autobiographers-from-england

"We meet in Smith's idyllic little house bordering in . There are overgrown roses in the front garden and the shelves are crammed full of books, family photographs and a solitary carved wooden bear. An almost-completed crossword lies on a pile of paper next to her armchair. The whole thing is delightfully redolent of a slightly chaotic . As we sit down to talk, a man from pest control knocks on the door and removes a dead mouse from the kitchen. Smith is unperturbed."

"This was India, made for her amusement. Even the sun invited her to pour out her gladness, to soak up its immense generous heat and sweat out her salty thanks. Even the beggars pranced with hope."

"Supper was as convivial a meal as our picnic had been. They sang songs for us, sitting round the table, unaccompanied, Byelorussian and Ukrainian and Russian songs. And they asked me to sing, in return, an English song for them; but I sing , and couldn't."

"Our display is quickly over, since fireworks, we know, cost money, and we three children, from a very early age, are made aware that money is a commodity of which we have wretchedly little. We also know that we mustn't speak of this. Our poverty, like my fear of explosions, is something to be ashamed of, and so to be concealed from the world outside the family. One day my mother, throwing a handful of scrumpled-up rubbish on the fire, notices with horror that amongst the rubbish is a . Ten shillings is a fortune! Too late! It's gone for ever in a lick of flame. Kneeling on the hearthrug, she bursts into tears. This is the first, but not the last time I behold my mother weeping."

"We passed s and playing-grounds, and heard from open factory windows the magnified cheerfulness of ""."

"The opening volume of her childhood s, The Great Western Beach (2009), described the first 12 years of her family life in , where all was not well in her parents’ marriage; As Green as Grass begins when the family moves to a house called Melrose in the village of , , where all continues to be not well between Mummy and Daddy. ... What the book is really about is escape: from Melrose, from working as a local schoolteacher in Devon, from a grinding job as secretary in a stuffy hut in the grounds of . ... After the war Smith decides she would like to work in s, and the next thing she knows, she’s on a boat to India with as well as ‘ — Bunny’. She’s the junior, the dogsbody of the filming team, but adores it and, again, we luxuriate in this new escape. Ralph — Bunny wants her to be ‘his girl’, but she escapes from him, too, and marries a much nicer man, who dies six years later. And then, the long silence."

"The road from Boston to Cape Cod is long and straight and ruthless. Two black slashes cutting through the sandy country of pine and scrub oak which never grow to any size before a motorist throws out a cigarette on to the dry grass and levels everything neatly down again. In winter, the cars carry Boston businessmen in hats worn straight and true, and women with plastic statues of the Sacred Heart suctioned to the dashboard. In summer, the cars are full of families, and trail boats and little houses behind them. When the road was made, for the locust families to redouble their assault on Cape Cod, hills were leveled, hollows filled, the landscape brought to order. The bare scrub land is empty since everyone has gone top-heavily to the coast, like passengers crowding to the ship's rail."

"... I took the ashes out to the , leaving a little trail of cinders from a broken corner of the box. The trouble about housework is that whatever you do seems to lead to another job to do or a mess to clear up."

"With the suit, Christine wore a grey felt beret which had been sold to her cheaply by Mrs Arnold in Millinery, because it had a mark on the back and no customer would buy it. Women were absurdly fussy when they had money to spend. When they were walking along they were just ordinary women, quite meek and obeying the policeman at the crossing; but as soon as Goldwyn's commissionaire, who bought his medals at the Surplus Supply stores in the , had pushed open the swing doors for them, they became customers, and that made them arrogant. Christine had easily removed the mark on the hat with some lighter fluid. Any woman could have done the same; but to have noticed the mark with a shrewd mouth, to have refused to buy the polluted hat made them feel recherché."

"In the Refusal Race, you had to trot up to a jump, stop the horse and sail over the jump by yourself on to Anna's spare-room mattress."

"If Monica Dickens means nothing more to you than horsey books and no-nonsense memoirs of nursing and service, then this eloquent novel about the genteel poverty of a widow shunted between her three egotistical daughters is a fine corrective."

"I have defined Ladies as people who did not do things themselves. Aunt Etty was most emphatically such a person."

"In my grandparents' house it was a distinction and a mournful pleasure to be ill. This was partly because my grandfather was always ill, and his children adored him and were inclined to imitate him; and partly because it was so delightful to be pitied and nursed by my grandmother."

"The first religious experience that I can remember is getting under the nursery table to pray that the dancing mistress might be dead before we got to the Dancing Class."

"You can have no idea, if you have not tried, how difficult it is to find out anything whatever from an encyclopaedia, unless you know all about it already."

"The chief thing I learnt at school was how to tell lies. Or rather, how to try to tell them; for, of course, I did it very badly."

