Sunday, 9th January, 2022
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| With not so little Juliet in my arms on Kings' Day |
Good morning all.
Let me start this week's post by sharing some good news which is a bit rare at the moment. Last week'st I reported that Eladio's 99 year old mother was very ill. We really thought it was the end but it wasn't. The good news is that by 2nd January she had completely recovered, enough to join in a family whatsapp call. Thank goodness for that I say and cheers to her. I can't wait to see her reach 100, the first member of her family to do so.
That cheered us up enormously last Sunday. It was a quiet day for us spent alone with Pippa. We needed some quiet time to recover from the excesses of our New Year's celebrations. I always find the beginning of a new year difficult. It takes time to adjust I think. Thus 2022 began quietly. But my friends, the party, at least in Spain, was not over as we had Kings' Day to come. More about that later.
On Sunday I dared go out for a walk despite the pain in my knee. I reckoned it could not do much damage as it will be operated on on 13th of this month. Yes, that's next week. As I will be out of action for a while afterwards I thought the walk would do me good. It did and I came back feeling energised. Lunch and dinner were leftovers, so no news there. There was news though when I had a very long Facetime video call with our friends Kathy and Phil who live in my beloved Yorkshire. Kathy was still getting over Covid - poor thing. Most of the symptoms had gone except for a wretched cough. Surprisingly Phil continued to test negative which may prove some people are immune. Who knows? My other friends, Jacky and her husband John, are not in this category as they too got Covid on Christmas Day. I was sorry to hear that and hope they are better soon. Thankfully the Omicron variant is less harsh than the previous Alpha and Delta ones. As the virus has taken hold and spread like wildfire we know more and more people who have got it whereas we did not know anyone in our circle or family with Covid before. In my opinion this proves Omicron is the most contagious of all the variants. On the other hand, this and the vaccine programme are achieving what many governments want and that is "herd immunity". Remember that term when Covid began? It was unthinkable then - Boris Johnson didn't agree - but now it looks it might be achievable but not through the way he had planned. I hope this proves the prediction of the WHO that this year we will see the end of Covid as we know it today. Time will tell of course.
On a different note, that day the Facebook reminded me of a photo of Eladio and I taken on New Year's Eve in 2010 - 12 years ago; no, 11 years ago. Does it matter? We looked so much younger. Wow so much has happened since then. I got lots of compliments but I know that we look older. However, the good news here is that as a couple we remain united and in love. What would I do without my wonderful husband by my side? If you haven't seen it, this is it. Today Eladio's hair is greyer - at least he has hair - and I have loads more wrinkles especially around my neck. I enviously see that my eyelids didn't droop in 2010 as they do now.
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| Eladio and I on NYE 2010 - looking a lot younger but just as happy as a couple |
We discussed age in our video call as Kathy and I often do these days. I predicted that my bones -arthritis will probably be my downfall. But who knows? We also discussed having very old parents and caring for them and that one day it will be our own children facing the same situation with us. Not a nice thought. Wouldn't it be nice to age without all the aches and pains and diseases such as dementia and Parkinsons? Hopefully science can help some time in the future. Again, who knows?
Apart from our walk and my Facetime call I didn't do much that day of any interest so let me move on to Monday 3rd January. I was up at 7 am and had quite a long and quiet day in parts. The morning was quiet and we went on our walk - slowly in my case. I made "cocido" for lunch, that Madrilenian winter dish based on chickpeas and various meats and vegetables. We needed a siesta afterwards. I was up and about shortly afterwards thinking just how quiet our life was when I heard noise downstairs.
It was Oli and family who had come on a surprise visit. It seems they were at Lidl when Elliot said "shopping, no. Booboos' house" (Booboo is his name for his grandfather). He clearly does not like shopping as Eladio doesn't either. They certainly livened up the house and it was wonderful to have their company in the library lounge with the fire on.
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| Enjoying the surprise visit of our grandchildren on Monday |
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| What an honour - my father's obituary in The Telegraph this week |
"Courtenay Lloyd, well-loved schoolmaster who taught Russian
to spies and married an exiled princess – obituary
The polyglot Lloyd taught at the Cambridge Joint Services
language school, then at Bradford Grammar, where he let his showman side emerge
Courtenay Lloyd, who has died aged 102, hunted Nazis in
post-War Germany, taught a generation of future diplomats – and spies – at the
Joint Services School for Linguists in Cambridge, became an inspirational
teacher at Bradford Grammar School, and married a Russian princess.
Charles Courtenay Lloyd was born in Amington, then in
Warwickshire, on May 1 1919, the son of the Reverend John Collins Lloyd and his
wife Dorothy (née Scull). His father later became vicar of St Mary’s Church,
Henbury, near Bristol, and Courtenay was educated at Clifton College, where he
excelled at languages.
When he was 16, however, his father, fearful of the effects
of the Great Depression, removed him mid-term and secured him a job at the
Imperial Tobacco Company, where one of his parishioners was general manager.
