Dearest Jane... (26 page)

xx D

Brighton was an easily accessible and nostalgic playground for my father. Outrageously saucy seaside postcards were always sent, signed by ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury’ and ‘Dame Harold Evans’. His POW friend, Michael Grissell and his wife Rosemary lived at Brightling Park in Sussex, which today combines a family farm and racing stables. Their elder son Gardie was to ride in the Roger Mortimer Memorial race at Sandown in March 1993 – which he won
.

Budds Farm

[Mid 1970s]

We are just off to Wales, land of male voice choirs, perpetual rain and appalling food. I hope we shall not be kidnapped by Welsh Language Mobile Guerrillas.

Moles Paradise

Burghclere

16 September [1970s]

Your mother showed immense pluck in plunging into the frigid waters of the Atlantic. She also showed perspicacity in choosing the most expensive items on the hotel menu. However, she looked after me and the dogs devotedly and I grudged her nothing. As usual, she was at her best when laying out a picnic. The beaches were marvellous, the bathers rather less so. If I could have 5p for every pendulous stomach, distorted breast, hernia or varicose vein that I saw, I would be under no compulsion to do another stroke of work. My experience of Welsh shopkeepers is that they are more avaricious, ill-mannered and disobliging than their counterparts in Newbury which is saying a good deal. For my real view of the Welsh, read Dr Fagan’s little oration on sports day in ‘Decline and Fall’. On the whole, though, I prefer them to the Scots: they are less self-satisfied and their congenital slyness is rather amusing.

xx D

Budds Farm

17 September [mid 1970s]

The Surtees had an agreeable 14 days in Salzburg, where it rained continuously, and Vienna. They wanted to go to the ‘Magic Flute’ in Vienna but no seats were available under £60! I’d have told the opera authorities just what to do with their flute, magic or otherwise.

Eventide Home for Distressed Members of the Middle Class

25 July 1979

I hope you enjoy the opera. I’m not desperately keen on it but I enjoyed ‘Aida’ in Cairo as the leading tenor was slosherino, caught his robe on a big nail and was left singing away in rather murky combinations with a trap door at the back. I made my appearance as a Roman Centurion in the Aldershot Tattoo of 1931 with the massed bands blasting out the Grand March from ‘Aida’. I got stung by a wasp one night but that’s show business.

Budds Farm

August 1979 [on pink pig paper]

I’m glad you enjoyed your culture trip to Glyndebourne. I do rather hate ‘La Bohème’. I was taught at Eton for a short time by John Christie, the founder of Glyndebourne. He frequently appeared for Early School (7.30 a.m.) in evening clothes, which of course commanded our respect.

Hypothermia House

[Mid 1970s]

I’m so glad you enjoyed your holiday in Devonshire. It is a delightful county but I could never work there as I find it impossible to keep awake. I do not believe for one moment that Drake was playing bowls when informed of the approach of the Armada: it is much more likely that he was having a couple of hours zizz on his hammock. In 1931 I was at Okehampton on a machine-gun course; it was hardly a well-chosen locality for that purpose as the ranges were always shrouded in mist so we used to go fishing instead. One day I was shown round Dartmoor Prison, a dreadful place, damp, chilly and depressing in the extreme. I was told that the food was all boiled, the objective being to impart just sufficient nourishment but render the meals as boring and unappetising as possible. I was shown a gang of blackmailers who were serving sentences of life or twenty years. They were the backbone of the prison chess team! Soon after my visit, there was a mutiny at Dartmoor and the convicts gained temporary control. The Governor had a vat of hot porridge poured over his head and was lucky to escape with his life.

Love to all,

xx RFM

Chez Nidnod

Burghclere

[Late 1970s]

I expect P and N enjoyed the seaside. Piers, I suppose, is just reaching the age when a bucket and spade holiday represents the summit of human happiness. In human existence is there anything to equal the pride and joy obtained through promotion from a wooden spade to an iron one? At that age one isn’t finicky about the weather. I enjoyed Aldeburgh in 1919 despite the jolly east winds from the Baltic. A boy called Paul Lindo instructed me (not altogether accurately) on the facts of life, in a bathing machine.

