John Sandilands

letters to and from John to editors

Date published: various dates
Publisher: not published publicly

Years after the event, letters to and from editors make hilarious reading. Although highly talented, John could also be a difficult customer and all too frequently, rubbed editors up the wrong way with the result that they lashed out at him.

Here are some letters sent to and from editors. The content is self-explanatory, and shows the kind of relationship writers—or at least writers like John - could expect from their editors. Nobody would ever take the time or trouble today to write such letters and the most amazing thing is that John hung onto them all. Most people would have torn up such letters - at least after the matter was finalised but John kept them as if they were trophies, which they probably were, in a way.

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Herogram

Date published: 1985
Publisher: Mail on Sunday

Here is one of the best Herograms John ever received:

25 Eccleston Road
West Ealing
London
W13 0RA
27th February 1985
Dear Sir
Congratulations !
YOU magazine is, in my view, the best colour supplement ever published. I enjoyed last Sunday’s (Feb. 24th) edition so much that I have stored it in a safe place. I shall take it out from time to time for careful re-reading and further enjoyment.
All the articles in this issue were very interesting, and “Fancy a Walk” certainly aroused my interest in the Rambler’s Association—- I am going to join. Thank you!
The article with the brilliantly witty title “The Toad Cross Code” is fascinating and I thank you for bringing the toad problem to your readers’ attention. Not only is this article very informative: it is, also, a literary masterpiece. John Sandilands is an excellent writer: the article clearly illustrates complete mastery of his craft.
May I ask if Mr Sandilands it an author?
If so, I would very much like to buy all of his books.
If not, please encourage him to write, a book; or, at the very least, a few short stories. On the strength of this article alone, I would like to recommend that Mr Sandilands work be made compulsory reading in every classroom in this country and, indeed, wherever the English language is studied or spoken.
Writers of Mr Sandilands’ calibre are sadly lacking in Modern Literature.
Yours sincerely,
Mike Stott

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Albert and the Jaguars

Date published: 2000?
Publisher: not published - except on the website

John wrote this clever poem about John (now Lord) Prescott when Prescott was Deputy PM, charting what a long way he had come from his early beginnings as cabin crew on the cross-channel ferry.

ALBERT AND THE JAGUARS

(With acknowledgements to Stanley Holloway and the late Albert Ramsbottom)

Now everyone’s ‘eard of Westminster
Which is famous for ‘ot air and sin
But ‘ere’s what ‘appened to young Albert Prescott
After New Labour got in:

Young Albert ‘ad ‘umble beginnings
A cabin-boy’s bunk was ‘is bed
Back and forth on the cross-Channel ferry
‘E’d dream of the great days ahead –
Of the days when all men would be equal
And ‘e’d be the Captain instead.

In them days life weren’t so plain-sailing
For a lad who were born lower-deck.
And ship’s mate, a terrible tyrant,
Would grab him by scruff o’ t’ neck
“Look lively you low-income lubber”
He’d hear this tool of t’management shriek
“Bad wages and little advancement
Is the lot of the poor and the weak.”

“ ‘ecky thump’ then thought young Albert
(In dialect, for posh talk were never ‘is thing)
“I’m boogered if that can be right
Fair do’s for all is more like it –
I’m joining Red Revolution tonight.”

He sent off for appropriate papers
In pencil wi’tongue sticking out,
Which was more than sufficient credentials
When all this Oxbridge stuff counted for nowt.
In them days the Red Revolution
‘Ad no place for tycoon or toff
An’ them what sounded their aitches
Would right rapid be told to bog off.

So on payment of proper subscription,
Ten bob then or theer-a-abouts
Young Albert was ready to rumble
And sling all the rich boogers out.

Apart from Captain of ferry
He’d a list of all those for the chop
Like them who owned their own houses
An’ got unlimited tick from posh shop.

His eyes would go very beady
At sight of those he thought overfed
Men wi’ bellies too big for their trousers
And faces all puffy and red.
“Do you good” you could hear Albert mutter
“To shift a bit o’that lard.”
‘E was specially ‘ard on car-owners,
Convinced that they’d got ‘em by fraud.
“Same sort” ‘e’d say, “looks down on Skeggy
And takes all their vacations abroad.”

Well, by now you’ll be getting a notion
Of Albert’s political stance.
So let’s fast-forward to Westminster
To see how ‘is cause was advanced.
Let’s ‘ave a look at the picture
Take ‘is book, so to say, from the shelf
Where we’ll see that in battle for justice
Albert’s done all right for ‘isself.

Far from ‘is bunk on the ferry
“E’s got an apartment in Admiralty Arch
No rent ‘cos it’s let grace and favour –
That’s ‘fair do’s’ for all on t’march!
Here he’s spent thirteen thou on new carpet
No vinyl or lino or tat
All paid for by taxpayers’ money
And you can ‘ardly get fairer than that!

His real home, oop North’s, like a castle
Wi’ acres of land all around
Though elsewhere ‘e’s planned thousands of ‘ouses
Where all common folk can be found.
The selfsame poor ‘uddled masses
E’s determined to turf from their cars
And shoehorn into public transport
Crammed into buses like jamjars.

Our Albert, meanwhile’s done a U-turn
On those who own motor-cars
Like Albert isself, for example
Who’s got not one, but two JAG –U- ARS!

Now plump and red-faced and important
He’s chauffered all over t’ land.
By some extraordinary metamorphosis
He’s become the kind of fat-cat he can’t stand!

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Peter Sellers; that is the problem

Date published: April 1969
Publisher: Nova Magazine

Peter Sellers was notoriously difficult to interview but Sandilands managed it ...

His London home is a flat in one of those famous but oddly anonymous streets off Piccadilly. All kinds of celebrated people have their abodes along this southern boundary of Mayfair but it is always difficult to imagine how they conduct their domestic lives in such a bleakly fashionable area where you never see a milk float or a bread van, a corner grocery or an all-night launderette. You have to assume that the inhabitants have all their food delivered at midnight by Fortnum and Mason in big wicker hampers and that they dump their costly clothes and crocodile shoes down the rubbish chute when they are dirty or in need of repair. They must have rubbish chutes because you never see a dustbin, and certainly not a dustman, down that way.
The apartment block in which Peter Sellers lives is so discreetly concealed amongst elegantly forbidding frontages that it is possible to pass the front door a dozen times without realising that whole human families conduct their lives within. I did so myself before spotting the give-away of an inter-com grille with a line of bell-buttons above, a sure sign of civilised habitation even in this wilderness.
Right up until that moment I was convinced that the notably affluent Sellers must have made his home in a streamlined modern bank, actually a few doors adjacent to his true location as I now found. The number of a building in such a street is a secret as closely guarded as that of a Swiss account.

I pressed the appropriate bell and applied my ear to the intercom with a certain excitement. If Sellers himself were to answer! Imagine being bidden to enter and ascend by Bluebottle from the Goons, or Strangelove or that unforgettable Indian doctor from The Millionairess. Even after nearly twenty years of listening to Peter Sellers on the radio, on television and in films it is hard to remember what he sounds like when he is speaking, as it were, for himself.
The voice, when it came, was a girl’s-or my God, what a damn good imitation I-a secretary voice, suitably metallic for these surroundings and, after a short ride in a robot lift, she was taking my coat and explaining that, at this moment, Mr Sellers was still completing his lunch.
In fact I could have divined this for myself because the hallway was constructed of sheet mirror and it was possible, standing by the entrance door, actually to see Mr Sellers at table, although he was round a corner and at some distance. Indeed, one could observe via the mirrors, half a dozen different versions of Mr Sellers portraying, with the uncanny accuracy one has come to expect from him, a person eating his lunch.

It seemed, at the time, an incredibly apt first glimpse of a character so diffuse. In the course of becoming a household name, a famous actor, a brilliant impersonator and even a common synonym for a certain type of Bombay accent, Peter Sellers has managed remarkably to conceal his own persona.
Now, about to confront him, I found myself quite unaware of what to expect. Was he a jolly man, or glum? A comedian, as presented, or deeply serious? Would he fall over the furniture and pull faces or address me gravely on VD, pot and the bomb?
It appeared that Sellers had been able to see several different versions of me entering his flat because he rose and waved me into what turned out to be a very large lounge of which the dining alcove was only a part. There were a surprising number of people in the room and Sellers introduced me to all of them as though they were going to have some significance in our further deliberations. There was a man called Bert who was mending the hi-fi, Britt Ekland’s daughter Victoria, a four-year-old glamour girl with her mother’s features but greater poise, and Victoria’s nurse.
There was a large, hairy young man sitting on the settee in a jacket covered with marigolds who turned out to be Michael, Sellers’ son by his first marriage and, amazingly, only fourteen years old. A girl, attractive in the arty manner, was at the table with Sellers. Sh8 smiled in a friendly manner but, in this case, he kept her identity to himself.

When these formalities were over everybody went back to their former preoccupations without further reference to the visitor and I was left for some time marooned in an armchair. Michael, a mite surprisingly for one of such mature appearance, produced a big box which contained, at heaven knows what expense, a magnificent construction kit for an Alfa Romeo racing car and sat with it on his lap. I was very interested and got up to poke about among the marvellous bits and pieces but its owner replaced the lid and took it away. He was a very composed boy with a rather sternly paternal air towards adults.
There was no alternative but to examine the surroundings, although these, too, seemed strangely remote. The furniture consisted of that costly modern combination of leather and tubular steel; there were the objects that rich men sprinkle about their homes: a mesmerically complicated clock, a wondrously elaborate table-lighter, two kinds of telephone, a personalised sixpence-in-the-slot fruit machine that must have cost far more than the sum of its jackpots.
There were one or two indications of Sellers’ famed love of gadgetry, a billion pounds worth of stereo, a jumbo recording machine the full astounding intricacy of which Bert was even now revealing, some glossy literature on the priceless cameras of Hasselblad and, casually in the corner, a stack of photographic equipment that would not have shamed Karsh.

There was a strange and complicated four-wheeled locomotory object on the carpet that gave no indication of its true purpose and could equally have been for the pleasure or exercise of Peter, Michael or even Victoria. There were a couple of beautiful modern paintings on the walls and also something called The Irish Blessing in fake crochet-work which began: ‘May the road always rise upwards ... ’ It would have been extraordinarily difficult, had one been a burglar breaking in in the middle of the night, to decide what kind of person inhabited the apartment.
Sellers joined me suddenly in a sidelong fashion that made it impossible to be certain if he had finished his lunch or was merely taking a breather before the next course. At forty-three he is remarkably youthful-looking; slender, as he watches his weight so carefully since that near-fatal heart-attack, his slimness accentuated by hipster trousers and one of those trendy woollen sweaters that, still new, appear to have been shrunken recently in the wash. He has a wide, intelligent brow and his expression is kindly, although he favours those narrow, contemporary eyeglasses that make the wearer appear to be observing you, in a possibly hostile way, through the aperture in a grating.

Overall, however, he is by no means easy to define. Even at close quarters he seems to recede physically, leaving behind only an Impression of Peter Sellers, a nose, a Jaw-line, a cocked eyebrow, the slightly satanic Strangelove smile. He was sitting on the settee immediately adjoining my right knee but he was still a long way off. We might have been two strangers encountering each other on a bench at a railway station, although admittedly a well-appointed one-the new Euston, say.
He seemed to have settled for a conversation rather than a salad so I attempted to bridge the gulf by telling him how much I had enjoyed his latest film, I Love You Alice B Toklas, in which he plays a respectable lawyer who leaves his bride at the very synagogue to embrace the Californian hippie life. He was only mildly interested. ‘You should have seen it before they got at it.’ he said, depressingly. I wondered why. ‘Well, for example,’ he said, ‘they set up this marvellous Jewish wedding ceremony and at the last moment they lost their nerve and dubbed the Rabbi into English. Now if the audience hadn’t gathered by then that he was a Rabbi speaking Hebrew I don’t see that there’s much hope for the human race.’
He drummed his fingers on the arm of the sofa as though hoping that there would be no further questions and, as if in sympathy, I discovered that I had arrived without a notebook. Sellers seemed relieved at this hiatus and immediately called his secretary to fetch one. She returned with an enormous, spiral bound book about a foot long which we both looked at in astonishment. I put it on my knees and appeared more likely to be on the point of sketchinq the subject rather than recording his observations. At that moment it seemed a much better idea but I rallied bravely and inquired if he still took a measure of enjoyment from the long succession of roles he has played since the world discovered him all those years ago.

‘Work,’ he said, without enthusiasm, ‘is the only way you find true happiness. The real excitement is the moment on the studio floor when it’s happening and it’s going right and you are doing it the way you want to do it. That’s what it’s all about for me.’ He receded again, as though to examine this statement to see if it were true, then returned a bit guiltily. ‘Of course, one’s home life is a different thing. I mean, I’m very happy with my children. That’s a marvellous scene.’
Over in the corner Victoria was constructing a tea-party, gradually acquiring most of the small furniture in the room and squealing with excitement at each new discovery. Sellers drummed his fingers again and across his long face there passed a momentary expression of agony. There was, in fact, a good deal of commotion going on around us. Bert was still eviscerating the recording machine and there was a steady and intriguing traffic across the room from the hallway to the interior of the apartment.
At this very point, moving from left to right, was a large workman, caparisoned as though for a TV commercial. He wore a baseball cap and dungarees and a wide leather belt from which dangled a huge, all-purpose monkey-wrench and the flaps of industrial gauntlets projected from a pocket by his knee. He shouted and waved to Peter Sellers, who jumped perceptibly then greeted him warmly in return before relapsing once more into his distant repose.
Having dealt so briskly with his latest film, his attitude to his work and to his family life he seemed uncertain that there was very much more he could add and he looked at me through the grating in a rather hunted way. With such a notebook before me, however, I felt bound to proceed and we prodded in a desultory style at a number of topics fairly familiar to both of us, presumably, as part of the known Sellers legend.
Was he still as keen on motor cars? Yes, he had a Rolls in London and a Mini Cooper S Special, a Ferrari in Geneva and a couple of Lotuses left over from the days when he owned a motor-racing team. He didn’t like the new model Rolls so he had had his old one done up to look like new.
Was his health all right-I mean, you know? Yes, he’d cut down drastically on the food, just one big meal a day. He did a series of exercises every morning, fifty press-ups on an inclined board and he also had a portable bar that you could fit into a doorway, even in hotels, for doing chin-ups, which were a good thing. He didn’t make as many films as he did before the heart attack. Then it was four a year but now it was only two.
Did he still feel at home in England, now that he was a world figure, an international film star? Well, actually his country of residence was Switzerland but he was still a British citizen domiciled in England-a tax thing, you know?-and he still loved the old country, except for the weather. He’d spent the past two years in Los Angeles, working on pictures, but he’d been a gypsy since he was a kid. He actually liked moving around a good deal.
I asked about his friends, sneakily hoping that he might go mad and produce something astounding about Princess Margaret and Tony, with whom he is very good chums. But no, he didn’t have a big circle of friends and he thought it was better that way. There were very few people who were really your friends. There was old Spike and Harry Secombe, the fellow Goons. He was always pleased to see them over here.
There was simply no way into some seam of conversation that might blossom into revealing anecdote, or illuminating sidelight, leave alone a soul-stripping expose of the inner character of this famous man. Having a lot of money was fine, you could sometimes give happiness with money, though you couldn’t buy it. It was probably a mistake for actors and actresses to marry-he has been parted from Britt Ekland for some time now -because it interfered with their work and anyway you needed someone to come home to who had their feet on the ground.
He was polite and attentive, except that he seemed anxious to keep an eye on what Bert was doing to his huge investment in the recording machine, but he seemed genuinely uninterested in himself and what he thought about anything, which is death to the grand old spoof of interviewing. It occurred to me that he was a genuinely modest person who, deprived of his miraculous accents, his moustaches and wigs and false noses, really did consider himself very ordinary. To my surprise he found this notion worth pursuing and he sat forward quite eagerly. ‘I’m not really a comedian, you know,’ he said, ‘although everybody thinks I am and expects me to say funny things all the time, which I don’t of course. I’ve always considered myself to be a comic actor, or just an actor really, a good one I think, although I don’t often get the chance to do the straight bit. I mean, after The Pink Panther all the scripts I was offered were Inspector C1ouzot falling over things and that sort of image is hard to shake off. Now there are people, comedians, with an aptitude for being good at parties but that’s not me. I suffer a lot from this withdrawing thing.’
As though on cue he withdrew again behind that curious, watchful Sellers face that he uses a lot in films-an expression which suggests he is expecting a tap on the shoulder from behind which will lead to disastrous consequences of some kind. There was nobody behind him, oddly in a room so full of activity, for Michael was now making a trip on the locomotory machine across the floor. If worked like one of those railway trolley cars. You stood on top of it and worked the pedals up and down and it went along rather merrily. Sellers watched his progress for a time as though he had actually been thinking deeply. ‘When I look at myself,’ he said, ‘I just see a person who strangely lacks what I consider to be the ingredients for a personality. I can see personality in other people but I can’t see any in myself.’ It seemed a very doleful admission and I must have looked upset because Sellers produced quite a happy smile and offered—a possible explanation for this unfortunate state of his being.
‘One feels,’ he said, ‘that perhaps through playing so many other characters one becomes a sort of nil on one’s own account. I mean, I can get through to people when I’m working. I mean when I was in vaudeville I could tell exactly what an audience was like before I even walked on. I could feel if they were bored and cold or warm and happy and play to them in the right way. You can even establish contact through something as lifeless as a camera after practice. There’s absolutely no problem there.’
There was evidence all around that this compensatory knack was paying off rather well but some mild further sympathy seemed in order. I complimented Sellers on an appearance that suggested he could go on earning steadily for some time to come. He should have brightened as film stars usually do unless personal references are so insulting as to be answered only by an early morning pistol duel. Instead he sank his chin on his chest and looked over the top of his spectacles as though senility had just caught him a staggering blow.
‘I’ve thought a lot about being over forty,’ he said. ‘It’s still a bit surprising to be referred to as a mature man because I feel pretty much the same. Other expressions like “middle age” crop up from time to time and you say: “Hello, hello, hello, I was twenty-five a couple of years ago. Young Peter Sellers appearing at the Windmill Theatre, where’s he gone, eh?’” He stood up as if about to go and look for him but changed his mind and sat down again. ‘I know I’m getting older on the outside but, on the other hand, it’s still all happening in here you know’-tapping his trendy-sweatered chest. ‘On certain things, like work and choosing decent roles, I’m a bit wiser but in the main I don’t think there’s much difference now from when I was considerably younger. Maybe I’m just immature, I don’t know.’
It seemed a peculiar situation to be frozen, as it were, at no particular age, feeling very much the same in spite of fame and experience, earning stacks of money and adulation but not being quite sure who you were. I wondered if he ever considered the future. ‘I think of the future in terms of work,’ he said, ‘better pictures, better roles, more control over what I do.’ We were back to square one and there was some danger of the ephemeral Sellers personality sneaking away again.
At this moment an elderly lady slowly traversed the lounge, right to left, wearing a red dress and red carpet slippers and carrying a matching red carpet brush and red plastic dust-pan. Principally to detain my quarry a little longer I asked if I had now seen the entire complement of the ménage, which now contained, to my knowledge, a secretary, a children’s nurse, a handy-man, a matching cleaning lady, that extraordinary workman, but possibly many others in the interior of the apartment.
‘Of course, without a wife,’ said Sellers, ‘you need quite a team.’ He brightened suddenly. ‘You know there’s this firm who send you debs to do the cooking?’ Abruptly and effortlessly he produced an entirely new voice, a high female version of the ecstatic plum-sucking he used to do as the immortal Grippe Pipe-Thynne. ‘Will you have the artichokes?’ he asked himself, fluttering his eyelashes and fluting his hands, almost fanciable so marvellously did he resemble for the moment a product of Roedean. Immediately he changed gear and become old Fred, he with the snuff-soaked moustache and ancient raincoat soaked in ale: ‘No fank you, love. Lumpermeat and a stackerchips.’ He spent some time enjoying old Fred’s tobacco leer then resumed his own voice, like a narrator. ‘You’re just getting used to one of them but then she doesn’t turn up one day so you ring up the firm.’ He did another voice, a more fruity, gin-laden variety of his Roedean: ‘I’m most awfully sorry but Cynthia has had to go down to Gloucestershire today to look after the Duke of Spin!’
Sellers was delighted. He slapped his tailored thigh and doubled up with delight. It was as though producing these three people so beautifully in quick succession had given him an enormous lift, like sinking a double Scotch or returning from an early morning run. It was a very simple exposition of his art but it was suddenly dimly possible to see how exciting it must be to have the gift of turning instantaneously and impeccably into somebody else, or a whole host of people, and how relatively tedious it would be when you were just being yourself.
It was possible to understand how very average life must seem when you were not being Dr Strangelove with his uncontrollable desire to give the Nazi salute or, a particular favourite of Sellers as he now revealed, the cat-breeding, drunken abortionist, Dr Pratt from The Wrong Box, who used to blot his dubious prescriptions with a pussy which he kept in the drawer of his desk.
Sellers had evidently divined that I was beginning to comprehend his extraordinary attachment to work, the marvellous, drug - like quality of taking these lunatic notions and making them flesh and, at last, he was truly enthusiastic. He began to tell me, unbidden, about his present film which is from Terry Southern’s book The Magic Christian and allows Sellers to portray Sir Guy Grand, a megalomaniac newspaper proprietor among other things, who adopts Ringo Starr as his son and heir after finding him asleep on a Hyde Park bench.
Sellers is co-producer of the picture but his excitement clearly had little to do with that. ‘I can promise you,’ he said, ‘that this film is going to cause a sensation. I know that your next film is always the best one but this time I think we’re really on to something. Sir Guy is absolutely extraordinary. You don’t even know where he comes from originally except that there’s a suggestion that he’s actually God the Father in the script!’
He was on his feet again now, quite unable to sit still while Sir Guy was about. ‘He’s got this sort of Albert Schweitzer hairstyle,’ he said, showing me with his hands flowing round his head, ‘this long droopy moustache and these very elegant clothes except that he has a ban-the-bomb sign embroidered on everything. ‘I can’t get him exactly until I see him in a mirror but it’s all there. I may just take his hairline back a bit’ - sketching with his finger round his temple - ‘but then again I may not.’
He stared at the carpet, wondering whether he should, but there were other problems. ‘Then there’s his accent, you see. He’s a very paternal figure, besides being so powerful and rich and at the moment there’s a lot too much George Bernard Shaw about.’ George Bernard Shaw? ‘Yes,’ said Sellers. He went over and switched on the recording machine which Bert had finally restored to its true condition and the rolling, unmistakable tones of GBS poured out sounding exactly like Peter Sellers.
‘You see what I mean?’ said Sellers. ‘There’s too much Irish in it and I’ve got to get rid of it. I mean, he’s the sort of man who says ... ’ He was a bit lost without Sir Guy’s actual words and he rushed into the interior of the flat to return with the script, Morocco-bound but deluged with pencil notes. He hurried through the pages, determined to find a bit which gave the true flavour of Sir Guy, and decided on the scene where Sir Guy goes into Sotheby’s to buy the Rembrandt.
Helplessly, Seller’s feet moved into the Sir Guy stance. ‘How motch is that painting?’ he said, in the Bernard Shaw voice. He straightened up to be the patrician sales director: ‘Seventy thousand pounds, Sir Guy.’ In an instant he was Sir Guy again. ‘Oi’ll give you eighty thousand.’ Director: ‘Shit! Er, I mean how very generous of you, Sir Guy!’
Sellers looked up at me with his face glowing with pleasure and enthusiasm and youthful irreverence. ‘There’s so much more of it but I’ve got to leave you some surprises,’ he said. ‘You see, this book’s like a young people’s Bible in America. Over there kids were coming up and handing it to me without even knowing that I’d already bought the property. I mean I feel I’ve got a terrific responsibility.’
It didn’t seem to matter what he was really like.
• •

