Rev John Graham, aka Araucaria: "Crosswords are a way of life"

Rev John Graham, aka Araucaria: "Crosswords are a way of life" Jan 18th 2013, 17:22 John Graham has been setting crosswords for half a century. Last week, he used one to reveal he has cancer. Here talks about the art of setting and what makes his solvers so loyal Just over a week ago, thousands of people turned to the Guardian cryptic crossword, saw it was by Araucaria, and settled in for a quiet hour of pleasurable frustration, but soon found themselves assailed by a growing sense of foreboding. "For me, there was chutzpah in making that 18 Down easy for regular solvers," wrote a puzzle reviewer, a few days later. "The rubric sends your eye down to that clue, you run through the six-letter signs of the zodiac, and before even writing it in, your stomach has lurched." A colleague, who did the crossword with her daughter, said: "It was like watching a photograph slowly appearing out of developing fluid." And her daughter turned to her in shock, and said: "I think this must mean he's dying of cancer." The reaction online is extraordinarily heartfelt and moving. Some admitted to completing their crosswords through tears; others devoted their comments to trying to explain why Araucaria has meant so much to them over the years. It is a "brain-joy" doing his puzzles, wrote one. "No other setter comes near to attaining his fusion of knowledge, originality, humour and consistency," said another. "It's not a solo pursuit, it's an intimate exercise," said brighton2k. "Your vocabulary, intelligence, wit and imagination being teased and excited by the setter. I've never seen crosswords as a challenge: they're a unique way of engaging with another person's mind. Araucaria's puzzles … are fair, honest, complex and have a deft wit. I imagine the person being just the same." The Reverend John Galbraith Graham – aka Araucaria, the Latin name for the monkey puzzle tree – has for the past 18 years lived in a tiny cottage in the village of Somersham, Cambridgeshire. Flat, frost-rimed fields stretch for miles around. Inside, it is ordered and cosy, calm and quiet except for two clocks ticking a hurried, insistent counterpoint. Graham, who set his first puzzle for the Guardian 55 years ago, seems younger than his 91 years. Partly this is because his default expression is a smile that lights up his face, but mostly it is because of his engaged, amused intelligence. Your solvers feel they know you, I say, because they have spent much of the last half-century puzzling out your character. "It seems to work that way, yes." And does he feel he knows them? "It's hard to say. I suppose I have a vague picture in my mind of a sort of idealised solver, who is a combination of everybody I've loved. When I meet or correspond with any of them, it's sometimes quite a shock, because they don't always react the way I think they're going to." The cryptic crossword turns 100 this year, and like every established religion or party, has its own schisms: in the stand-off between Ximenian (named after a setter called Ximenes, and requiring an absolute adherence to set rules) and Libertarian crosswords, Graham falls into the latter camp, which depends more on the solver's trust in the setter; trust that the answers will be in the reasonable purview of the average, educated reader with a decent amount of life experience. Crossword buffs such as the historian and former Guardian columnist David McKie point to the layers of interest that make up the peculiar joy of an Araucaria puzzle. "The first thing is if you look at the clues, they're entertaining to read just on their own, without starting to solve them." He's also, having invented his own forms of the crossword, such as the alphabetical jigsaw, "amazingly ingenious". And then there's his range: a recent crossword contained references to A Winter's Tale ("exit, pursued by a bear"), Twickenham, Lysistrata, Methuselah, oscilloscopes, raspberry bushes, Orville Wright and Penang. Graham does admit that, while he reads the papers with half a mind to keeping up to date, "modern music, modern art, modern poetry is outside my range, really". Having said which, he did once devote a crossword to the Spice Girls. And he has a checker, a woman in Wiltshire, who keeps an eye on his factual accuracy. Graham, who produces 14 crosswords a month, for various publications, with an average of 30 clues in each, says he sees crossword clues in everything, all the time, which is not always a blessing. "It can be very destructive of life, in a way – you can be reading a beautiful poem and then something occurs to you in the middle, that this could be a big part of a crossword clue. And of course the enjoyment of the poem is spoilt completely." He actively enjoys setting crosswords, as a creative process. "It's a voyage of discovery. I love the way the word invention both means discovering something and producing something new. That's how it works. Clues are not something you've invented in the sense that they're completely new – they're something you discover, about words and about connections. And that's exciting. The art of the crossword is getting all this stuff into a form that makes sense to people and brings the connection to them." But he resists the argument of one famous setter, Barbara Hall of the Daily Mail, who also worked in intelligence at Bletchley Park, that crosswords can be a refuge from the world. "For me, it's a way of life – it's just what I do, you know." If he wanted a pleasure to disappear into, what would it be? Poetry, it turns out; especially the Shakespeare of A Midsummer Night's Dream – an answer which, in its appreciation of serious lightness, of joy in words and in the worlds each word can hold, is entirely unsurprising. Graham is the oldest of six children; his father, dean of Oriel