For the Time Being (24 page)

If you take the glorious jacket from this splendidly edited, and presented, book and spread it wide across your knees, you will surely be amazed. I was.

The painting is by Laurits Tuxen (clearly not a Sunday painter, but no Klee or Léger) and it shows Queen Victoria
and her family
on one presumably imagined day in 1887.

Amid a glitter of gold, candles, ormolu, mirrors and brocaded walls, in full majesty and looking like a plump (fat is too unkind a word) queen ant, sits the Queen, Empress of India, clothed in black. Gathered about her are the family, adorned in great finery – satins, silks and velvets for the ladies, uniforms for the men. Medals bejewel these splendid figures; rubies, diamonds and sapphires adorn their women. The children – a horde of them – are kilted, frilled, ruched and sailor-suited.

I twice started to count the heads of this astonishing family group, and both times I lost my way, but you can reckon on over fifty. Fruitful indeed were those heavy loins.

Fruitful, too, was Victoria's pen. She and Virginia Woolf would seem to be the victors in the letter-writing race. But where Mrs Woolf had the lead over Victoria was in her provoking, and nourishing, intellect. Victoria had practically none; at least, nothing more than that of the usual governess-educated upper-middle-class woman of means with a house in Belgravia and, possibly, The House in Wilts or Norfolk. A respectable, safe, predictable love of all things ‘pretty', ‘cosy' or ‘dear'. A kind of Hush Puppy intellectual.

From these letters to her beloved eldest daughter Vicky, the Empress of Germany and mother of the wretched Willie (who dragged everyone into the First World War with a clanking of medals and a stamp of boots and one arm shorter than the other), it is obvious that she enjoyed watercolours, tableaux vivants, the singing of the de Reszke brothers, Ellen Terry doing her bits of tragedy at command performances in the drawing-room, and Beerbohm Tree doing his. She spelled him, possibly correctly, as ‘Bierbaum' – he was of Dutch descent and she was a regular stickler for the facts. But apart from charades and tableaux vivants, she also loved music, had a sweet singing voice and delighted in Gounod's ‘pretty opera' and Massenet's ‘thrilling tragical opera'.

And why not, indeed? I slide happily between Brahms and the Boston Pops, prefer Austen to either Amis, and enjoy
Oklahoma
more than
Parsifal.
It takes all kinds.

That is the Queen's frivolous side. She was a shrewd lady-of-politics, too: she knew what she liked, what she wanted and what she detested. She handled her huge family with extraordinary tact, even managing to avert political disasters by a sharp reprimand or a metaphorical slap on the wrist. She was Granny to almost all the royal houses in Europe. She was clever, to the point and firm.

These letters, written until a few days before she and Vicky also died, are full of love, encouragement and sense. After it was diagnosed that the Emperor (of Germany) had cancer of the throat, she was adept at smoothing German waters troubled by the Empress's wish that her husband be attended by an English doctor rather than a German. This was a difficult, and dangerous, situation. It was assumed that the English Empress was anti-German, when all the poor creature wanted was a sensible English GP.

Victoria steered that course safely with her advice, as indeed she managed to disarm the frightful Willie with her good manners. She won.
That
battle at least.

Agatha Ramm brings to a close the story of the Queen, derived from her correspondence in the five volumes edited by the late Roger Fulford, the first of which was published in 1964. The last and very moving letters between the Queen and her daughter
suddenly bring her closer to us; we recognize this astounding monarch as a creature of human frailties.

Sensibly Dr Ramm has edited out the exceedingly boring bits of family news, common to all letters from mothers to their exiled daughters, and has concentrated on the daily life of the two women, on the political events of the day, and on their reactions to subjects as diverse as the weather in Grasse or the death of Elizabeth of Austria on a lake steamer: ‘It is too, too awful … she did not see what had happened and so was able to walk on board the steamer but soon fainted and then a stain of blood was discovered on her dress.'

