The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 53

53 Pendennis by Tim Heald Katharine Whitehorn OBSERVER SUNDAY 4 MARCH 1990 Publish and be disowned It hurts you more than it hurts me SIR Stephen Spender is extremely put out by reports that someone called Hugh David is writing his authorised biography. Mr David is evidently going about London telling everyone that he has pulled off this astonishing coup because he used to be taught English by the great man at University College, London. He has even managed to get the story treated as gospel and published in at least one national paper not a million miles from Wapping. 'I have no memory of this says Sir Stephen, who has already produced a great Sir Stephen Spender: Put out. deal of inimitable autobiography and regards himself as the only conceivable candidate for the job of writing about his life.

'He says I once taught him but I certainly have no recollection of doing so. He even says he has been to this house. But I don't even know what he looks like. If he had been here and if he had asked permission to write a book about me I should have said No. I've always refused permission and I always And would it be helpful to let everyone know that any book claiming to be an authorised life of our most senior poet quite simply isn't? says Sir Stephen, David himself is sticking to his guns.

As far as he is concerned, he has had his project accepted by Heinemann and endorsed by his subject. 'I stand by what I already he told me. 'I discussed it with Sir Stephen last November and to the best of my recollection he said he had no objection to my starting work on his life. I then wrote to confirm Did he get a reply? 'Well, er, actually, How very mysterious. Kate Mortimer: Bom into one of those families where everyone gets Firsts and they all talk Greek at breakfastPhotograph by fane Bown.

The best and the brightest tries a country bumpkin life Pained response 'WHAT'S Kate Mortimer up to these I recently asked one of our rulers (a Cabinet Minister since you ask). he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, 'she's sorting out Poland for And indeed she is. 'Oh God, it's she said, sounding rather ratty, when I phoned her at home in West London. 'Can you get off the line? I'm waiting for The Poles and Hungarians (she's sorting them out too) should be delighted that William Waldegrave made her financial adviser to the Overseas Development Administration's Know-how Fund for those two nations because she is one of life's natural sorters-out. She manages that almost impossibly rare combination of being revoltingly bright and well-qualified while at the same time being just about the least pompous person you're likely to meet.

Who else would sit in a brasserie in Ravenscourt Park in jeans and a tweed jacket and chatter away about the time she and Claus Moser were interviewed by Lee Kuan Yew and she 'felt like a rabbit transfixed by a snake' or how Evelyn de Rothschild was taken boar-hunting when the two of them were on a mission to Romania on behalf of his bank or how her boss at the World Bank got gangrene of the intestine after a visit to Vientiane, 'a marvellous one-horse French provincial town with a White Rose brothel and a bar run by a drunken expatriate Brit'? She was bound to be bright because she was born into one of those families where everyone gets Firsts and they all talk Greek at breakfast. When she was three her father was made Bishop of Exeter where he stayed for 24 years. Home was a palace and as a small child she was used to the company of the great and the good. She was recently appointed to the little-known and thoroughly intriguing Royal Commission which still administers the profits of the Great Exhibition of 1851. 'I suddenly felt as if I was five she says, 'and surrounded by bishops She was quite sporty at school: captain of swimming and vice-captain of cricket.

At Oxford she did all the predictable things scholarship to Somerville, a First in PPE, postgraduate degree in economics. But she also got a half-blue for cricket. ('We were worse than a school team and I got into trouble for playing in white jeans and not a divided Her most unusual achievement was bowling the Master of Balliol for a duck. Like the present England attack in the West Indies she wasn't that quick but she stuck to line and length. Poor Christopher Hill was utterly deceived.

She says her best cricket was played when she was pregnant (her son Andrew is now seven) but that when she tried a recent comeback she found her throwing arm had gone. From Oxford she went to the World Bank in Washington. This sounds like a two-year world sort-out. She advised the Ghanaians, who had got stuck with some sugar mills from Eastern Europe designed for beet, not cane; she advised the Bangladeshis then East Pakistanis on post-cyclone reconstruction with special reference to the breeding of bullocks; and then she came home to join Victor Rothschild's Whitehall think-tank. There was an element of ne-potistic network in this for she had been great friends with Rothschild's daughter Emma at Oxford.

