Dearest Jane... (22 page)

Under Thompson, the Sunday Times staff parties were really awful being chiefly a shameless display of arse-licking by keen ‘executives’. I once had dinner with Rees-Mogg and found very little in common with him. Harold Evans (The Dame) is a gritty little fellow from Middlesbrough with a class chip on both shoulders. Sir Dennis Hamilton was the classic example (still is, no doubt) of a smiling shit. If he squeezed your arm and said how much he enjoyed and admired your work, you knew your job was in serious jeopardy. I think he hailed from Newcastle and was pushed ahead in the Army by Field Marshal Montgomery in the war.

I preferred the old Kemsley staff – Ernest Newman (Wagner’s illegitimate son); James Agate, who had been to a male brothel with Proust: H. V. Hodson, the Editor, who looked like a diplomat in a pre-war play by Somerset Maugham; and a weird old crow called Valentine Heywood, an expert on titles and decorations. There was also an amusing cricket writer, Robertson-Glasgow, who suffered from periodic depression and eventually cut his throat after breakfast one day with the bread knife.

Most of the people Evans introduced to the paper were Australian Trotskyites (like the ‘Insight’ team) or abrasive little fellows from northern newspapers. Also a conceited little shit called Michael Parkinson.

I have been working for ‘The Racehorse’ since June 1947. I was made editor at one stage but only lasted 3 weeks, my ignorance and ineptitude being impossible to conceal.

Best love,

RM

Harold Evans and Michael Parkinson – two media icons in the ascendant to whom my father would give no quarter
.

Budds Farm

21 November [early 1970s]

I have just had a letter of farewell from the Editor of the Sunday Times. It is typical of him and his dreary publication that it was addressed to the house we left some years ago, Barclay House, Yateley.

Budds Farm

26 January 1974

I am going to do a short stint with the Sunday Times; quite like old times again. The do-ray-me will come in useful, my capital having depreciated by £90,000 in ten months. (Gentlemen, charge your glasses. I give you the toast – ‘Wedgwood Benn’.)

Anthony Wedgwood Benn, legendary far left Labour minister (1974–9) and one of my father’s pet bêtes noires
.

Via Dolorosa

Burghclere

[1975]

What with Arabs, Trade Unions and Mr Wedgwood Benn, life is particularly disenchanting at present. I have been working 12 hours a day completing a book of monumental boredom and feel mentally exhausted. The job is now finished and it only remains to correct 1,297 pages of proofs. Today I have just done a rush job – an article on stallions of obscure origins that have proved successful in the Antipodes. Not the summit of hilarity for writer or reader.

Schloss Schweinkopf

Grosspumpernickel

Neuburg

[1970s]

A magazine I have never heard of has hired me to write 2 five thousand word articles on English racing from 1900 to 1925. I knocked them off in a couple of days and now feel rather anxious about getting paid. The editor’s signature seemed to indicate that his name was Soupfeather which sounds a trifle improbable but of course you never know.

Budds Farm

11 June [1970s]

There was a fight in the press room on Derby Day between N. Dempster of the Daily Mail and a fat man from the Express’s William Hickey column. Dempster dragged Fatty round the press room by his neck and Fatty pulled the ‘Mail’ telephone out by the roots. It was a lively scene much enjoyed by one and all. Dempster won on points.

Insolvency House

Burghclere

[Late 1970s]

Louise is reading more than she did. I have lent her ‘Madame Bovary’ which I hope she will enjoy. Did you know I had a mare called Madame Bovary, 33 years ago, in partnership with John Hislop? She won a race and bred a large number of winners. When she ran at Windsor, I did not own a car and just took a cab off the Kensington rank and told him to drive me to the racecourse. It only cost about £3. (Up until the war we used to get 4 postal deliveries a day in London, the last one at about 9 p.m.)

Budds Farm

[1970s]

Your mother enjoyed Ascot, even the ordeal of having lunch next to a plump Liberal peer who is an ex-parson. I got lumbered with a tall, gloomy Swede who owns a salt mine. A man in the Royal Enclosure sported an umbrella advertising French letters and was asked to leave.

