Dearest Jane... (29 page)

The Miller’s House

22 August [1980s, in red ink]

I have just received my annual summons to the Blue Seal dinner at the Savoy. When I was elected in 1946 the Blue Seal had so much treacle put away that the dinner and all drinks were free. Nowadays you hand over £40 to an official known as The Chaffwax as you enter the premises. Therefore I don’t go. Apart from which most of my contemporaries are dead, undergoing major surgery or are residents of private asylums on the outskirts of Worthing. The Senior Member is Lord Amherst who was elected in 1919. He was a chum of Noël Coward’s and on the fringe of the stage. The next senior is John Codrington, the well-known landscape gardener. I think he is ninety.

The Blue Seal was an ancient military dining club
.

Chez Nidnod

Kintbury

3 September [mid 1980s]

Last Sunday was a very hot day (87 degrees F) and I went to a barbeque lunch where with singular folly I elected to ward off heat stroke and dehydration with copious drafts of gin and vin rose. I felt so ill the next day I placed myself in intensive care, i.e. I lay on my bed reading crematorium catalogues and imbibing iced soup brought to me none too willingly by Nidnod. The following day my condition was declared to be ‘stable’.

Chaos Castle

Burghclere

[Early 1980s]

Yesterday we had a superlative lunch with old Harry Middleton. His marriage was of brief duration but he had a teenage daughter there yesterday, blonde and very saucy in a pink bikini. All the guests, except your middle-class parents, were upper class. I sat next to lovely Rachel Willoughby de Broke with whom I fell in love in the Newbury Corn Exchange in 1929. I was running well out of my class as she was taken up by Prince Ali Khan and the King of Belgium. Also at lunch was a somewhat royal individual who runs the polo at Windsor. I enjoyed it all very much and after a good deal of gin let my tongue wag somewhat indiscreetly. Drink unfortunately always tempts me to be clownish!

A popular friend and racehorse owner, Harry Middleton, had been assistant head of BBC Outside Broadcasting, including racing coverage. In the bikini, his daughter Laura later married Peter de Wesselow, grandson of Roger de Wesselow, who gave my father his first job in racing in 1947
.

The Miller’s House

17 March [mid 1980s]

I’ve just had an Easter card from the Very Revd Basil Madjoucoff; if only all my friends were as faithful. I first met him in the table tennis saloon at the YMCA, Jerusalem, in 1937. This YMCA, built with American money, is a huge phallus-shape building containing every luxury. Basil is an Armenian and those of his fellow countrymen who had not been sliced up by the Turks were pretty hot at ping-pong and Russian billiards.

If anyone is interested in the extraordinary story of the Very Revd Basil Madjoucoff, ask Lupin!

The Miller’s House

December [mid 1980s]

A huge parcel from America today containing a Holy Calendar and pictures of sacred birds from the Very Revd Basil Madjoucoff. It is 50 years since I beat Basil in the final of the table tennis championship at the YMCA in Jerusalem.

The Miller’s House

[Mid 1980s]

Fairly warm and occasionally sunny: we have a lunch party today and I have put chairs out in the garden although au fond I know it is not warm enough. The trouble is that I want our guests to see the garden which frankly does credit to Nidnod, now ‘une horticulturaliste enragee’, and myself. No weeds and some lovely roses and clematis. Children and dogs spell death to conversation; Thank God no children around today and I have incarcerated the dogs. Among the guests is David McCall, the same age as myself and living precariously after a hideous operation. He was my greatest friend at Eton and oddly enough I cannot remember ever discussing sex with him, a subject that comprised about 65 per cent of adolescent conversation. I think we stuck to racing. He had no money at all and his education was paid for by an uncle. His father went off to Dublin one day for a haircut and lunch at the Kildare Street Club and was never seen or heard of again! David began work as an insurance clerk at £110 a year and I gave him his first business, i.e. insuring my mackintosh for £3. Happily he soon went into racing as a bloodstock agent and is now a millionaire. Also coming are the Van Straubenzees (I fancy Mrs Van S.) and the Gaselees (ditto Mrs G.). I have mixed a drink called a Dr Bodkin Adams, named after the Eastbourne GP who is believed to have done in 400 of his wealthier geriatric patients. He was acquitted of murder because of the inadequacy of the prosecution led by an Eton contemporary of mine who was cordially disliked by one and all. For lunch we are having haddock mousse, boeuf à la something or other, meringues followed by Blue Vinney cheese, washed down with plonk rouge supplied by a friend of Charles, and some port churned out by a descendant of Dr Warre, the famous Headmaster of Eton. I have had a haircut and am wearing a white jersey (so far only one jam stain) and some poncy white shoes bought at a disposal sale in Marlborough. Talking of stains (quite an amusing topic) there used to be a fat punter at Ascot who always let it be known when things were going well as the soup stains on his waistcoat were real turtle.

xx D

As the new owners of my parents’ former home, Budds Farm, the Van Straubenzees played a small but significant role in our family history
.