Anybody interested in conspiracy theory should take a look at those gilded think-tankers who still meet from time to time and whose paths cross constantly: William Waldegrave, Sir Adam Ridley, William Plow-den, Kate Jenkins, Sir Robin Butler, Sir Peter Carey and, a later entry than Mortimer, Tessa (now Baroness) Black-stone. It was these last two who created a stir with a blistering report on the Foreign Office. In fact it was the work of six people over an entire year but it was the two young and attractive women who got the headlines and caught the flak. 'We very quickly she says, 'that the Establishment was far from dead. There was a fantastic campaign of disinformation to discredit us.

I still have friends who genuinely believe that we recommended the abolition of the entire BBC World Service. It's simply not In the event the report was heavily bowdlerised before publication and the Foreign Office, by and large, continued on its own sweet way. And the Establishment, as she was reminded by the Henry Fairlie obituaries and the speech of the new CBI boss, is ever-present. By 1978 she had become the think tank's oldest inhabitant so she left and joined the Rothschild bank. Banking is a mysterious affair to outsiders.

Mortimer mentions Singapore, Mexico, Chile, the North Sea, telephone calls to General Electric or Levi-Strauss advising them to sell dollars, a secondment to be policy director of SIB (all these She was a director of the bank by the time she finished but her last year there was not satisfactory and when an old friend asked her to join his publishing company as managing director she decided, characteristically, to give it a whirl. This was Sebastian Walker, whose Walker Books had carved out an enviable position in the children's market. But somehow it didn't work out and last autumn they parted company. So whither Mortimer? For the time being, there are the time-consuming Poles and Hungarian. She is a governor of University College, London, and a member of the unwieldy advisory board to the BBC Governors.

('There are an awful lot of us and we all like She is a director of what's left of the National Bus Company. And she is moving back to Devon to live with Bob Dean, who is the man behind the amazing new 650-foot tower planned to stand at the top of Armada Way in Plymouth. New technology alone will prevent her ever becoming a country bumpkin but one can't help wondering if Oke-hampton is big enough for her. She'd hate me for saying it but I think Miss Mortimer in her prime should be given a mega-job: a vice-chancellorship or public company of her own. Or what about the newly-created post of chief executive of MCC? Now that would be an inspired selection.

sounding spokeswoman said that my original spokesman had taken a day off and that they were acting on instructions from head office in Tokyo. The action, she said, was not being taken by London. Indeed, she strongly implied that London was not happy about it. The author and his publishers, Bloomsbury, have no intention of kow-towing and have retained the services of David Hooper of Biddies, the solicitor who acted succesfully for Peter Wright in the Spy-catcher case and Tom Bauer, author of the biography to which Robert Maxwell took such exception. One final irony in the case so far is that Bloomsbury was originally set up with help from none other than Linklaters and Paines.

playing of cricket is anything other than a thoroughly implausible cover story. II CLIVE NORLING, the world's best-known rugby referee, takes charge of the Varsity match on Friday. Yes, I know the men played at Twickenham in December but I'm talking about the women. Oxford are in the final of the National Students' cup, which they will play a week today at the Saracens' ground in north London. I shall be rooting for them because my daughter Emma packs down in the middle of the Dark Blue front row.

And by the way, both father and daughter have had enough boring jokes about 'the university hooker'. I CANNOT help feeling a certain sympathy with the mother who hit her son with a wooden spoon, and last week failed to persuade the court to take her off the At Risk register. A metal spoon would have condemned her; if she'd hit him with a sausage she'd have been OK. It is, as the judge said, a fine line; and we should at least be glad that this has been officially recognised. For the people who think no one should ever smack a child, that it should even be illegal, are gaining ground though they don't say how you stop your child hitting you.

There are undoubtedly some parents, I suspect mainly of docile small girls, who believe you need never lift your hand to a child; and I take off my hat to them, if only to scratch my head in wonder. But most parents do slap their small children occasionally. Twenty years ago Where? magazine, a notably progressive organ, made a number of families record for a fortnight what they actually did, not what they thought they should have done; and came to the conclusion that everybody smacks all that varies is the amount of guilt you feel about it. If the habit is as near universal as that, more akin to a cat cuffing her kittens than a Medea eating her young, it makes one raise one's eyebrows at last October's pronouncement by John and Elizabeth Newson that there is a correlation between being smacked and turning violent later on. I am put in mind of Graham Greene's schoolmaster, who insisted that sex caused cancer, because everyone he knew who'd had cancer had also had sex.