Budds Farm

31 May 1977

Pam and Ken are off to the South of France. I would like to see the General on one of those nudist beaches. Will he permit your aunt to be topless?

General Sir Kenneth and Lady Pamela Darling – my uncle and aunt
.

The Old Damp Ruin

Burghclere-under-Water

3 January 1980

Your mother wants a joint holiday with the Darlings next summer. NOT my scene, not nowadays anyway. I need a younger lady and a less energetic man.

The Miller’s House

Kintbury

12 July [mid 1980s]

I hope you had an enjoyable holiday in Italy. I rather prefer the Italians to the French but that does not signify a great deal. Like most Englishmen, I love France but detest the French almost as much as they detest us. The Italians are okay as long as they stick to Art and Agriculture. It is when they strike military attitudes that they tend to become absurd. The best thing about the French is the French language which is excellent for clarity of expression.

Maison des Gagas

Kintbury

[Mid 1980s]

I am delighted to hear you may come on holiday with your aged parents. I appoint you ADC, Baggage Mistress, Resident Clown, Nidnod’s Keeper, Reserve Chauffeuse and my partner at the Hotel The Dansants. Time of departure: May 12 approx: length of stay, 8 days approx: destination, v. expensive hotel in Beaulieu, France. Finance: I will be responsible for your travel costs, room and food. I may even stand you a drink or two.

A near perfect holiday with my aged parents in Provence. At home or abroad, my mother’s vocabulary was spiced with French expressions: ‘We are absolutely d’accord!’; ‘très sympathique’; ‘au fond’; and so wistfully, ‘A partir c’est toujours à mourir un peu.’

The Miller’s House

[Mid 1980s]

I’m quite glad you weren’t with us on our holiday in Portugal as it was fairly bloody. The villa was modern, v. comfortable and well-furnished, sited on top of a hill with a wonderful view. A charming garden, an excellent pool and a female cook nearly up to NAFFI standard. But the two and a half mile track leading to the villa was hideously rough, full of pot holes, chasms and boulders. Every drive down it was an ordeal and the car stopped ominously once on the way to the airport. It rained every day bar one. The local towns were as dusty and squalid as the less fashionable parts of Slough. The Tavernas dish up filthy food grudgingly. The recommended fish restaurant was closed. Many fat Englishmen clad in very short shorts – revolting. Nidnod got flu, a temperature and was dosed by a Frog doctor. The Lemprière-Robins got bad colds and I weighed in with diarrhoea. A steep cobbled hill fucked up my knees. We had no papers, TV, radio and passed the time with bad bridge. On Thursday we left at 7 a.m. and at the airport, where it was raining hard, we found a 6-hour delay due to shortage of crew. When at last we boarded the aircraft it did not take off for 75 minutes. At ghastly Gatwick the L-Rs found they had missed all Jersey connections. I got separated from Nidnod and the situation was tense till I suddenly saw her with, thank God, our taxi-driver, who had waited 11 hours for us. We got home, knackered, at 10 p.m.

xx D

See you soon. Roof is leaking!

The Olde Igloo

Burghclere

17 January 1980s

Nidnod asks me ‘Why can’t we go to Australia, everyone else does?’ That’s quite an easy one to answer. I’m studying a brochure for a train trip in the utmost luxury (and at enormous cost) from Victoria Station to Venice. As Nidnod gets bored (naturally) staring at me every evening across the sitting room, would not demon tedium raise its hideous head if compelled to gaze at me for two days in a Pullman car? The Cottrills are in Barbados, the Lemprière-Robins are off to Ceylon, the Darlings to South Africa. Mrs Roper Caldbeck is off to Portugal, Major Surtees to Cologne and the Draffens to Bournemouth. No one I know can afford to go ski-ing any more. Brig Lemprière-Robin is put out because his daughter’s young man wears three earrings.

Bankruptcy Row

20 May 1981

Just back from France; weather marvellous, groceries variable. Your mother shook me by ordering a lobster dish at a small seaside restaurant that cost me £26! Nice work, Nidnod!

The Miller’s House

[Late 1980s]

I hope I enjoy our Danube trip. At all events I don’t reckon to be seasick. Whenever I see the ocean I think of poor old Ovid leaving Rome, ‘Me Miserum, quanti montes volvuntur aquarum.’