The Queen was aware that high rank made for high risk, but was unafraid. She was equally fearless in arranging marriages: ‘Poor George of Russia's death comes rather suddenly … I now revert to the idea of the Prince of Hohenlohe Bartenstein … It sounds well but the great difficulty and annoyance mixed marriages cause now would make it absolutely necessary to know before.'

She was a wise woman, and her advice might be of benefit in the drawing-rooms of Windsor and Balmoral today. She detested Mr Gladstone, Mossypebble as he was known, but grudgingly gave him praise where due. However, he did not ‘enhance England' and fiercely deplored the Boers. A passage in a letter of 1899 has a dreadfully familiar ring:

I think that all rivals in turn egged on Kruger, to see what we should do and get us into a tight corner, abuse us for being cowardly and weak, unable to fight and afraid of the Boers if we did not make a stand as they now abuse us for our violence, tyranny and rapine … We must now hope that the struggle may be short and with as little bloodshed as possible.

I did grow fed up, however, with her constant moaning about her ‘sadness', her ‘crushing blow' and her ‘broken heart'. She obviously loved Albert to distraction and on his death slumped into self-pity and isolation and the black garb of widowhood. It does make one rather impatient.

Yet it has to be remembered, looking at the amazing panorama
on the dust-jacket, that she enjoyed a full and pleasurable sex life with her Consort. Although she detested and was acutely embarrassed by the results of this part of married life, she did pioneer the use of what was then euphemistically called ‘Twilight Sleep'. She recommended it, with a determination that
all
women should benefit. Perhaps she might come to be chiefly remembered for this generous gesture; but I doubt that many people give her a thought in the labour ward today.

The art of letter-writing has all but gone, and with it the chance to read and then re-read part of one's life. In this book is encapsulated a vividly recorded time, set down for us to enjoy 100 years on.

Would that we were so lucky today; luck today is a bunch of flowers at least, a scribbled postcard at most. The flowers will perish, the postcard will be mislaid, there will be no letter to savour. Sad.

Sunday Telegraph,
17 March 1991

Sketchbook from Southern France
by Sara Midda (Sidgwick)
Toujours Provence
by Peter Mayle (Hamish Hamilton)

Hot red dust sifting through naked toes, the warmth of a limestone boulder under one's hand in the heat of high noon, the cool of uneven, tiled floors in ancient kitchens, the jagged comfort of the scaly bark of an olive tree, the plush softness of moss at the spring.

And then the scents.

Of olives crushed beneath great stone wheels, the smell of thyme, myrtle and camphor, of lavender, warm bread from the oven, garlic and basil, fresh and green pestled into the ‘pistou', of red wine spilled on a scrubbed pine table, candle grease dribbling from guttering candles, warm varnish and the tinder-dry rushes creaking in a chestnut-wood chair. Bay leaves, fennel, sweet-geranium and the drifting scent of night-scented stock and the pungent odour from the spiked heads of nicotiana. Above and through this, the eternal scent of heat-burned pines.

All these, and many more, bring back to me the magic which was the Provence I knew, and all these, and more, are gloriously stored for you among the very simple treasures in
Sketchbook from Southern France.
Here, even if you have never been to Provence, you have an easy-to-read guidebook to undreamed-of loveliness. If you
have
been to Provence, it will evoke such memories of taste, smell and sight that you will be left slightly drunk with sheer pleasure. It is also stuffed full of dotty incidents: like the earthquake which trembled Avignon in 1565, and the date when Picasso started to work in his pottery at Vallauris.

Turn these ravishing little pages and you will discover just where to find stars on a ceiling, what a courgette-ronde is (delicious, I
assure you) and exactly how to make geranium cream. Is there a more delectable recipe than this anywhere? ‘Scented geranium leaves in
crème-fraîche,
cream cheese and sugar. Cool. Eat with peaches poached in wine.'

Sara Midda has drawn for your eye practically everything you could expect to smell, taste and see during one bountiful year in Provence. She has also discovered the essence of the
colours
of the land and set them to delight in invented designs of wallpapers for which, if they did exist – and they should – you could cheerfully kill.

