Growing Old Disgracefully
Fast nearing 70, I take my tips on surviving the Battle of Life from oldies like my late friend – and peerless war-reporter – Martha Gellhorn, who was savage in reaction to whatever wasted her time or sparked her incandescence. Just like her, I demand real conversation. The clock is ticking, the black crow is sitting there implacably awaiting the end. In face of all this, I want people to come to the table.
The son of a diplomat, I was trained to be a nodding wall-flower towards whom any cocktail-party guest, frozen out of humming conversations in the next room, made an unswerving bee-line. These days, I don’t mind what I say; further, who I say it to – though I haven’t yet matched Martha, who telephoned Sybille Bedford to sever their long friendship, giving as her reason, “Because you’re a bore, Sybille.”
What haunts is the spectre of that El Vino’s barfly who boasted “I’m going to Bordeaux” – provoking the response, “Who’s Deaux?” I worry I may have stupefied one or two Old Etonian Deauxs recently by emailing to say how much, on the contrary, I cherish our friendship.
Having been to a school that prided itself on being more academic and ancient, I absorbed an inbred hostility to Etonians which has taken five decades to overturn. Unpalatable to admit is that they are frequently more considerate, humane and brighter than popular opinion tolerates thanks to some stinking bad eggs. It’s a wildly unmodish discovery for which I’ve felt the retrospective need to atone, and damn the torpedoes. But heck, what is to grow old disgracefully if not to indulge in a little torpedo damning?
Time simplifies our tastes. Unlike Martha, who was fastidious in what she wore, I squander less of it thinking about clothes – often wearing shirts on inside out or going tieless to the Beefsteak, to the gargoyle gaze of younger members, who I then have poncily to inform that it’s in the rules. Plus I’ve been a member since 1991 when Auberon Waugh and Ludovic Kennedy proposed me – the latter recalling how Evelyn Waugh failed to enter the palace of truth when asked by “Charles” (as staff at the club are known) to declare the correct amount of claret he’d consumed at luncheon. A member standing behind Waugh was overheard muttering: “A man who cheats his club cheats at life.”
A life-cheater more caddish still is a book which bores. At school, we were ruthlessly educated to finish every volume started. Now for the first time since I began reading (Janet and John in Cambodia, aged five), I’m tasting the exhilaration of hurling across the room any novel that enervates/irritates/enrages after a few pages. Anita Brookner, Martin Amis, Rachel Cusk have all left their impressions on the wall, rather than in my mutinous mind. I pinch a leaf from my father, who inspects his bookshelves aware how “That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill”. At 95, he’s all-too conscious of the diminishing number of titles he has left to read/reread, with his trigger-finger alighting on ever-slimmer volumes of Thomas Hardy’s poetry.
In the dusk of the day, I’ve developed a similar unforgiving attitude towards wine, following a remark by a tremendous Australian writer – the unfairly vilified ex-husband of Helen Garner in her Baillie-Gifford Prize-winning diaries – who one lovely autumn evening gazed out from my deck in Tasmania and pronounced, “You can’t have a view like this and drink bad wine.” Hangover-inducing reds, such as those served at embassy receptions, have ruined too many hours. A fine wine should smack with the flavours of an old friendship or favourite novel. It should have weathered fall-outs and rapprochements, wars and pandemics, bush-fires and rainbows, and be immune to what anyone says or thinks of it on Life’s sunless hill. On top of that, a wine like a Louis pinot, from our local Freycinet vineyard, gives you the option of savouring it to the last vintage drop all on your disgraceful own.
Which probably is where I am headed following Brexit – the saddest and most reductive thing to happen to the UK in my lifetime. I no longer give a fish’s tit about the sensitivities of those too cowardly, haughty or downright brain-orphaned to admit what stares them pop-eyed in the face. I hate what it’s done to our sense of humour and optimism, our confidence, our culture, our finances, our sense of nationality, our place in the world – although not what it’s done to its instigators. As it shall console me to go on moaning to Martha’s splenetic ghost at the bar, even if she dwindles into my only audience, the Tasmanian tiger and the dodo have more chance of being revived than the Conservatives who perpetrated this black hole that keeps devouring.