Within an
hour several people get the answer:
Deborah Lipstadt. Ho ho! By four p.m. I
have had around seventy replies, all
correct. "Bald sh*t adopter." Fame has its
own rewards. 
|
May
27, 2005 (Friday)
Key
West (Florida) DAY begins with MH of Kansas
offering $22,000 for the third Hitler painting in
Charles T.'s possession. Seems I went into
the wrong business. Should have been an art
dealer. 8:23 am The Mango Bombardment begins. Thud, thud
on the cottage roof all day. 9:10 am Benté phones from London, as I am
in the Five Brothers getting a Cuban
coffee. . . 4:50 pm: the other "Hitler painting" vendor
reports in, as hostile as before. I reply: "I note that you have
STILL declined to include
any data about yourself (even your name and
address) let alone about the origins of the
'Hitler' painting. You will not find anybody
willing to deal with you on that basis."  It
may be genuine, although it looks very
naive. But it is my reputation on the line, and if
I am not wholly satisfied something is authentic I
won't endorse it.
I am working hard preparing seven of my earlier
books for short-run reprinting for collectors.
There are some shocks. I write this to L. in
Chicago after wading through a twenty-seven
page list of typographical errors which she has
spotted in the web version of The
Secret Diaries of Hitler's
Doctor: "… embarrassed, ashamed, and
totally humiliated. That is me, after going
through your list of errors and typos discovered
in the PDF of Morell. Thank goodness you
thought of digging that out, instead of Just
Sitting On It and Gloating. I have incorporated
all your points. You have got eagle eyes.I still can't get the rule about .) and ).
Four hours' work, but well spent. Now to replace
all the dropped caps which un-dropped for some
reason." She replies primly that she prefers the
expression "gimlet eyes." -- I scan a photo from
the Adolf Hitler "stamp album" book which I bought
for $200 at the Louisville militaria show; the
photos are all pasted in, and I assumed they were
photographic originals. Alas they are not, they all
have a fine screen overlaid. May
28, 2005 (Saturday)
Key
West (Florida) THINGS about 1940s BBC programmes are drifting
through my memory as I begin to wake up: I lie
there asleep, with my eyes deliberately closed,
wallowing in childhood memories. Itma (It's That
Man Again, a wartime comedy show, That Man
being of course Mr Hitler), and the Daily
Mirror's headline on the death of its star:
DROPPED COLLAR STUD KILLS TOMMY
HANDLEY (I've been cautious about dropping
collar studs ever since then); the catch-phrases:
"Can I do you now, sir?" and "Don't mind if I do,"
and the whole British broadcasting gang --
Kenneth Horne, Richard Murdoch, and
Professor C M Joad of The Brain's Trust, who
was memorably felled not by a collar stud but by
being caught without a tuppenny ticket on the
London Tube. That crime ended his BBC career. "It's
Monday Night at Eight O'Clock…", and then, on
Saturday evenings, "Carry on, London!" Five p.m.,
Children's Hour, and "Dick Barton, Special
Agent." Special agent? For whom, or what shadowy agency?
Never mind, our imaginations romped. The Law in our
village was Pc Andrews, a young police
constable installed in the new brick police station
in the village street; he was the entire police
force. He was called out when I was caught pressing
Button B on the payphone in the hope of harvesting
some forgotten pennies. Or am I confusing him with
the curate? His name was Andrews too. Neither
carried guns, anyway. "Dan Dare, pilot of the future, brought to you
by the makers of Horlicks" "Radio Luxemburg, 208
metres" What a pleasure to live in England then -- until
television arrived, and we were suddenly back at
the lower end of the ladder, because we did not
have one. There were neighbours (so it was
whispered) who just mounted the H-aerial on their
rooftops and chimney pots, to make out that
they had the set. Except that we really genteel
folk told each other that it was not "U" -- I know,
that's an anachronism -- to have television in the
house anyway, and that people of class did
not have one. The lower orders lived in Hutton Village. We had
to walk through that, to get to church. Eeeugh! The
only V-1 flying bomb to hit nearby landed in Hutton
Village, next to the school. That Mr Hitler, he
knew, he did. Wallop, it went off with. And a
crater rimmed with bits of wire and twisted metal,
that's what it left. We all trooped up through the
Village -- eeeugh! -- to gape at That Man's
weapon. Class meant so much in a small community --
that, and gossip, as the years passed. About which,
at the higher end were those families who had a son
in Korea. They definitely scored over those who did
not. The Kingston's were one. And a family in
Oakwood Avenue. And one of them never came back,
because the British Army, since ancient times,
buried its heroes in the foreign fields where they
had fallen. British war graves in those days were
respected, even by their enemies. 
MY little pink bike had gradually shrunk and we
could not afford a new one. I built pushcarts with
wooden boxes from Williams the Grocer, --
the fragrance of the orange-box wood will be with
me for ever, in that powerful olefactory memory of
ours. The small front wheels came off a pram, the
rear ones were bigger; the engineering problems
this involved were part of the constructional
delight.
