Dearest Jane... Page 19
Home Sweet Home
Thursday [late 1970s]
The usual restful morning here. The cat wakes me up at 6 a.m. and I let her out. Preparation of the cat’s breakfast is delayed by inability to find the tin-opener. My dog then demands to be let out and disappears into the shrubbery, leaving me shivering at the front door in my Marks and Spencer pyjamas. I decide to have a hot bath but find the water tepid. Shaving is frustrated by the battery in my razor being on the brink of extinction. I try and cut my toenails but develop acute cramp in one leg. I then do the boiler and find the fuel has not been delivered as promised and in fact has run out. I fill the log basket, clean the grate and lay the fire. I eventually settle to a peaceful breakfast, the table nicely laid, sausages, toast, marmalade and coffee and ‘The Times’. Peace, perfect peace at breakfast can only be achieved with loved ones far away. I am just perusing the obituary column when Charles arrives from London. At any rate he does not try to be jolly at breakfast for which I am truly grateful.
c/o Bishop of York
Ebor Castle
York
[1970s]
I hope you will be here next weekend for the local fete. There is a folk-song competition for local teams and I look to you to assist the Harts Lane team. Our song is ‘Farmer’s Itch’ and starts off:
‘As I were going down Cowpat Lane
With a crappity pudding for parson,
I was suddenly seized with a hideous pain
And terribly sick the green grass on’
This is an old Basingstoke traditional song and it is inaccurate to ascribe it to the late Reverend Enoch Durge, Vicar of St Vitus’s Much Polking.
Budds Farm
Whit Monday 1975
Mr Randall is the most industrious man I know; also easily the worst gardener. His seeds never come up and if they do something fatal happens to them soon afterwards. Even spinach and beans experience a terminal sickness under his care. He really ought to be a GP. Given a free hand, he would soon put the brakes on the population explosion.
Slight and dapper, Mr Randall had a comely and voluptuous wife reminiscent of Ma in H. E. Bates’s The Darling Buds of May – with a similarly large and merry family. There was a warm understanding between the Randalls and my parents.
Chez Nidnod
Burghclere
Monday [early 1970s]
A very grey day. To use a vulgar Canadian expression, it is raining ‘like a cow pissing on a flat stone’. In many ways England is a good country to live in but it is a disadvantage that there are only about twelve really fine days every year. The lack of sunshine accounts for the well-known English melancholia, accidie, liverishness and almost total lack of joie de vivre. No wonder the English invented gumboots and mackintoshes; and probably galoshes, too. English cooking, toad-in-the-hole, for example, and roly-poly pudding, is a reflection of the English climate. It is typical that cricket – allegedly our national game – cannot be played when it is raining. I have known several former captains of the England XI, and all have been alcoholics due to sitting around in dank pavilions all day waiting for the rain to stop and with nothing to do except play poker and drink. The house is being painted by Mr Thorn and his assistant, the latter being an unemployed actor with earrings. I think he might get a job in the chorus of The Pirates of Penzance.
Best love to you all from all of us,
xx D
The Old Drippings
Burghclere
February [1970s]
A thaw is now in progress: this is to be welcomed even if it does mean I am required to wear a mackintosh in the upstairs lavatory. Mr Thorne, alleged to be a plumber, says we need new water tanks and that the water here is undrinkable, particularly when bats and mice drop into the tanks and are drowned. Personally, I rather like the fruity taste of our water and the light-brown colouring. I believe in the old saying ‘What doesn’t sicken will fatten.’
17b Via Dolorosa
Burghclere
6 February [late 1970s]
I have come to the conclusion that I don’t like Budds Farm much, if at all. There is an unfriendly atmosphere and I have always felt slightly ill and vaguely unhappy here. I now have a growing desire to transfer into one of those large country houses where elderly persons have their own room and a couple of sticks of their own furniture, and eat plain and simple communal meals with a book propped up against the teapot or HP sauce bottle. Doubtless the other inmates would be as boring, querulous and unsociable as oneself. Those institutions are really a queuing-up point for the ferry which old Charon (I trust a member of the Transport and General Workers Union) punts at intervals over that murky stream called the Styx. However, at present my dog Cringer keeps me here. At least Mr Randall is happy. Last night he went to Shepherd’s Bush (Remember the headline ‘Police comb Shepherd’s Bush for missing girl’?) and saw a BBC programme featuring a woman with out-of-door teeth named Rantzen. I think it was what journalists call a ‘chat show’.
