The Church of England is worried about it; Leeds University students adore it; Milton Keynes council has just given in to it: witchcraft. After 300 years of persecution and 200 years of near-invisibility, it is all the rage again.
The maligned myth of the evil, ugly woman in a dunce’s hat (an image invented by the established church) is now being explored and exposed for what it is – a fallacy. In its place is emerging the picture of a pagan religion, full of mystical beauty and ancient truths, whose secrets have been passed down throughout the ages.
Increasingly Britain’s young, disillusioned by the inefficacy of the Church of England are flocking to it. There are no official records, but some number Britain’s witches at more than 1 million – and growing.
Abracadabra: Perhaps the most popular myth relating to witchcraft, now a favourite of magicians at children’s parties. Although witches did chant unintelligible rhymes to assert their superiority and supernatural powers, there is no record of witches ever using the word Abracadabra. which is based on an Arab word used in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. They do, however, cast spell as part of a healing process.
Lois Bourne, author of Conversations with a Witch (Robert Hale), recommends the following spell to get rich: Use shortly after a new moon, no more than once a quarter Ingredients: 7 tsp dried parsley 1 tsp ground cinnamon 1 tsp ground nutmeg 1 tsp brown sugar 2 pints boiled water, cooled Method: Mix ingredients in bowl. Strain into half a tub of bath water. Bathe for seven minutes, while praying for an increase in finances.
Broomstick: Superstitiously considered to be the witch’s main method of aerial transport to and from her coven meetings; in fact, it was used to vault over puddles en route. Traditionally a symbol of fertility, broomsticks were reputedly used by witches as they danced around fields, encouraging corn to grow to the height of the broom’s brush. Today, the broomstick or besom is used to cleanse a sacred space and is just one of many magical tools used to create a mood or attitude. Other vital tools includea pentacle, a thurible of incense, bells, candles, bells and wands.
Coven: Derived from the word convent; a small group of witches, numbering 13 – six women, six men and a priestess, known as a magistrar. Under 18s will not be initiated. Before being admitted, novice witches must train for a year and a day. Covens meet regularly at midnight, “the witching hour”, in a consecrated, ritual space outdoors, marked out as a sacred circle, to perform rituals and worship. A designated room in a witch’s private home may also be used for worship.
Demons: Witchcraft is often erroneously associated with demonology and Satanism, both Christian concepts. Accusations of devil worship were first levied by the Christian church circa 1500 in a desperate attempt to impose religious conformity on Europe. Thereafter witches often confessed to demonoligical practices under torture. Modern witches ask to be carefully distinguished from such practices, not least because they do not believe in the Christian devil and the notion of evil. They belie v ethat evilrebounds three-fold upon the evil-doer, so taking away all motivation for evil.
Endor: The first witch to be recorded in print. The witch of Endor appears in the Old Testament to raise the spirit of Samuel at the behest of Saul. However both the Latin and Greek descriptions of the woman translate, literally, as medium or ventriloquist since, in those days the cult of witchcraft did not exist.
Feminism: There has always been a “witchy” tendency within the feminist movement, celebrating the secret power of women, women’s innate wisdom and the importance of women-only gatherings. High priestess of this tendency is Mary Daly, author of The First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Women’s Press). Virago, the pioneering feminist press, is a slang word for witch.
Garter: A traditional hallmark of a witch. Edward Prince of Wales (later King Edward III) once hosted a royal ball during which the Countess of Salisbury’s garter fell down half way through a dance. The prince stepped forward, picked it up and placed it around his own leg, defying anyone to brand the countess a witch with the words: “Honi soit qui mal y pense.”
Halloween: The New Year’s Eve of the witches’ world, it is also the Celtic “Night of the Dead” or year-end, when the worlds of life and death become as thin as veils, allowing the dead to walk among the living. It is one of the Craft’s eight festivals celebrating the seasons and lasting from sundown to sundown. Many traditions have been secularised, such as pumpkin pie and apple-bobbing.
Incantation: Spells and chants, such as the famous “Hubble, Bubble” verse in Macbeth, are indeed part of the coven ritual, although the words of worship today are thought to be far more lyrical – in the “Queen of the Moon, Queen of the Sun’ vein. Their
actual content, however, is a closely guarded secret.
James I: The only Royal demonologist, and the man for whom Shakespeare’s Macbeth was written. In the early 17th century James I wrote a book called The Demonology, calling for the punishment of all witches. (He had a particular grievance against the North Berwick witches, whom he believed had sought to achieve his death by conjuring a storm.)
Knife: All witches carry a knife called an Athame, which is black-handled and has magic signs on the hilt. It serves not only as a tool but as a holy object. It may be disguised to maintain secrecy.