Half a mile up the road from our house toward
Billericay -- so now, you folks in Massachusetts
will know where that town's name came from -- was
English's, on the right side of the Raleigh Road, a
scrap yard with sheds full of war surplus
equipment: radars, valves, lamps, reels of waxy
yellow signals cable, and the rest. I bought a
signalling lamp, and a field-grey switching box; I
don't know why. They came in handy, they stood in
for the toys we could not buy. From somewhere I bought a large wind-up
gramophone, with a two-foot, violet coloured,
fluted horn; and I assembled a stack of HMV records
to go with it. "In eleven more months and ten
more days (I'll be out of the calaboose)."
Those parentheses always puzzled me.
"Estudiantina," and other titles.
HIS MASTER'S VOICE: In those
days you could see the polished coffin that the dog
was sitting on in the label. As the years passed, I
discovered classical music: a Sonata would take
four sides of shellac disc. Hearing the same music
today I still mentally reach for the stop lever
when the moment comes to flip over the disc. I had
an entire Beethoven symphony on such discs.  Later,
at Brentwood School in 1954, I was taken under the
wing of two elderly (or so they seemed to me) but
music-loving gentlemen at the photographic shop in
Ongar Road next to George's Café: Cyril
Stott owned the shop, a wiry, short man with a
reedy voice, and he lent me a 9.5 mm movie camera,
and took me to his house somewhere near Romford to
listen to classical music on the spanking new Pye
"Black Box" record player he had --"Listen to the
spitty sound of the brass," he would
suggest, putting on another Decca disc. That Pye
machine was certainly one-up on my violet horn.
George was there too. I do not recall any
improprieties, and I would not have recognised any
anyway; but the music was really good from that
little, mysteriously shaped, lacquer-and-brass
machine.
I knew I could never afford one myself. You had
to be a shopkeeper to afford that kind of thing. I
made a number of short films on the 30-foot reels
of Pathé 9.5mm film stock. I saved up for
five years just to buy a Pathé movie
projector to show them -- it cost £4.10.6d.
(four pounds, ten shillings and sixpence). I also
bought, much cheaper, a hand-cranked silent 35mm
projector and about 100 feet of a Laurel &
Hardy sound film.  The
films, the projector, and most other acquisitions
of those childhood years are all lost: my family
not having the same appreciation for historic
relics that I now do.
When I get up, there is a long call from Jessica
in London -- about printer problems, family medical
history, etc. She is now five foot four, she says.
I mention the picture deal -- $22,000, of which the
agent will pick up fifteen percent. "Don't tell
me!" she squeaks, and then just seconds later:
"That's $3,300 --" and she tells me the stages in
her mental computation. I work until midnight on a new jacket design for
the new short-run print of Hess, The Missing
Years. May
29, 2005 (Sunday)
Key
West (Florida)  ALREADY
a hot and humid day. Over ninety down here, and
very moist. Alan Heath has responded from
the UK with comments on the Odilo Globocnik
documents I found in CIA files on Aktion
Reinhardt.
I reply: "I've read your very helpful
comments. . . Unfortunately you have a
habit of stating bald facts without even a hint at
an authority -- e.g., 'This is obviously a
euphemism.' Why should the top Nazis use
euphemisms when writing to each
other? This is a factor I shall have to
address. What is the hard evidence for corruption,
pilfering, and other allegations you make against
Globocnik and other Nazis? Okay, Globocnik
(right) was a Bad Hat, but pilfering and
other crimes were pretty harshly cracked down on in
the SS (Koch, etc.), and I would have thought
stealing from Aktion Reinhardt would have been
punished more rigorously than other thefts. All of
the answers may seem pretty obvious to you, as an
expert; but I am not, and I am notorious for not
believing things until I am overwhelmed with hard
evidence." 1:47 pm after lunch I send this email to
Washington Post columnist David
Broder, whose syndicated column about Senator
John McCain in today's The Miami
Herald attracts my approval: "McCain (and Senator Biden) are
the only American politicians to impress me as
an Englishman consistently (although McCain did
upset me briefly with a law he was proposing on
Internet controls). Bush is a disgrace to the
great American people."
I HAVE posted an anagram puzzle on the
website: QUESTION:
who is the brilliant writer, thinker, and
philanthropist whose name is concealed in these
anagrams? - slab
throated dip
- bald
shit adopter
- add
portable shit
- that
lopsided bra
- hot
part disabled
- hits
atop bladder
| - dip
data brothels
- lopsided
rat bath
- bad
old therapist
- odd
lab therapist
- dips
betrothal ad
|
and within less than an hour several
people get the answer (I have to confess that I did
not): Deborah Lipstadt. Ho ho! By four p.m.
I have had around seventy replies, all correct.
"Bald sh*t adopter." The winner is in England. Fame
has its own rewards.
[Previous
Radical's Diary] 
BBC audio links on Tommy Handley (all
of the files are 'streaming' and in Real Player
format): 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/realmedia/localhistory/journey/stars/handfood.ram-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/realmedia/localhistory/journey/stars/handmix.ram
Large general selection, mostly Jack Hylton but
plus many others :
http://www.petefaint.co.uk/jackhylton/MUSIC.HTM |
David Irving