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Thursday 20 November 2008

Tangerine dreams

Francis King reviews Tessa Codrington's new book

While we turn the pages of her album, the photographer makes her comments. The artlessness and sometimes banality of these contrast oddly with the professionalism of the images. A caption like ‘Noor is a respected Moroccan matriarch; she and Boubker entertain queens and kings downwards in a lavish, but strictly Islamic, style’, is colour supplement stuff. ‘She was much loved by all who knew her’ is obituarist’s cliché. Information like ‘David was all over her like a rash’ or ‘Grandfather was mad about polo’ might well have been dictated into a tape-recorder.

I once asked Patrick Thursfield, a friend of more than half a century who has a page in this book but whom, I suspect, Codrington, like many other Tangerines, never really liked, why, on inheriting money, he had abandoned a successful career as a journalist to settle in Tangier. He replied ‘I wanted to be entirely myself’. By that he presumably meant to be not merely recklessly iconoclastic, waspishly witty and rudely combative but also openly homosexual. My most vivid memory of this highly intelligent and cultivated man is of arriving on a visit to find him in the garden of his resplendent Villa Ritchie. One gardener was digging a hole, another was holding the shrub to be planted in it, and Thursfield was giving imperious directions. That seemed to symbolise the sort of life led by so many of the expatriates of the time.

If Thursfield settled in Tangier to be entirely himself, many of the exiles illustrated in this book did so, one suspects, to be entirely their own fictions. David Edge, a butcher’s son who had spent the war years in Hungary as the catamite of an aristocratic monsignor, from whom he later inherited a fortune, presented the image of a decadent, all-powerful sultan as, clad in purple robe and gold sandals, he received his guests on a throne. Lady Gay Baird would brandish her aristocratic credentials by talking of the ‘side looking-glasses’ of cars, having been instructed from her earliest years, as she repeatedly reminded people, that to refer to mirrors was common.

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