Dearest Jane... (10 page)

Best love from your occasionally well-meaning father,

xx

Barclay House

3 April 1967

Could you please, by 10 April if possible, let me know your plans for the future? Much as I like having you at home where you do much useful work, I feel that the time has come for you to earn your living. I do not think I am being particularly unreasonable in suggesting you get down to work, as except for a spell at Miss Wilson’s Secretarial Academy, you have been unemployed (bar some Christmas work) since you came home from Oxford last July. In the words of the old song:

‘We don’t want to lose you,

But we think you ought to go.’

It would be kind of you, therefore, to let me know your plans; not just dithering generalities, but firm intentions.

Yours ever,

D

Barclay House.

27 April 1967

I miss you very much here and the house is deplorably quiet without you and Charles. I expect you may feel a bit lonely and homesick for a day or two but I think you will find Eton quite a friendly place and you will meet plenty of people of your own age.

A colony (household) of bachelor beaks (masters) at Eton, desperate to secure a cook for a term, handed me the job. How kindly and indulgently they treated me; I was fascinated by them. The youngest, now Sir Jeremy Greenstock, rose to become a high-profile ambassador at the United Nations; Mark Phillips became a housemaster – as did Howard Moseley and dear, splendid Michael Meredith (Eton Librarian) – to my future sons. Michael Kidson was legendary for lavishing his affable brand of derisory wit upon his pupils, other masters and myself. Always on the side of the boys, he bailed out my brother more than once. Fifteen-year-old Charlie, aka Lupin, visited me regularly for tea, snacks and surreptitious cigarettes
.

Barclay House

April 1967

Charles is really very pleased to have you there; inspire him to work if you can. He made a typical remark after we left you last night: I asked him who the masters were and his only comment was ‘The one that hadn’t shaved is rather nice.’ Your room looks quite pleasing; let me know if there is anything you want. I will bring back some sausages from Newmarket next week and drop them at the Corner House for you. Don’t smoke too much or try to be bright and chatty at breakfast.

Best love,

xx D

Barclay House

30 April 1967

I thought it might cheer you up as you toil at the stove cooking for the beaks at the Corner House to receive a letter. I hope you will establish a new standard of food at Eton and banish forever boiled cod and caper sauce followed by cornflower shape. Now the warm weather is here, an imaginative hors d’oeuvres is delectable, followed by lamb cutlets and new potatoes. If your clients show signs of losing weight, block them up with a tremendous suet roll, washed down with a tin of golden syrup. Boiled beef, dumplings and young carrots form an excellent stopper too, particularly if preceded by a bowl of thick pea soup nourished with cream. Keep an eye on that irresponsible but not entirely detestable brother of yours and ensure that even if he declines to work, he occasionally washes and changes his socks.

If you fall in love with a beak, choose a rich one. Preferably not a scientist of leftist views. I suggest a classical scholar with a nice place in Wiltshire and a villa in the South of France.

Budds Farm

Autumn 1967

So glad you have landed yourself a nice job in London entirely on your own initiative. You will soon be able to employ your brother (or me) as butler – chauffeur – social secretary!

Best love,

xx D

If only I could remember which job was being applauded!

Budds Farm

28 April 1968

I hope you are behaving with suitable decorum now you are living alone in your super-luxury flat in the heart of fashionable, exotic Notting Hill Gate. Today the de Mauleys are coming to lunch so no doubt we are in for a feast of lively, intelligent conversation (‘Does Jane see lots of nice people in London and go to lots of lovely parties?’). I think I shall say you are walking out with Tariq Ali.

Lady de Mauley could be relied upon to promote the necessity of meeting the right people
.

Budds Farm

Tuesday [1969]

I hope you are conducting yourself with bourgeois decorum and are giving no practical demonstrations of your approval of the permissive society.

Budds

6 May [late 1960s]

I trust you are well and are living up to the exacting social standards of darkest Islington. Your dear mother of course fears the worst and seems to think you would be better off with a nice chaperone somewhere near Pont Street.

