Britain going rudderless to the chasm

Leadership is hard to define. But it’s easy to recognise when you see it. And easy to spot when it’s missing.

Take Winston Churchill pronouncing perhaps the four most important words of his career: ‘We shall never surrender’. They sent a shiver up the spine of my mother when she heard them in 1940.

‘We were alone against the Nazis,' she told me. 'We knew a great many people near the top of government wanted to open peace talks. Churchill’s words told us the fight would go on.’

My mother never voted for Churchill in her life. But she recognised this act of leadership for what it was.

A counter-example? George W. Bush paralysed in a classroom of children when told his country was under attack on 9/11. And then taking longer to get to ground zero in New York than it took Bill Clinton, though Clinton had been in Australia at the time of the attack and there was a ban on international flights into the US for several days afterwards.

No wonder Dubya struck that pose on the deck of an aircraft carrier, under a  ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner, after US troops had brought down Saddam Hussein. Having failed to show leadership when called on to do so, he needed to ape it later to try to make up.

Britain today is on the brink of the most serious step since watching the breakup of its Empire in the 40s and 50s. The EU has given the country access to a huge free trade area since 1973, and with that access has come investment, trade and jobs. In less than nine months, it is due to leave and there is still no clear vision of what future it will face.

The uncertainty is itself a factor in the country’s economy. Companies, with no indication of how Brexit will look, are beginning to plan for its being abrupt and violent – a hard Brexit where Britain leaves with no agreement in place for continuing trade with the EU or, indeed, with other countries. Investment plans are going on hold or even reversed, with plans to transfer production to other countries.

The impact on jobs and the economy generally is likely to be massive.

Why are we in this position? Because Theresa May as Prime Minister, though she claims to preside over a Cabinet, is in fact doing little more than refereeing a constant battle between a group of warring ministers. Some seem more than ready to accept a hard Brexit, if only as a way to break completely from EU regulation, whatever the cost. Others favour different levels of ‘soft Brexit’ where Britain continues to accept some parts of EU regulation in return for some of the benefits.

May keeps her position unclear, ostensibly because she doesn’t want to reveal her hand during negotiations, though most of us suspect that she actually has no definite position. She’s trying to hold the ring between diametrically opposed contestants, and therefore refuses to pick a side of the argument.

All she claims to want is to keep as many as possible of the benefits of EU membership, such an open border between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland (which is remaining in the EU) and ‘frictionless trade’ with the EU. In return, she wants to accept little or no regulation by the EU.

It’s not surprising she feels this way. To accept almost any degree of EU regulation might be regarded as remaining the EU ‘by stealth’ and a ‘betrayal of the will of the people’ expressed in the referendum vote for Brexit. On the other hand, the benefits of membership are vital. She’s trying to square a circle, trying to take benefits without obligations, a position the EU has already rejected. They claim, correctly, it’s an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it.

May: she may be doing her best but no one knows what it is.
So it's not good enough.
No leader she

Whatever May’s approach is, leadership it ain’t.

Opposite her is Jeremy Corbyn, leading the Labour Party. His position is equally difficult. There is a trend in the Labour Party, mostly in its leftmost reaches (from which, as it happens, Corbyn emerged) that opposes EU membership. It’s an odd tendency that seems never to wonder why it ends up sharing platforms with the far right. If you’re agreeing with people with whom you have nothing in common, it’s worth asking whether you might have gone wrong somewhere.

If you have odd bedfellows, it might be because you’re in the wrong bed.

But there are other more practical problems emerging for Brexiters of the left. Most notably, they’re in a minority in the Labour Party.

Even Corbyn’s biggest trade union backer, Unite, is now questioning whether Brexit really is good for its members’ health. They can see the jobs going, along with the workers’ rights the EU imposed on the essentially right-wing British regime. They’re beginning to demand that Corbyn endorse an explicit pro-EU stance.