14b Via Dolorosa

Burghclere

Sunday [late 1970s]

We stayed with the Popes for Cheltenham. Lady de Mauley was at the races and while the Gold Cup was being run she talked vivaciously about clothes and the price of temporary cooks. I have discovered that Lady de M is known locally as ‘The Duchess’. Mrs Pope was highly complimentary about you and your husband. Frankly this is beginning to annoy me and I hope to unearth someone who took a very strong dislike to you both, particularly to Paul whose popularity is getting on my nerves.

P.S. I enclose £5 as I hear you had a bet on my horse. I would have advised you not to risk a penny on him as the ground was awful and his little feet went into the mud like tent pegs. Also his usual jockey was away, injured. Don’t pay any attention to what your mother says about racing.

Love to you all,

xx D

Budds Farm

[Late 1970s, on pig paper]

I have more or less finished a book (to be published by Guinness Superlatives Ltd) to celebrate the 200th Derby next year. I look like having three books on the market soon, all of almost unsupportable tedium. I am thinking of writing a novel about military life in the 1930s. There will be a very odious character called Major Hurstbourne-Tarrant with a wife called Muriel who seduces the innocent young narrator in the Railway Hotel at Fleet after the final night of the Aldershot Tattoo.

The Old Crumblings

31 January 1970s

Today a publisher, whose name eludes me, invited me to compile a history of racing throughout the world since AD 1200. I estimated it would take me till 1993 to complete the book and that the rate of pay worked out at £26 per annum. Under the circumstances, I felt obliged to decline. I must now write my speech for this ghastly dinner at Stratford-upon-Avon tomorrow. At least 250 people present and I am terrified as I speak about as well as your mother’s dog Pongo plays the French Horn. Thinks: is it better to get up sober and stammering or totally sloshed and rashly over-confident?

Little Grumblings

Roper Caldbeck

3 July 1970

Mrs Hislop’s horse Brigadier Gerard has won two nice races and is now worth at least £25,000! We went to a ‘small’ lunch party with the More O’Ferralls at Kildangan Castle; your dear mother was tucking into really admirable groceries between Clive Graham (racing journalist ‘The Scout’ on the Daily Express) who had not shaved, and the US Ambassador, who had. Very potent Calvados cocktails beforehand. I sat next to a tough old blonde who had been on the shadier side of show business and a lady belonging to the Guinness family. One old gent present had flown to Ireland next to Miss Bernadette Devlin and fell for her in a big way; I doubt if he will get to first base, though.

Love

xx D

The More O’Ferralls had established a fine racing stud at Kildangan, while Bernadette Devlin was an Irish Republican activist and youngest woman MP (Independent, 1969–74) ever elected
.

La Maison du Hangover Horrifique

Burghclere

[1970s]

Come to Burghclere if you wish to be where the action is! On Wed we had a dinner party before the Fancy Dress Ball – guests dressed to represent a racehorse’s name. Present were Mrs Mortimer (Petite Etoile), Major Mortimer (Red Rufus), Mrs Surtees (Spanish Steps), Major Surtees (The Benign Bishop), Mr Greenward (I’m a Driver), Mrs Greenwood (Raise a Native) and Mr Cottrill (Blue Cashmere).

Best love from your affectionate father,

xx RM

During his forty-five years as a racing writer my father witnessed many changes in the sport. His own epitaph was ‘The dogs bark and the caravan moves on, but never let it be forgotten that racing is meant to be fun.’

From the racecourse to home: my parents lived in a total of four different houses during their long marriage. It’s time to go home with them now – before setting forth on a Mortimer holiday or two
.

Chez Nidnod

Burghclere

[1970s]

Dearest Jane,

I am writing this with the window wide open; autumn sunshine is pouring into the house and smoke from bread that got jammed in the toaster is pouring out.

xx D

My father was a true home-lover – home was also his principle office though not a quiet one. He enjoyed the surrounding presence of his wife and family in the house, finding them available when he took a break. The general hubbub they created did not dim his concentration – a quality he had long ago cultivated in environments loud with people, on a busy racecourse for one, prison camp for another. It is only now that I wonder if he might sometimes have hankered after the retreat of another workplace.

