Diana Graves was laid to rest beside her husband, David, at Hanwell cemetery, west London on March 1 after a sad but uplifting funeral at the beautiful St Barnabas church in Ealing. Deeply moving tributes were paid by both sons and Heather Mills, a former colleague of David's (and mine) and close friend of Diana's.
Diana Graves was perhaps known to only a few Salut! readers, generally those who knew her late husband, David, a great colleague and friend.
Diana died on Sunday (Jan 31), far too early, after battling pancreatic cancer for several months. She had contracted Covid while in hospital for the tests that unexpectedly revealed her much more serious problem but I am not aware that the virus played any part in her death.
Diana remained philosophical, brave and even optimistic despite knowing the gravity of her condition. She broke the news to me in a hands-free call I took as I drove through glorious vineyards in the south of France. She was eager to talk and full of hope, speaking with great determination about reviving her idea of an evening out we'd planned - Diana, my wife Joelle and our friends Stuart and Jenny Higgins - until different travel arrangements and then lockdowns intervened. She was adamant it would one day go ahead.
When we spoke again, after my return to the UK, Diana was still a bundle of confidence and joy, excited about work to update the family home in Ealing, only a coupe of miles from ours, while she stayed with a sister in Shropshire. To my immense regret, we did not speak again.
Joelle and I are devastated by the news and our daughters, Christelle and Nathalie, share the pain now felt by Diana and David's boys Oliver and Nathan.
This is how, in 2007, I remembered David's tragic death on the fifth anniversary of it happening, and how I had witnessed Diana's magnificently dignified handling of the wretched task of telling the boys.
By all means check the link and see the kind words left by readers at that time about David. I will not transfer the comments here as this, essentially, is about Diana. RIP two great friends
By and large, Emmanuel Macron (photograph from the Elyseé Palace's official website) strikes me as being the best president France has had in decades.
I realise that isn't saying a great deal and certainly see that he has flaws: he can appear arrogant and dismissive of ordinary concerns and is, for such an intelligent man, occasionally clumsy with words. The charge of Islamophobia is absurd but some of his statements, during the recent controversy over the republication of cartoons Muslims find offensive, have been ill-judged. But he generally acts with a firmness, clarity and level of honesty too often lacking among modern political leaders.
It is also important to recognise that the context of his recent declarations is the bloodshed and misery caused by hideous terrorist atrocities, even though it is utterly wrong to blame Muslims as a whole for the horrific crimes of those who claim to be acting in Islam's name. Now, Mr Macron and his government must act with care to demonstrate that their response to extremism is not capable of being misinterpreted. I explore these issues in my latest piece for The National, which the editor kindly permits me to reproduce here ...
One of the first books about journalism I read was Evelyn Waugh's classic novel, Scoop. And 82 years after it was published, Scoop is back.
This time, the author is not the long-dead Waugh but the much alive Terry Pattinson. Closer to 80 than 70, he not only rattles off a stream of gags and one-liners on Facebook but has found time for a hugely entertaining book charting his rise (or descent?) from the Blaydon Courier to Fleet Street.
From those honourable origins in local paper journalism in the North East of England, he went on to work for the pre-Murdoch Sun, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror.
A phone call from my friend Martin Emmerson, a BBC broadcaster from Sunderland, brought me shocking news of the death of John Hays [above, right], the founder of Hays Travel. John built the UK's biggest independent travel agency chain from the small business he opened in 1980 in spare space at the back of the children's clothing shop owned by his mother in Seaham. John was 71 and a good friend ...
It was up in the East Stand of the Stadium of Light that I first met John Hays.
This week, I have been challenged on my view that while Muslims, or anyone else for that matter, are fully entitled to take offence at something that is written or drawn about them or their faith, taking offence is as far as it is morally acceptable for them to go.
Nothing that has happened in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in the north-western suburbs of Paris, Nice or other locations where fanatics decide to arm themselves with knives or firearms to commit cowardly attacks on innocents, shakes that belief.
Image: SilanocUPDATE (Thursday Oct 22): two pupils aged 14 and 15, suspected of taking money from the killer, are among seven people 'mis en examen', as close as it gets in French law to being formally charged, with complicity in a terrorist attack. Among the adults are individuals accused of involvement in the online denunciation of Samuel Paty that may have led directly to his murder ...
It is not uncommon for me to reproduce here the work I have done forThe National and successive editors have kindly given approval. It is less common for me to post straightforward news stories I've written, not least because knowledge about the events such reports cover tends to develop, often rapidly, and what is initially believed to be true sometimes turns out to be less so, or not at all. The gruesome Islamist murder of a teacher in the Parisian banlieue is a reasonable exception because some of the emerging detail, about how the killer prepared and achieved his despicable mission, should be seen as widely as possible.
I have long believed that among the entirely sensible responses to terrorism should be the immediate arrest of anyone who had contact with the perpetrator/s. Yes, me included if for some reason I'd interviewed or otherwise met him/her/them. Innocents can be excluded quite quickly. This has happened following the Paris attack and what a shame the killer did not survive to see what he brought on his family, friends and associates ...
