Dearest Jane... (16 page)

Alcohol did my mother few favours. Jekyll became Hyde. Dark and dreadful evenings could be followed by days of sweetness and light, with not a troubled word recalled. Whenever my father could raise the flag for his wife and celebrate her love and goodness’ he did so. Comments now published about ‘Nidnod’s noggin in the old martini bucket’ – and this book has its share – were his way of making light of the pain of my mother’s difficulties. Had my father understood how to take my mother in hand, he would have done so. He was not proactive by nature: retreat was preferable and, at times, essential.

My mother was someone who inspired affection; her own conspicuous loyalty and kindness brought her, in turn, many loyal friends. Those who worked for us tended to stay and she would remain in touch with them long after they had departed. Whenever my mother entered a contented phase and the bottles of spirits stood nearly untouched on the sideboard, her youthful zest for life, her pretty face, her warmth and generosity would smile on us all once more.

My mother outlived my father by fourteen years. She always maintained that whatever else, she was never bored by Roger. He was frequently very bored by our mother, yet he loved her deeply and depended on her completely.

My Dearest Jane . . .

Barclay House

25 January [early 1960s]

It is very quiet with you and Charles both away but your mother has not been feeling well and is not in the mood you usually describe as ‘merry’. I have just signed a contract to appear on TV one evening soon. The programme lasts between 30 and 40 minutes and I am to give the commentary. I think I shall wear my Beatle wig and the sweater I knitted during the war. I am starting to grow a beard from tomorrow.

The Sunday Times

14 February [early 1960s]

I got your mother a jumbo style Valentine; it is about the same size as the ‘Daily Express’ and conveys some doubtless charming sentiments. Charles is still demanding a drum for Christmas and if he works on your mother hard enough, I have little doubt she will be idiotic enough to give him one. I shall insist he plays it at the bottom of the garden in the summer house.

Barclay House

17 June 1963

Next week we have a lot of parties and your poor mother is already beginning to spin like a sputnik. Have you learnt your part for the school play yet? Your mother seems rather muddled about it and I cannot quite gather whether you are in ‘Macbeth’, ‘West Side Story’ or ‘Toad of Toad Hall’.

Barclay House

Sunday [mid 1960s]

Your mother is in very good form and as placid as a bowl of semolina. I think her holiday really did her good.

The Sunday Times

[1968]

I fear you had rather a disturbed period of convalescence. However we are a resilient family and no one seemed to be greatly put out for more than a few minutes by your mother stepping out of a first-floor window on to one of my better shrubs, on Saturday; then endeavouring to bring off a flying tackle on a moving car 48 hours later. Thank you for all your help on those two occasions.

Good luck in your new job and best love,

xx D

With a bandage over my nose following surgery, as my mother drove me home through Burghclere she insisted that I held a newspaper over my face so as not to attract attention
.

Budds Farm

Monday [late 1960s]

I am not sure whether I shall be able to hack my way through the jungle to your residence in darkest Islington tomorrow as your mother is off to Buxted Park at dawn on Wednesday (i.e. about 11.15 a.m.) and will want to discuss arrangements to be made during her absence, that is to say whether it will be kedgeree or fish pie for supper on Friday.

Budds Farm

6 May [late 1960s]

Your mother is in bed sending out lunch and dinner invitations to persons who do not want to come here and whom we do not wish to entertain. She is off to London tomorrow; keep an eye on her. I think she has an assignation with a Newbury car-salesman, whose left shoe is always done up with parcel string so I don’t suppose he’ll be standing her hot lunch at the Mirabelle.

Loose Chippings

Soames Forsyte

Wilts

14 June 1970

The new family name for Nidnod is ‘The Apricot’ because she is always liable to end up canned. She is in fair form but can be tedious about the election. She attributes Mr Wilson’s popularity solely to apathy and cynicism on my part and if the Tories are slammed on Thursday, I know who will get the blame!

