Dearest Jane... (25 page)

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.

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’.

One day in Menorca we set off for some secluded little cove to swim, but my father had forgotten his bathing kit. He decided to trip lightly into the balmy waters in his birthday suit. He was some way out to sea when a large coach arrived above the beach and from it, clucking like hens, emerged a stream of Spanish nuns, evidently also on a little seaside outing. Gleefully, we combed the beach for camouflage for my father. A collapsed cardboard box was scraped off the sand and born aloft to him in the sea; he slipped it over his head, emerging triumphantly with his elegant fig leaf in place.

Holidays can be both challenging and consolidating to friendships. Raoul and Sheelagh Lemprière-Robin were two great friends with whom my parents happily holidayed, given that their destinations were not always rewarding and could be rife with testing incidents and discomforts, plus at least one spat between my mother and Mrs Lemprière Robin, a lady of equally definite opinions.

In the mid 1980s my parents invited me to join them for a week in Provence. I was appointed map reader – but sacked after one hour in France, when my mother was compelled to reverse back up a motorway slip road. Our hotel restaurant was an early specialist in ‘
cuisine minceur
’, not quite my father’s choice of robust fare. ‘What
are
these fucking sheep’s balls?’ he exclaimed as a minute meatball he had failed to spear on his fork shot off the plate. But like the French holidays of my childhood, it turned out to be one of the happiest of times. ‘It is surprising what fun you can be,’ said my mother to me kindly. Such was my sadness at saying goodbye at the end of our holiday, I found myself in tears in the taxi as it sped from the airport.

By the time my father entered his seventies, his evident appreciation of my mother’s companionship and capabilities seem to echo the happiness of their earlier days. They were often accompanied by their little dogs who sometimes proved less troublesome than their children. Increasingly, his letters were to be coloured by memories of the holidays of his youth. In addition, he was intrigued by the holidays that others chose to take.

My Dearest Jane . . .

Loose Chippings

Soames Forsyte

Wilts

14 June 1970

How are you getting on with all those hirsute, noisy, argumentative Greeks? Have you made nice friends yet with any shipping magnates that would be suitable for the position of my son-in-law? Don’t lie about in the sun too much as it is bad for the skin and you will come back looking as if you were off to a fancy dress party as a prune.

My ‘sabbatical’ summer in Greece, mostly on the isle of Samos, renting a house at £4 per month!

Little Crumblings

Roper Caldbeck

Bucks

3 July 1970

I sent a long letter to you at Poste Restante, Vathy and another was addressed by your ever-loving mother. She has been confusing everyone by saying that you are at a well-known Greek hotel called Poste Restaurante! Can you beat it?

Budds Farm

[Early 1970s]

Is it true you are off to Paris? When I was just 18 I lived in France for 6 months. I was a nice, shy lad learning French before embarking on the Spartan rigours of Sandhurst. I had an aged tutor whom I mobbed up: with luck he used to lose his temper and throw me out and I spent long and happy days in Fontainebleau or at Barbizon. In those days Frenchmen had beards, bowler hats (straw hats in summer), button boots and short tailcoats. Usually pince-nez. The franc was very shaky and the exchange was about 380F to the £. My ever-loving parents kept me brutally short of treacle but occasionally I saved up £3 and went off to Paris for 36 hours where I had the time of my life and broadened my outlook. I went to France a dear little innocent boy (more or less) and was luckily seduced by the postman’s wife who was also usherette at the local cinema. I suppose she would be about 92 if still alive. Still, one had to make a start somewhere. I lived at Fontainebleau and spring in the forest there was something I still remember with pleasure. Did it never rain in those days? O mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter annos! (If only Jupiter would restore those bygone years to me. Virgil,
Aeneid
.)

I must remember to send old Mabel a birthday card. I think she is 87. I have seldom had happier times than when Mabel and I and my sister went to stay in rooms at Brighton (9 Holland Road) during World War I. No wonder I still retain affectionate memories of the West Pier and Maynard’s sweet shop. I remember as if yesterday all the slot machines on the West Pier, my favourite being the execution of the Irish Traitor Sir Roger Casement. I also remember with pleasure the busty lady who gave swimming and diving displays from the pier. Brighton then was full of wounded soldiers and I amassed a marvellous collection from the cigarette cards they gave me. If only I had kept them I would be sitting on a goldmine. I once saw an elderly lady fishing on the pier. A gust of wind removed her hat and her wig inside it. There were happy days sitting in a deck chair on the pier reading the adventures of Tiger Tim in ‘The Rainbow’ and consuming a 2p bag of raspberry drops and listening to the band of the 60th Rifles playing excerpts from Chu Chin Chow. The food was very nasty at the height of the U-boat campaign: no potatoes (only swedes), cocoa, margarine for butter, and a repellent sticky liquid in lieu of sugar. Enough of this senile and unprofitable drooling.

xx D

Mabel was the first woman Roger loved – his nanny
.

The Miller’s House

[Mid 1980s]

I’m glad you had an enjoyable holiday. Le tourisme in France is more agreeable than it was when few plugs pulled and nervous old ladies always cleaned their dentures in mineral water.

Budds Farm

Thursday [mid 1970s]

Last week I paid my first visit to Brighton since I went with you and saw all those appalling commercial travellers. This time the place was inundated with Trade Union representatives who of course, being members of the new aristocracy, had all the best rooms in the hotels and the best tables in the posh restaurants. At the Old Ship your mother and I shared a bed the width of a stretcher, on the 5th floor. My head was balanced on the bedside table, your mother’s feet were on the floor. Demon Doss was conspicuous by his absence. However, we had an agreeable morning on the pier, your mother reading the ‘Daily Express’, whilst I purchased postcards of an indelicate nature. We then had two quiet and pleasant days with the Grissells. On the way home we lunched at a flash public house which sold contraceptives.