By the early evening of Saturday June 10, 1944, the bold fighting men of a Waffen SS unit were able to start relaxing after their day's work.
No fewer than 642 French civilians had been slaughtered in Oradour-sur-Glane, a village set in lush Limousin countryside. The victims included 247 women and 205 children, among them little Désirée Machefer (pictured above), who were herded into the parish church and either burned alive or shot - or both.
Job done, the Germans must have been thinking as they embarked on a night of celebration, singing heartily and sinking copious amounts of plundered wine from the remaining houses not already set on fire. Those buildings could await their turn next morning when the hungover Nazi soldiers would complete the task of turning a bustling village into a charred and ghostly testament to a monstrous war crime.
In the 50 years I have been visiting and, at times, living in France, I have often thought of going to Oradour to pay my own insignificant respects to the martyred village. Only this month, breaking a long journey from the Mediterranean coast to London, did I finally get round to it.
I have nothing much new to say about the massacre. What happened that day - at the end of a week in which Allied forces landed on Normandy beaches and, so much more mundanely, my mother had her 30th birthday - is an essential part of the history of warfare in general and the Second World War in particular and is therefore well documented.
Of the officers responsible for the slaughter, one (Gen Heinz Lammerding, who had also ordered the hanging of 99 Resistants the day before 113km away in Tulle), avoided trial altogether, except in absence, and resumed a prosperous business career in Dusseldof. Another, Major Adolf Dickmann, described as a bloodthirsty drunkard, was killed in action in Normandy later the same month.
And, as a rare survivor, Robert Hébras, recalls in his slim volume, 10 June 1944: The Tragedy Hour by Hour, a third, Lt Heinz Barth, finally brought to trial in East Germany in 1983, insisted it was a completely normal act.
No, he is said in other accounts to have added, he had no regrets; "in wartime, one acts harshly and with means available".
He was jailed for life but released after 14 years, on account of age, health and having finally "expressed remorse", and lived for a further 10 years.
There are, of course, people of the far right in France, Britain, Germany, the United States and elsewhere who struggle to find fault with the Nazis and their evil acts, to the point in some cases of feeling the wrong side won the war. They occasionally pop up in Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National despite her attempts to detoxify its rotten image; her father, Jean-Marie, founder of the party as the Front National, has infamously dismissed the Nazi occupation as relatively benign and the death camps as a mere detail of war.
In August, one or more persons preceded my own visit to the impressive memorial centre adjacent to the preserved remnants of the old village, now a neighbour of the new Oradour that has developed since the war. But the mission not to pay homage.
He, she or they proceeded to daub the exterior wall, changing the word "martyr" to "menteur" - liar - and asking when the real "truth" would be told*, adding for good measure the name of a much-convicted Nazi apologist, Vincent Reynouard.
We do not know yet who was responsible. It could ,in theory, have been the work of anti-Nazis but why would anyone see a need to demonise demons?
To be fair, Mme Le Pen was among those quick to condemn the desecration.
Beneath grey skies and amid incessant rain, my wife and I walked, mostly in silence as requested, around the blackened streets.
Signs denote where once could be found schools, the baker's shop, a Renault garage, several cafes with some also offering hairdressing, a couturier, a dentist's surgery, the workshops of the blacksmith and wheelwright and so on.
Almost at the end of the walk, but before heading for the cemetery, we arrived at the shell of the church and wandered inside in awe, noting the confessional box where two children were found shot dead after surviving the fire, the altar and a plaque commemorating Oradour's 1914-18 war dead.
My consoeur Anna Pukas James, writing at Facebook after I had posted photographs and the two videos seen below, recalled her own visit a few years ago: "A haunting - and haunted - place." Dave Eyre, another Facebook friend, said it was "most moving places I have ever visited".
As for us, it was a bleak reminder, not of collective German guilt but of man's capacity for inhumanity to his fellow man, woman and child. not a death factory in the sense that Auschwitz was but, because of the calculated destruction in a single day of a large village and all or most who inhabited it, even more disturbing.
I am glad I went but, even 76 years on from the awful event, aware that I shall never forget what I saw there.
* A German version of the 'truth' of the tragedy of Oradour appears at this link and purports to show that the church was set on fire when explosives stored there were detonated by a civilian, possibly a Maquis Resistant and possibly not even French but intent on heaping blame on wholly innocent Nazis (save for the admitted murder of men in Oradour they failed to separate from activists). I am unaware of any evidence that any trace of Resistance or Maquis arms and explosives was found in the village)
Try as I might, I could not persuade Maitre Lucie Simon, the lawyer for 'Youssef', the hero of the latest attack on Charlie Hebdo, to talk at any length to me, let alone put me in touch with her client.
His actions merited a wider world audience. Me Simon put the phone down (later explaining that she had tried three times being doing so to make it clear she did not wish to speak to me). Happy to report we're friends again - 'don't take it personally,' she tells me ... and after a lifetime of having uncommunicative people slam the phone down, I don't.
This is likely to be my last piece for The National from France before my big return to quarantine in the UK next week. When I say I cannot wait to be back, I mean back in France in early 2021 if our government of clowns (copyright Joe Biden) hasn't destroyed all foreign travel by then ...