His hours of leisure were largely spent at home. Barclay House was the one he loved the best. It was there that he enjoyed his happiest phase as a husband and father of a young family. His health was OK and his career was in the ascendant. Life was full of promise. There were many good friends and neighbours, and we felt part of the Hampshire village of Yateley. We lived there for sixteen years. It was only pressure from a big property developer that induced my parents to sell up – very profitably – and move to Berkshire and Budds Farm, a house my father never liked. My mother loved it. Their final home was the Miller’s House in Kintbury. My father liked it – my mother did not.

My father’s physical antidote to the sedentary nature of writing was gardening. His first garden had been created from scratch, with pride and hours of his own hard labour. Barclay House backed on to a large garden. Paths threaded their way around its colourful features: a herbaceous border, beds of shrubs, roses and bright annual plants. A late summer border blazed with his favourite dahlias, fronting a long greenhouse, whose warm, damp interior glowed with sweet tomatoes. Apple trees flanked the wide path through the expansive kitchen garden and beneath them spires of lupins followed generous clumps of springtime polyanthus and primroses. I was not infrequently ticked off for picking them. We had a ‘garden room’ in the house where my mother arranged flowers, legitimately.

There were two large lawns to mow. Fierce games of croquet were played on the bottom lawn, led by my father, with Pimms and lemonade to follow. On the top lawn, the ancient mulberry tree growing at its centre provided the focal point around which our family life revolved. Trikes and bikes were ridden around it; lunch and tea parties for dolls, dogs, cats and people were relished on rugs on the grass beneath it. My little sister in her large antique black pram slept in its shade, my mother basked on her sun lounger, my father snoozed on his deckchair, book open in his hands. Prickly relations were humoured with sherry beneath the mulberry’s leafy canopy, which was sometimes hung with its dark, nefarious fruit, waiting to be converted into jellies and ice cream by my mother. On a June evening during Ascot week my parents sometimes held a cocktail party; the mulberry tree stood proud above a white-clothed table, jugs of Pimms and big bowls of strawberries and cream. A small waitress, I wove in and out between the adults in their delicious haze of cocktails, Chanel No. 5, cigarettes and chatter.

Of all the gardeners who assisted Roger in our three different homes, there was not a single one who measured up to his unexacting standards. Their most productive role was to provide material for amusement. His favourite was, as in a children’s story, the dependably cheerful, apple-cheeked, twinkle-eyed Mr Randall, ‘Old Randy’ at Budds Farm, for whom weeds grew ever more vigorously when he had sprayed them.

When I was unwell in bed, as a little girl, my father once decided to cheer me by bringing a terracotta clay flowerpot up to my bedroom in which sat, not unduly bewildered, a large toad. Two other little creatures my father brought to my bedside sprang straight from his imagination – Porky the Pig and Bruno the Bear – in stories which were neither repeated nor committed to paper. Porky was good-natured, greedy and always ‘Up for a lark’ – and always getting into scrapes. Bruno was the straight man whose job as a sensible, self-righteous bear was to point out the error of Porky’s ways. If my father preferred scallywag Porky, it was Bruno’s hat which he wore when addressing real-life money matters. My brother and I received this cheery little edict, delivered by hand, one April evening in the mid 1960s:

‘This morning at 8.10 a.m. the central heating was switched on and there was electric heating in the kitchen, which was empty. There were electric fires switched on in three bedrooms although it was a mild April morning.

The electricity bill is very large indeed and is sometimes over £30 a quarter. In these times of high costs and high taxation I am compelled to ask for a little restraint. From now on the central heating will be switched on by your mother or by me. Until the winter comes round again, electric fires in your room and in Charles’s are totally unnecessary and I forbid them.

The telephone is being used with an abandon that might lead one to believe that all calls are free. They may be so to you but not to me. All those local calls add up to a very big total and I want them cut down. If you have long-distance calls please find out the cost and notify me. If you have had any such calls in the past three weeks, please let me know.

Please be careful about leaving lights on when leaving a room. Over the months the amount of money wasted in this respect is considerable.

The time is fast approaching when you will be living away from home. It is no bad thing, therefore, to practise a little economy. Please remember that basic income tax is 8/6d in the £ and for some of my work I only receive 2/6d in the £ owing to supertax.