1970

The Listeners by Monica Dickens – #1970Club

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The 1970 Club is drawing to an end, and I have a LOT of reviews to catch up on – perhaps foolishly, I’ve been away since Thursday. But it’s been great, as always, and Karen and I will be announcing the next club soon.

But, sneaking in to the final hours, I want to write quickly about The Listeners by Monica Dickens. It’s been years since I read any Dickens, M. – I first fell for her for the wonderful comic memoirs One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet (and the slightly less wonderful third in the trilogy, My Turn To Make The Tea). Far more of her output, though, were more serious novels. I bought The Listeners back in 2009 and had long been intrigued by its premise: it follows people who phone the Samaritans and people who answer those calls.

For those not in the know, the Samaritans run a suicide prevention hotline (I don’t know if they’d use that terminology, so forgive me if not), and I believe you can also walk in. It’s been going for a very long time, and Dickens was involved in setting up the first American branch a few years after The Listeners was published. I’m sure the Samaritans has changed a fair bit since the 1970s, and I know a bit about them from when Mum volunteered there a decade or so ago. What hasn’t changed is the non-judgemental way volunteers answer the phones – having absolutely no idea what will be on the other side. Here’s a kind, overworked volunteer called Victoria:

When she hung up the telephone, it rang again before she had taken her hand off it.

“Samaritans — can I help you?”

The beeps again, replaced by heavy breathing. A man.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

The breathing continued. It could be anxiety. It could be a joke. It could be a sex call. It could be fear or pain. Whatever it was, you waited. You never rang off first.

You tried to offer help without being officious. You tried to make contact, but if no one spoke, all you could do was show that you were there. That you were still listening. That you would listen all night if that was what they wanted. Friendship. Caring. Love. Your voice had to convey your heart.

We do later learn who is calling, and it is a genuine call. Dickens goes back and forth into different lives, picking up their crises or mundanities. Victoria is sort-of engaged to a man she doesn’t respect; Paul is married to an alcoholic who mocks the Samaritans; Sarah is young and idealistic. On the other side – the people phoning in – we have Billie, who tries to provoke but clearly needs a friend; desperate, sad Tim who ends up in hospital where he’s too scared to give his name, etc etc.

Oh, I really wanted to like this novel. It’s a theme I’ve never read elsewhere, and I trusted Dickens to portray the characters with empathy and warmth. And I think she does that. But what she doesn’t include is any sort of momentum at all. Despite many of these people being in literal life-or-death situations, somehow the novel is turgid and tedious. I believe a thrilling novel can be written about the lowest possible stakes. These characters have huge stakes – but maybe Dickens took that as excitement enough, and forgot to make any of the writing or plotting interesting. We just pop in and out of lives, with minimal character development and no narrative urgency. I ended up skimming the second half of the novel.

Sorry to end the 1970 Club on a downer, but it’s always helpful in any club to give a full overview of the year – including the books that will be going straight to the charity shop!

Island in Moonlight by Kathleen Sully – #1970Club

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You may well know Brad’s blog Neglected Books. As the name suggests, he reads and reviews books that are neglected – but we’re not talking about authors who could do with a boost, like E.M. Delafield or Rose Macaulay. We’re talking authors who have almost entirely disappeared from the world – their books are near-impossible to track down, and often Brad is the only person to have written anything substantial about them online. One author he often mentions is Kathleen Sully.

Knowing how much he admired Sully, I popped her name on my mental list and kept an eye out – little expecting to stumble across one in the antiques shop in the village next to mine. It was especially surprising, given that they only have about 100 books for sale. But I came away with a proof copy of Island in Midnight (1970).

There is a slightly odd opening, of two young women sat in a high-class restaurant. They spot an attractive man who comes in – but, as one woman tells the other, ‘he played a mean trick on me’. She thought she was accompanying him to a party – but, instead, he delivered her to a friend who wanted to have an affair. And the friend was blind.