Morty’s Garden of Wonderful Weeds
Spring [early 1980s]
My Good Child,
What are you up to now? I hear rumours of you writing books on gardening (the blind leading the blind), on cooking, even on children. Why not combine cooking and children and go flat out for the cannibal market? The next thing I suppose will be to learn of you playing water-polo for Morpeth Mermaids.
I was offered the Sunday Times gardening column in 1953 but refused on the grounds of absolute ignorance. I have been doing a frantic morning’s gardening; my plants look unhealthy and I feel ditto.
Love,
xx D
When that book – An Idiot’s Introduction to Gardening – came out, my father wrote to me with succinct approval: ‘Easy reading means hard writing.’
Budds Farm
18 April [early 1980s]
Your mother and I continue to look at unsuitable houses and today we visit an Italian-style bungalow with enchanting views of the industrial quarter of Andover, the Florence of Hampshire.
‘Eventide’ Home for Distressed or Mentally Afflicted Members of the Middle Classes
Burghclere
[Early 1980s]
Our search for a new house continues. I have seen four which suited me but your mother imposes the veto with the regularity of the Russians at UN, and with the same air of dogged finality.
Budds Farm
7 June [early 1980s]
Our search for a house continues. To my surprise Nidnod took a fancy to a former pub called ‘Trip the Daisy’ 6 miles from Swindon, hardly the City of my Dreams. It is a charming house but no garage and no possible access to the property for a car. The garden is far too big, including a rock garden which always reminds me of Sunningdale. Personally I would prefer a really modern house on the grounds that a house is something to live in, not look at.
The Miller’s House
[Early 1980s]
Your mother has decided she likes the Miller’s House after all; good news. It is now forgotten that I discovered it and that her initial reaction was to say that she wouldn’t be seen dead in it! We have hung some pictures: it is not worth disagreeing with your mother. Emily the hen is settling down well and will soon join the ranks of those animals whose comfort takes precedence over mine. To celebrate the sale of Budds Farm, I have ordered a new pair of trousers from J. Byrne, Bespoke Tailors, overlooking the Newbury cemetery.
We have a walled garden here or a bit of one. I doubt if it would have reminded Alf Tennyson of:
‘Many a sheeny summer morn
Adown the Tigris I was born
By Bagdat’s shrines of fretted gold
High-walled gardens green and old.’
I am now off for some jolly shopping in Marlborough – a coal scuttle, loo paper, alka-selzer, the ‘Spectator’, bread, Worcester sauce, picture nails.
The Richard Crossman Ward for Decayed Gentlefolk
Park Prewitt Hospital
Basingstoke
[1970s]
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bsp; I bought a pair of scissors in Boots the other day and they broke in half five minutes later. When I went back to complain, the pert young lady assistant asked if she could see my toenails as they must be extraordinarily tough! I said she could see my toenails if I could see a bit of her. ‘What sauce!’ she said, bridling roguishly and we were really getting on quite well when a gimlet-eyed supervisor came along and we both slunk away very shiftily. I must be off, so in the words of the old Golders Green folk song it is ‘Hey ho and away we go with pretty Herbert Samuel’ (Trad.).
The Old Lazar House
Kintbury
Berkshire
Wednesday [February 1980s]
I am browned off with this winter. Cold weather is tolerable when you are active but it’s a proper bugger when your activities are confined to filling log baskets and coal scuttles, producing kindling wood and cleaning grates. Luckily I learned a lot about domestic fire-lighting at Eton. In my day boys had their first experience of frostbite at school; no wonder many of them grew up with purple noses of what one of my masters called ‘an incarnadined proboscis’. My father had gruesome stories of having to break the ice on his wash basin at Marlborough. In those days there were no urinals and each boy had a po under his bed.