Le Petit Bidet

Burghclere Les Deux Eglises

Berks

Sunday [1970]

A police car called here the other night and your poor mother managed to convince herself that the two bucolic occupants were the unexpended portion of the Kray Gang masquerading as the Basingstoke Fuzz. The subject of the call was some way short of enthralling, dealing as it did with the loss of a bicycle at Tadley’s by a man from Penwood called Herbert Mortimer. By the time this trifling error in identity had been cleared up, your mother wanted to drive straight off to Reggie Maudling and lodge a complaint. However, she has simmered down since and really enjoyed herself by showing a film of allegedly wild life in Kenya – her aunt, a black cook called Tombo and three guinea fowl – to a captive audience of George, Jenny and Ian the garden boy. I’m sure you would regard this as a typical exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie.

Reginald Maudling was the current Home Secretary. My mother had a natural affinity with those whom she described as ‘salt of the earth’. They inspired the best in her, creating bonds of mutual sympathy and affection – and amusement. That she was usually in the commanding position in these friendships and connections made them all the more rewarding
.

Schloss Buddestein

Worms

[1973]

Your dear mother’s greatest virtue is her loyalty. Not infrequently she would like to bend an iron bar over my cranium and in general she finds me a very annoying and perverse old gentleman. Nevertheless, she really feels quite sad at leaving me (Query: or is it really her dog Pongo?) and going over to Jersey tomorrow for a week on the Lemprière-Robin’s steamer.

My godfather Raoul Lemprière-Robin, known as ‘The Buggerdier’, and his wife Sheelagh were top dogs in Jersey. My mother would join them on adventurous sailing trips. Their lovely daughter Emma often stayed with my parents at Budds Farm and seemed possessed of all the virtues so absent in their own children
.

[1970s]

I find a fairly large proportion of Nidnod’s verbal output, which is extremely high, sheer drivel, and sometimes annoying and contentious drivel at that. Nevertheless I know I shall miss the old trout very much even though I do get a break from her views on politics, religion, Jane, Charles, Louise, Mrs Hislop, the lack of values in the modern generation and the highly undesirable qualities she finds in most of my relations.

The Crumblings

4 August 1973

It is very quiet here without Nidnod and I really miss her very much. I hope the holiday does her good.

17b Via Dolorosa

Burghclere

[August 1973]

The brief heat wave is over and the weather is dark and clammy like a woman I used to know in Alexandria before the war. Your mother came back on Aug 6. In the morning there was a fearful storm and water poured into my bedroom, the bulk of it falling on my bed. It rained pretty well the whole day and the sky was as dark as in late November at teatime. At 4 p.m. I set off to meet Nidnod at the airport. I parked in a space reserved for directors of some obscure company and proceeded to the ‘reception hall’. This was crowded with dissatisfied travellers and revolting children. At the information desk I learnt that Nidnod’s plane was still grounded in Jersey. I thereupon bought a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
(good on books on Thursdays) and retired to the car for a good read. Having made myself snug, I discovered that I had been sold yesterday’s paper. I slogged back to the bookstall where a young lady tried to appease me with yesterday’s
Daily Express
. Eventually I bought a woman’s magazine with knitting patterns rather than have nothing to read at all. On my way back to my car a 30-ton lorry passed me at high speed through a patch of flood water. If I had been thrown into a pond I could hardly have been more comprehensively soaked from my head downwards. Luckily I only had 75 minutes to wait in dank discomfort before Nidnod arrived, full of bounce and ponging strongly of fish, which was not surprising as she carried a sack containing sole, mackerel and a crab that in size and conformation resembled a 1916 tank. We had some mackerel for lunch the following day, Nidnod employing an old French recipe. After a few mouthfuls, the unexpended portions were tipped into a dustbin and the remaining mackerel were fried in an orthodox manner with excellent result. We had the crab in the evening which was quite good and managed to survive Nidnod’s special sauce!

The Old Dosshouse

[1975]

Your mother is in good form though determined to talk her full ration of complete balls; a bit more than her ration in fact. She is at present happily occupied in a row with Farmer Luckes over a hedge.

Budds Farm

[Mid 1970s]

Your dear mother has been overdoing things and is showing signs, well known to all of us, of fatigue. We had a lot of people here at the weekend and your mother treated them to interminable political monologues that made your dotty Aunt Barbara seem like Socrates by comparison.