This is an embarrassment to Corbyn, who needs Unite support but has been as assiduous as May in avoiding any clear position on Brexit. He’s caught between his roots in left-wing Brexitism and the unpleasant realisation that the majority of Labour, and even of his fan base, increasingly backs staying in the EU.

Corbyn with his pal McCluskey of the Unite Trade Union
But Unite members are beginning to ask for more from Corbyn.
He's not giving it. No leader he

So he’s as paralysed as May. Unable to take a stand on Brexit. Unable to lead his party or nation either towards a hard or soft Brexit, or towards remaining in the EU.

Again, I say, whatever that is, it ain’t leadership.

The worst of it is that a government as weak as May’s could fall. Rumours reach me that we should prepare for an election in October. That might leave Corbyn in number 10, with just five months to Brexit day and everything to negotiate. He might, at last, be forced to take a position.

I have friends who claim he would choose to stay in the EU rather than accept a hard Brexit. That would be a courageous position to take: he too would be assailed by Leavers high and low accusing him of betraying the will of the people. Would he really do that? It might be easier, politically, just to claim it wasn’t his fault that the Brexit was hard, and that he had no choice but to accept it.

That would be followership, of course, not leadership. But if nine months out, he still can’t even say that remaining in the EU might be an option, how can we be sure that he would just weeks before the fatal day?

Either way, what’s certain, is that Britain stands on the brink of a historic decision. And in neither of the parties likely to be in government to make it do we see any sign of leadership on the question. Just when the country needs it more than usual.

Not a prospect to inspire much confidence.

War, emigration and some fine silk socks

In 1940, my father, Leonard, volunteered to join the Royal Air Force. At his interview, a Wing Commander looked at his application and asked what must have seemed to him to be the crucial question.

‘So, young man, you were born in London, but moved to Brussels at six weeks?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And why did you do that?’

My father was English to his fingertips, even though he spent his childhood in Brussels and spoke French like a native – indeed, it became the preferred language of communication between him and his four siblings.

He left Brussels with his mother, on the last train before the German army moved in.

‘It was just as well we caught the last train,’ he told me, ‘the one before was strafed by German fighters and a lot of the passengers were killed.’

He arrived by boat in Portsmouth.

‘It was great to see all the warships in the port, lined up and sleek in their battleship grey. It made me feel that we weren’t defenceless, that I was home and among powerful friends.’

This was the start of the only extended period he was to live in England: from 1940 until he was demobilised in 1946. When he headed back to Francophone territory, specifically Paris.

Propping up a wheel of his bomber
- Leonard while doing his bit in WW2

My mother, Leatrice, on the other hand, had only been out of the country once in her life, on a family holiday in France. When she was three.

She was still in her late teens when war broke out. She spent one term away from London and the dangers of bombing, at a school in Windermere in England’s North West. She hated being away from home and decided she preferred to risk the bombs and came back. That occasionally meant cowering with her mother in the broom cupboard under the stairs until the all clear had sounded.

‘Under the stairs was the safest place. When you saw bombed-out houses, the stairs would often still be standing. But it was horrible crouching in there in the dark.’

No bombs fell in their neighbourhood anyway, in Hampstead Garden Suburb in outer North London, home for many Jews who’d made enough to be comfortable, though not quite enough to join their wealthier co-religionists in nearby Golders Green.

As the war went on, both my parents became blasé about the bombs.

‘I hated shelters,’ my father told me, ‘the atmosphere was dank and full of fear. So, when I was on leave in London, I just stayed up above and watched the raids. Once, I was walking home with a packet of eggs – precious at the time – and I could hear the shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells falling back to earth and tinkling on the ground all around me. All I could think of was how to keep my eggs safe.’

My mother even played a memorable tennis game with a friend, ignoring the air raid warnings, only to discover when they’d finished and climbed to the top of the hill where they could see the view, that the whole of the City of London was ablaze.

On leaving school, she took a shorthand course and went to work for Finchley Council, in North London.

‘The anti-Semitism was unbearable. I couldn’t wait to get out.’

