Autobiographical items

Dannie Abse, the Welsh doctor, poet and occasional diarist, died ten years ago today, just two days before I got married (though I’d known my new wife, Hat, for seven years, and we have two children together). I never met Abse, but there are one or two rather amazing links between him, Hat and I. He was best mates with my father, Frederic, in the 1950s, before Frederic abandoned me and my mother to emigrate to the US. Decades later, long before I met Hat, Abse was friends with her father, Giles Gordon. Indeed, both our fathers, (Hat’s and mine) are mentioned in Abse’s first published book of ‘journals’ - journals, for him, being a collection of ‘autobiographical items’. In later life, Abse lived in the same road as my mother, and they would walk their dogs in Childs Hill Park, and nod ‘hello’, in some faint acknowledgement of their social connection half a century earlier.

Abse was born in Cardiff, youngest of four children in a Jewish family. His father part-owned and ran cinemas. He studied medicine, briefly at the University of Wales, and then, in London, at Westminster Hospital and King’s College, becoming a specialist chest physician. During the latter part of the war he volunteered with other medical students to help, but was not sent abroad. He published his first book of poetry in the late 1940s, and in 1951, he was called up for National Service. That same year, he married Joan Mercer, a librarian at the time for the Financial Times, and an art historian. They moved to live in Hodford Road, Golder’s Green, north London, and had three children.

By this time, Abse was part of the London poetry scene, giving poetry readings, and being likened to his fellow Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, though he soon brushed off the latter’s overwrought style. A second collection of poems followed, and then his first autobiographical novel Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve (1954) brought him some early literary success. Many other poems, readings, books followed, as he managed to live life as a celebrated poet at the same time as pursuing a medical career.

In 2005, Joan was killed in a car accident, and Abse himself suffered injuries. He continued to write, and, in 2012, he accepted a CBE for services to poetry and literature, saying, at the time, that many people more left-wing than he had taken the award. He died on 28 September 2014. Wikipedia has a short biography, but there are also several detailed obituaries online, at The Telegraph, for example, The Guardian, the BBC. There are several older articles by Gerald Isaaman, ex editor of the Ham and High, for Camden New Journal.

My mother, Barbara, who died in 2007, also lived on Hodford Road, and would often see Abse in Childs Hill Park as they walked their dogs. I don’t think they ever talked, but they would nod a greeting as they passed, in some vague way acknowledging that they had known each other in the 1950s. Indeed, according to my father, Frederic Goldsmith, Dannie was one of his best friends in those days. They were both part of a group of musicians, artists, writers, German refugees (Frederic had arrived in London as a child in the 30s, his family escaping from Hitler’s Nazi Germany) that would meet in The Cosmo, on Finchley Road. Also part of that group was Peter the Girl, who was a friend of my parents; Uncle Bondy, who took us on holiday to his primitive villa in Bandol, France, at least once; and Peter Vansittart who married my aunt, Johnnie.

Around the time Abse was getting married, Frederic met my mother, and I was born the following year. The marriage between my parents didn’t last long - in contrast to Abse’s which lasted a lifetime and very happily so, according to all reports. Frederic, the cad, ran off to the US, not to return for 20 years. And when he did return to London, he thought it would be funny, in an ‘old times’ sort of way, to show up at Abse’s house in the middle of the night. But Abse didn’t find it funny, and, effectively, rejected his old friend. Peter the Girl, out of loyalty to Frederic, never forgave Abse for that - indeed she called me the day after he died to remind me of the story. Ironically, I was out of the country when Frederic made that visit to London - ironic because every year through my childhood he had written to me saying he would come visit soon!

Fast forwarding, to the year 2007, Frederic long since dead, and my mother just gone too, I met and fell in love with Harriet Gordon (often known as Hat). Her parents, too, had died in recent years: Giles Gordon, literary agent, and Margaret Gordon, children’s book illustrator. It turned out that her father had been Dannie Abse’s agent, and friend, for many years. Hat and I moved in together, and have two children now. Along the way, we wrote to Abse, thinking he might be intrigued by the coincidence. He wrote back, saying that is one ‘helluva coincidence’, or rather ‘a heaven of a coincidence.’

I feel justified in contributing a piece on Abse here, to The Diary Review, because he published several books which were either compilations of diary extracts and/or were given the title ‘journals’. In fact, in his first collection of ‘journal’ pieces - Journals from the Ant-Heap (1986) - Abse mentions both my father and Hat’s father, but in very different contexts. The so-called journal entries, though, had been written to order, on Gerald Isaaman’s suggestion for a column in the Ham and High (see below), and are only dated by month. Similar kinds of later autobiographical notes were put together with Journals from the Ant-Heap in a single volume called Intermittent Journals.

Here is Abse’s explanation of how he came to publish Journals from the Ant-Heap.

‘Gerald Isaaman, the editor of a local newspaper in London, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, affectionately known as the Ham and High, is a great admirer of George Orwell. In December 1983, recalling Orwell’s once lively column for Tribune entitled ‘As I Please’, he decided that, during 1984, he would like a similar series to grace the pages of the Ham and High.

George Orwell, alas, was not available. So he cast around other writers, shortlisting a number of them, no doubt alphabetically, for soon he telephoned me. I could not mimic Orwell. I could only write my own kind of prose. Gerald did not seem to mind and I agreed to offer him a fortnightly autobiographical column for one year only. He was to call my non-Orwellian ‘As I Please’ ‘ABSE’s 1984’. He proved to be an ideal editor. He only occasionally made suggestions and never changed my copy.

In March 1985 it was suggested to me that I protract my journal so that it could be published in book form. I could continue writing it, of course, as I pleased, and more importantly, when I pleased. I cannot pretend that I have not enjoyed conjugating occasional autobiographical items while I have been based in London or in South Wales. And I hope they will amuse like-minded readers. They are not private diary entries but were written, as all journalism is, as a public secret.’

Abse dedicated Journals from the Ant-Heap ‘To Margaret and Giles Gordon’ (Hat’s parents); and here is one extract from the book, in which Abse reflects on the Cosmo days, and mentions Frederic/Fred, my father - approximately 20 years before Hat and I were to meet.

March-April 1986
‘We decided to dine out to celebrate the arrival of an advance copy of my new book of poems, As the Bloody Horse. We chose to eat at The Cosmo in Swiss Cottage. Joan and I had not visited that Viennese café for years but suddenly, in nostalgic mood, we wanted to make a return journey to 1949. In the post-war years, when I was a medical student, instead of studying in my ‘digs’ in Aberdare Gardens, NW6, [. . .] I often spent an evening gossiping and arguing with other Cosmo habitués.

Because of the refugees who had come to live in small rooms scattered across Swiss Cottage, this area had become a corner of Vienna with a distinct café life. Soon, young British writers, artists, musicians and burglars, joined the refugees and found the party-going, cigarette-smoking laden atmosphere of The Cosmo congenial. Generally Joan - then Joan Mercer - and I sat in the annexe over one cup of coffee all night but there were occasions when the annexe was too full and its occupants overflowed into the large main restaurant where they had laid white linen table-cloths over the tables in order to encourage their clientele to eat something!

It was to the main restaurant that we now repaired. It had hardly changed. There was something old-fashioned about the place, something outmoded, as if the clock had stopped not so much in 1949 but in pre-war Vienna. [. . .] It was odd to gaze around the restaurant and observe not one person known to us. Where were the novelists, youthful once more, Peter Brent, Bernice Rubens, Peter Vansittart? Where the sculptor, Bill Turnbull? Would not Emanuel Litvonoff, Cherry Marshall and Rudi Nassauer come in at any minute? Was Ivor M in jail again? Were Keith Sawbridge, Fred Goldsmith and Old Bondy next door in the annexe arguing the toss? I recalled Jack Ashman, somewhat manic, and Theodore Bikel with his guitar - and the prettier faces of Penny, Noa, Betty, Jacky, Peter the Girl, Nina Shelley. I looked out of the window. Across the road where once had stood the elegant facades of fire-blitzed houses reigned instead W. H. Smith and MacDonalds.

Soon Joan and I were talking about the most remarkable ghost of The Cosmo, Elias Canetti. Canetti, some twenty years older than us, used to insist we called him Canetti, not Elias, since he did not care for his first name.  [. . .] Canetti would sit in The Cosmo regularly, often with pen in hand. When questioned on what he was writing he made it clear that it was a masterpiece. He had been working, he told us, on a book about Crowds and Power for more than a decade. When asked when he would publish it he quite seriously commented that there was plenty of time, that he did not wish to make the mistake Freud had done - contradict himself. ‘I have to be sure,’ he would say passionately. If ever a man believed he would one day receive the Nobel Prize for Literature that man was Elias Canetti. And he was right.’

After Joan’s death, Abse’s output was, understandably, focused on his grief. Apart from poems, he also published a diary - The Presence (Hutchinson, 2007) - he had kept in the year after the tragedy, and this turned out to be more of a bona-fide kind of diary, kept day-by-day, than anything he had published hitherto. The blurb describes it as ‘both a record of present grief and a portrait of a marriage that lasted more than fifty years’. ‘It is an extraordinary document,’ the publisher says, ‘painful but celebratory, funny yet often tragic, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.’ Here are a few lines from the first extract.

22 September 2005
‘The past survives however much one tries to drive it down and away from one’s consciousness. It rears up provoked by something overheard or a scene, a place, an object, a tune, a scent even. It is inescapable. But I think how I must count my blessings, though it would have been better if Joan not I had been the one who had crawled out of that capsized car. She would have been much more self-sufficient. Count your blessings, son, my mother used to say. A cliché. At times of stress, clichés, family sayings, proverbs, are drawn to the mind like a magnet. I do count my blessings: at night, though I don’t sleep well, I am unable to lie on my right side now that the stress-fractures of the right thoracic cage have healed; the scar on my chin and neck are hardly visible; my left thumb, though oddly angled, is less troublesome and it is no bad thing that I’ve lost a stone in weight. Presumably the latter is due as much to my increased metabolic rate as it is to the lack of Joan’s tempting and nutritious cooking. At least I hope I haven’t developed an over-active thyroid. I take my pulse and note it is raised though not alarmingly so. Do I write all this down as an aide-mémoire for my future self?’

