Dearest Jane... (30 page)

Budds Farm

20 February [1970s]

Your brother gave a dinner party for 12, the food prepared by himself. Trust him to be eccentric, the repast started with fried cheese on toast.

Budds Farm

12 May [early 1970s]

I had a good dinner at White’s on Monday: to wit, a couple of perfect martinis first; poached salmon from the River Dee with cucumber and a rich cream sauce; Welsh lamb with new potatoes and young beans; fresh strawberries with kirsch and cream; and, I forgot, a lovely clear gravy soup first with not a single winking eye of grease on the surface. All this washed down with an excellent hock, a faultless claret; followed by port (I think Taylors 1924) and brandy.

Chez Nidnod

Burghclere

[1972]

Thank you so much for the nice birthday gift which was much appreciated. Just the thing for my jaded palate. I am getting quite like my great-great aunt who when she was 91 used to souse her chocolate éclairs with Worcester sauce to get a kick out of them.

Le Petit Nid des Deux Alcoholiques

[1970s]

Your mother is cooking as if her life depended on it and weird smells and greasy black smoke are escaping through the kitchen window. She could always get a job in a crematorium.

Budds Farm

[Mid 1970s]

I went to Cousin Tom’s Derby night dinner at White’s. 17 guests including the ineffable Lord Goodman. Vintage Bollinger before a dinner of cold soup, salmon soufflé, cold duck in aspic and stuffed with foie gras, new potatoes and asparagus, bombe surprise with fresh raspberries. Drink included Chablis, a delicious 1961 Claret, Port, Brandy.

Lord Goodman, a leading lawyer, held many prestigious positions in politics and the arts
.

‘Eventide’ Home for Distressed or Mentally Afflicted

Members of the Middle Classes

Burghclere

[Late 1970s]

After Charlie Rome’s funeral, four of us caught the inter-city at Darlington at 5.33 p.m. and looked forward to a leisurely dinner and some British Railways claret to cheer us up. We advanced on the dining car at 7 p.m. and found it empty bar a few members of the staff reading newspapers and playing cards. ‘No dinners after 6.15,’ we were told. (Passengers had not been warned of that decree.) ‘Is there a second sitting?’ we asked. ‘The staff does not like second sittings,’ we were informed. We then went to a sordid installation termed a ‘buffet-bar’ where I ordered four whiskies and soda and four sandwiches. A surly individual replied that there might be a little whisky but there was no soda, no sandwiches, nothing at all to eat, and that in any case he was closing down as he wanted to do some paperwork (what?). I have written to complain but I don’t suppose I shall even get an apology. However, Mr Surtees took me to his flat in Chelsea and regaled me with lentil soup, cheese and Burgundy.

xx D

Aged 20, Charlie Rome was captured in the same year as my father, 1940. Forbidden to attempt to escape because of his conspicuous height, he taught fellow POWs, including Roger, to knit. To celebrate his twenty-first birthday in prison, he was given an extra potato. I witnessed the happy reunion of these two at a dinner party in their old age, communing like a wise pair of bespectacled owls in their velvet dinner jackets
.

The Olde Leakyng Cabin

Burghclere

December 1980

My luck is in: I hear I have drawn a small carton of petit beurre biscuits at the Jacksons Store raffle. On Christmas Day we go to the Darlings for lunch. Let us hope she can be induced to light a fire in the drawing room. The more I think of it, the more I wish I was having Christmas at a kosher hotel in Eastbourne. I have had Christmas at some weird places including Bethlehem, Trieste, Alexandria, Spangenberg and Cadogan Gardens.

Love,

xx D

Now a hotel, Roger’s family home was in Cadogan Gardens, SW3
.

Budds Farm

[Early 1980s]

The Hounds of spring may be on Winter’s Traces, but life here can hardly be termed satisfactory. The temporary cook arrived on Monday. She is a divorcee of about 35 and by no means bad looking. She has hunted, yachted, ridden in point to points, piloted a glider and cooked for a leading Newmarket stable. She talks incessantly. Unfortunately she cannot cook. Last night the Bomers came to dinner. Disaster! We started with stuffed tomatoes (unspeakable) and then boiled pheasant which might have been boiled crow. Sarah Bomer was sweet as usual. Nidnod was in a fearful mood. Unfortunately Nidnod has invited guests all this week, thinking (quite reasonably) that this expensive cook could provide some edible nosh. I have been ordered to read less and laugh less!

Best love,

D

Budds Farm

28 March [late 1970s]

I went to a dinner (men only) at Nicky Beaumont’s at Ascot House. Very comfortable, nice furniture and altogether agreeable. Excellent 6-course dinner of which I recollect asparagus, lobster, English lamb, mushrooms on toast. Sluicing on the same high level. Guests mostly old characters connected with racing.