My mother’s sister Barbara (Aunt Boo) was a political activist for wide range of causes – a determined bearer of placards. My mother took a more practical public service route, becoming a local councillor, a role in which she immersed herself with customary zeal
.

Sunday Times

Editor in Chief’s Office

Midnight [1972]

King Chaos reigns here unopposed. If your dear mother was fighting a marginal parliamentary seat with the eyes of the world upon her, there would hardly be such an air of desperate tension and such long conferences planning the next steps in the campaign. Under the circumstances I have taken refuge in the hairy arms of demon alcohol and am heading with no little rapidity towards what the late Mr Gladstone called ‘the pint of no return’. I cannot forecast how the election will go but your mother is very determined. She is rather like Lord George Bentinck who ‘did nothing by halves and feared no man’. I have got to have a big elm down; the local wood-cutter sent in an estimate for the job of £125. I have told him exactly what he can do with the tree, coupled with a fervently expressed hope that he will contract Dutch elm disease himself. (I hope he is not in your mother’s constituency).

xx D

Insolvency Hall

Much Crumblings

Berks

8 May [mid 1970s]

Your mother is slightly out of hand as her party has swept the board and now controls the dream city of Basingstoke. She has just gone off to a celebration meeting.

Many Cowpats

Burghclere

[1972]

Your dear mother is taking her Council Duties very seriously and I am the unhappy recipient of interminable monologues on the intricacies of local government and the iniquity of all those who do not put forward views that would have seemed a trifle archaic at the time of the First Reform Bill. The onset of deafness is by no means an unmitigated misfortune.

Budds Farm

12 February 1973

Your dear mother has departed for a Council Meeting carrying enough bumf to keep her busy for a very long period indeed. We are continually being rung up nowadays by people who think she is the local welfare officer and that I am her unpaid secretary. I soon dispel that particular illusion.

Gormley Manor

Much Shiverings

3 February 1974

Your mother has returned from Leicestershire and everyone seems to be annoying her very much – family, friends, neighbours, the NUM and the local council. I think you are fortunate to be 346 miles away or you would be getting it hot and strong, too!

Budds Farm

17 February 1974

Your pert sister sent me a saucy Valentine and signed it ‘Mrs McQueen’. Your dear mother was convinced it had in fact come from the popular hostess of the Carnarvon Arms and I was given a fearful bollocking, with many hostile comments on my alleged drinking and amorous habits, combined with severe reminders that no member of the Denison-Pender family ever received Valentines from barmaids.

Little Crumblings

30 September 1975

Your mother is in a fearful flap over the disappearance of 2 bath towels and everyone in turn is being accused of stealing them along with a silver paper knife from her desk. She is in poor form and blames everything from World War II to the political philosophy of Barbara Castle on me. However, I mutter to myself the consoling words of the old Salvation Army hymn: ‘We nightly pitch our moving camp a day’s march nearer home.’

Best love,

xx D

Little Crumblings

Burghclere

[Late 1970s]

Your mother is very much engaged with horses at the moment and this renders her a little bit touchy, particularly after 7.15 p.m. when she is liable to make Queen Boadicea look like the secretary of the Peace Pledge Union.

The Merry Igloo

Burghclere on the Ice

[Late 1970s]

Your mother has developed a disturbing belief that a sausage she cooked was stolen by a poltergeist. I have with difficulty restrained her from calling in the Revd Jardine, a Welshman with an Afro hairstyle and irregular teeth.

The Reverend was duly summoned by my mother to exorcise the said poltergeist with ‘Bell, Book and Candle’. When, a few weeks later, my mother was asked how things were going poltergeist-wise, she responded, ‘Oh absolutely marvellous! The vicar came round and circumcised it!’

Budds Farm

2 December [early 1970s]

Your mother came with me to Newmarket last week. In Newmarket town she put the car key in upside down, wrenched it and broke it in half! I could not get another key and as BMWs are full of safety devices, was immobilised for 2 days to my immense inconvenience.