Dearest Jane... (34 page)

The Miller’s House

15 May 1987

Otto, who recently bit an Olympic Games gold medallist, sends his love.

D xx

There were a number of politicians whom my father would not have minded setting his miniature sabre-toothed Chihuahuas on. Some of Roger’s funniest but fiercely felt commentaries involved the supposed great and good of British politics and they feature in the next chapter, offset by his most frivolous jests, japes and tomfoolery
.

Little Hangover

Great Pissups

Berks

[1970s]

Dearest Jane,

Your pig mask which you so kindly gave me is proving a great success down here. I had an appointment with Mr Lipscombe, manager of Lloyds Bank, Newbury, and Chairman of the Rotary Club. I slipped on the mask just before entering his office. On seeing me he sprang to his feet and turned quite pale, evidently taking me for a masked robber. When I told him I was rather concerned about a missing share certificate, he was much relieved. Where will demon pig strike next?

Best love,

xx D

Out of Roger’s bran tub came jokes, poems, quizzes, bizarre tales – and news items. He was sometimes moved to poetry, attributing his verse respectfully to a ‘W. Wordsworth’. He taught us to recite by heart from
Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes
by Harry Graham – not compulsory on any curriculum today.

‘There’s been an accident’, they said,

‘Your servant’s cut in half, he’s dead!’

‘Well,’ said Mr Jones. ‘Then please

Give me the half that’s got my keys.’

I spent my 2/- (10p) weekly pocket money on practical jokes that hung from a board at the local post office, rarely attaining the audience glee I was banking on. Once I nearly blinded my father by spraying his nose with sneezing powder. A sobering moment. I blame him entirely – he was the leader in tomfoolery.

One day he returned home from London to find his wife and young family gathered round the tea table. ‘How was your day, darling?’ asked my mother. ‘Well, the most extraordinary thing happened to me, in Harrods . . .’ There followed with a long tale of misadventure, culminating in my father’s arrest by the Harrods store detective, charged with shoplifting ‘As the detective led me away,’ he said gravely, ‘I kept protesting my innocence.’ My mother’s face creased with concern. ‘And then, the detective got hold of my leg and simply would not let go. He starting pulling it . . . as hard as I have been pulling yours for the past ten minutes.’

A few minutes later he let out a yelp. It seemed that he had knocked out his two front teeth on his teacup! One hand over a groaning mouth, he held his purchase from the Harrods jokes department aloft: two large bloodied fangs. My innocent mother was around the table in a flash. ‘Poor Roger! Darling!’ First aid was essential! Her arm round him, she steered him towards the door. My tall father, intent on hamming his part to the maximum, walked bang into the door frame, resulting in a giant bruise and twenty-four hour concussion.

Sensible in his study, his attention turned to other matters – current events and politics. His omnivorous appetite for news might incite him to letters purple with disparagement and despondency, redeemed for the reader by the pithiness of his delivery.

My father’s path sometimes crossed the intelligentsia of his day. He relished encounters with those on the inner circles of power and influence. It would have been entirely out of character for him to display any degree of obsequiousness. The qualities he admired were courage, honesty, kindness, humour, a sense of duty – and intelligence well used. He was very disinclined to be impressed by money even if he might appreciate the perks it could purchase. To prick the balloon of pomposity or humbug was his regular delight. His unashamed glee in provocation often led him to adopt the opposing position in any political dialogue with a defender of convictions either to the extreme right or left. Naughty Roger – he found subversion irresistible.

The troubled 1970s – involving the stranglehold of the trade unions, at whatever cost to the country – represented what he saw as the nadir of political life in Britain. He was far from being alone in his despair on the evident decline of values and standards in society overall. That the country was being brought to its knees by intransigent union leaders and inept politicians was profoundly disillusioning to the World War II generation who had given six years of their lives to fight for their country. They felt betrayed. My father could be award-winningly gloomy and, to crown it all, there was the decline in the newspaper industry on which he depended to make his living.

