In doing so he conjures up the dream garden, its greenhouses, hot beds, heated walls, fruit cage, nuttery and of course the sublime head gardener, who produces these marvels to the minute for the delight of the owner and his guests.
There is no question of anything so vulgar as selling the delectable produce to people who might not appreciate their finer points. Mr Bunyard could not have left home for so much as a day between May and October or he would have missed the prime moment of one or other of his fruits.
Sometimes he is lyrical. In the chapter on pears he writes: ‘Happy those who were present when Doyenne de Comice first gave up its luscious juice to man. Here at last was the ideal realised, that perfect combination of flavour, aroma and texture of which man had long dreamed.’ And so he describes all the fruits grown in this country, denigrating or eulogising according to his taste.
A more matter-of-fact help for amateurs and professionals alike is The Small Garden by Brigadier C. E. Lucas Phillips. How I wish I had met this man whose handsome face is on the last page of my paperback of 1962, now nicely browning at the edges.
He is at his best when describing the downside of his subject. Pest No. 1, he says, is the jobbing gardener. If he had lived till now I wonder if he would have said it is the strimmer?
The chapter called ‘The Enemy in Detail’ and the treatment thereof is so funny and so well written it carries you along like a thriller. What other gardening writer would describe cuckoo spit thus: ‘Inside a mass of frothy spittle is a curious soft creature which, on disturbance, will attempt to escape by weak hops.’ The Brigadier tells you all you need to know. Seek no further and send the rest of your books to the jumble.
Now for THE favourite – about a kitchen garden, which I prefer to lawns and flower beds.
It is The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. Held in the palm of the hand, the luxury of wasted space on the pages, the razor-sharp narrative, the warning by the hero’s mother not to go into the neighbouring garden because his father was put in a pie there by the gardener’s wife, makes you long to see what the place was like. You must read several pages before you arrive there while anticipation mounts. How much better than being begged to visit with opening hours and price of admission attached. I’m sure Mr McGregor would never have allowed people in and would have attacked the British public with his rake or any other weapon close at hand.
Beatrix Potter is not only my favourite author, she is my favourite artist. The illustrations have the magic quality of leaving a lot to the imagination. You are only allowed a corner of the cucumber frame, a couple of pots of chrysanths (no flowers on them luckily), some meagre cabbages, a gooseberry bush, a little pond, one robin and three sparrows. But you can picture the whole through the Westmoreland mist.
The gooseberries, whose net impedes the escaping rabbit, are not Leveller or any such shiny and tasteless invention. They are red and hairy, Bunyard’s ‘ambulant fruit’, good enough to please the master himself.
The two classic edgings to the vegetable beds are beautifully drawn, stone for a stone country and box, which looks right everywhere.
I confess that nostalgia plays a part in my love for this book. Mr McGregor’s dibber, a wooden wheelbarrow, a real besom, real flower pots and a proper tin watering can are balm to the eyes of this old-age pensioner. A proper gate too, made on the place and not bought from a garden centre.
Peter feasts on lettuces, French beans and radishes till he feels sick. He goes in search of parsley to settle his stomach and comes across a pond. He can’t (but we can) enjoy its construction of this Lake District stone, no concrete to be seen, and the water lilies and flag iris which grow in it. The trouble is a white cat studying the goldfish whose tail ‘twitches as if it were alive’. She is as much of a threat to a rabbit as Mr McGregor himself. The relief when our hero just manages to escape after so many hazards is enormous.
But it is the image of that northern garden which has stayed in my mind’s eye all my life and it is without doubt my favourite.
Fourteen Friends
by James Lees-Milne
James Lees-Milne was looking for a title for his latest book. We were discussing it and one of my granddaughters asked what it was about. Fourteen friends, I said, all dead. Without hesitation she said ‘Stale Mates’. An excellent title, I thought, before I read it. Dead the mates may be, but stale they are not. Brought to life as the author knew them, they are described in his inimitable way. He remembers an absurd or sad detail which stays in the mind and nails some facet of the personality of his subject to a T.
