Did You Really Shoot the Television? (28 page)

Mac, in a rare moment of bitchiness, observed of Osbert that in
the days when he drew for
The Strand
, ‘As he came up the stairs, you could see him working out the joke he would make when he got to the top.’ It was true that, to Osbert, every social appearance was a theatrical performance, crafted for effect: the lift of the great bushy eyebrows, the flick of the moustache, the devastating line delivered in a fruity, emphatic, booming voice that could be heard across the bar of his beloved Garrick Club: ‘There they all were in 1945; gongs for Matthew, gongs for Mark, gongs for Luke,
but no gong for Colonel Peter
[Fleming].’ There was a host of stories, enlivened with vivid mimicry, of Isaiah and Maurice – Berlin and Bowra – and of Churchill and Macmillan. He possessed an encyclopaedic familiarity with Debrett, and a marked taste for titles, especially if their holders were semi-literate. For Osbert with his talent to amuse, all manner of grand doors were thrown open.

Anne delighted in her new-found intimacy with John Betjeman. She described him as the only man in England from whom she was happy to accept such invitations as this one: ‘I’m giving a lunch party next Tuesday on Southend Pier. Do come – such a lovely ride, just an hour each way by train from Fenchurch Street. Southend is at its best in January, all that icy wind and huge grey waves.’ On the train, Betjeman delivered a running commentary, of a kind perfectly familiar to any viewer of his television masterpieces: ‘Keep your eyes open for a really splendid cemetery on the left – it must be the largest in Britain, all overgrown like a jungle. Now move over to the right for Upminster windmill – oh, what a pity, it’s cloaked in fog. Now back to the left for Basildon New Town; you mustn’t miss it at any price, it’s the most hideous thing in Britain, an education in itself. Now there’s ten miles of absolutely unspoilt country – oh dear, they do seem to have run up a few things, in fact I see it’s continuous building all the way. Never mind, we’ll soon be at Westcliff, that’s the
better
end of Southend. There are some fine 1890 boarding houses you’ll see as we pull out.’

Anne described how they bought cockles and prawns, which John B recommended as a speciality of Southend (‘Oh, I see they’re Norwegian’), then looked at an art gallery and a church which she
and Osbert found devoid of any architectural interest whatsoever, before taking the train home. ‘It had been a glorious day,’ she wrote, without irony. ‘Indeed, in my experience, all days were glorious with John B.’ She was fascinated by watching Betjeman and Osbert together:

Their humour, their love of architecture, their deep knowledge of all the arts except music, their phenomenal visual memories, their capacity for enjoyment at every level, their shared religion (high C of E), their beautiful voices, their charm, their selfishness, made them two characters who had been cast in the same mould, but hand-finished differently. They both looked extraordinary, John with his rabbity teeth, Osbert with his huge head on a short body and bulging, all-seeing blue eyes. They were both scintillatingly but effortlessly witty, surpassing each other in each other’s company. There was no niche nor buttress of a cathedral that they were willing to pass by, no thumbnail sketch in a major exhibition of paintings that they would not pore over. A single parish church would occupy them for two hours, and I confess that I often grew tired, and would rest on a tombstone wondering prosaically where and when we would lunch.

However frosty my relations with Osbert, I too adored Betjeman. In my turbulent youth he was as kind to me as to a host of others. He once took me to lunch in St John’s Wood (always pronounced ‘
Sinjun’s
’ by John B) to meet Dame Veronica Wedgwood, a friend of his who was among my heroines as a historian. Before I departed for America in 1967, he invited me to lunch at his little house in Cloth Fair, and presented me with a briefcase from Swaine Adeney, which embarrassed me. I knew it must have cost a lot, and in those days John was never flush. Then he took me on a whirlwind tour of the City of London, of exactly the kind which my mother experienced in Southend, and offering far more beauty. ‘Dear boy,’ he said, ‘I want you to see all the wonderful views that will have vanished behind concrete by the time you return to these shores.’ We galloped from church to church for an hour or two before John halted in a
street and said: ‘Shut your eyes. Walk five steps. Turn right. Now, open your eyes, and you will see the view of St Paul’s from the east exactly as Wren conceived it – for the last time before they put a new office building in the middle of it.’ Even in those years when my aesthetic sense was woefully underdeveloped, I was moved. I was more grateful than I could say to John B for offering me the most precious gifts he could offer – not the briefcase, though I still use it, but his time and wisdom.