But the Newsons study is more interesting in detail than the headline suggests: because it was beating at seven that seemed to point to violence at 16, with being hit at 11 correlating most closely with prison at 20. Even they found that three-year-olds were slapped every week or so; and the difference in ages seems, to me crucial. You slap toddlers more than older children, not because they are smaller, but because they are very physical: they know some words, but they can't be controlled just with words. Hugs and slaps and smiles and being picked up bodily and removed from the scene of the crime is much more their language. Unfortunately nearly everyone these days automatically says, 'Oh, it's all right if you hit them in the heat of the The Victorians said you must never hit a child in anger; and then Shaw said it was better to hit a child in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life, than to strike it in cold blood.

I think he was wrong: it isn't better to be maimed for life than to live in dread for half an hour; and if you only slap when you're angry, you may forgive yourself more easily, but the action's likely to be virtually useless. If you give a tougher punishment than usual, it's to get across the message that the child's done something worse than usual: run out into the Spring Mediterranean Cruise Saturday 5th May to Friday 18th May from 895 This is a splendid offer at a special, very low price for a Mediterranean cruise aboard the first class MS Caledonian Star during May, from Greece to Portugal. The timing takes advantage of the spring weather when the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Menorca will be in full bloom. The MS Caledonian Star is -perfect for such a journey as it carries a maximum of ISO passengers in absolute comfort with Scandinavian officers and Filipino crew ensuring excellent service. There is a wide range of facilities including two lounges, bar, library, shop, clinic, sun deck, swimming pool, observation deck and video library.

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Banging the bricks together 450 times or whining about going to bed is just as likely to be the last straw where Mum's temper is concerned but then the child doesn't get the message it's done something extra bad, just that Mum's extra ratty. The more confident the discipline, of course, the less there has to be any punishment. When one of my sons was being bullied in the playground, the young, unsure teachers thought they couldn't and shouldn't do anything. 'They've got to work things out they said, and stayed indoors. But on Wednesdays Mrs Harris was in charge.

She was of the old school, and it would never have occurred to her that there was anything she couldn't put a stop to. So on Wednesdays it never happened. I much doubt if she would ever have beaten a boy; but schools have other shots in their armoury. In saying I think it's absurd to suggest that parents should never smack, I am distinctly not saying the same of schools. The chances of abuse are so much greater; the age-groups mainly older; the civil liberties issue more important.

How can you legally insist that a parent sends its child to a school where 'he may be beaten by someone the parents don't trust? The roles of teacher and parent ought to be different. Teachers used to be taught never to touch a child in either anger or affection: a sensible enough precaution: 1 But parents have to touch their children1 if' they're grow normally at all. And just as the fact that a tiny minority of parents sexually abuse their children doesn't mean that the rest had better stop hugging theirs, so the fact that a few parents woefully overdo it is no reason the rest should feel like murderers if they so much as slap a leg. If we ever did get close to making it illegal for a parent to spank a child, there is one more point to consider. Every time you take power away from a parent you give it to someone else.

If it's against the law to smack your child, then someone else must be given the power to run you in who? The already overworked social worker? The Neighbourhood Watch? The police? Big brother? We rightly limit parental power when it comes to actual battering and neglect; but to classify as criminal something nearly everyone does is not going to make it any easier to chase up the parents who really are doing their children harm. One more thing for us all to feel rotten about is not going to help anyone. Patrick Moore is 67. ON THIS DAY: Psychologist Professor Hans Eysenck is 74; astronomer Patrick Moore and author Francis King both 67; poet, playwright and novelist Alan Sillitoe, 62; Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink, 61; Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish, 39; Welsh international footballer Joey Jones, 35. Also on this day; Edward Heath resigned as Prime Minister in 1974; Robert Mugabe formed a government in Zimbabwe, 1980; the Forth Bridge was opened, 1890; Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi born, 1678; Russian novelist and dramatist Nikolai Gogol died, 1852; painter Sir Henry Rae-burn born, 1756; writer and broadcaster Basil Boothroyd born, 1910.