Finally, I turn to my own diaries and find but one significant mention of Abse - yet another synchronous connection.

30 May 1977
‘Who is Dannie Abse? Yesterday evening my mother showed me a book of his poems, an old friend  of Frederic, I was told, before I was born. A poem ‘Epithalamium’ was pointed out - ‘Today I married my white lady in a barley field’. This evening I walk in to Pentameters because I have nothing else to do. Astonishingly, the man himself is reading tonight. I am anxious to meet him.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 28 September 2014.

Lafcadio Hearn in Japan

‘Then came the tug-of-war. A magnificent tug-of-war, too, one hundred students at one end of a rope, and another hundred at the other. But the most wonderful spectacles of the day were the dumb-bell exercises. Six thousand boys and girls, massed in ranks about five hundred deep.’ This is Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-born Anglo-Irish writer, who died 120 years ago today, writing in a diary he kept while working as a teacher in Japan. Indeed, having emigrated from the US, he became very well-known for writing many books about Japan. Even in his diary entries, he seems fascinated by the traditions and culture of the Japanese people, and in the Oriental minds of his young pupils.

Hearn was born on the island of Lefkada (after which he was named), Greece, in 1850, the son of an Anglo-Irish surgeon-major in the British army and a Greek mother. His parents had a troubled relationship, which soon led to divorce. Neither parent was interested in Lafcadio, and he was brought up by another disinterested relative in Dublin. Nevertheless, he received a decent education, partly in France, partly in Durham, until his guardians went bankrupt. Aged 16, he suffered an injury to his left eye which left him partially blind and shy about his appearance.

In 1869, when his guardians had recovered some financial stability, they paid for Hearn to travel to the US, to Cincinnati, Ohio, to stay with relatives. However, these relatives gave him little assistance, and, for a while, he took menial jobs to survive. With a talent for writing, he gained a reporter’s job on the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer in 1872, and soon developed a reputation for his journalistic audacity and for sensational articles about murders. In 1874, he and a friend set up a weekly journal of culture and satire, Ye Giglampz. That same year he married Alethea (Mattie) Foley, an African-American woman, but the marriage violated Ohio law, and, in response to religious lobbying, he was fired from his job. He went to work for the rival newspaper The Cincinnati Commercial.

Tired of the city, and divorced from Foley, Hearn moved to New Orleans in 1877, where he lived for a decade, writing for, and editing city newspapers. He wrote many articles for national magazines (such as Harper’s Weekly), and books about the city, and is credited with helping create the popular reputation of New Orleans as a place with a distinct culture more akin to that of Europe and the Caribbean than to the rest of North America. He also translated French authors into English.

In 1887, Hearn accepted an invitation from Harper’s to become a West Indies correspondent, and he lived in Martinique for two years. After that, though, he decided to go to Japan. Upon his arrival in Yokohama in the spring of 1890, he was befriended by Basil Hall Chamberlain of Tokyo Imperial University, and officials at the Ministry of Education. At their encouragement, he moved to Matsue, to teach English at Shimane Prefectural Common Middle School and Normal School. There he moved in distinguished circles, and later married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a local samurai family. He had the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo.

Hearn stayed over a year in Matsue, moving on to another teaching position in Kumamoto, Kyushu, for a further three years. In 1894, he secured a journalism position with the English-language Kobe Chronicle, and in 1896, with some assistance from Chamberlain, he began teaching English literature at Tokyo (Imperial) University, a post he held until 1903, and at Waseda University. He died on 26 September 1904, having written and published many books on Japan - a full bibliography can be found on Steve Tussel’s Lafcadio Hearn site. Further biographical information on Hearn can be found at Wikipedia, the magazine Humanities, or The Japan Times.

Among his many different kinds of books, Hearn left behind a couple of diaries, neither covering more than a short period: one written in Florida in 1887, and the other written just after taking up his first teaching post in Japan. Both these are freely available at Internet Archive. The first published was From the Diary of an English Teacher included in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Volume II) published by Houghton Mifflin and Company (Boston and New York) in 1894. Later the diary was re-published in other Lafcadio Hearn volumes, such as Diaries and Letters, in English and Japanese, translated and annotated by R. Tanabe. Posthumously, in 1911, Houghton Mifflin published Hearn’s Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist, which includes a diary called Floridian Reveries.

Here are several extracts from Hearn’s Japanese diary.

15 October 1890
‘To-day I witnessed the annual athletic contests of all the schools in Shimane Ken. These games were celebrated in the broad castle grounds of Ninomaru. Yesterday a circular race-track had been staked off, hurdles erected for leaping, thousands of wooden seats prepared for invited or privileged spectators, and a grand lodge built for the Governor, all before sunset. The place looked like a vast circus, with its tiers of plank seats rising one above the other, and the Governor’s lodge magnificent with wreaths and flags. School children from all the villages and towns within twenty-five miles had arrived in surprising multitude. Nearly six thousand boys and girls were entered to take part in the contests. Their parents and relatives and teachers made an imposing assembly upon the benches and within the gates. And on the ramparts over-looking the huge enclosure a much larger crowd had gathered, representing perhaps one third of the population of the city.

The signal to begin or to end a contest was a pistol-shot. Four different kinds of games were performed in different parts of the grounds at the same time, as there was room enough for an army; and prizes were awarded for the winners of each contest by the hand of the Governor himself.

There were races between the best runners in each class of the different schools; and the best runner of all proved to be Sakane, of our own fifth class, who came in first by nearly forty yards without seeming even to make an effort. He is our champion athlete, and as good as he is strong, so that it made me very happy to see him with his arm full of prize books. He won also a fencing contest decided by the breaking of a little earthenware saucer tied to the left arm of each combatant. And he also won a leaping match between our older boys.

But many hundreds of other winners there were too, and many hundreds of prizes were given away. There were races in which the runners were tied together in pairs, the left leg of one to the right leg of the other. There were equally funny races, the winning of which depended on the runner’s ability not only to run, but to crawl, to climb, to vault, and to jump alternately. There were races also for the little girls, pretty as butterflies they seemed in their sky-blue hakama and many-coloured robes, races in which the contestants had each to pick up as they ran three balls of three different colours out of a number scattered over the turf. Besides this, the little girls had what is called a flag-race, and a contest with battledores and shuttlecocks.

Then came the tug-of-war. A magnificent tug-of-war, too, one hundred students at one end of a rope, and another hundred at the other. But the most wonderful spectacles of the day were the dumb-bell exercises. Six thousand boys and girls, massed in ranks about five hundred deep; six thousand pairs of arms rising and falling exactly together; six thousand pairs of sandalled feet advancing or retreating together, at the signal of the masters of gymnastics, directing all from the tops of various little wooden towers; six thousand voices chanting at once the “one, two, three,” of the dumb-bell drill: “Ichi, ni, - san, shi, - go roku, - shichi, hachi.”

Last came the curious game called “Taking the Castle.” Two models of Japanese towers, about fifteen feet high, made with paper stretched over a framework of bamboo, were set up, one at each end of the field. Inside the castles an inflammable liquid had been placed in open vessels, so that if the vessels were overturned the whole fabric would take fire. The boys, divided into two parties, bombarded the castles with wooden balls, which passed easily through the paper walls; and in a short time both models were making a glorious blaze. Of course the party whose castle was the first to blaze lost the game.

The games began at eight o’clock in the morning, and at five in the evening came to an end. Then at a signal fully ten thousand voices pealed out the superb national anthem “Kimi ga yo,” and concluded it with three cheers for their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and Empress of Japan.

The Japanese do not shout or roar as we do when we cheer. They chant. Each long cry is like the opening tone of an immense musical chorus: A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!’

3 November 1890
‘To-day is the birthday of His Majesty the Emperor. It is a public holiday throughout Japan; and there will be no teaching this morning. But at eight o’clock all the students and instructors enter the great assembly hall of the Jinjo Chugakko to honour the anniversary of His Majesty’s august birth.

On the platform of the assembly hall a table, covered with dark silk, has been placed and upon this table the portraits of Their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and the Empress of Japan, stand side by side upright, framed in gold. The alcove above the platform has been decorated with flags and wreaths.

Presently the Governor enters, looking like a French general in his gold-embroidered uniform of office, and followed by the Mayor of the city, the Chief Military Officer, the Chief of Police, and all the officials of the provincial government. These take their places in silence to left and right of the platform. Then the school organ suddenly rolls out the slow, solemn, beautiful national anthem; and all present chant those ancient syllables, made sacred by the reverential love of a century of generations [. . .]

The anthem ceases. The Governor advances with a slow dignified step from the right side of the apartment to the centre of the open space before the platform and the portraits of Their Majesties, turns his face to them, and bows profoundly. Then he takes three steps forward toward the platform, and halts, and bows again. Then he takes three more steps forward, and bows still more profoundly. Then he retires, walking backward six steps, and bows once more. Then he returns to his place.

After this the teachers, by parties of six, perform the same beautiful ceremony. When all have saluted the portrait of His Imperial Majesty, the Governor ascends the platform and makes a few eloquent remarks to the students about their duty to their Emperor, to their country, and to their teachers. Then the anthem is sung again; and all disperse to amuse themselves for the rest of the day.’

4 April 1891
‘The Students of the third, fourth, and fifth year classes write for me once a week brief English compositions upon easy themes which I select for them. As a rule the themes are Japanese. Considering the immense difficulty of the English language to Japanese students, the ability of some of my boys to express their thoughts in it is astonishing. Their compositions have also another interest for me as revelations, not of individual character, but of national sentiment, or of aggregate sentiment of some sort or other. What seems to me most surprising in the compositions of the average Japanese student is that they have no personal cachet at all. Even the handwriting of twenty English compositions will be found to have a curious family resemblance; and striking exceptions are too few to affect the rule. Here is one of the best compositions on my table, by a student at the head of his class. Only a few idiomatic errors have been corrected:

“THE MOON

The Moon appears melancholy to those who are sad, and joyous to those who are happy. The Moon makes memories of home come to those who travel, and creates home-sickness. So when the Emperor Godaigo, having been banished to Oki by the traitor Hojo, beheld the moonlight upon the seashore, he cried out, ‘The Moon is heartless!’

