All in One Basket
Page 9
Chatsworth house, garden, park and woods and the further landscape are as one, the cattle and sheep grazing out of doors are as much a part of the place as the Rembrandts are indoors: they support one another to make the whole.
Farming here goes in harmony with nature and the huge numbers of visitors. If the sheep and the deer go – which God forbid – an integral part of the place will go with them. It is the spectre of such a disaster which the people who look after this place are living with in a kind of limbo. And it is repeated all over the country.
Our 4,500 ewes have started lambing: there is usually a cheerful atmosphere in the caravan by the lambing sheds where the veterinary students and other seasonal helpers snatch a quick cup of tea between lambing a ewe in trouble, penning the newborn lambs with their mothers to avoid ‘mismothering’, filling the hay racks and water bowls. The necessary precautions are meticulously carried out. It goes without saying the lambing staff must arrive and leave the buildings spotlessly clean and they have to allow five days between lambing here and going to the next job or back to college. They have their own special car park in the yard with disinfectant and scrubbing places. Everything is done as efficiently as ever by our magnificent staff, but even Radio 2 is turned off.
Some lambing shepherds traditionally start in the south of the country, where lambs are born earlier in the year, and work their way north to the lowlands of Scotland a couple of months later. This year there will be no ewes in these areas for them to tend.
Most of the ‘cade’ lambs – the weakest of triplets or those born to a ewe which has died – are mothered on to a ewe with a single lamb and enough milk for two. But the surplus are sold on to people who come from here, there and everywhere who bring them up on the bottle. There can be none of that this year – no strangers are allowed near. The cades will be ‘tapped on the back of the head’ and that will be the end of them.
In our so-called civilised society we have become used to being more or less in control in everyday life, whether it be in farming, shop-keeping or opening a house to the public. Now there is fear of the unknown, like a medieval plague.
Politicians come and go on the television between the harrowing scenes of human and animal misery, making things worse with their endless words and wishful thinking and apparent inability to make or implement decisions. Their shiny cars, neat suits and hateful hairstyles are a world apart from the muddy Land Rovers, layers of sweaters and waterproofs and broken faces of the Cumbrian farmers.
An astonishing fact is that none of the recommendations of the Northumberland report written after the 1967 outbreak have been carried out or apparently even considered. It seems incredible when you realise those like Lord Plumb, with a lifetime’s experience of farming and farming politics, worked for nine months on the Committee of Inquiry after that outbreak. He and his colleagues came to conclusions full of common sense, even down to the details like the fact that there should be a sufficient number of captive bolt pistols so that pistols could be set aside for cooling without holding up the slaughter.
I very much doubt if Mr Brown has ever held a gun with a hot barrel, but practical countrymen like those who wrote this report know exactly the sort of problems continual shooting would create.
I wonder if he knows that meat is still imported here from countries where foot-and-mouth is endemic? I wonder if he knows anything?
This same Mr Brown, who is meant to be in charge of agriculture in this country, has not been to the north-west since the epidemic began. Can you imagine the politicians of old ducking their responsibilities in such a cowardly fashion?
To top up this catalogue of disaster, we are told there will be ‘an election’ or two elections on 3 May. Everyone I have talked to here agrees it is positively obscene even to consider such a thing while this national emergency is with us.
Here, there is an eerie atmosphere and near-silence. Only the Prime Minister goes on talking.
Books and Company
Stranded!
I cannot imagine why I was asked to contribute to this series where you have to choose and describe ten books for company on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I have read very few books and I have minded finishing them so much that I have often vowed not to start another. Coming to the end of some gripping story or reaching the inevitable death of the subject of a biography is like losing a friend whom you have begun to depend upon night and day in a secret liaison with the author. It is no good saying you can read it again. It is never the same the second time.
