Lucky Dip, by Richard Thomas (Austin Macauley, 2021, 291pp, £11.99) Reviewed by Hugh Arbuthnott

The title of this memoir is well-chosen. Richard was a diplomat, a dip, and although the Diplomatic Service did its best to work out career plans for its staff, circumstances and other peoples’ careers often got in the way. You put your hand into the Lucky Dip and had to accept what came out. Sometimes you were lucky, sometimes you weren’t. Richard was one of the lucky dips according to his book, happy with all the jobs he drew out of the bran tub.

 He was born in February 1938. Like many other parents who could afford it or who had the right connections, Richard’s sent him and his elder sister to Canada in 1940 to escape the bombing in England. They returned in 1944 when a long connection with West Kent and East Sussex began. His parents ran a National Association of Boys Clubs’ school in Cranbrook which trained boys in the arts and later on ran the theatre and Ellen Terry’s house at Smallhythe. Among other places in Kent and East Sussex, the family later lived in Winchelsea.

One might say that Richard’s luck started when he went to private schools and then to Merton College, Oxford. It was also his luck to be in the last cohort of young men called up for National Service in the Army where he seems not to have been overworked and was an extra in the film Tunes of Glory.  

Richard’s account of his adult experiences jump about in time which make it difficult sometimes to follow what happened when, but overall it is in chronological order. His diplomatic career started in the CRO, the Commonwealth Relations Office, later merged with the FO to become the FCO now the FCDO; the reader has to swallow alphabet soup throughout the book. It is worth the effort because his entertaining account of his life as a dip well illustrates the many jobs that dips do but also the fun and the adventures they have and the famous people they meet. Richard rightly praises his wife who, like so many dips’ wives, worked unpaid with him in his job and therefore for the British Government.

 

Richard’s jobs were in London in the CRO, then the FCO and in British Embassies and High Commissions abroad. He was in Paris as a member of the British delegation to NATO before its Council moved to Brussels to join SHAPE. He was in the High Commission in Ghana, Accra, where he married his  wife, Catherine, an Australian. When in the High Commission in India administering an aid programme, he also helped to set up schools in Bhutan. In the Embassy in Prague he formed links with opponents of the communist regime who later became the government.  When Ambassador to Iceland, he was involved with NATO again but there was a severe domestic upset when the residence butler murdered his (the butler’s) boyfriend in the residence basement and went to prison. In Sofia, also as Ambassador, his Embassy was giving practical support to Bulgaria as it became a liberal democracy after the collapse of communism. Catherine helped the many orphans left in dreadful conditions by the communist government. Richard also once had the tricky task of entertaining Robert Maxwell who had business interests in Bulgaria. His final job was as High Commissioner in a string of island mini-states in the Eastern Caribbean where he had to manage a large staff covering development and the battle against drugs gangs.

 If you wonder what diplomats do, Richard’s book will tell you at least what one of them did. But it is also full of personal details and experiences which make it lively, interesting and amusing.  

 

 

NIGHTINGALE by Gillian Southgate

 

In Hampstead, Keats lay listening, wondering from where

A song melodious charmed him. He  knew why

His soul cleaved to the singer’s joyous air,

Calling from beeches and a darkling sky.

Mortal, he knew that he was on the brink

Of death, his body thin, his youthful visage white,

That pain might ease with taking of strong drink,

The blushful Hippocrene, more purple than the night.

Out from the dark, scents of the flowers of earth

Set him to ponder on life’s transience, to find the words

To wish for dance and song and sun-burned mirth,

While sobbed the nightingale, most passionate of birds.

 

"Still Further" by Jonty Driver

 Jonty Driver has published this collection of eighty of his poems written over the past twenty years since he retired from teaching. They were selected by our June speaker, Douglas Reid Skinner (see below), who acted as editor and who helped to organise them for publication. A copy of the "flyer" will be attached to the next Winchelsea Literary Society newsletter. If you aren't yet on the mailing list, and would like to see this, which includes a summary of Jonty's life and career and details of how to obtain the book, please e-mail me at lawrenceyoulten@gmail.com 

Here is a review, written by Rosie Irvine, for the Ewhurst Parish Magazine, and reproduced here with her kind permission:

"Jonty Driver is a regular member of the congregation at St James’s. He moved to East Sussex with Ann after he retired from teaching in 2000. He was born in Cape Town in 1939 and was President of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students in 1963-4, and this led to him being detained in solitary confinement by the security police. He became stateless when the renewal of his passport was refused while he was studying at Oxford.

