DIARY
PETER LEVI With Harold Macmillan something died which was like the tap root of a tree. He recalled a very old friend of his mother's who went as a little girl of eight to the ball on the night before Waterloo. When I asked him if it was true that the Queen in private was extremely funny, he answered with authority, 'Oh yes, all the children of George IV were like that. He used to mock his ministers behind their backs.' I think Lord Stockton's own admir- able funniness and intense charm were a matter of timing. I certainly never so loved being talked to by any other public man. I asked him once in a room in Oxford if he remembered me. `Of course,' he said. `You and I are the only two people here who were properly elected with no bloody interference from the Hebdomadal Coun- cil. My election was the corruptest on record. Half the dons at Balliol were. socialists, you know, but they all turned out to vote for me.' He stood for the Chancellorship as a Prime Minister in office. 'All my colleagues and all my advisers were against it. They said I had nothing to gain and everything to lose. I told them the same may be said of fox hunting, but it's a very fine sport.' He took much of life in the same spirit. I remember him on the subject of port and lemon in his constituency: 'Not real port, you know, but the kind of port a publican might have. No one will ever know how many ports and lemons I've downed in the interests of the Conservative Party.' As a boy from Eton he played truant in London and heard the intensity of the silence when Marie Lloyd came on stage. She was the only person he ever knew with that quality except for Lloyd George, though he thought Prince Charles has it to some extent. In 1914 he changed his collar — 'You gave a box of fresh ones to the butler: you sweated your way through several in a hot London ballroom' — and went outside for a breath of air. An early news boy was shouting about a murder at Sarajevo. 'That at least, I thought, is something that need not concern us. Within a month we were all at the barrack square.' Of all that lost genera- tion he was the most startling survival.
Any year is a good one in which nobody gives me braces. Time was when my trousers kept up with neither braces nor belt, by some kind of osmosis, but I hate belts and prefer braces in principle. There used to be a male temperament called 'belt and braces', like always car- rying three pens and having six boxes of matches in every room, but the only person I have ever seen wearing both was a village bell-ringer of enormous girth: I recollect that neither seemed adequate. The trouble with modern braces is that they give too easily if you have heavy pockets, and the buttonholes are too small for serious but- tons. The last heavy old-fashioned braces I ever found were in a French country market, trade-marked Hercule. They never groaned or creaked or complained, but after many years of placid service the leather suddenly snapped, rather like those manila ropes used by the navy which had to be renewed annually. Hemp cost more and lasted longer, but it had stretch in it. There is no manila equivalent in braces.
The most enjoyable small pleasures of this season are the smell of trees, the unusual lights, and the dark woods. It has been a private festival of lights to defy those dark days surrounding it on which one leaves for work and comes home from work in the dark. As the astronomic gloss on Gregory Nazianzen for 6 January re- marks. Virgo peperit, lux crescit: 'The Virgin has conceived, light increases.' What this means in terms of heavenly bodies I have never been able to deter- mine. Origen, who was at least closer to the event than we were, said Christ was really born in summer. A retired man I used to meet on the bus, and whose respect I unjustly but permanently earned by telling him Ben Hanbury was a good trainer (it was to keep up with his con- versation, and the only trainer's name I knew), was in Woodstock placing a bet the other day, and pointed out the sparkling and scanty Christmas lights of that tiny place with great relish. He would not have liked Oxford Street or even Oxford. 'I remember you,' he said. 'That Ben Han- bury, he's had some good horses.' The racing calendar gives him more to look forward to, but the lights still make him light up.
Our village woods are said to be teeming with foxes, which are seldom seen, but the fox cubs come up at night and play with the kittens on the edge of the village. A house in the next village but one had a hunted fox come to the door, and a girl from the stables let it in. It drank the dog's water and slunk under the table. So far so good, but now whenever the sound of the horn is heard the fox comes racing to the kitchen door whether hunted or not. Soon- er or later something is going to be said. At least they can scarcely sack the girl, be- cause when she told me the story she was working in a barber's shop cutting men's hair. I cannot claim that she hissed while grooming me, but she handled the clippers as if one were a thoroughbred.
Who is it that decides what is news? The other day vasectomy for budgerigars made the front page of the Sunday Times. Except in the Independent one finds less and less serious news on front pages. When I was young and sat in cafés in the sun I used to think that a careful reading of the press revealed much more than a spy would ever 'find out. The Foreign Office research department took a similiar line. Now the West Germans have arrested some seedy traitor, proclaiming. that he might have betrayed the lines of Nato's advance planning. Surely the Russians could read that in the newspapers, or even in the Spectator? I am sure they are intelligent enough to respect le directeur conservateur du Spectator, as Eliot called him. For myself, as I grow older I prefer to spice the news in the papers with a little unverified gossip. If carried long enough in the head, strange unrelated facts drop into place. I remember cherishing a theory about the southern borders of Russia being crossed perfectly freely by transhumant shepherds twice a year, and having it confirmed years later by a man who used them to smuggle in Gillette razor blades hidden in the hair of their camels. That kind of information is more useful to a thriller writer than to the Cabinet, but it does throw a sidelight on events.
The answers to my DNB game were: Admiral A. H. Hillgarth, Sir Christopher Bullock, Clementine Churchill, Duncan Grant (who returned of course to figura- tive painting, but his Kinetic Abstract is in the cellars of the Tate) and Maurice Edelman, MP.
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