Best love,

xx D

Ovid’s ‘Ah me! What mountain waves around me flow’ was one of my father’s favourite quotes
.

My parents’ many friends bob up like corks throughout my father’s letters, and brief biographical detail is usually attached to one or other of their appearances. Social life and, more essentially, friendship, are the focus next
.

Friends are for life and life is for friends.

Anon

A treasured letter can sometimes vanish inexplicably into the ether. One such was when my father wrote to me in sympathy following the premature death of a good friend. Etched in my memory from that letter is the line : ‘Of all the words in the English language, “friend” must be the nicest.’

As the letter writer he was, my father maintained and retained many friendships throughout his long life. He never, to the best of my knowledge, fell out significantly, if at all, with a single man or woman whom he embraced with that status – friend.

Desmond Parkinson and John Surtees, stemming from their years together as POWs, were two of Roger’s closest friends. Once married to their respective wives, friendship sprang up between my mother and Mesdames Surtees and Parkinson. That there was the odd exception is unsurprising given that there were to be three Mrs Surtees and four Mrs Parkinsons.

Women were very susceptible to Desmond, whose effortless sex appeal was enhanced by an enigmatic reserve which was also highly desirable in his professional life – he worked in the Secret Service. Eminently approachable, easily blending into an apparently ordinary commuter’s existence and a home-lover who mowed his lawn at weekends in Silchester, there was little in Desmond’s peaceable demeanour to indicate that his domestic life was one punctuated by regular turmoil. My mother was devoted to him.

A bon viveur and an eminent connoisseur of wine, which was his trade, John Surtees had the most delicious smile and whilst conservative in habit and outlook, exuded an aura of mild mischief. He too was very attractive to women. The friendships with the Surtees and the Parkinsons were facilitated by being relatively near neighbours, within dining distance of my parents.

Loyalty to friends rated very high with my father. Since he relished gossip – grist to the mill to any writer – discretion overall was possibly not his strongest virtue. The great circus of characters my father encountered on his social and racing rounds made unwitting contributions to his locker of anecdotes. Many lapped up my father’s wit, delighting in it, unless they found themselves speared on the sharp nib of his pen. Even then.

Friendship is one thing – marriage quite another. For Roger, John and Desmond, marriage did not prove to be easy. The deep mutual understanding and tolerance established in their shared prison-camp existence made these old friends entirely relaxed in each others’ company. As husbands, my mother largely held prison responsible for their emotional flaws.

The company of women delighted Roger, who warmed to a pretty face in which kindness, humour and intelligence might be discerned, so long as when her lovely mouth opened it did not spout forth any fanatical or insistently earnest views. As for sex, his letters are stuffed with references to it, most usually in tales of the comedic or tragic peccadilloes of his fellow man or woman, including occasionally his own. The tone and language of their telling is in the voice of one for whom sexual passion seems some way down the list of human compulsions. Affectionate rather than passionate, his view of male/female relations found their best expression in the cartoonists he loved: James Thurber, Osbert Lancaster and Andy Capp.

Providing you were not a doctor of a different skin tone, a trade union activist, a left-wing female feminist student, a lecturer at a provincial university, a ‘commer
ss
ial’ traveller, as he used to say, or a long-haired, unwashed friend of his children, my father was amenable to most forms of social connection. He was always on the lookout for good conversation.

From his letters, often soaked in cocktails and popping with wine corks, it would be easy to form the view that my father and mother were both rampant alcoholics. For my father, a stack of work was never more than a glass away. I often saw him merry, maybe mightily so, but never drunk. My mother’s smile was brightest over a cup of tea to which she hadn’t added a slug of gin or brandy. When she was on form, her own spirits were quite vibrant enough without alcohol to convert them into a hotter pickle.

Both as host and guest, my father was what he occasionally called ‘Little Mr Popular’ – a raconteur who charmed and mildly shocked others around the dining table. He often wished people would go home almost as soon as they had arrived and he never outstayed his welcome elsewhere. He did not evaluate a successful social occasion by the hours given up to it – the last thing he wanted was a lunch that lasted until 6 p.m. or a dinner till 1 a.m. Had he been such a guest, the chances of him having the time to digest and relate his adventures in his letters would have been much less likely.