That’s the last we see of those women, but we are introduced to Alex (the blind man) and his friend Max, who goes out of his way to help Alex cheat on his wife. From this introduction, we shift into Alex’s first-person viewpoint. This is how it starts…

Until you’re blind, you don’t know what sight is – that is, if you go blind after having perfect sight. Close your eyes, bandage them, then walk about in the room you know the best – perhaps your bedroom. You thought you knew where the dresser was – eh? You’ve banged your shin, knocked over a lamp – broken the damned thing, no doubt, and landed up in a corner. And you think you know which corner. But it isn’t. And you’re so damned confused that you’re afraid to move again for a minute or two. When you do, you move slowly, cautiously, ready for anything – even a stuffed tiger that your wife bought from a sale that day and didn’t tell you about. And all the while – and this is the worst part – you expect a light to be switched on.

Alex lost his sight in an accident that we never really learn about. I quite liked Sully’s refusal to dress up the narrative with unnecessary plot details – the reader needs to know that Alex is blind, and isn’t able to come to terms with it; we don’t need to know the ins and outs of how it happened. Sully has a stripped-back approach to storytelling, more invested in how people react to their immediate and latest environment, without dwelling unduly on the past.

After an unfortunate sexual exploit, Alex’s wife intends to file for divorce and he determines to leave his current life and his homeland. Though his powers of visual recall are fading, there is one exception to this rule: an island he visited when he was only 20 years old. This is many decades in the past, but he has carried the experience with him ever since as some sort of exemplar of paradise.

Even as I write this, I can see the sweep of the bay as the ship pulled up to the tiny landing stage. The water was as transparent as the air and sky. And blue: the kind of blue you never see in this country. The white buildings set the blue off and the sand was pure gold, with gold’s soft glitter. There were oranges and lemons ripening in the orchards and the leaves of those trees were dark and polished, casting purple shadows. All shadows had intense colour on the island – no greys. The natives of the island were as beautiful as the flowers – and as innocent. And it seemed to me that there was always music: everybody had an instrument and played the thing. I promised myself an accordion but never bought one.

You can see how this sort of idyllic vision would have stayed with him. Impetuously, Alex determines to return to the island and start a new life there. He’s as selfish in this decision as he is in every other. Sully doesn’t waste too much time trying to make Alex a sympathetic character: he is monstrously self-interested, with affections for others but no pretence that he would ever put their needs ahead of his.

His chauffeur, Pell, is persuaded to accompany Alex to the island and get him set up there. As it approaches, Pell (whose perspective we get throughout his chapter) struggles to align what he’s seeing with Alex’s memories. Rather than lapping Meditterean shores in bright sunshine, he sees ‘grey water lashing at the low concrete wall of the water-front’.

Out of season, the island is miserable. Alex is spared the bleakness of the visuals, and can superimpose his recollections of the island of his youth – but he can’t ignore how abandoned and hopeless the island feels. There are no tourists, little industry, and a crowd of locals without much going for them. There’s Lyn, a tart-with-a-heart type who is running low on ‘heart’; there’s the proprietor of Joe’s restaurant whose fondness for Alex will only run as far as his income; there’s Willis, who agrees to be a sort of Man Friday for Alex while supposedly looking out for somewhere he can live – though, knowing this will be the end of their financial relationship, is in no hurry to secure anywhere.

As the story develops, perhaps the most important relationship is one suffused in memories – the woman he had a brief affair with back when he was 20, and the possible consequences of that affair all these decades later…

I know Brad doesn’t think much of Island in Moonlight, but I thought it was really good. I can’t compare with Sully’s other writing, as this is my first of her novels, but I was very much attracted by her writing style. It is sparse, often dialogue-heavy, and the shifts into different characters’ first-person narratives is done sharply, entering straight into their mindset without any fanfare. The plot whizzes by, if it can be called a plot, and there is precious little character development. But there is such an assurance to Sully’s writing that I felt totally confident in being taken wherever she wanted to take me. Island in Moonlight is an odd, sparse book that breaks a whole lot of conventional novelistic rules without putting anything too experimental in their place – and it sold me on Sully. I’ll definitely keep looking out for her.

Trespasses by Paul Bailey – #1970Club

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When I reviewed Jenny Offill’s brilliant novel Dept. of Speculation earlier in the year, I asked for recommendations for other books told in fragments or vignettes. The comment section has lots of brilliant suggestions, but I don’t think anybody mentioned Paul Bailey’s Trespasses (1970). The fragmentary style may be in vogue now, but Bailey shows that some authors were doing it more than half a century ago.