Eventually he became a British citizen, but he was not allowed back into South Africa until after apartheid had ended, many years later. His last collection of poetry was So Far: Selected Poems 1960-2004, and now we have Still Further: New Poems 2000-2020.

A large part of Jonty’s heart is still in South Africa where he grew up, and like other poets before him, such as Louis MacNeice, he is never wholly at home now in either his country of birth or in his adopted land. As he writes in ‘Sunset & After’,

"I’ve journeyed back from where I don’t belong

to where I also don’t belong."

In this book we travel with him to South Africa and across its vast expanses of veldt, and then suddenly we are back at Orchard Cottage with

"White wisteria

over an old oak door:

snowfall in midsummer."

It seems to me that the poems from South Africa are perhaps more anguished, because of the injustices and brutalities of its history, and because Jonty was forced to leave behind the country and his dear family and friends.

Many of the poems face up to old age and the ever-approaching prospect of death and the questions of faith that this gives rise to, and he says in ‘Rhyming Runes for Magical Dan’,

"About the final letting go

we can’t pretend to know."

They are searingly honest (and not for the faint-hearted!), revealing far more of the inner man than most of us perhaps choose to reveal.

‘Extracts from a Diary’ is a meditation on the poet’s mortality, written in hospital where he knows that

"The obituaries will tell those who read them a few partial truths"

But then we follow him on a slow recovery in ‘Walking Along New Road’, tucked away in this corner of East Sussex where our knowledge of the location is an added bonus for the local reader. And similarly there is a lovely sequence of poems about the Romney Marshes, including ‘Chorus’ which begins,

"Sing we our songs of the Romney marshlands

compost & leaf mould, silt, shingle & sand"

Interspersed through the collection are love poems for Ann, including ‘An Old Man & His Wife’ and ‘Song of the Sparrows’, written during lockdown ‘in the plague year, 2020’ which ends,

"I turn to you, as always, love,

who feeds the birds and knows each name;

we’re both aware what waits for us,

but tend the garden, just the same."

There is a poignant ‘Song for the Grandchildren’ that beautifully captures the fleetingness of childhood with its joyful, spontaneous play. And a poem ‘For My Dead Brother’ after the famous Catullus 101 (‘Atque in perpetuam, frater, ave atque vale’) that ends,

"I face the fact: I too must die

so greet you now: my last goodbye."

And there are many loving tributes in memory of old friends. So this is a collection that is wide-ranging in its geographical scope, but that is ultimately a tribute to the places where Jonty has lived and to all the people with whom he has shared his long and interesting life.

Rosie Irvine

Signed copies of Still Further can be obtained from Jonty. Please send a cheque for £7.50 (p&p inc) plus your postal address to him at Apple Yard Cottage, Mill Lane, Northiam, RYE, TN31 4JU

"In Time" by Douglas Reid Skinner: Literary Society Zoom Meeting 18 June 2021

 The Lit. Soc were pleased to welcome once again a man dubbed the poets’ poet, the well-travelled South African, Douglas Reid Skinner, whose vigorous audience engagement and sonorous recitations on his previous visit are still warmly remembered.  Would Zoom critically diminish that force field of personal magnetism?  The title In Time was to cover a miscellany of themes from his own oeuvre. He set the stage with musings on his collection The House in Pella District published in 1985.  Pella, a small village in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province, sits amid a landscape of desolate beauty and is deeply rooted in the past.  The Bushmen, very much yesterday’s men,  still live there along side modern, commercial mining interests who drill ever deeper into the area’s rich geological past in pursuit of minerals and semi-precious stones.  Ostensibly following in  the tracks of 18^th century explorers, Skinner is aware he is stalking himself.  He visits his birthplace, Upington, the fertility of whose farms’ soil benefits from the rich, alluvial silt of the Orange River.  After going to the hospital in which he was born, he recounts in The Visit his return to his now dilapidated and abandoned childhood home.  Approaching it in remorseless heat which melts the tar on the road, he studies the photo held in the palm of his hand;

it shows two people smiling at a child

at play on blankets spread beneath the trees 

the world seems made of found and fallen things.