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Introduction to Articles

John first came to widespread attention with Nova, the daring and innovative woman’s magazine of the 1960s and 70s. Nova was the first ‘intelligent’ woman’s magazine, and the first to use top-quality writers. It was at Nova that John’s ability at profile writing came to the fore, and some wonderful examples are reprinted here.
He went on to contribute to Sunday magazines such as The Observer Magazine, Sunday Times and Telegraph Magazines, and the Mail on Sunday’s YOU magazine, all then in their confident heyday. While working for YOU magazine, he became a leading travel writer, again showing an unusual facility with this difficult genre. Most travel writing in newspapers and magazines is little more than an extended thank you note for a free trip to an exotic location. John’s travel pieces are a notable exception to the often tawdry norm.
John wrote for Woman magazine when his then wife, publishing executive Jo Sandilands, was the editor. In those days, Woman had a circulation in excess of three million, and was a mighty power in the land.
As a sports fanatic, John also contributed columns to papers such as the now-defunct Today, and the Evening Standard. He also excelled at television reviews and personal columns. Those written about his cat, Colin, are among his funniest ever.
Here is a selection of his best work or, at least, those pieces which met their deadlines.

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The Toad Cross Code

Date published: 1980s
Publisher: YOU magazine

John could spin straw into gold, or turn toads into princes, as this article shows.

THE TOAD CROSS CODE

Tom Langton watches you carefully as he introduces you to a toad, its alarming, science-fiction fingers blindly searching for a grip on his outstretched hand. The toad has a face like Eric Heffer on a Bernard Manning body, the whole ungainly assemblage sprinkled with warts like a portrait of Oliver Cromwell. Nature, you judge, has not been kind to the toad if its future relies on media exposure, which is the reason for arousing this particular toad from its seasonal hibernation to pose, as winningly as it can, for the waiting camera.
It’s a photocall for the Toads on Roads campaign of 1985 and Langton, mastermind of this latest demand on the public’s awareness of the plight of harassed minorities, is placing a lot of faith in the possibility of making toads appealing. There is a stockpile of trendy toadiana back at the campaign headquarters: ‘Help a Toad Across the Road’ T-shirts, car stickers, beer mats and posters are all in the pipeline, and he is working hard to sell the lumpy little amphibian as a star.
“Just look at those golden eyes!” he says as the toad droops its heavy lids as if about to hibernate, or worse, right there in his palm. “They’re terrific survivors. They’ve got a million years of history, you know.” The toad’s chins undulate powerfully as if it’s trying to suppress a monstrous burp which has been troubling it since the Stone Age.
Unquestionably there are image problems in soliciting public support for a creature best known to most people as a term of abuse and which even Shakespeare dismissed as no more than an ingredient in a witches’ stew. Nothing, from the toad’s Latin name, Bufo bufo, to its Greek classification, herpes, which means slimy or slithery as well as what everyone now thinks it means, seems designed for smooth PR. Somehow, though, Langton has to deal with the difficulties because otherwise there would be no toads to protect.
He tries again. “Just look at those subtle markings! Everybody thinks toads are nasty, slippery creatures but feel that amazing skin. Dry as a bone! And talk about determination ...” He sets the toad down on the road where it promptly sets off as if for some important engagement, hampered only by its peculiar gait, which looks like the swagger of a portly John Wayne, executed in very slow motion.
It’s in this same ponderously jaunty fashion that toads, for years now, have been taking giant steps towards extinction. Their crisis point, Langton explains, comes in early spring when they migrate from their winter habitat to the ponds of their choice along predetermined routes, often as ancient as the toads themselves. What fails to penetrate their low, slightly puzzled foreheads is the fact that certain obstacles have arisen during the aeons of their occupation of the earth, most notably the ever-increasing network of roads. Moving slowly and in great numbers, mostly at night and with their golden eyes no more than an inch above the ground the historic migratory stream collides sickeningly with the 20th century.
Of all the predators that wildlife faces, the car has become among the most ferocious and there is even a piece of conservation jargon, DOR, to express the toll it takes. It means Dead on Roads and in a single night on a major motorway 3,000 toads have been accounted DOR, squashed by heedless traffic.
It is to counter this annual slaughter that the British Herpetological Society has launched its current drive, effectively a plan for a roadside round-up of migrating toads and a manual air-lift across the principal hazard by such caring individuals as can be found, prepared to treat a warty little creature like Bufo bufo with dignity and kindness. The task of Tom Langton, the young ecologist who is conservation officer for the Society and newly appointed herpetologist for the Flora and Fauna Protection Society, is to get this show literally on the road and he, at least, might have been designed by Nature for just such a job in the age of communication.
Slim, tousle-haired and suitably anoraked, he is a model of contemporary ecological chic and he presses the various buttons which activate the media with a computer operator’s offhand expertise: “We’re well behind the rest of Europe in all this,” he points out, the token toad now back in his hand and blinking as though about to burst into tears. “In Holland, half the country turns out for the two weeks of the migration. It’s like a national institution over there. JThe Swiss close off whole sections of road that cross known migratory paths and as for the Germans ...” He pauses so that you’re obliged to ask him what the Germans do, increasing the likelihood that you’ll make a note of it.
The Germans, it emerges, actually build tiny tunnels under their motorways, complete down to little steps at either end of help the toads with their awkward method of locomotion. And two-way tunnels at that, since, with Teutonic efficiency, they have tumbled that toads which have been to the pond are at much the same risk while making their way back to where they came from. Since this is Britain the Roads on Roads campaign comes nowhere near such high technology, relying heavily on volunteer effort and the slightly ramshackle methods which the British seem to prefer when tackling almost anything.
The campaign’s instructional leaflet, prepared for schools and Scout troops and Women’s Institutes and other modest organisations which actually keep the country going, contains a diagram for a do-it-yourself method of toad control involving a sheet of plastic and some wooden pegs, for a totally outlay of perhaps 50p. By pegging the plastic along the roadside at a crossing point the toads can be baffled into lolloping along the barrier in search of an opening, thus arriving at a collecting point where a volunteer can scoop them into a bucket and carry them across the pond.
The major governmental interpolation in this merciful activity is the Department of the Environment’s agreement to a new road sign which shows the silhouette of a toad inside a warning red triangle. It is intended not only to protect the toads but the toad-minders from the careering lunatics in cars who show such scant regard for people, let alone amphibians.
Langton mentions the sign with the quiet pride of anybody who has got anything past a government department but, in fact, in the cause of economy, the DoE merely copied the design of the sign in use in Holland. There they drive on the right so that to the British motorist the road depicted seems to be hopping out of danger instead of into it. The DoE intend to deal with the matter in due course.
Langton deals with the nuts and bolts of the Toads on Roads campaign dutifully but knowing that they lack a certain amount of red corpuscle in media terms. He is clearly aware that the success or otherwise of this spring’s toad campaign in Britain depends on the public attitude to toads themselves and he is shrewd enough to see that the major pitfall is that people don’t usually think about toads at all.
“but that’s the whole point,” he says, so energetically that the token toad in his hand looks almost alert for a moment. “Anybody can get excited about the conservation of magnificent golden eagles or cuddly koala bears. The toad’s a strange looking creature that doesn’t affect people’s everyday lives very much, but it has been on the earth for a very long time and it has its place in the ecological system that involves us all. If the campaign does no more than cause a driver leaving a pub at closing time to stop and ask himself whether he would rather run over a toad or take some care and let it live, then the effort is worthwhile.”
But of course, at this stage of the toad’s long evolution it’s a little more complicated than that. There are a thousand good causes nudging at the elbows of the media and Langton is finally obliged to throw the big switch which makes cameras turn and arc lights glow and even ballpoints whirr. “Why,” he says with great deliberation, “do you think that toads are so determined to cross the road? “ You return his gaze with a toad-like furrow of the brow and he allows the pause to lengthen. “Sex,” he says suddenly, observing with scientific detachment the response this key word provokes in media men – rapid eye movements, quickened breathing, a dramatic increase in the attention span.
Now, with the toad back in its cardboard box and his audience instead in the palm of his hand, Langton describes the sex life of toads in the full, frank, no-holds-barred fashion normally encountered by the media only in their dealings with Prince Andrew’s girlfriends. The story begins, as it often does, in the depths of some damp woodlands, where the toads rest until the temperature changes of early spring trigger them into wakefulness. Their first thought, another familiar phenomenon, is of sex but, as in human affairs, it isn’t as easy as all that.
Toads require such specific conditions in the water where they mate that one of the wonders of their life cycle is that they don’t simply turn over and go back to sleep. Frogs are so haphazard that they will drop their spawn in a puddle if there are no ponds to hand. Toads will John Wayne their difficult way past convenient ponds to reach the ones of their particular fancy. Even provided with substitute, custom-built ponds (the Germans will stop at nothing) and resettled to take advantage of them, the toads will trudge across the country to their traditional honeymoon grounds.
In that case, even a hazard as lethal as a motorway, let alone the lesser roads which are now traversed ever faster by cars escaping the hazards of the motorways, will not divert a toad with sex on its mind.
When Tom Langton reveals the ultimate, innermost secrets of what goes on among those who manage to reach the pond you being to see why. Down there, beneath the moon and amidst the rustling reeds, there are scenes the like of which can only be encountered on the Costa del Sol in summertime. It’s the female toad who chooses and the biggest male toads which are her invariable choice.
Again, as in human life, the smaller male toads do their level best to alter this state of affairs. Mating takes place by a method known as amplexus, by which the male toad leaps on the female toad’s back and holds her tight in his strong little arms. A small toad, in an excess of frustration, will do his best to drag an unwilling female from among the parade along the bank of the pond and into the pond itself. There the water amplifies his wimpish mating chirrup and makes him sound like a much larger toad, with most satisfactory results. Anyone who can hear a tale like that and not want to help a toad across the road must have a heart of stone and, as Tom Langton knows, his job is complete. There’s just one more good angle that he doesn’t mention in connection with the Toads on Roads campaign. Ironically enough, the only toad that anybody had ever heard of before this, Mr Toad himself, greeted his first sight of a motor car with a chirrup that must have aroused every girl-toad in the district. “Oh bliss!” he carolled, “Oh poop-poop. Oh my, oh my!” He could not have foreseen the future impact of poop-poop on Bufo bufo, but Langton was almost certainly keeping that back for one of those children’s programmes on the television.

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The Toad Cross Code

Date published: 1980s
Publisher: YOU magazine

John could spin straw into gold, or turn toads into princes, as this article shows.

THE TOAD CROSS CODE

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Animal poems

Date published: various
Publisher: not published

John had his light moments—and his lighter moments. This animal alphabet, just done for fun at odd times, shows an Edward Lear-type mischievousness at work.

AARON THE AARDVARK

Aaron the Aardvark, not naturally vain
Kept regarding his profile again and again.
What, he would wonder, turning this way and that,
If his nose were more elegant, less droopy and fat?
Would cosmetic surgery, a nip here and there
Make him look much less mournful, not to say debonair?

On reflection, however, he decided best not,
There’s be less aardvark in keeping the nose that he’d got.

BERYL THE BAT

BERYL, a Bat with a sensitive ear
Often wished she could cut out some things she could hear.
The family rows of the couple next door,
The bat up above dropping his boots on the floor,
Not to mention the stuff from much further away
Like a Jumbo descending at JFK..
The cacophony sometimes made home life a hell,
“Thank heavens,” sighed Beryl, “I don’t see so well.”

CONNIE THE CODFISH

CONNIE the Cod-fish, a real fashion freak,
Was irresistibly drawn to anything chic.
Like the day she read in a smart magazine
That cod could look lovely with touches of green.
Parsley, she read, eyes glued to the page,
With a simple white sauce was this season’s rage.
Dreamily Connie imagined the scene –
Herself decked out in the ‘new white and green’.
A mouth-watering sight for her ravenous date,
She’d not swallowed the fact she’d be served on a plate ..

DERMOT THE DRAGONFLY

DERMOT the Dragonfly
Not troubled by weight,
Kept piling up
The food on his plate.
Accumulations of protein and carbohydrate
Wrecked his aerodynamics
And cemented his fate.

EDWARD THE ELEPHANT

EDWARD, an Elephant with a musical ear
Would trumpet all day but draw nobody near.
He pondered a lot on this lack of a crowd,
Was he blowing off-key, or perhaps much too loud?
Would it, he wondered, pack ‘em all in
If he blew out his trumped and played violin?
But the problem persisted – while crowds remained thin –
Of tucking the instrument under his chin.

FENELLA THE FRIESIAN

FENELLA the Friesian, a miserable cow
Was always embroiled in some sort of row.
At night when the herd were at home in their shed
She’d pick somebody up on something they’d said.
Sarcastic put-downs, rejoinders and quips
Flowed off her tongue and fell from her lips.
She’d maintain this invective until a late hour
Putting all in a moo
And turning their milk sour.

GARETH THE GOLDFISH

Gareth the Goldfish, making use of his bowl,
Swam round the Equator and not Pole to Pole.
Alas, a companion introduced as his bride,
Caused great consternation – she swam side to side.
But as she and Gareth reached the end of their tether –
They went for counselling –
Now they swim round together.

HEINRICH THE HAMSTER

HEINRICH, a Hamster of German descent
Had a rigid routine wherever he went.
Early to rise at dawn’s rosy peep,
He’d blink once or twice
Then go straight back to sleep.

IAN THE IGUANA

Ian Iguana, a gluttonous lizard,
Got a packet of biscuits stuck fast in his gizzard.
This unwelcome obstruction lodged in the way
Of all he intended to eat on that day.
A couple of pizzas were part of the plan
With a big shepherd’s pie and an apricot flat –
All that just for lunch, it’s important to say
With tea, dinner and supper still on the way.
The biccies that caused this reptile’s setback
Were merely perceived as a mid-morning snack!

JEFFREY THE JACKAL

JEFFREY the Jackal seemed one of those chaps
Who could settle to nothing, just pick up scraps
Of employment that lasted for hours or a day
A bit here and there and then he’d away
As the pub and the betting shop led him astray.
“A proper old scrounger,” you’d hear housewives say
Until their lavvies were blocked and their husbands away.
Or their fuses went phut or a banister broke
That was the moment they’d send for a bloke
Who could fix all that stuff with a grin and a joke.
And with none of the bluster an ‘expert’ parades –
Jeffrey, you see, was a jackal of all trades.

KENNY THE KINKAJOU

KENNY the Kinkajou, when out on the ale
Was always well pleased with his prehensile tail.
Equally handy for mopping up beer
Or if stuck near a juke-box, for blocking one ear.
In fact out for a laugh and to sink a few jars
You just couldn’t beat it for hanging round bars.

LOIS THE LEMMING

LOIS the Lemming was easily lead –
“Shouldn’t run with the crowd,” her school report said.
Imagine the worry for poor Mum and Dad
That she’d hang out with a gang and do something bad.
But all efforts to guide her turned out a flop –
As one dreadful day she went over the top..

MURIEL THE MUSQUASH

Muriel the Musquash, a very good swimmer
Often thought she’d like to be quite a lot slimmer.
Though aquatic rodents shouldn’t really be teeny
Instead of a one-piece she’d wear a bikini –
A musquash bikini, next best thing to mink
Which would catch every eye on her way to the drink.

But what she didn’t consider was, looking a peach
She’d be ogled by all the rats on the beach.

NELLIE THE NIGHTINGALE

Dame NELLIE the Nightingale, a diva of note
Woke up one day with an awful sore throat.
“What on earth shall I do?” she croaked to her mate,
I’m signed up tonight on a big singing date.
The tickets are sold and the orchestra’s booked,
If I duck out of this, that’s my goose really cooked.”
She tried cod liver oil and a Fisherman’s Friend
And some pastilles and linctus without seeing an end
To the setback a nightingale always most fears,
Which is to sound off one night like a van changing gears.
As showtime approached things looked utterly dire
With Nellie no nearer night’s heavenly choir.
But with darkness approaching her mate grabbed his coat –
“I’m off to the doc’s and I’ll be back with a note!”

OLLIE THE ORANG-UTAN

OLLIE, a typical Orang-Utan
Belonged to the species thought closest to Man.
This meant he was lazy, inclined to deceit
And whistling after young girls in the street.
It meant that his room was always a mess
With his things strewn about ‘cos he couldn’t care less.
Skateboard and trainers were all in a heap
With CDs full blast so no-one could sleep.
His Mum often thought that he might be less crass
If the species were more like some nice tidy lass.

PETER THE PUMA

PETER the Puma, while running about
Felt a pain in his leg he thought might be gout.
A call to his doctor: “It’s gout without doubt.
Spend a week with your leg up
Port and pheasant are out.”

QUENTIN THE QUAGGA

Posh QUENTIN the Quagga thought it terribly coarse
That a breed so distinctive should be linked to the horse.
“Show me a horse,” he’d say, “that in any way
Has a striped head and neck and I’ll willingly pay
A fiver a stripe to whoever succeeds
In tying together the separate breeds.
It’s all a matter of breeding,” he’d go on to aver
And well-bred quaggas would surely concur.
Except, once again, Mother Nature has blinked
And every last quagga’s now sadly extinct.

RUPERT THE ROEBUCK

Plump RUPERT the Roebuck, whiling away
The post-prandial hours of a typical day,
Unwisely allowed his attention to stray
From a large clump of lion-grass not far away.
A growl and a roar and the flash of a mane –
Now Rupert will never be whiling again.

SELWYN THE SALMON

SELWYN the Salmon’s imaginative leap
Was to think about fish-cakes without losing sleep.
A concept at which even red salmon pales
Was it really, he wondered, like rarebits and Wales,
A mere marketing ploy linking ‘tatoes and fish,
Not a form of mash murder, but the name of a dish?
Could the term, long-established, be used just as well
For a line of confectionery Selwyn could sell
Fairy cakes, Battenbergs, marzipan loaves
Sold in smart little bakeries in inlets and coves.
Or wherever fish gather round reefs, rocks and pools
In large ‘glomerations, especially schools.
His take on fish-cakes was such a success
That Selwyn became a tycoon, more or less,
Sufficiently moneyed to cruise half round the earth
Back to one special river – the place of his birth.