The sight of the Moon makes an immeasurable feeling in our hearts when we look up at it through the clear air of a beauteous night.

Our hearts ought to be pure and calm like the light of the Moon.

Poets often compare the Moon to a Japanese mirror and indeed its shape is the same when it is full.

The refined man amuses himself with the Moon. He seeks some house looking out upon water, to watch the Moon, and to make verses about it.

The best places from which to see the Moon are Tsukigashi, and the mountain Obasute.

The light of the Moon shines alike upon foul and pure, upon high and low. That beautiful Lamp is neither yours nor mine, but everybody’s.

When we look at the Moon we should remember that its waxing and its waning are the signs of the truth that the culmination of all things is likewise the beginning of their decline.”

Any person totally unfamiliar with Japanese educational methods might presume that the foregoing composition shows some original power of thought and imagination. But this is not the case. I found the same thoughts and comparisons in thirty other compositions upon the same subject. Indeed, the compositions of any number of middle-school students upon the same subject are certain to be very much alike in idea and sentiment - though they are none the less charming for that. As a rule the Japanese student shows little originality in the line of imagination. His imagination was made for him long centuries ago - partly in China, partly in his native land. From his childhood he is trained to see and to feel Nature exactly in the manner of those wondrous artists who, with a few swift brush-strokes, fling down upon a sheet of paper the colour-sensation of a chilly dawn, a fervid noon, an autumn evening.

Through all his boyhood he is taught to commit to memory the most beautiful thoughts and comparisons to be found in his ancient native literature. Every boy has thus learned that the vision of Fuji against the blue resembles a white half-opened fan, hanging inverted in the sky. Every boy knows that cherry-trees in full blossom look as if the most delicate of flushed summer clouds were caught in their branches. Every boy knows the comparison between the falling of certain leaves on snow and the casting down of texts upon a sheet of white paper with a brush. Every boy and girl knows the verses comparing the print of cat’s-feet on snow to plum-flowers, and that comparing the impression of bokkuri on snow to the Japanese character for the number “two,” These were thoughts of old, old poets; and it would be very hard to invent prettier ones. Artistic power in composition is chiefly shown by the correct memorising and clever combination of these old thoughts.

And the students have been equally well trained to discover a moral in almost everything, animate or inanimate.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 26 September 2014.

His eye became dull

‘This day cut short all our hopes and fears about our only remaining boy. At an early hour this morning his eye became dull, Anna tried repeatedly to make him take nourishing drink, but without effect.’ This is from the diary of John Allen Giles, an historian primarily known as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and history, who died 140 years ago. Though his long diary is full of relatively short and mundane entries (even about his own wedding), he does occasionally write more emotionally and at length, as in the entry about the death of his son.

Giles was born in 1808 at Southwick House, in Mark, Somerset. He was educated at Charterhouse and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, successfully completing his degree and MA before becoming a fellow at the same college. Though planning to become a barrister, his parents persuaded him to go into the church. He was ordained deacon in 1832 and priest in 1835. He held the curacy of Cossington, Somerset, jointly with the headship of Bridgwater School. In 1833, he married Anna Sarah Dickinson, with whom he had four children; that same year vacating his fellowship. 

Having published Scriptores Græci Minores in 1831, and a Latin Grammar in 1833, he was appointed to the headmastership of Camberwell College School, and two years later, headmaster of the City of London School. However, after losing the confidence of staff and pupils he was asked to leave in 1840. He retired to Windlesham Hall, Surrey, a house he had built, and there engaged in literary work, as well as teaching private pupils. In 1846, Giles became curate of Bampton, Oxfordshire, where he continued taking in students, and where he wrote many books, at least two of which were suppressed by Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford. He produced, among others, editions of most of the major English medieval chroniclers, including The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth (1842), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (1847), and The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great (1858),

In 1855, Giles was imprisoned for falsifying details of a wedding ceremony (which had been an act of kindness for one of his employees), serving three months of a year-long sentence. He moved to Notting Hill, and in 1857 took the curacy, with sole charge, of Perivale in Middlesex. In 1861 he became curate of Harmondsworth, but resigned after a year and went to live at Cranford, where he again took on pupils, subsequently moving to Ealing. In 1867 he bought the living of Sutton in Surrey, which he held for 17 years. He died at the rectory there on 24 September 1884. Further information is available at Wikipedia and the Oxford National Dictionary of Biography (log-in required).

Giles kept a diary for most of his adult life. He left behind six manuscript volumes written up, mostly in 1878, as a fair copy from rough contemporaneous notes. The manuscripts were passed down through the family, and eventually gifted to the Bodleian Library. They were edited by David Bromwich for the Somerset Record Society and published in 2000 as The Diary and Memoirs of John Allen Giles. Here are several extracts as found in the published edition.

17 December 1833
‘I was married this morning in Bridgewater parish church and went back to a collation at the house of Mr Dailey at the end of West Street, to which he had lately removed from Huntworth. After the usual ceremonies, Anna and I started in a post chaise towards Bristol on our way to Oxford; but, owing to various delays we did not get beyond Crosse, and stopped for the night at the last inn on the road towards Shut-shelf, at the angle formed by the road over the hill and the road to Axbridge.’

18 December 1833
‘We started this morning rather late by a coach which went in the direction which we intended to take; but before we had gone far, I was seized with pain similar to what I had felt some few months before, and we were obliged to stop at Whitechurch, where I passed the night very ill at ease. The people at the Inn did all they could to relieve me.’

19 December 1833
‘I was able to continue the journey to Cheltenham, where we again slept, at the Plough Inn.’

20 December 1833
‘Went on to Oxford and took apartments at a house nearly opposite All Saints church in the High Street. Douglas Giles was residing in St Mary Hall Lane.’

21 December 1833
‘We went to breakfast this morning in Corpus, at the rooms of Crouch, who was next to me in the college list, and by my removal would succeed to a fellowship. After breakfast he went off to Christ Church cathedral to be ordained, but seemed much puzzled to know whether it was necessary for him to wear a white neck-tie or not.’

6 February 1934
‘We went to a large evening party or conversazione at Mr Cantwell’s , No25 Wimpole street. Old Mr Wood, for some time an itinerant lecturer on ancient history, was present. He once spent an evening at my father’s house, and somewhat astonished me both in history and etymology. He said Stonehenge was an antediluvian structure destroyed by the deluge, and derived “righteous’’ not from “right,” but as a corruption from “rightwise.” He however made himself very agreeable this evening, and showed that he was in general very well informed.’

16 February 1934
‘Our man servant John went to Mr Pickering’s in Chancery Lane and brought home the works of Matthew Paris. The same morning Mr Charles Grant, who had taken the pencil drawing (coloured) of me several years before at Oxford, took a sitting of Anna and me for the oil paintings which we still have.’

18 February 1934
‘Anna and 1 dined with Mr Melhuish, a most wealthy and respectable merchant, living at Peckham. His son, who attended the Camberwell Collegiate School, was a very genteel and well-behaved boy, but backward in his learning, from ill health. He had some complaint in his knee, and had a stump fixed to it, on which he walked, the leg sticking out behind him caused him much embarrassment in moving about among the school-boys.’

21 February 1934
‘I spent the afternoon at the British Museum, copying out some Latin poems of George Herbert, which I was preparing to edit for Mr Pickering.’

3 March 1934
‘Anna and I dined at Mr Webb’s, where we met Dr Laing and his two daughters Nancy and Jemima. Mr Walsh also, who held a good appointment in the Custom House, an antiquary, a virtuoso, and a dandy, was present; also another gentleman who knew Bp Heber and W. H. Ireland who forged the Shakespear Manuscripts. Dr Laing kept a school of verv respectable boys, and Anna knew him from her childhood.’

24 May 1837
‘This day cut short all our hopes and fears about our only remaining boy. At an early hour this morning his eye became dull, Anna tried repeatedly to make him take nourishing drink, but without effect. At a quarter before 7 o’clock she offered him some, but he said “No, no!”. She said to him “Arté, Arté, where’s papa?” Upon which he threw back his right arm over, as I lay beside him in the bed. At 7 o’clock his breathing for a minute or two became thick: the dreadful cough was coming on, but want of strength prevented it; one or two long gasps for breath succeeded, and my poor child was gone. The room was still covered with his playthings, the box of tools which Smith the baker had given him only a week before, and the box of bricks which had so often furnished him amusement. His third birthday, if he had lived so long, would have been the 10th of September. He had endeared himself to all the family in a thousand ways: no doubt the case is the same with other persons in the case of their first two or three children, and we now felt that our house was left desolate. The little fellow used to sit with me every day in my little library at Camberwell, whilst I was writing, and would play for hours with an old knife, wooden spoon, steel pencil-case, ivory paper-knife, piece of sealing-wax and many other such articles, which I kept in the cabinet, and took out occasionally to amuse him. It was not 2 months ago that I found him in the long passage of the City of London School running up and down among 300 of the boys, all of whom seemed as delighted as he was. He was a general favourite with all our friends both at Camberwell and elsewhere. He was an especial favourite with my father and all at Frome. His second visit to Frome in last December & January had particularly endeared him to my father, who seldom came into the room without taking him on his knee and singing the old song “Arthur O’Bradley.” That which gave me the greatest pleasure was the readiness with which he acquired the names of my books. Those which he knew the best were - The Byzantine Historians - Dr Johnson’s Works - Dr Lardner’s Works - Sir Philip Sydney - The Cruquian Scholiast - Gregorius Corinthius - and the Forty Commentators. Thus, by his death our house was desolate. In the afternoon we received the visits of several friends, all of whom were grieved but not surprized to hear what had happened.’