Law: The Witchraft Act was repealed in 1951 when 20,000 British witches were left to live in peace. The most viciously anti-witchcraft law was the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486, under which hordes of people were executed without even the interrogation of witnesses.
Magic: Derived from the word Magi, meaning the wise; witches still believe they are capable of superhuman powers, especially when worshiping together in their covens. Many hint that the magic is derived from natural body rhythms.
Nudity: Covens perform their rites in the nude or “sky-clad” while others wear long white robes in Druidic tradition. The body’s natural powers are thought to be impeded by clothes. Modern witches play down this aspect of their gatherings, saying that the nudity is entirely spiritual.
Occult: From the Latin “hidden or secret”. Witchcraft has always been associated with the occult because witches believe in what might now be termed parapsychic and paraphysical power. People are not readily admitted into modern covens, unless they have a strong belief in the paranormal.
Pagan: Witches are – and were – pagans, from the Latin paganus, meaning country dweller. Witchcraft was originally the mystical religion of the fields, and christianity of the towns (though nowadays many witches are forced, by dint of circumstance to meet in rooms in towns). The focus of modern witchcraft’s worship is a goddess – who may not be named for fear her power should be weakened, but it is thought she is a Mother Earth figure. A priest or priestess leads the worship ceremony.
River-dunking: One of the better known methods of testing whether a witch was the genuine article. The suspect’s right arm was tied to their left leg and vice versa, and they were lowered into a river three times; if they sank on each occasion, they wer e innocent; if they floated, they were a witch. This was one of the more painless tests: truly terrible forms of torture included the lowering of a heavy weight on to a suspect crushing them into either admittance or death.
Sex: Witchcraft is a religion in which sex is seen positively as an expression of the forces of nature, not solely for sinning or procreation. The magical tradition of Tantra, studied by witches today, is designed to make women sexually dominant because,according to Shan, a 45-year-old witch living in south London, a “woman’s experience of sex is deeper and more powerful”.
Transvection: The term used by “witchcraftologists’ to describe the imagined magical practice of transporting oneself by broomstick or animal. Allegedly, the only thing that could bring a witch out of the air was the sound of church bells ringing, so so m e churches rang their bells all through the night.
Unguent: An ointment smeared on the body to aid flying. It was thought that witches used rub-on ointments as cures and poisons far more than brews.
Witch: Referred to in witches’ circles as the W-word, according to Dr Vivianne Crowley, a 37-year-old witch who works for a management consultancy, because it conjures up images of old hags, black cats and creepy graveyards. Recalling the persecution of witches over the centuries, they prefer to be referred to as Wiccans, after Wicca, the anglo-saxon term meaning the “craft of the wise” and the derivation for today’s “witch”.
X: Marks the cross for Christianity, witchcraft’s ancient enemy. The only way Christianity could eradicate witchcraft was by taking on board some of its properties – smells and bells, for example – and slowly diluting them before rejecting them altogether. Ironically, young people are now seeking the liberating, ritualistic side of witchcraft once again in the form of the ever-growing New Age movement.
Youth: The great majority of witches were sent to their deaths by the testomonies of young children. The Salem witchhunt of 1692 was started when two children claimed to have been possessed by the devil. Paranoia broke out and all those the children indicated were tried and, unless they admitted to witchcraft, executed.
Zoophilia: The practice of copulating with the devil in the form of animals or familiars, to which many of those tried in the witch hunt did confess. Modern witches would be appalled at the suggestion of the continuation of the practice.
Fingers crossed, hair brushed as neatly as it ever is, coat hanging casually on my right arm, handbag full of loose coins jangling on my shoulder, I approached the Clinique counter in Harrods. “Excuse me, I wonder if you have any free samples of y our moisturiser? As you can see, I have dry skin.”
The fake-tanned woman in her pristine white coat peered at me out of fake black lashes down her eagle-like powdered nose. Wearing jeans, polo-neck, Benetton cardigan and no make-up, I looked neat but scarcely a millionaire. “Nah, we don’t do samples,” she said, and turned away to examine her already immaculate nails.
My brief was to discover what it takes to get a free sample of the exfoliators, toners, bronzers, foundation, moisturisers et al that, in normal size, can be hugely expensive – sometimes more than £100 per item. Surely it is only reasonable to allow clients to take away a small sample to test the stuff before forking out for it?
No, it seems. Make-up consultants are picky about which of their clients are deserving. If you want a freebie, you need to learn how to go about it in the right way.
In Harrods, I wanted to test the efficacy of various chat-up lines, sans glitzy appearance (that would come later). I approached Estee Lauder and could scarcely get my query out before the woman with over-blushered cheeks riposted: “Nah, but we have a special offer of scent and bag if you buy two products.” Crestfallen (my brief did not allow me to spend any money), I walked on.
