The articulate, audible voice of the past
Frank Keating
JOHN ARLOTT: A MEMOIR by Tim Arlott Deutsch, £14.99, pp. 223 If life were fair, we would have been celebrating John Arlott's 80th birthday a couple of weeks ago. Peals of village bells, hosannas, reams in the public prints, and doubtless a full works-and-pomp ITV biog- raphy by Melvyn Bragg hot on the heels of a New Year knighthood from Mr Major. Instead, three cold winters after Arlott's death, his son has published this portrait of pert which has not gone down at all well in some quarters, if you can believe the Daily Mail. But the book seems to me to be a tender, touching, and truthful sketch — to be sure made more bold and human for its occasional, but always loving, application of warts where warts there certainly were, both in the striving selfishness of the great and good man's early professional life, and in the (always a favourite word of John's) fretful and increasingly desperate days of his variety of final complicated ill- nesses.
This is not about cricket or broadcasting or journalism. Nor is it the wine-and- cheese party (Arlott was infatuated by both) you might expect. It is a portrait of the triumphs over the travails of a giant, and often near genius, of a complex human being who, to all intents, 'invented' an English cottage industry which will be long logged as having enlightened and enchanted half the nation for half the 20th century.
Here is some harrowing observation from a loving son at which will wince those of a certain generation who worshipped Arlott's ripe talent and rich voice from afar, as well as those who had the immense good luck sometimes to work and dine and laugh with him — always sitting at his feet in awe, but increasingly, like the monarch's insensitive and unsuspecting Fool, trying to chide him out of his melancholy — not realising that a too-obsessive family man had been almost broken by deaths in the family.
When Valerie, Tim's stepmother and John's second wife, died at 44, John fumed at Tim, 'My wife is dead and for me noth- ing will ever be the same'. Earlier, when his 20-year-old joy, Tim's older brother Jim, had been killed one New Year's Eve when his sports car had run into a lorry, John put on the black tie he was to wear for the rest of his life and,
driving home at night from football matches or engagements, he would charge his car at hapless lorry drivers, swerving at the last moment.
The morning after his father's death, Tim sat at the big, strong dining-table in Alderney reading the obituaries — and suddenly he was immensely comforted at finding the image of a depressed Dad with broken health being overwhelmed by another memory — 'of a sharp-eyed, vigor- ous, beguiling man' explaining his beliefs with thunderous clarity and sincerity, eyes agleam with interest and confraternity and concentration and kindness. 'The Master. We will never know his like again', ends the grateful son. Nor will we, in that arcane and dottily magical little kingdom of the wireless airwaves which he ruled with such pomp for 40 years.
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