The picture of the Bluebell Wood

Following the art theme of the blogs this week I walked round my house and looked at the pictures on the walls and noticed there were two distinct themes, either horses or woods.  Over my fire is the very common print of The Three Kings. For  some reason when I was wee I was a big fan of Arkle who is not as famous as his two fellow subjects (Red Rum and Desert Orchid)  in the painting but it’s nice that he’s there all the same. Arkle’s owner famously said that she loved him too much to ever run him in the Grand National in case he came to harm.

                               

                                          The Three Kings by Susan Crawford

My favourite picture of all is a tiny print in a simple wood frame with a typed label on the back.  It hung over my granny’s sideboard for many years. It has been a constant in my life, a feeling that  I want to live in that house down this lane.

My granny too said it was her favourite picture.  Yet it is so small, so unprepossessing, with no mount around it, no fancy frame. It’s held together by a bit of string. It’s not even a painting. It’s not even very good. The brown paper on the back looks as though it came from a paper bag and it is crumpled, torn and repeatedly stained with watermarks from the floods when my granny’s neighbours upstairs left their bath running.

                                   

                                                    Only 10 " by 8", 

 But the picture is beguiling. Enchanting.

I’m not sure if the picture is one of extreme calm or imminent threat. There is no light coming through the tree canopy, it’s all dark. There is a single winding path that is waterlogged leading up to a tiny cottage that may or may not have a thatched roof.  The path seems to wind its way beyond the cottage into the only area of light so the viewer’s eye is taken from the darkness and into the light.  From that point of view, the viewer has found themselves in the middle of the forest and faces a long walk to get out.

                                   

Even the way I wrote that ‘has found themselves’. … How did they  get there?

  The floor is covered in bluebells so it is spring and the trees are green but goodness knows how awful it would be in the winter. There is a sense of contented isolation about it and I’m sure this picture was in my mind when I wrote about the isolated cottage in Blood of Crows.  But the picture asks a lot of questions. Who lives in that wee cottage?  Why do they live in such a remote place? If you were brutally murdered there, would any body hear you scream. Would anybody find you if you were buried in amongst the bluebells?  Forensic topography would mean nothing here.  A mobile  phone  will not work here. You will be at the mercy  of the spirits of the forest and the wood elves.

And the biggest question of all, if my granny liked it so much, why isn’t it in a nicer frame? 

There is something of fairytale darkness about it, of Hansel and Gretel, and the Little Red Riding Hood. It is Grimm, if you pardon the pun.

I keep coming back to the isolation, the sense that you are on your own and you will either rise or fall but it will be by your own hand.

                                           

My gran, the owner of the picture, was orphaned as she was born, the youngest of 13 children and grew up in an orphanage. With her closest sisters, they lived together as a unit, with a house  mother in a ‘small cottage’ somewhere outside Sheffield. There they learned to cook and sew and clean with a view to going into service. She dreamed of being a seamstress, always darned everything. I mean everything.

                                  

She never said a bad word about the orphanage, the ‘cottage homes’ as the system was called. They had food in their bellies and many folk didn’t in the north of England in those days ( we are talking early 1900 here). She grew up being terrified of ending up in the workhouse (which was what the Southern General of last week’s post was originally built for.) and while researching some pictures for the blog I realised why; the workhouses and the cottage homes were both part of the action on poverty at that time.  So the home was not just for orphans, but for children whose families could no longer afford to keep them.

                                           

And it was a label of social disgrace. But Yorkshire girls are tough and I don’t think my gran ever noticed or if she did, she didn’t care. The only thing I heard her comment on occasionally, was the cruelty of the local village children to the cottage home children. They would bully and taunt the orphanage kids. It was a five mile walk, over rough ground, often in snow, from the orphanage to the school. The cottage children wore leather boots all year round. The boots were good quality and handed over from child to child as  the foot size changed,  to cope with the long walk to lessons – and the boots were the badge of ‘being different’ was how she put it. 

 All her life she stood up for the underdog and taking this literally, would come home with unwanted   puppies and stray dogs with bits missing. She had a difficult life, moving to Glasgow to live in a Govan tenement over run with mice,  being widowed and left with three children but she never lost her ‘we never died a winter yet’ attitude. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t a sweet nice little granny, she was more your functional granny. She was a strict disciplinarian and would bruise my knuckles by rapping them with a wooden spoon, when I misbehaved at the tea table.