While Anne’s delight in intellectual society was uninhibited, her attitude to grander company was more equivocal. She had always been conscious that her own background was modest. Once, in my childhood, I fatuously enquired of her whether the Hastingses were upper-class. Absolutely not, she said sharply, ‘upper middle-class at best’. She interviewed Nancy Mitford at the time of the great rumpus surrounding
Noblesse Oblige
, the book Mitford edited and part-wrote on class, U and non-U. ‘Am I U?’ Anne demanded with characteristic directness. The great social arbiter looked her up and down and conceded evasively: ‘You have U legs.’ One night the Lancasters dined at the Garrick with Miss Mitford. For Anne, this was not a comfortable experience. Osbert and Nancy had known each other for almost forty years, and spent the evening shrieking with laughter about long-dead grandees and newly remembered feuds and teases. The third party felt distinctly
de trop
.

Yet, plunged into the clever U world – for Osbert had no more patience than herself with philistines, coroneted or otherwise – Anne adapted to it with growing pleasure. Her manner, always commanding, assumed something of the
grande dame
, of Lady Littlehampton perhaps – for when Osbert received a knighthood, she became Lady Lancaster. The historian Michael Howard said simply of Osbert: ‘He was a life-enhancer.’ Their friends found Anne a perfect companion for him, though she remained exasperated by his dogged indifference to practical matters: ‘He behaved during our marriage as though we had a full Edwardian staff, from butler to boots.’

Osbert himself wrote: ‘For sheer pleasure few methods of progression can compare with the perambulator. The motion is agreeable,
the range of vision extensive and one has always before one’s eyes the rewarding spectacle of a grown-up maintaining prolonged physical exertion…The gondola alone, I think, can compare with the pram for pleasure.’ Anne added sardonically to that passage: ‘Or sitting in the passenger seat admiring the scenery while one’s wife drives a hired car up a precipitous mountain road at dusk.’

Nonetheless, she adored her travels with Osbert, especially in the Mediterranean – not infrequently on Lord Camrose’s splendid yacht – and above all in his beloved Greece and Turkey. Though she always professed herself to be a socially humble, politically liberal professional woman, disavowing any taste for high life, she acquired a growing appetite for stately-home weekends. Her cultural hunger, unassuaged during the years with Mac, at last found fulfilment. She admired Osbert’s tireless crusading and lobbying, often in cahoots with Betjeman, for the cause of architecture and the preservation of fine buildings. She respected his dedication to his craft: he wrote a thousand words a day in addition to drawing for the
Express
and for his own books. ‘The emotional security was a revelation,’ she wrote. ‘Osbert was born with a self-confidence rare in my generation. I personally attribute this to his innate talent – there was so much that he did well – but he put it down to the fact that, being five years older than I, he was born into a securer world. He remembered carriages, butlers, bootboys, visiting cards and coming down to tea in a blue silk suit with a Brussels lace collar.’

As her new life became settled, Anne reviewed her career. She was weary of Fleet Street life, and the pressures of writing a regular column. In 1968, soon after her remarriage, she resigned from the
Daily Mail
. Thereafter, she did little newspaper journalism, but became a panellist on the BBC’s hugely popular radio quiz show,
My Word
, alongside Dilys Powell, Frank Muir and Denis Norden. Through thirteen years that followed, once a week they disported their wit and knowledge of language, much to their own amusement as well as that of the audience. Anne adored her broadcast companions, once remarking that Frank Muir was the only brilliantly talented man she ever met who might be described as socially normal.

Most of her time and energy, however, were devoted to a new writing career. In her childhood she had acquired a considerable familiarity with wildflowers. She learned something about plants, and much about practical gardening, during thirty years at Rose Cottage. Moreover, she had the gift of all good journalists for extracting information from experts and presenting it to the public with a sparkle and lucidity of which they themselves were often incapable. Hugh Johnson, then the young editor of
Queen
magazine, invited her to contribute a monthly gardening column. The feature flourished, and led to a series of books which gave her a new reputation.