Putting on an expression of desperation and my best “air hellair” accent, I approached Christian Dior. “I’d like to buy some day moisturiser for my mother,” I lied. “She is fiftyish and has …” Before I could go any further, the woman interrupted, “Co m bination skin? Dry on the cheeks? Oily on the chin and nose?” Actually, I had been going to say, she has marvellous skin, but something told me that the path to success did not lie in that direction.
I smiled, dumping my bag on the counter, looking as if I was prepared to stay there all day if necessary. “Dooo tell me what you’d recommend.” Five minutes stretched into 10 as the virtues of cream against lotion, richness against lightness, day cream a g ainst night cream were extolled. I waited until the end of the spiel to put, nonchalantly, my two key questions: how much? (the answer ranged from £25 to £65 a pot) and, “Do you think I could take her a sample?”. By then I’d earned it. “Of course,” sher eplied, fishing out the cutest little pot.
The story of my mother’s facial ailments also did the trick at the Sisley counter, where I was recommended a moisturiser for £88. £88?! But it was crucial, I knew, not to flinch. “I don’t suppose you have a sample of that I could take her,” I asked airily, as if I spent £88 on a measly tub of moisturiser for my mother every day. “Of course,” said the girl. “This will last two to three days …”
So the mother story works, presumably, on the basis that the mother of 50 is likely to spend more on her face than her messy-looking daughter of 25, who is simply the marketing medium.
How, though, to get freebies for oneself? I approached Chanel looking, I hoped, totally bewildered. “Excuse me, I would like to look permanently suntanned but I’ve been told that it’s really bad for your face to wear foundation. Could you advise me please?” I sounded like a vain half-wit. “With pleasure,” said the girl, who then proceeded to test various creams all over my face and hands. “Ooh, I’m so confused,” I sighed vacantly. “I don’t suppose I could possibly take a sample?” The answer was yes. So the idiocy ploy works, too.
Now it was time to see how important appearance could be. I entered Harvey Nichols and, in the loo, changed into designer suit, jacket and pearls. I was careful to carry my coat so that my finery was clearly visible, and jangled my only expensive jewellery extremely loudly.
Back to Clinique with precisely the same query about moisturiser as before. To my horror I met with the same negative response. The woman (also an eagle-nosed type) was looking disdainfully at my hands. I followed her gaze … Cripes, I had some dirt wedged under the second and third fingernails on my left hand – and she’d noticed.
Big mistake. Make-up consultants test their wares on hands. A chipped fingernail, flaking nail varnish or, even worse, dirt … and they’re certain to notice.
On to Boots, where I casually looked at the Almay hypo-allergenic moisturisers. “I don’t suppose,” I said, trying not to sound as if I was saying it for the 100th time, “you do samples of this?” “But of course,” said the girl, seemingly amazed. She hand e d me two packets of the stuff. “Anything else?”
Essential tips for plying the counters Do… …clean your hands …clean your nails …wear expensive bracelets/rings …carry your coat so as to expose your clothes …invent plenty of skin problems …speak with an “air hellair” voice …mention Mummyif you are below 30
Nobody can doubt, neither his friends nor enemies (and there are plenty of those), that David Copperfield’s British premiere is an event that stretches credulity. We have never seen the like: Copperfield, 38, is an American illusionist on a scale, and wage-scale, that would make Mr al Fayed weep. He can fly. He can make a carriage from the Orient Express disappear. He can make the Statue of Liberty vanish. He made dollars 26m last year.
You can watch him being sawn in half by a circular saw whose diameter is at least twice his body-width. He escapes from a straitjacket whilst hanging upside down from a burning rope above flaming spikes. And he does all this live – in front of audiences who scream and howl with excitement and admiration.
Just in case this is not sufficiently spectacular, he is engaged to MegaMegaBabe Claudia Schiffer, who looks adoringly into his eyes at every possible photocall. This has transformed Copperfield into a sex symbol.
Where once a terrible haircut, huge collars and a bacofoil jacket sufficed, he now reeks of fake tan, his hair and eyebrows are blacker than Dracula’s and his black Levi jeans (he only ever wears black and white) are tight enough to make you wonder if he is in permanent agony.
Every year CBS releases a video of his tricks, and this year, his fifteenth as a performing magician, merely emphasises that he is a total control freak -ad absurdum. Schiffer is wheeled in to play a gormless reporter dressed in her lingerie who asks him banal requests along the lines of: ‘Tell me all about you and your magic, David’. Between excerpts of Walt Disney-style music, Copperfield answers her in mellifluous know-all tones and then the camera pans to a video showing one of his illusions.
Adulation, say his critics, is what Copperfield cannot live without. Even Max Clifford, probably PR’s biggest advocate of sensationalism, whom Copperfield employed to organise his current European tour, found him just too much to bear and left. ‘He asked me after a press show in San Francisco why I hadn’t joined the other members of his entourage – who must have seen his show 500 times – leap to their feet and scream with admiration. I told him that I had clapped – and that, had I got to my feet, it wouldn’t make any difference to his reviews; in fact the British press would have thought I was quite bats.’