I imagine that looking out of the train window hoping to spot a bear or a sable might pall after you have trundled by the first million birch trees. Russian and Asian birds would be meaningless to one who only likes blackbirds and thrushes, and I imagine the agricultural scenes, fascinating to start with, would be as repetitive as the birches.
So I must think about ten tiresome books and the reasons for choosing and lugging them up the steep steps of the train. (I hope it still looks like the train in the opening scene of the film Anna Karenina.)
Books of reference do not have the same trouble with the ending because you don’t read them straight through, so they can’t get the hold on you that the other kind do. And when you are old you forget what you have looked up (and why) and you happily do it all over again. The Oxford Book of Quotations will do very well and I can go on being surprised by the number of everyday sayings from Shakespeare and the Bible. Of course it has the unfortunate side of whetting the appetite for more, but it will keep me happily occupied for many hours. I am at home with our copy, blue cloth cover with dark rings where sloppy wine glasses have been put to rest. So that is book number one.
The second book is short, only 1,237 words (a lesson to the writers of thousand-page biographies of dreary politicians which litter the visitors’ bedrooms at Chatsworth), small, neat and light enough to make up for the bulk of my first choice. The print is excellent and the illustrations are second to none. As a shopkeeper I revere it as the best book on retailing ever written.
It is Ginger and Pickles by Beatrix Potter. Ginger, the yellow tom cat, and Pickles, the terrier, kept a village shop which stocked most things required by their customers. The shop was patronised by the locals, rabbits, rats, mice, frogs and tortoises which lived around Sawrey in the Lake District at the turn of the century. The mice were rather frightened of Ginger and the rats were frightened of Pickles. Ginger made Pickles serve the mice because they made his mouth water and he could hardly bear to see them going out with their little parcels. Pickles felt the same about the rats. But they realised that to eat their customers would be bad for business. The rats shopped extravagantly and Samuel Whiskers ran up a bill as long as his tail.
In spite of being nervous of the proprietors, all these creatures crowded into the shop and bought a great deal of whatever took their fancy, especially toffee. But Ginger and Pickles made the age-old mistake of giving unlimited credit. Nobody paid and there was nothing in the till. They could not afford to buy food for themselves and had to eat their own goods – biscuits and dried haddock – after the shop was shut.
The ever-present village policeman (oh where is he now?) terrified Pickles because there was no money to buy himself a dog licence. Tabitha Twitchit ran the other shop in the village and insisted on cash down. In spite of stocking less attractive goods she prospered.
Things at Ginger and Pickles went from bad to worse. Eventually they went bankrupt, shut up shop and retired. Nobody cared. Tabitha Twitchit, now a one cat monopoly, put everything up ½d. Pickles became a gamekeeper and Ginger, surrounded by the latest in traps and snares, grew stout in a rabbit warren. Thus they got their own back on their debtors. The watercolour of Pickles in his new job carrying a gun, his long-nosed face peering round a wall, in pursuit of the rabbits who had found the counter to be just the right height stays in the memory, as does the illustration of him serving a hedgehog (Mrs Tiggy-Winkle the washer woman, no less) with a bar of soap, entering it in a note book,
bowing and saying ‘With pleasure, madam’.
After a while a dormouse and his daughter began to sell peppermints and candles. When John Dormouse was complained to about candles which drooped in hot weather he stayed in bed and said nothing but ‘very snug’, which, the author tells us, is no way to run a retail business. The moral is don’t sell faulty goods and never give tick.
My third book is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water. I am sorry to say I have not read it, but I look at it every day as it has been on the table by my bed since it was published. It comes under the dangerous category because I know that if I am rash enough to start it I will miss it terribly when it is finished. My journey will be the ideal opportunity to try his journey and if I keep it till last and am still floundering about with the others when I arrive at the other end of the world I can go on looking at it like I have for years.
