Dearest Jane... (12 page)

Eichstätt (slightly better)

Ditto

Ditto

Trieste

Senior Officers School

Your mother is at her art class and is threatening to take up painting in oil. We had a very successful lunch party on Sunday, Emma E. being the cook. I think a reasonably good time was had by all. I have just had a belated card from Basil Madjoucoff, who is now the Very Reverend Basil Madjoucoff, Pastor and Dean! Thinks: was it my finest hour when I beat him in the final of YMCA table tennis tournament in Jerusalem?

To make your guests nice and talkative, I think the easiest drink is an old-fashioned Bronx: 1/3 Lemon juice 1/3 Any old brandy even something brewed up behind the Corbridge Gas works 1/3 Cointreau. Anyway, my dear child, have a good time and try and forget the country is on the brink of national bankruptcy and World War III.

Best love,

xx R

The Old Lazar House

Burghclere

27 August [early 1980s]

Dear Little Miss Voluble,

It was very nice seeing you again and your lively conversation added a new facet to breakfast.

The Miller’s House

14 January [1980s]

Thank you for your letter which I greatly enjoyed. I am not surprised you hate rugger. It is hardly your scene. Why not offer your services as a goalpost? I had a nice Christmas present yesterday – a bottle of champagne. Whenever you feel unwell, have two glasses of champagne. If that does not cure you, you are very seriously ill.

D xx

The Miller’s House

27 December 1988

We drove home in summer weather: only saw 10 lorries in the first 100 miles. Thanks for a delicious haversack ration: the consommé was up to your best standard. I don’t kid myself that a semi-moribund crumblie adds much to the traditional Christmas festivities, rather the reverse in fact, but I enjoyed myself a lot and the browsing and sluicing were beyond praise. Paul is exceptionally generous in the drinks dept. Anyway, thank you all, including those two bouncing boys, for giving me such a good time. I assure you your efforts were greatly appreciated. Thank you all very much indeed.

xx RFM

The Miller’s House

26 January 1988

I enjoyed seeing you and it is difficult to believe that you are well on the way to the wrinkled forties. You certainly don’t look it and you remain agreeably high spirited too. Why not have lunch with me in the early spring and I will take you to the Renoir Exhibition. A view of those fine fleshy women gives me the temporary illusion that I am still alive. We might also see ‘The Shooting Party’ (I enjoyed the book) at the Curzon Cinema where the seats supply adequate bum comfort. Expect a teeny Lent present from me in the not far distant future.

The Miller’s House

31 August [early 1990s]

This is the last day of summer. I cannot help wondering if I shall ever see another one. I’m lucky to have seen as many as I have. It is rather sad, at least I think that it is, that we live so far apart and exist in consequence in different worlds. However, as long as you’re happy!

Best love,

xx D

The mantra of loving parents: ‘We only want our children to be happy.’ How did that dream work out for those younger siblings of mine? Here they come
.

The Scorchings

Burghclere

12 August 1974

Dearest Jane,

I much relished having all the family here recently and in the term ‘family’ I include your much respected husband and the genial Sir Dennis [my baby son]. Families can be monstrous things but one of the few virtues of the Mortimer set up is that you, Charles and Louise have always got on so well with each other. If there is a family dust-up it is Chinese odds on your mother being in the thick of it, probably the instigator. Against this you must weigh the fact that she is a person of high physical and moral courage and would literally lay down her life for any member of the family if she thought the need had arisen. Her loyalty to us all causes her to expect fewer faults in us and more virtues than we actually possess.

Best love to you all,
xx D

Being the oldest may define your position in the family hierarchy, but the small significance of this primacy was diminished by one crucial detail – I was not a boy. Just as I was getting into my stride as top dog, aged three, along came my brother. If trumpets could have sounded and bells rung, they would have done. My parents were overjoyed – a boy was a proper person. Abounding in good humour from his earliest moments, he was an immediate success. There was little indication then of Charlie’s future as Lupin, wildcard, renegade and occasional exhibitionist. His most extravagant act of attention-seeking as an infant was to rock his cot so hard that it moved across the room and blocked the door, which had to be removed from its hinges to gain access to the dear little fellow.