The vehemence in his letters washed over this daughter at the time. In the 1970s I was happily absorbed in looking after my family, creating a home for us in Northumberland, making friends – and running my small bookselling enterprise. Unwittingly, I left the hard realities of the world beyond to my husband who, as an industrialist on Tyneside, was at the sharp end of events.

His political and social comments – these stray bats from Roger’s belfry – swoop in randomly, true to the usual style of his letters. Curious guests at a dinner party, his dog’s’ repellent behaviour, tycoons at Ascot, flowers in the garden, a local scandal, my mother’s mood, nostalgic memories of the past and Lupin’s and Lumpy’s antics in the present all run together in a seamless flow with barely a paragraph break in sight. As a voracious reader, Roger’s literary enthusiasms and critiques enhanced many of his letters. The following extracts veer from his gravest national concerns to his naughtiest observations on provincial life, further lightened with crackers full of treats and teases, and punctuated by his regular ‘Thought for the week’.

My Dearest Jane . . .

Hypothermia House

[1980s]

I think letters, like sermons, should start with a suitable quotation. My text this week comes from G. K. Chesterton: ‘A good wife stands by her husband through thick and thin, even though she realises that his head is extremely thick and his excuses extremely thin.’

Chaos Castle,

Burghclere

20 August [early 1980s]

Which well-known headmaster made himself unpopular by getting tipsy on speech day and declaring that ‘Cricket should only be permitted in private by consenting adults’?

What has 22 legs and one ball? A women’s hockey XI.

Thought for the week: ‘Life is only made worth living by three things; to be writing a moderately good book, to be in a dinner party for six, and to be travelling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.’ Cyril Connolly.

Chez Nidnod (Sans any bloody heating)

16 November 1978

I have just been treating myself to a course of Balzac paperbacks. I was taught to enjoy Balzac at Eton in 1927 and even won a small prize for my knowledge of his book ‘Une Ténébreuse Affaire’, greatly to the surprise of the master concerned. I also developed a fancy for Maupassant after translating his Franco-Prussian War stories at the age of 15. His story ‘The Two Friends’ still makes me blub a bit. It was at Eton that I developed a liking for the poetry of Housman, the master in question being, I am fairly sure, unaware that the author’s affection for Shropshire Lads was not of an entirely innocent nature and that his deeply homosexual feelings were the mainspring of his poetical outpourings. I believe Housman, a tall bachelor with a military moustache and the foremost Cambridge classicist of his time, was a very formidable character indeed and not at all the type of man one would have expected to be in love with a corporal in the Shropshire Light Infantry.

Budds Farm

23 June [late 1960s]

I am sorry you detect fascist tendencies in me but of course ‘fascist’ can mean anyone to the right of Cohn-Bendit. It’s just one of those words like ‘democratic’, ‘liberty’ and ‘truth’ that have different meanings according to the user. In my opinion students who deny freedom of speech to those whose views differ from their own and who use violence against political opponents qualify as fascists (Mark 1). They are hideously reminiscent in behaviour of Hitler’s supporters in the struggle for power in Germany forty years ago. It is really sad to see young people with such closed minds. Luckily our ‘protesters’ are much softer physically than those ghastly Nazi thugs who really were tough and would have eaten the entire left wing of the LSE before breakfast without noticing it. I remember the shock I got when I first saw the SS Division ‘Adolf Hitler’. Enormous, mindless, blond giants, dedicated to violence and very good at it too, what’s more. Older generations that have had to take on Germans in two world wars find it difficult to regard even the most violent of our ‘protesters’ as anything but puerile and 98 per cent harmless.

Yours ever

RM

Daniel Cohn-Bendit was a German anarchist activist and the prominent front man in anti-government student riots in Paris in 1968
.