Copperfield, however, does not speak that kind of language. His is the language of fairy tales: ‘I like my shows to be romantic.’ Even his hard-pressed childhood (he was, he says an ugly-looking misfit) is given a gloss: ‘I needed magic to communicate, to get girls.’
At the end of the video Claudia says to him: ‘Shall we go up?’ He takes her hand, leads her to the edge of the building, and like Peter Pan and Wendy, they disappear into the night.
It’s enough, frankly, to make you puke – but you might not want to miss it for the world.
David Copperfield is appearing at Earls Court next week. Tues/Wed 8pm, Thurs/Fri 5.30pm and 9pm. Sat, 8pm. Tickets, from pounds 15 to pounds 48, are available from the box office (071-373 8141).
(Photo omitted.)
Rosie Boycott: (a founder of the feminist magazine Spare Rib in the Seventies, now editor of Esquire) I’m a big Germaine fan; I think it’s great that she does not mince her words and that she’s not hung up by niceties.
She’s so funny and big on practical jokes. At a book launch recently she asked to be introduced to the poet Alan Jenkins.
The first words she said to poor Alan, who was completely mystified, were: ‘I hear you are absolutely fantastic in bed.’ She moved on immediately to a deaf elderly woman, with whom she talked all evening, about leaf mould.
Melvyn Bragg: I like Germaine; I think she’s temperamental though; she’s like a rocket; she reminds me, in fact of the Blackpool trams.
Intellectually she will stick to her tracks but every so often shoots off interestingly and provocatively. She’s quick to be generous, quick to flare up and quick to make amends and I’ve experienced all three. The only thing I fear about her chat show is that she will have to curb her tendency to drive and dominate the conversation.
A S Byatt: I don’t know her particularly except for her Shakespeare book which I quite liked. I feel that summaries will do as far as her feminist texts are concerned. She has a tendency to chastise authors for not having written what she thinks they ought to have written without paying much attention to the book that they actually have written.
David Lodge: ‘No comment.’
Martin Amis: ‘No comment.’
Enoch Powell: ‘Who’s that?’
Dame Barbara Cartland: Who is she. . .oh I see. . .well she’s not nearly as important as what is happening to the Royal Family then.
Alexander Chancellor: (magazine editor and columnist) She’s a friend of mine, I think. I haven’t seen her for ages but we used to see her in Italy. She’s a meticulous perfectionist – she became the perfect Italian peasant – mind you a very upmarket Italian peasant. She insisted on baking her own bread kind of thing and she had a roomful of essences of some kind. She’s very endearing; she lets you know exactly what she feels and there is something very engaging about that. She can be prickly – it’s possible to give her offence without having the faintest idea why.
Victoria Gillick: I don’t want to comment about her.
Michele Roberts: (novelist) I don’t know her personally but The Female Eunuch was a major book for me and my contemporaries then joining the women’s movement. We saw her for as a luminary. I don’t think she’s necessarily helped the movement right the way through but at least she’s gone and stuck her neck out. She’s remained fiery and I like that. And I think she has been given a rather hard time.
Jonathon Green: (author and lexicographer) I only know her very tangentially. She refused to be in my first book about the 1960s because she did not want to be associated with nostalgia. So, I didn’t dare ask her to be in the next two which were on immigrants and sex.
PD James: I think at 74 I’m perhaps to old to have been influenced by her books – they are more for a younger generation – but I have read them with interest and admiration.
Algy Cluff: (businessman, former owner of the Spectator) I’ve known her for years. She’s a formidable lady. I wanted her to edit the Spectator until somebody reminded me that I’d already offered the job to Charles Moore.
She needs a man more than anybody else I know. She is a very handsome woman; all this dressing down that goes on doesn’t suit her at all.
Clive James: Germaine is the best guest in the world, so her only problem as a host will be the guests.
Murray Sayle: (Australian journalist, worked in London in the Sixties and Seventies) Germaine is very nice; the sadness is though, that the world has lost a great academic scholar because of all this feminism; her book on the Taming of the Shrew is really excellent. Her feminism can be explained as a result of her Australian experiences; she came from an oppressive Catholic upbringing followed by a stint of Christian enlightenment in Melbourne to a very different environment in Sydney where there was a gang of intellectuals who modelled themselves on razor-carrying proletarian pioneer convicts, and were known as ‘The Push’; she soon realised that these men gave women a lousy deal – and I recognise them as the men she is always denouncing in her feminism; of course with her intelligence and outlook she was always going to have great trouble finding a husband in Australia – mind you she hasn’t fared much better in Britain – but none of the men she has ever dallied with have been Australian.