For a brief period my brother and I both attended the same private primary school. My first emotional memory of my little brother was seeing him march out of assembly with his curious gait and an untamed tuft of golden hair sticking up at the centre of his head. I was overwhelmed with a sudden rush of protective sisterly love. He was not a brother who ever beat me up, put a frog in my bed or tied me to a tree and left me to be eaten by wolves. But I was of inferior sex, and within a few years, he was reminding me daily that I was nothing but a girl, pronounced and written ‘Gurrrl’, a name which stuck, ultimately evolving into Miss G.

At eight years old it was time for my brother’s first rite of passage: leaving home for prep school as a boarder. In his first year, his return to wind-blasted Wellesley House on the Kent coast had been delayed through illness. Later that term, I accompanied my mother on the 130-mile drive to drop him back at school. It was not a heartening experience – home was the only place where my brother wanted to be. As we drove away, I turned and watched this small lone figure waving from the school steps, absurd in his bizarre uniform of tweed plus fours, and my tears started to flow. ‘It’s just l-l-l-like
Oliver!
’ I sobbed. I knew every song from the musical off by heart. I didn’t have the reassurance of knowing that within minutes my brother would be in his dorm, ragging with his friends. And neither did my poor mother.

The floor of my brother’s room at home was dense with Dinky cars and a Scalextric track which was always going wrong, a happy challenge to its owner’s engineering skills, his particular talent. Later, further electronic devices were wired up over every conceivable space in his room. These gadgets were activated by clapping his hands, which he did when he awoke in the morning. Loud strains of ‘You ain’t nothing but a hound dog’ from his icon, Elvis, throbbed through his door, a signal for his elder sister to fetch him ‘a cuppa tea’. You get the picture. By twelve years old, my brother had equipped himself with a black plastic ‘leather’ jacket and winkle-pickers, replacing his bright blue patterned jumper – accessorized by his pink straw pork pie hat for holidays.

With his passion for cars, Charlie spent hours helping out at the local garage. Our father saw this as a harmless aberration, certainly not as a potential career path for an essentially practical boy, one devoid of academic interest and, unknown to teachers or parents, heavily hampered by a then unrecognised condition – serious dyslexia. All things being unequal, Eton was his destiny.

As for the rest, my brother has provided his own record in print. As Lupin, he became a lead player not only in my father’s now legendary letters to him, but in letters to me from both my parents. At school, he was still an innocent little chap of only minor mischiefs – with the nicknames Charlie B, Tich or Twitch. Before long Lupin would gain his reputation as something of a delinquent and exhibitionist who continues to insist, even now as a ‘senior citizen’, that he is a ‘spiv’. Always drawn to low-life scenarios dominated by every variety of unreliable nutcase, he was often highly amused by the individuals he found in the lower depths. He is fundamentally a very kind man. He has always willingly embraced those he could effectively befriend, from tragic addicts to self-deluding crooks, energetically dedicating himself to sorting stuff out for his fellow fallible human beings. In this, I include his family, to whom he demonstrated his loyalty through his consistent care of our mother in her last years and his fair and meticulous management of all her affairs on our behalf. He was a genuinely good and loving son. All these efforts have been set against a background of his personal struggle with bad health for over thirty years, undertaken with enduring courage and humour. Illness has never prevented him from tackling tasks in hand.

In 2005, he went to the Chelsea and Kensington Registry office with his partner Tim to become the first couple there to have a civil partnership ceremony. Labelled as a non-stayer, my brother as Charlie, not Lupin, has turned out to be a remarkable survivor – and that is staying power of a high order.

My first sight of my much younger sister Louise was in my mother’s arms on the morning of 13 January 1958. My mother had given birth at home the day before. I had felt cheated of being excluded from such an interesting occasion, but gained a treat, being removed unexpectedly to London by my mother’s friend, Lady de Mauley, to attend a pantomime along with two jolly little boys, her son, Tommy Collins, and Desmond Parkinson’s son, Richard.

