The sight of 97 old Bletchley Park code-breakers gathered in rows outside the house – as happened at the Veterans’ Reunion on a sunny Sunday in September – revealed what a good recipe for longevity was their wartime regime of mental concentration, strict hours in cold sheds, rationed diet and rigid discipline. Most were aged about ninety, and most were women (who outnumbered men at BP by three to one). Their white hair gleamed in the sun, their voices were strong, their minds sharp, their hearing unimpaired. I talked at random to two wonderful nonagenarians, Elizabeth Hughes and Anne Wyndham, newly recruited Wrens of eighteen and seventeen when they arrived at Bletchley, having volunteered for SDX (Special Duties).
It was the Wrens who operated the 211 Bombe machines, invented by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, testing the Enigma settings, eight Wrens per Bombe. ‘We had no idea what we were doing, but had to be very quick and extremely accurate,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Everything plugged in correctly to the back of the drum, no wires touching anything else. And we never asked questions. Naive is the word.’ ‘Our lives were taken up with our love affairs. All we wanted was to get away to London for a night out,’ said Anne. ‘There was nothing to do round here.’
What still amazes everyone today (it’s the first question people ask) is how they all kept silent about it for 25 years, until the emergence of Robert Harris’s book followed by a flood of others. The other feature of these women is that, like the fighter pilots, they were so young and were entrusted with such responsibility. ‘Well, I’m quite good at bridge,’ is about the most extravagant claim an old Bletchley girl will make.
Whenever a J B Priestley play is revived (which is all the time, somewhere), the beadiest eye in the audience is that of Tom, only son of JBP and his second wife, Jane, who at 83 is keeper of the Priestley flame and oversees the estate on behalf of nine family legatees. He has just watched the BBC’s new adaptation of An Inspector Calls, with David Thewlis as the Inspector, Ken Stott as the northern industrialist and Miranda Richardson as his missus. It was, he points out, closer to the 1954 black-and-white film with Alastair Sim than to the original Priestley drama. But we can all now see the original version: a revival of the celebrated 1992 National Theatre production by Stephen Daldry, unforgettable for its amazing collapsing set, is now touring the land until next April.
There will be full houses everywhere, not least because An Inspector Calls remains on the A-level English syllabus, perennially popular with sixth-formers ‘who are at just the right age to appreciate its moralistic questions’, says Tom Priestley. He has long observed its appeal to school groups and wishes they could all see the Daldry production. ‘Daldry managed,’ he says, ‘to incorporate the 1912 Edwardian setting with the era when my father wrote it, i.e. 1945. It gives it a rich, timeless quality. Unlike that thing on TV that I never watch, what’s its name, Downton Abbey.’
Just before Priestley died at almost ninety in 1984 – no longer Jolly Jack but a rather grumpy fellow – Tom, a distinguished film editor, interviewed him for a TV film called Time and the Priestleys. They concentrated on distant memories of Priestley’s youth in Bradford. ‘The West Riding of Yorkshire,’ J B told him, ‘was a great place for discouragement.’ Also, he admitted to his son, ‘I’m more a writer than a human being, I think.’ In wartime he was the BBC’s voice of the nation; his novels are still being read, and his plays rediscovered.
What is it about Irishmen and other people’s bedrooms? Maybe Mary Kenny can explain. A neighbour’s garden flat in London has French windows, whose upper pivoted panes measure sixteen inches square. At dead of night an Irishman appeared in the bedroom of its horrified tenants, mumbled an apology and let himself out by the front door. He had squeezed through the half-open window, itself at the end of a long and impregnably rose-trellised garden.
Now one reads: ‘Couple get a nude awakening.’ An Australian couple in Sydney woke in the middle of the night to find a naked and slumbering Irishman in their bed. It was Katie who first became aware that the dormant male body next to hers was not one she recognised. She alerted her other bed mate, Chris, who challenged the man, while she called the police. The Irishman gathered up his clothes and was making a run for it when the police arrived. It appeared he had entered the house through a window left open for the cat.
The progenitor of such Irish behaviour is of course Michael Fagan, who strolled into the Queen’s bedroom in Buckingham Palace at 7am on 9th July 1982. He had earlier been seen scaling the 14ft perimeter fence, which is topped with revolving spikes and barbed wire.