Lloyd’s longevity can be partly attributed to his rarely touching the free
carton of cigarettes he received every week.
The job – collating coverage of the company’s activities in
foreign newspapers – was ideal for a linguist, but he longed to continue his
studies, and after taking night classes won a place at Selwyn College,
Cambridge, to read French and German.
In 1940 he joined the RNVR, where in the cruiser Norfolk, he
caused great amusement among his shipmates by kneeling to say his prayers, and
wearing pyjamas; he also recalled that one of his duties was to hand out French
letters to the seamen whenever they reached port, despite having no idea what
they were for.
In April 1941 he served as liaison officer in several
destroyers on loan to the Norwegian Navy, based in Liverpool and employed on
Atlantic convoy duties. Briefly he served in the British destroyer Wells as
signals officer, before in late 1944 he was appointed to the Admiralty to work
for the Director of Naval Intelligence.
VE-Day saw him in Orkney, where, he recalled, the habitual
quiet was shattered by drunken servicemen taking service cars for joyrides and
pranging them.
Requesting an appointment which would make use of his
rapidly acquired Norwegian, he was sent to Oslo in October 1945 to serve with
the Allied forces overseeing the dismantling of the German occupation. In 1943
he was awarded the Norwegian War Medal and in 1946 King Haakon VII presented
him with the Liberty Medal.
Lloyd was then offered a job by the Allied Control
Commission in Germany, heading a team of six who were tasked with tracking down
Nazi war criminals in hiding. Three of the team were German Jews who had fled
before the War and become British citizens. Lloyd recalled the work as not
being too difficult, since most Germans, including the police, were eager to
co-operate.
In 1948 he finally resumed his interrupted studies at
Cambridge, switching to German and Norwegian. He then studied Russian under
Professor (later Dame) Elizabeth Hill. She became a lifelong friend, a
formidable character who would rearrange his furniture to her liking whenever
she visited him.
In 1951 she invited him to become her “right-hand man” at
the Cambridge branch of the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL), where
National Servicemen were put through intensive training in Russian so that they
could become translators and interpreters – or in some cases, operatives – for
the Intelligence Services. The Russians regarded it as a “spy school” and
tasked Guy Burgess with collecting information on it.
Courtenay Lloyd during his time in HMS Wells, 1942
Lloyd protested that his Russian was insufficient, but
Elizabeth Hill insisted that he merely needed to be a lesson ahead of his
pupils. He proved to be a natural teacher and administrator, remembered by
Philip Hanson, later Professor of Soviet Economics at Birmingham University,
for his “amazing ability to recall from one week to the next who had got
exactly which grammatical construction wrong the last time round”.
He was described by Geoffrey Elliott and Harold Shukman in
Secret Classrooms (2002), their history of the JSSL, as “a shy and gentle man
prone to blushing, [who] figures improbably in the archives as the official in
charge of discipline and of reprimanding absentees and other miscreants, though
doing so must have hurt him more than it hurt them.”
One of his colleagues was Her Serene Highness Princess Elena
von Lieven, a Russian aristocrat whose family had fled to Bulgaria after the
Revolution, then into Western Europe after the Russian invasion; she was the
god-daughter of Princess Zinaida Yusupova, mother of Rasputin’s murderer.
Penniless, she was working as an announcer for the BBC Russian Service when
Elizabeth Hill recruited her to the JSSL. She and Lloyd married in 1953.
Lloyd subsequently taught Russian at RAF College Cranwell
and published a First Russian Reader in 1965. In 1964, with the Cold War
thawing, he took up a post teaching modern languages at Bradford Grammar
School.
The Lloyds purchased a 20-room mansion which they crammed
with lodgers; a Czech family who had fled following the suppression of the
Prague Spring were housed for free. As his wife took up a teaching job some
distance away at Leeds University, Lloyd took on the cleaning and, often more
pluckily than successfully, the cooking.
In contrast to his quiet demeanour at home, where he was
content to let his voluble wife do most of the talking, Lloyd proved to be
something of a showman as a teacher, and was much-loved.
He was particularly cherished for the school trips he
organised to the USSR, where pupils could expect to be entertained at the flat
of the British Cultural Attaché – one of Lloyd’s former JSSL students. One
downside, the boys recalled, was that their party sometimes received inferior
service on trains or in shops, because Lloyd spoke Russian so well that he was
assumed to be a native rather than a tourist.
Lloyd was a traditionalist who once threatened his wife with
divorce if she bought a dishwasher; if prevailed on to accompany his family to
a beach, he would sit fully dressed reading The Times. When his son asked him
to explain the facts of life, Lloyd retorted: “Get on with your German verbs!”
He liked to holiday alone, and walked everywhere, having never driven a car
except in postwar Germany.