TRISTRAM THE TORTOISE

TRISTRAM the Tortoise, not one to hurry
Went out one day for a takeaway curry.
One his way there he dawdled and looked in the shops
And on the way back he was stopped by the cops
For kerb-crawling, loitering and licking his chops.
And when he got home he was put on the spot
Because even the vindaloo was no longer hot.

UNA THE URCHIN

UNA, an Urchin, Sea-Urchin that is,
Was incredibly scruffy, her hair in a frizz.
Her trainers real grubby, her cap wrong way round.
Her parents despaired that a mate could be found
For a maiden so messy and who caused such distress
A mollusc with attitude, they had to confess.
Not so, thought a photog from a smart magazine
Assigned to a spread on the whole seashore scene.
“That is a look” he cried, “all will adore ..”
Now top model Una pulls guys by the score.

VERNON THE VIPER

VERNON the Viper, a serpent with style,
Got fed up with crawling for mile after mile.
This form of progression seemed old-fashioned and slow,
And image-wise hardly the right way to go.
How much quicker, he thought, and better by far
To swish back and forth in a smart motor car.
If you want that to happen, said a voice in his head
You’d better become a vindscreen viper instead

WALLACE THE WILDEBEESTE

WALLACE the Wildebeeste wanly perceived
Though his birthday had come no gifts he’d received.
No iota of pleasure from party or feast
Or even a call from a girl wildebeeste.

X FOR ??

X-CUSE me for taking an easy way out
But creatures starting with X, well, there’s not much about.
There may be a fish in the ocean’s vast deeps
One of the ugly ones that give you the creeps.
Or one could invent a fabulous beast
Found in the Arctic, or parts of the East.
Or one can turn to the dictionary’s page –
Xylophagous insects? Hardly the rage!
Bugs feeding on wood somehow don’t engage
The muse of a poet at this alphabetical stage.

YOLANDA THE YAK

YOLANDA the Yak would stop for a chat
In any part of Mongolia she happened to be at.
Strangers got buttonholed, travellers stopped
As she nattered and nattered until their ears popped.
With a Mongolian precipice yawning in back
They’d long to retreat from that yak, yak, yak, yak.

ZACHARIAH THE ZEBRA

ZACHARIAH the Zebra was easy to see
While making his way from A over to B.
With black and white stripes from his nose to his tail
His visibility factor scarcely could fail.
But motorists were still pretty much at a loss
When a beast of this stripe chose a zebra to cross.

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Know the Type

Date published: 1998
Publisher: The Guardian

For about a year, John contributed a weekly column to the Guardian about the well-known estate agents Pratt and Idiot. Each one is a miniature masterpiece. Here are two of them.

The Guardian ‘Space’: May 98

Know the type: Rime and reason

Oddly enough, Alastair, the numero uno negotiator at estate agent’s Pratt & Idiot, was about to slope off to a chum’s wedding when a senior seafaring citizen walked in. At least Alastair, sharp as ever, could tell he was some sort of mariner from the fact that he wore a peaked cap, a blue reefer jacket and had a large brass telescope tucked under one arm.

A couple of the other negotiators were free, if you don’t count filling in the “O’s” in Property News, and Alastair indicated them with his mobile. But the old boy steered straight towards him, fixed him with a glittering eye and laid a hand like a long-dead starfish on his Armani-style jacket sleeve.
“I am an ancient mariner,” he said, “and I have a house to sell. But give not up the day job yet - It is a house from Hell. Some years ago while still at sea I had problems with a bird,” (here Alastair thrice shook his head, ‘twas a tale he’d oft times heard).
“No, nothing like that” the seaman said, “I shot an albatross, a real bad move which, in property terms, can lead to grievous loss. Though house prices rise, my dwelling falls about my tortured ears. If something can go wrong it will and it’s been like that for years. An albatross that’s taken can give your very soul dry rot. Get your home address in that bird’s black books and well, basically, that’s your lot. I’ve water, water everywhere yet still the floorboards shrink. There’s fungus in the header tank, a blockage in the sink. The joists they creak, the rafters sag, the plaster all is blown. I have to sell, no longer can I manage on my own.” He knelt
and flung his arms around the negotiator’s knees: “Please rid me of this cursed place and put my poor soul at ease.”
The wedding guest tapped his fake Rolex watch and once more shook his head: “It isn’t one for us I fear. Try a house auction instead.”

Doctor in the house
The Guardian “Space” magazine 8 May 1998

Dr Hardcastle had a kindly expression but he was clearly a busy man as he arrived to view a property. “Don’t usually do house calls,” he explained as he bustled in. “Do you mind if I wash my hands before I have a poke around? Habit I’m afraid,” he smiled. “Right,” he said briskly as he emerged from the cloakroom, “I see from the estate agent’s notes that you’ve had some remedial work done. Nothing serious? Ah, just a little problem downstairs. Let’s have a look, shall we?” He winked: “Don’t worry, I’ve seen it all before…”

He gave the bottom of the house an examination: “Bit of underpinning I see. Notice there’s a truss on the brickwork. How old are we?” he glanced at his notes. “Ah, late Victorian. Anno Domini, eh? Gets to us all eventually.” He took the cellar steps two at a time. “Mind if I wash my hands again?” he enquired. “Always a good idea when you’ve been messing about down there.” This time he flushed: “Nothing wrong with the waterworks! See what’s going on upstairs shall we?”

He twinkled: “Lot of problems can be traced back to the bedroom, you know.” He was concerned about some creaking in the master bedroom’s floorboards. “Joists getting a bit arthritic,” he diagnosed. “Age again, probably, but I wouldn’t consider replacement yet. Now, if you’ll just slip those radiator covers off — I’ll turn my back if you prefer.”

His brow furrowed when he felt the radiators: “Mind if I have a little look at your boiler?” He listened with his stethoscope. “Does this thing smoke?” he asked. He glanced at his watch. “Must get along, got a surgery to look at. But I’ll just take a sample of your plaster if I may. Run a few tests.” He’d reached the door of his Rover: “Absolutely nothing to worry about, but I take it you won’t mind if I got a second opinion?”

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In bed with John Sandilands plus Jilly Cooper, Zandra Rhodes and Peter Cook

Date published: 1984
Publisher: Over21 Magazine

For this issue of Over21 magazine, John appeared on the cover with the above celebrities. It is one of his most intimate and revealing pieces.

I think so highly of my bed, and so possessively, that I can foresee a day when I’ll do my best to stop anybody else getting into it. I’ll be quite old and finally free of the fiery passions that have often made the thing like Euston Station down the years but, a lifelong habit being hard to break, I’ll still be dropping the odd saucy innuendo.

The Meals-on-Wheels lady, bored and fed up with trundling spinach round the borough, will mistake this lingering quirk for a genuine flicker. Not averse to a clean old man, she’ll dash aside her bottle-green, nylon wrapper and, clad only in her slip and corsets and avoiding my bad leg, she’ll clamber aboard.

I’ll have one of those National Health walking sticks with three legs for when I have to go to the lavatory, and I’ll fend her off with it, looking a bit like King Neptune if he had those big rubber blobs on the end of his trident. She’ll be mortally offended and mark me down for pork and gummy gravy for months ahead but I shan’t care. I shall keep my bed impregnable, like a fortress, but stocked with everything I need for a satisfactory dotage. All the stuff, in short, that busybodies in the past have chucked out, much against my wishes.

There’ll be newspapers, some dating back to 1946, in, around and under the bed. Simply by diving down the covers I’ll be able to lay my hands on a woolly vest or a pair of socks, for when I’m chilly. I’ll have a packet of fags and a box of matches under the pillow, for lighting up first thing and for once there’ll be an ashtray handy with a comforting depth of dog-ends, instead of having to watch it whisked grumblingly out of the door at nights, as if it were a bed-pan.

There’ll be accommodation for a bit of snack and odd things that I may need in the night: a bottle of Guinness, various medicaments like cough mixture and Disprin and kaolin-and-morphine and all that other stuff you have to get up for or else lie there suffering, There’ll be a bank of electronic gadgetry all jumbled together and with the flex comfortably snarled; my reading lamp, the thing for the electric blanket, my Teasmade and record-player.

I’m not saying it’ll look a picture, or be all that hygienic but it’ll be mine and that, as far as beds are concerned, is what I can now see matters,

“Get your bed right,” I’ll tell the Public Health Inspector, who will have come round to see me, acting on a vindictive tip-off from the Meals-on-Wheels lady, “and everything else falls into place.”

“Including the Meals-on-Wheels lady” the Inspector may privately think, as he roots out my woolly vest and packs it in a plastic bag to be taken away for analysis, but there’ll be some good sense in what I say, as is often the case with us oldies.

Looking back I can see that the bad times, the fights and infidelities, career setbacks, disease and similar distress, have all coincided with unsatisfactory sleeping arrangements. Not only dismal living quarters with beds too narrow or lumpy, or low, mean-faced, rejective beds encouraging you to stop out at nights, but also sleeping partners with many of the same characteristics. Obsessional sheet-straighteners and coverlet-smoothers and pillow-plumpers with a ridiculous aversion to old newspapers and a tendency to snarl when discovering a sock down at the bottom where the fluff collects.

It’s no accident, I say, that all unlikeable institutions, nicks and workhouses and hospitals, refuges for tramps and the worst type of seaside boarding houses, make a point of having particularly nasty beds and make the maintenance of them in a state of ghastly clinical cleanliness and order a particular fetish. As I’ll tell the Inspector, distracting his attention while I retrieve my vest, I might have become an old soldier instead of a health hazard if the military hadn’t made such a fuss about beds.

When I was in the Army you had to strip your bed every morning, right down to its meagre mattress, then fold the blankets in a special tight pattern, squared off with psychotic neatness and laid out for inspection, along with your webbing equipment and second best boots, for heavens sake. If the Sergeant Major wasn’t pleased with this peculiar display he would take his parade-stick and knock it all on the floor for you while you stood rigidly to attention doing your best not to weep.

“Well, I can tell you son (quaver, quaver), if that was to ‘appen today I’d know what to do. . .” My claw-like fist will fasten round the rubber handle on my three-legged stick and spite will flash from my rheumy eye but the Sanitary Man will have fled and I shall have my bed to myself. At last. •

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Ballooning

Date published: 1970s
Publisher: No idea where this was published

John was prepared to do almost anything for a story. Here he has a go at hot-air ballooning.

BY NO MEANS the least curious aspect of encountering a balloonist is that you find yourself asking first about the method of landing rather than the problems of getting thirty thousand cubic feet of brightly coloured nylon and a large laundry basket up into the air. Somehow, and perhaps illogically, going up in such a wayward gadget seems a lot less dodgy than the prospect of coming down.

I put the matter to a man called Bob White of the London Ballooning Club while he was preparing a launch, expecting an impressive list of technicalities, although he was actually hunting for a safety pin to hook a wire to the basket at the time. “Well, you don’t exactly land,” he explained cheerfully. “You have a sort of controlled accident. A lot of the art of ballooning is in choosing where to have it!”

I was prepared to dismiss this information as a piece of jolly ballooning humour of the kind favoured by the club members, who happily describe themselves as “balloonatics”, but that was before I spent a day with a multi-coloured monster called “London Pride.” When I was introduced to “London Pride” she was curled up in her basket like a fat old tabby, a comfortable wodge of striped fabric looking about as unsuitable for air travel as a patchwork eiderdown. Nobody would have suspected her of the devilish conduct she was later to display on nothing more intoxicating than a blast of hot air.

We began the day by packing balloon, basket and several large containers of propane gas into a long trailer for the journey from the club’s headquarters at Dunstable Downs to a garden fete at Bristol. A balloon launch, I discovered, is much in demand at such affairs and a large crowd had assembled by the time we arrived. The first job was to drive them back off the launching pad, an expanse of grass behind the hoop-la stalls, because human nature being what it is people often have an irresistible urge to stick things in balloons and it is a pastime that already has enough hazards.

There was, for example, the matter of thermals. Everybody was asked, over the creaky loudspeaker, to keep a sharp look- out for thermals and we all peered about dutifully until one of the balloonists remembered to explain what a thermal was. It turned out to be one of those sudden winds that send ice-cream papers flying on the beach on hot days and are actually caused by the uneven heating of the earth by the sun. The arrival of a thermal at precisely the moment a balloon is making its lift-off is one of a balloonist’s particular nightmares.

There are others—simply preparing for flight, for a start. London Pride is a hot-air balloon, which means to say that she is just a large envelope into which a stream of heated gas is blown continuously like a hot breath, as distinct from a hydrogen balloon which is filled and then sealed but at a cost of several hundred pounds for each flight. It followed that London Pride had to be laid out along the grass in a long, wrinkly strip and huffed into life, exactly like a monstrous version of the kind of balloon you buy at Woolworth’s.

The difference was that London Pride stretched some forty feet from crown to basket and took a great deal of man- handling, even in repose. It isn’t merely by chance that if you attend a balloon you are described as “crew”, even if you never leave the ground—a small reward though for the amount of lugging and tugging involved. Yet another hazard of ballooning, it emerged, is actually getting a flight. London Pride is owned by an eleven-strong syndicate of the London Ballooning Club who got together to raise more than £3,000 to buy her in America, almost the only place to find a balloon five years ago when the Club was formed.

The syndicate, an otherwise sane collection of mainly professional men, have to take it strictly in turn to become airborne and put together the twelve hours flying time necessary to acquire the licence needed to captain a balloon. The Board of Trade, astoundingly, have an official Inspector of Balloons and he solemnly goes aloft to test each aspiring balloonatic just like a driving examiner.

The driver on this occasion was a tall, bespectacled, pipe smoking gentleman in Public Relations, called Tim Godfrey, who already held a licence and he was to be accompanied by a learner with another two hours flying time to go before his chance to qualify as what must surely be thought of as a fully- blown balloonist. I had half expected that balloon-men invariably took off in a sort of Jules Verne set of houndstooth cape and deer-stalker, possibly with goggles, but London Pride’s complement wore anoraks and slacks with just the addition of a motor-cycling bone-dome and a pair of industrial gloves apiece as a concession to the perils of flying away in a laundry basket.

Godfrey completed the casual air of what was, after all, a pretty extraordinary undertaking, by igniting the gas burners with the same match he had just used to re-light his pipe. The burners, when turned on to full power, produce a terrifying roar and project jets of heat in the manner of a flame-thrower. It wasn’t easy to see how they were to be directed into the deflated interior of London Pride but the answer was supplied again by Bob White, who is a highly successful company director at those times when he has, as it were, his feet on the ground. “It’s my turn to be Cremation Charlie,” he announced and disappeared inside the balloon. His presence, like a tent- pole, held open the large aperture at its base and Tim Godfrey aimed satanic blasts past him into the cavern beyond.

The spectacle of London Pride inflating was something to behold. At first there was a series of small bumps and wriggles beneath the fabric, like a family of puppies fighting under a blanket. The bumps grew into vast blisters and continued to swell until, to my immense relief, Bob White was able to abandon his suicidal role and step forth to a round of applause from the crowd. The balloon, I discovered, is made from nylon treated to be heat-resistant but a method of heat- proofing company directors, of course, has yet to be found.

London Pride had now grown to immense proportions, fat and buoyant and seemingly hysterically anxious to leave the ground. It was a crucial moment in the operation as she reared, fully-inflated, above the basket, causing the wires to groan and strain and bringing a flock of people, casting anxious glances over their shoulders in fear of thermals, hurrying forward to hold her down. We crowded around, hanging grimly on to the basket as it hopped up and down impatiently and I was surprised to notice that the helper next to me was actually a passing newsvendor who was grabbing ineffectually at the belt of Tim Godfrey’s trousers while grasping a bundle of Bristol evening newspapers under his other arm.

In this wild confusion the final preparations were made for the take-off, which consisted of passing the balloonatics a rather inadequate-looking road map and two cans of beer for sustenance during the flight. A can-opener was also chucked in as something of an afterthought. Ballooning, it was possible to reflect even while removing a newsvendor’s thumb from my eye, has little in common with the Space Age.

At last a direct alignment of balloon and basket decided her captain that the moment had arrived and he bawled at the mob around him to let her rise. She did so with a final roar of her burners that sounded suspiciously like a sigh of relief and bounded off with the prevailing wind narrowly missing a nearby clump of trees. Earthbound, we dusted our hands and congratulated each other but there was suddenly a concerted dash by all those in the ballooning party to set off in pursuit by car. Ballooning is a very literal sport, you are forced to decide, and once a balloon has been released on a journey somebody is obliged to go and fetch it back. I started out with Bob White in the car pulling London Pride’s trailer, for this very purpose, and we were accompanied by an apprentice lady balloonist acting as navigator.

At first we dashed rather aimlessly about a series of country lanes craning upwards for a sight of the balloon while White explained that the particular dread of those engaged on balloon-retrieving duties was meeting head-on with another and a pair of industrial gloves apiece as a concession to the perils of flying away in a laundry basket. In fact, though, a certain amount of science was involved. London Pride had enough gas to stay aloft for forty-five minutes. She would proceed in the same direction and at roughly the same speed as the wind so that reaching her approximate landing point was a matter of choosing roads leading to the same spot besides, hopefully, keeping her In

Up aloft, I was told, the aviators had rather less control of their fate. A hot-air balloon has a line controlled from the basket which can be used to release some heat and so decrease height, another line to deflate the top panel for a more rapid descent. Thereafter, by way of brakes, there is merely a heavy rope to be thrown over the side and which, with any luck, drags along the ground and brings the whole contraption to a halt. A particularly nasty possibility is that up-draughts will drive the balloon ever higher until the gas runs out, at which point she returns to earth like a brick.

Considerations like these have led to a standard insurance cover of £50,000 for every flight but, as it turned out, this particular Odyssey of London Pride was to produce some fresh food for insurance man’s thought. We were neck-and-neck with her when she began to come down over some pleasant rural countryside approaching the Severn. For a moment it looked as though she would land neatly in a peaceful meadow and I was about to reproach Bob White for his description of balloon-flight as an accident looking for somewhere to happen. At which point London Pride accelerated swiftly down- wards and ploughed a fifty yard fairway through a field of standing corn with her basket before touching an overhead power cable with her crest. There was a cataclysmic blue flash and her colourful magnificence subsided abruptly to Mother Earth.

It is astonishing how many people assemble from a seemingly deserted stretch of the West Country when a balloon strikes a power cable while decimating a cornfield. Besides, after a very short pause, an angry farmer and several technicians from the local Electricity Board, there was suddenly a whole range of those people who normally gather around a city incident involving a bicyclist and a bus. There was even the inevitable expert, a splendid old gentleman who turned out to have commanded an airship in the First World War and who was able to offer invaluable advice as London Pride was earned, (?)sadly deflated, from the scene of the disgrace.

Tim Godfrey and his pupil, too, were retrieved from the cornfield, still quite intact and showing remarkable phlegm even when a man from the Electricity Board told them that they had cut off the entire power supply of the Severn Bridge. I was assured that if a sewing machine could be found to repair the rent in London Pride I could look forward confidently to the promised maiden flight on the morrow.

And, of course, not all balloon flights end in such a manner nor would it entirely mar the pleasures of ballooning if they did. There is nothing to compare with the feeling of elation you enjoy as you soar towards the clouds and feel the grip of the breeze as you rotate in almost total silence and peace above the patchwork of the fields, an occasional pigeon for company as you revel in man’s very first form of flight. You can even have pleasant chats with passers-by as you are descending, which is something you never enjoy in a Jumbo Jet.

Or so I was assured by Roy Giles, the photographer who accompanied me and made the flight instead. As far as I’m concerned you need only one real qualification for becoming a balloonatic. You have to be slightly out of your head.

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Obituary, March 2004

Date published: March 2004
Publisher: Daily Telegraph

This fine obituary was written by John’s great friend, Dermot Purgavie.

FROM DERMOT PURGAVIE, NEW YORK
TO ANDREW MCKIE, TELEGRAPH OBITS
SANDILANDS

John Sandilands, who has died aged 72, was a scarred and grizzled veteran of journalism’s more flamboyant days, a prominent member of a distinctive generation of writers nourished by the magazine boom of the Sixties and Seventies and a dangerous man with an epigram.

He wrote with perception and exuberant humour for newspapers, magazines and television, seeking out the offbeat (camel fights in Turkey), the exotic (palace-hopping with the Nizam of Hyderabad) and the challenging (getting blissed out on kava in Fiji) and finding significance in unsuspected places. In an achingly-funny piece about a Welsh holiday in a gypsy caravan hauled by a wilful (and flatulent) horse, he reported that he had discovered the cause for the decline of Romany culture: “Nobody would feel much like making clothes pegs after a full day spent in horse management.”