 Which  was often.

At thirteen, the girls had to leave the cottage home to go out to work and in her first week of being a junior housemaid, she was crossing a road, avoiding a young man cutting a hedge. He took one look and said to her, ‘Are you Jessie Cadwallander’. It was one of her older brothers and the whole family slowly got back together again.

                              

Only to be ripped apart by two world wars.

She was never one for looking back. She  died at 105 without a bit of dementia, and apart from sight loss and hearing issues, she was in good health.  It said on her death certificate ‘extreme old age’. And that canny be a bad thing.

                                   

Her secret to a long life? She didn’t drink ( one advocaat at Christmas and even then she couldn’t finish it as it was too strong). She always had a four legged companion somewhere. She worked hard (still in the community canteen in her seventies). She had, because of poverty,  what we would call a good diet. She was green fingered and grew everything. Red meat was a rare thing. She ate fish, porridge and every morning started with a glass of water with a lemon squeezed into it. Her number one tip, be content with your own company. She was never ever lonely although she had few friends and lived on her own for the last fifty years of her life.

 Which brings us back to the picture, and the isolation of that  house, and the carpet of bluebells.

 And where do I live now? In a house  across the road from the woods that are known on the map as the bluebell woods. Every morning the dog and I go up there to be on our own. We don’t need  company so we walk up on the high ground away from the handbag dogs and anything that ends with ‘doodle.’

  

I think it might be in the genes.

Caro Ramsay  24 04 2015

Hero Rats

The bad news out of South Africa this week is the outbreak of xenophobic violence in some parts of the country.  Based on the age-old principle that if something is going badly for you it must be someone else’s fault, foreigners – almost exclusively black people from elsewhere in Africa – must be the cause of the slowing economy and lack of jobs.  In the words of Pete Seeger’s song, when will they ever learn?

Angola minefield. Looks harmless?

But just for a change I want to report on a good news story from Africa. Land mines. Well, the land mines themselves are not a good news story, quite the opposite.  When Portugal decided more or less overnight to pull out of its African colonies of Angola and Mozambique, it left a power vacuum that soon became a battleground for control between competing “liberation” movements, often with the backing of outside powers playing their own dirty games.  Among other things, this led to minefields of horrendous proportions, particularly in Angola.  Although the war there ended in 2002, most of the mines remain and they remain active.  Often they surround towns that are expanding and need more land for crop growing.  The results are inevitable and often horrific.

High tech mine detector

Clearing the mines is a painstaking and dangerous business. It involves using metal detectors to clear paths and then to work outwards from safe ground.  Multiple false alarms bring the process to a halt until the cause can be definitely identified.  Various more remote technologies have been tried, including the remote detection of the chemical signatures of the decomposition products of the explosives.  The success rate is quite good, but would you be willing to accept “quite good” if you were walking in the area?  And these technologies are not cheap.

Dogs have been tried in the past, but there are problems, not the least of which is that they can set off the mines.  

Enter the hero of our story, the Gambian Pouched Rat.

It has always seemed to me that the rat has had a very bad rap.  They are smart, successful in a wide variety of environments, and tend to clean up after us.  Of course, they can transmit diseases, but no one’s perfect.  And they are said to make excellent and affectionate pets.

A hero rat on the job

But these are working rats.  They have an extremely sensitive sense of smell, and can be trained to pick up the scents arising from buried land mines without difficulty.  Best of all, they are too light to set off the mines, and they run on guide wires that ensure that their handlers can follow them safely and investigate their discoveries.  They have a much lower false alarm rate than metal detectors; the process of clearing an area can proceed more quickly and efficiently.  Because they are doing such a great job, they have become known as the Hero Rats.  You can see them in action in a recent New York Times video HERE.  And if you want to know more about them, and even maybe to “adopt” one (the rats accept Visa and Mastercard), take a look at the Apopo site HERE.

Did I mention their great whiskers?

It’s a good news story from Africa – rats to the rescue!  Now if we could persuade rats to generate electricity, we might be in with a real chance!

As one Nose to another...

Michael – Thursday.

Under The Dome

A couple of months ago, a documentary about China's pollution went viral, receiving over 150 million hits in the first few days of its online release. Made by Chai Jing, a former investigative reporter with CCTV, "Under the Dome" is reminiscent of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." It explains the problem in ways that people can easily understand. And it is a call to arms. Some have called it China's "Silent Spring." 