Trespasses is mostly (by not entirely) told in short, sharp vignettes. They are often headed HER or HIM or THEM or BOY or BEFORE or AFTER – being, in turn, about Ralph, Ellie, them as a couple, Ralph as a child, and then before and after the big event. We learn what that is almost immediately: Ellie died by suicide. With chronology thrown out the window, the reader is flung instantly into a maelstrom of perspectives, events, and memories. Here’s a taste – this is the first page or so:

EARLY

It is May and the sun is shining. It is warm.
Early this morning, walking in the grounds, I stopped before an apple tree. I looked up at its branches, which seemed to droop under the weight of so much white and pink.
My head was empty; I could enjoy the blossom.

HER

She has been dead some weeks. Mrs Dinsdale complained – the state of her bathroom due to all that blood. People who disposed of themselves, she told me, were as inconsiderate as they were wicked. If wicked was putting it too strong, perhaps unnatural was nearer the mark. My wife had gone against nature.

PEACE

Endless green and blue: below and above. And one apple tree – white and pink, because it is always spring – darkening the earth, and fiercely light against the sky.
Some birds, occasionally singing, and a sun just strong enough to look into.

THEN

It was not a scream in the strict sense of the word. It was more like a howl.

We can’t rest in reflections on Ellie’s act, because of the constant jumps in time. Indeed, a funeral is mentioned in the opening pages – but we quickly realise it is Ralph’s father’s funeral, many years earlier. We are wrong-footed so often that you quickly give up trying to work out where you are, and instead take it all in like an abstract painting. What it conveys brilliantly is Ralph’s state of mind, after his wife’s suicide – unable to process anything properly, and disoriented to the point of mental collapse.

But considering how fragmentary, achronological and formally experimental Trespasses is, I was very impressed by how clearly the secondary characters come to life. Through a jigsaw of fleeting encounters, we get to know comic creations like landlady Mrs Dinsdale and her vicious relationship with her daughter, who would now probably be described as ‘sex positive’. Ellie and Ralph’s respective and contrasting upbringings speak a lot to their meeting across class barriers, and their mothers are fun and oddly poignant to spend time with.

I couldn’t decide if their gay friend Bernard was surprisingly progressive for a 1970 novel or not – he is a camp caricature of arch sayings, but nobody seems bothered about his sexuality. He speaks of his own actions with a mixture of shame and shamelessness, and he is one of two background characters given long, non-fragmented sections to narrative about themselves in the second half of the novel. Bailey keeps us on our toes, with this traditional approach to novel writing feeling fresh and even jarring, coming in the midst of the experimental.

The one thing we never get a grasp of (and I think this is a good narrative choice) is why Ellie made the decision to kill herself. When the novel came out, suicide had only been decriminalised in the England for nine years, and I’m sure it wasn’t considered with as much understanding as it is now. It is a bold topic for a novel, and Bailey writes it brilliantly. The experimentalism is never allowed to overshadow character, and Trespasses is first and foremost a book about character – often very amusingly, but there is something deeply moving about Ralph’s raking back and forth through his memories, for clues about what would happen.

I’ve read two Paul Bailey novels – his debut, At the Jerusalem, and now his second. I’ve been unintentionally reading them in order. I don’t see him much discussed now, though he is in fact still alive, but I’d love to hear from anyone else who admires and enjoys his work. And I’m glad the 1970 Club sent me back to my Bailey shelf. In my year of loving fragmentary novels, this is an excellent find.

A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence

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Regular visitors to StuckinaBook will know how much I adore Margaret Laurence, and particularly here Manawaka sequence of novels. They have a little overlap, though can be read independently – and it includes some of the best novels I’ve read in recent years, particularly A Jest of God. The only one of the five I hadn’t read was the penultimate in the sequence, A Bird in the House (1970), and is the only one that’s not really a novel: it’s a series of linked stories about a young girl called Vanessa.

Through her eyes, steadily growing up over the course of the stories, we see a family tied together and falling apart. She is loyally close to her father and sporadically close to her mother; a little brother is born in one story; she fears some grandparents and adores others. The patterns and habits of her family are all she knows, and she details them with the interest of an anthropologist and the familiarity of a constant observer.

The world is a kaleidoscope of people and philosophies, and Vanessa is gradually working out who she is and what she stands for. But it is a curious blend of perspectives – because it is not really through the eyes of eight-year-old Vanessa, but 40-year-old Vanessa looking back. The naivety and newness of everything is layered with the reflections of a middle-aged woman remembering them.