Sois sage,

xx D

183 The Turf Club

Monday [January 1970]

It is very kind of you to ask me to dinner on the 23rd bearing in mind the long-established fact that parents tend to be odious with their children, and children only slightly less so with their parents. What costume shall I wear? My old blue three-piece, betraying to one and dreary all my middle-class background, or a bottle-green wig, spangled pyjama suit (displaying emerald in navel). I trust your various 21st birthday parties go off well and I personally see no difficulties, but from your poor mother’s point of view it is as complicated as the Versailles Peace Treaty and probably as unsatisfactory, too.

The ‘Au Revoir’ Home for Distressed Gentlefolk

Barbara Castle Crescent

Brookwood

Surrey

22 July 1970

My Poor Improvident Child, not entirely to my surprise you seem to be thoroughly disorganised and in grave financial difficulties. I have therefore instructed Mr Featherbole of Lloyds Bank to cable you £30 forthwith at your current poste restante address. It ought to arrive tomorrow. Your brother set off at 9 p.m. today; at 9.45 he was back, having forgotten his luggage. At 10.15 he was back again having forgotten his razor (an item which will probably not be over-employed). He is a very likeable moron. Louise, who has had a bad school report, sends her love. Thank you for the photograph. Can it have been you in a herringbone suit and slight beard?

I had left my job as an advertising copywriter for a summer on a Greek island, travelling with Paul who had taken his typewriter to do some writing. A writer at heart, his first bestselling novel was published in 2007
– Salmon Fishing in the Yemen –
one of many. Lupin drove out to join us for a spell. He arrived four days after we had left. Back in London, I became distracted by different people and activities
.

Le Petit Bidet

Burghclere Les Deux Eglises

Sunday [November 1970]

How is your curious existence progressing? What are the latest episodes in this heart-gripping serial that plumbs the depths of human emotions and strikes a new note? Have you succeeded in busting open that terrifying monopoly in the creation of bizarre shoulder bags that was threatening western culture, nay even civilisation itself? Are you still in the throes of a meaningful relationship with the trendy, avant-garde critic of wet and dry groceries whose name continues to elude me? What pulsating dramas are being steamily worked out behind those prim Georgian facades of groovy Gibson Square? No one tells me anything and I’d like to be told – though not at any great length.

My phase of making beautiful handbags was of little appeal to my father. The trendy avant-garde critic was funny, clever and sanguine Scot, Colin Adamson – still a true friend
.

Ward No 27

Mortimer Home for the Mentally Under-Privileged

Nuthampstead

Herts

[Late 1970]

I enjoyed seeing you last week and thank you for helping. I thought you looked well despite efforts, worthy of a nobler cause, to maintain members of the tobacco trade in full employment. I’m sorry if your own life is giving you trouble. I wish you would get another job. I think you are squandering your talents. The fact that most of your relations are mad, egocentric, irresponsible, unreliable, financially incompetent and hysterical – in fact a truly lamentable collection of middle-class dropouts – is no excuse for you to make a morose hash of your own life.

Best love,

xx D

My father was right. However, things took a happy and decisive turn in April 1971 when I became engaged to Paul
.

Budds Farm

May 1971

We are meeting Dr and Mrs Torday this week. I expect from what they’ve heard of us they’ll nervously be awaiting two total lunatics; I don’t think they’ll be disappointed. To promote a merry family atmosphere for your nuptials, I have decided to dismiss my worries about Charles from my mind and to wash away my resentment in a copious flow of stimulating alcoholic beverages, with the East Woodhay Silver Band playing ‘Here’s to the next time’ in the background.

Your affectionate father,

xx

In July, we married in St Mary’s Church, Islington, with a reception in Chelsea
.

The Sunday Times

1 October 1972

I am delighted to hear from your dear mother that you have moved to a very attractive house. Stet Fortuna Domus! Harrogate is (or used to be) a sort of poor man’s Baden Baden. I once stayed there for the St Leger (1937) and was permanently sloshed in the Majestic Hotel. The waters at Harrogate are good for the liver but somewhat unpredictable in their immediate results. When I was a boy an old admiral warned me never to trust a Harrogate fart. Coarse counsel but wise.