Christina Odone: (editor of the Catholic Herald) My one overriding memory of her was in fact from the pilot programme for her new series which was filmed in the summer. She had rows of female hacks lined up and I had genned up on topics such as unfair discrimination in the workplace, intellectual minorities etc but instead her first questions were: ‘So when you are in bed with your man. . . .’; ‘so we’ve all had lesbian experiences. . . . .’ I was completely horrified; I knew that if I answered those kind of questions, quite simply I would lose my job; and something of this must have shown on my face because when it came to me she smiled and moved on to the next person. What an amazing act of intelligence and generosity] She struck me then as a really big person.
Margaret Forster: (novelist and biographer) I think she is brilliant; as a speaker two things stand out about her; she is amazing at thinking on her feet; she breaks off into wild tangents and just when you think she has completely lost the thread she seems to realise this and yanks the conversation back quite miraculously.
The other thing is that when other people are speaking she puts on an expression of complete bewilderment even if the other speaker is talking complete sense so that the camera simply cannot keep off her; it is a look of pity. She has little curiosity about other people; she may be intellectually curious about them but you couldn’t have a mundane gossip with her.
Richard Ingrams: She is very clever which probably makes her life difficult -she’s much more clever than most people; and she is very kind.
Sir Reresby Sitwell, 67, and his younger brother Francis, 59, are distinctly uneasy in each other’s company. To publicise ‘The Sitwells’ – an exhibition looking at the remarkable lives of their artistic ancestors, which opened last week at the National Portrait Gallery in London – they request that they be interviewed separately. At the private view, I overhear a guest talking about a family feud; meanwhile, one of Francis’s sons, William, mentions he has only ever visited Renishaw, Reresby’s home, once. ‘We aren’t particularly close,’ Sir Reresby later acknowledges, ‘but we are eight years apart in age.’
If the friction is really tremendously bad, however, the pair are not letting on. They agreed to pose together for a photograph, and they do, in fact, end up talking to me together for a brief while.
Reresby and Francis are the only sons of Sacheverell (more commonly known as Sachie) Sitwell who, together with his siblings Edith and Osbert, took the artistic establishment of the 1920s and 1930s by storm. Poets, writers and musicians, they fought vigorously against all that was uncultured – what they called ‘the Philistine’ – and had a love-hate relationship with the new-fangled ideas of the Bloomsbury group.
The Sitwells quickly became the celebrities of the literary establishment; the exotically dressed Edith was photographed endlessly in controversial poses – the most famous is of her stretched out in a coffin – by Cecil Beaton, while Osbert concentrated on novel- writing and Sachie wrote about archaeology and art. Their fame reached its zenith with Facade, the performance of Edith’s poems set to music by Sachie’s young protege, William Walton. The work was ridiculed at first, but later acclaimed as highly innovative.
After 1925, when Sachie, oppressed by living with Osbert (a homosexual), married the beautiful Canadian Georgia Doble, the trio went their separate ways, to Osbert’s initial fury and Edith’s consternation. But Edith, in particular, went on to win sufficient acclaim as a poet to earn her a damehood, and Osbert’s five-volume autobiography, Left Hand, Right Hand], became a staple on many school reading lists.
Their friends, who included Gertrude Stein, Diaghihev, Rex Whistler, T S Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis, all looked upon them as different and eccentric, in D H Lawrence’s words, ‘as if they had been brought up on a desert island’ – and in many ways they had.
Their childhood at Renishaw, a gloomy, ghost-ridden Jacobean mansion among the coal mines of Derbyshire (the setting for Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover) was unhappy. Their father, Sir George Sitwell, was an eccentric who locked himself away in his library studying bizarre topics and insisted on eating alone. He saw sex as purely functional. Before committing the act he would go on a strict diet and read some scholastic work before announcing to his wife, ‘Ida, I am ready.’
Their mother, Lady Ida, was a society beauty who had no interest in her husband’s intellectual pursuits. She spent all day reading in bed or playing bridge – and eventually brought disgrace upon the family in 1915, when her gambling debts led indirectly to a jail sentence for fraud.
It is hard to reconcile the two rather short, tubby jovial gentleman in front of me, every inch the English country squires, with their exotic, unusually tall – Sachie was 6ft 5in – anarchic, eccentric, artistic forebears. On the other hand, of the three siblings, Sachie was considered the most ‘normal’: he was the only one who even married.
I ask Sachie’s sons for corroboration. To my surprise they shake their heads. ‘Perhaps he was more normal but I’m not sure about happier. He was a far more complex man than that,’ they both say. ‘There was a dark side to his nature,’ adds Reresby, ‘I was terrified of him.
‘I remember that my school report would arrive on the same day as Country Life and that he would read the report in one hand and bash me over the head with the magazine in the other,’ says Reresby. Francis’s face lights up.
