Real Life Can’t Compete

                         In Atlanta Botanic Gardens, when we visited our dear friends Bob and Irina last year

Before I get started, here are two popular music quiz questions. Don’t Google them, the answers will appear at the bottom of this piece.

1.       By what name is Ellen Naomi Cohen better known?

2.       Which Neil Young song provided a hit for the Dave Clark Five?

****************************

Morag Styles, a much-loved friend and neighbour, died just after Christmas. She was a lovely person and a terrific character, first ever Professor of Children’s Poetry at Cambridge. She was a stalwart of our street’s book group and provided impressive hospitality on the occasions when she hosted it. I always went home plastered on those nights.

Here is her obituary in The Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/10/morag-styles-obituary

Anyway, after her funeral, there was a major celebration of her life at Homerton College, Cambridge. In addition to the fulsome and well-deserved tributes, there were free copies of Morag’s Memoir, A Child of Air. Much of it deals with Morag’s childhood, not a very happy one, much of it spent with relatives in Scotland while her parents were out in India, being Big White Carstairs.

She notes in the Prologue to the book that, ‘Reading almost literally saved my life as a child,’ and quotes The Manchester Guardian angel Lucy Mangan’s memoir, Bookworm: ‘…glorious days when reading was the thing and life was only a minor inconvenience… when the outside world fell away completely’.

This struck a chord with me. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood (rather I made those around me unhappy), no-one was cruel to me, but there were aspects of childhood that I really did not enjoy, and as Alan Bennett says, I was glad when it was over. But I revelled in books. My childhood reading followed a pattern which I am sure is similar to that of many others. When I first learned to read properly, I devoured adventure stories by Enid Blyton. Later I graduated to books which had an element of magic or fantasy, Edith Nesbit’s magnificent The Phoenix and the Carpet, the Doctor Doolittle stories, the Narnia books of CS Lewis, and of course The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein. And for me, as a kid in industrial lowland Scotland, I felt that Real Life just didn’t have a look in. The worlds to which these books took me was so much more interesting and exciting.

Later, in my twenties and thirties, my work sent me to Singapore, France, Russia, Sweden, and many other countries, so real life had some excitement. There were still occasions, however, when I felt that real life couldn’t compete. One was when I saw the film Cyrano de Bergerac, the 1990 version directed by Rappeneau, with Gerard Depardieu in the title role. As you might expect from French cinema, it was beautifully shot and constructed, with great artistry, the performances were powerful and the story had romance, comedy and adventure. And the subtitles were Anthony Burgess’s translation of the 19^th century author’s original dramatic poetry. I came out of the cinema experiencing again that bittersweet childhood feeling that Real Life can’t compete.

January was pretty miserable for me. I had my diagnosis of prostate cancer confirmed, I sustained a head injury while out running, and I caught the most dreadful cold, probably as a result of the head injury: I had to linger for four hours in the crowded waiting area of the Accident and Emergency Department, and there were a lot of sick people there. I have to say, however, that when it was my turn, they did a great job of checking me out and stitching me up. During this period of infirmity, I skipped the January book group meeting, as the selection looked to me like misery porn about life in the trenches in the first world war. In my frame of mind in the last few weeks, I was in no mood to read anything other than thrillers, augmented with occasional episodes of Spongebob Squarepants on the telly (well OK, maybe I’m exaggerating). I know that life is scary and can be miserable. I don’t need to have my nose rubbed in it for 300 pages.

During this period I read crime novel after crime novel. Linda bought me one of the few Montalbano books which I hadn’t already read, from a bookshop in Cambridge whose merchandise is exclusively crime novels. If you’re in Cambridge, go and have a browse. In addition to the impressive selection of reading material, from the early 20^th century golden age of murder to the present, they have some lovely greetings cards with themes from classic murder stories. Anyway, the Montalbano books give something of the Real Life Can’t Compete feeling, with Salvo Montalbano’s little Sicilian world of the station, his home on the seafront, the trattoria where he is continually stuffing his face, and the merry band of idiosyncratic detectives that he leads. And as is always the case with provincial Italian stories, I am reminded of my infancy in Malta, and our overland return to Blighty in 1960.

                                                          ****************************

Mention of JRR Tolkein above reminds me of two things. First, when Tolkein turned 80, I sent him a birthday present, a little brass candlestick. His publisher used to block all correspondence except around his birthdays. I received a handwritten thank you letter from the great man. And to my frustration and anger, I can’t find the bloody thing. I think it must be somewhere under the stairs. The other thing that came to mind was that on occasion, I have pretended to get Tolkein mixed up with  JPR Williams, the rugby player, as a joke (OK, not a very good one). However, while we are on the subject, I should say that Williams was an orthopaedic surgeon as well as a rugby player, and I once saw him in the canteen at Northwick Park Hospital. So there you are.

                                                          *****************************

Answers to the quiz above:

1.       Mama Cass Elliot.

2.       Southern Man.

I must have been a member of the last generation of fourteen-year-olds who listened to Radio Luxembourg on my transistor radio while lying in bed late at night and yearning for a wider world. I seem to remember Kid Jensen playing the Dave Clark Five version of Southern Man on Jensen’s Dimensions. In the words of the Fairport Convention song, who knows where the time goes?

                                                    Another scene from the Botanic Gardens, Atlanta