29 May 2022 29
MEMOIR
Rosamund Urwin
Old Rage
by Sheila Hancock
Bloomsbury £18.99 pp272Sheila Hancock argues that
one of the great advantages of
an acting career is that there is
no retirement age. “I am not
suddenly deemed redundant...
so long as I can remember the
words and stumble across the
stage or set without bumping
into the scenery,” she writes.
In fact, she goes on, that alone
can be enough to elevate you
to “national treasure” status.
At the risk of ending up in
Private Eye’s “national
treasure watch”, surely
Hancock, now 89, has earned
that mantle? After a brilliant
career on stage and screen,
she has shown herself ever
capable of reinvention,
bringing her wit to Radio 4’s
Just a Minute and Channel 4’s
Celebrity Gogglebox, and her
wisdom to the Brexit debate,
when she went viral for a
speech appealing to history
as a reason for remaining.
Why, then, is she quite
so determined to do herself
down? She calls her career
“risible” and opens her
witty memoir with her
embarrassment at receiving
a damehood in the 2021 new
year honours list, imagining
the Queen fretting: “First
he asks me to prorogue
Parliament. Now this.” She
fears she isn’t enough of a
“role model” for the award,
but after reading this book she
is definitely one of mine.
Few can sing for their
supper quite like Hancock.
There are tales of mice-
infested dressing rooms;
climbing a mountain in her
eighties for a film with just
three months to
prepare; leaving
training to be a
bunny girl at the
Playboy Club
because the
outfit caused her
discomfort (she
kept the ears).This was supposed to be
a different book — “a gentle
record of a fulfilled old age”
— until life intervened. There
was Brexit, the pandemic
and her daughter’s breast
cancer diagnosis, leading
to a poignant return to the
mother-child relationship in
which Hancock, then 84,
shows her 50-year-old
daughter how to inject herself.
During lockdown Hancock
is categorised as “extremely
vulnerable”. She has the
benefit of a loving family
around her, who leave flowers
on her doorstep and arrange
Zoom calls where they keep
having to tell her she is on
mute, but she is ill-suited to
being idle. She has previously
said lockdown drove her a
little “mad”, but it also made
her hyper-aware of her aching
body and that death is
“uncomfortably near”.
Twice widowed — her
first marriage was to the actor
Alec Ross, her second to
the Inspector Morse star John
Thaw — she writes that she
knows where she would like
it all to end: in her brass bed
under silk sheets, as Thaw’s
life did.
I have long thought that the
over-eighties make the best
interviewees, because they
are more likely to speak their
mind. They don’t worry that
an unpopular opinion will
render them the focus of
Twitter’s two minutes of hate
or will slow their ascent of
the greasy pole. I have now
extended this to memoirs.
Hancock’s is everything a good
diary should be: funny, packed
with wit, wisdom and
kindness, and
unfailingly —
and often
unflinchingly
— honest. cso it’s hard to see what
sources have been used. It
feels as though they are few
in number but have been
worked hard.
The prose occasionally
reads like the commentary
for a television documentary,
which is fine when it is at
BBC4 level, although the
tone occasionally lapses into
Channel 5. There are some
long digressions (on the
assassination at Sarajevo or
on the history of blood
transfusions, for instance),
almost as if the author feels
short of more personal
material: there is little on
Gillies’s life with friends or
family and not much of his
existence outside the
operating theatre. He was
an exceptional golfer,
winning a blue for Cambridge
and doing well in national
amateur competitions;
though to judge from the
photograph here his swing
was not a thing of beauty.
Fitzharris does not go into
his sporting life, although she
gives a nice picture of him
practising his chip shots down
the long corridors at Sidcup
between operations.
No one could say this
biography is dry. Fitzharris
is committed to her subject,
she is fluent and she is a
superb user of quotations.
For this you can overlook
the odd bit of biographese
(“Gillies must have felt”) and
the occasional bumpy link
between case histories. As
well as being a demon
quoter, she has a good way
with an anecdote. After the
war, Gillies expanded his
plastic talents from the
life-saving into the cosmetic.
He needed the money. A
society lady with a long noseWise, witty,
kind and true
Sheila Hancock’s look back at her life is
everything a good memoir should be
came to him, as did her lover,
who was paying for a
reshaping operation. They
could not decide between the
Greek and the retroussé
options. The lady, meanwhile,
told Gillies in private that her
real affections were with
another man. Such a triumph
was the procedure that she
dropped both lovers and
sallied off with her
super-conk to find new worlds
to conquer.
Gillies died at the age of 78.
Archie McIndoe, his cousin,
would use and expand on his
techniques when treating
burn injuries sustained by
pilots in the Battle of Britain,
including Richard Hillary,
author of The Last Enemy.
There may well be more to be
written about Gillies and
McIndoe, but Fitzharris’s
warmly engaged book will be
part of any larger picture. cRICHARD CANNON/TIMES NEWSPAPERSOctogenarians
rule Sheila
Hancock