It is easy just to go to Provence, look at the mountains, sit on some terrace with the London papers, listen to the BBC World Service, drink your beer or tea, and demand steak and chips for your lunch. You need never remove your shoes to feel the red dust, you can wear sunglasses all day against the light, shriek at the sight of a gecko, insist on your tomatoes being spherical and Dutch, wash your lettuce in three rinses of permanganate and eat peanuts with your evening gin and tonic rather than touch a
picholine de Provence.
If all you want from Provence is a mild sun-tan and a cup of tea at four o'clock, I suggest you stay away and go to Bridlington.

Provence is too exciting, too dangerous, daring and ‘foreign', and you will use up the room some others may long to occupy. Peter Mayle is one such person, only he stopped
longing
and made his life in Provence a fact.

There is no reason to suppose that his
Toujours Provence
will not be as triumphant as his
A Year in Provence:
it is full of splendidly amusing stories written in a deceptively simple manner. His self-deprecation is engaging, and all his loyal readers who ‘laughed until they cried' the first time are bound to do so once again. Here are the funny French, the doleful peasants, the pigs and truffles, the local dog shows, every bit as ghastly as those in our own dear Home Counties; the gargantuan meals consumed, the bottles of drink poured down welcoming throats.

He also deals with the miseries of unwanted and unexpected guests who, quite by surprise, happen to ‘find themselves ten minutes away' and descend en masse, disrupting his daily work and
life. I could have put him wise to a trick or two had he asked. Don't, repeat don't, have a swimming pool.

The very year that Peter Mayle and his wife moved to Provence and the great adventure of a new life, I was wretchedly forced to leave after the happiest two decades of my entire life. So I know, very well, all that he describes and everything that befalls him. He writes very tellingly of things I loved and well remember, but he does not make everything all geranium cream. He recalls the severity, and the desperation, of the drought in Provence. This short passage, taken at random, is as exact in description as it is possible to be:

The patch of grass in front of the house abandoned its ambitions to become a lawn and turned the dirty yellow of poor straw. The earth shrank, revealing its knuckles and bones, rocks and roots that had been invisible before.

That's just how it was, and an arrow of remembrance pierces anyone who has ever had the privilege of living in the blinding light of Provence, quite literally known as the ‘province of light'. But take heed! Rightly, Mayle reminds the reader it is not as simple as some people think when they try to find a new beginning there. It is tough. Many are defeated, many come away bruised and burned. You have to work very hard indeed, and that means learning the language and realizing, rapidly, that the language is not simple French.

Provençal French is very different. So, too, is Provençal man. The French from ‘up north' are as foreign as you yourself. Foreigners are always regarded with grave suspicion. But if you work at it diligently, if you are willing completely to absorb the life and manners, if you are equally willing to be absorbed, ‘to lose your identity', and if you are prepared to ‘go native', then you might, one day, albeit grudgingly, find that you are
almost
‘accepted' and then you
may
claim the right to say that you ‘live' in Provence. But it will take time. And trust.

And remember, as Peter Mayle reminds you, that the winters are as savage as the summers, and that you can break your heart
there as easily as you can lose it. But here are two very different books filled with things which will help you to understand, at least in part, this wonderful place.

Daily Telegraph,
27 April 1991

The Last Enchantments
by Robert Liddell (Peter Owen)
The Time of Secrets
and
The Time of Love
by Marcel Pagnol (Deutsch)

My father, born in the last few years of the Victorian age, always considered himself an Edwardian. He spent his whole life imbued with the high standards of Edwardian life and never defaulted. He was able, at twenty, to come to terms with the most appalling world war. and survive it physically if not mentally: for he was never completely free of its dreadful legacy of fear and pain.

He managed, brilliantly and with a great deal of fun, to cope with the amazing changes of the twenties, when I was born, but he never truly discarded the Edwardian standards which he always held so dear and which, to my astonishment, I seem to have inherited. Of course, over the years they have become diluted, but they are still recognizably there, and I am often mocked for having them. However, one stands by them resolutely; they have stood me in very good stead in the past, present – and frankly I don't give a fig for the future.