He had what one colleague describes as “a gift for intimacy” and he accumulated a wide and varied network of devoted friends. Even his plumber wept when he heard Sandilands had died. But though he was loyal and loving, his fierce beliefs, a tendency to truculence and a wit that could be lacerating fatally damaged several once-close relationships and alienated a succession of editors.

A grammar school boy from Brighton, he learned to type doing his national service in the army and followed his accomplished older sister, Chiquita Sandilands, into journalism. He worked at John Bull magazine and in the early Sixties, when Fleet Street was still a boisterous, boozy little village, moved to the Daily Sketch, then joined King magazine, a would-be British Playboy launched by nightclub owner Paul Raymond. To save money, Jo Brooker, a 21-year-old editorial assistant, was drafted as the magazine’s first cover girl and would later become the editor of Woman, the programme director of Capital Radio and Mrs John Sandilands.

Raymond bailed out after the first issue and Peter Sellers, Bryan Forbes, Bob Monkhouse, David Frost and others were persuaded to invest to keep it going but in 1967 it finally submitted and sank. Fatefully, Sandilands washed up at Nova, the grittily-innovative magazine edited by Dennis Hackett, who famously found and nurtured a stable of new young writers— among them Sandilands, Irma Kurtz, Ian Cotton, Peter Martin – who would go on to become bankable bylines in the fast-expanding universe of Sunday colour supplements.

He travelled to remote and distant places, sustained by parcels of Olivier cigarettes air mailed to him by his wife and by his phlegmatic, imperturbable Britishness. Reputedly, he could say “Do you take me for a fool?” in nine languages.

When not adventuring, he recorded his often-comic encounters with the likes of Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Bridget Bardot, Lee Marvin, Ava Gardner and Mick Jagger. He got Terence Stamp to talk about the problems of being beautiful, and Peter Sellers to talk about the problems of being Peter Sellers (“When I look at myself, I see a person who strangely lacks what I consider the ingredients for a personality”).

In 1980, he became an editor at Now!, Sir James Goldsmith’s extravagent but forlorn attempt to create a British news magazine. A year later, on the day it died, he was one of those who led a party of the newly-unemployed to Fleet Street for a fabled Last Lunch before the office credit cards were cancelled. Around midnight, Sandilands could be seen herding stumbling colleagues into the back of Daily Mail trucks after he had negotiated with the drivers to deliver them home. Some actually made it.

He also worked successfully in television, putting in a long stretch as a writer on This Is Your Life and collaborating on a documentary about GI brides, and he co-authored a prisoner-of-war book called Women Beyond the Wire with a longtime friend, producer Lavinia Warner, creator of the BBC series Tenko.

A compulsive collector, he was a well known haggler in the backrooms of London junk shops. He lived hedged in by lead soldiers, early Dinky cars, wind-up toys and sets of cigarette cards recording feats of famous cricketers and the uniforms of the Indian Lancers and the Witwatersrand Rifles. But he had an emotional connection to the sea – for a while he was the proud commander of a 1934 ex-navy admiral’s pinnace – and he amassed a serious, recognised collection of nautical art, specialising in paintings of vessels called transitionals, early steam-powered ships that cautiously refused to surrender their sails.

He told elaborate jokes and anecdotes, came armed with a sly, subversive wit intended to provoke trouble among life’s stiffs and prima donnas, and was impulsively funny. At This Is Your Life, when the subject was Johnny Speight, creator of Till Death Us Do Part, host Eamonn Andrews was concerned that Speight’s cockney father spoke so quickly he would be unintelligible. It was pointed out that it was difficult to break the habits of a man who was 78. “Couldn’t we just try him on 33 and a third?” said Sandilands. He went to a theme restaurant in London where the waiters dressed as Roman soldiers, and 45 minutes after ordering he tapped a passing Centurion on the breastplate and asked: “Do the snails make their own way to the table?”

He did his “notes” on an upright Olivetti typewriter, liberated from King when the magazine folded, but he became afflicted with severe writer’s block, and comfortably cushioned by shrewd property investments, he hadn’t written anything for the last five years, leaving unfinished a book about the Foreign Legion and his long-promised reworking of Eskimo Nell.

John Sandilands died of a heart attack in London on March 15. Amicably divorced from Jo Sandilands, he is survived by his longtime partner, the journalist Liz Hodgkinson, two nephews, Alan and Keir Knight, and a niece, Hannah Hetherington.

Ends

Some fragments from Sandilands’ letters to Purgavie, then the Daily Mail bureau chief in New York. ……

I have examined you letter carefully for any signs of genuine information or even the sort of second hand gossip you seem to be able to get away with in the Daily Mail now that dear old Don Iddon’s been inched out by what I call the new chaps. The USA certainly seems to have quietened down a lot since you got there although old Al Coooke is still turning the stuff up good as ever. I sometimes wonder how the wife and I would manage without the wireless

—————————-

I managed to get hold of a paperback on how to open a vein so I’m fairly cheerful at the moment, although I can’t pretend the work has been going all that well. But, after possibly the worst year since I started the business with just a couple of rooms in the East End, I have come into contact with a thrustful young publisher who has put a thrustful young book subject my way. I’m a bit rusty after such a long lay off but I’ve been running in the morning in ammunition boots and copying out chapters from Dombey and Son, and some of the old reflexes are coming back.. If it happens as planned, I would probably come to States at the end of March so I would have something to put on the dust jacket.

………………………

Sometimes in the evenings I take a paper and pencil and make up an England XI to play the Rest of the World but I just end up in a temper again. Somehow you can’t imagine Wilf Mannion sitting down and writing out lists of great feature writers who could have saved the Saturday Evening Post.

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Everyone in England now has to work a 3-day week, which has put a big strain on me because it means I have less time to myself. All the street lights have been switched off so you can’t see who you’re accosting at night and there are bombs going off all the time. They gave the docks a pasting the other night. We take some blankets and a flask of tea down the Hammersmith Tube, although the wife wants us to move to somewhere nicer on the Central Line. It’s all extremely miserable, what with the TV going off at 10.30 and although I tell a few jokes and mime to records I think everybody misses the commercials

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I am writing this at 33,000 feet over the Congo because my office is an awful mess as usual. I am going to Johannesburg to see Gary Player for one of the papers and if they like the interview they’re going to put my name on the top. I know you find that sort of thing exciting. I’m on an airline called UTA and we have been issued with a customs declaration, a disembarkation card and a will form. Two highjackers got off at the last stop to wait for the next flight. We have all been invited to help ourselves to the duty frees and there’s an Irish priest doing confessions at five quid a time.

—————————-

I must close now in order to catch the postman. I find the best way to do it is to wait until he’s in the middle of undressing the woman downstairs. I hope you don’t mind paying for the stamp

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Interview with Jane Fonda

Date published: November 1968
Publisher: Published in Nova Magazine

This is probably one of John’s best ever interview pieces, and has been much anthologised. The young Jane Fonda was then living with Roger Vadim, and John travelled to St Tropez to meet her

Jane Fonda’s Curious Menage At St Tropez

Extracted from Ray Connolly’s book “In the sixties”. Here’s RC’s footnote: “John Sandilands was probably the best profile writer on Nova. He has also made television programmes and, with Lavinia Warner, wrote Women Beyond the Wire, an account of women held in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in the Second World War. He is currently writing a book on the French Foreign Legion.

Nova November 1968

In movies the late Sixties was generally a period of soft-focused extreme silliness. Few films were more absurd than Barbarella, which starred Jane Fonda and was directed by her husband Roger Vadim.

The new films of Roger Vadim are always accompanied by a certain excitement. His first picture, And God Created Woman, made at St Tropez in 1956, starred in great anatomical detail his wife Brigitte Bardot. Its release was accompanied by the rumours of impending divorce through Bardot’s relationship with her leading man in the picture. The divorce was confirmed in December 1957, and the following day a young Danish actress called Annette Stroyberg gave birth to Vadim’s baby. They married and Annette became the star of Vadim’s next picture, Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

At the time of the film’s opening it was reported that she was having an affair with a French guitarist called Sacha Distel who had come suddenly to fame as a boyfriend of Brigitte Bardot. A divorce followed.
The release of that picture outside France was delayed for two years by censorship difficulties but when Vadim came to New York for the delayed opening he was accompanied by a new protegee, an eighteen-year-old French actress called Catherine Deneuve. Their friendship received considerable publicity, as did the birth of Vadim’s son to Catherine although neither was considering marriage.

The presentation of Vadim’s first film with the American actress, Jane Fonda, daughter of Henry Fonda, was enlivened by news of their romance. The film was called La Ronde (The Roundabout), but Vadim went on to marry Jane in 1965.

Their latest picture together, on general release this month, is a highly erotic science-fiction fantasy called Barbarella in which Jane appears nude and in a variety of futuristic sexual dilemmas. A few weeks ago, just before the London opening, she gave birth to her first baby, a daughter.

She is eight-and-a-half months pregnant and she is looking absolutely lovely. She is tall so that her imposing front makes her stately and she can still glide a little when she walks. It is blazingly hot at St Tropez and she is wearing an embroidered Tunisian djellabah, ankle-length, as a maternity gown. Nothing else. The sleeves are wide and cut to the waist and when she raises her arms to push back her mane of blonde hair it is possible to see her bare breasts which are remarkably shapely, even at this late date.
She seems wonderfully happy. Everybody seems happy. There are guests at the villa, an Italian prince and princess and their baby boy. On the low wall along the terrace above the sparkling Mediterranean the princess is reading a book, lying on her stomach with just the bottom half of her bikini between her olive skin and the brilliant sun. The boy baby is naked, plump with contentment and rude as a cherub.
Two dogs, an Alsatian and a golden spaniel, are panting companionably together in the shade and in the kitchen the good-looking Italian boy in his tiny shorts is preparing lunch, moving methodically but lazily, the exact pace for working when it is very warm and nobody really cares about the time. It is a late August weekend in the Vadim villa at St Tropez and nobody seems to care much about anything except just being, pleasurably, in the Mediterranean sun.

Jane Fonda, the third and current Madame Vadim, is discoursing amiably about the state of maternity which has now overtaken her, at thirty, for the first time. ‘I think,’ she says, ‘that it would be nice if you could have babies by all the men that you love and respect. There are a few of Vadim’s friends that I would love to have babies with but the trouble is that it all takes too long. Christian Marquand, now, who is Vadim’s best friend, said to me once, ‘I’d like to have a baby by you,’ and it would be wonderful to have a son of Christian’s but, I mean, nine months ... If a pregnancy lasted two months, say, it would be different but I don’t think I could consecrate nine months to anything that wasn’t Vadim’s.’
She gazes with her huge, innocent, blue-grey eyes out across the Gulfe de St Tropez and it is possible to wonder if this is the latest small-talk of Riviera villas but she is thinking about it seriously in a fond, rather wistful way. ‘If I weren’t married to Vadim I’d be very sad not to have his baby,’ she ponders. ‘He has such extraordinary children, you know;’

Vadim is out there somewhere in the gulf in his speedboat, one of the stream of craft that pour out of the famous harbour to sport like dolphins, aimlessly, on the spangled water until the lure of St Trop draws them home again. He is absent but overpoweringly present because it is his unique lifestyle that has created this wondrously insouciant scene.

For more than a decade Roger Vadim has stood as a symbol of male emancipation - a man with the ability to ignore convention and, much more importantly, to make beautiful women ignore it with him. There should stand on the celebrated quai at St Tropez a large bronze statue of Vadim, frozen in some noble pose, a resting place and occasional convenience for passing sea-birds and a permanent memorial to the marvellous skein of movies and marriages, parting and paternities, schemes and scandals that he has woven over the years with St Trop as their sunny setting.

In the beginning was Brigitte Bardot, whom he married and casually handed over to the world in a celluloid package, smile, bosom, legs and incomparable behind.

Next there was Annette Stroyberg, a Nordic replica of Bardot, a baby, then marriage, then more sizzling film stock devoted to her naked charms. Next there was Catherine Deneuve, a baby; no marriage but the inevitable Paris-Match pictures in which this pale, Parisian beauty had suddenly come to look amazingly like her predecessor and Bardot.

Somehow St Tropez has always remained the maypole round which this complex combination of flesh and flouted morals, casual wedlock and off-hand fatherhood has circulated and now there is another Vadim consort there, pregnant and seemingly quite comfortably attuned to this curious modus vivendi.

Even bow-fronted, without a trace of make-up, she looks with her high cheekbones and flood of careless blonde hair again a good deal like Bardot but it may be an illusion brought on by St Tropez. Jane Fonda is different from her precursors, she has come from another mould. She is not a Vadim invention but a film star in her own right, the daughter of a famous film star, a beautiful woman with her own stock of intelligence and poise. She is aware of all this and she tries, politely; as if it is a duty; to explain.

‘I guess,’ she says, ‘I’m a kind of slave type. I seem to function very well when someone puts me in a framework and Vadim always knows exactly where he’s going. His marriages, you know, don’t end because he’s impossible to live with. He’s a very understanding, easy going, intelligent sort of person, the complete opposite of everything you hear about him before you know him. He has the ability to make a woman blossom. He brings out qualities in her that may have been there already but were never going to come out without Vadim to help them along.

‘He seems to be attracted to complicated, impossible people, myself included, but he is never the one who makes the difficulties. When I first got pregnant, for example, I was the world’s worst bitch. I was really terrible. It got to the stage of saying very calmly: “Look, we won’t get divorced yet, while I’m having a baby.” For a little while there it was all over and I was terribly unhappy.

‘Some time later when I was very relaxed and contented again I mentioned all this business to Vadim and he’d completely forgotten the whole thing. He’d forgotten and to me it was this awful drama!’ She opens her eyes even wider and smiles showing all her pearly, quaintly protuberant teeth, astonished at the saintly detachment of Vadim from the idiocies forced upon him by beautiful women. Fondly she recalls how easy it was to misjudge him without the privilege of closer acquaintance with him.

‘You know, I first met Vadim in Maxim’s when I was seventeen years old and I was studying painting in Paris. He was with Annette Stroyberg who was very pregnant with’ - she pauses only momentarily to assimilate the implications - ‘well, my stepdaughter, and I’d only heard the bad things about him. How he was this cynical, vicious, immoral, Svengali-type character. I was very aggressive because I’d only heard the legend. Later on he sent for me to come to see him at the Beverley Hills Hotel in Hollywood, to talk about a film, but we had nothing to say to each other. I thought that all the charm and the softness were just an act to cover up for all the other stuff. One of the reasons for the flip-over’ - she demonstrated the flip-over with her long, brown hands - ‘was the discovery that he is so utterly different from his public image.’

She is quite plainly; to use an old-fashioned expression, in love with Vadim but discovering his many remarkable qualities is no longer exactly an original exercise for a lovely girl who has the world at her own feet. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘I know there is a pattern that repeats itself with Vadim and women but it’s not something he works at, it’s just the way he is. He has his friends and his way of life here and we are constantly running into people who knew him then, but if you’re married to someone like Vadim and you were jealous of his past you couldn’t go on living, could you?

‘I’m not jealous because I find that men who have lived a full life and known a lot of beautiful women are no longer trying to prove themselves. The mystery and glamour of every new woman that comes along has gone for Vadim because he knows it all. The French have an expression for the way he is which is something like “he is at ease within his skin”.’ She lowers her eyelashes and drops her voice at least an octave. ‘Besides, the kind of life he has had has made him a good deal more interesting. ’

There would seem to be a danger, alongside a personality so accurately adjusted and well-defined, of a certain loss of identity even for an actress who has become one of the biggest box-office attractions in the whole of the film industry Jane Fonda shook her head so violently that she had to go through the fascinating process of pushing back her mane. ‘I have my identity more than ever before because when you are happy you become so much more what you are. Most women, with Vadim, become more definite although it’s not something he tries to create. When he’s not there I feel less of a person, not more. He was away in America a while ago and he stayed away just a few days too long and I began to feel very lost and unhappy. When you are very contented with somebody it seems to give you a kind of aura. I think I have become much more attractive to men since I married Vadim.’

Vadim has been missing again for some time now and there is building up a certain air of expectancy about his arrival that is strengthened by the fact that promising signs of lunch have appeared. The plump housekeeper who, in the convoluted manner of a Vadim ménage ,turns out to be the mother of the Italian cook, has set a table on the terrace loaded with wines, salads, long loaves and interesting sauces, and the spectacle has magnetized a sudden crowd of people, all of whom introduce themselves by saying: ‘Where is Vadim?’

There is the prince who belongs to the princess and a sultry girl in a bikini who turns out to be the baby’s nursemaid instead of a contessa and Serge Marquand, who is Christian’s brother and thus, evidently, Vadim’s second-best friend. With him there is an enigmatic American girl who confesses later, and mysteriously, that she used to date both Serge and Vadim when she was fifteen and in Mexico of all places. She too wears a bikini and the uniform olive tan.

They all sit down at the table and look hopefully towards Jane who, in turn, looks hopefully out towards the sea which at present, somewhere and presumably contains Vadim. The villa is in the Pare de St Tropez, an expensive enclave with a guard at the gate, out on the headland past the village where the tourists endlessly turn over the clothes at Choses on the quai and scramble for the status of a table in the front row, far right at the Cafe Senequier. The seagoing traffic is now all streaking back to St Trop, because it is the hallowed French luncheon hour, and Jane watches the white wakes for a time. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘I hate St Tropez.’ There could be so many reasons why. It was Vadim and Brigitte Bardot who invented all that wonderful nonsense about the importance of slacks from Choses and certain seats at Senequier, the whole satire on chic and le snobbisme that is the best of St Tropez. The actual, immortal villa of Bardot at Cap Pierre is only concealed by a large rock, just out of view.
It emerges that what Jane dislikes are merely the huge crowds which flock into what was once no more than a tiny fishing village. ‘We have this big car and sometimes when I take it into St Tropez to do the shopping the traffic is so awful that I just burst into tears. I leave the car right there in the middle of the road and walk away.’ She makes a weary housewife face as though St Trop were Surbiton instead of the scene of her husband’s most picturesque forays.

There may be a subtle association of ideas, however, for she says suddenly, ‘You want to know something very funny? Sometimes when I go into St Tropez with Vadim people call me Brigitte. They’re standing right up close to me and they call me Brigitte!’ It sounds a thoroughly disagreeable experience for someone with a name as famous as Jane Fonda’s but she doesn’t seem to think so. ‘I mean, I just find that puzzling. I don’t know how people can make that mistake.’ There is no suggestion that she is the least bit troubled by being part of a small procession. ‘Bardot,’ she says, shaking her head in honest awe, ‘she’s a real phenomenon. She can be in a room filled with powerful personalities but you are still constantly aware that she is there. I’ve met her but I can’t talk to her - she scares me to death.’ She thinks about that for a moment then produces a tiny spark of rebellion: ‘Of course she has made a series of very bad pictures.’

The acting career of Jane herself has not taken its major strides through the movies she has made for Vadim, for in Vadim pictures the volume and quality of sheer flesh that he favours tends to outweigh such a shy nuance as acting talent. Her professional reputation rests, at this moment, with Barbarella, Vadim’s latest creation based on a pseudo-science-fiction comic-strip. In it she is required to say little more than ‘Good heavens!’ as she is continually confronted with an astounding spectrum of sexual occurrences, both pseudo-science-fictional and distinctly earthy in every respect.

On the topic of her career there is just a hint of something less than euphoria, a defensiveness that she displays nowhere else. ‘If I have anything as an actress,’ she says, ‘I have variety. Why not go out on a limb and do something like Barbarella? It’s fun, it’s something new and different. Maybe making the picture wasn’t as rewarding to me in the acting sense, day by day, but I like taking a chance like that.’

The honesty that exists permanently in her blue-grey eyes exerts itself. ‘I guess that if I had just received a letter from Dino (Dino de Laurentiis who produced Barbarella) I would have thrown it away. I would never have done Barbarella with anyone else but Vadim. He convinced me that it was right for me and I’m very glad that he did.

‘Of course I know that in America everybody is going to go “Eeeeek” and say that it’s just another Vadim nudie picture. I’m sure that, back home, my grandmother is going to say, “Jane, how could you do it?” but I don’t think of it as an erotic film. It’s just funny and free and nice. You know Vadim only has me completely nude behind the opening titles? He said, “Everybody will be waiting for that so why don’t we get it over with right away and get on with the picture?” That’s how he thinks about all that.’

More time has passed and a measure of desperation is beginning to emanate from the guests at the table. They are now nibbling with increasing vigour at the salad and the bread and the bravest among them have actually started on their hors d’oeuvres. Conventional instincts long bred in Jane from her birth in respectable, mid-western Nebraska and encouraged during her further education at Vassar finally prove too strong and she rises and sweeps towards the table in the classic hostess manner.

