FRUITS OF THE MARAZION QUAKER LIBRARY (12) - SHEILA HANCOCK (2022) 'OLD RAGE'

 Jo Wren, a Quaker Elder at the Marazion Meeting House, donated a copy of Sheila Hancock's latest book to our Marazion Quaker library a couple of weeks ago, saying that since Sheila was a Quaker her story should be of interest. Jo had just finished reading her own copy and was impressed. I have now finished reading these 258 pages and agree. This is a work that many will find inspiring. Joan Bakewell, reviewing the book in the Guardian, wrote: 'Her gift for directly communicating the open-heartedness and spirit of adventure with which she confronts her life ... is the stuff of bestsellers'. 

Sheila was born in February 1933 and is now 91 years old. 'Old Rage' is structured around diary entries from January 2016 to June 2021 which serve to relate events from her life during that period and present her commentary on national matters that are shaping the wider world. Within all this, there are many reflections back to other episodes in her past - these are the thoughts of an octogenarian weaving together the threads of her long life. The book, however, starts in November 2020 when Sheila receives the official communication from Downing Street telling her in strictest confidence that she has been recommended for the honour of DBE - she will become a Dame of the British Empire if she accepts the offer. 

Sheila Hancock, aged 90

I was hooked straightaway. Sheila writes: 'I feel sick with inadequacy. A lifetime of getting away with it does not merit reward ... Should I turn it down? It's hardly in keeping with my Quaker belief of equality.' I am thinking: Please, please, do turn it down - as Benjamin Zephaniah did'. I turn to Wikipedia and discover that Dame Sheila had accepted the honour. Alas! I return a little disappointed to the story of her recent and past life - but then I am a paid-up Republican and a proper 21st century socialist in the Corbyn tradition. I find in later pages that Sheila loves the royal family and has no time for Corbyn. Well, we are all shaped by our experiences and influences. And there's still much to admire, enjoy,

and be moved by in Sheila's story.

There are other personal reasons for feeling connected with this tale. The last secondary school Sheila Hancock attended before being accepted at RADA was Dartford County Grammar School for Girls. She was one of a handful of girls, from a primary class of nearly fifty, who won a scholarship aged 11 in 1944 to attend her DGS. I scrapped into the school across the road, my DGS for boys, in 1960 after failing to pass the 11-plus outright and having to take supplementary tests and go through an interview. When Sheila got her scholarship, her parents bought her a bike and thus gifted her wings to take her burgeoning soul deep into the Kentish countryside - just as I did later on my bike. My parents who were uncomfortably protective never blinked an eyelid as I tasted my freedom on two wheels, savouring that same Kentish landscape. Mr. and Mrs. Hancock, bless them, gave their daughter a similar freedom - and Sheila was a girl! Sheila and her family lived in Latham Road, Bexleyheath. That is so close to where I used to live, first in Brook Lane, Bexley and then the more down-market Cowper Close, Welling. Every day, the 96 bus took me through the Broadway, Bexleyheath, two streets away from Latham Road, to and from school in Dartford. 

Sheila Hancock - at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 1949-1952

A specific national matter that shaped the years covered in Sheila Hancock's diary from 2016 to 2021 was of course Brexit. Sheila is a Remainer - for reasons that she articulated to acclaim in a national debate on the eve of the Referendum in June 2016. She had grown up during a war in which she learned to hate the Germans and the Japanese and yet 'out of this maelstrom of hatred came the idea of a united Europe'. This outcome should be treasured; leaving the European Union would be a terrible step backwards. By now, Sheila was a widow (she had been married to the inimitable John Thaw of Morse fame) and lived part of each year in London and the other part in her house in Provence in France. 