The Miller’s House

April 1988

We went out to dinner last night. As we approached the house of our hosts, I said to Nidnod, ‘If Lady C. is here, I intend to drive straight home.’ Alas, another lamentable case of lack of moral courage and she ruined my evening. She likes me slightly less than a cat likes a bull terrier and always infers I am suffering from a terminal disease – possibly wishful thinking on her part. I unfortunately forgot to put my teeth in and Nidnod was furious. She is getting her own back with frozen bully-beef for lunch and those biscuits like bus tyres they issue to arctic expeditions. Do you remember the one good restaurant in Newbury, La Riviera? It has been sold to new owners and is now called ‘The Last Viceroy’. I am trying it out with Freddie Burnaby-Atkins on the rather flimsy grounds that he was in fact ADC to the last Viceroy.

Best love,

RM xx

‘The Browsing and Sluicing were excellent’, wrote my father on nearly as many occasions as he claimed to have been poisoned by meals of a ‘repellent’ nature. Neither a gourmet nor a gourmand, Roger appreciated good food and he largely depended on my mother to produce it. When left to his own devices, he was a cook of some originality.

‘Gormley Manor

Much Shiverings

[Early 1970s]

I drummed up many nourishing delicacies during your mother’s absence including a giant pie composed of salmon fishcakes, fish fingers, onions, haricot beans, Muscadet and potatoes. I had three helpings and fell into a restful coma afterwards.’

In their earliest years of marriage, my mother, a novice in the kitchen, did her best despite the limited ingredients available due to food rationing. Their happy ménage was nearly brought to a premature halt when she served a bowl of steaming boiled pig trotters – unadorned – at a dinner party. A homemade pâté in Yateley a few years later reduced the dinner guests to silence, until my father broke the ice – ‘I wondered what had happened to that dead rat in the cellar, dear.’

In much later life, my mother could take an hour to fry an egg, rendering it into an unrecognizable specimen on my father’s plate. In order to be well prepared on other occasions, dishes were cooked so many days in advance of consumption that interesting bacterial variants might be on the menu.

Between these two polar points in my mother’s cooking career, she produced quantities of absolutely delicious and imaginative dishes to which I owe my own pleasure in cooking. She relished the adventure of new recipes, taking herself off on day courses at the Cordon Bleu school at Winkfield. She was a fine sauce maker!

Cooks were hired from time to time, with varying degrees of success. Our daily food in the late 1950s was transformed by our tiny Italian cook, Fernanda. Enticing aromas of herbs and garlic wafted from the kitchen; sheets of homemade pasta hung over the back of a kitchen chair, awaiting Fernanda’s sharp knife to cut them into strips of tagliatelle or squares of ravioli.

The microwave was invented for my mother. She adored electronic gadgets – an earlier favourite was the electric carving knife which made Sunday lunches sound more like a chainsaw massacre. Once the microwave arrived, the suggestion of preparing even the simplest dish was greeted with ‘But I’ll do it in the microwave!’ My mother was inspired to write an ode to her microwave which she stuck on the kitchen wall. When a microwave engineer was called out one day, he read it and, hugely impressed, took a copy back to his company who promptly rang my mother to offer her a job as a microwave salesman. She settled for £20 of free microwave equipment.

By the 1980s, going out to a local restaurant or pub became a popular pastime for my parents. Only a few hostelries escaped my father’s crusty critiques on paper but luckily for them, not in the press.

Gathering round the table to eat together as a family provided happy memories – but was not infrequently the stage set for domestic fall outs. My father became practised in quietly leaving the room, but not before he had uttered the last word. Sometimes it was a simple one:
‘Pax
’ – Peace.

My Dearest Jane . . .

