Last week I went to the funeral of my dear friend Philip Kerr, who wrote more than 30 novels. Many of these – as we learnt from his agent, Caradoc King, in his splendid eulogy – were sold for “north of a million dollars”. Philip was just 62 when he died but left a legacy of books that explored the moral ambiguity of the 20th-century condition in a way that makes him comparable to Graham Greene.
Like Greene, Philip had an acute sense of good and evil. It was this moral lens that gave his novels their beauty, power and wit, especially in the case of his Bernie Gunther detective novels, which rival those of Raymond Chandler.
The series was set in Nazi Berlin, but the moral universe of the novels was born from Philip’s own “unforgiving” religious upbringing in Scotland. In an interview with the New York Times in 2016, he said that the Bible had “made me what I am, unfortunately”. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t “get that book out of my twisted psyche”.
It came as little surprise to learn that as he was dying (of cancer) Philip turned to God, despite having had complex relations with Him over the years.
King recalled that his first introduction to Philip was a charming handwritten letter, along with the manuscript of his first novel, March Violets, and a rather dashing author photograph. The latter item was suggested by the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, on the basis that many publishing editors were female. The photo showed Phil puffing on a huge cigar and wearing red braces à la Michael Douglas in Wall Street. It was duly published on the novel’s dust jacket.
It was a fine spring day and there was an exceptional turnout at St Mary’s, Wimbledon, from the top table of London’s literary and film world: Sebastian Faulks, Graham Swift and the Oscar-nominated producer Peter Czernin, to name just a few heavyweight names. Philip’s wife, Jane, looked sad but proud, as did his three children who all read bravely and beautifully.
It was a wonderful celebration of a unique writer’s life. Thirty novels, plus children’s books, is a remarkable achievement, and there was a real sense of a “commanding officer” of a literary generation having his coffin cast into the sea.
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It is the 900th anniversary of our local Church of St Gregory the Great in Morville, Shropshire. The date 1118 is carved into the stone archway that was originally built as Morville Priory by Benedictine monks. A year-long programme of “community” events began last month with Evensong followed by wine. As I looked around the packed village church it struck me that the word “community” has been hijacked by developers and greedy farmers to suit their own ends.
Several years ago there was a proposal to place a number of industrial wind farms and solar parks around Morville. This would have desecrated a landscape described by PG Wodehouse, who grew up in the area, as “the Paradise of England”. The renewable projects were all touted by farmers and their backers as “community projects”, even though nobody who lived nearby wanted them.
Yet when it came to the real community of Morville coming together to celebrate 900 years of village life, I noticed that not a single “developer” farmer was present in the church.
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The National Trust has a new chairman, Hilary McGrady, who wants to be more “radical” and increase the Trust’s appeal among town dwellers. I am not sure this is needed. Country Life already sells more copies to people in towns and cities than in the countryside. Our villages and great houses have always had a special place in the British sense of identity and imagination. But that doesn’t mean that people are desperate to leave their brunches at trendy cafes in cities to visit such places as Morville Hall. They just like to know that they are there.
Which is why one of the best things about the Evensong service was that I was standing in the pew behind the new tenants of Morville Hall (a Grade 1 Elizabethan house by the church): Christopher Hodsoll and his wife, Sarah, who have just moved to Shropshire from London. I wonder if the fact that Christopher is a well-known antiques dealer, with a warehouse full of beautiful period furniture, had anything to do with the National Trust’s decision to select the Hodsolls as the new tenants of the village manor, which has been at the centre of Morville village life for more than 500 years.
The last tenants had arrived without suitable furniture of their own and locals thought there had been a burglary when they held their first “open day” as it was so empty. They struggled with the demands of maintaining the formal two-acre garden. Their short residency was a cautionary example of how the English country house dream can sometimes turn sour. I am glad to report that under the Hodsolls, Morville Hall is back to looking its period best.
William Cash is the founder of Spear’s
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