‘You too?’ he asks, ‘I used to intercept mine before it got to him.’
Reresby, the talker of the two, goes on to narrate how he once filled a questionnaire at his prep school, Sandroyd. ‘ ‘Why did your parents send you here?’ it said. I answered,’ he chuckles. ‘ ‘Presumably because they recognised a fellow sadist in the headmaster.’ ‘
I ask them about their parents’ famous life-long infidelities. ‘It was very distressing,’ says Francis, and Reresby nods in agreement. ‘And it became more distressing the older we got. Our illusions were shattered.’
The conversation turns to Eton, and for the first time I think I detect a chip off the old block: ‘We certainly did not enjoy it – because it was very sporty,’ says Reresby, ‘and we loathed games.’ At this point, in characteristically jovial fashion, Reresby trundles over to the door to show me how his housemaster – a sports fanatic apparently – had been able to raise his legs up to the ceiling.
Despite his professed dislike of the school, however, it turns out that Reresby actually did rather well academically (more than could be said for his father, uncle or indeed brother). ‘You won the school essay prize,’ Francis reminds him ‘and got a scholarship to Cambridge.’
Neither event seem to hold much value for Reresby, however. I ask him if, in view of his ancestry, he had ever tried to write. ‘Oh no,’ is the abrupt answer. ‘You see I’m rather shy of writing.’
A Sitwell? Shy of writing? ‘You have to understand,’ says Reresby quickly, ‘that our father wrote so many books – 137 in total.’ Have you read them all? I ask. ‘Good Lord, no,’ they reply together.
At this point Francis suggests he leave me with Reresby for half an hour – I have sensed throughout that he feels uncomfortable, perhaps stifled by Reresby’s presence. Reresby on the other hand is confident and chatty. He talks easily about his upbringing at Weston Hall, Northamptonshire, (Sachie’s marital home, where Francis and his family now live); his various careers, which ranged from salesman at Fortnum & Mason to wine merchant. He sweeps over his marriage to an aristocrat, Penelope Forbes, which caused huge friction with Sachie and Georgia. ‘They were an arrogant and nasty,’ says Penelope later, when I visit their home, Renishaw. ‘She was jealous of me because I was better born.’
What is clearly Reresby’s pride and joy, however, is Renishaw, bequeathed directly to him by Osbert (Sachie had opted out on account of death duties).
‘Osbert left me the house in 1965 when he went to live at the family’s Italian home, the Castello di Montegufoni,’ he says, ‘but he did not leave any money.’ Slowly, he and Penelope, whose talents as a gardener, musician and gilder he eulogises throughout the interview, sought to exorcise the place and create a genial family home for their daughter, Alexandra. He is especially proud of the beautiful gardens, which are now open to the public.
Judging by the way he talks, smiles and jokes, Reresby is a happy individual, untainted by memories of the past and living wholly for the present. ‘I think Peneople and I have led rather happier lives than my ancestors,’ he smiles. Later he shows me a private letter from the historian Philip Zeigler: ‘Gloomy and sinister seem to be the adjectives most often applied to the house under the last generation; but whatever there was to give it that reputation seems to have been completely exorcised.’
Francis reappears and I notice now that he hangs his head in his brother’s company and lifts it when he is gone. He speaks more slowly than his brother, as if he is thinking very carefully – but then he has worked in PR for most of his life, and perhaps is more wary of journalists. It is clear that Francis feels more oppressed by the family history than Reresby. ‘I was too young to be given a choice so I was sent away to Canada during the war,’ he says ‘which was a mistake because I was behind academically when I returned and only scraped into Eton where I was teased because of my Canadian accent.
‘I did, however,’ he says, almost with defiance, ‘pursue the things I enjoyed. I became secretary of the Natural History Society and got involved with music which was just getting going there.’
And, of the two, it seems that it is Francis who has continued to fly something of the family’s cultural flag. He is a founding member then chairman of the music charity, the Park Lane Group – which organised Edith’s 75th birthday concert at the Festival Hall in 1962 – an occasion which moved her to tears; he was on the councils of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Byam Shaw School of Art and this week attends his first meeting of the board of Sadler’s Wells.
Significantly, Francis did not choose a career directly in the arts. ‘My business career (at first with Shell Petroleum and, since 1966, in financial PR) gave me independence,’ he says, adding softly. ‘It gave me the means to get away from the family.’
I ask him if he thinks his father would have minded that he had not pursued an artistic career. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘I think both Reresby and I have a far better life; my father was not a happy man; he was very disillusioned; he was always in his brother’s shadow and he had no religion to fall back on. He was haunted by the fear of getting old.’