College, Oxford, when John was born, became a bishop; his mother, when she was not managing her large household, wrote "children's religious books, which weren't very good, but she also wrote a companion to children's worship, which was". The novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, who wrote a memoir, The Knox Brothers, about four brilliant uncles born in the 1880s, once said in an interview that: "They were a vicarage family and vicarages were the intellectual powerhouses of 19th-century England." Although his family did not hit the same heights, it's a description Graham, who was born in 1921, recognises. The six children had to find their own entertainment, and they often found it in wordplay: charades and puzzles. One of the online comments on his announcement of cancer is from a nephew: "The young John used to grab the Times as soon as it was delivered to his father's home, put it on the upright piano in the drawing room, and stand to excitedly solve the whole thing before breakfast – he was around eight or nine at the time." Religious faith was an integral part of his childhood, but in his teens he began to question it, and by the time he went to read classics at Cambridge, he was an atheist. This was at the beginning of the second world war. "I thought I'd better go and join up or something. [But] there were so many people queuing that I couldn't be bothered, so I thought, I'll do it another time, but I never did. I hung around for a bit, and then I thought, I don't think I really like this war – for a couple of years, I suppose, I was probably a pacifist." For reasons he cannot clearly remember now, he changed his mind about two years into the war, and with a vengeance: "I thought to myself then, if I'm going to fight, I must do the nastiest job I can think of [in terms of killing people], and the best way to do that is to be a bomber pilot. I finished up as the person who drops the bombs, not the pilot – an observer, they were called in those days." He flew missions over Italy, "night-intruding", until their plane was hit, and he had to bail out. Two of the four crew – he and the pilot – survived, and he was mentioned in dispatches, although he is dismissive of this. "It was because I bailed out and got safely back," he told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs. "It was automatic. Anyone who did that was mentioned in dispatches." He found refuge with an Italian family, who hid him in a stable, "nice and warm, full of rats" and then in a hide in a field. He took Italian lessons from a schoolteacher billeted with the family; he taught her English and Latin. When he returned, he switched from classics to theology, because he already knew Greek, was bored with the classics, and couldn't understand the maths lectures. But later that year, he felt a positive calling. "I was saying me prayers," he told Young, trying to distance himself from the sincerity by slipping into uncharacteristic demotic, "and I just somehow knew. It's the only time something [like that] happened to me, I may say, but it did seem as though I was being spoken to." When he left university, it was to work in a parish in south London, under his old air force chaplain. This did not last long, because he fell in love. Although it seems surprising now, this was a Church of England parish that demanded celibacy from its priests, so Graham was sent to Durham. "It was a job that was right for me. I loved it there. But Nesta remained in London. We had three years to wait. We got married at the end of those three years and I went as a curate to a parish." They were married for 26 years, though many of the latter years were increasingly unhappy, and eventually he left to be with the woman who would eventually become his second wife, Margaret. The church intervened again: divorced priests could not then serve in the ministry, and so he had to leave his job and his home, as well as his marriage. It seems an extraordinarily harsh outcome. "It wouldn't happen now. But they were still struggling, really – it's always been the church's teaching that marriage is indissoluble. I mean, sex has always been a problem for the church, from way back. It still is." He must have resented it, terribly. "No, because I knew the rules when I started, and I knew I was breaking the rules. I had to choose between keeping to the rulebook, or a spot of happiness for all concerned. It wasn't a difficult choice. It was a painful choice, but there was never much doubt about what I was going to do." Margaret, whose husband had died, had her own home, so he moved in there. He had been setting crosswords since 1958, but in secret, because his wife, in particular, felt it would not look good if a priest was seen to be moonlighting; suddenly it became his only source of income. "I was living with Margaret for seven years. We got married, but even that wasn't enough. When Nesta died [in the mid-1980s] I was no longer living in sin, technically, you see. So they recognised the second marriage", and finally allowed him to return to the ministry. "We had a very happy 14 years. It's more than 14 years since she died, which is strange. You remember the earlier part of your life better than the middle part, in my experience. And it was the middle part, in a sense." He had had his suspicions about what was wrong with him, and his official diagnosis of oesophageal cancer, a few weeks ago, did not come as much of a surprise. He seems to have met it with a striking measure of calm. Although he was exhausted for a couple of months, "really quite depressed, though I've not realised it. Being anaemic, I haven't been able to do anything." But a few days ago he was given iron tablets, and they're finally kicking in. "Now, I hope I'm going to feel very fit and happy, and able to do anything. Until – until whatever happens next."