Diary
Christopher Hitchens
In Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion novel sequence, we are introduced to the hopeless young charmer Fielding Gray. His father is remote and sourly reactionary; his mother develops ominous signs of chippiness and puritanism. Young Fielding gets through most of the right hoops but usually in the wrong way. His public school, in other words, is slightly too minor. He is cheated of the joys of Cambridge only to taste them later on. His regiment is raffish rather than distinguished. His career as a gentleman-scribbler is a ropey one, very much circumscribed by the simultaneous eclipse of the British Empire and of the idea of the leisured man of letters. Nor are matters helped by such vulgar difficulties as the need to pay tradesmen, the need to keep up an appearance of sexual continence and the need to maintain a steady flow of copy.
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[*] Tricks of Memory (Weidenfeld.290 pp., £18.99,7 October, 0297 81186 X).
Letters
Vol. 15 No. 23 · 2 December 1993
From Warren Wallace
In his Diary (LRB, 4 November) Christopher Hitchens has attributed to Constant Lambert a questionable limerick about Lady Maude Hoare. If his text were imperfect, might he also be wrong about authorship? I remember hearing a better version in 1955, while hanging about the Stag, a pub behind Broadcasting House then favoured by luminaries from BBC Radio Features. The text ran:
‘That will do!’ said the Lady Maude Hoare.
‘I just can’t concentrate any more.
You’re perspiring like hell,
There’s that terrible smell –
And look at the time – half-past four!’
Being struck by the power of the piece, I committed it to memory straightaway. Alas, paradoxically, I can’t for the life of me recall who did the reciting. Could it have been Louis MacNeice? Or perhaps C. Gordon Glover? Anyhow, the same voice declaimed several poems, all on the English nobility, and every one of them credited to a ghostly, long-gone creative figure with a name something like ‘Cheatle’. May I hope some scholar will clarify?
Warren Wallace
New York
Vol. 15 No. 24 · 16 December 1993
From Marian Sugden
I believe the BBC producer the late R.D. Smith may have been responsible for a series of limericks based on names in Debrett (Letters, 2 December).
Marian Sugden
Cambridge
Vol. 16 No. 1 · 6 January 1994
From Freddy Hurdis-Jones
To answer Warren Wallace’s query (Letters, 2 December 1993), John Cheatle was a BBC producer, whom I knew because he lived in the same converted house on the east side of Gloucester Road as did Audrey Lucas, a friend of my mother’s and, more interestingly, of Evelyn Waugh’s, as may be seen from the latter’s correspondence. Cheatle died by his own hand, of gas-poisoning, in that same flat in, I think, 1983. I believe he was in danger of losing his job because of his drinking habits.
The more usual, democratic and correctly scanned version of the limerick Mr Wallace quotes goes like this:
My back aches, my penis is sore,
I simply can’t fuck any more
I’m covered with sweat
And you haven’t come yet
And – my God! – it’s a quarter to four!
removing it, of course, from the Yang to the Yin, if that’s the right way round.
Freddy Hurdis-Jones
Malta
Vol. 16 No. 3 · 10 February 1994
From Alfred Burke
Marian Sugden’s suggestion (Letters, 16 December 1993), that R.D. Smith may have been the author of the Debrett limericks was a nice try, but I think that Reggie Smith’s exuberance didn’t quite spill over into malice and satire, no matter how gentle. The original enquirer’s memory of a ‘legendary’ character called ‘Cheatle’ is surely closer to the mark.
John Cheatle, a producer of all sorts of programmes for radio, was indeed a legend in his own lifetime, just after the war. Anecdotes of his latest mockeries were circulated with relish, and reached well beyond the pubs around Broadcasting House. My single experience of his adroitness was his production for radio of an adaptation of Max Beerbohm’s ‘Savonarola Brown’. He was clearly too restless to sit behind the glass panel issuing instructions, but preferred to fizz and crackle around the studio during rehearsals and even on the take. His performance of the Clown, singing a song of his own invention, possibly improvisation, while accompanying himself on a keyboard rigged to sound like a lute, was a hilarious turn, never to he forgotten. I doubt if he would be allowed into Broadcasting House these days.
Alfred Burke
London SE22
Vol. 16 No. 5 · 10 March 1994
From Freddy Hurdis-Jones
Alfred Burke (Letters, 10 February) cannot have seen John Cheatle just after the war, since he died in 1943, as I should have said in my letter. His production of ‘Savonarola Brown’ took place in 1939. Lady Maude Hoare, born Lygon, was the sister of Lord Beauchamp, known to Asquith as ‘sweetheart’, who was hounded out of the country for unnatural practices by his brother-in-law, Bendor Duke of Westminster.
Freddy Hurdis-Jones
Malta