After a year we left London when Paul was offered a job with a company near Leeds. We bought a cottage close to Harrogate
.

The Sunday Times

The Editor in Chief’s Office

Midnight [1972]

I am content that you seem happy in Yorkshire but of course wish you were not so far away. However, I intend to motor to Harrogate before long to take the waters since my liver and kidneys are howling out for treatment. I shall look forward to taking a number of delicious meals chez Torday.

Budds Farm

31 January 1973

Just a brief note to wish you and your ever-loving husband a successful New Year and what the prayer book calls a happy issue out of all your afflictions; which includes your driving test.

The Sunday Times

2 April 1973

It really was nice seeing you – and the esteemed P. Torday, too, this weekend and your visit gave Cynthia and myself a lot of pleasure. Of course I’m sorry you are off to live in Northumberland – I must look it up on the map one day – but one cannot expect one’s children to spend their lives within an hour’s drive of the old soaks at home. The best way to keep in touch will be by correspondence; I will endeavour to write to you once a week and I hope you will try and do roughly the same.

Change was on the way again. Following the tragedy of the death of my mother-in-law in a car accident in Kenya, Paul brought forward his long-term plan to go and support his father in the family engineering business near Newcastle upon Tyne
.

Budds Farm

[1970s]

I’m sorry I was short with you on the telephone. I ought not to have answered it as I was doing something I thought (mistakenly) was important. Your mother is entertaining 4 men in the kitchen including a postman press-ganged into moving a swarm of bees. Your mother has monopolised the conversation and not even a bee has managed to get in a buzz. Am now off to do a vase for the flower show.

xx D

The ‘important’ activity that I had disturbed was the boiling of his breakfast egg. He hated the telephone
.

HM Office for the Deciphering of Ancient Documents

19 Sludge Street

London WC1

[1970s]

I sent a page of your last letter to a local handwriting expert, Mrs Eunice Thribbs. I did not reveal your identity and she drew the following conclusions: ‘Your Pakistani friend is a victim of recurrent malaria and his consequently shaky hold of a cut price biro has led to malformation in much of the script. A modest knowledge of the English language, in particular the spelling of words containing more than one syllable, adds to the problems of even a pertinacious reader. I conclude that the writer is male, over seventy years of age, several times married, has suffered from trench feet, is willing to please but is handicapped by scanty education and an unfavourable environment. His religion is Primitive Methodist, his favourite dish curried rabbit and his colour shocking pink. Lucky day – the martyrdom of St Vitus.’

xx RM

Budds Farm

15 June 1974

I wish you and the highly esteemed Paul Torday were here as it is very hot and conditions are ideal for croquet and jugs of Muscadet with the unexpended portion of yesterday’s fruit salad floating around on top.

Budds Farm

28 August [mid 1970s]

It is very kind of you to invite the Budds Farm mob up for Christmas; personally I would as soon have the Kray gang. I will certainly give your generous invitation most serious attention. Why, you may ask, does the old dodderer not accept at once? The reasons are as follows. While in full appreciation of your comfortable house, bounteous hospitality and stimulating company, I rather dread in midwinter two car drives of inordinate length particularly with the car loaded to the roof. Also, as one gets more and more senile and decrepit, one is reluctant to leave one’s one own home and is happier amid the old familiar lares et penates. However comfortable the beds, I never sleep well away from my own bracket, although sometimes the non-stop drone of your dear mother’s voice induces a form of coma not totally un-reminiscent of blissful unconsciousness. I am sure all the other members of my family are looking forward to coming to Hexham and would be bitterly disappointed if they were prevented from doing so. My present inclination, therefore, is to send them with my blessing and some money for petrol and to hold the fort here with the dogs. I think your mother will be in far better form without me and will find ample compensation for my physical absence in the knowledge that she can make the wildest and most inaccurate statements with rather less fear of contradiction.