Chateau Marcuse

Cohn-Bendit

Deauville

France

1960s

Over here, the dockers, who don’t do all that badly on a weekly minimum take-home of £35, are being as bloody-minded as ever with total disregard for the precarious economic state of the country. In greed and ignorance they almost match some business tycoons that I know, but not quite.

The dockers’ strikes affected England and France in the 1960s
.

Schloss Buddestein

Worms

[1973]

I was reading yesterday of a vague and elderly Dean who went to preach a sermon to the boys at Winchester. Unfortunately in his usual muddled way, he embarked on a sermon destined for a small rural community. The boys were apparently quite surprised when he started off, ‘All of you have hands horny with toil and many of you are mothers.’ On another occasion he meant to start his sermon with the words, ‘It is my half-formed wish’. A ragged cheer went up when he intoned, ‘It is my half-warmed fish.’

Budds Farm

25 July [early 1970s]

What times we live in! A General Strike – Civil War even – is well on the way. I have started to despise my own country and to dislike most of my fellow countrymen. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo (I hate the unholy rabble and keep them away – Horace). It will be amusing, if the revolution comes, to find ourselves on opposite sides! I can picture you as Vivandière to Che Guevara Highgate Commandos while I shall be serving in a minor capacity with the Burghclere Blimps.

The 1970s was a troubled and discouraging decade in Britain and my father was in a regular state of apoplexy. I could have been up for the role of vivandière – a female supplier of military provisions
.

The Old Troutery

30 January [early 1970s]

I think the decline of this once great country set in when people started to use the term ‘students’ in place of ‘undergraduates’. Until recently I had always thought of ‘students’ as squalling Arabs overturning trams in Alexandria or members of a quasi secret society planning to do something unspeakable to the Minister of the Interior in Zagreb.

Chez Nidnod

Burghclere

[Late 1970s]

Do you remember Lady Knox in ‘The Irish RM’ saying she disapproved of gardening for young girls as ‘it promoted intimacy with dowagers’?

Budds Farm

Monday [late 1960s]

It is bitterly cold and snowing hard, bringing to mind my favourite lines from Wordsworth:

Life has its problems for us all.

Our dreams must go beyond recall,

The future’s chill and black.

The girl I loved was so cross-eyed

That every single time she cried

The tears ran down her back.

The Sunday Times

31 October 1973

I have just received an enormous tome called (God knows why) ‘The Pearl of Days’ and dealing with the history of the Sunday Times. As an exercise in crawling up the arses of their employers, the authors win the Nobel Peace Prize for 1973 and probably 1974 as well. If one did not know Lord Thomson and his henchmen to be a posse of ruthless financial cut-throats, one might regard them after reading this as next in line for canonisation. As for H. Evans, the pinchbeck radical who carries out the function of editor, he is made to seem the equal of the great Delane of the Times whereas, cardwise, he is roughly the four of clubs. I found it unattractive in the book that the sexual eccentricities of former employees were exposed and ridiculed. There are members of the current hierarchy who would look fairly comic if their propensities had been revealed in the same way. I have written a letter to the Sunday Times thanking them for the book and giving my opinion of it. It will not make me more unpopular with the trendy back-stabbing mob than I am already.

Best love,

xx D

Never a fan of Harold Evans, then editor of the
Sunday Times,
Roger was spared working under the Rupert Murdoch regime to come! A mere reader, I enjoyed the paper under Harold Evans
.

Budds Farm

Thursday [late 1970s]

Did you ever read Harry Graham’s poem on the dangers of being bright at breakfast time, featuring a row between a Rural Dean and a Bishop? As far as I can remember, the Dean was having a peaceful meal:

Perusing as he munched his toast

The Anglican or Churchman’s Post,

When in there walked to his distress

The Bishop of the Diocese.

The Bishop is intolerably breezy and a row ensues, ending in blows:

Until at last the luckless Dean

Slipped on a pat of margarine,

The Bishop took a careful shot

And stunned him with a mustard pot.

14b Via Dolorosa

Burghclere

Sunday [late 1970s]