"Dear Reader, you may take it from me, that however hard you try — or don't try; whatever you do — or don't do; for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; every way and every day: . So it is no good bothering about it. When the little pests grow up they will certainly tell you exactly what you did wrong in their case. But never mind; they will be just as wrong themselves in their turn."

"Ladies were ladies in those days; they did not do things themselves."

"Peter Hook has had a fractious relationship with New Order over the years, and the two factions have been engaging in legal wrangling over the use of the name. Before that he, of course, was part of Joy Division, playing alongside Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner until Curtis's tragic suicide in 1980. It was with Joy Division where he developed his famous high-note style, claiming that the amp he learnt on was so bad that he could only play high notes in order to hear himself!"

"The truth is, every single British reptile is somewhere in . ... They call 'em the big six. Actually, it's the fairly small, slithery six. ... It's , , s ..., (which is, in fact, a lizard) — there are two real lizards ... ... and ... ..."

"Anyone who has witnessed Bill Oddie’s passion for nature, or watched the personable and wonderfully erudite wildlife presenter in action, might be forgiven for thinking that he could never really have been anything else. But such a role was not the natural end of a career that began with comedy sketches in a university amateur drama club. While most young people will recognise Oddie from such well-loved programmes as the BBC’s ' and ', his career is really a tale of two halves, and “the comedy years”, as he laughingly refers to them, made up a considerable period of his life. He was at Cambridge at the same time as and , and later become part of the comedy trio ‘’, whose humorous sketches delighted audiences throughout the 70s."

"... a hundred and fifty s — that is not natural ... Very little is this garden is actually you know, on any grand scale, natural. But it is friendly."

"... in many ways, the days of conservation are, sadly, a little bit numbered ... the point I'm trying to make is ... how much wildlife has decreased or, in some cases, completely disappeared. But, the only places where our wildlife is flourishing — and this is really, more or less, all over the world — are ... s ... Managing a reserve is really just on a big scale."

"If you report what you think is a , which actually turns out to be a funny robin, you can validly distract from your error by claiming that an aberrant robin is actually ornithologically more intriguing than a Red-flanked Bluetail."

"… 84% of people in England and Wales want foxhunting to remain illegal. That’s the kind of public support most politicians only dream of. Rather than pandering to a vocal minority who want to return Britain to the dark ages of animal cruelty “for fun”, we call on all politicians not only to reject any repeal, weakening or substitution of the but also to support its strengthening and its better enforcement."

"I could sit and watch this sort of thing for ages — and, in fact, I do. Absolute routine — having had my breakfast down the road maybe. It's come back here, feed the birds ... and just take half an hour, often with a camera ..."

"... Time piles rock upon rock. The sea comes and goes with the passing geological ages. Unless other events intervened, my trilobite would have become interred within an ever deeper pile of sediments, to a depth possibly beyond the deepest coal seam, and buried into an obscurity from which it would never emerge. But often in geology that which is buried is destined to rise. Phases of mountain building throw up rocks that were once deep beneath the surface. The British isles have been through no fewer than three such phases since my trilobite scuttled about on the sea floor. The first of these — the — was responsible for disinterring my fossil."

"I ought to introduce you to trilobites ... fossil arthropods distantly related to the s and s of today, but very distantly related — enormously diverse in the ... rocks ... with an evolutionary history of their own of several hundred millions of years ..."

"Collecting a pile of fossils is only the beginning. Many fossils are only fragments of the whole animal or plant. To piece together the whole organism is rather like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of the complete picture to work towards. Piece has to be added to piece, and the larger and more fragmentary the animal the more the result is in question. Not surprisingly mistakes have been made. The first reconstruction of the dinosaur Iguanodon finished up with its thumb on its nose!"

"One lies upturned on the sand. Its tail sake waggles feebly, quite unable to perform the task of turning the body back over again. Five paris of legs twitch ineffectually in a vain attempt to achieve the same end. I find it impossible to resist the temptation to right the poor animal. It is easy to grasp it by the edges of the head-shield. Once righted again those spindly legs allow the crab to trundle slowly away. Its behaviour seem at once strangely determined, but also apparently random, like the slow progress of a confused old lady on a ."

"Fossil hunting was a slightly more esoteric pastime, but what is perhaps most telling about Fortey’s childhood was his awakening to s. Today there is a whole library of richly illustrated guides and scholarly works on mushrooms. The fungus foray is a popular activity offered for public participation up and down the country. Yet when Fortey did it there were no teachers and the only widely available book was The Observer’s Book of Common Fungi. It covered 200 of the many thousands of British species. Fungi, in short, are difficult. The author tells us he remains an amateur enthusiast, but it is a mark of his ability that he describes how, in 2006, he found a tiny fungus Ceriporiopsis herbicola new to science. The discovery of entirely unknown organisms happens to few, but it happens in Britain to almost none. You realise that a challenge in this funny and entertaining book is peeling back the curtain of the author’s self-deprecation."