Always a sympathiser of the political left, her next job was with Albert Inkpin, formerly the first general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. When they met he’d been demoted to running the Friends of the Soviet Union. She helped him with its paper, Russia Today. The publication recounted the glorious achievements in the Soviet Union and the triumphant advance of the working class everywhere under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. In other words, it was a propaganda sheet. If it existed today, we’d call what it purveyed fake news.

Come to think of it, it does exist today and that’s exactly what it purveys.

My mother found the diet there a little too rich. She moved on to an organisation that was more congenial to her, the venerable social democratic movement –Inkpin might have described it as bourgeois liberal – the Fabian Society. She worked half time for the Society and half time for one of its leaders, the Labour MP John Parker.

One of her more vivid memories was of lying in the grass in St James’s Park, between the government offices in Whitehall and Buckingham Palace, watching German V1 flying bombs coming over.

‘You listened for the motor to cut. If it did when the bomb was close, it might drop straight out of the sky towards you. I once heard a V1 motor cut while I was in a Lyons Corner House restaurant. All the clients, including me, flung ourselves to the ground under the glass-topped table – hardly likely to give us much protection. Fortunately, the bomb didn’t hit us.’

The V1 'doodlebug'
The time to get really worried was when the engine stopped

She stayed in the job after the war. That meant she was there on an evening in 1946 where a diminutive, humble figure walked through a crowd of Labour staff members in the Headquarters building, with only a smile and an occasional wave in an acknowledgement when they stood to give him an ovation. The man was Clement Attlee, and the staff had just had the confirmation he would be the next Prime Minister, having beaten the legendary and apparently unbeatable Winston Churchill. He would be one of Britain’s most effective Prime Ministers.

My mother hankered, however, to get away. She found an ill-paid job in Paris and moved there. She didn’t realise it, but it would be the last time she lived in England for four decades.

Meanwhile, my father had started working with a British railway body and had done well. So well, indeed, that his boss called him in one day to congratulate him on winning a more senior appointment back in Britain.

‘But… I didn’t apply for the job,’ my father told him.

‘No. I put in the application for you. And you’ve won! It’s a great honour.’

‘Maybe. But it’s not a job I want.’

He eventually gravitated to working with UNESCO, based in Paris. He was young, well-paid with few responsibilities. He indulged in some luxuries, one of which was silk socks. In all the time I knew him, I never saw him in silk socks, which is perhaps a measure of what it cost him to accommodate my brother and me.

Meanwhile my mother moved on from the ill-paid job and joined the UNESCO typing pool –not the most fulfilling work but it allowed her to live far more richly than she ever had before.

One day she was invited to a party with a bunch of her colleagues and found herself on the floor with her back against a sofa, on which a young man was sitting. What she saw of him first was, of course, his shoes and his socks.

‘Good Lord,’ she said, ‘you’re wearing silk socks with little clocks going up the sides.’

‘Yes,’ he said. Thus they took the first step towards a life containing my brother and me, and far more cotton than silk.

Hell's just some people

‘Hell is other people,’ wrote Sartre.

My own feeling is that in reality it’s only certain other people that are hell. And some of them one can adapt to.

For instance, crying babies in planes used to drive me crazy until I had my own children, at which point my attitude went through a complete reversal. Now, when I hear a child crying I just feel sorry for the parents. I know how embarrassed, upset and impotent they feel, as they struggle with an impossible task, quietening an unhappy child. Or an angry one.

I was reminded of that today when I heard a baby wailing in a flat next door to us. It didn’t last all that long, but while it was going on it was clear that the parents were completely unable to calm him. He wanted something, he wanted it now, they weren’t able – or perhaps willing - to supply it, and he was making his displeasure fully known. Not to just to them but, as in our case, to the neighbours too.

He knows he wants something and he knows he’s not getting it.
That annoys him. But at least he has the potential to learn

Still, the noise didn’t irritate me. I’ve been there, held a wailing child, wandered around in the moonlight with him on my shoulders at 2:00 in the morning. I know what it’s like and can’t work up any annoyance, just some fellow feeling and a trace of ‘thank God that’s not me any more’.