I was interested to know about the hardships of John Fowler’s early life, of which I knew nothing. I often wondered who his face reminded me of and J L-M has it with Tenniel’s Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Latterly, he tells us, courage was necessary on the part of the client to ask John to work on a house. Courage was needed to be his servitor. I carried his patterns for him when we were doing up a house belonging to the National Trust. He sent me scurrying up and down the Long Gallery at Sudbury, drawing curtains to get a certain light, undrawing them, pinning bits of stuff here and there and moving furniture at his command. It was no good crying for mercy. He would have given a pitying look at such frailty when, already mortally ill, his whole being was focused on the job in hand. But when we got home in the evening his barked out orders were forgotten and we laughed till bedtime. J L-M’s portrait of John describes him perfectly and is one of the best in the book.
Kathleen Kennet12 discovered that J L-M was asked by The Times to write her obituary. She bombarded him with letters full of details about her achievements, even pursuing him by post to Italy to keep him up to the mark lest he should leave out a plum or two. It would have been easier if she had written her own obituary, like distinguished people write their entries in Who’s Who. I am quite glad that KK is one of the mates I did not know. Yet J L-M loved her.
Vita Sackville-West is another matter. She was the inventor of a style of gardening which is still mimicked all over the world, a poet and an original, but seeing her craggy face and shapeless form in the photograph we know so well it is impossible to believe that she inspired such passion as is described. But we must believe it, because no one was immune. Men and women alike fell under her spell. Her husband referred to her affairs as her ‘muddles’. So muddled am I by the variety of her conquests that I long for explanations. Why did she have to ‘masquerade as a wounded Tommy in the streets of London’ to delight Violet Trefusis? At a charity concert where Vita recited, Lady Crewe, the organiser, announced that ‘she would pass the Queen round to the left like port’. J L-M ‘remained a faithful fan’ and exhorts us to do likewise. I just wish I had met this heady mixture of Clark Gable and Marlene Dietrich with ‘eyes of glowing coal’ and an exceptionally beautiful voice.
The description of Henry Yorke/Green13 makes me wonder why J L-M took so much trouble over him and wonder even more how people could have enjoyed his dreary novels, the quotes from which are dispiriting in the extreme. He states that Henry had ‘very beautiful manners’. This sentence might have been left out had he been a fellow guest when the Yorkes stayed with us in Ireland many years ago. Henry sat in a heap for a week and did not speak except to say, when gazing out of the window at the rain, how much he hated the country. His wife was indeed saintly to look after this morose man until he died.
Two who were changed out of all recognition as time slipped away were James Pope-Hennessy14 and Everard Radcliffe. The former was beautiful, funny and clever with intuitive charm and was an inspired writer. His friendship with J L-M had its ups and downs, and some of the downs must have been hard to forgive, but ‘his merriment was infectious, his charm insidious’. On a National Trust jaunt to Suffolk he says to the author: ‘Being with you is like being with myself, only nicer.’ No wonder Jim rejoiced in such company. Alas, drugs, drink, and ‘mad larking’ turned Jamesey into a near-demon who met a grisly end. J L-M’s last glimpse of his beloved companion o
f better times, from the top of a bus in Trafalgar Square, makes the blood run cold.
Radcliffe inherited Rudding Park near Harrogate. He was as much in love with the place as Vita had been with Knole and devoted his life to the well-being of its estate and to adding works of art to embellish the house and garden. When money troubles caught up with his extravagances he played a protracted game of cat and mouse with the National Trust over his inheritance. On the point of signing, and without a word to the Trust, Everard put the place on the market and decamped to Switzerland, leaving the love of his life to become the inevitable conference centre. His story is nearly as sad as poor Jamesey’s.
Fourteen Friends is compulsive reading. The author’s generosity of spirit shines through the descriptions of the disparate characters we come to know. He notes the faults as well as the virtues of his mates, but he does not criticise, and loves them in spite of all. Lucky people.