25 May 1837
‘Mrs Thurlby, of Camberwell Grove, called and sate more than two hours with us. She was deeply grieved at the loss of our poor boy, whom, next to her only child Ann, she loved better than any body in the world. The last time she had called before this, about a week ago, Arthur no sooner saw her than he asked for a watch which she used to give him to play with, when he was at her house, which was next to our own at Camberwell. The last visit he paid her was about 5 weeks ago: I carried him part of the way, and he walked the rest, until we reached Mr Thurlby’s house. As we passed our old residence in Chatham Place, No 17, in Camberwell Grove, he said pointing to it “Der is de old house, papa!” As Mr Coleman, who occupied it, was my undertenant until my own tenancy expired, we went in to call, and Arthur went at once to the folding doors which separated the dining room from the library behind it, and said “Is dat papa’s liblaly?

3 February 1862
‘Date of a letter to me from my college friend Dr Bloxam about the Chichele professorship of History at Oxford, for which I meant to become a candidate. But my connection with Oxford was now so slight that I had little chance, and indeed cared little about it. I am naturally disinclined to discharge public duties, and above all things hate committees, whereas in these days almost every thing is done by a committee.’

13 February 1862
‘I was agreeably surprized at receiving a letter from the Rev. Evan Davies, formerly master of the Grammar School at Dorchester, of whom I had heard nothing for 40 years - Also an almost illegible letter from a stranger Mr Upton of Cashel in Ireland.

23 April 1862
‘This morning, as I was in Bosworth’s shop in Regent Street, Mr Herbert Watkin, who occupied the rooms upstairs, ran down and begged me to go up and sit for a photograph. I went by invitation to a conversazione at the Marybone Institution, where the first thing I saw was my own photograph in a frame over the fire-place.

Mr Herbert Watkin no doubt knew that I had delivered a lecture at the rooms of that institution and therefore was likely to be known to the members.

About this time I got many letters from my friends hoping I should obtain the professorship at Oxford, and from others who tried to assist me.’

24 May 1862
‘This afternoon as my servant was driving me home from W. Drayton in my dog-cart some pleasure vans came furiously along the road and struck against us, breaking the carriage in such a way that, although the owner of the vans professed to mend it, the cart was fit for nothing afterwards.’

5 July 1862
‘A garden party at Fulham Palace.’

18 August 1862
‘A letter dated this day reached me at Frank’s house, Stourbridge, but I was so pressed for time that I was obliged to return home without going to see William and Anna Louisa as I could have wished.

About this time I began to enquire about an advowson of some living which I might buy, so as to present Herbert to it hereafter. Also at this very time Mr DeBurgh, instigated by his wife, who hated me as a liberal churchman, and afterwards became a Roman Catholic, tried to eject me from the vicarage house at Harmondsworth. I of course resisted, and compelled him to consent to my remaining up to a certain time, when I promised to give up the Vicarage House.’

16 September 1862
‘Date of a letter from Sophy de Vere with a polite invitation from Mrs O’Brien to pay them a visit. Mrs O’Brien told Sophy that she could not put down my life of Thomas à Becket, so thoroughly did she agree with me about him.

Gustavus von Holst

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Gustavus Theodore von Holst, British composer of The Planets, one of the Western world’s most famous and popular pieces of music. He was a consummate man of music, not only a composer, but a conductor, a concert trombone player, and a pioneering teacher. From his early 30s, he began to keep appointment diaries which, from the end of World War I, according to one biographer, ‘become true diaries’. The title of the biography promises ‘Diary Excerpts’, unfortunately there are so few quoted extracts, and none of any length, it is impossible to get a sense of Holst the diarist.

Holst was born in Cheltenham, England, on 21 September 1874. His father, a professional musician, was of mixed European ancestry with many musicians among his forefathers. His mother, too, was talented musically. When she died in 1882, his father remarried. Gustav was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School, where he learned various instruments and began composing. On leaving school, he studied counterpoint in Oxford for a short time with George Frederick Sims, before taking his first job as an organist and choirmaster. In late 1891, he gave a first public piano recital (by when he was using the shortened name Gustav), with his father, in Cheltenham. And, the following year, music he had written for a Gilbert and Sullivan-style operetta was performed in the town.

Holst moved to London in 1893, to study at the Royal College of Music, winning a scholarship in his third year, and supporting himself by playing trombone in London theatres, and at seaside resorts during the summers. At the College, he studied, in particular, composition under Charles Villiers Stanford. Richard Wagner’s music soon became an important influence on his emerging style; but, it was Ralph Vaughan Williams, who he met in 1895, and who become a lifelong friend, who would have more influence on his music than anyone else.

Although he had had some compositions performed and published, Holst needed to earn money, and he wanted to work as a performer. He took posts as organist in various London churches, and, on leaving the College in 1898, he played the trombone in the Carl Rosa Opera Company and he toured with Scottish Opera. He married Isobel Harrison in 1901, and they had one child, Imogen. (Imogen, who died in 1984, was a successful composer and teacher in her own right, and also kept a diary for a while when she was working with Benjamin Britten.)

By 1903, Holst had decided he wanted to focus on composing, but, as money was still tight, he took up various teaching posts, at girls’ schools in Dulwich and Hammersmith, at Morley College, and at Passmore Edwards Settlement (now the Mary Ward Centre). His teaching would come to be seen as pioneering new ways in musical education. In composing, Holst was often inspired by literary texts - Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, the Ramayana (having studied Sanskrit, he made his own translations). He also drew on national folk music (although his friend Williams became a more passionate exponent of folk song) and on new European music, such as that by Stravinsky. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘the cosmopolitanism of Holst’s style, rare in English music of his period, lends him a special historical significance’.

Holst tried to enlist at the outbreak of the First World War, but was rejected as unfit for military service. He continued teaching, and it was during this period (1914-1916) that he composed what would become his most famous piece of music - The Planets. In 1918, he was taken on by the YMCA to be a volunteer musical organiser for troops, based in Thessaloniki, Greece. His teaching employers gave him a leave of absence, but the YMCA were worried about his German-sounding name, von Holst, so he changed it by deed pole to Holst. On returning to Britain, he took up additional teaching posts, at Reading university, and, with Williams, at the Royal College of Music.

In the early 1920s, Holst found himself immensely popular, not only because of The Planets, which had found success across the Atlantic, but with The Hymn of Jesus and The Perfect Fool. He undertook a lecturing and conducting tour in the US, but then the strain of being in demand for conducting, teaching, and working on his compositions, led to a kind of breakdown. On the instructions of his doctor, he cancelled all professional engagements in 1924, after which he only resumed teaching at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith. Some later works, such as the First Choral Symphony and Egdon Heath, were not so well received by critics and audiences as his earlier works. In 1927, Cheltenham organised a Holst Festival.

In his final years, Holst continued to make gruelling conducting and lecturing tours to the US (including at Yale in 1929 and at Harvard in 1932) and to compose (A Choral Fantasia, for example, and, for the pupils at St Paul’s, Brook Green Suite). After his 1932 trip, however, he fell ill; and he died in early 1934. Further biographical information can be found at Wikipedia, Kenric Taylor’s Holst website, or Music Sales Classical,

Holst left behind a large volume of letters which were employed by Jon Ceander Mitchell (professor at University of Massachusetts Boston) to construct a biography. This was published in 2001 by the New York-based Edwin Mellen Press (which describes itself as a non-subsidy academic publisher). In this book - A Comprehensive Biography of Composer Gustav Holst with Correspondence and Diary Excerpts - Mitchell states: ‘In addition to the letters, Holst left a plethora of other primary sources of information. Extant diaries begin in 1912. At first Holst used these simply as appointment books but, beginning with his eight-month stint with the British YMCA at the end of World War I, they become true diaries which give us details about daily events in the composer’s life. Closely related to the Diaries are Holst’s surviving Notebooks, which begin in 1913. These contain Holst’s “laundry lists,” often referring to plans for international travel, but sometimes containing some of the composer’s innermost thoughts.’

However, in apparent contradiction to his title, Mitchell rarely includes any diary excerpts in the book. He does use the diaries extensively to source facts about Holst’s movements and activities, and, very occasionally, includes a quoted phrase. As for actual excerpts, a sentence or more long, I could find only one! Here is that one diary excerpt, and a couple of extracts from Mitchell’s book where he mentions Holst’s diary.

16 November 1915 [waiting for a boat from southern Italy to Corfu]
‘Visit officials and buy food for boat in morning. Get on board 2PM via small boat.
Boat supposed to start at 5 PM
Passage [supposed to] last 15 hours
Boat does not start at all. Hung up all night.’

1932
Mitchell says Holst took his teaching at Harvard seriously: ‘He followed through, keeping tabs not only with the progress of the individuals, but also with the progress of the classes as a whole. Diary entries confirm this, from “small class and little work” [23 February] to “good class with lots of work.” [25 February] Holst’s concerns for and frustrations incurred from his students affected him more and more as the term progressed. His diary entry for Wednesday, March 2 confirms this: “evening concert of my pupils’ music with subsequent bad nights.” ’

1933
Mitchell says: ‘The classical symphonic cycle had always interested Holst, yet it had always befuddled him. To this point he had made four attempts [. . .] His fifth and final attempt was to have been an orchestral symphony. In late 1932, possibly at Durham Cathedral, he had written sketches for an Allegro, an Adagio, and a Finale. Preliminary sketches for the Scherzo came later, on March 22, 1933, when he was bedridden at Elm Crescent. According to his Diary entries, Holst began actual work on the rough draft on Sunday, July 30th and finished it on Friday, August 18th. One month later, on September 16th, he finished the two-piano version of the Scherzo. [. . .] In spite of a rather abrupt ending, the Scherzo, at just over five minutes, is long enough to stand on its own as an independent composition. As such, it is Holst’s last completed work.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 21 September 2014.

Scenery fantastic - like home

A few days ago, it was Reinhold Messner’s 90th birthday, and today it is the centenary of the birth of Messner’s hero, Hermann Buhl - both climbers marked, in particular, by their experiences on Nanba Parbat, the ninth highest mountain in the world. Some of the content of Buhl’s expedition diaries - including entries written in the days prior to his famous ascent of Nanba Parbart - has been made public thanks to a book co-authored by Messner.