At the same time, Francis seems fiercely proud of his family. ‘Perhaps my forebears have suffered exclusion but if they, or anyone else, had any doubts about their achievements then the proof of the pudding lies in this exhibition, which has taken the gallery three years to put together.’
Francis made many devoted trips to Edith’s house during her bedridden last years – to the end she dressed as bizarrely and entertained as vigorously as ever. ‘If they had been alive to see last night’s private view,’ he flashes, ‘they would have been the proudest people in the room.’
(Photographs omitted)
WHAT was Anna Pasternak up to when she decided to write her extraordinary tale of the Princess of Wales’s alleged affair with Captain James Hewitt? The obvious answer is that she was making a fortune: close friends say the deal amounted to pounds 1m. But there is another answer which is to do with the nature of modern journalism. At 27, Anna Pasternak was anxious to make an impact in her chosen career – to become one of those ‘star’ columnists, perhaps get invited on to a few television shows – and, in the 1990s, getting involved in a story of this sort is rapidly becoming almost the only route to success.
The past five years have seen a transformation in the definition of success in newspapers, especially among young reporters. Until about 40 years ago, journalists were usually anonymous. Only a handful of the most distinguished – Sefton Delmer and James Cameron, both war correspondents, or Godfrey Winn, a royal correspondent of the old ‘God-bless-you- ma’am’ school – enjoyed bylines. Most journalists appeared simply as ‘our own correspondent’ or ‘staff reporter’. The most famous columns – such as Cassandra, and Crossbencher – were written under pseudonyms.
If you were under 30 the way to make your name on Fleet Street was to produce a front-page scoop. Even then fame was limited and transient. Nobody had heard of Colin Mackenzie, the journalist who, 20 years ago, discovered the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs hiding in Brazil; after he had found Biggs, nobody heard of him again.
Now, ‘star’ columnists are often not journalists at all, but people who have become famous in another field and for other reasons: Mariella Frostrup, David Mellor, Gary Lineker, Alan Clark. Newspaper editors increasingly believe that readers would prefer, for example, to read articles about sport by a famous sportsman rather than by A Nobody – even if A Nobody could actually write better. An added attraction is that, though celebrity columnists command high fees, they are probably not as expensive as sending a reporter to the ends of the earth in pursuit of a story.
The answer, for the ambitious young journalist, is to become a celebrity. Miss Pasternak’s peer group has achieved this with remarkable speed and ease. By dint of his eccentricity William Cash, son of the Tory Euro-sceptic MP Bill Cash (which helped), actually changed the events he was covering. He danced with Madonna at the Cannes Film Festival, got slung into jail at Elizabeth Taylor’s 60th birthday party and puked all over the walls of Jay McInerney’s spare bedroom after an interview. All this gained coverage by other newspapers and provided the 27- year-old Cash with enough material for a book.
Imogen Edwards-Jones, 26, acquired notoriety when she flew to Hollywood to have her lips enlarged for an article in London’s Evening Standard. She subsequently wrote endless pieces about her sexual relationships, and the ‘I’m game for anything’ label, unsurprisingly, stuck. She became known among her circle as the Sunday Times’s ‘rave correspondent’ – not something I believe she was particularly proud of, but at least she was known as something.
Toby Young, editor of the Modern Review, now in his early thirties, first earned his space in the gossip columns when his founding editorial team crept into the offices of a national newspaper at night to use their printing facilities. He continues to pop up: a ferocious argument with the actress Elizabeth Hurley, plastered all over the tabloids, did nothing to stop his fame spreading. Sometimes, in an incestuous merry-go- round, the journalists who have become celebrities have their fame spread by the celebrities who have become journalists. Ginny Dougary made the headlines (relatively late in life) when she wrote a piece containing some disparaging remarks by Norman Lamont about John Major. David Mellor, in his Guardian column, described her as ‘an antipodean secretary and mother of two who has gone down in the world as well as across it’. Was she upset? Not likely. ‘This is brilliant,’ said Dougary at the time – and promptly encompassed the former National Heritage minister’s wrath in her next book, The Executive Tart and Other Myths.
How far can this go? A former executive of a national broadsheet suggested at lunch recently that he had been considering employing Elizabeth Hurley as a lifestyle columnist. No disrespect to Ms Hurley, but I choked on my rocket. He failed to understand why.
Even Anna Pasternak must quail at the thought of competing with the likes of Elizabeth Hurley. After all, at 27 Miss Pasternak is a granny compared with 23-year-old Victoria Coren, daughter of Alan Coren, former editor of Punch (which again has not exactly been a hindrance).
For the moment, however, since the publication of Princess in Love, Miss Pasternak is one of the most talked-about journalists in London. She is a living example of what ought to be every young writer’s motto: if you can’t make it writing a story, then it’s worth having a go at becoming the story yourself. It’s a modest start but,
at 25, I think it’s time I had a photo-byline.