In any case, it’s easier to forgive noise from babies because they are creatures of pure potential. Who knows what they may turn into. And, above all, they could well learn self-control.

It’s far sadder when the noise is being made at the other end of life, when there’s so little less to hope for. Visiting my mother in hospital, where she’s struggling against a battery of conditions that tend to afflict a 93-year old, is pretty depressing and not just because of her state. On one visit, when I arrived in the ward I could hear a woman down the corridor shouting quite as loudly as the baby next door today.

‘Help me! Someone help me! I need help! I need it now!’

I was there for nearly two hours and the shouting never stopped. People in the nearby beds must have found it insufferable. She was surrounded by nursing staff who were, clearly, helping her, but her problem wasn’t physical, it went far deeper, to an area within her well beyond their reach. Like the child, she knew she needed something, and knew that no one was providing it, but had lost the capacity to comprehend that they could do nothing so that continuing to clamour was ultimately pointless.

What made things worse was that before I even left the four-bed bay where my mother was sleeping, the woman diagonally opposite her also started to cry out.

‘I need help. Now. Urgently. I need to see a doctor. Straight away. Bring me a phone. I’m going to phone a doctor. I need a doctor. Come now and get me a doctor. I need a doctor now.’

The litany went on and on. At one point she spotted me.

‘You there. Yes, you. The man sitting in the corner. Bring me a phone. I’ll phone for an ambulance. They’ll get me into hospital.’

‘Err…’ I replied, ‘you’re in hospital.’

Not useful, I know, but I’m not much good in these situations. But simple pragmatism? It clearly wasn’t going to put her off.

‘I need a doctor. Bring me a phone. I’m going to phone a doctor. I need a doctor. I need a doctor now.’

Then she decided to adopt a new tactic.

‘I’m getting out of bed now. I’m going to look for a doctor.’

She made ineffectual moves towards leaving her bed.

‘Now, Sylvia,’ said a nurse, ‘you stay in bed. You might fall down and hurt yourself.’

‘I need a doctor,’ replied Sylvia.

‘A doctor will come and see you. But the doctors are busy just now. They’re in the Emergency Department.’

‘Well, I’ll get up and fall down. Then they’ll have to see me.’

She may have been not entirely conscious, but I have to say, her logic was impeccable.

The sad thing about these older women was that, unlike the child, there was little hope of their getting better. Of developing new self-control. Like the child, they wanted gratification immediately, and they’re unlikely to learn what the child may, that there’s much to be said for deferring gratification. If only, to avoid immediate disappointment.

That makes their protests harder to bear than a baby’s. Though they’re still not the least bearable of all. Those are the wailing cries of entitlement that come from people who are technically adult and who have neither the excuse of the child who hasn’t yet learned, or the older person who’s losing the lesson.

One of the saddest aspect of the world today is just how many of such people are in positions of power. Supported, apparently, by growing movements, in nation after nation: nationalists in Italy or Hungary, backing Brexit in Britain, voting for Erdogan in Turkey, supporting Trump in the US.

Now those adult babies really are insufferable.

He wants gratification. He wants it now.
And there’s no prospect of his learning better.

There's good emergency service triage. And then there's the other kind

It came as a bit of a surprise when the French Emergency Department doctor (‘urgentiste’) I was talking to asked if we could postpone for a week the webinar we were planning.

‘You may have picked up that there’s a bit of a controversy in France around emergency services right now, and we’re even more crazily busy than usual.’

Well, I hadn’t picked that up. But two friends were with us from the glorious Eastern French city of Strasbourg where we used to live. One of them was a nurse, so I reckoned she’d know. Though actually both of them were fully up to date, and for a good reason.

‘Yes, a terrible scandal,’ they told me. 'In Strasbourg.’

The problem had arisen on a call to the emergency services. Rather than describe what happened, I’ll just translate the transcription of the call, between a frightened caller and a triage clerk:

‘Miss, I’m in pain…’

‘OK, so you phone a doctor, OK, got it? You understand, phone SOS Médecins [the primary doctor emergency service].'