Buhl was born in Innsbruck, the youngest of four children, on 21 September 1924. After the death of his mother, he spent years in an orphanage. He appears to have been a sensitive and sickly teenager, but took up climbing, and, in 1939, joined the Innsbruck chapter of the Deutscher Alpenverein (the German Alpine association). He was soon mastering the most difficult climbs, and became a member of the local mountain rescue team. World War II interrupted his studies, and he did service with the Alpine troops, seeing action in Italy before being taken prisoner by the US. After the war, he returned to Innsbruck where he trained as a mountain guide, and made many spectacular climbs in the Alps, often solo.

In 1951, Buhl married Eugenie Högerle and they would have three daughters. In late 1952, he was invited to participate in the Austro-German “Willy Merkl Memorial” Expedition to Nanga Parbat (Merkl had led a fatal expedition to the mountain in 1934). Up to this time, no one had yet reached the peak, and 31 people had died trying. The expedition was organised by Merkl’s half-brother, Karl Herrligkoffer from Munich, but the expedition leader was Peter Aschenbrenner, from Innsbruck. Buhl made mountaineering history when, on 3 July, having seen his companions turn back, he reached the summit, solo, and without oxygen. It was 40 hours before he managed to return to camp, having bivouacked during darkness, standing upright on a narrow ledge.

In 1957, Buhl became the first man to top two eight-thousander peaks, when he reached the summit of Broad Peak with an Austrian team led by Marcus Schmuck. This was accomplished in the so-called Alpine style, without the aid of supplemental oxygen, high altitude porters or even base camp support. Two weeks later, Buhl fell to his death when he and another of the team attempted to climb nearby Chogolisa Peak. Further information is available from Wikipedia and The Alpinist. 

Buhl’s book, Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage, published in English by Hodder and Stoughton in 1981, has become a classic of the genre. This can be read freely online at Internet Archive as can a more staid book - Nanga Parbat, incorporating the Official Report of the Expedition of 1953 by Herrligkoffer - which includes Buhl’s own account of his ascent.

Buhl kept expedition diaries during most of his climbs, including the famous Nanga Parbat ascent. Although these have not been published separately, they have been used, and quoted from extensively, in Hermann Buhl - Climbing without Compromise by Reinhold Messner and Horst Hofler, published by The Mountaineers in 2000. (See also the recent Diary Review article, Death on Nanga Parbat, for more on Messner who was much influenced by Buhl.)

The book, Climbing without Compromise, starts with various essays about Buhl, including homages by Messner and Hofler, but the substance of the book consists of original texts written by Buhl himself, essays and reports on his climbs, and some diaries: three early ones (1941, 1942-43 and 1944-50) and two expedition diaries from the 1953 ascent of Nanga Parbat. The book, which is lavishly illustrated with photographs, and includes an appendix of Buhl’s route climbs, can be digitally borrowed at Internet Archive.

Part of the authors’ commentary with regard to the 1953 Austro-German expedition to Nanga Parbat is as follows: ‘Although Buhl is superior by far to all the members of the expedition team, he must first fit into the group. If anyone is capable of conquering Nanga Parbat, it is he. Buhl’s diary entries, written in the tent at the high camps and down at base camp, contain the true essence of the man and give us an insight like no other document into the daily expedition routine - at times very wearing - and even into the subsequent division of the team. We discover quite a lot about the lack of organization on the part of the leadership, and about the bigotry of the few dilettantes, who first try to stop the brilliant Buhl at base camp and who then want to monopolize him after his success. The narrow-minded way in which they try to force Buhl into the yoke of their group mentality is material for psychologists. It is a good thing that Buhl is not a man who would let himself be forced into anything.’

Here are a few extracts from Buhl’s expedition diary as quoted in the Messner/Hofler book.

12 May 1953
‘Wonderful path through pine woods, completely, wildly romantic, reminds me of Karwendel. First view of Nanga. Fairy-tale meadows, really fantastically beautiful. Temporary camp in a moraine hollow at the edge of the woods.

At 12 o’clock the dispatching of the coolies begins. Wild chaos, wild shouting. A large tent and two normal tents are pitched. Approximate height 3700 meters. Scenery fantastic, just like home.’

31 May 1953
‘Base camp.
. . . Peter, who is out hunting, comes back in the afternoon, asks about Kuno and then lays into me because everyone is doing exactly as he pleases. If we don’t want to obey the orders we should go on our own . . .

As Peter says nothing to me about going up, I ask him again. As my altimeter is broken and we only have one between four, as opposed to Base Camp where there are four altimeters, I would like to swap mine, also on the wishes of the others. After asking several times and being told we could manage with one, I eventually get Albert’s. I don’t even want to mention the map - although there are five of those at Base Camp.

As I set off Peter tells me not to be such an egoist. I don’t really understand and ask why. He finally says it’s because of the altimeter. It’s all too much for me so I give it back to him and leave. Peter calls me and then comes after me. Gives me the altimeter back and tells me not to be so childish, he had put himself out for me, and after all they were not dependent on me, and could manage without me, whereupon I leave. It takes me 50 minutes to get to Camp 1, it is snowing heavily again. Walter is waiting for me up there.’

21 June 1953
‘Camp 4
High winds during the night. Entrance under a meter of windblown snow, tent no longer visible at all. Set off at 8:30 with a 100 m rope up the Rakhiot ice wall. Stretched it out with other bits of gear at the bottom, but still 30 m short of the bergschrund. Traverse behind the Rakhiot Shoulder prepared: smooth ice . . . Cut many steps, weather good but windy.

Then a diagonal traverse up brittle snow to Rakhiot Peak. Strong wind and cold. Climbed the last needle, IV, without gloves; just like being at home. First seven thousander, 7070 m. Otto stayed down below.

Over the summit, down the other side without rope. Wonderful view to Silbersattel and Nanga, particularly the South Face above the fog.

Climbed down to Moor’s Head, left snow shovel behind. Mist whipping up the ridge. Traverse back to Rakhiot Face. Send Otto back to cook something while I cut a ladder of steps down the Face. Three porters, Hermann and Kuno are at the Camp. I arrive at 7 o’clock but no food is ready yet. There are two tents in the hollow.

Tomorrow we are supposed to go to Camp 5. I’m already looking forward to it.’

1 July 1953
‘Camp 4
Set off for Camp 4 at 6 a.m., Walter, Hans and I with three porters. Otto stays at Camp 3 for another day. He does not feel very well and wants to rest up for another day and follow on with Madi the next day. Wonderful weather, no clouds as far as you can see, haze in the valley, best indication of a lasting period of good weather. Minus 20 degrees in the morning, deep snow, difficult to break trail.

Three walkie-talkie calls with Base Camp. Order to retreat; we should rest and then follow new orders for attack. Do not say what those orders are. We don’t even consider climbing down, we’ve never been in such good shape.

Aschenbrenner still at Base Camp. He’s still officially the mountaineering leader, although he handed the task over to Walter days ago. Conversations with a very agitated Ertl end with the message “kiss my arse,” and we continue. Ertl makes us aware that they will have cause to thank us one day . . . Midday at Camp 4. Totally snowed up, first have to dig everything out, very arduous. Then Hans and I each take a 100 m rope and climb up the Rakhiot Face with them, fix them on the traverse to the Moor’s Head and climb down again, while Walter busies himself with the porters, fitting crampons, etc. Back at Camp 4 again at 7 p.m. Slept well all night.’

There is a further entry quoted, for 2 July, and then Messner/Hofler say: ‘Hermann Buhl recorded the summit approach in his diary as far as the Bazhin Gap. The entries end abruptly with the words “Enormous cornice, really hard, steep rock ridge.” ’ They then include one (of several) essays written subsequently by Buhl about his ascent on 3 July.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 21 September 2014.

Death on Nanga Parbat

Happy birthday Reinhold Messner, 80 years old today. An Italian mountaineer, dubbed by some as the greatest climber in history, he was the first to make a solo ascent of Mount Everest without additional oxygen, and he was the first to climb all 14 peaks in the world over 8,000 metres. The first of these was Nanga Parbat, in the western Himalayas, in 1970. During that expedition, his brother, Günther, died. Messner has published many books, but none, as far as I know, could be classed as diaries. Nevertheless, a diary, and the evidence therein, has been at the centre of a controversy blighting his fame since the early 2000s, when several colleagues on the Nanga Parbat climb broke a long silence to claim that, contrary to Messner’s account, he had, in fact, been responsible for his brother’s death.

Messner was born in Brixen, in the very north of Italy, on 17 September 1944, and grew up, fluent in Italian and German, in nearby Villnöß. He was part of a large family, with many brothers; and his father was a teacher. From the age of 13, he began climbing with his younger brother Günther, and by their early 20s, it is said, they were already among the best climbers in Europe. Inspired by the Austrian mountaineer, Hermann Buhl (the first man to climb Nanga Parbat), Messner embraced the so-called alpine style of climbing, with light equipment and a minimum of external help.

In 1970, Messner undertook his first major climb, an ascent of Nanga Parbat. Alhough he and Günther succeeded in ascending the unclimbed Rupal face, Günther lost his life on the descent. (Messner himself lost several toes to frostbite, which meant he could not climb on rock as well, so, thereafter, he focused on higher mountains where the climbing was mostly on ice.) At the time, he was attacked by others for having persisted on the climb even though his brother was less experienced, and these accusations led to various disputes and lawsuits. In 1971, he returned to the mountain to look for his brother.

In the next few years, Messner succeeded in climbing two further eight-thousanders, before ascending Everest in 1978 without supplemental oxygen. Two years later, he made a second Everest ascent, this time solo and without oxygen. He continued climbing the eight-thousanders through to 1986 by when he had become the first man to climb all fourteen of them without supplemental oxygen. After that, Messner eschewed climbing high mountains, preferring to undertake more unusual expeditions, such as skiing across the Antartic (1989-1990), and, more recently (2004), walking across the Gobi Desert.