This blend comes most to the fore in the way Aunt Edna is depicted. She is unmarried, looking after Vanessa’s cantankerous grandfather but also dependent on him. As a child, Vanessa loves and admires Edna, accepting her role as an inevitable part of the fabric of her life. But the older Vanessa clearly feels a whole range of emotions to Edna – pities her position, hopes for her, admires her spirit, recognises the limits on it. As a narrator, she is rather older than this spinster aunt – who, to young Vanessa, of course seems old. Through the stories, Laurence masterly weaves these complexities. The last line of this paragraph is brilliant, and quintessentially Laurence:

If someone coming to the Brick House for the first time chance to light a cigarette when Grandfather was home, he gave them one chance and that was all. His warning was straightforward. He would walk to the front door, fling it open, and begin coughing. He would then say, “Smoky in here, ain’t it?” If this had no effect, he told the visitor to get out, and no two ways about it. Aunt Edna once asked me to guess how many boyfriends she had lost that way, and when I said “I give up – how many?” she said “Five, and that’s the gospel truth.” At the time I imagined, because she was laughing, that she thought it was funny.”

Another instance of her lovely turns of phrase comes in a story about Piquette Tonnerres – a character and family overlapping intriguingly with one of the major families in the next book in the Manawaka sequence, The Diviners: “I could not reach Piquette at all, and I soon lost interest in trying. But all that summer she remained as both a reproach and a mystery to me.”

Each story was published separately and can be read separately – so we see Vanessa grow up, but we are also reintroduced to the family each time. Impressively, it doesn’t feel repetitive or annoying to read so many introductions in sequence – it feels, rather, like a fresh development on each character whenever we meet them again.

I think the stories I liked most were the ones about particular people who come briefly onto the scene. The one about Piquette, ‘The Loons’, is a good example. Another is ‘The Half-Husky’, about a local boy who torments her pet dog (which is quite hard to read). Laurence is too sophisticated to give her stories a neat message, but we are pulled towards moral conclusions that never quite coalesce. Vanessa is clearly learning, though doesn’t come to any finalities. Rather, these stories show us experiences and wonderings and leave behind an impression of beauty and brutality intertwined. Nothing is sentimental in these stories, but somehow they are touching. Adult Vanessa clearly has a mix of nostalgia and sadness about her childhood – not least because of a tragedy that happens almost incidentally in one chapter, then spreads out like dye in water throughout the others.

Laurence is at her best, I think, when she can really lean into the development of a character and examine every aspect of their emotional life. It’s why A Jest of God remains her masterpiece, in my eyes. But A Bird in the House is excellent too – beautiful writing, extraordinary knowledge of human character, and moments that will certainly remain in my mind. Now I’ve finished the Manawaka sequence, the only real question is when I’ll go back and read them all again.

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

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84 Charing Cross RoadI’ve written about a couple of Helene Hanff books over the years – you can see them from that ‘browse’ menu over on the right hand side – but I don’t think I ever wrote about her most famous book, 84, Charing Cross Road. Well, a beautiful new edition from Slightly Foxed Editions brought about an excellent opportunity. I suspect most of you know this book already (and I can also recommend the lovely film) but, for those who don’t, I have written about it over at Shiny New Books. Below is the beginning of my review; if your appetite is whetted, you can go and check out the rest.

Slightly Foxed Editions – and I never tire of saying how beautiful they are – offer two different, wonderful things to the world. Either they are an introduction to brilliant memoirs that were undiscoverable and unknown, or they give the opportunity to have much-loved classics in that inimitably lovely series. And, of course, 84 Charing Cross Road appears in the latter category.

The Young Ardizzone

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As I mentioned before Christmas (in the post from which I swiped this photo) I got a lovely Slightly Foxed edition of Edward Ardizzone’s The Young Ardizzone (1970) from my Virago Secret Santa, and I took it away with me for my few days of indulgent reading at the end of 2012.  It was the first book I finished in 2013, and it amuses me that the year I found most elusive for A Century of Books was the first one I completed in 2013 – not that I’m doing that project this year.  BUT it is going on Reading Presently.  And what a lovely gift it was!  It is – but of course – wonderful.