‘I can’t.’

‘You can’t? Oh, really, you can phone the ambulance service but you can’t…’

‘I’m going to die.’

‘Yes, you’re going to die, without a doubt, some day, like everyone else… Ring SOS Médecins, OK?’

‘Please, help me, Miss.’

‘I can’t help you. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.’

‘It hurts, it hurts…’

It’s hard to disagree with the Enquiry finding that the clerk’s tone was harsh.

That was at 11:30. At 12:32, a relative rang again and, by sheer bad luck, was dealt with by the same clerk. Again, the call wasn’t put through to a physician, although two were available.

At 13:47, SOS Médecins itself called the emergency service. This time a different clerk answered. She put the call through to a physician who immediately sent an ambulance. It arrived at 13:58. Some two hours twenty minutes had been wasted by then, and that proved critical: although the patient was immediately hospitalised, she died at 17:30.

She was 22.

This tragic litany proved career-limiting for the first triage clerk, who has been suspended pending dismissal. It did no good to the emergency service director either, with the report of the Enquiry recommending that his resignation, already offered, be accepted.

It’s a classic case of rare – or hopefully rare – ineptitude. A fine object lesson in how not to run triage. Triage is the process by which healthcare staff decide what level of care a patient might need. Clearly, it failed in this case.

However, that there’s one other aspect of these events which casts a still deeper shadow over them. The woman who died was called Naomi Musenga. As my French friends point out, even on the telephone, her accent would have revealed her sub-Saharan African roots.

Naomi Musenga, in a photo from franceouest.fr
Would she have been treated differently if she’d been white?

Would the clerk have reacted differently had the caller’s voice identified her as white? Who can say? But the way things are in the world today, how can we immediately rule it out?

At any rate, it’s no wonder my French ED physician was too busy for a webinar this week.

A cautionary tale for our times

Imagine the United Kingdom sheltering behind a customs tariff wall. Inside, there is great suffering as food prices rise. Worst of all, in some areas the suffering has reached the point of starvation. There, thousands are dying and thousands more are emigrating by whatever means they can, as unemployment and poverty rise inexorably. The worst hit areas are depopulating.

Not everyone, however, responds to this catastrophic situation in the same way. Some of the very wealthiest strongly support the tariffs, because they protect their businesses by eliminating foreign competition to them. 

More strangely, as well as this right-wing resistance to any attempt to take down tariff walls, there is also vociferous and powerful opposition from the left. These activists believe that tariff reform will expose elements of the working class to competition too. To protect them from it, they are prepared to stand by the tariffs, even though they know that the price is terrible suffering and even death among a far broader section of the poor. Odd, most commentators would feel, since the left should above all speak for the poor – all of the poor and not just a relatively small section of them.

Does this sound like a Brexit dystopia? A UK after leaving the EU, with tariff walls in place partly to protect itself, partly to retaliate to the wall put up by others. A UK receiving a painful lesson in the non-existence of the Brexit dividend.

Funnily enough, that isn’t what I’m describing here. This isn’t a picture of the future. It’s a picture of the past, of the time in the early 1840s when British agriculture was being protected by the corn laws, even though they caused major hardship for much of the working class and the poor dealing with high food prices.

The region where the hardship became actual starvation, and which began to depopulate, through death and emigration, was Ireland, then a part of the UK.

Irish poor reduced to starvation
all in the name of protectionism and resistance to free trade

The landed interest on the right of the political establishment favoured the preservation of the laws. Much of the rest of the right wanted them abolished, partly because it would favour the development of business, partly because if food prices fell, there would be less pressure to increase wages for workers.

The elements on the left who oddly sided with the hard right were the Chartists. This was a movement for political reform and for working class rights in the middle of the century, but it apparently couldn’t grasp the basic principle that the corn laws kept food prices high and inflicted huge damage to the very people the Chartists set out to defend.