A Mingled Measure
by James Lees-Milne
Everyone who enjoyed the other ‘Kubla Khan’ diaries will fasten with joy onto this volume which covers the years 1953–71. J L-M was no longer working full time for the National Trust, so there are no more hilarious descriptions of meetings with owners of houses considered for handing over. But it is a wonderful picture of the life of this observant man who describes places, artists, writers, neighbours, friends and relations and allows us into some of his own thoughts.
Forty years on, some people seem as extinct as dodos – Eddie Marsh, for instance, who criticised so sharply a manuscript of J L-M’s that it made the author miserable for days; a rag-and-bone man uttering his cries in Thurloe Square and Hilaire Belloc setting himself on fire by his candle while staying with a friend. J L-M arrived at Nice airport at 3.40 a.m. and walked the six miles to Alvilde’s (his wife since 1951) house in Roquebrune. The installation of electric light at Westwood Manor in Wiltshire is noted and deplored. These are memories of a long lost world.
The L-Ms lived at Roquebrune for ten years, she passport and tax-bound, he going to and from his flat in Thurloe Square. They hob-nobbed with the locals, from Prince Rainier to the curé’s cousin (her mother kept a tame hen whose tail feathers trimmed the frame of her photo – the hen’s I mean, not the mother’s), the Graham Sutherlands, the local goatherd and annual visitors to the coast including Winston and Clementine Churchill. There lived a witch in the village and Somerset Maugham down the road. When a mistral blew up, spreading sparks which caused a disastrous fire over their garden of little ledges up the steep hillside to the very walls of their house, I didn’t mind as much as I should have done.
In 1964 the L-Ms moved to Alderley Grange in Gloucestershire. ‘The perfect mid-Georgian house’, wrote Candida Lycett-Green. ‘Inside a grand and generous staircase rose from a pale stone-flagged hall patterned with black stone diamonds.’ Here Alvilde’s twin accomplishments of cooking and gardening were appreciated by all who had the luck to taste or see the results of her work. In spite of frequent visits to London for the opera (where they always seemed to land in the Royal Box), plays, exhibitions and some committees of the National Trust which still bound him to that organisation, one feels that the diarist was really at home in that magic part of the country.
He walked in the woods with his whippets and in spite of saying he always looked at his feet he noticed everything. The more he noticed and loved what he saw the more gloomy he became over what was happening to England. He often found himself among friends who bewailed the state of the country, politically and aesthetically. His favourite places were threatened by motorways or drowning in a reservoir – even a new cowshed filled him with gloom. Watching the 1972 TUC Congress on the television convinced him that ‘communism must come to this country within twenty-five years’. I do hope he is comforted by the fact that there are only three years to go and it somehow doesn’t seem likely. The same year Denys Sutton ‘thinks an immediate revolution possible and an authoritarian government absolutely essential. George Weidenfeld said exactly the same thing a week ago.’ Well, well.
Later that month ‘Caroline Somerset took the Weidenfelds round Badminton and Lady W. said to C., “Did it take a long time to find such a beautiful house?”’ I expect that was several Lady Weidenfelds ago.
A friend who had been to Chequers told J L-M that Mr Heath, unable to bear sleeping in the room which had been Mr Wilson’s, chose another. That is the most human thing I have ever heard about Mr Heath.
‘Went last night to the Handley-Read collection of Victoriana at the Diploma Gallery. The hideousness and stuffiness of the furniture and ornaments beyond belief – sheer lodging house, and no wonder both Handley-Reads committed suicide last year.’
I’ve never heard of the Handley-Reads or their horrid collection, but the aesthete in J L-M was not surprised by their grisly end after one glance at what the poor things had accumulated.