(Photograph omitted)
THE SMART dinner party was progressing nicely – the champagne was flowing and everyone was munching the starter – when one of the guests turned to the hostess: ‘This roulade is absolutely exquisite.’ The hostess smiled graciously. A pause. ‘What did you put in it?’
The silence seemed ominous. And had the questioner glanced at the scarlet face of Edwina Rickards, a fellow guest, he might have guessed something was up. He did not, and Ms Rickards, a professional cook and the true architect of the meal, was left to rescue the conversation. ‘Didn’t you use cheese and basil?’ She looked meaningfully at the hostess, who nodded quickly. ‘Then, of course, the chicken and asparagus.’ The dinner party continued smoothly and the hostess’s secret remained safe.
‘This kind of thing happens all the time,’ says Ms Rickards, who cooks lunches in the City as well as making small dinners for the 40-60 age group. ‘You just have to laugh.’
The number of women hiring private cooks for dinner parties has risen over the past 15 years, she says. And so has the number of hostesses who try to give the impression that they have cooked for their dinners parties themselves.
‘Women in their thirties, who cannot cook, do not wish to be shown up in front of their female friends,’ she says. ‘They feel the need to give the impression of industry in the home, especially if they are not working. Those who do work, on the other hand, tend not to care.’
It is precisely because of such foibles that caterers these days have to be far more than just good cooks. They need to have humour and patience – in huge quantities. For, just as every hostess has a tale to tell about ‘those simply disastrous caterers I hired’, so all caterers have their own about an impossible hostess.
‘Every day is filled with drama,’ says Jane Lloyd-Owen, who runs By Word of Mouth, a company based in Wandsworth, London. ‘Last week a client rang up two hours before a lunch for 270 people, and said that suddenly she had 40 more people coming. We had to find 40 more portions of everything in no time at all – but that’s just par for the course.’
Temperamental clients are an accepted obstacle. In the middle of one grand dinner, an elderly man refused to eat Ms Lloyd-Owen’s food and insisted that someone fetch him a McDonald’s. ‘We did it.’ She actually laughs. ‘It’s all part of the theatre of the day.’
If the client is not the problem, the venue probably will be. The marketing director of one of England’s more famous old London caterers, who asked not to be named, explained how his company once had to cook the soup and vegetables for a dinner on the back of a lorry.
‘We took the only parking space available,’ he said, ‘until, that is, the owner of the building turned up and needed it. Someone then had to drive the lorry, with the soup and vegetables boiling away in it, round and round the block, while I leapt out from the pavement and flagged it down whenever I needed more food.’
In view of all the sagas about catering for large events – Roger de Pilkyngton of Payne & Gunter recounts that just before a dinner for 200, his secretary put down the phone and said, ‘They’ve just told me its 200 couples’ – it is perhaps surprising that most caterers find cooking for small private dinners to be the biggest problem.
Hostesses at home tend to be far more fussy about the food. ‘It is quite normal for someone to change her mind over the menu at the last minute,’ says Ms Rickards. ‘Then, when you get to the house with the food, there is nothing suitable to serve it on.’
This is not the least of the problems she has encountered. After one dinner, she was chased round the kitchen by the hostess’s husband, flapping his arms and clucking: ‘Where’s my pretty little partridge then?’
One woman refused to let any of the caterers she employed into her larder. ‘She steadfastly locked it and hid the keys, only allowing you to go in if you told her the precise amount of any ingredient you needed,’ said a cook who had worked for her.
But caterers have learnt to deal with such setbacks with equanimity. Ms Lloyd-Jones recalls the day her entire fridge-lorry, packed with champagne, was stolen – the day before the party. ‘We had to go out and buy everything all over again,’ she says, without a hint of irritation.
‘The fascinating part is working around the problem,’ says Mr De Pilkyngton. Michelle Julian, of Babette’s Feast, concurs. ‘We will do whatever we’re asked – nothing is too difficult.’
But just as caterers are about to become confused with saints, Ms Rickards showed that she was capable of some endearing stroppiness.
The friend who had pretended to have made that cheese roulade herself had rung to ask her for the recipe. ‘It turned out that the guest, who had asked about it at the party, wanted it,’ she says. ‘I didn’t give it to her.’
Edwina Rickards (081-299 3150): price negotiable.
Jane Lloyd-Owen, By Word of Mouth, 22 Glenville Mews, Kimber Road, London SW18 4NJ (081-871 9566): will deliver three courses to your home, from pounds 25 a head.
Payne & Gunter, Mayfair House, Belvue Road, Northolt, Middlesex UB5 5OJ (081-842 2224): prices dependent on venue.
Babette’s Feast, 8 Disraeli Gardens, Fawe Park Road, London SW15 2QB (081-871 1265): prices from pounds 25 a head for a three-course meal.