Two men in the same boat

Richard Usborne

The Seven Ages Christopher Hollis (Heinemann £3.60) I Know What I Liked Vernon Bartlett (Chatto and Windus £3.50)

Christopher Hollis is seventy two, Vernon Bartlett is eighty. Both were public school (Eton and Blundell's respectively), both MPs (Conservative and Independent). Both, in these new autobiographical books, cover ground, here and there, they have been across in earlier books, Bartlett the more noticeably. Both make easy reading, perhaps because both have been men of the spoken word. Bartlett's was one of the first personality-plus voices of radio, and Hollis has been a debater, lecturer and schoolmaster.

Since Hollis, in his book, paces his life very much to the rhythms of religion, there is a good deal of apologia: and the 'firstly, secondly, thirdly, of course, surely, after all'. . system of linkage in his prose gives the less disciplined reader valuable signposts and handrails to guide him through Hollis's thoughts. Browning's Bishop Blougram had been set him as a special study at Eton. As a convert to Catholicism after Oxford (he was a great friend, of Evelyn Waugh), Hollis, devoted son of an Anglican bishop, changed a life of doubt diversified by faith to one of faith diversified by doubt. He is a most reasonable apologist.

There are many sunset-touches in his book. His father's predecessor as Bishop of Taunton was Wynne Wilson, who had been headmaster of two public schools and a Dean of Bristol. He was also married to a Wills tobacco heiress.

"I like to get my golf over in the mornings," he pronounced, "because then I am free for bridge after lunch."

And

There lived in Wells a titled lady ... an extreme low churchwoman. When the names of those who had been killed in the war were read out and prayers asked for them she would kneel at the back of the church and at each name shout out "if repentant." From Balliol (Sligger Urquhart, Belloc, Knox) onwards Hollis was in the 'best' English Catholic circles. Of Kenneth Bell, Junior Dean of the College in his day, Hollis writes: a strange roistering character, he was to end up his life as an Anglican vicar in a parish near Coventry, "praying away," as he explained to me, "like hell."

A public school man, Hollis on the whole disapproves of public schools. A member of Pop at Eton, he disapproves of Pop. Thinking Lady Chatterley "without exception the silliest book ever written," he also "thought it entirely absurd, that it should be banned." In discussion of John Kennedy, the President of America (he was a friend of the Kennedy family), he says that Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, had been the most impressive Catholic influence in Kennedy's life.

Cardinal Allen, the great Elizabethan ecclesiastic, once said "the man of apostolic life should despise riches but see to it that he has plenty Faf them." I do not know if Cardinal Cushing ever heard of Cardinal Allen. I should think probably not, but he lived his life exactly on that model.

And

Though he (Cushing) thought it his duty to champion the Kennedys nothing could be further from the truth than to think he was blind to their shortcomings. I remember that he said only a few weeks before the President's death, "Oh yes, of course I know him, baptised him, married him. Don't like him, of course — no heart."

"I am thankful to say that I have never had any great appetite for success" Hollis writes. It is a most engaging book.

Vernon Bartlett's is really a scrapbook; memories mostly of places where journalism and radio took him: and sometimes rather too scrappy for clarity.

We passed through a little sleepy town, whitewashed as are all towns in the part of Spain that once was ruled by the Moors, and at the far end of it we passed three men standing in the ditch by the roadside, obviously waiting for a lift. We had room for two of them. I suggested to my companion, and we reversed the car and got out to speak to these men. Each of them had been shot in the back of the neck.

His dislikes have been fascism, psoriasis, war (he fought in the first war and his two sons fought in the second), caraway seeds, turnips, carrots, unpunctuality, bedbugs, whisky, the House of Commons (when he was an MP) except at Question time, General MacArthur, De Gaulle, gout, South Africa's treatment of its 'non-European' majority, the pollution of the Mediterranean, Italian sportsmen who shoot little birds, and organised religion.

He has liked the sound of corks being pulled, the smell of newly ground coffee, orchestral Beethoven in darkened rooms, cats, Devonshire, small Italian towns, walks on the South Downs, falling in love, his life as a journalist, Malaysia, surfing, Herbert Farjeon, cheap Paris restaurants, Bernard Shaw, broadcasting (but he was violently sick after his first broadcast), flattery (a little), Dr Dolfuss, Ed Murrow, Madame Soong's thigh.

over as dinner was over, 'TV' (Soong) took me,

over to a sofa and asked me for all the political news f Europe. But there were the lights of Hong Kong, nd there was Madame Soong sitting on a little tool near the fire and revealing, above her tocking, an acute angle of thigh the colour of old vorv. How the hell could I tell 'TV' all the political of Europe.

e does not claim to have been a dedicated olitician. Of his election campaign:

I liked that campaign. My opponent was a charming young man, Patrick Heathcoat-Amory, whose family had for years provided governors for my old school, Blundell's. We were both so ignorant of politics that I was quite prepared to accept his home in Tiverton for the duration of the campaign — a suggestion which our respective agents rejected with horror.

But when he and a number of fellow MPs, visiting the Airborne Division on Salisbury Plain, were in a glider which was clearly about to crash,

a Tory MP whose name I have unfortunately forgotten earned my gratitude by saying, "Christ, there are going to be an awful lot of by-elections!"

Of his achievements in the House of Commons, he is modest:

The only one that comes into my mind must surely be one of the smallest on record. For some reason, in the early days of the (second) war, the, coloured reproductions that enable citizens to identify the water birds that frequent the lake in St James's Park were removed, although they could scarcely have been of use to the Germans if and when they landed. By persistent questions, I got these reproductions restored to their frames. But the fact that I must have helped many people to distinguish between a widgeon and a teal, a goose and a swan, would not, I fear, convince an impartial jury that I had been a very useful Member of Parliament.

Richard Usborne's classic study, Clubland Heroes has been revised and Is to be reissued by Barrie and Jenkins later this year.