Walking down Magdalene Street this evening I was depressed to find that one of my favourite establishments — a lovely secondhand bookshop — had gone. I guess its lease was up and the landlord (Magdalene College in all probability) proposed a whopping increase. This is why Cambridge is increasingly being denuded of ‘real’ shops and is now crammed with the kind of ludicrous boutiques which are the only enterprises that can pay the exorbitant rents demanded by the colleges.

Giles Smith has been on the road again…

It’s a week since the new Lotus Europa S left me and I still bear the bruises. Specifically, I bear a bruise the size of a hubcap in the triceps area of my right arm – the legacy of my repeated attempts to get out of the car while retaining at least some degree of dignity.

It’s low, you see, the Europa S. Low and thin. You don’t so much climb into it as pull it on, the way you might pull on a pair of trousers or a sleeping bag. And once you’re in there, you are, technically, lying in the middle of the road, separated from the Tarmac by some leather upholstery, a sheet of metal and approximately two and a half centimetres of clear air.

The thing is to choose your location before exiting.

A crowded high street, for instance, may not be the best place to discover the full range of physical exertion involved. And if, at any point, both your palms are flat down on the pavement of that high street, with your legs still somewhere back in the car, as mine were in those tentative, trial stages, then you could end up wishing you had taken some private instruction first.

My advice: lean hard against the door-jamb. The catch will bruise your arm, but it will give you all the support you need. And take it one limb at a time. Another thing to master: a mock casual facial expression for use at the completion of the manoeuvre. It helps to mask the embarrassment and the pain.

And all because he wanted to drive “what is, in essence, a rocket-powered biscuit tin.”

That boy can write.

On Christmas Night we went visiting, and our hostess announced that everyone was expected to do a ‘party piece’. Desperate to avoid singing, I asked if I might do a reading and my glance alighted on a wonderful book I hadn’t seen in three decades — the collection of ‘Letters from Paris’ dispatched by Janet Flanner to the New Yorker — and read a passage from that.

Afterwards, I was offered the loan of the book and accepted with alacrity. I’ve had difficulty putting it down ever since. It has some of the best reportage I’ve ever had the good fortune to read. Here, for example, is Flanner’s dispatch for April 19, 1945 in which she describes the scene at the Gare de Lyon:

The next day, the first contingent of women prisoners arrived by train, bringing with them as very nearly their only baggage the proofs, on their faces and their bodies and in their weakly spoken reports, of the atrocities that had been their lot and that of hundreds of thousands of others in the numerous concentration camps our armies are liberating, almost too late. These three hundred women, who came in exchange for German women held in France, were from the prison camp of Ravensbruck, in the marshes midway between Berlin and Stettin. They arrived at the Gare de Lyon at eleven in the morning and were met by a nearly speechless crowd ready with welcoming bouquets of lilacs and other spring flowers, and by General de Gaulle, who wept. As he shook hands with some wretched woman leaning from a window of the train, she suddenly screamed C’est lui!, and pointed to her husband, standing nearby, who had not recognised her. There was a general anguished babble of search, of finding, or not finding. There was almost no joy; the emotion penetrated beyond that, to something nearer pain. Too much suffering lay behind this homecoming, and it was the suffering that showed in the women’s faces and bodies.

Of the three hundred women whom the Ravensbruck Kommandant had selected as being able to put up the best appearance, eleven had died en route. One woman, taken from the train unconscious and placed on a litter, by chance opened her eyes just as de Gaulle’s color guard marched past her with the French tricolor. She lifted an emaciated arm, pointed at the flag, and swooned again. Another woman, who still had a strong voice and an air of authority, said she had been a camp nurse. Unable to find her daughter and son-in-law in the crowd, she began shouting “Monique! Pierre!” and crying out that her son and husband had been killed fighting in the resistance and now where were those two who were all she had left? Then she sobbed weakly. One matron, six years ago renowned in Paris for her elegance, had become a bent, dazed, shabby old woman. When her smartly attired brother, who met her, said, like an automaton, “Where is your luggage?”, she silently handed him what looked like a dirty black sweater, fastened with safety pins round whatever small belongings were rolled inside. In a way, all the women looked alike: their faces were gray-green, with reddish-brown circles around their eyes, which seemed to see but not to take in. They were dressed like scarecrows, in what had been given to them at camp, clothes taken from the dead of all nationalities. As the lilacs fell from inert hands, the flowers made a purple carpet on the platform and the perfume of the trampled flowers mixed with the stench of illness and dirt.

This is wonderful, spare writing. It’s the journalist as eyewitness, giving her reader a feeling of what it was like to be there. It combines the big, impressionistic picture with the tiny details that fix truths in one’s mind: the socialite’s brother, still trapped — despite the war — in his privileged cocoon, asking his sister about her luggage; the unconscious woman who wakes to see the French flag, and then faints away again; the scent of lilacs mixed with the stench of death. Flanner once said of herself: “I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.” Quelle eponge!