The official report of the incident and Fagan’s account of it diverge. Why his sandals, politely returned to him two years later, were on the roof remains a mystery. What is beyond doubt is that he poked his head through the curtains of the Queen’s four-poster at 7am. According to him, recalling the episode to Emily Dugan of the Independent on Sunday in Jubilee Year, the Queen said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and immediately rose from her bed and left the room. According to the report, however, she rang the police twice at an interval of eight minutes, on the second occasion asking if they would bring a cigarette for the intruder. They arrived after twelve minutes, the steadiness of her voice beguiling them into thinking it was not an emergency.
‘Where were the corgis?’ asked Brian Sewell in a letter to the Times. Fagan’s countryman Spike Milligan said: ‘The things that a man will do to get a cigarette.’
Fagan told Dugan that he had nothing but the greatest respect for the Queen: ‘I hope she beats Victoria. I hope she lives to be a hundred. If she does, I’ll send her a hundredth-birthday telegram.’ As she has now beaten Victoria and he is 67, this seems quite possible. Regarding his strolls round Buckingham Palace, of which he claimed to have done two in 1982, he blamed them on putting too many magic mushrooms in his soup.
‘Nobody under thirty ever plants a tree,’ Robert Robinson once stated on radio. He said it was a milestone of maturity. Perhaps that should now be updated to forty or fifty, given the later age of home and garden ownership today. Even the great tree evangelist Thomas Pakenham, at 81 strikingly like his late father, the seventh Earl of Longford, was not consumed by arboreal joys until mid-life. His new book, The Company of Trees, is a combined memoir, travelogue and tree diary 25 years after his first tree book, Meetings with Remarkable Trees (triggered by a great storm in Ireland), which sold 250,000 copies, to general amazement.
At 27, Pakenham inherited from an uncle an Irish castle, Tullynally, along with its 1,600-acre demesne and a resident arboriculturalist, a professor of forestry. Since then he has planted 90,000 trees – oak, ash, sycamore, beech, Scots pine, silver fir, larch, spruce – but also seeds from his Himalayan travels: magnolia, blue poppy, a giant lily, and a Forest Walk of exotic high-altitude specimens from Mongolia, Tibet, Pakistan and China. Having founded the Irish Tree Society, Pakenham also led a successful campaign to save the last oak wood in the Wicklow mountains. Each tree was already numbered, about to be sold to a German manufacturer of kitchen cabinets, when the society raised the funds to scupper the deal.
‘Trees are therapy,’ Packenham says. ‘ You don’t have to hug them: just walking in woodland is therapeutic. Silentio silvarum – the silence of the woods – is a powerful thing. Trees are good listeners. The further we move into the hectic digital age, the more we need the solace of woodland. Trees become your friends.’
The death of a pet can be a cause of great sadness, and its owner usually grieves alone. But now that sadness can be shared, for some bright spark on the Times has discovered that there is money to be made by allowing readers to submit and pay for obituaries of their pets. Thus, immediately after the people’s obituaries section (for which, mercifully, the bereaved are still not required to pay), there has sprung up another page for the remembrance of animals that have died.
I don’t know how long it has been there – I only noticed it the other day – but it seems to be popular. On the page I saw, there were Molly and Jasmine, a cat and a boxer dog, described as ‘best buddies’, who, both thirteen, had been put down and cremated together ‘with Jasmine lying in Molly’s arms as she had done in life’. Then there was ‘fluffy white Jessica ... the sweetest cat in the world with an incredible purr’ who had, however, ‘remained unmoved’ when introduced to the Duchess of Cornwall.
Silky, a pedigree beagle, was ‘a loving, special little dog’ whose only defects were extreme greed and a fondness for coffee. More surprisingly still, there was a rat called Tuvok (‘after a Star Trek character’), which, unlike most rats, ‘had a sociable, gentle nature and loved to be cuddled’. It showed when it was happy by ‘grinding its teeth and boggling its eyes’.
Before setting off for the United States, a country that, amazingly, he has never visited before, Pope Francis, 78, wanted his spectacles fixed. But with characteristic modesty, he didn’t summon his optician to the Vatican. He just popped in unannounced to a tiny shop in the heart of old Rome. Alessandro Spiezia, 71, choked back tears as he embraced his surprise visitor. ‘I don’t want a new frame,’ said the Pope, who is long-sighted. ‘You need only renew the lenses. I don’t want to spend too much.’ But then he whispered in the optician’s ear: ‘Be sure to make me pay you what I owe.’
Here was another example of Bergoglio’s down-to-earth normality, a quality he first displayed as Pope when, after his election in 2013, he went immediately in person to pay the bill at the guesthouse in Rome where he had stayed during the conclave. This normality is a cause of his worldwide popularity, if also of some accusations that it diminishes his spiritual authority. It should go down well in America, however.