‘Meals in this house are such a problem,’ she announces brightly but unnecessarily. ‘Vadim is always hours late for everything.’ This news is received so mournfully that Jane loses her nerve and whispers to the cook’s mother who almost sprints out of the kitchen with the main course, a gigantic fish lying on its side like a bombed battleship. ‘Vadim caught this fish at five o’clock this morning!’ Jane prattles on sociably. ‘We didn’t get home until dawn. Vadim’s way with a dull party is to stay right to the very end in the hope that something will happen. He just doesn’t use the same clock as other people.’

Her audience is not attentive and the fish’s huge bones are showing as if it had been attacked by piranha when a loud whoop is heard, theatrically, to seaward. That’s Vadim!’ says Jane, igniting as to a mating call. She hurries into the house and is back with her eye make-up on by the time the Titan appears, walking slowly up the steps which lead from the rocks to the terrace. He is tall and strongly built, broadening quite a bit at the waist of his bathing suit and wearing thick-rimmed library glasses. He looks older and more impressive than the lean, slightly wolfish figure of his early St Tropez period.

The guests, in much better heart now, greet him like a hero. He has a loud voice, deep and heavily accented and his manner is lazily boisterous. He envelops Jane in an embrace then peers down her revealing sleeve while patting her bottom with his free hand.

After examining her noble stomach he tells everybody: ‘I am sure that it is really full of water and there are seven little red fishes swimming around in there. 1 am so certain that 1 am preparing an aquarium for them instead of a nursery.’ He heaves a big mock sigh. ‘One night of pleasure and nine months waiting for seven little fishes!’ Undeterred he sits down to the remains of his morning catch. ‘He has been through all this pregnancy thing before,’ Jane explains fondly, ‘but he forgets. It’s just as though it’s the first time. You know he has even had cravings?’

After lunch Vadim sits next to Jane on the wall, thrusts his hand up her sleeve and fondles her breast while promoting a discussion on whether childbirth leaves a faint white line on a woman’s abdomen, extending from the navel due south. The American girl has had a baby recently and Vadim pursues his researches down into her bikini without relinquishing Jane’s flesh.

The controversy continues for some time but it is very hot on the terrace and it is decided that an expedition will be made to Pampelone beach, so much more favoured than the Tahiti plage nowadays. Vadim manoeuvres the riva, that most status-laden of Riviera power boats, up to the small jetty below the house and Jane makes the tricky progress aboard just like everyone else, without benefit of solicitous hands or noticeable concern from anybody over her unwieldy condition.

Vadim revs up mightily and buckets across the waves around the headland while she reclines, a thought precariously in the circumstances, on the rear decking. Presently Vadim hands over the wheel and takes to water skis, performing expertly while the boat is hurled through a series of back-breaking arabesques which make Jane’s position seem even more temporary.

She is quite unworried and turns round to watch her husband and, by shifting slightly in the well of the boat, it is possible to conjure up a highly symbolic optical illusion. It can be made to appear that Jane is holding Vadim on a leash of brilliant orange nylon rope, but a very long leash which in no way restricts his freedom of movement. It seems a reasonable moment to wonder why Jane and Vadim took a step so oddly conventional as actually getting married.

‘Mostly,’ says Jane, ‘because of the child.’ This, too, appears rather formal reasoning for such a liberated couple. ‘Not this child,’ says Jane, patting her stomach. ‘We took my stepdaughter to America with us and you know how they are there. Kids used to say to her: ‘Oh, your mommy and daddy aren’t married are they’ and there was all that nonsense with hotels and things like that. It was just easier to be married, that’s all.’

The subject is making her slightly more uncomfortable than her seat on the back of a bucking boat. She is vehement for the first time. ‘Vadim and I have been together for five years but I honestly can’t remember if we’ve been married for two years and lived together for three or if it’s the other way around.

‘Our wedding was on the twenty-first floor of a hotel in Las Vegas. The judge was seventy years old and we went out afterwards and gambled all night. I can’t even remember the name of the hotel. Maybe it was the Sands.’ It was the Dunes and the casual nature of the ceremony has been established, but Jane continues, ‘I’d formed a very definite view about marriage - that it’s silly. It just doesn’t make sense to me. That people form a couple seems perfectly natural. Marriage is something else again, something superfluous like the human appendix. I’m sure that in the future, like that organ, it will be eliminated because it certainly doesn’t protect anything as far as the couple are concerned. We’re all fickle, why have the added burden of marriage? Maybe women do need the security, I don’t know, but two days before the wedding I went into a complete panic and I wanted to call the whole thing off. Now I feel better about it. I believe that, in the end, if you’re careful, marriage needn’t really spoil anything.’

On cue, Vadim performs a final sequence of spectacular gyrations and disappears abruptly beneath the waves while Jane winds in the empty towing line. She makes her own descent, heavily, into the surf at Pampelone beach and everybody gathers at a small bar which blossoms magically out of the golden sands. Within moments, and from nowhere, whole segments of Vadim’s life manifest themselves. Vadim’s mother appears, a tiny, bespectacled grey-haired lady, Vadim’s sister, big-boned like Vadim, and Vadim’s brother-in-law, one of the several he has acquired in his time. There is Vadim’s daughter by Annette Stroyberg, Nathalie, a tall, lissom ten-year-old who exactly resembles her mother, plus Vadim’s slanting Tartar eyes. Jane sits amongst them all, very contented, talking as volubly as everyone else in her fast American accented French.

By the time it comes to leave, the news of a Vadim visitation has spread right along the beach and a crowd of people has assembled outside the bar. Jane makes a majestic progress back to the boat with the throng falling back in front of her like awed savages, their faces covered with cameras as if in respect. Thus each of her predecessors, pregnant or otherwise, have made their departures from the beaches of St Tropez, but her smile is generous. She seems quite happy with her position in the line of descent.

Back at the villa the Vadim entourage disappears to change into the vivid kaftans and pyjama suits and tight Choses trousers which constitute evening wear at St Tropez and Vadim alone remains in his bathing shorts on the darkening terrace. He has made himself a large Scotch and he is in a mellow mood, looking out across the velvety gulf. He is prepared to divulge a little of the philosophy that has enabled him to dispose of so many of the stresses which bedevil almost every other husband and father on earth, a few of the secrets of the care and maintenance of such a carefree menage.

‘I am asking a lot from life when I am living with a woman,’ he says. ‘What is important for me is to trust and to trust is not to protect a woman too much and never to put her in situations where she has no temptations to face. To protect your wife too much is to be like a stingy man with money. It is a sick thing. In life beauty must be seen and it is a terrible conception that if that beauty exists in your wife it must be hidden.

‘I would not be jealous if my wife was naked in our garden and she was seen by someone for whom I have respect - someone who would appreciate her beauty on a normal, intelligent level. I would not mind a bit. If a man has an intelligent wife he will not hide her, will he? I do not have the slightest sense of sin so far as sex and the body are concerned. Why should I pretend that I do for the sake of narrow, stupid, bourgeois thinking?’

He smiles charmingly, showing his big, horse teeth. He is immensely attractive, infinitely persuasive because his face is guileless and pleasant except for a hint of secretive humour around his wide-set eyes. With an effort now, however, he manages a stern expression. ‘It is respect that is important between a man and a woman. Here, at the house, we may be playful with each other and our friends but at a party, at a club perhaps, if my wife starts to flirt and dance lasciviously I don’t like that because it is vulgar and does not show proper respect for the relationship. You will never see me kiss and caress a woman in public,’ he concludes with a conviction that brooks no possibility of argument.

It remains mildly puzzling that, in his films, his womenfolk are so ardently addressed and undressed by other men before a public of varied intellect and numbered in millions. Vadim considers the question, an old friend whom he met after his very first picture and the suggestion of humour around his eyes becomes a statement. ‘It is strange, isn’t it?’ he says.

He is forty years old, a father, at last, in wedlock; was there any chance now that his way of life might change, his taste as a movie-maker progress to properties more recognizably serious, and certainly more adequately clothed, than Barbarella? ‘You change a little at adolescence,’ says Vadim with endless tolerance. ‘Sometimes that adolescence lasts a very long time but you never learn anything really new after you are twenty, except perhaps in a relationship with a woman. I think that Jane is sensitive and intelligent and evolved enough to understand that which is why, at the moment, we are very happy.’

He is interrupted by the ringing of the telephone inside the villa and Jane emerges in the beautiful white maternity smock that she wears for evening. ‘C’est Brigitte Bardot qui t’appelle,’ she says casually. Vadim thanks her politely and goes to answer the call.

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Mr Pastry

Date published: 1960s
Publisher: This was published in some long-defunct magazine

Richard Hearne, known as Mr Pastry, was a popular children’s television entertainer in the 1950s and 60s

MR. PASTRY’S BREAD AND BUTTER COMEDY

ON A TELEVISION programme a few years ago character comedian Richard Hearne surprised viewers by appearing in immaculate evening clothes. On a prop balcony overlooking a romantic Mediterranean scene, he recited a poem to a beautiful girl. Then he leaned nonchalantly on the balustrade and shot out of sight as it collapsed.

Behind the scenes, studio carpenters had prepared for the stunt by building a platform for Hearne ,to fall onto him just out of sight. But he overshot the safety device and landed twelve feet below the balcony on his head.

Semi-conscious, he had to be led to his place for the next scene which showed him in the familiar grizzled make-up. round brass spectacles and cutaway coat of his famous character Mr. Pastry.

“Dicky took the incident as a grim warning against stepping out of line, ” says a friend. Since Hearne assumed the role of Mr. Pastry, the kindly but misguided old gentleman whose whole existence is fraught with unfortunate accidents, he has had to live a double life.

An accomplished character actor -in 1947 he was offered three parts with the Old Vic company in Shakespearean plays- he has fought a losing battle to retain his identity against the competition of the ageing character he portrays. He received more than three hundred invitations to perform opening ceremonies at fetes, garden parties and other functions last year. “Every one,” says Hearne, “stipulated that I should appear as Mr. Pastry.”

When he visited a hospital during a provincial tour of the show Mr. Pastry Comes To Town he started his round of the wards in an ordinary lounge suit. After patients in the first two wards had greeted him with polite smiles but scarcely a flicker of recognition, he returned to the theatre for his Mr. Pastry costume. For the rest of the visit he received delighted welcomes .

The slapstick antics of Mr. Pastry have brought Hearne rich financial rewards. In one week on American television this year, when he appeared before an estimated 120 million viewers, he received £2,500 in fees. On a previous trip, his earnings were calculated at £125 a minute. At these rates, Hearne can afford to be philosophical about his dual personality, but he confesses to misgivings about the extent to which Mr Pastry dominates his existence.

In appearance and manner be presents an exact antithesis of the ageing character he portrays: youthful, forty-six with Puckish features, humorous blue eyes and a lithe, athletic figure, he has a bounce that completely belies his stage make-up.

One critic described Mr. Pastry as “looking elderly, sincere and dangerously agile-like the nice uncle people avoid talking about”. Hearne admits that once he dons his make-up, he automatically assumes the cranky walk, pronounced stoop and vague air of idiocy that are features of his characterisation. “I feel an immediate urge to get up to Mr. Pastry’s kind of tricks,” he says.

Hearne’s friends and colleagues are frequently amused by his unconscious habit of talking about Mr. Pastry in the third person. The extent of his absorption in the character has helped him through when one of his numerous slapstick effects has gone wrong. In one TV show. Hearne. as Mr. Pastry. was demonstrating how to mend a faulty stove and was to be showered with soot from the stove pipe immediately before the exit line: ” Next week I’ll show you how to decarbonise a steamroller.”

An effects man released the soot too early and Hearne. standing with his mouth open, received it full in the face. Unable to speak, he had to mime his way out of camera range. ” His impromptu exit was perfect Pastry,” says a B.B.C. producer. “It was so good that he never complained about the error.”

Hearne - and Mr. Pastry- conduct a constant search for new comedy ideas. Almost completely independent of script writers-” no one else is crazy enough to think up the situations ” - he worked his way through thirty-six original scripts in the first eighteen months of post-war television broadcasting and is now forced to explore domestic jobs like paperhanging and gardening for a slapstick twist.

He made the erection of a television aerial at his home the subject of a complete sketch, with him clambering unsteadily over his own roof.

Hearne owns an extensive workshop equipped with a forge and anvil, and when necessary he makes properties of surprising complexity. When he wanted a trick bicycle for one sketch. he bought an old frame and worked all night to equip it with collapsible handlebars. folding pedals and wheels which flew off at a touch.

Hearne’s stage career began at the age of six weeks when he appeared with his mother. a straight actress, as the baby in a play called For The Sake of a Child. His father was a member of an acrobatic act and Richard began to learn falls and acrobatic routines as soon as he could walk. His only formal schooling was through reading correspondence courses. “But I spent a lot of time finding out how to avoid dislocations, bruises and cuts,” he says. “It worked on a process of elimination. If you hurt yourself in a fall it was your own fault if you did it that way again.”

For several years, Hearne appeared with his father in a circus, assisting in an acrobatic act and working as a clown.

His first appearance in the West End was in pantomime at the London Hippodrome. where he was a member of an acrobatic act called the Three Marinos. Early in the show’s run Hearne overheard the producer say to one of the principals: “That acrobat Hearne - he can talk!” As a result, when half the cast were laid low by a flu epidemic, he was pushed on to speak the lines of half a dozen characters, including the Demon King.

Leslie Henson was also appearing in the pantomime. Impressed by Hearne’s good looks and acting ability. he offered him a part in his next musical show. Nice Goings On. at the Gaiety Theatre. Hearne expected to be cast as a juvenile lead, but found that he was to play an old man of sixty-five—the forerunner of Mr. Pastry. He did so well that the character became established almost overnight and teaming up with Henson and Fred Emney, he was featured in a run of musical successes that lasted until the war.

When regular television programmes began in 1937, Hearne’s type of comedy quickly established him as one of the first “names” of the new medium.

During the war Hearne travelled long distances entertaining Servicemen, and landed in Normandy shortly after D-day. When the television service was resumed after the war, Hearne’s talents were again in demand.

In 1947, he tried another new medium. Impresario Tom Arnold. who was planning a new ice show, rang him up to offer him a star part if he could skate. Hearne assured him that he could-and then phoned the Queen’s Club to arrange for lessons.

Today Hearne lives with his wife. a former Gaiety showgirl, and two daughters. Cetra and Sarah. in a fourteenth-century farmhouse near Sevenoaks in Kent. When he took it over. the house was derelict. although the foundations and structure were perfect. Removing broken-down partitions and ceilings, he discovered a wealth of oak timbering and open hearth fireplaces.

He began restoration work and the building is now classified under Buildings and Monuments of Historical Interest: It is protected by law from alteration or demolition.

According to his wife Yvonne, Hearne rarely sits down for more than a few minutes at a time. Part of his excessive energy is expended on athletic practical jokes. Travelling down to Sevenoaks by train on one occasion with his neighbours. stage stars Cyril Ritchard and Madge Elliott, he was chatting animatedly when the train went into a. lengthy tunnel. When it emerged at the other end he had vanished. His companions discovered him lying in the luggage rack above their heads.

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Patrick Moore

Date published: 1971
Publisher: Nova Magazine

Here is astronomer Patrick Moore, seen through John’s eyes for Nova magazine

JS tracks Patrick Moore - and finds him out of this world

He is the man to talk to Them when They arrive, descending in a shower of sparks near the Post Office Tower and demanding to be taken to our leader. They will be a slightly intimidating lot with high, super-intelligent, domed foreheads and eyebrows like antennae, and they will speak very quickly in an odd, staccato fashion. In these respects, of course, they will actually bear a faint resemblance to Patrick Moore.

He will receive them in the Sky at Night studio, showing a marked lack of surprise but immense enthusiasm. ‘Mars, eh? Quite extraordinary! Jolly interesting though! Now let me start by asking you about those curious canals ... ’ He will nod vigorously while they confirm everyone of his long-held theories on the subject. then lean into the camera fizzing with didactic zeal: ‘A lot of very distinguished astronomers would insist that these chaps couldn’t exist up there in an atmosphere composed of four parts helium and seven parts Italian vermouth, shaken not stirred ... But! ... ’

He will hurl himself backwards in his studio chair to give greater prominence to his raised forefinger, then lurch forward again with hypnotic energy, the antenna over his left eye waggling madly, as though he has altogether too much fascinating data like this to convey, and is delivering additional information simultaneously to those with the good fortune to read semaphore.

He lives 238,857 miles from the moon at Selsey, a quiet sector of the galaxy near the Sussex coast but possessing, to the fevered imagination anyway, a singular charm. The countryside thereabouts, in winter of least, has that deserted, slightly menacing air familiar as the background to British science-fiction movies of the early 1950s. Here are the empty lanes along which lone policemen wearing bicycle clips cycle slowly, stopping to tip back their helmets and scratch their heads resignedly when some young idiot roars past in a low-slung, open MG, college scarf flying and goggles glinting under motoring cap of Harris tweed. Not for a country bobby to divine the importance of that roadhog’s mission.

The location was so authentic, driving between the damp hedgerows on the way to visit Patrick Moore, that it was even possible to make a stab at the dialogue: ’ Look here, old man, I’ve motored down from Town to dig you out of this country hideout of yours. Some ... chaps ... have landed near the Post Office Tower and they’re making a bit of a nuisance of themselves. Whitehall’s in a pickle but I happen to have read some of your stuff up at Oxford and Cambridge and I’m certain you’re the fellow to help us out ... ’

His home is ideal, a large, converted Georgian barn with a thatched roof, the whole surrounded by a mellowed brick wall with double gates and a gravelled drive leading up to the front door. Among the apple trees in the garden are his three powerful telescopes and a strange green instrument of scientific purpose but with rudimentary arms and legs, an appearance sufficiently humanoid to cause a tremor of apprehension in the messenger from Whitehall. Too late! The confounded Creatures have got here first!

The door is opened by a handsome lady, not young, who calls into the oak-beamed interior briskly but with perfect modulation: ‘Patrick, dear, you have a visitor!’ He appears past the barometer so accurately costumed for his role that it is difficult not to greet him with outstretched hand and a cry of ‘Prof! Thank God you’re here!’

He is a very large man, six feet three inches tall and rather portly at the age of 47, so that his ancient sports jacket flaps around his vintage grey flannels and the knot of his tie seems to have set off on a separate journey from his shirt collar with a promise to meet somewhere at the rear. He looks at once kindly and stern and his right, or telescope, eye flickers continuously, a pulsar conveying an impression of that powerful intellectual energy which has brought him deserved renown in his chosen field.

He leads the way into his study - no, his den - and that, too, is perfect. Bookshelves cover every inch of the walls and they are literally sagging beneath the weight of papers and learned tomes of every size and shape.

On every table and ledge are mysterious pieces of scientific paraphernalia, unrecognisable to the layman beyond those peculiar skeletal globes which feature in portrayals of Galileo, props perhaps to buttress the remarkable assertions he used to make to the populace in his day: Tonight we’re going to discuss something very interesting. Quite extraordinary, in fact! It seems jolly likely the world is not square at all but round! It remained only to discover if Patrick Moore, amid these cerebral surroundings, maintained that exact, invigorating manner which makes his performance on television so compulsive. There was a moment of delicious uncertainty while he poured two whiskies with a generous hand and sank into a comfortable leather chair, but then he leaned forward with all his familiar urgency and his eyebrow beginning its ascent towards his dynamic hair.

‘The lady you have just encountered is my mother,’ he announced. ‘Quite remarkable! Eighty-four and a half years old. Absolutely sound in wind and limb. Excellent eyesight. No trace of deafness. Trained in Italy as a young girl under a certain Signor Clerici. Fine soprano voice. Destined for the opera until marriage came along!’ His own voice gave the exact snap at the end of every sentence that grabs the attention like a sprung mouse-trap, and he was obviously incapable of uttering without saying something of riveting unusualness.

There was all the excitement of a lucky dip in asking him to account even for such basic matters as his early youth and the genesis of his enthusiasm for the universe. There was a pause while he lit a meerschaum pipe, that completed to the last detail his Professor’s set, then began with encouraging dispatch.

‘Born, Pinner, Middlesex,’ he said, puff, puff. ‘Moved to Bognor, Sussex when I was six. Mother was vaguely interested in astronomy. Borrowed a book of hers at about that time. Could read rather well for a chap of six. Joined the British Astronomical Association at the age of eleven. Hold the record as the youngest member. Vice-President now!’ He added a chuckle to the puffs, as he did subsequently whenever he mentioned some achievement. An unusually modest man.

‘Missed public school, worse luck.’ He tapped the breast pocket of his sports jacket. ‘Silly heart trouble as a child. Passed Common Entrance to Cambridge, though. Coaching establishment at Tunbridge Wells. Then Mr Hitler came along!’ He gave Mr Hitler the sort of contempt he might have offered a bully at the public school he never attended. ‘Always regret not going up to Cambridge. Particularly when I go there to lecture, as I do quite a lot.’