Lean cuisine, Canada-style She's raised 7 children and 14 grandchildren. Now she needs a family. MY STORY last week about the row between Nomura, the Japanese securities giant, and the author, Albert Alletzhau-ser, has put the cat even further among the pigeons. Nomura, you will recall, did not like the book Alletzhauser has written about them, but their spokesman had had a cordial meeting with Alletzhauser at the Savoy and there were no plans for legal action. It was surprising, therefore, when early last week Alletzhauser received a fierce letter from Nomura's London solicitors, Linklaters and Paines.

This demanded the withdrawal of the book, substantial damages, a public apology and an assurance that none of the offending passages (unspecified) should be repeated. When I called Nomura again an embarrassed- WE ALL know that the BBC is full of dangerous lefties in bow-ties and brothel creepers or crypto-fascists employed by the intelligence services, depending on your political persuasion, but now they've been infiltrated by the Freemasons. So, at least, the broadcasting unions believe. They represent more than half the Corporation's 28,000 employees and have formally asked the board to supply details of masonic lodges. They have also asked for details of a club called 'The Bushmen', started about 30 years ago by Sir Hugh Greene.

Various other DGs have belonged and no one seriously believes that their alleged purpose the Royalty check THE SOCIETY of Authors, which represents some 5,000 of the country's writers, has just had the result of its second spot-check on publishers' royalty accounts. Last year the first name out of the hat was a member called Ann Oakley, who is published by the respected firm of Basil Blackwell Ltd. The society's investigators discovered that Blackwell had underpaid her by more than 500. A cheque and apology duly followed. This time the writer chosen for investigation was Annette Kuhn, author of four books published by Routledge.

On the very day that the society's investigator, Raymond Wood of Kernon and Go, arranged to visit International Thompson Publishing, who handle all Routledge distribution and royalties, the company wrote to Annette Kuhn: 'We regret that whilst computerising the royalties an error occurred on the December 1988 It turned out to be a little matter of 388.50. Sales of a book called Cinema Censorship and Sexuality for May and June 1988 had simply disappeared. 'It's a bit says the society's general secretary, Mark Le Fanu. 'Publishers are always complaining about whingeing authors. We'd all hoped these investigations would show how wrong we are to be sceptical but I'm afraid that's not how it's working He says that the society run more frequent checks.

I think it should institute a trophy for the first publisher found to have made a mistake in an author's favour. WHAT IS it about the Canadians? Having lived and worked there, I know that Canada is not a dull country, nor are the Canadians a dull people. Yet they spend their lives trying to convince us otherwise. The latest issue of Canada Today has just arrived with a feature on 'Canadian cuisine: A gourmet's delight'. Now anyone conversant with, say, After years of dedication to her craft, Nang Chin a weaver from Thailand, grew too frail to work.

A widow, with no-one to support her, she was i terrified of facing the Nova Lox or the St Lawrence Market knows how good their food can be. Yet what do they give us as examples? 'Chuck Wagon Stew' and 'Niagara Apple Cheese Betty'. And what is the recipe for Betty? 'Six apples, one and a half cups of shredded tangy cheese, three cups of coarse breadcrumbs, a teaspoon of cinnamon, quarter of a cup of sugar and ditto of cold "WPHHfflFStv vl1' Names of travellers Postcode future alone. Now, thanks to a family from the UK who sponsor her, Hang can face the future without fear. What 8 more, their help also supports projects which benefit entire communities.

So that for less than 2 a week, they give both Nang and other elderly people in need, the basic essentials of clean water, food and medicine. By sponsoring a grandparent, you too can turn misery and despair into health and happiness. Please help to care for someone like Nang today. To find out how much your support can mean, clip the coupon now and post to: Adopt a Granny, Room 902223 Help the Aged, FREEPOST, London EC1B 1BD. How can they do this to themselves? Michael Ignatieff, our very own Canadian columnist, please discuss.

don't think the new Institute of Directors man's right at all. These damned meritocrats are everywhere. How else can you explain the news that this year will see the publication of the first Debrett's 'Company Directors'. Is nothing sacred? (S0A 8080 or complete the coupon. Tel No I wish to pay be AccessVisaCheque ATOL 883B Road.

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London Adopt a Granny Cheque for is enclosed Please send to: Voyages Jules Verne. 10 Glenworth Street. London NW1 5PG ABTA 68215 Ch Pic -mr Help the Aged am r- Reg in England 146462 The Observer Ltd, Chelsea Bridge House. Queenstown Observer Spring Cruise, Voyages Jules Verne, 21 Oorset Square,.