    This was the first place where he lived.      

Having started on childhood, families and memory, Skinner  continued unpacking the theme of time in the 1980s by studying the ancient geology of the Cape with stone functioning as a book whose pages were the layers of botanical history i.e. deep time.  A complementary objective in this endeavour was the constant search for self, for a new vision emerging from the weighty complexity of the past.  The speaker admitted to conscious imitation of the Leakeys in Kenya and Richard’s transition from safari ranger to palaeontologist.  The poem On Time records how the hiatus created by an hour’s wait for a train presents the opportunity to study the raw, elemental geology of Glencoe during its first winter snowfall, after a short crow’s flight into a fast fading past  from his softer, coastal lunch stop.  The glacial pace of change in the surrounding rock formations contrasts sharply with a hawk striking ,,,,the hawk that suddenly falls down gravity’s steep wall.   Heaven was inspired by an exploration of Western Cape with a friend where they encountered more extraordinary rock formations on a particularly memorable stretch to Cape Point.  It was encouraging to learn of Hieronymus Bosch’s belief that death was not a prerequisite for admission to Heaven and to hear of the heritage left by the area’s Huguenot pioneers, who must have found the wine industry they established at Franschhoek mitigated the austerity of their Calvinism.   

An inveterate globetrotter, 1979 found Douglas in a tribe for whom stoned had an entirely different meaning as he commuted to work in a New York clearing bank via   the Staten Island ferry, but even adrift on a sea of financialised froth his Muse did not desert him as his moving rendition of December, New York Bay neatly illustrated. Heading West, a visit to Point Reyes National Park north of San Francisco, inspired Blue Dragon Flies  which had the poet ruminating on time frames of a completely different scale, of perennial fertility cycles and the budding of the notion that each thing has its own time.  

Even with the filter of Zoom in place, the music of our speaker’s finely measured lines and the X-ray clarity of his gaze still won over the audience while his thought provoking material provided plenty of philosophical biltong to chew over long afterwards.

 William Doherty

 

Loot by Barnaby Phillips

 Many members will remember the talk by Barnaby Phillips to the Literary Society in 2016. He told us the gripping and moving story of a Nigerian soldier in the British Army, sent to fight the Japanese in Burma. He was wounded and saved from capture by the Japanese by some Burmese villagers. Barnaby had managed to find the now elderly ex-soldier in Nigeria, and took a "Thank-you" message from him to Burma (Myanmar) to see if he could find the family who had saved his life. The account of his success was very moving, and was also used in an excellent documentary made by Barnaby, himself an experienced TV journalist working fo Al-Jazeera.

Now Barnaby Phillips has produced another book, "Loot", on the  topical subject of the Benin bronzes taken by the British from an area now part of Nigeria. Along with the Elgin Marbles, these artifacts have been the subject of much discussion about whether they should be returned to their origins. I'm looking forward to reading it. Here's a link that will help you find more about "Loot" CLICK HERE

The Forgotten Spy: Talk to Winchelsea Literary Soc by Dr. Nick Barrat 19 March 2021

 

Winchelsea’s pride of loyal literary lions gathered round their cyber water hole to watch acclaimed genealogist and TV family history celebrity, Dr. Nick Barratt, take the plunge off the top board into his own ancestral  gene pool and emerge after a lung-bursting immersion waving a copy of his recent book, The Forgotten Spy. This tale removed the grit from one family member’s oyster in solving the mystery of Uncle Michael’s Big Day.  Back in the 1930s the 6 year old Michael was assiduously coached by his parents to negotiate North London’s  busy streets and walk to his local Fever Hospital and find out whether his younger brother had succumbed to scarlet fever and was now posted among the deceased in the daily bulletin. Happily he was able to report his sibling’s continued survival to his uncharacteristically distant and distracted parents.  Nick’s plunge into his family history revealed the reason for this parental detachment – they had learnt at that day’s  inquest into the suicide of Mum’s brother, Ernest Holloway Oldham, that he had been a spy. 

