fire. Jim could have left his diary anywhere. If Alvilde had read it she would have found only eulogies and affection, all perfectly genuine. Theirs was a happy marriage; they liked the same things and, almost always, the same people.
All through his diaries Jim relates jokes and oddities, and in this volume is a comic masterpiece : his journey to Mount Athos with Derek Hill. After the usual Greek buses and rocking boats stuffed with peasants and their livestock, there were customs and form- filling , Derek telephoning an important monk to little avail. Once on the magic mount the horror of the expedition became clear. Carrying heavy knapsacks, they struggled up steep rocky paths to the monasteries. They slept in dormitories with other pilgrims, in iron beds with dirty, hairy rugs. They washed in a trickle of cold water in a filthy basin with no plug. The lavatories were so terrible that Jim remained constipated. The refectories produced beans floating in oil and hunks of dry bread; no butter or eggs because cows and hens are forbidden on the sexist mountain. The few decrepit monks prayed all night, the churches were too dark for a glimpse of Byzantine treasures, and they were not allowed to see Mary Magdalen’s left hand, though an icon which had come on a beam from Palestine, taking 300 years, they did see. Tourists were few, and the beauty of Greek mountains and sea and ruins was like living in a Claude. But they squeezed themselves with alacrity into a jeep full of monks, to avoid a tiring climb. Sharp turns and bumps made the monks fall in heaps, losing their tall hats, their buns of hair coming down; it sounds worse than a vaporetto in the Venice rush hour. One monastery offered lumps of delicious Turkish delight: Derek took two. Jim liked the pious atmosphere, unchanged since the sixth century. But what about the jeep and the telephone? Robert Byron loved it 70 years ago despite fleas, but hewas in his twenties.
In November Jim came for a last visit to me in France with my sister Debo. We had a delightful evening, but next day he felt deathly ill and they had to rush home; he died a few weeks later. He was brave to come. He was nearly 90, and we had been friends since he was 11.
Jim was a pessimist. He predicts here that we shall be living in a Marxist hell within ten years. There will be no more hawthorn in May, no hedgerows, the farmers will have bulldozed them. All the trees will have died, not just elms but oaks, beeches, sycamores. Twenty years on, none of these disasters has happened. But he lived for beauty, and his whole life was dedicated to saving what is left.
Through Wood and Vale
, Lees-Milne, J.
Sunday Times
(1998)
High enough on the Ladder
A gossip writer’s job is an intensely disagreeable one. He is abused either by his friends and acquaintances for betraying confidences, or else by the newspaper which employs him for failing to betray them. In this tricky school Mr Driberg learnt his métier, and his book about Lord Beaverbrook is a perfect illustration of the gossip writer’s dilemma. This time it is his readers who may complain that not enough is told, while it appears that the victim feels he has told too much—‘a hostile biography’. Over all hangs the threatening cloud of the English law of libel, which as usual spoils the fun.
The two most interesting things in Lord Beaverbrook’s life are (1) how he became a millionaire before he was 30 and (2) how he built up his group of newspapers and made another vast fortune with them. Mr Driberg deals briefly with these matters, but at great length with his former employer’s pursuit of political power. Three times in his life Lord Beaverbrook enjoyed a modicum of power: when he was active in the intrigues which made Bonar Law leader of the Conservative Party in 1911 and replaced Asquith with Lloyd George in 1916, and again in 1940 when Churchill harnessed his energy (for he is a human dynamo) to aircraft production. During the remainder of
All through his diaries Jim relates jokes and oddities, and in this volume is a comic masterpiece : his journey to Mount Athos with Derek Hill. After the usual Greek buses and rocking boats stuffed with peasants and their livestock, there were customs and form- filling , Derek telephoning an important monk to little avail. Once on the magic mount the horror of the expedition became clear. Carrying heavy knapsacks, they struggled up steep rocky paths to the monasteries. They slept in dormitories with other pilgrims, in iron beds with dirty, hairy rugs. They washed in a trickle of cold water in a filthy basin with no plug. The lavatories were so terrible that Jim remained constipated. The refectories produced beans floating in oil and hunks of dry bread; no butter or eggs because cows and hens are forbidden on the sexist mountain. The few decrepit monks prayed all night, the churches were too dark for a glimpse of Byzantine treasures, and they were not allowed to see Mary Magdalen’s left hand, though an icon which had come on a beam from Palestine, taking 300 years, they did see. Tourists were few, and the beauty of Greek mountains and sea and ruins was like living in a Claude. But they squeezed themselves with alacrity into a jeep full of monks, to avoid a tiring climb. Sharp turns and bumps made the monks fall in heaps, losing their tall hats, their buns of hair coming down; it sounds worse than a vaporetto in the Venice rush hour. One monastery offered lumps of delicious Turkish delight: Derek took two. Jim liked the pious atmosphere, unchanged since the sixth century. But what about the jeep and the telephone? Robert Byron loved it 70 years ago despite fleas, but hewas in his twenties.
In November Jim came for a last visit to me in France with my sister Debo. We had a delightful evening, but next day he felt deathly ill and they had to rush home; he died a few weeks later. He was brave to come. He was nearly 90, and we had been friends since he was 11.
Jim was a pessimist. He predicts here that we shall be living in a Marxist hell within ten years. There will be no more hawthorn in May, no hedgerows, the farmers will have bulldozed them. All the trees will have died, not just elms but oaks, beeches, sycamores. Twenty years on, none of these disasters has happened. But he lived for beauty, and his whole life was dedicated to saving what is left.
Through Wood and Vale
, Lees-Milne, J.
Sunday Times
(1998)
High enough on the Ladder
A gossip writer’s job is an intensely disagreeable one. He is abused either by his friends and acquaintances for betraying confidences, or else by the newspaper which employs him for failing to betray them. In this tricky school Mr Driberg learnt his métier, and his book about Lord Beaverbrook is a perfect illustration of the gossip writer’s dilemma. This time it is his readers who may complain that not enough is told, while it appears that the victim feels he has told too much—‘a hostile biography’. Over all hangs the threatening cloud of the English law of libel, which as usual spoils the fun.
The two most interesting things in Lord Beaverbrook’s life are (1) how he became a millionaire before he was 30 and (2) how he built up his group of newspapers and made another vast fortune with them. Mr Driberg deals briefly with these matters, but at great length with his former employer’s pursuit of political power. Three times in his life Lord Beaverbrook enjoyed a modicum of power: when he was active in the intrigues which made Bonar Law leader of the Conservative Party in 1911 and replaced Asquith with Lloyd George in 1916, and again in 1940 when Churchill harnessed his energy (for he is a human dynamo) to aircraft production. During the remainder of
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