Here's Part 1, with full English subtitles.




I've blogged (and written a book about) China's environmental problems, which are so severe that they've had a huge negative impact on peoples' health and could undermine China's economic miracle altogether. The Chinese central government—or at least certain factions of it—are well aware of extent of this crisis, and on paper, Chinese environmental regulations are fairly strict. But China's environmental protection agency, SEPA, lacks the funding and the regulatory teeth to actually enforce those regulations, and competing interests that benefit from unrestrained growth and dirty industry want to keep it that way, in spite of the very real costs of China's filthy air, contaminated water and polluted soil.

These dynamics partially explain why "Under the Dome" was a huge viral hit, with some 200 million Chinese viewing it. Until the video was abruptly pulled from Chinese websites by government censors.

China's central government in recent years has been fairly tolerant of discussion and even protests, as long as those protests remain localized. And there are many in the government who would like to see stronger enforcement of environmental regulations. But the "red line" in China is any kind of discussion or activity which could form the basis of a mass movement that might potentially oppose the CCP, and environmental concerns in China have the potential to unite large numbers of people. In fact, they already have. From poor farmers protesting polluting factories that destroy their crops to wealthy urban dwellers who would like to be able to breathe safely on the streets of their own cities, these issues cut across class, income and location.

Sadly, the margins for acceptable public discourse under new President Xi Jinping have narrowed considerably. Environmental activists, feminists, and journalists have been detained and in some cases sentenced to long prison terms for activities that might have been tolerated a few years ago. In the case of "Under the Dome," a New York Times article speculates that the documentary may have been actively supported by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and then suppressed by agencies such as the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Finance. From my amateur Sinologist's perspective, I find this a pretty credible theory. As the NYT piece points out, power in China is far from monolithic, and factional competition and fragmented authority drive events far more than many people realize.

But what is also true is that these competing interests are all "under the dome." Everyone whether they are rich or poor breathes the same air.

Lisa…every other Wednesday...

Jane Peterson: Artist, Adventuress

My husband David and I fell in love with American Impressionist art.  It became a great passion for David.  He studied it by reading, poring over catalogues, visiting museums, attending auction exhibitions and sales.  After a few years, he could, from thirty paces away, identify almost any American painter who worked between 1870 and 1945, and he could tell you if what he was looking at was typical of the artist’s work.  Because David has the soul of a collector, he could also tell you what the work would likely sell for at auction.

In the Nineties, we began to acquire art.  By then, most paintings of American Impressionist men were beyond our means.  Women’s work was, if you asked us, greatly undervalued.   David began to look for women artists whose work appealed to his discerning eye.  We bought paintings by men if they were priced right, but there were many more quite wonderful ones by women that we wanted and could afford.

Jane Peterson soon became our favorite.

Her art is wonderful.  But there was something else about her that greatly appealed.   Her subject matter.  She had lived a life of independence and adventure.  My kind of woman.  David’s too, evidently, since he had fallen in love with me.

Jennie Christine Peterson was born in Elgin, Illinois in 1876 of an employee of the Eglin Watch Company and his homemaker wife.  She had a public education and changed he name to Jane when she finished high school.  She had had no art instruction as a child but worked from intuition and taught herself enough to gain admission to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.  Her mother gave her $300 and off she went.

When she graduated Pratt in 1901, she studied for a while at the New York Art Students League.  Soon her wanderlust took her to Europe.  There she traveled with other artists and developed her style by studying her contemporaries and the masters.

Eventually, she ranged far and wide.  In 1916 she joined Louis Comfort Tiffany on a US transcontinental trip in his private railway car.  After that, she took her paints and her easel—a woman alone—from Maine to Florida, all over Europe, to Turkey, and across North Africa, making beautiful works wherever she went.  She became friends with Gertrude Stein, met Matisse, and Picasso, and had over eighty one-woman shows in her lifetime.  When she was fifty she married a corporate lawyer, M. Bernard Philipp, who was twenty-five years older than she.  They were married about ten years when he died.  Four years later, she tried marriage again, but in less than year, she and her second husband separated and later divorced.  After that failed marriage, in her mid-sixties, she took to the road again.

In 1938, the American Historical Society name her the “most outstanding individual of the year,” only the second woman ever so honored. 