Love to all,
xx D
The Miller’s House
1 April [1980s]
What a ghastly Easter. Freezing cold and nothing to do except drink and stoke the fire. I was reduced to drinking Grand Marnier at 11 a.m. Luckily our guests were easy and gave no trouble. I refuse to garden when the temperature remains below 48 degrees. Even so I must go and plant out some special-offer pansies which look about as miserable as I feel.
The Miller’s House
April 1988
I have been planting chrysanthemums called ‘Sunburst’ which are very expensive and decidedly ugly, rather like a certain type of woman.
The Miller’s House
Sunday [1980s]
My typewriter has just packed up. Il ne manquait que ca! I can’t remember if I owe you a letter. I now combine physical decline with mental instability: no wonder poor Nidnod is browned off with my growing inability to cope with life. I don’t much care for it myself. ‘My husband loves gardening,’ I sometimes hear Nidnod say to some old buddy. This morning I have been hoeing the gravel, a fatigue I regard with strictly limited affection. Old Randy is away for a fortnight and the weeds seem to know it and sprout ferociously.
Best love to one and all, your decrepit parent,
xx RM
The following is an extract from my father’s single and unappreciated contribution to Kintbury Parish magazine: ‘Gardening for the Elderly’.
Sometimes I have heard dedicated foxhunters, after a couple of dry martinis, express the hope that they will eventually meet their end in the hunting-field. So far, I have only met one gardener desirous of expiring quietly in the herbaceous border and she, sadly, was run over by a No. 14 bus in Knightsbridge while endeavouring to reach Harrods during sales week.
The Miller’s House
Spring [Mid 1980s]
Last week I bought 4 pictures in Kingsclere and a wicker garden chair in Great Bedwyn. In Little Bedwyn I discovered a most attractive pub, more like a French café, which dishes out excellent prawns and suchlike goodies. Come and have a tuck in with me there.
xx D
My father took a fortnight’s paid holiday with his family every year and looked forward to it. My parents were united in their enthusiasm for holidays. We all loved the seaside, at home and abroad. Lupin did not enjoy the sun, latterly preferring to remain in his hotel room reading Sherlock Holmes. As the years rolled by, my mother’s inclination was for action, my father’s for repose.
Martha swallowed a jellyfish and Jane she got the cramp.
Mother in law began to jaw because the sea was damp
Neighbour Jud got stuck in the mud and a crab got hold of me
And away sailed the bathing machine a-sailing out to sea.
This was an old music hall song chanted by my father on every seaside holiday. For him, Edwardian holidays by the sea had been a reality. It was on our seaside holidays in 1950/60s France, that my parents’ happiness together seemed to blossom, or at least to green their boughs. ‘The French know how to live!’ my mother declared as she navigated from the Michelin map for my father steering the family car (Wilf Wolsey, Reg Rover or Victor Vauxhall) coastwards through the lush, pastoral landscapes of Normandy and Brittany.
Beguiled by the romance of the simple life, my parents murmured daydreams of retirement – a little blue-shuttered cottage beside an apple tree, cats and dogs basking in the sun, hens pecking among the beans and dahlias, a plump pig grunting from its pen. They were enchanted by rustic sightings of ancient Messieurs and Mesdames in faded checks, denims and clogs, cajoling a cow down a lane. Then the sudden appearance of a ‘pert Mademoiselle’, buxom on a bicycle, would turn my father’s head in a more youthful direction. The absence of grand aspirations in my parents’ fantasies was endearing. They dreamed not of chateaux or villas but of cosy cottages.
‘The roses round the door make me love mother more,’ quipped my father as we passed another rose-clad farmhouse. At the sight of a churchyard crammed with gravestones, he would invite us to join him in this recital:
There’s a ten foot wall round the cemetery
Which is foolish without a doubt
The people outside don’t want to get in,
The people inside can’t get out.
Cafés and bars along the route served drinks all day long. This suited my parents well. Within an hour of arriving in France, aged nine, I was introduced to a delicious aperitif, a tiny tumbler of Cinzano, an experience simultaneously sharpened by the sting of a French wasp on my leg.