Messner has written over 80 books, many translated into other languages, including English, with titles such as Free Spirit: A Climber’s Life; The Crystal Horizon: Everest - The First Solo Ascent; All Fourteen 8,000ers; My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas’ Deepest Mystery; and The Big Walls: From the North Face of the Eiger to the South Face of Dhaulagiri. He served as an MEP for the Italian Green Party between 1999 and 2004; he helped found the international NGO, Mountain Wilderness; and he now devotes most of his time to the Messner Mountain Museum, which is located at five different sites in Northern Italy.

There is some biographical material about Messner available in English on the internet, at Wikipedia, for example, at Badass of the Week, and at Youtube (interview in English), but there are also plenty of published books about his life, not least Reinhold Messner: My Life at the Limit.

Although Messner has written many books about his climbing life, none, as far as I can tell, contain actual diary material. However, 30 years after his successful but tragic climb on Nanga Parbat, the controversy over his role in Günther’s death resurfaced. In 2002, Messner published The Naked Mountain, a retelling of the 1970 Nanga Parbat expedition. Even before its publication, though, several of the team’s members had publicly announced they disputed many of the details in Messner’s account. Two of his fellow team members (including Max von Kienlin) published their own books, in Germany, claiming that Messner held far more responsibility for his brother’s death than he had admitted. Messner reacted furiously, and the charges and counter-charges were played out in the European press.

Good summaries of the dispute can be found in 2004 articles in The Guardian, a 2005 article in Men’s Journal, a 2006 article in Outside. and another in Vanity Fair. The details are fairly intricate, but in summary are as National Geographic explained at the time: ‘While Messner claims he led his flagging brother down the Diamir Face as a last resort, some teammates charge that he had planned a solo ascent and traverse of the mountain from early on in the expedition. He had even talked openly about it to his teammates (though not, of course, to expedition leader Herrligkoffer). Americans Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein had become instant legends with their traverse of Everest in 1963. To complete a comparable traverse of Nanga Parbat - solo - would make Messner a mountaineering celebrity on a par with his hero Hermann Buhl. Messner’s critics believe he was so focused on that goal that he placed it ahead of caring for his flagging brother.’

The evidence against Messner depends largely on von Kienlin’s diary, which he reproduces at length in a book, the title of which translates from German as The Traverse: Günther Messner’s Death on Nanga Parbat). Messner, though, claims von Kienen faked the diary pages and added them at a later stage. Messner has also made much play of the locations at which gruesome remains of his brother (first a leg bone, then a boot, then a headless corpse) were found to bolster his own account. Here is a good explanation of the role von Kienlin’s diary has played in the controversy, again from a 2004 National Geographic article:

‘Messner says he’s convinced that two crucial pages of von Kienlin’s diary are fake - written in 2002 or 2003 on “old paper” and stitched into the journal as if penned in 1970. Charlie Buffet, one of Europe’s leading mountaineering journalists, asked Messner about the diary during an interview for Le Monde in late January 2004. (Buffet also assisted in reporting this article.) Messner’s response was blistering: “Yesterday, I was on television in Berlin, and I said publicly that this liar has falsified his journal. If that’s not true, he can sue me. And show his journal, so that I can prove he falsified it and he will go to prison.”

The most devastating charge in von Kienlin’s book, however, concerns the conversations he says he had with Messner himself. The diary describes an anguished talk the two friends had, soon after being reunited in Gilgit, in which the distraught Messner says: “I’ve lost Günther! I called for him. I don’t know why he couldn’t hear me. Maybe he was in bad shape. Maybe he didn’t manage [to climb down]. Maybe he even fell. My God, I didn’t want that!”

The diary depicts Messner as having been overcome with doubts and regret, wailing, “Perhaps I should have gone with him, because alone, he wasn’t capable of it. Why did he follow me? Why?" He hides his face in his hands.

Then von Kienlin’s account adds a stunning twist: Since the tortured Messner is almost incapable of talking, von Kienlin writes, “I feel obligated to guide him.” Messner doesn’t know what to say to their leader, Karl Herrligkoffer, so von Kienlin proposes a face-saving fabrication: “You must not tell K that you intended to make the traverse.”

According to von Kienlin, he himself proffered the fiction that Günther was lost in an avalanche low on the Diamir Face - and understood that he must keep an eternal silence about the ruse.

Messner’s response, as recorded in the diary: “R pulls himself together. ‘You’re right.’ He looks at me with clear eyes.” ’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 17 September 2014.

Anderson and Free Cinema

‘The pages are a challenge, and though often people think that writing a diary is unhealthy - as it certainly can be, when it confirms a tendency to turn in on oneself - it can also be the reverse, forcing one to objectify, to pursue one’s thoughts, to marshal them and use them.’ This is from the acclaimed diaries of the film maker and theatre director Lindsay Gordon Anderson, who died 30 years ago today. A major cultural figure of his time, he was a leading light in the so-called Free Cinema movement that foreshadowed social realism in British film making. 

Anderson was born in 1923 in Bangalore, South India, where his father had been stationed with the British Army. His parents separated in 1926. Lindsay was educated at Saint Ronan’s School in Worthing, at Cheltenham College (where he met his lifelong friend and biographer, Gavin Lambert), and at Wadham College, University of Oxford. He served in the Army from 1943 until 1946, latterly working as a cryptographer for the Intelligence Corps. Returning to Oxford, he switched from classics to English, graduating in 1948.

Anderson worked as film critic writing for the influential Sequence magazine, which he co-founded with Lambert, Peter Ericsson and Karel Reisz, before contributing to the British Film Institute’s journal Sight and Sound and the left-wing political weekly the New Statesman. By the late 1940s, he had begun to experiment with film-making himself, directing the 1948 Meet the Pioneers, a documentary about a conveyor-belt factory.

With Reisz, Anderson organised, for the Institute, a series of screenings of independent short films by himself and others. He developed a philosophy of cinema for which he coined the term Free Cinema - to denote a movement in the British cinema inspired by John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. Anderson and other members of the movement allied themselves with left-wing politics and took their themes from contemporary urban working-class life.

One of Anderson’s early short films, Thursday’s Children (1954), concerning the education of deaf children, won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1954. And, in 1963, he directed This Sporting Life based on a novel by David Storey and produced by Reisz. These films are seen as among the forerunners of an emergent cinema of social realism. Anderson is best remembered for his ‘Mick Travis trilogy’, all of which star Malcolm McDowell as the title character: If.... , O Lucky Man!. and Britannia Hospital. Anderson was also a significant  theatre director, long associated with the Royal Court Theatre, where he directed many plays, especially those by Storey.

Anderson never married, but he seems to have yearned for male relationships, especially with his leading men such as Richard Harris (star of This Sporting Life). Some in his circle found it difficult that he did not publicly acknowledge his sexuality (despite, one can conclude, a growing acceptance of homosexuality, especially in the creative industries). He died on 30 August 1994. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the BFI.

In 2004, Methuen published The Diaries: Lindsay Anderson as edited by Paul Sutton. The publisher states: ‘Throughout his life Anderson stood in opposition to the establishment of his day. Published for the first time, his diaries provide a uniquely personal document of his artistic integrity and vision, his work, and his personal and public struggles. Peopled by a myriad of artists and stars - Malcolm McDowell, Richard Harris, Albert Finney, Anthony Hopkins Brian Cox, Karel Reisz, Arthur Miller, George Michael - the Diaries provide a fascinating account of one of the most creative periods of British cultural life.’ The full work can be borrowed digitally online at Internet Archive, or sampled at Goooglebooks. Several extracts from the diaries can be found in the Diary Review’s Happy Days with Peggy; more about the diaries themselves can be found at the University of Stirling website.

From Paul Sutton’s introduction to the Diaries:

‘Anderson started writing his diary in 1942, when he was eighteen years old, preparing for active service in the Second World War and about to study Classics at Oxford. For much of the rest of his life, he used the diary as a means to organise his thoughts, to spur himself into action, and to pass the time on long international flights. As with any diary, there are omissions. For example, there are no diary records from August 1955 until January 1960 (thus missing out his first theatrical triumphs); only four diary days of 1960 have survived; only three days in 1961 have any record; and no diary has yet surfaced for 1968 (the year he made If . . .). In his last years, the diary took the form of notebook jottings and copies of letters dictated to his secretary. [. . .]

In the most poignant passages, the diary becomes a self-analytical tract, or poem, that reaches into the heart of light and shade within himself. In the diary we can trace, too, the genesis and the growth of a body of films and plays with a clarity and a thoroughness that is rarely possible. For example, in 1987, in Maine, he closed his feature film career, making good a promise to a friend by directing Bette Davis in The Whales of August. In the diaries, many years earlier, we read of boyhood visits to the cinema to see films starring Bette Davis; in the Second World War, stationed, like his father before him, in India, we read of a bicycle trip into New Delhi to see Davis in Mr Skeffington, and in the busy year of 1965, he was a guest of Bette Davis in New England, coaxing her into a new play on Broadway that was never to be. This is all a part of the fabric of life, an artist’s life, a half-century of weavings of work-thoughts and meetings that coheres into a portrait not just of an artist, but his art, and his time.

So that the diaries could be published in one volume, they have been edited down from perhaps a million words into the current form. [. . .] I’ve included what I feel to be the essential Anderson: the entries that give the clearest picture of a remarkable man, the society in which lived, and a body of work that up till now has never been given the attention it deserves.’

Here are several extracts including the first of the published entries.

1 January 1942
‘One of my principal New Year’s resolutions is to keep a journal. In this journal I shall write only when I have something to say; its purpose is both to remind me in after years of how I felt and what I did at this time and also - quite unashamedly - to give me literary exercise. It should help improve my style and my ability to express myself and many of the incidents it records will no doubt prove excellent copy. I will however not tell lies in order to improve a story.