Today her paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Hirshorn.

The photos above are typical of Peterson’s work.

With apologies to Jane for my poor photography, these below are the ones in David’s and my collection.  I treasure them.

"Evening, Holland Fishermen, Valendam" - Oil

"Venetian Lagoon" - Oil

"The Town Square, Afternoon" - Watercolor

"Street in Old Constantinople" -  Watercolor
David was fond of telling people how, on a trip to Istanbul, we stayed in a hotel on this
very street, and didn't realize it until we returned home and looked at picture with new eyes.

"The Clock Tower, Venice"--Oil
David gave me this one for my 51st birthday

Annamaria - Monday

Playing with perspective – the amazing street art of Julian Beever

Zoë Sharp

When I write I always love playing with people’s preconceptions. My good guys are rarely all good, and there are usually some redeeming features in my bad guys. It’s not only the characters I try to do this with, but the situations and locations as well. And whilst I hope I never cheat the reader, what you think is going on might not be case.

When I worked as a photographer, it was often said that the camera never lied. Fortunately, though, it could be made to be exceedingly economical with the truth. It all depended not only on lighting and filtering but also on exactly where you placed the camera in relation to the subject of the shot.

Someone who is a master at playing with our visual perception is British artist Julian Beever. Julian studied art at Leeds Met. University and did a variety of different jobs, from English as a Foreign Language teacher to tree planter.

Julian Beever self-portraits

He began pavement (that’s sidewalk to anyone across the Pond) art as a busker to fund his journeys through numerous different countries, mainly pictures of well-known faces to grab the attention of passers-by.

Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots on Oxford Street, London

By the early ’nineties, however, he’d developed his anamorphic 3D artworks which have brought him commissions and acclaim around the world. Here are just a few examples of his work. More can be viewed on his website, or in his book: Pavement Chalk Artist.

 

A Slight Accident in a Railway Station, Zurich

Lift Off from Cape Dover: a drawing used to raise money for the BBC Children In Need appeal in 2013

Part of a series used by White's Electronics of Inverness in Treasure Hunting magazine

Waste of Water: sometimes it's hard to know what's really there in Julian's artwork, and what isn't!

Eiffel Tower Sand-Sculpture: this drawing in Paris was the subject of an episode of American TV series Concrete Canvas

Let's Be Friends: drawing for the TV show Unbelievable, done in Tokyo as a plea to the Japanese to appreciate the beauty of living whales

An amazing example of Julian's ability to incorporate features of the landscape into his artwork...

This wrong view of the snail really shows the skill of the 3D drawing. Julian had to stick paper to the glossy bench in order to be able to draw on its surface, and further back he used a standing steel post as one of the snail's horns.

Times Square: drawn, where else, but Times Square, New York!

Yorkshire Water: this drawing in Sheffield was never finished beyond this rough stage. Work was halted due to ... Yorkshire water in the form of heavy rain.

Julian works in pastels, and points out that the images only appear 3D when viewed through a camera  lens or on a screen like a phone or iPad.

His work is stunning, as I'm sure you'll agree.

This week’s Word of the Week is anamorphosis, which comes from the Greek anamorphoun, to transform. It means a drawing or projection, which presents a distorted image that appears natural when viewed from a certain angle, or with a suitable mirror or lens.

Ion Trewin : An Anecdotal Memoir by John Lawton

John Lawton

There’s more to books than writers. However much we might try to pretend otherwise everyone who’s ever written for this page knows damn well that a good editor, publisher can make a difference – Edward Garnett, Max Perkins … Ion Trewin. Ion died on April 8^th after a lifetime in newspapers and books. It’s not a cliché to talk of publishing greats. He was one.

His reputation ran ahead of him. I’d heard of Ion Trewin long before I met him. He’d worked for the Daily Telegraph in the 1960s, and was literary editor of The Times until the strike (or was it a lock-out?) of the early eighties, at which point he moved into publishing at Hodder & Stoughton, at a time when publishing and Bedford Square were all but synonymous.

A couple of years later I landed back in England after a spell in Spain and hit the moment of realisation that awaits all us old hippies – ‘1967 ain’t coming back. Bin the tie-dye and get a job.’ This was 1984 and proved every bit as grim as predicted.

I wanted not to do any of things I’d been doing any longer. I did what any educated fool would do – I started putting rings around job adverts in The Grauniad, expecting not much.

