactor, whom I have never met, is himself a sort of model American. Is the company name Norton AntiVirus familiar to you? Well, Mr Norton is the liberal-minded, generous, imaginative, humorous and artistic capitalist who has been sending us these unique presents year after year out of the blue.
Today, at the start of 2019, there arrived a magnificently produced volume detailing in full colour the entire corpus of the enterprise. It was The End, it announced. There would be no more of our fascinating annual gifts. I have just played the musical box in grateful requiem, and this afternoon will have another go at the tangram.
DAY 78
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Very often, for what it’s worth, I compose these little diary entries in my mind during my morning exercise, and if the weather is particularly inviting, I do it down on the seaside promenade in Cricieth, where I am sure to meet people I know and swap pleasantries with. Today was a prime example.
The autumn sun was wonderfully invigorating, the breeze out of the Irish Sea was an inspiration in itself, and there were just enough people around to stimulate passing badinage. With almost the very first step I took, the first of my statutory thousand paces, a fine idea for the opening stanza of my day’s work came into my mind. It was a merrily inspired opening, I thought, and I looked forward to reaching my thousandth pace, at the far end of the promenade, and going home to write it.
O dear! So bracing was that sea wind, so invigorating the exercise, so numerous the acquaintances I met and such fun their varied small talk that by the time I ended my walk, that wonderfully promising opening to my piece had gone completely out of my mind, and now that I am back at my desk I am left only with this less than brilliant Day 79. Forgive me!
DAY 79
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A Christian fundamentalist called upon me today. Not a mere evangelist, or a Jehovah’s Witness, or one of those general-purpose sectarians to whom I am always happy to present the simple agnostic commandment ‘Be Kind’. No, this one was the real thing: the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the infallible
scriptures, miracles, the Atonement, the Devil – all the fundamentals of fundamentalism were absolute facts to him, and there was no arrogance to his certainties. They were all historical truths, he assured me, and there was no point in debating them.
Nor was there. He was a most courteous young man, unquestioning, and his utter belief in his own convictions struck me as being beautiful in its own right. How can a simple agnostic, groping with endless doubts, argue with such certainties? I didn’t try. His interpretation of Truth seemed a kindly sort of creed, and that’s enough for me.
DAY 80
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I don’t like to swank, but I often do, and I am always proud of my contributions to the literature of Manhattan – two books of long ago about a city I have long loved. One was commissioned by the Port of New York Authority, was called The Great Port and was dedicated, as it were, to the seamanship of the city. The other evoked Manhattan’s effervescent delight when the end of the Second World War brought back the American armies from their victories in Europe. This one I called Manhattan ’45, because it sounded partly like a kind of gun and partly like champagne, and I like to think that both will be read, if only as curious mementos for NY aficionados, when I am long dead and gone.
The other day, though, I discovered a book about Manhattan that I had never heard of, by an author strange to me. It is called The Long-Winded Lady, its author was an Irish-American journalist named Maeve Brennan, who died in 1993, and it has made me very envious. I’ll tell you why …