There are lots of teenage girls out there who go mad for Justin Bieber, or young boys who idolise football players (I’m afraid I can’t name any who weren’t playing back in 1998).  In my own off-kilter way, I’m in danger of becoming a total fanboy for Slightly Foxed Editions.  They’re just all good.  There are other reprint publishers I love, as you know, but I think these are the most consistently wonderful offerings.  No duds.  Excuse me while I put a photo of the editorial team on my wall.  Ahem.

Edward Ardizzone’s childhood seems to have been rather unusual, where parenting is concerned.  He was born in 1900, in Tonkin, Vietnam, but moved to Suffolk, England when only five.  His father, however, stayed behind, moving around Asia – visiting England at intervals, moving his family around the country (for he was certainly still married to Ardizzone’s mother, who spent four years out in Asia with him when Ardizzone was at boarding school) but playing minimal part in Ardizzone’s childhood.  The chief figure was his tempestuous grandmother – Ardizzone often describes her going ‘black in the face with rage’, but adds that she ‘was normally gay, witty and affectionate’.  More diverting relatives!  Lucky Ed.

I always love reading about people’s childhoods, but I loved Ardizzone’s more than most, because it   took place in East Bergholt.  I’d initially thought, flicking through the book, that only a chapter or two took place in East Bergholt – but he is, in fact, there for a few years.  It’s the village where my grandparents lived for about 40 years, and Our Vicar’s Wife was there for her final teenage years, so I know it pretty well.  I even recognise the house Ardizzone lived in from this little sketch.

A very lovely village it is too.  Here are some of his recollections:

Yet certain memories are with me still.  A particular picnic in a hayfield during haymaking; a fine summer afternoon in a cornfield when the stooks of corn became our wigwams.  A certain rutted lane with oak tree arching overhead and hedges so high that the lane looked like a green tunnel leading to the flats below.[…]Not far from the old parish church, with its strange bell cage planted down among the tombstones, was a round bounded on one side by a very high red brick wall.  Set in this wall was a small gothic door.  It was of wood and decorated with heavy iron studs.  Beside this door was a wrought-iron bell pull.
It’s all quite simply told, but works well with the simple pictures.  The name Ardizzone meant nothing to me when I received the book, but I did recognise his illustrations – although I don’t know where I encountered them – which are throughout the book as a delightful accompaniment.  I must confess, to my unlearned eyes his draughtsmanship is not the very finest, and the comparisons Huon Mallalieu’s Preface makes with E.H. Shepard and Beatrix Potter seem a trifle generous.  But, even with those reservations, his illustrations enhance the memoir no end.  It is almost all done with lines and crosshatching, just a dot or two to suggest facial expressions.

Ardizzone didn’t enjoy school greatly – there are some incidents of bullying which seem to me quite shocking, but he only really mentions them in passing, without any suggestion that they have scarred him for life.  And, indeed, his various school exploits take up most of the book – with plenty of cheerful moments, especially when describing respected schoolteachers.

I only wish Ardizzone hadn’t whipped quite so quickly through the final section of his autobiography – where he explains (in three or four pages) his progression from being shown by the London Group, favourably reviewed at the Bloomsbury Gallery, commissioned to illustrate a Le Fanu collection, and finally a successful children’s author/illustrator.  He rattles through it all at breakneck speed, which is a shame, as it sounds a fascinating period in his life.  So many autobiographers find their own childhood much more interesting than the rest of their life, and many of their readers would find everything interesting.  Oh well.  Mustn’t grumble; I’ll accept what Ardizzone has given us.  And what he is given us is rather lovely.

Frederick the Great – Nancy Mitford

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I’ve done it! I’ve done it! My book for 1970 is finished, and with it is finished my Century of Books. I was so fearful that I might stall at 99 on December 31st, so finishing on December 28th was rather a relief. I’ll write more about the project, including the sort of stats and things that interest me, but for today I’ll get on with reviewing the title I chose for 1970 – Frederick the Great by Nancy Mitford.