I answered this one, a paraphrase you will understand: ‘Wanted young literary agent with interest in American fiction to build up list of new writers for major London agency.’

I applied, expecting not much.

They replied.

Oh fuck … it was Curtis Brown. My heart sank, I’d bummed around the edges of London publishing for a couple of years before the Spanish expedition and the joke about Curtis Brown had been, ‘Give them a shirt and they’ll stuff it.’

I thought about withdrawing. Didn’t do it, and went to the interview expecting … not much.

After an interview of startling incompetence (on their part, not mine) I left expecting … not much. But this was 1984, Big Brother was watching over me. I was called in a second time, to find myself magisterially grilled by another London Lit legend, George Greenfield (John le Carré’s agent and the model, if such there be, for the Hon. Syd in my story Bentinck’s Agent) after which I knew damn well I’d got the job.

Fate, as often, intervened in the shape of a twat in a yellow Cortina who ran over me and my motorbike. Laid up for six weeks I was able to mull over the job on offer. I took it. Started with a walking stick, and limped onward.

By Christmas that year I was enjoying Lit London, pleased to be living above the breadline and more than a bit baffled by it all. Perhaps I was out of my depth? In the New Year, the stuffed shirt joke came back to bite.

Frank Delaney presented Radio 4’s Bookshelf, far and away the best book programme the BBC ever had. Frank wrote non-fiction at that time … books on Betjeman and Joyce for Hodder & Stoughton. He came in one day after lunch with Ion, quoting Ion as saying ‘There’s no agent at Curtis Brown I’d recommend to any of my writers.’

Ouch.

But … it was my moment to test the depth of which I might be out. I asked no one’s permission, rang Hodders and left a message inviting him to lunch.

Does all publishing revolve around lunch? Probably.

Ion accepted. I met a big bear of a man, with a beard that was already turning white.

“You’ve been an agent for how long?”

“Four months.”

“Learnt anything?”

“Such as?”

“What are we, the publishers, doing wrong? What would make the writers happier?”

Easy peasy.

“Communicate between books, drop this attitude that you are their publishers only when they have a book ready. Consult about things that will cost you little … covers, author blurbs … they want a say in all of that. And pay up. I don’t mean pay more. I mean pay what you have agreed to pay, whether measly or generous, on the agreed date. Late payment annoys writers more than anything.”

It was the start of a long relationship.

I found myself drawn to publishing’s rogues. They were more interesting than all the others … the gentle roguery of André Deutsch, the not so gentle roguery of Colin Haycraft (Duckworth) and the twinkling mischief of Ion Trewin. Asked by the Booker Committee if he was ‘devious’ Ion replied that he was. Perhaps it’s the same thing. I was always drawn to the mixture or humour and mischief in the man.

Over the next year I sold him three or four books. We never discussed what he thought of the company. Just the books.

And over that year it became obvious I was never going to make the grade as an agent. I was a northern hick from the hills. I did not know London. And of the handful of universities I’d been to only one was on the map that counted. I was an outsider and I had come to see that that was a killer disadvantage.

But … what next? To quit was financial suicide. The only out was to get paid to bugger off. Not that hard. Let it be known you’re looking elsewhere, throw in a bit of bad behaviour and you can get yourself canned.

I did good deals for my writers, but the best I ever did was turning a tin handshake into a brass one.

I have declared a principle in this. Getting fired means simply that you are letting others make the decisions you will not make for yourself. In the days when I had a CV (gave up such nonsense years ago ... ‘if you need to see my CV you can just fuck off!’) I had no hesitation in putting ‘fired’ on it.

But … what next?

Four publishers phoned me in my last week.

A nice woman at Collins (before they had a Harper): “Don’t stay as an agent. It’s so obvious you don’t like it.”

A nice man at Constable: “Don’t even think of setting up on your own, it will kill you.”

André Deutsch: “We should meet, my boy.”

“How about lunch, André? I have the use of the company credit card till next week.”

I took him to Le Caprice off Piccadilly. A stinger.

Does all publishing revolve around lunch? Probably.

Two bottles of wine, and when the meal ended I scored him a hundred fags on the company card.

“I’d like to offer a job but I’m over-edited to death. But on Fridays, around five, the cap comes off the whisky bottle. Join me.”

I did. On several occasions

And … Ion Trewin phoned:

“Come over. I’ve a job for you. Not much, but it will keep the wolf from the door.”