The past, not the future, then. But something similar is happening again in the present. That, of course, simply confirms the principle that people are unwilling to learn lessons from history.

The left-wingers in the role of the Chartists are the Brexiters of the left in the Labour Party. Their concern is that the EU is an organisation wedded to market economics and preventing any kind of development towards socialism. That seems to imply that Britain on its own, freed of the liberal economic shackles of the EU, would suddenly embrace socialist principles, as though there was a colossal and currently muzzled desire for pure socialism in the British people.

This is not a view of Britain that it is easy to reconcile with reality.

What is oddest about the people who take this stance is that it makes them some strange bedfellows. They find themselves working with some of the least savoury elements of the hard right, such as UKIP. It’s hard to explain why, given that they see themselves as socialists and internationalists, they don’t question how they can be in partnership with xenophobes and extreme nationalists.

Just as the Chartists found themselves working shoulder-to-shoulder with the toughest of Conservatives but never apparently wondered why.

What’s certain is that the damage the corn laws did before their repeal in 1846 – too late for Ireland – is likely to be caused by Brexit too. Businesses are beginning to threaten ending their investments there – Airbus and BMW just in the last few days – and prices will inevitably rise as the country leaves the free trade area that has guaranteed it cheap produce for forty years.

Which proves another principle: if you refuse to learn the lessons of your mistakes, you condemn yourself to making them all over again.

Bride of Belsen

It takes a lot to survive a concentration camp, so to survive three is practically miraculous. All the more so if you live through a death march as well. If, finally, you turn that experience into a life-enhancing event, rather than a crushing blow, then you’re a remarkable person indeed.

That was the case of Gena Turgel who died earlier this month.

Gena Turgel meets the Queen at Buckingham Palace
on 28 May 2015

She was born Gena Goldfinger, on 1 February, in Krakow. That’s a wonderful, vibrant, exciting Polish city even today. Back then, it was little different, though in those days some of that vibrancy was doubtless supplied by the city’s large and active Jewish community – then some 60,000 strong but down to 500 today.

When the Nazis occupied the city, Gena’s family was forced to give up its textile business and move into the newly designated ghetto. One of her brothers was shot there and another escaped, but no one heard from him again. From the ghetto, the survivors in the family were moved to Plaszow labour camp, made famous – or infamous – by the film Schindler’s List.

Her sister and brother-in-law were caught by the Nazis trying to smuggle food into the camp and executed by them.

From there, Gena was marched in 1944 to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but instead of being gassed was sent on a death march to the camp at Buchenwald. She survived that too, and was finally moved to Bergen-Belsen.

There she nursed Anne Frank through the typhus that killed her.

Appalling experiences that no human should suffer, especially when they are completely unnecessary and merely inflicted by other humans. That is, humans who have lost their humanity.

Fortunately, she didn’t lose hers. Among the first allied soldiers who liberated Bergen-Belsen was a young Jewish sergeant in the British Army, Norman Turgel. I assume he was really a Nathan, like my grandfather, who was also often called Norman by his gentile friends (or non-friends). Norman met Gena in the Infirmary. He apparently found her attractive enough to want to invite her to dinner.

The dinner was in a British Officers’ mess. The tables were covered with crisp white linen, shining cutlery and vases of flowers. For someone who had spent over five years in concentration camps, the sight was difficult to take in. But Norman had an explanation ready. 

‘This is your engagement party,’ he told her.

As Gena would tell the story, he had decided on first meeting her that they would marry. As indeed they did, within six months, and, by special permission, inside the Bergen-Belsen camp. That won her the title she kept ever after: the Bride of Belsen. She even had a silk wedding dress, made from a British army parachute.

Norman and Gena Turgel
He in battledress, she in the parachute-silk wedding dress

She spent the rest of her life working constantly to spread awareness of the Holocaust, its causes and its victims.

She died on 7 June this year, at the age of 95. Having lived a long life marked by early and terrible suffering. But which she turned to great value.