I am not sure whether or not it will be absolutely frank: I am not used to writing solely to myself - and that perhaps is why I am so quick to mistrust published diaries. So at first at any rate I will probably be fairly reserved. And yet this is absurd: either I am writing for myself, or for a friend or friends or for publication. I can cross out the last - though, of course, I can easily expurgate it if necessary. Nor am I writing for my friends. I will therefore resolve to be utterly frank - a resolution which I do not think I can possibly keep! So here we go.’ 

4 June 1945
‘Ah sex! How obvious it is that without a satisfactorily adjusted sex life, a full and happy life is impossible: and I am chiefly frightened now that the repressions and introversion inevitable for me may end in twisting me, incapacitating me somehow as a person or as an artist (if I am an artist). I feel an increasing need to come out into the open - I have no more to be ashamed of than anybody else - though this of course is impossible.

And the deeper in I get, the further I am from spontaneity and simplicity, and the more difficult relations will become. Besides there is a very positive need for physical intercourse which, if continually repressed, may seep in and poison all my friendships.
I need the help probably of a technician in this sort of thing, a psycho-analyst. I need to find out whether I am irredeemably homosexual. Whether my instincts can or should be repressed or allowed scope or subliminated. How? All very simple really. The only danger seems to be a tendency to treat sex as a mere physical act like excreting. That must be guarded against.

I shall certainly do this when I get back to England.’

19 June 1963
‘The pages are a challenge, and though often people think that writing a diary is unhealthy - as it certainly can be, when it confirms a tendency to turn in on oneself - it can also be the reverse, forcing one to objectify, to pursue one’s thoughts, to marshal them and use them. And although, at the age of forty it is a little chilling to think one is starting again, it is still possible one may yet improve.

I think of Richard, of that side of him which has a somewhat insidious appeal to me: the dark, powerful and sadistic side, proud and narcissistic, to which I play the servant while he plays the king. . . He has just read the proof copy of Radcliffe and rang me up to say it’s marvellous: where did David [Storey] get it from? I wonder for an instant if there’s anything in it of him and me. . . is there? Not too much I imagine. When did he start the book? I told him David had spoken of it before we met. . . He talked of the idea of filming it and, momentarily, I wonder also if he would like to direct it.

Knowing Richard, and experiencing these extremes of warmth and cold, the gentleness and the violence, the reason and the hysteria, has certainly been an education for me . . . making real and comprehensible much that before was only theoretical. It is a battle of wills, and it is something of an experience to find myself in a relationship where my will is the weaker, where, intermittently, I am made to accept domination, and made to accept behaviour - treatment - I would accept from none other, through fear of losing favour. It’s interesting that for all my masochism in fantasy, I am not able (so far) to enjoy consciously the treatment in practice. When on the stage of the Royal Court, Richard grasps me by the throat - I am conscious only of the will to stand firm, to survive . . . In little, I suppose this does crystalise the Radcliffe relationship . . . But how far from (for instance) the relationship we had at Cannes where he was all kisses and appreciation: “I don’t know how you put up with me.”

Of course it is precisely this duality of nature, this comprehension of evil and goodness, that gives Richard a quality of genius as an actor. So that to wish that he were always ‘nice’ is to wish him other than he is - an impossibility anyway. And since it is what he is that attracts me so: why should I wish him otherwise?’

My own diaries have mentioned Anderson a few time, most recently in this extract.

12 February 2018
‘For once, I found something to read in The Guardian on Saturday. The obituary of a writer called David Sherwin. I didn’t have any memory of him (nor does his name occur anywhere in my diaries) but he was the writer of the three remarkable and radical films directed by Lindsay Anderson in the 1970s and 1980s all starring Malcolm McDowell: If. . ., O Lucky Man and Britannia Hospital. For much of my youth, Anderson was one of my favourite directors (second only to Nicolas Roeg) because of these films, but, I read, it was Sherwin who was the instigator and creative energy behind them - although all three films were very much a collaboration between Anderson, Sherwin and McDowell. The Guardian also published a few thoughts by McDowell himself on Sherwin. Here’s one para: ‘Our production company was called SAM Productions, for Sherwin, Anderson and McDowell. With the Mick Travis [McDowell’s character] trilogy, David wrote three amazing films. Crusaders (which became If…) was David’s original idea, which Lindsay took and made mostly about his own life. Coffee Man (which became O Lucky Man!) was mainly my story. Britannia Hospital is more David’s.‘

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 30 August 2014.

The cost of stockings

Here is a final selection from the yet-to-be-published London in Diaries, this one about Marielle Bennett, a would-be actress, and a Mass Observation respondent during the Second World War. Her diary remains unpublished, and unnoticed within the Mass Observation archive, but it provides a fascinating record of what one unremarkable Londoner was experiencing day-by-day during the war years. See also The Drama of London in WWI, 34 heads on London Bridge, I was utterly amazed! and Innumerable ripples; countless diamonds.

Marielle Bennett and Mass-Observation

Only two decades after the end of the First World War, which had caused so much devastation and death, German aggression again drew Britain into a major military conflict. The Second World War, though, would go on to involve nations across the globe, and be considered as the deadliest conflict in human history. Despite the global nature of the war, Britain with its political centre as ever in London, was very much a dominant and central force, as well as a major military target - just as it had been in the earlier war.

It is no wonder that so many individuals uprooted from normal life and turned into active participants of war, living in adversity and close to killing and destruction, should have chosen to try and record the extraordinary things happening to and around them. There are, thus, many published diaries specifically about the Second World War, and even today, more than 65 years later, newly found or edited war diaries are popular publishing ventures. Only a relatively small number, though, were written in London - but, unlike diaries set in the city during peaceful years, all or most of the Second World War diaries do have much to say about the city itself.

Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat now largely remembered for his diaries, was in London during the war, and his diary - The Siren Years - is witty and readable. Anthony Weymouth, a physician who also worked for the BBC, gives a detailed but far dryer account in his Journal of the War Years. Frances Partridge, one of the Bloomsbury Set, published her diary under the title A Pacifist’s War. Colin Perry was just a lad, but his Boy in the Blitz, first published in 2000, is a lively, youthful take on London during 1940.

One of the most well-known of Second World Diaries, although not published until the 1980s, is that by Nella Last, a housewife in Barrow-in-Furness. Last was one of 500 or so individuals who responded to a call by the social research organisation Mass-Observation to write about their lives. It had been launched in 1937 to record life in Britain, ‘an anthropology of ourselves’, according to the founders. With little funding, it relied on volunteers to keep diaries or reply to open-ended questionnaires. Researchers also recorded, anonymously, people’s conversations and behaviour at work, in public places, and at sports and religious events.

Mass-Observation worked throughout the war producing thousands of reports and a series of published books. After the war, its emphasis shifted away from social issues towards consumer behaviour, and, in 1949, Mass Observation was registered as a limited company, and eventually incorporated into an advertising firm. The Mass Observation Archive is now held at the University of Sussex, and holds all the material generated between 1937 and 1949, with a few later additions, from the 1950s and 1960s. The project was re-launched in 1981, and today continues to collect information aimed at providing a structured programme through which ‘ordinary’ people can write directly about their lives, and at creating ‘a resource of qualitative longitudinal social data’.

Nella Last’s diary written for Mass-Observation was exceptional because of the quality of her writing, its editors said at the time of publication, but also for the length and regularity of Last’s writing. In fact, many of the diaries delivered to Mass-Observation were bitty and intermittent in character, and only very few have been published. While Last’s is not set in London, there is at least one published Mass-Observation diary that is: Love & War in London by Olivia Crockett, billed as London’s answer to Nella Last.

Another London diary in the Mass Observation Archive - but unpublished - was written by Marielle Bennett. As with Crockett’s diary, Bennett’s is also a blend of private feelings mixed with her reactions to the war and its effect on people and places. It opens in August 1939 with sporadic entries until October, and restarts in the summer of 1940 for a couple of months. The following year, she writes to Mass-Observation: ‘I have been very slack. . . however I will make a fresh attempt starting from this month.’ She restarts in May 1941 for a few weeks. There are also a few entries in 1942, 1946 and 1947.

Not much is known of Bennett, other than that revealed in her Mass-Observation diary. The start of the war finds her living with her parents at 53 Upper Park Road, NW3; but, by the middle of 1941 she is staying out of London near Barnet. She was separated from her husband in the mid-1930s, and in 1940 reverts to her maiden name (Vaughan). She calls herself an actress, though there is a little evidence in the diary of her working, at least until after the war, though she does visit, and write about, the theatre often. In the spring of 1941, Bennett’s grandmother dies, and thereafter many pages of the diary relate to her efforts to sell or trade her grandmother’s jewellery and clothes/furs.

From the start of the diary, Bennett shows an interest in psychology. She attends some ‘brilliant lectures’, but then, having decided to try and train as a psychiatric social worker becomes very depressed when trying to analysis herself. She abandons her training for a while, but returns to studying books at home, and making weekly visits to a therapist. She makes the acquaintance of various people who have known Jung or Freud, and in June 1941 becomes much more serious about her therapy, taking a more intensive series of sessions with her analyst, often thinking about her dreams, and doing ‘psychic paintings’.

There is a persistent sense in Bennett’s diary that she is writing for an audience (i.e. Mass-Observation, to whom she sends what she calls ‘reports’) not only because of the occasional comment such as ‘Sorry this report is so trivial but nothing of importance has happened to me,’ but also because of a vague sense, here and there, of her making an effort to provide information and observations. Nevertheless, on reading the diary, one feels very close to her, as though one is there with her, making curtains out of black satin, having trouble finding suitable clothes to wear in the air-raid shelter, and being frustrated that she no longer wants to go to the cinema because all the films are ‘only slightly covered propaganda’.

Mother bought many yards of black satin
1 September 1939
Walked over the heath and saw the balloon barrage etc. Help my parents to put up rolls of brown paper and tape for the black out. Does not prove to be very successful.

2 September 1939
Mother bought many yards of black satin, which we made into curtains all the after noon, which proved to be more satisfactory, but really hate all the preparation and found it very wearisome. Not that quite a number of acquaintances seem to be enjoying themselves, the sense of responsibility and having something to do seems to make them feel more important. [. . .] Went to the cinema, difficult to get home in the dark.