My father’s essential accessory on every holiday was a miniature leather suitcase, in which he kept travel documents and money. My heart always warmed to the sight of his substantial form, purposefully striding into airports and hotels, carrying this doll-sized case. A particular sweetness settled over my father on those sunny seaside holidays in France, away from work and grey and brown-gravy England, the plop of bills on the doormat at home.
The ‘Book Box’ was another holiday treat. My father would make a judicious selection of books for each of us, packed into a box which was to remain unopened until we had crossed the Channel, which on some occasions was not by ferry to Le Havre or Cherbourg, but flying from what was basically a field near Folkestone in a ‘Silver City’ plane which carried cars as well as passengers.
These were not the holidays described in my father’s letters. We were with him! It was as my parents got older, and their children less compliant or absent, that he shared his holiday experiences, good and bad, in his letters.
When combing my father’s letters for holiday stories, the unexpected revelation was how frequent were my mother’s absences from home on her own excursions. There was some magnetic force in my mother which attracted potential drama on any expedition. A magnet inherited and magnified by Lupin.
There was a glint in my mother’s eye as she prepared for her trip to the equestrian events at the 1956 Stockholm Olympics, an invitation she had accepted from a Swedish millionaire of my parents’ acquaintance. He had taken a big shine to my mother. My father allowed her to go on condition she was accompanied by her aunt as chaperone. The remaining evidence of the trip is my mother’s flickering cine film of the distant Olympic flame and horses jumping in conditions of what appears to be pitch darkness.
Staying in Cyprus with my Aunt Pam and Uncle Ken, Brigadier Darling, in command of a British anti-terrorist campaign there in the late 1950s, my mother was not averse to the idea of being close to the front line, but her sister and brother-in-law kept her under control. ‘Your mother!’ my uncle would roar. Military protection could not prevent her from contracting sand-fly fever from the beach where she regularly snorkelled, delaying her return home for several weeks.
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sp; In Oslo, in the 1960s, my mother again stayed with my aunt and uncle, who was now NATO commander of Northern Europe. Their official residence was Oslo’s former Bunny Club with a mural of palm trees and flamingos adorning the drawing-room walls. Sometimes well-inebriated groups of party lovers rang the doorbell late at night, ignorant of the new, dignified occupants of the ‘club’. They were not the only nocturnal disturbance. Bursting into my uncle and aunt’s bedroom one night, my mother entreated them to rise at once. There was an emergency – outside in the city, riots were taking place and the sky was lit with explosives, which could only signify that, as in other European capitals at the time, student revolution was at hand. It was a firework display, the opening event to a Norwegian national festival.
At another festival, on a family holiday in Sardinia, my mother rang the hotel to say that she and my ten-year-old sister had missed the bus back following their excursion to a carnival in the middle of the island, two hours’ drive from our hotel. They were stranded overnight, all lire spent, in an area notorious for ruthless bandits. They were rescued by a friendly local family and supplied with food and a bed to share for the night, arriving back safely by lunchtime the following day. My mother’s fury with my father for making no apparent attempt to rescue them cast a pall over the remainder of the holiday. For his part, my father had been fully confident that his wife’s penchant for misadventure was invariably balanced by her resourcefulness in overcoming ensuing difficulties.
My mother emerged from such incidents intact. Fate dealt her a much unkinder hand when she was knocked unconscious, badly bruised, and robbed in the bedroom of one of Kenya’s poshest watering holes – the Muthaiga Club Hotel – in 1970. Her usual fearlessness was set back for a time. The long-term effect of this horrible experience was to raise her mildly racist tendencies to full heat.
Occasionally the long-suffering General Sir Kenneth and Lady Pamela Darling, nicknamed Honkel and Ham, accompanied all of us on holiday. Having no children of their own, the teasing and banter of these family occasions gave them light relief from the unstinting deference they were accorded in military life. ‘What’s going on here!’ my uncle would roar as he entered a room, rather hoping for something inappropriate, and in this he was usually rewarded. My bossy aunt could unbend into fits of giggles, no more so than when, after a long lunch of sangria and paella in Menorca, the whole family danced in a crooked row along the waterfront singing ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’.