Next comes The Best of Beachcomber by J. B. Morton. The world has turned upside down since the column in the Daily Express delighted us and now the characters, so outrageous then, are all over the place in real life. Narkover and the headmaster, Dr Smart Allick, are quite tame as public schools go. Captain de Courcey Foulenough’s bid for a seat in Parliament makes me mourn Screaming Lord Sutch, whose slogan of ‘Vote Loony You Know It Makes Sense’ was reminiscent of the Captain’s policy for Democracy and Duty Free Lard.
The Captain was elected for South Mince and Tiddlehampton in spite of disgraceful scenes at his meetings in the headquarters of the Mince Steam Laundry Playing Fields Association. His opponent, the lovely Miss Boubou Flaring, stood as an Independent Liberal or an Independent Progressive Liberal – she could not decide which. Foulenough dismayed his supporters by changing his platform to Independent Progressive Liberal and saying ‘a split vote is just as much fun as any other sort of vote’. He stood for ‘work for all, friendship with every nation, national reconstruction, national revival, higher wages, higher exports, higher imports, lower taxation, rearmament, peace, co-operation, co-ordination, and no closing hours’. This seems strangely familiar in 1999.
The next headline announced: ‘Foulenough in’.
No sooner had he taken his seat in the House of Commons than the mace was missing, which was only to be expected from one educated at Narkover under the third generation of Smart Allicks. ‘Speculation ran, or rather waddled, rife as to the motives of the theft. The name of Foulenough is being freely mentioned, and it is assumed that he walked off with the symbol of British umtarara in a fit of absentmindedness. Nobody can believe that he intended a deliberate insult to the majesty of the House, et tout le bataclan du tralala.’
The entertainment offered by the Filthistan Trio is a bit near the knuckle now. The three Persians, who played see-saw in the hall at the Ritz by placing a plank across the belly of the fattest, most likely own that hotel of sacred name by now, although they returned to Filthistan long ago.
You may remember the twelve red-bearded dwarfs. They plagued Mr Justice Cocklecarrot by their inane answers to his questions in the case brought by Mrs Renton against Mrs Tasker, who habitually pushed all the dwarfs into Mrs Renton’s hall. As we are no longer allowed to call a dwarf a dwarf and no doubt we will soon be stopped from describing a beard as red for fear of insulting its owner, it is refreshing to read the transcript of this famous case. The political incorrectness of Beachcomber is pure joy today.
The fifth book is The Curse of the Wise Woman by Lord Dunsany. It should be required reading for all politicians who wish to understand Ireland and the Irish. Although it is seventy years since it was published, and the events described took place a hundred years ago, little has changed. The infinite contradictions, the unseen but deeply felt currents of conflicting thought so apparent to the lovers of that country are brought before the reader with a terrifying impact in the first few pages.
Mountain and bog are described by one whose childhood was spent drinking in the very essence of Ireland. The author was as one with both in his understanding of that mysterious, haunted land. His description of a hunt makes me thankful that whatever Mr Blair may decree in England he has no power to stop fox hunting in Ireland. He should read it. If he has any imagination he would be caught up with, and then overwhelmed by, the thrill of it, the sight and sound of a pack of hounds in full cry over the empty January land that was the west of Ireland at the turn of the century.
The narrator was a schoolboy at Eton, spending the Christmas holidays in his faraway home. He describes Mrs Marlin, the Wise Woman, her power as a seer, her cabin on the edge of the bog, her son who was the author’s ally and knew from his mother when the geese would come and where to find snipe on shooting expeditions over the treacherous shining bog, all written with the comprehension that only an Irishman has of his fellow countrymen.
Mrs Marlin saw the destruction of her world coming with the machines of the Peat Development Company, which arrived to cut the turf. Her curses terrified the operators and all were the victims of the larger power of nature when the bog itself moved and engulfed the lot of them.
Number six is a book I could not be without. The Oxford Book of English Verse – not the smart, thick, heavy new edition but Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1900 anthology reprinted in 1920 on feather-light India paper. The inscription ‘Unity Mitford from Uncle G. 8 August 1925’ is inside the cover – my sister’s eleventh birthday.