Born in 1894 and educated at private schools, courtesy of a legacy from an uncle in Southern Rhodesia,  Oldham finished in mid-table in the Civil Service exams he took on leaving school.  This secured a post at the Board of Trade and after a stint in Education the outbreak of the Great War saw him in the Cipher Department of the Foreign Office.  He enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles and was placed on the Reserve List before seeing action in the Staffordshire Regiment after completing officer training.  He was  then seconded to Military Intelligence but was blown up, concussed and nearly buried alive at Saint Quentin during the German Spring Offensive in 1918: all enough to be repatriated to Blighty.  The war’s end had him back at the F.O. and in their delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference. Limited foreign language skills scotched a potential diplomatic posting in Rio and after a spell overseeing Whitehall’s King’s Messengers he was back in the shadowy world of security,, intelligence and ciphers.  He was involved in co-ordinating the Government’s activities in the General Strike of 1926 and the following year married an apparently rich widow, 10 years his senior, with 2 sons and a house in Kensington. 

Far from fading into the rosy glow of domestic bliss, Barratt’s tale burst into flame as one Charlie Scott walked into the Soviet Embassy in Paris offering them grazing rights on British Intelligence’s cables by selling them the cipher code book for £50,000.  This triggered a cascade of investigations as the Soviets sought authentication of Scott and the British charged Ernest Oldham with elucidating the matter.  The Russian agent, posing as a Hungarian count Joseph Pereli,. tracked Scott and learnt this was Oldham’s alias.  He even went  to Oldham’s house, met his wife, arranged a lunch assignation at the Ritz and began  an affair with her which culminated in him living with the Oldhams in a ménage à trois.  Life in espionage’s fast lane proved stressful and his increasing reliance on alcohol as a prop necessitated Oldham’s admission to a Suffolk Rehab. Clinic. 

Although later said to have  been behaving increasingly erratically, Barratt opined that Oldham’s presence at the summit meeting where Germany was admitted  to the League of Nations in 1932 and the intelligence that he gave the Soviets helped forge the partnership with Germany that resulted in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the 1939 dismemberment of Poland.  In a bizarre final act Oldham was sacked and denied pension rights in November 1932, possibly indicative of realisation dawning in British Intelligence.  His wife, Lucy, left him in early 1933 and the Russians requested a swan song – stealing the cipher code book.  The slapstick abortive attempted theft added Oldham’s colleague Kemp to his pursuers in the role of amateur sleuth and MI5 started to tap his phone.  He still had the use of his red diplomatic passport and managed to elude his British hunters for several months on the Continent before being spotted by chance in Jermyn Street when he returned penniless to London.  Nick Barratt felt that the evidence against Oldham was only circumstantial but the pressure drove him to suicide by placing his head in the gas oven of his kitchen   Lucy also committed suicide some years later and Tereli was recalled to face Stalin’s purges in the 1930s but seems to have survived his years in the Gulag..

Access to both British and Soviet archives allowed Nick to appraise his great-uncle’s espionage career.  The Soviets rated Arno (Oldham’s code name) one of their top assets and his demise a great loss.  The British view is  ambivalent with much being made of his alcoholism and erratic behaviour but little of his ability to consistently give British Intelligence the slip or to explain why he continued to be given tasks and access to the Foreign Office despite his wayward lifestyle.  Maybe he was quite a good spy. The egregious maverick British Intelligence officer, Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame, was also exercised about the Oldham case as he crashed around Whitehall in the 70s and 80s on his own campaigns of destabilisation. 

Our speaker hypothesised that the Soviets suffered buyer’s regret after Oldham and their next batch of recruits, the Cambridge 5, were more ideological fellow travellers.  The 4^th and 5^th men, Blunt and Cairncross, managed to see out their careers as pillars of the British Establishment although we are assured the security services had everything under control by the 1960s.  Hmmmm.

Family history and genealogy are increasingly popular pursuits and the evening concluded with an animated audience engaging Nick in a lively Q and A session. 

William Doherty