My thanks to the BBC, via my wife, who heard it on the radio. At a time when we have an Italian Interior Minister prepared to leave people to drown in the Med rather than let them land, and a US President who sees nothing wrong in forcibly separating children from parents and keeping them in cages, we badly need to be reminded of humans who kept their humanity.

It’s a wonderful relief.

The parachute-silk wedding dress
Preserved in the Imperial War Museum, London

By strange twists of fortune to relief for the soul

There are times when we just need to let the stress out. Little does that as well as music. Especially music in good company. Especially when part of the good company is provided by the musicians.

My family’s going through a stressful time. Well, the worst stress is for my mother. At 93, things can go wrong quickly, and they’ve been going pretty badly wrong for her just recently, as she bounces between a hospital and an intermediate care facility, a step down from acute care but still a medical establishment, not home.

She’d done well to get to 93 still able to live in her own flat. There was a part-time manager in her building but no medical care. Until a few weeks ago, my mother has coped with her own cooking, shopping and washing, only drawing on the help of friends when it was offered. Now, though, the pain she has suffered for some years has become worse and a series of other problems have led to her transferring in and out of different forms of medical care, and the sight is a sad one to see.

It’s the harrowing paradox of human existence: none of us wants to die young, but reaching advanced old age is no fun either.

The stress is worst for my mother, but the rest of the family has suffered from it too. So it was wonderful to find relief from it at another concert in the museum in Luton. These take place, as I’ve mentioned before, in the lovely surroundings of Wardown House. On this occasion, the concert involved two violinists playing a series of pieces; an unusual, and attractive, aspect of the event was that they stopped regularly to talk about the music they were playing or their composers. That was fun and it established a friendly rapport between the players and the audience.

Let me quickly indulge in what will feel like a digression, though it isn’t really.

Back the late 90s, a scandal hit the papers. It was a financial matter but not confined to the financial pages. Nicola Horlick was that rare creature, a woman who was a highly successful player in the financial services market. She was managing director of UK investments for Morgan Grenfell Asset Management, until she was suspended in January 1997 and resigned two days later. She was accused of preparing to move to another company, which was the excuse for her suspension; there was, however, widespread suspicion that she had irritated her employers by being far more successful than any woman was expected to be in that profession (or, it was felt, had any right to be).

In 2005, she set up Bramdean Asset Management. One of the partners there was Enrico Alvares. Now, he had a most unusual background to be a financial manager. The son of a professional violinist in Nairobi, he had been more or less obliged to take up the instrument at the age of three. He studied music at prestigious schools in London and eventually joined (by invitation) the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, where he played for ten years.

But then he decided that he wanted to make a little money. So he joined Nicola Horlick and made, in his own words, hundreds of times more than he ever could from music. Hs initial passion, however, never deserted him and in time he decided that money could only go so far. He returned to the violin.

Meanwhile, Stephanie Waite had done something not dissimilar. She had played the violin from the age of two. At eighteen, she went to Cambridge to study English literature and moved into teaching after graduating, including several years teaching English and Music at Pentonville prison.

One night, however, she attended a string quartet concert at London’s Wigmore Hall. She remembers neither who was playing nor what they played. Her principal recollection of that evening was the overwhelming feeling that this was what she wanted to be doing. She had to get back into music.

By different routes, both Enrico and Stephanie found themselves playing in one of the major orchestras, she with the violins, he as first viola. The orchestra was too big for them to meet but, by what turned out to be a happy coincidence, they got to know each other on the homebound train. Soon after, they were married and since then they have frequently given violin duo concerts together.

Stephanie and Enrico: wonderfully performing glorious music
in the beautiful setting of Wardown House

One of those concerts was in Wardown House, which is where we met them.

Two odd and serendipitous paths to that place. Where, by further serendipity, we listened to them at just a time when we most needed the balm they provided.

Life, as my mother’s experience shows, often gets things badly wrong. Sometimes it does them exactly right. And this was one of those occasions.

For that, at least, I’m grateful.