Lloyd endured a good deal of tragedy in his life: his
brother died of polio, aged 16, in 1938; his sister died in an aeroplane crash
along with her husband and three children in 1971; his wife died in 1999, their
son George in 2001, and George’s wife in 2008. Lloyd remained stoical,
recalling the words printed on a picture of a fawn that hung above his bed as a
child: “Be a good beast, suffer in silence.”
He retired to Madrid to live with his surviving daughter
Masha and her family, and latterly gave English lessons to his carers. On his
100th birthday his daughter published a biography of him, and he received a
personal message of congratulation from the King of Norway.
Courtenay Lloyd, born May 1 1919, died November 8 2021"
That was my breakfast reading. I loved reading the comments too and was surprised at the interest in my father by The Telegraph's readers but then of course his life was quite extraordinary. These are just two of them: "What an interesting and productive life this chap lived. Wonderful that his skills in languages were picked up when he was so young, and then polished up to the betterment of our country. The few little differences he had to the common man just add exactly the right amount of spice to the obituary. Job very well done. RIP." "Another light from a lost world extinguished. Fab obit full of touches befitting a man who obviously touched many.RIP and God bless you Sir."
Later friends sent me the newspaper clipping. It is far more impressive to see the written print although as a PR professional I do know that far more people read the news online than they do in print.
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| My father's "obit" in The Telegraph this week |
Wednesday 5th turned out to be an important day for many reasons. At home life was quiet. The highlights were our walk in the sun and good old fish and chips for lunch. 5th December in Spain is known as "Noche de Reyes" - the Eve of the 3 Kings - and children around the country get as excited as children in the rest of the world when Father Christmas comes. Spanish kids actually get both but traditionally "Reyes" is always more important. Parents take their children to see the many many 3 Kings' processions held all around the country. It was to be Elliot's first time. I think he didn't grasp much as he was asleep part of the time and it was raining. I remember when we used to take his mother and her sister to the procession in Boadilla many years ago. Far grander is the one held in Madrid but who wants the bother of traffic, parking and trying to find a spot to see their majesties, Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar? It's much easier to watch it on TV.
I watched a lot of TV that day including the beautiful film "August Rush" a sort of modern day Oliver Twist but where the orphan is a musical prodigy. A bit sickly sweet but I adored it. That night Eladio and I watched a film we also loved. "100 year journey" tells the story of an Indian family setting up a restaurant in rural France with competition from a traditional Michelin star restaurant (Helen Mirren) across the road. This really took our mind off all our current worries which, if you have been following my story in the past few months, will know it is about our squatter. Damn the man.
It was that day I came across the book "Putin's People" written by the ex FT correspondent in Russia, the British journalist Catherine Belton. A friend sent me the pdf but I would probably have bought the book anyway. It has been named book of the year for 2020 by none less than The Economist, The Telegraph, The Times and The Financial Times. I have only read the first 30 pages but am very alarmed at Putin's tentacles in London - a frightening portrait of Russia's influence in the western world. In the book she tells of interviewing our squatter in Boadilla at a cafeteria where he describes the part he played in bringing Putin to power. She refers to him as a "KGB operative". Do you now understand why we are so worried? Here is an interview with her where she describes meeting "he who shall not be mentioned".
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| The book where our squatter is described as a KGB operative and one of those who was instumental in bringing Putin to power. |
In France meanwhile, President Macron was damning those unvaccinated as numbers of those infected sore. He used the words "Je vais emmerder les non vaccinés". His words very not very presidential and this could cause him problems with elections coming up. Frankly I think he is right. This week Italy has made it compulsory for those over 50 to be vaccinated. In Austria it is compulsory for all those eligible and the unvaccinated in most parts of the world are those who are causing most admissions to hospitals.
This week we learned that the tennis star Novak Djokovic is probably one of them. He has certainly showed his doubts about being vaccinated on occasion and now he is stuck in Australia where he had traveled to compete in the Australian Open which he has won many times. You all know by now that he has been detained and that the Australian population are up in arms.
This story is front page news worldwide and has probably damaged Novak's reputation forever. So while he was in quarantine and detained in some seedy hotel on the outskirts of Melbourne, life continued for us mortals.
We woke up on Kings' Day looking forward to enjoying it with our grandchildren. They were here for breakfast and Oli brought the "roscones" - a "roscón" is a special cake with or without cream in it and is a sort of enriched sponge cake with angelica on the top and is delicious. I laid the table so it all looked festive. I caught Elliot in the photo sitting in my father's place. He is of course the future.
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| Elliot at the breakfast table on Kings' Day |
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| Our tree with the presents ready for opening |
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| Elliot enjoying opening presents |
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| Our Kings' Day lunch table |
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| Our Kings' Day family photo with my father 10 years ago. |
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| Wearing my new dress |
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| The entry for my father and his family in the 1921 Census |
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| Elliot playing with his toys |
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| 6 Heaton Grove, Bradford. Our family home from 1965 to 2005 |
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| With my father at our old house on Christmas Day 1990 (circa) |
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| Elliot playing yestereday at our house |
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