‘H’m. Yes. Pity,’ said the visitor. his own speech patterns taking on a surprising new trend. ‘Not too active as a youngster then?’ ‘Ah, not so,’ said Patrick Moore, pointing his pipe stem. ‘Wrote m’first book when I was eight. Stars and stuff. Told Mother it was written in simple language so the young could understand.’ He chuckled quite a bit at that.

‘Started mapping the moon in m’teens, you know. British Astronomical Association had a moon section, but nobody took it all that seriously in those days. Just a few of us moon-mappers before the war. Little group of lunar enthusiasts.’ He puffed, as they say, reflectively. ‘Old Goodacre. Old Wilkins. All dead now of course. In their sixties then. r was the youngest. Sole survivor now. Bit surprised how fast things have moved m’self. Didn’t expect a landing much before the 1980s, y’know.’

‘Mustn’t blame y’self’,’ the visitor consoled. ‘Anyway Mr Hitler must have kyboshed all that stuff as well. War years? Chairborne, I daresay, with the ticker playing up?’‘Bomber Command, actually. Swindled the medical of course. Knew the RAF was all I could do. One route march and the silly old heart wouldn’t stand up to it. Don’t like mud. Very bad sailor. Besides, machine guns, bayonets and so forth are rather dangerous, don’t y’think ?’ Chuckle, puff.

He was a navigator, actually, and served with a Pathfinder squadron, which was appallingly dangerous work, going in low-level, before the heavy bombers, to mark the target with parachute flares. Didn’t get any of that sort of rot out of him. No fear! The war, eh ? Only Bomber Command navigator who wore horn-rim specs throughout!’

[ asked him what rank he had achieved. ‘H’m ? Squadron Leader, I think. Lots of things. Pottered around. Did a bit of foot-slogging, y’know.’ Chuckle, puff. ‘Home Guard, 1940. Commanding Officer, Major J. H. Marr, MC (?) DSO, retired. Delightful chap. Knew him for many years. Dead now of course. Said he’d go home to lunch if Moore was given a rifle and some ammo!’

There was clearly nothing more forthcoming from him on that great struggle.

None of the major milestones in his career got much better treatment. After the war he was a master for a time in a prep school, teaching history and English and around this time was asked to write a book about the moon. ‘Rather odd, that,’ he said, seeming to be genuinely mystified. ‘Gave a lecture to the Interplanetary Society which got into the Press don’t know how. Publisher was looking for a chap to write a book about the moon and they thought I might be the one. Hadn’t written a book since I was eight: - chuckle, puff - ‘but I did Guide to the Moon which, luckily enough, went rather well.

He intensified the twinkle in the keen blue eyes beneath the antennae and wriggled a bit in his chair, signs which you came to recognise after a while as the signal for the mention of a particularly good jape.

‘Wrote a boys’ novel about the same time which was accepted first go.’ He rose, twinkling backwards over his shoulder and went to the bookshelves, extracting from between two massive works a slender volume with a rather exciting dust-cover. It was called Planet of Fire. ‘Written about a dozen of the things since then: he said, looking positively sheepish as though caught in some mild misdemeanour. ‘Rather fun to do.’ He riffled the pages. ‘Rather fun to do.’

There was a wooden shield on the wall bearing the Baden-Powell emblem. The inscription read: ‘Thank you Pat, from the East Grinstead Scouts.’

He was about to resume his seat and his curriculum vitae when his mother’s carefully-coiffed and silver head appeared round the door and she pointed out that we might be late for lunch, if we were not to depart at once. She made a small moue at the ways of country hotels and suggested, delicately, that the visitor might like to wash his hands before setting out. There was an excellent picture of the surface of the moon on the wall of the lavatory.

At table in the dining room of the hotel, empty at this season but for an anxious waitress of advancing years in a shiny black dress with a white ruffled pinafore, Patrick Moore revealed an even wider range of enthusiasms . He was a rather keen cricketer with the local team, producing quite a decent slow leg-break from lime to time. Appalling batsman but jolly keen on the game. He was also quite a bit in demand for opening garden fetes in the locality. One had acquired a certain local notoriety.

He was munching heartily some freshly-caught cod from the neighbouring English Channel and it seemed possible that there was very little to disturb the pleasant tenor of his existence down there in the country. He looked up abruptly from his plate and pursed his lips, another small mannerism.

‘There are certain things,’ he said, ‘that make me rather crawss.’ He paused then continued, enunciating clearly: ‘Weirdies, beardies, Commies, Lefties. You’ve only to switch on the television to see these longhaired gentlemen making nuisances of themselves on public money. If they don’t like it here let them go somewhere else.’

His good humour had deserted him temporarily. ‘Both Mother and I are rather keen on Enoch Powell. Enoch for P.M. we say, don’t we Mother?’ He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘I’ve nothing against our Coloured Brethren. Splendid chaps. But I may say that if I went to somebody else’s country I’d make a certain effort to behave myself!’ He twinkled again as though a shadow had passed. ‘On the other hand I suppose I’m a bit of a socialist in some respects. Dead against blood sports, you see. Absolutely dead against!’

He had brought the car, a matronly family vehicle, for the short trip to the luncheon-place and to make a space for herself on the back seat his mother had been obliged to shift an avalanche of ancient copies of The Times and abstruse astronomical journals, yellowed by possibly years of sunlight. She had drawn her son’s attention to this discomfort on the outward journey and now, on the way back, she discovered a smell of petrol which she mentioned several times.

At the front door again she returned to the subject. ‘I really do think you might take the thing to the garage, Patrick,’ she said. ‘You know I don’t usually go on about things.’

‘That,’ said Patrick, helping her up the step, ‘is not entirely accurate, Mother.’ He decided that he would prefer a short walk in the garden to show me his telescopes before we, too, went inside.

There were some windfalls’ still around the apple trees and he suddenly picked one up and set off across the damp turf, moving purposefully until his arm whirled over in a cricketing delivery. He turned his wrist and the apple left the back of his hand - definitely a leg-break! - and struck first bounce a distant trunk. He was very pleased again.

We examined the telescopes and he was pleased with them as well as if they were old friends living in their little sheds, always ready for a friendly chat with him if he should be feeling fed up with things.

‘This is the Big Chap!’ he said, patting a monster with the diameter of a dustbin and the Big Chap seemed to turn its single blind eye upwards and regard him with returned affection.

Back in the den we resumed our places and it was time to discover his route towards that curious pinnacle, his eminence as a television personality, a pundit of unchallenged supremacy in matters relating to outer space and a performer of unrivalled excellence. He has made of The Sky at Night, which he has presented without fail every month since April 1959, a jewel among the dross of earthly things which compose an average night’s viewing, galvanising even those to whom the night sky is no more than a signal to draw the curtains and whirling them into the convolutions of the Andromeda Spiral or across the blue-black infinity to contemplate, astonished, the arcane nature of Delta Draconis.

Even the conquest of the moon seemed somehow incomplete until the powerfully heightened activity of Patrick Moore’s eyebrow confirmed a major breakthrough.

He listened patiently to a summary of this, carefully tailored to take account of his modesty, and took the opportunity of re-stoking his pipe. He had also found a battered pair of horn-rims, maybe the self-same specs of Bomber Command and he put them on to increase the severity as he waved his meerschaum warningly.

‘Never claim to be anything I’m not of course. Would never make a real astronomer. Much too bad at maths. I’m an observer. Other people have to work out the sums. Other side of the moon was a very good example. I got the observations and they happened to be what the space people wanted.’

He rose again to disturb the precarious equanimity of his laden bookshelves by removing the top of a tall pile of exercise books. There, in his careful handwriting, was column after column of the fruits of his nightly communing in the garden with the Big Chap and the other telescopes, punctilious notes stretching right back to his boyhood. His lifetime preoccupation with the backside of the moon, in fact, was of international importance when the mighty space race caught up with his youthful hobby and NASA still listen respectfully to his papers on lunar subjects.

He seemed doggedly determined to remain an amateur however. He spent three years in Ireland as Director of the Armagh Observatory but he dismissed that with a wave of his pipe. ‘Suppose you could call it professional but it was the only official post in this game that I ever took. Not the right person for a routine job.’ He chuckled and puffed, enjoying perhaps the undoubtedly attractive role of a sort of buccaneer in space. It was necessary to insist that at least his masterly command of the terrifying medium, television, must have resulted from some sort of devotion to that black art.

‘Not a bit,’ he said, by now inevitably. ‘Ill again with the old heart in the early Fifties and gave up teaching. Decided to take a gamble on writing instead. Wrote Amateur Astronomer. Don’t know why, but it caught on. Become a sort of standard work, I suppose.’ He got up, went to the bookshelf again, but came back instead with a work of his on Roman Britain.

‘One of my hobbies!’ Chuckle, puff. ‘Quite happy pecking away at that beast.’ He indicated his desk with its stand-up typewriter of early Caxton vintage. ‘Never thought about television but I suppose I was known as a bit of a moon-man. Got invited along to some kind of unscripted discussion on some scientific thing and they got the impression - probably quite wrongly - that I could talk a bit.’

It seemed a slight enough preparation for the ease he shows before the dreaded camera, equalled possibly and only by David Frost. ‘Used to act sometimes as a younger chap. Expect that helps. Amateur dramatics, of course. Always used to get the funny parts. Nothing serious. Eccentric vicars.’ He chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, puffed as a final recollection struck him. ‘Ended up as the Demon King rather a lot!’

The revelation arrived with the blinding intensity of Halley’s Comet, making him totally recognisable for the first time, explaining his hair and his eyebrows and his magical mastery of knowledge even to the uttermost limits of the universe, setting in place his devotion to Enoch Powell and his accurate leg-breaks, his chatty way with Martians and even the smell of singeing petrol in the motor car. The Demon King! Of course !

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Fiji

Date published: 1970
Publisher: Observer Magazine

John was also a brilliant travel writer as this piece on Fiji, written over 40 years ago, shows.

Queen Victoria bought the Fiji Islands from their native chieftain for a trifling sum in 1874 and she could scarcely have added a nicer trinket to her splendid collection of mountains and deserts, lakes and rivers, palm and pine. Today, with the old monarch’s attic practically empty and the remnants going cheap down the Portobello Road, Fiji remains almost intact as a marvellous heirloom for anyone who still sees the Union Jack as more than a motif on a carrier bag.

Out there, aided by the trade winds, surely a British invention, it waves with slightly embarrassing bravura, standing stiffly away from the flagpole above the Governor’s Residence against a background of tall coconut trees with heads suitably bowed. Below, at the wrought-iron gates, stands a stalwart of the Native Guard, blood-red tunic straining across brawny chest, trusty Lee-Enfield at the slope, eyes front, dreaming of a place in the Coronation contingent or taking on the Queen’s enemies anywhere in the world, assuming she can afford to send him there.

The Fiji Regiment in their distinctive white skirts, fearsomely saw-toothed at the hem, are clearly still quite capable of thrashing filthy foreigners wherever they may be found, martially invincible, especially behind the brass band of the Fiji police under their British conductor in his razor-sharp khaki drill.

Walk through Suva, the capital, down Disraeli Road and Gladstone Road or along Victoria Parade past fine colonial buildings like the Grand Pacific Hotel, beloved inevitably of Somerset Maugham, and you start to look for gunboats with steam up among the piers of Princes Landing. There is cricket in Albert Park and rugby posts everywhere, for the Fijian adores that noble code, and with his superb physique can scarcely fail to excel.

The dream of Empah that comes upon you in Fiji, needless to say, is not quite as uncomplicated as all that. At the the other end of Viti Levu, the main island of the group, on which Suva stands, is Nadi, Fiji’s international airport. The big jets of Qantas and BOAC growl in and out daily on their way round the world and sinister influences are at work to turn Fiji into another Hawaii, that plastic paradise further along the route.

There is a school of tourism in Honolulu to which all the Pacific Islands awakening to this new form of conquest faithfully send their acolytes, and there is a resultant rash of conventional tourist bait which suggests that Fiji, too, acquired its geography, history and ancient traditions principally to make up a neat two-week tourist package.

“When you’ve gotten your bearings in Nadi Town head out to native bures (thatched huts) or travel by buremobile (a land cruiser built like a village hut)” says a typical effusion. “A five-day excursion to Nabutauntau, in the island’s dense interior, brings you face to face with the now-friendly cannibals who killed and ate their last missionary at the turn of the century! Don’t miss the Friday fun-nites at Viscisei village or Nausori where the whole tribe greets you to pose for photos!” There is fire-walking and spear dancing, wardrum thumping and waterskiing, big-game fishing, snorkelling and native feasting, the whole modern mishmash of Ourts and Theirs that threatens to turn Bligh’s South Pacific into one big Butlin’s.

And yet, somehow, Fiji rises beautifully above its brochures, buremobiles, go-go mini-mokes and coconutshell cocktails. Somehow the immense dignity of having been bought by Queen Victoria reduces the hysteria of Honolulu tourism to no more than an occasional outbreak of indifferent taste, like an ill-suppressed burp at a vicarage tea-party. Somehow, the mountains and the palm forests, the villages – even Viseisei on fun-nite –the silver coral beaches, the thundering surf out on the reef at Korolevu, swallow the attempt to turn them into the multicoloured sundaes of the brochure photographs.

It will take 50 years longer than anywhere else on earth to spoil Fiji in all its 300 islands , and even then there will be the Fijians themselves, surely the most impeccably splendid natives of that huge troupe that Victoria acquired. In a world which rampant tourism has made increasingly grasping and grumpy, something – the Union Jack, the police band, rugby maybe – has preserved a race with a gift for making the traveller feel other than a painfully necessary inoculation virus stuffed into the bloodstream of the local economy.

After only a few hours in Fiji, you become aware of a benevolent presence, of ready smiles and small courtesies, of chuckles hiding reservoirs of mirth, an overall ambience of casual comradeship that you would never meet in northern climes except perhaps in a lunatic asylum. I would like to see Fijians take over the duties ofg New York taxi drivers, Australian customs officials, Spanish policemen, English traffic wardens, and in every other sector where warmth and friendliness, humour, good will and even physical beauty seem dangerously to have receded.

Where else but in Fiji would a hotel porter shake you warmly by the hand, inquire your first name and then tell you his, then throw an arm around your shoulder? In any other land you would sniff the fellow’s breath or send directly for the manager, but in Fiji even the suspicion that he is feeling for the size of your wallet barely crosses your mind. Fijians seem simply not to care about tips and other such vulgarities.

In these Arcadian circumstances it comes as no surprise to discover that the native population are a diminishing group already outnumbered by the Indian immigrants. These Indians, hardworking and businesslike, treat the idle, easy-going natives with the exact disdain learned under the British Raj from Victoria’s day. For a sense of continuity, you can scarcely beat the Fiji isles.

Observer Magazine, 15 Feb 1970

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Interview with Dustin Hoffman, Los Angeles Times, 1968

Dustin Hoffman - Immediate Star

Sandilands is a London writer and frequent contributor to Nova Magazine, now on a trip to New York and the West Coast.

The 5 foot 6 inch frame of Dustin Hoffman is scarcely the ideal location for a Homeric struggle. His head is moulded on heroic lines with its wide brow and noble nose, but thereafter he is constructed like a comedian: his arms and legs are short and tense and his posture perky as though he is permanently preparing to deliver a funny routine.

Behind the tired sports jacket and concertina jeans that constitute his formal business apparel, however, a momentous battle is going on. Hoffman is fighting for nothing less than his values, or so he says in that depleted voice that wells somewhere deep in his thorax and emerges reluctantly down that imposing nose.

Hoffman’s values are under assault in New York City, which I judge to he some of the worst terrain in the world for defending things like that, and there is no doubt that he is being hard pressed at this time.

“If I pass a group of people on the street,” he says, ‘‘I can usually count three before I hear it: eeeeeee!” He is not exaggerating. We walked down the street together in Manhattan and though nobody threw ticker tape from tall buildings it was a pretty majestic progression for such a small man.

This kind of success is what has caused Hoffman to consider his values so closely because he says that it is not entirely what he was after when “The Graduate” made him an immediate star.

“Look,” he said, “I was very happy before “The Graduate.” I was doing some work off Broadway and laying down some kind of foundation as a character actor when this picture came along and changed everything professionally. Now I have the fear that what has followed will change me as a person and I am really very happy the way I am.”

He was in the back of a chauffeur-driven Cadillac now, hunched down in the corner and looking excessively doleful as if he had recently been caught in public without his trousers on.

“About all you can do is to try to keep your feet on the ground and proclaim yourself as an actor, You have to pope that some people will believe you and will stop trying to turn you into a fantasy figure:” .

The predicament of one in danger of being swamped by riches and celebrity does not arouse immediate sympathy. The notion of a highly paid star professing his preference for the truths of his art is not entirely new. Somehow Hoffman overcomes uncharitable mutterings of this nature. He is eminently believable as a potentially fine character actor suddenly barred forever from the comfort of a false moustache.

“I still have the friends I had before The Graduate.” he said, “I go to the same places and I try to lead the same kind of life in spite of people ringing me up to jet over to somewhere and meet up with the Burtons or something like that. I really don’t want to see my name in print after having shown up someplace the night before.

Hoffman treats this aspect of the phenomenon that has overtaken him with strange calm. “It happened so suddenly that my name is still in the telephone book,” he explains calmly. They know where to find me so they come around. They’re very nice and polite and they do no harm.”

The Cadillac had now drawn up at the foot of the glass mountain which houses his new and high powered personal manager. Watching him stumping towards the lift; short and narrow -shouldered, leaning forward a little in his peculiar silent-movie walk, it was possible to wonder if there were not, perhaps, some compensations for a sudden onrush of stardom.

He sat down in a deep chair in his manager’s office, curling up in a position only slightly sub-foetal and permitted himself his small, triangular smile. “I was waiting for a cab just recently at a very busy time and when one came along I was just beaten to it by a very pretty girl. I asked her if she would split it with me and she said yes. I guess she wouldn’t have done that if it had not been for Benjamin but more importantly I wouldn’t have asked her.”

Dustin Hoffman nibbled at finger nails already well chewed and considered that concession to the primrose path.

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Interview with Ava Gardner

Date published: 1970s
Publisher: This article was published probably in the 1970s, possibly in Nova magazine.

John was considered one of the best profile writers of his time and had an uncanny ability to get right underneath the skin of his interviewees. This interview with Ava Gardner was published in the days when magazines and newspapers ran long interviews and they enabled readers to ‘‘meet the stars’ Here is John’s take on Ava, considered one of the most beautiful and magnetic actresses of her day

She was staying in one of those tall, discreet blocks of luxury flats behind Park Lane that emerge briefly from the better class of evening newspaper sensation stories such as -Mayfair Gems Haul, Top-model Mystery, Financier Absconds. There the uniformed porters are like palace eunuchs, there are Judas holes on watch from every door and the hush of an expensive mortuary broods over all.

The lift arrived obsequiously and whispered upwards, there was muffled quiet in the corridor and the doorbell made a little rude sound, hastily stifled, like a butler breaking wind. A plump, coloured maid appeared and let me in in two cautious stages, not unkindly but with proper suspicion of a stranger from the outside world. My coat was removed and spirited away to be quarantined.