Nicky Beaumont was Director of Ascot racecourse. With his wife Ginny, he returned to his home county of Northumberland when he retired. Full of character and always up for a laugh, the pair of them were full of good cheer and kindness
.

The Miller’s House

27 February [mid 1980s]

Lunched yesterday with Gilly and Ag Clanwilliam and had a marvellous treacle pudding which I greatly relished.

The Miller’s House

12 July [mid 1980s]

Nidnod made me give her dinner at ‘The Blue Boar’ the other night; the food made a transit camp at Catterick seem like the Connaught.

The Miller’s House

27 April [mid 1980s]

The hired cook is a success; v. good food but wasted on me as I prefer kedgeree, fishcakes and kippers.

The Old Lazar House

Burghclere

27 August [early 1980s]

Your mother enjoyed her holiday in the Channel Islands. She came back with two jumbo crabs which we had for lunch today. She did them very well (a cayenne pepper sauce) but my stomach was in a state of mutiny some hours later. A slight fracas occurred when two geese entered the kitchen and made some huge messes. The conservatory has been invaded by an army of dung beetles. A vigorous counter attack with an ancient spray killed them off and I now have the task of removing about 7,000 corpses.

Chez Nidnod

15 August 1981

V. hot here and everyone agreeably limp and lethargic. Nidnod thinks she is in Malay and gives us paw-paws for breakfast, a fruit previously encountered by me only when reading pre-1914 stories by Somerset Maugham.

[1988, postcard]

Filthy smoked salmon at the 5 Bells. Might have been the Aga Khan’s galoshes.

The Old Organ Grinder’s Doss House

17 September [early 1980s]

Yesterday I took Nidnod to Marlborough, bought her a book and gave her tea at the Pretty Polly Tea Rooms which provide the largest and richest teas, and the most expensive, in the south of England: also a bewildering variety of ices. I would like to take the boys there. Very good strawberry jam and cream.

The Miller’s House

[Mid 1980s]

We had lunch in the Three Swans at Hungerford where we had whitebait cooked as badly as only an English pub could cook it. I then asked for some cheese. I might as well have asked for a fried chimpanzee. ‘Ploughman’s lunch’, possibly a ‘cheese sandwich’, but they had never heard of anyone ordering ‘cheese’. I must go down to my evening repast – vegetable soup and a slice of toast. I shall soon be caught pinching Otto’s dinner.

Eventide Home for Distressed Members of the Middle Classes

25 July [1980s]

As for your vegetarian cooking, I am convinced it would be a howling success with feminist readers of the Guardian; most men like something with more blood in it (disgusting brutes)! It is extremely kind of you to ask a tedious relic of the past such as myself to stay. There are certain obstacles to be overcome but I hope to be able to accept your generous invitation (no courgette and peaspod puddings, if you don’t mind).

Your affectionate father,

xx

Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were a different kettle of fish – it’s time to swim alongside them
.

Blood may be thicker than water but it is also a great deal nastier.

E. C. Somerville and Martin Ross,
Some Experiences of an Irish R.M
. (1899)

As he arrived in the world, my father encountered his first relation. His mother. It was not an encouraging start.

His mother’s appreciation of her son was marginal and her criticisms generous. Her known pleasures lay in expanding her hat collection, pampering her poodles and sharpening her tongue. Some balance was achieved by the kindly nature of his gentler father. Little Roger did not give his parents much trouble. He got on well enough with his elder sister, Joan, my grandmother’s favourite.

That my grandmother had grown up in a family of thirteen children had done little to mellow her outlook. She was not unintelligent but she may have been blighted by some inner and untold unhappiness, poor lady. Her father, Thomas Blackwell, was well liked and a highly respected business tycoon. Latterly known as the ‘Jam King’ he was the Blackwell of ‘Crosse & Blackwell’, purveyors of fine jams, pickles and conserves since the early 1800s. His second wife, my father’s grandmother, was reputed to have been in love with a poor curate when her parents pressed her into marrying another suitor, the older and more prosperous Thomas Blackwell.