The first,
Down to Earth
, was published in 1971. She described it as ‘not so much a textbook as a treasury of ideas, by a devoted but amateur gardener’. Illustrated by Osbert, the book reflected her practical approach. She argued, justly, that the limitations of her knowledge also represented a virtue, because they enabled her to see the challenges as most gardeners do: ‘always pushed for time and cash, the reality never quite catching up with their dreams’. She wrote about the new gardening world in which skilled help was hard to obtain at any price, and thus labour-saving was vital. The new-age garden must be founded upon shrubs, more hardy and less tender plants, less staking, more paving and permanent planting. Though Anne had seen many great gardens, she knew that 86 per cent of those in Britain occupy less than a quarter of an acre. She refused to lament the changing pattern of design, observing that ‘Some of Miss Jekyll’s surviving gardens seem quaint and fussy to modern eyes.’

She argued that the greatest of all contemporary styles was the ‘New Cottage’, idealised at Sissinghurst. Here was the principal theme of the sort of garden she addressed in her book: three-dimensional, with important trees and climbing plants; full of slow-growing plants; dominated by shrubs, roses and ground cover; so profusely planted that most of the year no bare soil is to be seen. Colours are muted, giant blooms spurned. There is an emphasis on preserving beauty through the winter, which Miss Jekyll cared little about. ‘Any snobbery is of the inverted kind,’ Anne wrote. ‘We use our houses hard, and want pleasure from the garden all the year round…The most
important law in the designer’s code is that a garden must harmonise with the landscape.’ If some of this sounds familiar, indeed old hat, almost forty years later, when Anne first took up garden writing it was fresh. A host of readers responded to her cheerful, straightforward approach. Just as Mac’s shooting manuals articulated technique with a clarity which better shots than himself could not match, so Anne’s elegant prose more than compensated for any weakness in her knowledge of plants.

Down to Earth
, which reached the best-seller lists and was serialised in the
Evening Standard
, was followed by
Sissinghurst: The Making of a Garden
. This was, in effect, an authorised portrait of the great creation of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, for which Anne spent some weeks, in fits and starts, living at the castle. She was the third writer to attempt the project, and the first to succeed. ‘To me,’ Anne wrote, ‘Vita had a physical presence in that house, in the tower, in every corner of the garden…She was undeniably an egotist, but, working for many hours in the garden and among the letters and books, I came to like her very much. In the rose garden, I was infected by her romantic love of profusion, her desire to “cram, cram, cram every chink and cranny”. The atmosphere was so intense that sometimes I felt that I was staying in a religious precinct. My days at Sissinghurst, though in some ways alarming, gave me deep pleasure and intensified my love of plants, and because Sissinghurst is an intimate garden, not majestic or grand, I found there was much I could learn there to help me with my own amateurish plot.’ Anne spent many hours talking to Vita’s son Nigel, to the head gardener – who had worked for Vita for three years before her death – and to local people who had known the couple. She spent a year on the project, because she wanted to see the garden at every season.

The book sold well, and was followed by
The Pleasure Garden
and
The Cottage Garden
, the former illustrated by Osbert, both warmly received. Anne became increasingly involved in the Royal Horticultural Society, judged at its shows and sat for some years on its Council. She was thrilled by her new status as a gardening queen, adoring the excuse and opportunity to travel the land, visiting great gardens and
their owners, adding to her store of expertise. Every journalist with an ounce of self-knowledge knows how transient is newspaper writing, and deservedly so. Books and their repute last a little longer, plough a marginally deeper furrow. Anne made a real contribution to promoting the explosion of gardening enthusiasm and knowledge that overtook Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. She was almost humbled by an invitation to compose a slim volume on flowers for the British Museum. Her books were published in America and widely translated. She never claimed to be ‘a gardening expert’, but instead used her gifts as a writer to translate a great mass of the accumulated wisdom of others onto the printed page, which is what most good journalism is about. This role gave her immense pleasure for twenty years.

Mac continued to produce books – he claimed a final total of twenty-seven – until the last year of his life. Their themes became ever more whimsical and their sales were very modest, but his pleasure in writing them never diminished. His political judgement did not improve. In 1967 he wrote to me predicting that Rhodesia’s rebel prime minister Ian Smith would go down as one of history’s great men, and that a confederation of Rhodesia, Mozambique and South Africa would ensure that southern Africa remained white-dominated. He adored Enoch Powell. He contributed occasionally to country magazines, but his pieces described sporting experiences of his past, not present. After his marriage to Anthea, he scarcely shot or fished again. Partly, this reflected the fact that he lost the desire to kill things; partly also, the reality that there was no spare money to pay for grouse and pheasant shooting, or salmon fishing.