I was thrilled and fascinated to have a baby sister. As the youngest she was much indulged – my father doted on her, later nicknaming her Lumpy Lou or LL. But of all of our three childhoods, Louise’s was the one spent in the greatest isolation with little sibling support on tap as she witnessed increasing ructions between her parents. When she was three years old, my brother and I went off to boarding school. By the time she was eleven, she was away at school herself, I was living in London and my parents had moved from the friendly village of Yateley to live at Budds Farm, Burghclere, remote from all her former playmates. She rode her pony cheerfully enough, but all too often her closest available companion was the TV set. Although a serious giggler who enjoyed a good prank, and a normal child who loved playing with her friends when possible, her essential disposition was a silent one, unfathomable in its infinite reserve – perhaps a wise tactic in our family.

In the mid 1970s, while based in London, Louise fell in love, or so it seemed. The suitor who had captured her heart was Henry Carew, a vibrant young man whose verbal capacity more than filled the vacuum of my sister’s silence. Both aged nineteen, they soon settled down to live together in Henry’s house in London. With equal promptness they experienced parental criticism and firm opposition from both of their families – neither of whom warmed to the other – which had the foreseeable effect of cementing the bond between this very young couple. They protected themselves by popping into a registry office and getting married – in secret from us all.

‘At least they didn’t want to just
live
together,’ said my mother when the truth came out after they had announced, aged twenty-one, their ‘engagement’. Members of both families and plenty of friends attended their wedding blessing in Burghclere church.

My father accepted the situation and made as much effort as he could to be an accommodating father-in-law. He and my mother were bewildered by the hours the enamoured young couple spent in the bathroom and how often Henry was to be found brewing up energizing snacks in my mother’s kitchen. Hot Hand Henry, or HHH as he became known, unquestionably had bags of energy and enthusiasm – but it just wasn’t the variety to put my father at ease, let alone my mother. If their unruly dogs added little to my parents’ pleasure, later their two delightful children, Becky and Benjamin, did. HHH’s entry into the family was the beginning of a whole new saga.

My Dearest Jane . . .

Barclay House

6 March 1964

It was a great relief to hear that Charles passed into Eton and your mother’s admiration for her only son could hardly be more unbounded had he won a scholarship to Oxford and three events at the Olympic Games!

Barclay House

9 October [mid 1960s]

Louise is in good form and telling rather more untruths than usual. Charles has given up writing home – a custom I shared at his age. I am giving a lecture at Eton later this month and poor Charles is fearfully embarrassed. What unfeeling brutes parents are!

Barclay House

14 March [mid 1960s]

Louise acted the extremely important part of a tree in her school play yesterday. She remembered her part perfectly.

Barclay House

24 October [mid 1960s]

Last week I lectured at Eton and as no one actually threw anything or walked out I felt reasonably gratified. Your brother was over here on Saturday in fine form and distinctly cheeky, the young toad!

The Sunday Times

25 January 1966

Poor Charles seems rather depressed; I don’t think he is the type to enjoy Eton or get the best out of it, at least not in his present frame of mind. Personally I rather detest ambitious people as a rule, but it is disconcerting when one’s son resigns himself so young to a life of good-natured sloth.

The Sunday Times

[Late 1960s]

Tich seems in good form and so far likes his work. I took his friend, the ineffable GR, to Basingstoke; he annoyed me by wearing strings of beads and in general looking rather like my late governess, Miss Shaw. He is so wet that I wonder his long-suffering parents do not grow watercress on his person. Even the meanest creatures have their uses.

Love,

xx D

Chateau Marcuse,

Cohn-Bendit

Deauville

France

[Late 1960s]

Tich casually announced at breakfast that he had left his job and was taking a few months holiday. To make money, the old discotheque is again being circulated around middle-class homes in the Berkshire area. He is now talking of working in a racing stable. Louise is in good trim and retires to her room with a stomach-ache if the situation seems likely to develop to her disadvantage.