One of the requirements of our home education was to learn a poem by heart each term. As our governesses often left and a new one came, the easiest way to do this was to choose the poem learnt the term before. Several times I got away with this simple ruse. The poem I loved was ‘The Lament of the Irish Emigrant’ by Selina Dufferin. The first lines ‘I’m sitting on the stile Mary, Where we sat side by side, On a bright May morning long ago, When first you were my bride’ still bring tears to the eyes. No new edition includes these sentimental, tragic verses dedicated to a victim of the famine leaving his home, his dead wife and baby for the New World.
This leaves me with four more books to bundle into the hold-all. I confess I am stumped. I might take Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders, but I think it would make me unbearably homesick, so these six much-loved volumes will do. I must go back to looking out of the window or copy my friend who has done that journey and find a pack of cards for a spot of Patience to pass the time till the samovar comes round again.
Best Gardening Books
There are enough books on gardening to fill miles of shelves and they proliferate at an alarming rate. In the October issue of The Garden there is a list of 706 NEW titles on subjects as diverse as Vascular Plants of Minnesota to Cites Cactaceae Check List via Fern Names and Their Meanings and A Key to Egyptian Grasses. Add them to those already in print and you will be totally fuddled and have years of reading ahead.
To choose a favourite from such a bewildering variety is almost impossible. I imagine that the Desert Island Discs rule, where you are not allowed the Bible or Shakespeare, applies. That eliminates the loved reference books: the RHS Dictionary, Bean, Hillier’s Manual, even Graham Thomas’s sixteen volumes of distilled wisdom. Having sadly put these aside I find I like the old books best. Like old cookery books, they are quite different from those published now. They were ordinary book shape, the text was printed on thick, almost blotting, paper. There were no photographs, or a few hopelessly bad ones in black and white with a glimpse of forgotten elms beyond the garden wall. They are a pure pleasure to read.
In the last few years we have been bombarded by the new style of gardening books. They have grown in size as well as numbers. They are too heavy to hold, so shiny they make you blink and the photographers (they are mostly photographs) can’t have a decent night’s rest in May and early June as they dash from Cornwall to Sutherland while the fashionable flowers are out. Striped tulips, striped roses, alchemilla, crambe and allium must be caught in their prime. The wielder of the camera pauses just long enough to add the Kiftsgate rose with its mates Bobbie James and Wedding Day breaking do
wn apple trees in the old orchard.
All very wonderful but I would like to see these gardens in August when the photographers have gone away.
With some famous exceptions I don’t want such books myself, but I am thankful that they exist because very soon they are reduced to half price and sell like hot cakes in the shop at Chatsworth.
So, back to the old friends. I love Potpourri From a Surrey Garden by Mrs C. W. Earle, first published in 1897. It is sprinkled with reassuring turn-of-the-century advice on bringing up children, food and health as well as sensible words on gardening.
In the days when they lived in the same vicarage for decades reverend gentlemen produced some lovely books on flowers. Try In a Gloucestershire Garden by the Reverend Henry N. Ellacombe, A Prospect of Flowers by the Reverend Andrew Young, and latterly the Reverend Keble Martin’s best-seller The Concise British Flora, a worthy successor to those two blessed volumes of my childhood by Bentham & Hooker.
These aren’t gardening books, you’ll say, because they are about wild flowers. But tell me of a garden today which dares not have an ever-growing plot of corncockles, poppies, pink campion and clover?
E. A. Bowles and his crocus, V. Sackville-West, that mistress of English who set a gardening fashion sixty years ago which is still going at full steam ahead – the list of loved ones grows. But just wait till you open The Anatomy of Dessert by Edward Bunyard, 1929. Let him describe the minute difference between varieties of peaches, the very week at which they are at the zenith of deliciousness, the way a melon should be handled and the smell of a perfect fig.