Bellamy’s and the art of recovery

I always thought there had to be another Bellamy’s and, of course, there is. It’s on Bruton Street, W1 and looks a rather expensive restaurant. Anywhere with a separate oyster bar will need careful consideration, yes?

Bellamy’s takes its name from the establishment in Evelyn Waugh’s sublime World War II Sword of Honour trilogy. It was the London bar and restaurant where the ‘officers and gentlemen’ of the middle novel, often in transit, would meet and greet as bombs fell all around, leaving people homeless. As in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, set around Clapham Common, there was a generally fatalistic attitude; your number either came up or it didn’t and you simply carried on as best you could.

Waugh was a wonderful writer and the trilogy, together with Brideshead Revisited, is among the finest literary achievements in the English language. He was also a mighty snob. ‘People ask why I don’t write about the working classes. Well, the fact is I’m not very interested in them,’ he once told an interviewer. His novels often concern the Mayfair set, the ‘Bright Young Things’ he satirised relentlessly, though his long stint in the armed forces showed that his ear was finely tuned to the habits and language of the common serviceman.

Waugh had to recover from various setbacks. The ‘hero’ or more correctly the central character of Men At Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender is Guy Crouchback, a thoroughly decent man who comes late to the Army (the Halberdiers) and is therefore nicknamed ‘uncle’.

His relationship with the Catholic church is uneasy and his marriage ends in divorce. Waugh, whose first marriage also failed, converted to Catholicism and opposed all moves towards church reform. He fought many acerbic battles, often with interviewers and reviewers lacking his intelligence, while alcohol and medication took their toll. His last ten years, when he moved to Combe Florey House in Somerset, were more peaceful. For someone who died at 62 his creative output was quite phenomenal.

I’ll probably go to Bellamy’s just once, taking a copy of Men At Arms with me. Apart from anything else it’s very funny and features Apthorpe and his portable toilet, known as his thunderbox. ‘I say, old man, you haven’t seen my thunderbox, have you?’ he asks a fellow Halberdier. My problem is that I’m running out of suitable companions. Bill Chapman could quote extensively from Waugh and we’d have gone to La Barca in Waterloo, while the little Iranian place on Holland Road is a non-runner now that committed Arsenal man Pat McElroy has also departed the scene. Mercifully David Ashforth and Jim Old are still going strong, which is also good news for The Plough, just off the M4 near Swindon.

I’m going through the leanest of spells on the betting front, not that even an impressive list of setbacks can rival the hardships mentioned above.

Where recovery is concerned, I suppose the Alpino (long gone) on Marylebone High Street would have offered welcome comfort and consolation had Import not won the Wokingham in 1976.

Three years earlier there was a long period of reflection when Jacinth, whom I considered unbeatable in the 1000 Guineas, went down to subsequent Oaks heroine Mysterious. In fact it was quite a year, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie hoping that Venice would ease their pain following the loss of a daughter in the film Don’t Look Now and Thomas McGuane finally making his mark as an author (more in the States than here) with the publication of his novel Ninety-Two in the Shade.

Parts of this book have stayed with me ever since 1973. Thomas Skelton, adrift in a dangerous, ‘anything goes’ place like Key West, awakes one morning in a strange hotel where substances have clearly been consumed overnight. He sets off to walk to Key West and it is already hot, even at 5am. He floats in a skiff  –  all he really wants in life is to be a skiff guide  –  sinking a few beers in rapid succession. It is a possible turning point in his life, but no more than that. ‘As he drifted over the stony, illuminated reef, he saw that he would have to find a way of going on.’ Yes, that’s right. Whatever the nature of the setback, unfortunate or foolish, you have to find a way of going on. McGuane and Richard Ford are the two great modern American writers, I think.

Much closer to home, we lost the gifted cricket writer David Foot, a good friend with deep human sympathy, as his biographies of Wally Hammond and Harold Gimblett demonstrated. One of his finest pieces features the war-damaged Siegfried Sassoon fielding almost nonchalantly at mid-on during his time at Heytesbury, where he would interweave cricketing imagery with that of the Somme. This is unforgettable:

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats

And in the ruined trenches lashed with rain.

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bat

And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

And going to the office in the train….

Cricket was Sassoon’s way of dealing with the mental anguish of war, although the occasional and inevitable spasm stopped him in his tracks. In his own way he was dealing with the sheer horror of the First World War and this truly remarkable balancing act saw him through to his eighties. He found a way of going on.

Like Foot, and indeed John Arlott and other cricket writers of similar vintage, Michael Henderson would have been more than happy for cricket to carry on the way it was  –  three-day county games, the quiet Sunday in-between and every serious follower in the country knowing who came from where. There was a time when the names of the all-conquering Surrey team of the 1950s rolled off the tongue but relatively few people could tell you which county Ben Stokes plays for. (In fairness, he’s not often available anyway.)

If you love cricket and opera, there is only one book for you and it’s Henderson’s That Will Be England Gone, a line from a Philip Larkin poem, which deals with the regrettable rise of the one-day game, culminating in The Hundred  (‘an abomination’), at the expense of the traditional version.

Unlike many sports journalists today, Henderson is not afraid of treading on a few toes. If you thought admiration of the late Hugh McIlvanney stretched right across the board, you’d be wrong. Henderson thought he became a parody of his former self, a process smoothed by the second bottle of red.

When writers can be as direct as this, their mellower thoughts are well worth careful appraisal. Henderson believes ‘a thread of solitariness runs through the fabric of Somerset cricket’. Well, Gimblett and Peter Roebuck, both considerably gifted, took their own lives. And the ‘barking of the black dog’ brought Marcus Trescothick’s Test career to a premature end. When depression forced him to return home from Nagpur in India, it was Alastair Cook who took over and promptly scored a century in England’s second innings. He added another 31 hundreds before retiring from Tests a short time ago.

The notion that ‘nice guys come second’ is complete nonsense, of course, because there are very few nicer people than Cook, who warmly embraced Trescothick when Essex denied Somerset their first county championship in 2019.

It was Trescothick’s last match and his only way of recovering from the cruellest  –  in sport, anyway  –  of mental setbacks was to write his very honest and widely praised autobiography Coming Back To Me. The mist came down on that final day at Taunton, though the Quantocks towards Combe Florey could still be picked out. Not the most sympathetic of men, even Evelyn Waugh might have felt for the young man starting afresh in life.

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