I stood in the hall alone for quite a long time, resisting the urge to peer through keyholes. There is something more than a little unreal about Ava Gardner asking you round to her apartment on a Saturday evening. Was she really here, so far from the settings of her legend? Wild, wilful Ava of the Spanish sun, Latin lovers on the Via Veneto, the paso doble on Madrid cafe tables? Notorious Ava of the nightclubs, broken glasses, spilt champagne and the smarting cheeks of unwise waiters ... ‘Excusa me, Mees Gardner ... ’ Smack! ‘Let’s get outta here, baby ... ’ Beautiful Ava, magnificent beneath a black mantilla at countless corridas, laughing with her head back, accepting ears and tail with proud grace then calmly claiming the matador as well. She made her first picture in 1941: Ava, aged eighteen, one of those absurdly glamorous young goddesses that Hollywood used to discover every year and bestow upon the world in a huge cellophane package tied with a pink ribbon bow. ‘Ava Gardner,’ says a Metro Goldwyn Mayer studio biography of the day, yellowing now and distinguished only by its age, ‘is the kind of girl who cannot help but create excitement and interest wherever she goes. The combination of beauty, brains and glamour has been hard to beat through the ages and this young lady has those qualities in abundant measure. ‘Ava ... prefers blouses, sweaters and skirts ... abhors slacks . . . likes sandals . . . around the house ... on grass ... loves to go barefoot .... likes to read, dance, travel ... is a light sleeper . ..plays recordings loud ... likes children, dogs and small animals ... ’ They used to put out stuff like that and millions of glossy photographs of gleaming teeth and shining hair and there would suddenly be a new film star causing queues at the Odeon and having her name linked romantically with the handsome young god the studio had unearthed for the same celluloid year. The kind of interest and excitement Ava created, however, was of a more sophisticated order. She was voted the girl with whom American lift operators would most like to be stuck at the top of the Empire State Building, but she just never did fit comfortably into the studio biography ordering of existence. She married Mickey Rooney-tiny Mickey Rooney, nearly a whole foot shorter than her regal five feet five-in 1942 and divorced him in 1943. She married Artie Shaw, the globally renowned clarinet player, in 1945 and divorced him in 1946, one of those spectacular American mental cruelty affairs in which she claimed he was a pseudo-intellectual who would learn whole pages of Dostoievski off by heart and recite them at the breakfast table. Then, in 1951, she married Frank Sinatra, who was known in the jargon of those far-off and extraordinary days as not only a crooner but World Heart-Throb Number One. The Sinatra liaison lasted for five years but it was always a stormy business with sunderings and reunions sounding round the earth. Eventually Ava made the irrevocable break with studio biography society by moving to Europe and to Spain, no less-fiery, colourful Spain, land of the flamenco, towering passions and proud, cruel men. Here she was overtaken by the kind of fate you would expect to befall a young lady of beauty, brains and glamour who had so arrogantly rejected the studio biog’s safe and antiseptic scheme of things. She made a picture in Spain called Pandora and the Flying Dutchman which involved a real, live bullfighter named Mario Cabre. Cabre was devilishly handsome and something of a poet, a potent publicity combination, and the poems he wrote to Ava started a vogue for coupling her name with swarthy, dashing Latins. They couldn’t all have been matadors, I suppose, for the bullfight had already begun its decline, but that was the impression. One becomes casual about detail when the material is so picturesque. Even the titles of her films added to the aura of daiquiris and décolletage, the red rose between white teeth, swirling Spanish skirts hoisted high. There was The Barefoot Contessa and The Naked Maja and The Sun Also Rises from a novel by E Hemingway. Still, today, it is difficult to disentangle Ava’s actual exploits from the stuff on cine-film. When the scene moved to Rome, Cinecitta and the Dolce Vita, she was there in a cloud of paparazzi, the exciting sounds of altercation mingling with the smashing of expensive lenses. When she came to London, still in those days a dreary amalgam of chaps with turn-ups and frigid women, light relief just cockney bus-conductors joshing chars, she imported a whiff of the wicked Continong. There was a night when she flamencoed at the Don Juan club until five in the morning and the management were obliged to suggest that she went home. So she took the musicians back to the Savoy with her and cha-cha’d in her suite with Esteban and his Latin-American band. Somewhere near, I knew, was Much Woman, a Film Star in the grand, heroic mould, but all I could see were blank doors and it was as quiet as the grave. I would have been grateful for a chat with the maid. Suddenly there was a waft of music, distantly, and a moment later Ava was there. The first thing you noticed was that she was painfully shy. Shy! She stood for a few seconds nervously, like a little girl, pursing her lips so that the dimples showed in her cheeks, then she put out her hand hesitantly and without dialogue. I shook it, feeling a need to bow slightly. I wondered if either of us would ever find the ability to speak again but Ava said, as if she had been rehearsing carefully, ‘Won’t you come in?’ and we set off in procession down a lot of chocolate-coloured carpet .. Ava’s heels were medium height, not chic, she was wearing a black suit, knee-length and oddly dated and a plain silk scarf was tucked in at the throat. Her hair, dark russet, not black, was in an untidy sweep across her forehead and I could see no make-up, although I expect it was there. She would have been a little dowdy if she had not been so incredibly handsome, so luscious, so marvellously magnetic, a peach-skinned knockout at forty-five. We reached the lounge and stopped again. The music turned out to be something soft and Latin-American on the bank of hi-fi in the corner and Ava did a couple of steps, professionally smooth, moving her hips and smiling downwards but it was not a success. She froze and we were saved by the coloured maid. Ava took ages to decide that she wanted a Martini but she couldn’t string it out forever. Wistfully, she watched the maid’s broad back disappearing out of the door and we took seats on either side of the cold fireplace. It was a cold room, expensively furnished in beiges and browns but without heart, a waiting room and we waited. ‘I read your magazine,’ said Ava finally, dimpling. ‘It seemed very nice.’ Did it? Her legs were excellent, her ankles slim and thoroughbred. She smiled across at me, the bright, miraculous Ava smile, but 1 was hopelessly stuck. She was so completely unexpected, so vulnerable. She made me feel like some brutal interrogator from the OGPU, just sitting there. I wished that I could take her on my knee and promise that I’d go away. How could I ever ask her about the big drinking, the Latin love-ins, the divorces and the scandals? ‘Could I possibly have met you somewhere before,’ said Ava, polite and elaborately puzzled. It was as bad as that, 1 mean. The maid came in with the drinks-a small Martini for Ava, about an Imperial pint of vodka and tonic for me- and Ava watched her moving about as though anxious to treasure every moment before we were alone again. ‘Are you going to go out, Renee, honey?’ she asked anxiously. ‘You know it’s Saturday evening?’ ‘She has her friend here,’ she explained to me. ‘I’ll stick around for a while,’ said Renee a bit glumly, glancing shrewdly at me in a sidelong way. She departed and Ava made an immense effort to shake off the shyness. She lit a cigarette and with that in one hand and a glass in the other-familiar props? - she seemed to gain a little confidence. She sat up very straight and wriggled her shoulders then leaned forward quite briskly with her dark brows in a line over her incredible, tilted, grey-green eyes.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘do they ‘tell so many lies about me?’ Who? ‘Well, everybody that comes to see me, everybody that writes about me? Why do they keep putting out this stuff about me dancing all cafe tables without my panties?’ I’d never heard that, actually. ‘Well, they write about how I get drunk but, look, 1 don’t even like this stuff.’ She stared down at her glass. ‘I don’t like the taste of it, I like the effect but I don’t like the taste of it. That’s why I have so many different kinds of drinks, that’s why I change them around all the time you know’?

About her, among the other enigmas, there is an impression of a fantastic sense of humour that she would share with people she chose and I looked at her carefully to see if she was joking. She wasn’t. Worse, she seemed pretty upset and so far I’d hardly said a word.

‘I’m supposed to have slept with everybody, that’s another thing,’ she said. ‘There have been guys that I’ve loved and I’ve had affairs with them but that’s not the same, is it? I don’t like what they’ve said about me for one very good reason and that is that it’s not true, that it’s LIES.’ Her low voice trembled a little, she had kicked off her shoes so that they lay heart-brokenly on the rug and now she tucked her glorious ankles up on to the seat and hugged her glass, utterly defenceless. There were actually tears in her grey-green eyes.

‘I ought to be hardened to it . .I ought to laugh about it, but I do care because it hurts me. It hurts me even after all this time.’ It hurt me, too, terribly, to see her so sad. I said, though I didn’t, that I thought I could understand. ‘You understand nothing,’ said Ava with infinite resignation. ‘You’ll find when you get home that you have a dull story and you’ll invent things. What did I read somewhere - that I pushed somebody who came to see me off a terrace, a photographer or somebody. Isn’t it awful that I care so much about what people think of me. But I do care. I care very much and that’s what’s so wrong.’

1 said, trying to comfort, that it couldn’t be altogether awful to be beautiful, famous and free to live exactly as she pleased. Why, there were millions of people very grateful to her for seeming to lead an existence so patently red-blooded, vibrant and life-size. I needn’t have bothered. ‘The worst of all,’ Ava said, wearily pushing the hair back from her forehead, ‘is when people write to me, as they do, to say, “Maybe that’s what you are but in spite of it all I still love you.” I appreciate what they’re trying to say but oh ... ’ The low, lovely voice trailed away.

It seemed to me that perhaps her noted regard for Spanish bullfighters had led a lot of people to get things all wrong. Matadors are so - well - colourful, aren’t they ?

‘Bullfighters,’ Ava said, sighing. ‘Oh Gahd.’ She stared at me very hard, like a great exotic cat with those tilted eyes. She put her feet back in her shoes and sat forward again to deal with this nonsense here and now. ‘Bullfighting I like, okay? I have one bullfighter who is a good chum and that’s Luis Dominguin. I saw him fight once-once, right ?-some time after he was married and had a family.

‘Cordobes I have met. Vaguely. I had lunch with Belmonte once in Seville.’ She lit another in her succession of cigarettes looking down at the carpet, frowning, getting it absolutely straight, okay? ‘Let’s see, who else do I know? ... about all I can tell you about bullfighting I had from Hemingway, you know? I went to a bullfight once with Papa and he was very nice and very kind but he didn’t tell me too much about what was going on and he’s not the kind of guy that you’d ask.’ She shook her head, wiping smoke from her eyes. ‘Bullfighters, sure, but it wasn’t to do with sex or anything like that, Luis was so kind to me when I was ill down in Spain a few years ago. I had these kidney stones and he came to see me in hospital. A real nice guy.’

She was relieved to have that out of the way.

She dimpled, much happier now and took her shoes off again. There was one tremendously spectacular affair with a handsome Italian comedian called Walter Chiari - and Italian comedians are colourful somehow - when a Paris Match photographer sat up a tree for three weeks to get a picture of them together in a bedroom. And succeeded. There didn’t seem much point in going into it though.

I had finished my vodka and Renee came back exactly on cue and examined me out of the corner of her eye as though gauging its effect. She went out with the glasses, wordlessly, and Ava said, ‘Oh, she’s sweet, so sweet.’ When Renee came back Ava said, ‘Aren’t you going to bingo, honey?’ She smiled reassuringly. ‘This guy isn’t going to do anything terrible to me.’ ‘I’ll stick around for a while,’ said Renee. She had left me with another monstrous vodka and tonic though Ava, again, had just a small Martini.

We had dealt smartly with sex and drink and those scurrilous stories that had bedevilled Ava for more than two decades of making motion pictures. It was a relief to be able to turn instead to her film career, but at the mention of acting Ava was suddenly sad again. She had just made a picture in Paris called Mayerling, which is a costume drama about that old true story of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and his love for an unsuitable princess which led to their joint suicide.

Ava plays the Empress Elizabeth, the Crown Prince’s mother, which might understandably be a cause of mild sorrow to an actress who was once called ‘The World’s Most Beautiful Anima!” But Ava’s malaise about the movie business went, it was plain, rather deeper. She had not made a picture for more than three years before Mayerling and that scarcely suggested a burning ambition to get on in the business.

‘Listen,” she said, ‘I’ve tried so many times to give it up. I’ve Quit often and stayed away completely. I’m not an actress, I’m not a film star, I’m not a personality of the motion-picture industry and I never will be. I mean I’m not even a good actress for one thing. If I’m going to be an actress I ought to work at it, oughtn’t I, and that’s something I’ve never done. It’s something to look terrific, which is why I got a contract as a little girl of eighteen, all those years ago, but I’ve added nothing, done nothing in my work that was great and meaningful and wonderful. I made my first picture in 1941, you know that? All those years and. I’ve done not one thing that was worth while. Isn’t that a shame that I’ve wasted so much time?’

She threw her head back so that I could see the length of her beautiful throat then looked back, swallowing hard and trying to smile.

She won an Oscar nomination for her role in Mogambo. Didn’t that indicate that things were not quite as bad as they seemed? She turned the corners of her wide, lovely mouth down.

‘When I go on to a film set I must do what I must do, or try to anyway, but it’s what making movies creates outside that is so much worse. All the time, wherever I go, I’m supposed to be this great movie actress, this film star’ -she threw her arms up and out and turned her head over her shoulder to indicate the sort of thing- ‘and that’s not me at all. When I’m not making pictures my life is very good and very important. It would seem very dull to you but to me it’s important. Just being a film star is a very great bore.’

She paused there, as if dimly aware that might sound a bit much when it was written down all wrong like all the other stuff she told people. ‘I mean, of course, if it’s a bore it’s my fault because I’ve done nothing to make it good and I’ve done nothing to make it good because ultimately I don’t believe that the life has anything good to offer. I don’t believe I have anything to offer, come to that. I’ve never done anything worth while except maybe cook a good dinner once in a while or be a good chum to somebody.’ She smiled, far too brightly, the big, film-poster smile, not for real.

1 was well through the bucket of vodka and I couldn’t bear the thought of her eyes clouding over again. I would have to go across and cuddle her and make everything all right and then Renee would come in.

I asked, instead, why she had chosen the Empress Elizabeth as a passport back to all this grief and futility. It was wonderful casting, of course. The Empress was a startlingly beautiful woman who kicked over the traces pretty thoroughly by the standards of the Hapsburg Empire back there in the late 1800s. She travelled around all the time, which was uncommon for an Empress in those days and she too had her unconventional pastimes, though in her case they were things like hunting, riding and mountain climbing. ‘In her later years her dislike of publicity increased,’ says her entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but she remained wildly popular with the peasantry, even when she withdrew for years at a time to the palace she built on the island of Corfu.

None of this, evidently, had been lost on Ava. ‘Elizabeth was not prepared for her life and I was no more prepared to be an actress or a movie star than she was ready to be an Empress. I understand this woman so much. She was far too shy, too sensitive, to do a good job. She ran sometimes and hid. She was frightened as I’ve been frightened. She didn’t fit.’

Ava was liking the train of thought quite a bit and the hint of tragedy in her face, the big cheekbones and the fine jaw-line were all working overtime the way they do on the screen when she is going well. ‘You know, I think what really decided me was when I found out that the Empress was a Sunday child, like me, and our birth-dates were the same, December 24, Christmas Eve.’ Destiny was looking out of her eyes but she remembered that this movie thing was all nonsense and she shook herself again. ‘No,’ she said, reassuring herself, not me, ‘I’m not that superstitious or funny. One of the best reasons for making movies is that they give you money.’

I had finally finished the vodka and once more Renee entered exactly on cue and swapped it for another, so big this time that it must have been the father of the other two. While she was out of the room Ava said, ‘She won’t go out now. Her friend is here but they won’t go out. This is a girl she met while I was making Bhowani Junction, a hairdresser, you know, and they are still friends.’ Bhowani Junction was made in 1955. I wondered how long Renee had been around. ‘She came to me in 1946,’ Ava said, ‘and she has been with me off and on ever since.’ Renee, returning, was given the fondest possible smile and when she left Ava said: ‘How can this woman protect and love me so much? She’s as close as my sister, closer even .. .’ She was talking to herself again.

‘If 1 can fed happy and protected and secure everything can be all right but, you see, they never leave you alone. Gahd, the last time 1 was in Rome,’ she said, ‘I went there to have a dress made for my Godchild’s graduation. I went there on the spur of the moment, false names and everything, just Renee and me, and it was so great for three or four days. Just to walk in the park and see the little puppet shows and to drive around and watch the fountains and go buy my clothes for a very special occasion.’ She was back with the full dramatic bit and you could tell something nasty was coming the way you can when people are talking happily in Peyton Place.

‘Wonderful,’ I said and she nodded busily because she wanted to get to the denouement. ‘Then the paparazzi caught up with me. 1 was trapped in a hotel and 1 had to stay there until they could smuggle me away.’ We were both stunned at the awfulness of it but Ava recovered much more quickly. She suddenly laughed, a wonderful, throaty gurgle that transformed her into a young beauty. ‘Oh, a sad story,’ she said, ‘except that it’s not all that sad and not the least bit important to anybody except me.’ She seemed. to be so many different people, Ava, even allowing for the slight double-vision that the current vodka was inducing in me. 1 was getting into a mood to offer helpful advice and it seemed to me that what Ava ought to do was to settle down in one place instead of tearing around the world all the time. Like that she could probably find security.

‘If 1 was married and had several children I’d stay in one spot,’ she said, ‘but I’m not and 1 haven’t and 1 can’t find anyone place that’s exactly right for me. There are so many wonderful locations to stay in and to see and 1 can’t give them all up, not yet anyway.

‘I moved from Spain four months ago, 1 think for good this time, but I’m still not sure where I want to be. Maybe I’d live here in London but I have this little pooch who means a lot to me and I can’t have him with me right away so I can’t stay.’ She paused. ‘Maybe,’ she said pensively, as though wife for a successful man, not too old, not too young, experienced certainly but never to excess.

She had drunk, I judge, the exact amount of martini that is pricelessly valuable, the amount that brings a glow that suppresses an irresistible sparkle .. What an incomparable hostess!

‘I think,’ 1 said, enunciating more carefully than 1 had intended, ‘that you should get married again.’ Ava sat up and her eyes flashed, then softened, then went reflective and then, finally, smiled.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think that is the only thing 1 was really made for. 1 was a pretty good wife, in spite of three divorces. 1 have great love and great affection for every man I’ve been married to. My husbands are all good chums even though things didn’t last.’

I dug around later and it seemed to be true. Mickey Rooney, flat broke after six wives, told all to the papers about their stupidity and avariciousness but never once mentioned Ava. Artie Shaw sends her records and she sometimes visits Frank Sinatra.

‘My life is so goddam unimportant,’ Ava was saying. ‘It’s been such a very big waste, but I’ve found out one thing. It’s better to keep one man warm all your lifetime. That’s satisfying. That’s worth while.’

1 felt great, a saintly figure with the gift of setting tangled lives to rights. 1 sat forward eagerly and was going to find out from Ava exactly where things went wrong and we were going, to see that they never happened like that again.

Before setting out on this new and ambitious programme though I needed a drink, and when I looked for my glass 1 saw that it was empty. Renee came in as promptly as ever, but this time she was planted squarely on the carpet and there was something unmistakably terminal about her manner. ‘It’s getting late,’ she said, ‘and Miss Ava’s had a pretty long day. Do you think there’s anything else you want to ask her?’

As if this were a magic incantation, my mind went blank immediately and I was out in the street seconds later. Lurching down Park Lane, revived a little by the air, I had just enough sense to wonder if Renee used some mechanical device for measuring her drinks so exactly. A brilliant scheme, as effective as an electrified fence for the protection of Miss Ava. But it could explain, I suppose, how the world was always being given such a garbled impression of the lady.

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When the cure is sun, sea and mud

Date published: 12 Dec 1995
Publisher: Daily Telegraph

The psoriasis came on with no warning and, as the cracking of skin and itching intensified, John Sandilands realised he had a problem. His consultant suggested a trip to the seaside.

The trouble first appeared on the horizon like a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. Or a man’s elbow, anyway. Mine. Perhaps a year ago, after a spell on a prescription drug, ,the skin on my elbows became cracked and flaky. It was annoying, a bit unsightly in a short-sleeved shirt, but nothing more. My GP said it was psoriasis, sometimes a side-effect of the drug, and he gave me some cortisone cream that kept it in check.

Psoriasis. I’d heard of it vaguely and never liked the sound of it. But I wasn’t worried. Like everything else in a reasonably healthy life, it would go away shortly, especially if I ignored it. But earlier this year, for no reason that I can identify, my scrap of psoriasis went suddenly frantic.

In no time, it was rampant, from scalp to the soles of my feet. The cracks and flaking were joined by big, red welts - plaques, I would learn to call them - in vaguely geographical shapes: Australia on my midriff, with my navel at Alice Springs; the Philippine archipelago stretching down to the hip-bone from the short ribs. On my back and legs, these features began to run together so that I looked as if I were wearing a football strip. Arsenal, unfortunately.

This whole display was accompanied by furious itching, especially at night, and the flaking was prodigious: a blizzard, leaf-fall in autumnal New England, a New York ticker-tape welcome. In the morning, on the dark sheet, you could trace my whole outline in flakes, like the ghostly impression of the Almighty on the Turin Shroud.

This was the private course of the outbreak. In public, with my two-tone face, Hammer-Horror hands and shifty looking attempts to hide both, I was deeply unhappy. I felt that everyone was as fascinated and repulsed by these developments as I was, though evidently they were not. “It’s psoriasis,” I’d say pre-emptively when I turned up somewhere looking as if I’d been microwaved. “Ah, yes, like the Singing Detective,” they’d say, as if that were helpful.

The ostrich attitude could only be carried so far. I grew a beard not only to avoid the agony of a razor blade on my suffering skin, but for concealment - although men with beards are only a little ahead of ponytails on my scale of misgivings. I now felt obliged to explain the whiskers. “Psoriasis,” I told the greengrocer. “Like that geezer on telly?” he said, without looking up from the vegetables.

The beard fostered flakes even more furiously than my scalp, and combined, they achieved an output of industrial proportions. One day, both myself and my lunch companion stared horrified at what I was about to consume. I might have passed the whole thing off as Parmesan, except that I was about to embark on a creme brulee. It was time to concede I had a problem. No amount of prescription creams had made any difference, and I looked inquiringly at the long menu on the window of my local Chinese health shop. With a complaint so much like a biblical plague, the notion of attacking it by some unconventional means seemed worth pursuing, and this brought me to the Alternative Centre in West London - a clinic specialising in psoriasis and associated conditions, and run by a restored sufferer.

