FLORA & FAUNA

exactly what you would go out and buy now. The rake seems to have been top tool and is unchanged, though it has a sort of half-brother that boasts a spike. Perhaps it came from Italy, for Christ seems to be carrying one at the Resurrection in Titian’s Noli me tangere, where Mary takes him for the gardener. The Riverside Gardens is perhaps the sadder book. Wonderful prime-site, status-symbol gardens drifting to the river from either bank are all now devoured by concrete. At the Bridge House on London Bridge, which seems to have housed a sort of London County Council, there was a kitchen garden that fed a multitude and an annual festival with green branches and green candles that continued for over two hundred years. All gone. Across the river was Winchester Palace with vast ecclesiastical wealth and land. All sold. A breath of Fulham Palace does still just survive in bewildered paths and a forlorn gateway. As for Whitehall Palace, we all know what happened to that. Like what remains of the gardens of the Tower of London, it is no longer a place of gillyflowers. Lambeth Palace still has a walled garden to one side, but the traffic screeches by and it is invisible. As for More’s own creation, his gardens at Chelsea, there are only a few patches of rose-red wall left, a queerlooking stone slab in the Moravian Burial Ground, and a decrepit-looking mulberry tree said to have been planted

A ha-ha

by More himself, which if he saw it now he would order to be removed. More went to Chelsea for seclusion (despite 100 servants and a large family) and to meditate in the garden, where he had built a private library for reading and prayer. Christianson believes that it was in Chelsea that More’s religious strength deepened, enabling him to defy the king. There is a statue to More standing on the Chelsea Embankment, newly decked with gold. More made jokes about contemporaries who flaunted

themselves in scarlet and gold, but there. Way to the north along the King’s Road is the awkward dog’s leg at the World’s End which has been annoying town planners for years. I was once told by an old man who used to shoot snipe on the Chelsea marshes that this corner marked the boundary of More’s cornfields. Between the dog’s leg and the statue now there’s solid masonry: prime-site streets, but of little beauty. The maps in this book fetch a sigh too: woodlands, orchards, vines, fountains, meadows in the heart of central London. Behind the Tower rise green hills. Only the Abbey stands immoveable, and the earth is presumably still beneath the pavements. Anybody who cares for gardens or English history will want both these books for Christmas. To order these books, see order form on page 78

LETTERS

LAST POST

Dear Sir, Nigel Jones’s disparaging and pretentious review of Max Arthur’s Last Post (LR, November) does him no credit, not least because it is riddled with errors. He writes that, ‘the only common qualifying factor for inclusion in The(sic) Last Postis the random one of having survived to be a centenarian.’ Not so. The common factor is that those included were the last remaining British survivors of WW1. He writes that, ‘there is nothing distinctive about Arthur’s nine.’ As 21 survivors contributed to the book, which nine does Jones have in mind? His puerile sneer that the book, ‘is not of high literary distinction’ is a gratuitous insult to the veterans who are not, they would be the first to admit, literary men, and completely misses the point which is that theirs are the authentic voices of that time. He refers to ‘a distasteful element’ of the book showing ‘signs of haste’. I suggest that tracking down and interviewing the 21 survivors could hardly have been a rushed job, as the final publication proves (during the period from the first interview to publication twelve of them died). At the book launch at the Army Museum, Major

General Sebastian Roberts said, ‘The remarkable thing about Max Arthur is that in a country which keeps covenant with its war dead in a quite exceptional way, he uniquely and personally, but on all our behalf, has kept covenant with the living veterans.’ Nigel Jones should be ashamed of himself. Yours faithfully, Group Captain Don McClen, CBE, AFC, RAF (ret’d) Sherborne

LEG-PULL

Dear Sir, In his review of J M Coetzee’s Slow Man (LR, September), Anthony Gardner explains: ‘Paul Rayment … has no family, so when he returns from hospital with an amputated leg he requires a nurse-cum-housekeeper to look after him.’ Even with two legs, I can’t follow. Whose leg did Rayment bring home? Yours faithfully, Graham Landon Newcastle

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006