A 25-year-old Pakistani immigrant has been charged with the attempted murder of two journalists stabbed outside the former offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in an attack underlining a rising terrorism threat in France.
He allegedly made two reconnaissance visits in the days leading up to last Friday's attack in Paris but had no idea Charlie Hebdo had moved premises after the 2015 massacre of 12 people, including journalists, cartoonists and a Muslim police officer.
This glorious image was the work of a North News and Pix photographer to accompany a report of mine about a campaign to save the Bishop Auckland-Darlington branch line
This splendid essay by my friend Bill Taylor first appeared at my tiny site Salut! North, highlights from which I am slowly transferring here before its overdue closure. Bill, writing as long ago has 2011, gets as high as the lights go ...
I’ve never been one to flog a dead horse (actually, that’s not at all true) but trying to breathe life into a dead blog is a different matter [Bill was referring to the neglected date of Salut! North - Ed].
And it’s probably appropriate that this attempted Kiss of Life involves a real-life kiss… no yearning after an unattainable girl in a bus shelter for me.
It’s also mostly set in Shildon, Colin’s hometown, rather than my own, Bishop Auckland, a good three miles away. Strange how great a distance that seems when you’re 14 years old.
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Which is how old I was when, for some inexplicable reason, my friend Peter and I decided to attend a performance of the school play at Bishop Auckland Grammar School. This would be two years before we were both invited not to return and only a year before Colin was to be kicked out.
Anyway, off we went and a pretty dull production it was, too. She Stoops to Conquer, as I recall. The headmaster, Dennis Weatherly – remembered more fondly by some old pupils than others – had heard me read for the part of Tony Lumpkin (the low comedian, for anyone unfamiliar with the play) and remarked sourly that giving it to me would be the most blatant typecasting he’d ever seen.
Come the intermission and we were out in the yard. I was looking around for a suitably remote corner to smoke one of the fourpenny Woodbines that the evil couple in the shop across the street sold singly to impecunious children. And then I was going to suggest we cut our losses, have a quicky froffy coffee in Rossi’s, the local hangout, and go home.
Peter, who I’ll admit was a bit more precocious than I, had other ideas.
Somehow we found ourselves talking to two…. girls. I didn’t talk much to girls in those days; I still regarded them as little more than boys who went backwards when you danced with them (a female teacher once tried briefly to instill the foxtrot into us) and giggled nastily in class when you hadn’t done your geometry homework and were knocked out of your seat by a blow across the head with all the exercise books Cosher Ibbotson had collected. That’s one reason I always sat at the front with the swots. It was far less painful.
Seeing these two, whom I knew only vaguely, out of uniform and into makeup – inexpertly applied, I’m sure, but your average 14-year-old boy doesn’t need much to stir his concupiscence – came as a surprise.
What was an even greater surprise was to hear one say, “If I’m with Pete (much cooler than Peter), you must be with him.”
Back into the play we went and, sure enough, his was sitting next to him and mine – her name was Margaret – was sitting next to me. After an agonising “should I or shouldn’t I” 20 minutes, I took her hand. And far from wrenching her fingers free, she put her head on my shoulder! At a school play!! In the assembly/dining hall!!
We didn’t wait for the end. Margaret whispered that she and her friend had to go and did I want to see her home to Shildon?
With the unheld hand, I did a quick count of the change in my pocket. Just enough for two bus fares to Shildon and one back to Bishop. So, yes, I did indeed want to see her home.
We got off the bus before Peter and his paramour and Margaret led me along a footpath by the railway line.
“This is as far as you can come,” she said, leaning disquietingly up against me. “Otherwise my dad might see you.”
Her eyes were half-closed and her lips were pursed. I leaned towards her, wafted in on her perfume, and murmured, quite intoxicated: “Is that the entrance to Shildon tunnel?”
I was still young enough to be interested in trains. And how often, en route to the metropolitan delights of Darlington, had I travelled through this very burrow. To be standing at one end of it… only one thing remained to consummate my delight. Margaret read my mind.
“You’d have to wait all night,” she said. “The last train’s gone.”
She seized me by the shoulders and applied her lips to mine. And, believe it or not, I quite forgot the tunnel and trains and railway lines. Your first kiss will do that.
It wasn’t Margaret’s first, as I discovered 20 minutes later when she came up for air and said, “You’d better go or you’ll miss the last bus.”
I said I’d see her in school next day and she shook her head.
“I wouldn’t say anything if I was you,” she said. “If Stu-y finds out, he’ll kill you.”
Stu-y? She nodded and named one of the school hard-knocks (as we called them), a strapping young thug with a tendency to punch and kick first and not bother asking questions.
“He’s my boyfriend. So be careful.”
I don’t think Margaret and I ever spoke again. I did catch her once looking at me from a distance with what seemed like a speculative eye. I turned away, in case Stu-y was looking, and speculating, too.
I don’t suppose she’s with him any longer. Hard to think that we’re all 63 now. Truth to tell, I’ve forgotten what that first kiss felt like.
But I’ve never forgotten the thrill that went through me when I first beheld the tunnel.
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