People who have grown up since the years of the war and immediately after can have little idea of what this country owes to J L-M. He rescued, almost single-handedly, scores of delectable buildings, each one unique. It was before the word ‘heritage’ was chucked around to justify keeping everything from a badger sett to a banjo. No one bothered then. Pull them down, leave them to rot, these buildings will never be needed again, was the attitude of those in command. Had it not been for his dogged persistence against all the odds, including public opinion, local government opinion and up, up to the Cabinet itself, none of whom had the slightest interest in things of beauty and legislated accordingly, the poor old heritage would have been a great deal poorer. J L-M is far too modest to underline any of his achievements, but he is lauded by everyone who remembers them.
In my ignorance I could have done with some guidance here and there. Who was Father Illtud Evans, whose death saddened (only momentarily, I admit) J L-M? Why did Monica Baldwin want help? I long to know more about Bertie Towers, who bought ancestors to go with a manor house and of whom ‘Alec Clifton Taylor had little opinion’.
There are a number of spelling mistakes, wrong dates and asterisks the second time a person is mentioned and some places don’t appear in the index – unworthy of the house of John Murray and surely not the fault of the writer. Never mind. I read it with intense pleasure because A Mingled Measure brings J L-M into the room, and who could be a better companion on an autumn evening?
Dear Mary
by Mary Killen
What trouble people get themselves in, what mix-ups and muddles, and not only in ‘social life’ where the chilling word etiquette still appears to rule. (I thought it had gone with the war: wrong as usual.) Every hour of every day the most worrying things seem to happen.
Many of them arise from the inhibited British being unable to face unpleasantness head on. It would be much easier to say to an offender ‘you smell’ or ‘please stop eating in such a disgusting way’, but we have been brought up not to do that. Instead we ask Mary Killen and she knows just how to smooth the way, whatever the problem.
I have great sympathy with some of her correspondents – the unlucky SM of Wiltshire, for instance, who sat next to the Foreign Secretary at dinner, didn’t recognise him, asked what he did, failed to hear the word Foreign and spent the rest of dinner discussing shorthand typing. Too late to ask for advice, I am afraid.
ES of W11 has joined a health club in Notting Hill and lives in terror of seeing Antonia Fraser bare. You must buy the book to see the inspired answer to this one.
Since beloved David Cecil died I am no longer troubled by the problem of CS of Islington who asks, ‘What is the correct way of removing spittle which someone has accidentally spat onto one’s face while talking enthusiastically?’ So I didn’t bother to read the answer.
I pity poor AM of Fonthill whose wife is addicted to telephoning faraway friends before the cheap time. If my father had caught me doing that, his reaction would have been to hand out the short, sharp shock treatment which a Home Secretary advocated for certain offences a few years ago. I don�
�t suppose nice Mary would ever suggest anything so drastic, but I heartily recommend it to AM.
LG of Ludgershall asks how to stop her weekend guests stealing books. I’m afraid that is a dreadfully difficult question, especially as they always bag the most readable. Mary’s solution, copied from the late Lord Moyne, tells LG to have a supply of stiff cards and make the borrower write his name, address and date of borrowing and put it in the space in the shelf where the book was. A good plan, but not as threatening as that of my sister when she was married to the same Lord Moyne. Their bookplates read, ‘This book was stolen from Bryan and Diana Guinness.’
The perennial agony of forgetting names is the subject of two letters. DL of SW1 suffers from it, and as he/she works in publishing and I presume has to attend such ghoulish entertainments as book launches, he/she will be delighted with Mary’s clever solution. But what struck me about his/her letter was not the problem but the fact that he/she states, ‘Flattery and ego-stroking are integral parts of my job.’ How I should love to meet this individual, surely the rarest of birds in that profession where bosses and employees all seem to lack the most basic good manners (always excepting the late Jock Murray).
The best thing about being old is having grown out of minding most of the social pitfalls described in these letters. In years gone by I was as vulnerable as the next person and one frightful evening stands out. I found myself sitting at dinner next to M. Pompidou, then President of France. He spoke no English, I no French. Our host sat opposite us across a narrow table, greatly amused by our predicament. We sat there crumbling bread and trying to smile at each other. Dear Mary, where were you that evening?
I Once Met
All in One Basket Page 10