Sandra Gibbons, apart from introducing me to a fresh horror - “as a psoriatic”, she began - was both encyclopaedic, with six books to her credit, and psychologically comforting. And she was the first to mention the Dead Sea treatment, a combination of sunlight and immersion in the sea itself.

I was impressed by her enthusiasm, but found this a bit too alternative for my taste, and so I did what more sensible people might have done sooner. I was hoping the Harley Street skin specialist would chuckle at someone paying his prices for such a trivial onset, but when I was stripped down to my Arsenal kit, he took one look and said: “I think we should have a little talk.” He said immediate treatment was imperative “You may have seen a television programme ... ” - and offered me a drug called methotrexate, a big one also used in cancer treatment, administered only under hospital supervision because of risk of liver damage. Or the Dead Sea.

I have given this last pronouncement a sentence to itself because I was very surprised that a distinguished consultant would suggest a bit of sunbathing and swimming as a fifty-fifty runner alongside a full-scale hospital job of Singing Detective gravity. I felt like saying “What about a week at Pontin’s, mate?” in a Tony Hancock voice, but I found methotrexate, as names go, even more objectionable than psoriasis.

This notion that the Dead Sea treatment could equally well be conducted at Bognor has been rather annoyingly referred to by a number of people since my return. “Take your bucket and spade, did you?” the greengrocer asked.

In fact, the sea - actually the River Jordan where it evaporates in the huge heat of the Negev Desert and peters out as a long, thin puddle packed with minerals and salts - has been known for its curative properties since biblical times.

The lowest place on earth, well below sea level, its atmosphere so filters the sun’s rays that it is possible, uniquely, to lie outside without harm for up to eight hours a day. Even the air has the soothing properties of a tranquilliser. To take advantage of the sea’s properties, a little colony of hotels and clinics exists like an oasis at an otherwise barren and rocky spot called Ein Bokkek on the Israeli shore.

Baldly, and I can speak with authority, having had both my hair and beard shorn to facilitate the daily application of Dead Sea-derived potions at my chosen clinic, the treatment was an all-day alternation between the absurdly buoyant warm washing-up liquid that is the Dead Sea, and sunbathing stark naked in a solarium for as long as you could bear it.

The. solarium was no more than a screened-off section of the foreshore - males and females, mercifully, in separate enclosures - in which the afflicted lay in various stricken poses, like the denizens of the Inferno in the drawings of Gustave Dore. But if prisons are the universities of crime, this was the finishing school of psoriasis.

Here, in the endless and astonishingly fatiguing hours under the relentless sun, everyone related their history. While I, a new boy, listened spellbound, psoriatics of all nations spoke of whole lifetimes in its shadow; of genetic inheritance, onset after accidents or mental trauma and, most often, onset for no reason at all. The place was littered with tales of broken marriages and marred relationships and lost work opportunities.

Here were people who had tried everything from methotrexate to exorcism (and in one case, the sacrifice of a chicken), and there were several who, tiring of feeling like livid lepers, had tried to end it all. The consensus of these experts was unanimous and even alliterative: sunlight was sovereign for psoriasis.

And yes, miraculously as the days passed, the continents shrank, the archipelagos receded and the blizzards ceased.

At the end of three weeks, I was ordinary again, just a man with a tan on the plane home to London.

At my psoriasis clinic, it was claimed that up to 90 per cent of cases in which there were no extra complications responded almost totally to treatment.

Aftercare was recommended, which is why I now have a routine of creams and bath oils and mud-packs probably slightly more elaborate than that of Claudia Schiffer.

A lot of people have told me that I look well- “Didn’t you have a beard?” - and because wine and whisky both made me itch, I have been off both for months.

But the specialists at the solarium always had a caveat. Psoriasis, unfailingly enigmatic, can return as briskly as it goes. “Don’t worry,” said one of the brotherhood. “I’ve heard of a place in Turkey where you bathe in a pool of piranha and they nibble you clean.”

We chuckled, but we all wrote down his address.

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Article2

Date published: 0

A horse-caravan may appear an ideal holiday alternative to a car. But a weekend showed John Sandilands that the Romanys have their problems too.

A list of instructions came with the horse, how to adjust his dress, hook him on to the caravan and so forth, and this was very comforting until you realised that the horse, of course, wouldn’t, have read them, thus halving their value in times of stress. Some simple manoeuvre, described reassuringly in a short paragraph, became immensely complicated when the horse took part. Backing him into the shafts, for example, was like trying to push a large dining-room table single-handed through a narrow aperture. There were legs at all four corners, seemingly more sometimes, and you really needed to be at both ends simultaneously.

The literature of the Welsh Romany Caravan Company managed to make a holiday in a horse-drawn caravan sound almost irresistible, a carefree progress through lovely Mid Wales drenched in the soft song of tinkling harness and creaking leather, not sweat. The countryside was unquestionably beautiful, well within the terms of the Trade Descriptions Act, but even when the green hills rolled and the slender trees kissed in quiet glades you began to wonder later if you could get the company on some sub-section relating to horses down among the fine print of that invaluable document.

You also saw, for the first time, why Romanys had so readily given up a gentle and picturesque mode of travel in exchange for the smelly motor-car. Nobody would feel much like making clothes pegs after a full day spent in horse management.

‘Previous experience of horses is not necessary but it is useful.’ said the brochure, and after a weekend with a horse you realised that this was not merely informational but a philosophical statement of considerable importance, Having to do with a horse and cart is much more valuable for building hardiness and character than an expensive education like the Duke of Edinburgh’s.

Nothing in life prepares you, or me anyway, for exposure to a working horse, You collected your caravan at Mr I wan (?) Thomas’s farmyard just outside Aberystwyth and that was quite straightforward. The caravan was rounded and gaily-painted and typically Romany apart from a small advertising legend for this type of holiday on the back. I had taken my wife along, not so much for company as to admire me mastering another skill, and I left her to the woman’s work of checking on the beds and the stove and the cupboards, all of which she reported present. I went with Mr Thomas to the stables to fetch the horse and he laid back his ears, rolled his eyes and kicked the woodwork savagely.

The horse, that is, not Mr Thomas, who went to the adjoining stall and led out a much more tractable beast although his name was Fireball, which might or might not have been ironic. The other horse, it turned out, had not yet been broken to the shafts but it was an early reminder of what these creatures look like in a temper. I wasn’t sure whether to ingratiate myself with Fireball, doing it all by kindness like Elizabeth Taylor in ‘National Velvet’, or to marshal him about firmly like Mr Thomas. I didn’t know how he would stand for firm marshalling when we were alone together so I sent my wife to the village shop for lump sugar.

Meanwhile Mr Thomas produced a skein of leather straps and buckles, chains and rope and bound it all round Fireball as if he were readying Houdini for his greatest escape. The various elements, however, sorted themselves out satisfactorily and when all was in position he merely tapped the horse lightly on the nose and Fireball shot backwards into the shafts as though the arrangements under his tail included some powerful magnetic device. There was clearly not very much to harnessing up.

Mr Thomas, it emerged, came with you for a couple of miles until you got the hang of the steering and then you drifted off into Mid- Wales to go wherever you willed, except that there was a route map pinned up inside the caravan with a series of farms marked on it together with the names of their owners, which were all either Davies or Evans. You weren’t obliged to go to any of these places but at least you could be assured of a welcome from the appropriate Davies or Evans when you appeared in your gaily-painted caravan and would be offered a field for the night. The alternative was to strike out on your own, risk being mistaken for a genuine Romany and possibly be greeted with a hail of buck-shot.

We started up off the road and within perhaps half a mile discovered something very depressing about horse-drawn transport. A hill loomed up and Mr Thomas promptly dismounted, indicating that I should do likewise. Horses, it turned out, had to be walked up hills otherwise they got tired. You were supposed to get tired instead and you did because you had to hold on to the bridle all the way and proceed at the pace of the horse which though burdened had two extra legs. You had to move your two as fast as a figure in a silent film and when the horse threw his head up you found yourself bicycling in mid-air until your feet returned to the ground. Halfway up the hill Mr Thomas noticed that my wife was still aboard the caravan, looking queenly, and he made her get down too. She dwindled quickly behind us, calling out piteously whenever she could catch her breath. At the summit there was another discovery. Horses had to be walked down hills as well.

It didn’t look as though the question of rein-handling would arise very often but it was quite simple, left rein to go left and its logical corollary. There wasn’t much more Mr Thomas could do when we reached the crossroads, except to wish us luck, which he did amiably enough although I would have preferred more conviction. He dismounted and left.

We were now in the classic posture of the brochure, sitting leisurely on either side of the caravan’s step, reins in the male Romany’s hands and the horse stepping lively before us. Somehow, though, a certain Gypsy cool was lacking and this I trace to the extraordinary spectacle of a horse in motion, viewed from the rear. For several furlongs ahead there was nothing but horse, starting from the huge hillocks of its hindquarters and proceeding by a series of undulating brown plains to the twin peaks in the middle distance which were its ears.

All of this flesh was moving with a powerful overall purpose but with little internal connection, much as an old feather mattress might proceed if granted locomotion. I felt at first humbled by the expenditure of so much effort on my behalf and then alarmed at the possibility that Fireball was coming to pieces. Presently another gradient appeared but I was so hypnotised by what was taking place in front of me that I failed to step down and now the activity was tremendous. Fireball seemed to elongate by several feet and serpentine waves passed down his spine, washing over his head which bobbed up and down like a buoy in a tempest. On the downward slope the process was reversed so that his hindquarters ballooned, threatening to overflow the driving position and disappear into the interior of the caravan to wreak heaven knows what damage.

The performance was so astonishing that I couldn’t see why Mr Thomas hadn’t mentioned it in the brochure, let alone recommending descent at inclines. It had been in my mind anyway, ever since that first hill, to disobey his instructions in this respect as soon as he was safely round the corner and I did so now as another rise approached. It was here, for the first but by no means the last time, that Fireball displayed the type of low equine cunning which makes the invention of the horse-whip infinitely more defensible.

Halfway through the travail of this second climb there was suddenly the sound of tearing calico followed by an odour so pungently rustic that I feared I might swoon like Ophelia on a dung-heap. My wife recovered first, perhaps because she was wearing a shawl. She crawled into the caravan to return with an atomiser container of Marcel Rochas’s expensive toilet water, some half a pint of which she promptly shot into the atmosphere. There was simply no question of remaining at the horse’s hindquarters for the descent and Fireball looked around with immense satisfaction as we climbed down. Justly so, for ever afterwards he never failed to respond in that way when called upon for extra effort, nor was he denied the same havoc or the rest of the Marcel Rochas. It was, I suppose, something else to be learnt about horses. I never knew they did that.

Perhaps merely by contrast, the rest of the day’s run was fairly uneventful. Fireball, thankfully, kept a steady pace and it was possible, perched just above the hedgerows and travelling so slowly, to notice the attractive detail of the countryside in a way that you never could in a motor car. Wild flowers posed prettily, nodding as you passed instead of falling flat on their faces in the blast of your exhaust. Wherever there were horses in a meadow they raised their heads when Fireball’s footfalls must still have been a murmur in the distance and were waiting, whinnying, by the hedge as the caravan went by, allowing you to wave to them in the manner of the Queen Mother.

The only slight irritation amidst this idyll was the fact that Fireball seemed to be listening to your conversation. Horses’ ears swivel round abruptly at every sound although their eyes remain blandly to the front, rather like a head-waiter when he hears a fiver crackle, and this was quite inhibiting after a time, something akin to chatting into a megaphone. Perversely it was just as annoying if Fireball’s ears turned in the other direction halfway through a remark as if it were too banal to merit any more of his attention. There was no reason why he should have expected particularly clever people to come on this kind of holiday.

On the other hand his general behaviour at this time was quite satisfactory. Mr Thomas told me later that some of his horses merely paid lip-service, as it were, to the bit in their mouths and conducted your tour for you as they saw fit. There was one beast, called Fred, who always stopped at the first Evans regardless of any instructions to the contrary, which meant that your day’s run lasted about 35 minutes. Didn’t this vex the more ambitious type of Romany? No, said Mr Thomas, Fred was tremendously popular. Children who had been on holiday with him sent him cards and little notes on his birthday and at Christmas.

Fireball by-passed the first Evans with no more than a sideways glance and seemed perfectly willing to go beyond the second Evans even unto the first Davies if I hadn’t decided to stop. I did, however, and after what happened next I thought of asking Mr Thomas for Fireball’s date of birth so that I could send him a poison-pen letter every year until he went to the knacker’s.

Actually it wasn’t Fireball’s fault but the event was so horrendous that the question of specific guilt seemed unimportant. It was really a matter of overconfidence. By now I could tell that I was one of those people who have a way with horses. You often see them in cowboy pictures and they are always rather engaging. I was so sure of negotiating the caravan into the field without aggravation that I sent my wife within to put the kettle on and took my place at Fireball’s head with a single finger hovering round his ear-hole. There was a hand-brake on the equipage which had been cannibalised from a Morris Minor but you couldn’t imagine a Mexican horse-wrangler needing a thing like that. There was also an incline leading into the field and when Fireball felt the full weight of the caravan on his haunches a look came over his face of the kind that you see on babies when they are holding their breath.

The veins stood out on his forehead and his eyeballs bulged and then he accepted his fate. All of us set off across the field at a full gallop, heading straight for the hedge. Both Fireball and I gathered ourselves to hurdle but I recollected that my wife was back there somewhere, warming the pot and putting biscuits on plates. At the last moment I effected a superhuman lurch and the whole machine slewed round at right-angles and finally came to a shuddering halt. There was an appalling silence and then slowly, under the half gate that was the door of the caravan, there emerged a sickly ooze that I assumed at first must be my wife’s brains.

There was rather more of them than I would have expected sometimes and presently I climbed up to investigate. It was a terrible sight. On the floor of the caravan was a pyramid of cutlery and plates, food, water, tea-bags, all formed into a sort of custard by a steady seepage of Fairy Liquid. My wife was pale but calm and when I got her out of the cupboard she dabbed at it all absent-mindedly with her shawl and then began to croon to herself.

My instinct was to leave it all and return immediately to the railway station at Aberystwyth, which was only eight miles distant according to a signpost although we seemed to have been on the road for about three weeks. I recalled, however, that a further unexpected bore connected with horses was the necessity to remove them from the shafts if you stopped. The instructions were quite specific on the point and you were also supposed to de-harness if you were putting up for the night.

A horse left between the shafts when at rest begins to sag in a curious manner, rather like a worn-out deckchair, and you have no certainty that it will function in quite the same way should you decide to set off again. I meant to remove the harness in an ordered sequence but it wasn’t that easy. Each strap and buckle seemed merely to reveal another which had to be pursued to its conclusion at the other end of the horse. It was much as it must have been when undressing girls in the 1950s.

I ended up with about a hundredweight of assorted tack distributed across the paddock because Fireball took advantage of each release to move a bit and when the last strap parted he left the shafts like a cork from a bottle. A champagne bottle, for once he was free Fireball flowed about the field with his tail streaming and his mane dancing and you were able to recall that horses are beautiful creatures, full of grace and strength when they are naked and unencumbered by a Romany caravan tied to their bottoms.

I had plenty of time to observe this sort of poetic movement the following morning. Indeed I could probably have produced detailed sketches of a horse’s musculature if, like Leonardo da Vinci, I had the knack. The next day Fireball was up early, pushing over the caravan, because his oats were kept at the back and he seemed to be aware of that section of the instructions which said he had to have two helpings first thing. Mr Thomas had recommended using this breakfast to anchor the horse when the time came to harness him up but Fireball must have been eavesdropping again.

He eyed the oats longingly when I came out but there was a tremendous tension about him as if he expected them to explode like those lively cereals in commercials. In fact his nerves were due to the precise timing needed to grab a mouthful of oats and still get away before I caught him. All professionals are edgy when they call on their skills and Fireball was a good ‘un. An hour and a half later he was still free but we had gone through a series of athletic events together as they do in the Olympic pentathlon: sprinting, jumping over a stream, long distance running, stalking, falling over and swearing.

The particular Mrs Evans at this stopping place had been keeping an eye on us for some time, perhaps because she thought we were wearing holes in her grass, and presently she joined in. She was a very good shot with the tin that held her chicken-meal and she drove Fireball towards me while I pretended to be looking the other way. I was supposed to turn round at the last moment and grab him but I had made the mistake of taking all his clothes off and there was nothing to seize short of sinking my teeth into his ear and hanging. on. I should really have put him to bed in his bridle if I wasn’t going to nail him to the fencer which I would do another time.

The. tremendous activity in the paddock and the gong-like sounds of Mrs Evans’s chicken tin had now attracted a small crowd of Sunday morning passers-by and they began to line the hedge, under the impression perhaps that Fireball and I were going to wrestle, refereed by Mrs Evans.

Several cars drew up and from a Mini a stocky man emerged accompanied by a small boy. They both marched purposefully into the field as though to put a stop to such a spectacle. For some reason Fireball stood stock still when these people appeared and it was actually the small boy who led him over, giving me the contemptuous look he probably reserved, as a rule, for girls. The man gave me quite a long lecture on horse- catching, saying ‘see!’ at the end of every clause, but I had to nod politely in case he shooed Fireball off again and set me a practical. He also showed me how you could grab a horse’s nose, much as the boys in the Remove did to Bunter, and squeeze it painfully as an aid to discipline. Everybody who claimed to know about horses, you noticed, began by telling you the best way to make their eyes water but I had a certain amount of sympathy with Fireball because he must have known what a mess I would make of putting his harness on again.

In the end seven people became involved in this operation, shouting and tugging and grabbing the instructions off each other. Fireball’s ears began to wilt and hang down like a spaniel’s from the number of times that he was obliged to push his head through his horse-collar, an immensely weighty object like a ship’s anchor. He was very patient throughout this torment, merely lowering his eyelids from time to time and looking like Saint Sebastian. You could have liked him quite a bit if he hadn’t got mixed up in the caravan business.

I judged it best, although it was still quite early, to start back for base. thus allowing for any tragedies that might take place and extend the journey into the winter months. I also proposed to run a few trials in horse-handling and it seemed a good idea to be near help. So far, for example, we hadn’t risen above walking pace and I fancied a trot. Fireball didn’t, but I discovered a means of getting him into top.

Horses, Mr Thomas had told me, have precedence over everything else on the road, even, he thought, the right to take liberties at junctions, which must have been a rationalisation since the only sure way to stop Fireball at a Halt sign would probably have been to root it up and use it as a club. Nevertheless, when the Sunday morning traffic began to build up behind the caravan I felt a compulsion to pull over and wave the cars on. This brought the hedgerows into contact with the ribs of the vehicle, producing a noise like a stick along railings.

Fireball’s ears revolved so fast when this happened that they caused a draught and immediately he picked up his hooves and began to gallop. This was most exhilarating for the driver, very much like the chariot race in Ben-Hur though it put up the overall miles to the gallon in terms of my wife’s toilet water.

Still, with the sun shining and the birds singing in Welsh cadences, it was good to be out on the road and I was quite sorry when the first Evans once again hove in sight. There were a lot of other Romanys in the field, making their way home at the end of their holidays, and the place had the look of a true Gypsy encampment. I was a bit reluctant to join this brotherhood and have to put up with other people’s stories about their adventures but it was clearly my duty to stop.

One family had scrawled ‘We are not Gypsies’ in chalk on the back of their caravan, which showed you the sort of time they’d had, and sure enough everyone had been traumatised one way or another, mostly by their horses. A maternal-looking lady with several children told me that they’d set out on a very hot day which made her horse perspire so violently that the kiddies thought he was melting. She felt so sorry for him that she made the family walk all the way, which had been a bit tough on the children. Another lady’s horse had had a nose bleed, which she found very alarming although horses evidently do this quite often even if you haven’t taken your fist to them.

In fairness it should be said that everyone seemed to have enjoyed their holiday, the children especially, and they all said things improved greatly when you got to know your horse a bit better and stopped putting his collar on backwards. One man thought the trick was to remember that you weren’t in a motorcar and once he’d realised there was no accelerator he found it very relaxing.

It was certainly a cheap enough vacation - £7 •50 a week during the Summer season, £5•50 the rest of the year. At the going rate for horse manure you could probably show a profit at the end of a fortnight because that’s another thing about horses.

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List of John Sandilands articles

John Sandilands Articles

Obituary, March 2004 >>
Introduction to Articles >>
Article2 >>
When the cure is sun, sea and mud >>
Interview with Ava Gardner >>
Interview with Dustin Hoffman, Los Angeles Times, 1968 >>
Fiji >>
Patrick Moore >>
Mr Pastry >>
Interview with Jane Fonda >>
letters to and from John to editors >>
Ballooning >>
The Toad Cross Code >>
Peter Sellers; that is the problem >>
In bed with John Sandilands plus Jilly Cooper, Zandra Rhodes and Peter Cook >>
Know the Type >>
Animal poems >>
The Toad Cross Code >>
Albert and the Jaguars >>
Herogram >>