I became his chief reader, and over the next couple of years I read more books than I can count for Ion, for Eric Major and for Nick Sayers (who is still at Hodders.)

By 1987 I was where I’d been aiming for all along … in television, a business in which everyone was a rogue, at Channel 4 … a loose collective of indies where I think you probably could not get a job if you weren’t a rogue.

But there was downtime. I showed Ion the unnamed novel I’d started in Spain.

“So, this is chapter seventeen?”

“Yep.”

“And the other one is chapter twenty-two?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t mean to be awkward, if anything I mean to be traditional. Where’s chapter one?”

“Haven’t written that yet.”

It got thrown back at me. Instead he commissioned my one work (to date) of non-fiction: 1963: Five Hundred Days. By coincidence the year Ion had come up from Devon to join the Daily Telegraph: his year, his subject. I never did quite work out why he’d eschewed university. He seemed to have missed nothing.

By 1992 rumours were circulating that Ion was being headhunted by a new publishing house – Orion, being brick-built on Weidenfeld and Nicolson’s near fifty-year foundation. I asked. He denied. I did not believe him.

About the same time Channel 4 work took me to lunch at the House of Lords to meet George Weidenfeld.

Does all publishing revolve around lunch? Probably.

When we’d thrashed out a programme George asked if I’d bring my next book to him. I professed unwavering loyalty to Ion.

“Hire him, you get me.”

George did not take the bait, so I waited for, and attended, Ion’s leaving party at Hodders and duly followed him to Weidenfeld, where I set the finished novel in front of him – now named (by Ariana Franklin, not me) Black Out.

“Imagine the mess we’d be in if I’d bought it for Hodders,” he said.

Quite.

After that he was my editor for another fifteen years. Can’t remember how many books, but most of them. A minimalist at editing. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. A superb communicator … I’d hear from him a couple of times a month in pre-e-mail days, more after. I never saw/heard him lose it. Ne’er a cross word. Not sure I even heard him say so much as an ‘oh fuck’. Given my propensity for bad behaviour (never, ever leave me alone in an office with Ikea shelving and a cricket bat), no small thing.

One, and one only example …

Orion were late with an advance. Not days or weeks, but fuckin’ months.

I worked out the interest on the sum so owed at Bank of England base rate, added two per cent and invoiced them. This resulted in an invitation to lunch from Ion.

Does all publishing revolve around lunch? Probably.

We met at Orso’s in Drury Lane.

The invoice was passed back to me across the table.

“I can’t possibly pay this.”

The invoice was passed back to him across the table.

“Why not?”

“Because no author has ever tried a stunt like this before, and I won’t be the one to set a precedent by paying.”

The invoice was passed back to me across the table.

“So?”

“So this is what you do. Invent ten …” (could have been five or twenty, this was an age ago) “… manuscripts that you have read for me and re-invoice for the same sum. I put it through the books as reader services. But if you stick to this line of yours about charging interest on late advances … well … we’d be starting a revolution.”

That sounded so appealing, but … I pocketed the invoice and did as he said. Invented manuscripts and authors (who knows? The Brian Clough Book of Quick Desserts might have been a winner) and billed Orion with a phony invoice. I think he enjoyed the scam as much as I did.

Ion was the best company in London. Not above gossip, connoisseur of the craik, wholly devoid of malice.

We’d lunch at his club – the Garrick. If in New York at the Harvard … or was it Yale? (I always get ’em mixed up.)

Does all publishing revolve around lunch? Probably.

But, er … not always, as on occasion we’d breakfast at Simpson’s-in-the Strand. If he was watching his weight … and at peak Ion was a very big man … he’d have porridge or muesli and I’d get stuck into an Arbroath smokie. We had dinner at my house in Islington, but, and this marks a boundary of his sense of privacy, never at his in Highgate.

I’ve been widely reviewed in my time. I take no credit for that. It was all down to Ion, a man who, it seemed, was as far from the outsider as one can get. He knew … everybody. All I, the outsider, had to do was … hang on.

I never doubted Ion would retire rather than hang on, and publishing being ever in flux I could understand why he did retire. Nor did I think this would be the end … Lit London … no … Lit Britain would always find work for an idle Trewin … so he never was.

Ion Trewin picked me off the scrap heap.  I shall miss him more than words can tell.