"In 2011, after retiring from his role as senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, and following a windfall from presenting a TV series, Fortey purchased four acres of prime and wood. Located in the , a mile from his hometown of , Grim’s Dyke Wood is the very patch that had Mill so enraptured two centuries ago. Though it has changed in the intervening years, it is still a glorious spot – Fortey’s initial intention was to use the wood as a way to “escape into the open air”, to record a rich ecology of living wildlife following a career locked away in dusty museums studying dead things. He soon realised, however, that any portrait of the place would be incomplete without its human histories, too."

"The trilobites, of course, overall have a fantastic variety of morphologies — fantastic variety of shapes. So you would expect them to have many different sorts of life habits."

"… Trilobite expert, tiddlywinks player, mushroom hunter, poetry enthusiast and ardent lover of the museum, Fortey joined the staff of the paleontology department in 1970. He tells us that at the time he joined, the museum was so hierarchical that there were separate lavatories for “scientific officers” and “gentlemen.” (Both, however, were supplied with toilet paper that had “Government Property” stamped on each sheet.)"

"… if you look back into history, the way the world has divided up into, say, linguistic groups, cultural groups, is ultimately under the control of geology. So, for example, think of the differences between the peoples north and south of the Himalayas. It’s extremely hard for people to cross – even the individual valleys within the Himalayas have cultural differences. Their history has been controlled to a large extent by those barriers. That’s a great control. But even on a small scale, the way cities looked – you know, the kind of cities that could be built – was controlled by the rocks that underlay it. For example, you could build tower blocks in New York because you had that nice, firm metamorphic rock to drive your piles down into. And the particular building stones are what have given, well, let’s say the majority of French cities and towns their own peculiar and interesting flavor. So geology controls the character of the world to a large extent."

"The public galleries take up much less than half of the space of the Natural History Museum. Tucked away, mostly out of view, there is a warren of corridors, obsolete galleries, offices, libraries and above all, collections. This is the natural habitat of the curator. It is where I have spent a large part of my life—indeed, the Natural History Museum provides a way of life as distinctive as that of a monastery. Most people in the world at large know very little about this unique habitat. This is the world I shall reveal."

"It was that did it for me. “Dr was an eccentric in the grand manner … he always wore hand-tooled cowboy boots with elaborate curlicues in the stitching and a hat and jacket to match. He was very shortsighted, and tended to stumble along in the purposeful way adopted by the cartoon character Mr Magoo, while mumbling vigorously to himself.” The Magoo lookalike also carries a whip and a six-shooter, but that is not what matters most about him: what matters is that he was an expert on the s of the . .. A book that starts with slimy things in the oceans and continues to the dawn of human civilisation in the must offer more than just a procession of challenging concepts and unfamiliar words, and accordingly up pops Mr Magoo, with whom Fortey (himself big on the trilobites of the Ordovician) once shared a hotel room."

"They say men can never understand the pain of childbirth. Well, they can if you hit them in the testicles with a cricket bat for 14 hours."

"Scoring a goal is the best part of the best job in the world. So when I see players not even smiling I can’t relate to them."

"Between 14 and 21 is when a lot of people get lost"

"My abiding memory ... is my mother’s reaction. [...] She and my father attended a big first night at the Vic, with all the glitterati there — Judy Garland and goodness knows who else. My poor parents were gobsmacked. Anyway, Sir Laurence comes up at the reception and asks my mother if she has seen the Othello film yet. "Oh yes, we thought it was very good, Sir Laurence," she replies, "but that was a bugger of a wig you made Derek wear." She was quite right. It was a bugger of a wig — but I just wanted the ground to swallow us up."

"The only ego I've got is when I'm performing."

"Can you imagine being wonderfully over-paid for dressing up and playing games?"

"Going to war was the only unselfish thing I have ever done for humanity."

"Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don't take anything too seriously, it'll all work out in the end."

"Isn't it fascinating that probably the only laugh this man will ever get in his life is by stripping off his clothes and showing his shortcomings."

"In retrospect you look back and think, "Why didn't anybody say anything?" My brother Seymour, who's incredibly militant, used to make these jokes about storming on stage in a black beret and black gloves."

"Powell's offering us £1,000 to go home. I'll take the money: the train fare's only 10 quid from here to Dudley."

"Traditionally, television audiences have always been massively white, because it tends to be organisations such as the British Legion who apply for tickets, and black people have never felt as though they belonged in clubs like that. It was only when I went along to the BBC ticket unit and suggested that my stuff might appeal to people who hang out in social clubs in Brixton and Willesden that anyone thought about the imbalance. It wasn't particularly racist — it just hadn't occurred to anyone before."

"Robert Luff was a powerful, articulate businessman, bald-headed, very smart, about 50 to 60 years old, and he had all these shows on, all over Britain, including The Black and White Minstrel Show, which at that stage was making him a fortune."