John Thaw and Sheila Hancock - photo with thanks to Daily Express

Her tales of encounters with other members of the acting and comic profession are full of interest and fun. These are people who fill our television screens even if we may not have seen them in person. Sometimes, though, her observations betray a judgement that seems to me flawed. How can she still be 'a great admirer of Russell Brand' when we all now know what many women have claimed about his self-gratifying behaviour? When she weaves her words around her family, the stories are always interesting and insightful. An unexpected blow - her eldest daughter, Ellie Jane, is  diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017 - and she describes her emotions and the story of the recovery back into health with honesty and deep awareness. Yes, 'a child dying before her parent is unnatural. Not to be endured. Not by me.'  

Her admiration for the royal family fills a number of pages. Yet there is an acknowledgement that there might be another viewpoint. She writes: 'I suppose, if I think it through rationally, with my hatred of the class system of which our aristocratic royal family is the apex, I should  be a republican'. Yes, indeed - Sheila's 'hatred of the class system' seems less than fully thought through. There are no references to Karl Marx in 'Old Rage' and as noted above Jeremy Corbyn is regarded in much the same way as the media pundits and most of the politicians in the Labour Party see him: '...the scruffy Jeremy Corbyn, in his shabby anorak, and a tiny, miserly poppy brooch (laying) his wreath at the Cenotaph ... like some grotesquely misplaced gesture of defiance.' Straight from the Mail, or the Express, or the Telegraph, or even perhaps the Times. Yet Jeremy had nearly become the prime minister the year before in 2017 such was his popularity after four weeks of electioneering. Another week longer and the wealthy and powerful elite might have been staring blankly at their screens in disbelief. Perhaps Sheila is more knowing than she sometimes seems for she later admits to '...floating about leading a middle-class life, with working-class attitudes. A phoney, in fact.' Too harsh, I think - Sheila just needs a little more time with those who have a socialist vision fit for the 21st century. We are never too old to learn.

Sometimes, Sheila hits the nail gloriously on the head. Here is her entry for July 2019: 'Boris Johnson has become prime minister. The world's gone mad. Trump? Johnson? I have got to get out of here. I need to calm down or I will have a heart attack.' 

Thank you, Gary Barker, for this brilliant cartoon

Sheila Hancock does write very well about ageing and the fact of death that awaits us all. One would expect no less from someone who is a Quaker. She 'was accepted into membership of the Society of Friends in 1993 (aged 60) by 'convincement', as it is called - a certainty that I want to try to follow the Quaker path. It is challenging sometimes. For an angry old woman like me, the Peace Testimony is especially difficult, but Advice 27 - 'Live adventurously' - guides me in my old age. I have tried Catholicism, Buddhism, Congregationalism, Atheism, Humanism, eventually finding a home in Quakerism for which, especially in these troubled times, I am truly grateful.' 

Her entries for 2020, the year when the coronavirus pandemic laid this country low, are astute. She is particularly good at mocking the confusions around the rules that began to appear and then multiply. She mocks Johnson without ever fully realizing that all his actions and above all his inactions followed from his prioritizing of the market. The flawed economic ideology of neoliberalism is not part of her way of making sense of the world, more the pity. Sheila does, even so, tell a revealing story about her youngest daughter, Joanna, who has a second home for rental in St Ives, Cornwall. In May, Joanna drove her three children down from Devon to check on the house. The work went on late, the children were tired, and she decided to spend the night. At 9 pm a neighbour came to the door and threatened to report her to the police if she did. Overnight stays were not allowed. Sheila lets rip, including this response: 'It seems to me that, if you are going to obey rules, you have to double-check that they are necessary, and made by people with good motives, who know what they are doing. We do not seem to be controlling the virus as well as some other countries.' A touch of litotes there - but pointing in the right direction. Our death rate at one point was the highest in the world.

Sheila Hancock's ending to the book is beautiful and centred on the idea that 'what will survive of us is love'. I will leave you to read it in full. A worthwhile read and an encounter through someone else's eyes of a period that has shaped us all, not least through Brexit and the Pandemic.  

Old Rage (2022) by Sheila Hancock