Barclay House

19 October [early 1960s]

Your mother leaves for Germany on Tuesday and I am left to hold the fort, so to speak. However, I always manage to look after myself pretty well and make myself reasonably comfortable.

Barclay House

25 October [early 1960s]

It is somewhat lonely here with only the inscrutable Moppet the cat for company. I am doing some nice steady work in the cook-house and last night drummed up salmon fishcakes and scrambled eggs, followed by bananas, vanilla ice and cream, the meal being swilled down with a bottle of Chianti. Tonight I am doing a little casserole of chicken cooked in Burgundy, preceded by a rich broth into which I have thrown everything from the unexpended portion of a pork chop down to the remains of a tin of Kitekat. ‘What doesn’t sicken will fatten,’ as the old saying goes! Everyone is kind to married men living on their own and I have a stack of invitations as thick as the telephone directory; I may even accept one or two.

Love,

xx D

Budds Farm

6 May [late 1960s]

I made a new cocktail last night, orange juice, grenadine, vermouth, brandy and a splash of crème de menthe. It is guaranteed to make a week-old corpse spring lightly from its coffin and enter for a six-day bicycle race.

Budds Farm

[1970s]

Charlie and I had the Bomers to dinner last night. The menu, daintily executed by me, was as follows. 1 Salmon Chowder (i.e. tinned salmon from Jackson’s Stores jinked up with eggs, red pepper, oatmeal and the unexpended portion of a bottle of Hungarian Riesling (9/- a bottle – don’t miss this astonishing bargain). 2 A rich pie of minced beef, minced pork and haricot beans generously sprayed with a rich kidney and Chianti sauce. 3 Raspberries, strawberries and bananas, well iced, and floating merrily in a sea of brandy and orange Curacao. To prepare for this repast we had all shoved our heads into a trough containing a very powerful cocktail.

The Bomers, Colin and Sarah, much loved next-door neighbours at Budds Farm, were serious foodies who saved shillings in a jam jar in their kitchen for the purchasing of a pot of caviar. My mother loved Sarah for her sweet and sympathetic nature, as did my father, with the added bonus that he could enjoy literary discussions with her
.

Budds Farm

23 June [late 1960s]

On return for a pleasing family lunch, I found your brother had stormed out after a row with Nidnod; he did not appear till teatime. Your sister had had a row with Nidnod, too, and declined to have lunch as well. I wanted lunch badly but found it quite uneatable, so a good time was had by all, I don’t think!

The Sunday Times

Tuesday [late 1960s]

On Sunday evening we had supper at the Carnarvon Arms. I was slightly alarmed when a squat, hairy man accompanied by a long bespectacled woman arrived with an electric organ and set it up, but in fact he played very agreeably – mostly old tunes for moth-eaten listeners and I had a little difficulty in preventing your mother joining a man with Guinness on his moustache who was singing – if that is the right word – the choruses.

Schloss Blubberstein

Montag [early 1970s]

It continues sehr nasty weather down here, immer Regen and Sclamm! Der Herr Oberst Thistlethwayte and his family came to lunch yesterday and a reasonably good time was had by one and all. Louise cooked the mitagessen and dished up a huge capon with mushrooms, carrots and peas that was really quite excellent. Vortrefflich!

Noel and Ann Thistlethwayte and their children were good family friends
.

Schloss Schweinkopf

Grosspumpernickel

Neuberg

[Early 1970s]

Your sister chain smokes Marlboro cigarettes and declines to take exercise. I took her to supper at the Marquis of Granby, near Brightwalton. The browsing and sluicing there are more than adequate and I had some delicious onion soup. Louise had enough pâté maison to load a barge, followed by a cheese soufflé that would have satisfied a platoon.

Budds Farm

[1970s]

Last Sunday we went to lunch with old Mrs D. (85) who has twice received extreme unction but has made astonishing rallies just as the District Nurse was placing pennies on her eyeballs. Her wit and precision of speech remain undiminished; she is merely a trifle more sceptical. Unfortunately luncheon, not prepared by her, was of a singularly repellent character. We started off with a gigantic raw beetroot each, covered with what looked and tasted like Erasmic, a shaving soap.

Budds Farm

12 October [mid 1970s]

In a public house last week I was induced to consume a highly coloured circular object designated ‘a Scotch Egg’. I am not a fan of the Scots but do they in fact merit this particular insult? Mine contained four inches of garden string and the beak of a fully grown hen. Is this usual or was I just unlucky?