BMJ No 7115 Volume 315
Soundings Saturday 25 October 1997
Old men at play
"Graham, for some reason, had never tried flagellation, but thought he ought to ... So he asked around his office - at the Times, actually - and as one would expect got a phone number quite easily. Made an appointment and trailed off to Acton, I think it was, one rainy afternoon. Sadly, the poor girl had just been laid low by the mumps and didn't feel up to even the gentlest whipping. But as it happened she was a keen philatelist - as of course was Graham - so they spent a couple of delightful hours over her stamp album instead ... I've no idea whether money changed hands or not. It hardly matters. But how typical of Graham. Essentially a saint trying desperately to be sinner. Whereas I, of course, am a sinner desperately trying to be a saint."
Mr Greene, he dead. As too is the aspiring saint, Malcolm Muggeridge: journalist, novelist, and spy. As too is the frail figure at the other end of the dining table, Compton Mackenzie, who with gratifying symmetry could claim the same three doubtful callings. On each side of the table four undergraduates listened as they swapped stories - scabrous, whimsical, and poignant - from their combined century or so of adult life.
I was mightily intrigued. Compton Mackenzie had spied in Russia at the end of the first world war, Muggeridge in east Africa during the second. Both had written vastly, Mackenzie mainly his string of novels, Muggeridge innumerable articles on almost everything under the sun.
Muggeridge had just been elected rector of Edinburgh University and was rewarding his campaign team. Presumably to guard against the tedium of unrelieved student company he had invited his old friend Monty, who decades previously had been rector of Glasgow. Their stories ran on: Philby, Frieda Lawrence, Huxley, Boothby, Driberg, and many others, each served up, salted with irony, skewered in anecdote, done to a turn.
As they traded their tales up and down the table, the undergraduates on either side looked left and right, spectators for two hours on a kind of slow motion conversational Wimbledon. For some it might have been an effort, and in particular I remember wondering what the chemical engineering student from Colombo made of it all. In any case he smiled.
I would be exaggerating if I said that dinner changed my life, but it certainly changed my view of life. The two old men - Muggeridge then in his 60s, Mackenzie well into his 80s - made of the occasion a kind of bardic recital of the literary, military, and political life of the century as seen from the raffish end of Fleet Street. They were that evening what old men round dwindling campfires in preliterate societies must have been, the vehicle of a culture.
"I've probably talked too much," said Mackenzie as we drove him home in a student Mini. "I often do when I'm enjoying myself." We assured him he hadn't. On his doorstep he paused. "One last thing. I'm going to tell you something you might some day want to tell your grandchildren." Four variously puzzled, impressed, and drunk undergraduates listened. "Many years ago I was dandled on the knee of a very old highlander who as a youth had fought in the greatest battle of his century." Magician-like, he grinned. "So each of you can now say you've met a man, who's met a man who fought at Waterloo."
Colin Douglas
doctor and novelist,
Edinburgh
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