Dearest Jane... (24 page)

I hope you’re all having a good time at the seaside. Yesterday I got sloshed at lunch at the Walwyns and spent a lot of money at the Lurcher Show. Colonel Mad came to lunch here on Friday. He is an alcoholic diabetic. The cat made a huge mess in the bath this morning. I sent a cheque to Louise and her dog Chappie ate it. Nidnod on very good form.

xx D

Colonel Mad was
Private Eye’s
name for Jeffrey Bernard. In his ‘Low Life’ column in the
Spectator
he once applauded Roger’s
History of the Derby Stakes
as the best racing book ever written. My father asserted that it was only the booze that impeded Jeffrey Bernard from being a top racing writer. When Jeffrey temporarily decamped from Soho to Berkshire, without a car, he wrote himself a letter every day thereby ensuring a postal delivery to his cottage – and a lift in the post van to the local pub, ready for opening time
.

Chez Nidnod

25 September [1970s, on pink pig paper]

Thank God I have only 748 pages of this porcine writing paper left. I’m not sure Lloyds Bank really like it. A hideous start to the morning: I woke up, switched on the wireless and the Croydon Salvation Army Band was playing ‘Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam’. I then tottered to the bathroom and had to evict from the bath a platoon of exceptionally large and healthy spiders whose attitude was distinctly hostile. However, morale was restored by drinking champagne in the sun with the Bomers. I went blackberrying yesterday and was accompanied throughout by an amiable bullock. We are now on good terms and he answers to the name of Nigel.

Chez Gaga

Burghclere

[1974]

I called on the vicar last week and found him nude except for an exceedingly scant pair of Eton blue swimming trunks, and a beret. I unloaded a great deal of jumble on him for the church fete.

Chez Nidnod

Sunday [late 1970s]

I hear you have been seen at the local hunt ball. I always thought you might end up by becoming a typical member of the Northumbrian sporting community and I shall not be surprised to hear of you taking riding lessons before long. I never really liked hunt balls all that much; hideous memories of wheeling enormous women round the Corn Exchange floor to the strains of the ‘Blue Danube’; slightly intoxicated young men making what they believed to be hunting noises and going down on the floor to worry the hearthrug. Since my photo appeared in the local paper, I am almost a celebrity and am treated with rather less disdain than usual in Jacksons Stores and the local public house.

Best love and my respects to your ever loving husband,

RM

Budds Farm

Spring 1974

Your dear mother took me to a party given in a draughty village hall by the Kingsclere and Whitchurch RDC. Sweet sherry in minute glasses, pickled onions, presentations and speeches. I was cornered by a voluble Welsh parson who was a great hand-kisser; he might have kissed mine but for a largish biro stain.

Castle Chaos

Burghclere

22 October [late 1970s]

The dahlias have been wonderful. I really grow them to annoy garden snobs who affect to despise all colour in the garden bar white and grey, and who mutter ‘Surrey stockbroker’ when they see a herbaceous border.

La Maison des Deux Gagas

Grand Senilite

France

[1973]

My herbaceous border, which was looking proud and handsome, has been battered to the ground by a storm of the sort that upset Ovid so much as left Rome for exile: ‘Me Miserum; quanti montes volvuntur aquarum’ etc. (Ah me! What mountain waves around me flow.)

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]

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.