Various Blackwells surfaced intermittently in our family life. My father’s first cousin Tom, a true friend and ally to Roger, was generous and a shrewd financial adviser. They both worked in the racing world – Tom, a member of the Jockey Club, owned a stud near Newmarket. Although he had two children, Charles and Caroline, from his marriage to the glamorous Bunny, before she took off for pastures new, Tom was very definitely a man’s man and one of the old school. There are more question marks over his jovial bachelor brother, John, assistant head at my brother’s prep school, a great golfer and well loaded. My father enjoyed them both. My mother enjoyed neither of them. Tom and John’s mother, Aunt Shirley, all kindness and fluff, bobs up like a cork in my father’s letters along with Aunt Margery Blackwell, a sedate spinster who lived in Gerrards Cross. A former beauty with a lovely voice, she had cancelled each of her three weddings at the last minute in terror of the impending honeymoon. My grandfather was usually delegated to inform the unfortunate husbands to be.

Aunt Joan grew up as a brisk Blackwell in manner and habit, occasionally glowing with a jolly show of interest in her nieces and nephew. One Boxing Day, teenage Lupin and I found ourselves sitting in the drawing room alone with Aunt Joan. Thoughts on our social life suddenly struck her and turning to my brother she asked brightly, ‘Any balls, Charles?’ The phrase entered family history. Aunt Joan had been released from the obligations of her mother’s drawing room by the Second World War, flourishing as a WRN and later as swimming teacher at the Francis Holland School. She was a competent and keen photographer. Her friends were called ‘chums’ and had names like Bunty and Pixie. She married the charming, urbane Reggie Cockburn, barrister. She was his second wife in what was well known as a marriage of companionship rather than consummation. It was not until after her death that I learned that she had several step-daughters – and received the impression that it was nearly news to them as well. She had an unerring ability to promote the excellence of almost every child she knew to my parents, apart from their own. Nonetheless, she was kind enough to me.

If passion and warmth did not beat powerfully in the Blackwell breast, my father’s Aunt Star Blackwell was a compensation. Abandoning her first marriage to elope with an attractive Irishman, Chris Mitchell, to live in a beautiful Georgian house in Co. Wicklow, Ireland, she was beloved by both my parents. Aunt Star had a huge sense of fun. I leave her profile to my father later in this chapter.

Neni (Enid) and Pips (Phyllis) were my mother’s aunts. Aunt Pips was something of a surrogate grandmother in the absence of her sister Doris, my granny, whom I lovingly remember from all the occasions I stayed with her. She died when I was only three.

Aunt Pips had style and verve. Slender with perfect posture and well dressed, she was a talented horsewoman who hunted side-saddle. A black-and-white cine film of Aunt Pips tells the story – in her formal riding habit, smiling behind the black net veil attached to her top hat, merrily puffing a cigarette through the net. She loved the young but tragically had lost her only son to appendicitis aged twelve, followed later by the death of her beloved husband, Norman Loder – a great friend of the poet Siegfried Sassoon, whose signature appears on every other page of their visitors’ book. Aunt Pips’s second husband, Lindsay Shedden, was a cool dude – tall and slim. I remember him in his eighties, stylish in jeans and a large sombrero in their garden at Rose Cottage, Somerby, in Leicestershire. Uncle Lindsay was married four times – one of his wives was the Duchess of Rutland.

Never judgemental, Aunt Pips was popular with all of us. Her sister, Aunt Neni had been very pretty and so was her little house and garden at Manton in Rutland. There was nothing to suggest that her life had been dominated by tragedy. Her wild and handsome only child, Michael, like a brother to his first cousin, my mother, had been killed by an accident on a motorbike, aged eighteen. Her husband, Uncle Ted Kemble, a former county Chief Constable, later committed suicide.

Relating to relations was often tricky – not necessarily eased by the absence of children on all sides of the family. We had only one first cousin, a good egg called Alex Fellowes, who became a headmaster and happily married father of four. Alex was the only son of my mother’s middle sister: the notorious Barbara, Aunt Boo, famed for her political protests and variety of lovers. My mother did not appreciate Aunt Boo’s shenanigans but, when he grew up, Lupin did. He carried out small services on a large scale for this aunt, responding to persistent telephone appeals round the clock. He enjoyed Aunt Boo! The contrasting sensibleness of her elder sister Pamela could be depended upon. Pam and her soldier husband Ken were a great team, if a strict one, as aunt and uncle, aka Ham and Honkel. This did not in any way restrain my father from poking fun at their foibles, not least my aunt’s deplorable dress sense and her stringent application of domestic economies. He was not to know how generous she and my uncle would later be to my brother and sister and myself. Ham’s one indulgence was the Du Maurier cigarettes which she smoked in quantity. Both polo players in their youth and dedicated riders to hounds into their old age, Ham and Honkel had a great passion for horses. I can remember trembling as their two enormous grey beasts – appropriately named Slam and Jeep – thundered around us in a field. Their chosen dog was always a whippet. My uncle rose through the Army to the ultimate rank of General Sir Kenneth Darling, straight as they come.