Echoing Voices

In No Voice from the Hall, John Harris recollected with great humour and keen observation his covert entry into empty and deserted country houses in the years after the Second World War. He now broadens his sights, sometimes straying into Europe or as far off as Malaya and the USA. We hear of Ruler Matlock who set him against formal education, of his antics during his very short apprenticeship as an upholsterer at Heal's, and of his brief yet profitable curatorship of the Grotto of the Four Winds at the Battersea Pleasure Gardens. In France in 1953 he is befriended by RIchard Penard, the great French collector. He trespasses into the Desert de Retz to find the faded glory of the China House and the Broken Column, and he experiences the Bohemian life of a student on the Left bank in Paris. At Paul Melon's Oak Spring in Virginia he is awakened by 'gangsters' ,and we read with astonishment of MI5 bugging Anthony Blunt's rooms above the RIBA's Drawing Collection. As the tales proceed, new comrades join in the snooping, and this deligthful sequel has all the gusto and enthusiasm of its predecessor.