3 September 1939
Hear the Chamberlain speech out of my window from a neighbouring wireless. Do not listen after I hear we are at war. The air-raid warning came as rather a surprise. Did the proscribed things, closing windows etc. Mother worried because my father is driving some greyhounds to the country and she did not know where he was. However all is over.

Gas masks; the cost of stockings
30 September 1939
I met my friend, who is at present touring in a comedy, we did some shopping. I discovered that stockings are up 1/-, my usual 3/11 cost 4/11. The colours were not good either and little selection. The assistant told me that their usual 1/6½ ones will soon be sold at 2/11 and are not fashioned (fully). [. . .]

After tea I went with my family to the pictures. I carried a gas mask for the first time as I did not know whether I could get in the films and I knew my father would not want me to have a long argument, which I should have done had I been alone. The films were “Hound of the Baskervilles” and another with Jackie Cooper and Freddie Bartholomew. Very patriotic and upholding of the military tradition in American. Very obvious and silly film, I thought.

1 October 1939
At six I went over to a friend’s flat in Westminster. The bus was slow. Noticed an ARP warden on duty outside the flats. Walked over to Chelsea via the embankment to see an acquaintance. She said she was hoping to go to Rumania for the Quakers to help with the refugee problem. Had dinner. Was told of a young man who has decided to join up because he cannot bear the thought of carrying a civilian gas mask down Oxford Street! Had a bottle of claret and went to bed.

How little meat one gets at Maison Lyons
3 October 1939
Noticed what little meat one gets nowadays in the 1/6 luncheon at Maison Lyons. Was telephoned by a pacifist friend who invited me to a meeting.

4 October 1939
Went to the hair dresser. The shop was so quiet, I was there four hours and only saw two other customers. The head man has been called up for the Territorials. The second who did my hair said “I was going to join the navy, but my girl doesn’t want me to, she says let the others go first.” Then he said his parents want him to return to S. Africa where he can get a job. He said “supposing the U Boats get me?” and remarked that he would hate to leave all his friends as he has been here many year.

7 October 1939
I stayed in most of the day and refused to go to the cinema with my parents. I have decided not to go to this form of entertainment while it continues to be only slightly covered propaganda. I’d prefer to keep my money and see a theatrical show. For the most part thank God the theatre is still fairly free.

Not all shows are musicals or comedies YET
13 October 1939
Went to “Music at Night”. The Westminster was fairly full. In the programme the management appealed for support and good attendances otherwise they will be “One of the war’s first casualties.” Excellent show, do not think they will have to worry. But getting home was awful, pouring with rain and so few buses. However it was worth it to me. I noticed a good many uniforms in the audiences, women as well as men. I do not know whether this is the type of play appreciated during war time, but it was certainly gratifying to know that all shows are not musicals or comedies YET.

14 October 1939
Noticed a local shelter has been pulled down and is being rebuilt. Spoke to a tobacconist who said the heath is ruined now owing to the trenches and guns etc.

Air-raid suits going out of fashion
26 August 1940
Start out with the intention of buying an air-raid suit for me. First we went to Bournes but they had nothing I liked. Then to Dickens and Jones who had the very thing at 41/2 guineas but we could not afford more than 2. Then to Swan and Edgars where they were horrible, trying to be very feminine instead of tailored, bits of fur and coloured scalves hanging about. Then to Weiss in Shaftesbury Avenue. The sales girl said they had gone out of fashion and most women prefer trousers and a sweater now. They had nothing suitable either. Some terrible things like striped pantaloons at 16/11. Eventually, rather hot and cross, I made up my mind to give up the idea and buy something else with the money.

28 August 1940
Called for Mother and we went together to Victoria and picked up tickets for the matinee of “Cornelius” Had lunch at Zeeta’s, service very slow, think the girls are inexperienced and overworked. The theatre was a superb show. Beautifully produced and the type casting excellent. In fact I have not enjoyed anything so much for ages. The audience was pathetically small and had to applaud like mad.

Bombs in Kentish Town, Kilburn and Fitzjohns Avenue
29 August 1940
Heard from the charwoman that Kentish Town got a bomb. That accounted for the noise being so near. Also heard that Smiths factory at Cricklewood had got some. Charwoman said that everyone “turned as white as a sheet.” Her husband will watch from the doorway but when she goes near he has “a fit”.

30 August 1940
After a quiet night I went up to Hampstead in the morning to order a new book that Priestly recommended on the wireless “The End of Economic Man”. [. . .] Father rang up [. . .] he had heard that our district had been bombed. However he said Fitz Johns Avenue had shattered windows, we did not verify this.

31 August 1940
Hear that Kilburn has been bombed. Stay in for first warning. I set off to meet a friend, but first took some old silver to a place where they buy metal for Spitfires, at first the man only offered me 2/3, I protested as it was 4 pieces. [. . .] Eventually we compromised and I took 9/-. I believe he would have gone to 10/- but I did not persuade him. He said he would lose over the deal. I bet he does!! He said he was going to close the shop next week as he does not like the raids and he thinks they are going on indefinitely. He was a lively old man and I liked him. he told me to get out of Hampstead on account of the Jewish refugees as Hitler would be after them. [. . .]

‘Dirty swine, everyone ought to be killed’
Met my best friend - an actress is who now married and just about to give birth. I am to be the godmother. We intended to go to coffee and then a doctor in Queen Anne’s Street, but we had just met when the warning went, as were in Evans, we sheltered there. Very comfortable. The first shelter I’ve been in. My friend varnished her nails most of the time [. . .]

Went to the Hollyrood and had two lagers. Telephoned another friend and then the sirens sounded again. We could not get back into the pub so we chased along Oxford Street to the Horseshoe where we went down the dive and had another and waited for the all clear. I went to the lavatory then, to find the attendant, a woman about 50, in an uproar. “Dirty swine, everyone ought to be killed, they are not fit to live. We ought to have killed them after the last war. Inhuman devils.”

4 September 1940
The pub was in uproar, because a very familiar figure - a man of about 40 - who I have often seen there came in in battle uniform of a private. Everyone teased him saying “Nice bit of stuff” and things like that. He seemed to think that nothing fitted him at all, and said his boots must have been worn in the evacuation of Dunkirk.

The whole of our street cordoned off
5 September 1940
Our char woman came today. She was very amused because a whole lot of children were shut in an air-raid shelter whether yesterday or the day before. “You could ‘ear the kids screaming fit to bust theirselves.” At last they were rescued by the warden, who must have inadvertently shut them in.

9 September 1940
The whole of [our] street was cordoned off [after a bomb in the night] and people from outlying districts came and peered over the ropes at us as though we were exhibits. We ourselves had to either tell the police when we left home that we should be returning in a few minutes, or else we had to produce our identity cards. We had huge squads of demolition workers to pull down the remains of the house [no 54], and the occupants who seemed to have either been away at the time or to have escaped with slight injuries stood outside and collected all the things that were still “collectable”, clothes were tied up in bundles and taken off. Of course nothing was much good from 54, but the house next door 56 was not quite so badly damaged. A baby and its parents usually live in that house but luckily had spent the night on the opposite side of the street and had not been injured. Some children had cuts and I saw several people walking round with cuts and bandages. I went up the street to post a letter and the demolition men must have taken a dislike to me in my trousers and one called out “Pleased with yourself aren’t you?” Which rather upset me, as altho’ I am terribly pleased to have escaped so narrowly, I am awfully sorry for the other people. Still perhaps I do look pleased with self. I hope not!

Mum nearly caught in trial gas attack
8 May 1941
We are now sleeping out of London and returning every day. We started to do that from April 17th after the heavy raid on London.

21 May 1941
Went into west end. Had an appointment with a psychologist with whom I am studying analytical psychology.

24 May 1941
I came home for lunch and then Mother went to Kentish Town to buy some things. She could not get any emerald green sating ribbon for a new night gown I am making. On her way back she was nearly caught by a trial gas attack the ARP had organised at the end of this road. She had no gas mask and they were laying out the people who had gone out without gas masks on the pavement as though they were casualties.

News full of aeroplanes and guns and ships
30 May 1941
Won at darts. Have done so for several evenings. My father’s greyhound came in second in the rerun for the Wembley Gold cup. It came in first in the first run. Very disappointing. One of the last dogs turned round and ran in the wrong direction causing the judges to ask for a rerun. The race was broadcast and naturally we were very excited when it won [on the first run]. Still second wasn’t bad, but hard luck on my father.

2 July 1941
Went to the films with my people and saw “Kipps” which I thought very good, and thank god not about the war. I got so fed up with all the propaganda we had to sit thro’ first. MOI film about WAAFs and another about Merchant ships and the news just full of aeroplanes and guns and ships.

Giving the boys something to look at
5 July 1941
A WAAF friend of mine telephoned that she was in Paddington waiting to go through to another depot. [. . .] I was in my bath when I got the message, but I dressed and hurried to Paddington in very quick time and we had a drink or two at The Norfolk Hotel, and she told me what terrible head aches she has had since she went on the gas course a fortnight ago. We went up to the services cloak room in Paddington Station and I was amused to find the room literally covered in photographs cut from Magazines like “Lilliput” of nude women. The cloak room attendant said it “gave the boys something to look at.”

21 July 1941
Had several conversations with people who expressed the opinion that “life isn’t worth living now”. Complaints about money, food queues, lack of cigarettes, and rationing of clothes seemed to abound.

23 July 1941
Then we went to see ‘Blythe Spirit’ which is one of the best productions I have ever seen. Margaret Rutherford as the medium was superb. I do not know when I have seen a more amusing and yet realistic characterisation. I could go over and over again and not get bored with that show. My friend saw a man come into one of the boxes towards the end of the play and look around at the audience intently and then make a great show of lighting a cigarette. She said it must have been Noel Coward as no one else would do it quite like that but I was too interested in the play to worry about the author! After that we went to get tea at The Prompt Corner only to find it closed. I was not surprised at that as all the places I hope to find seem closed. Eventually we got some at a nasty little cafe in Charing Cross.