Vintage Books kindly sent me a couple of Nancy Mitford’s biographies a while ago, and I was in a bit of a quandary about them. Those of you who were reading Stuck-in-a-Book in 2008 may recall my Mitfordmania, which has lessened a little (mostly because I came to the reluctant conclusion that Debo Mitford probably wouldn’t become my best friend) but is certainly not dead. So I was all eagerment to read another book by Nancy Mitford – but my interest in notable figures of French history is so minute as to be negligible. On which side of the balance would Frederick the Great fall down? More Mitford or more History? Frivolous and funny, or scholarly and dry? I thought I had my answer on the first page:

He was the third son of his parents: two little Fredericks had died, one from having a crown forced upon his head at the time of the christening and the other when the guns greeting his birth were fixed too near his cradle; the third Frederick, allergic to neither crowns nor guns, survived, and so, luckily for him, did his elder sister, Wilheimine.
Can this possibly be true? Had two heirs did in such surreal circumstances? I decided not to take recourse to Wikipedia, but just to take Nancy’s word for it. Even if Nancy is honestly reporting events, the tang of Mitford is evident in the bizarre way she phrases them, and the absence of any sort of explanation. I’m sorry for the children and their mother, but I was delighted that Mitford didn’t lose her tone when writing non-fiction.

Indeed, for much of the time it felt novelesque. Mitford uses almost no footnotes and, whilst there is a bibliography at the end, her biography is evidently incredibly subjective. Since she doesn’t reference properly, even when giving excerpts, it is impossible to ascertain where she gets her information – and where she is making stuff up. I doubt she ever invents battles which didn’t happen, or friendships which never existed, but she certainly imposes a great deal that she cannot have known for certain. The first 80 or so pages of Frederick the Great concern his life as a prince, principally (ahaha) his relationship with his father. It was the section of the book I found most interesting, but Mitford blithely imagines Frederick’s thoughts and feelings, giving no evidence for these forays into his consciousness – for, indeed, what evidence could there be?

Frederick William (Frederick the Great’s father) loved hunting and religion (if not noticeably God), and hated intellectuals and the French. Frederick the Great was – from birth, it sometimes seems – the exact opposite. He suggested that hunters were below butchers (because butchers killed out of necessity, and did not enjoy doing it), he enjoyed winding his father up by being blasphemous or heretical, and worshipped the French tongue so greatly that he always signed himself Fédéric, could barely speak German, and prized French culture above any other. At least this is what Nancy Mitford claims – but I began to suspect she might be superimposing her own devotedly Francophile feelings upon this German king, just a little.

It is something of a truism of biography to present the subject as a ‘mass of contradictions’. Certainly, Frederick the Great seems that. Mitford emphasises his love of culture (he was passionately fond of Voltaire, at least until they met; he practiced the flute four times a day) and his progressive nature (legal reforms which saw only a handful of death penalties given a year, in contrast to the rest of Western Europe; decreasing cruelty to civilians during warfare) but alongside this is, of course, his reputation as an invader and ruthless militarist. That reputation was, indeed, all I knew about him before starting this biography. But Mitford is much keener to present him as a human, even lovable, character – anecdotal foibles and all:

The King’s time-table when he was at home did not vary from now on; many people have described it and their accounts tally. He was woken at 4 a.m.; he hated getting up early but forced himself to do it until the day he died. He scolded the servants if they let him go to sleep again, but he was sometimes so pathetic that they could not help it; so he made a rule that, under pain of being put in the army, they must throw a cloth soaked in cold water on his face.
He often comes across as rather a silly, but ultimately adorable, little boy. When it comes to his militaristic tendencies, Mitford is clearly quite bored by them – and, in turn, makes the chapters describing them by far the most boring of the book. It’s true that I would never thrill to the accounts of battles and tactical manoeuvres, but Mitford’s style loses all charm or polish when she comes to write about them. These secluded chapters are written with all the panache of a primary school essay about a child’s holiday activities – “Then he did this, then he did this, then he did this” – and Mitford evidently can’t wait to get onto the next chapter.

Ultimately, it is a very involving character portrait, with so much subjectivity laced silently through it, that Mitford is in every sentence. Since it is non-fiction, people appear and disappear, arrive far too late in the narrative or inconveniently die – Mitford can’t help it, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less confusing for an ignorant reader like me. So, poor historian that I am, I can’t pretend that Frederick the Great will ever rival Nancy Mitford’s novels for my affections, and this wasn’t the all-consuming, utterly-joyous reading experience I’d hoped might round off A Century of Books, but it was definitely interesting to see how Mitford might approach the topic – and, who knows, I might even have learnt a thing or two that I’ll remember.