Much of the Brigadier’s writing is delightfully dated. Many bright little plants are ‘gay’ and in my battered old paperback he recommends a dependable insecticide, DDT – edited out of this edition now it is illegal. Slugs, bugs and bacteria are likened to Fifth Columnists. The new generations of gardeners may wonder at the meaning of that. Weeds are classed in three degrees of abomination, the worst being the tap-rooted varieties, ‘underground creeping horrors’. Couch grass and ground elder are ‘vegetative serpents, brutes which laugh at the hoe as love laughs at the locksmith’.
The chapter on the kitchen garden takes us steadily along, with all the favourites and their needs clearly described. It is embellished with simple line-drawings (we have already seen a little masterpiece entitled ‘How Not to Water’); one page ends with ‘a gallery of oddments’, which show their age as today they are no longer odd but fashionable – kohlrabi, celeriac and salsify.
Having profited by the Lucas Phillips wisdom and followed his ways in making a new garden – or improving an old one – to our (and his) liking, we arrive at the last chapters, where he excels himself. ‘Know Your Enemy’, something the old soldier studied in his military career and applies forcibly to the deceptive calm of the garden, is his title for the introduction to this section. Who could forget the picture conjured up by scab and canker ‘going hand in hand’? It cries out for a drawing by Edward Lear of these brotherly pests advancing on your apple trees. He quotes Erasmus Darwin in 1790, ‘Crack follows crack, to laws elastic just / And the frail fabric shivers into dust.’
We are jolted into full attention by the originality and often hilarious descriptions of ‘Friend and Foe’ and, best of all, ‘The Enemy in Detail’. Who else but our now beloved author would describe the larva of the ladybird (a friend) as ‘agile, torpedo-shaped, resembling a minute crocodile’? You have got to learn the difference between the ‘brisk’ centipede (friend) and a millipede (foe). The latter has ‘innumerable very small legs and, when worried, gives off an obnoxious smell from his stink glands’. The idea of a ‘worried’ millipede is something I have never considered but I will now – assuming I can tell it apart from its fewer legged rival, the friendly centipede – and I will do my best to give the former a nervous breakdown. I am afraid the children’s dear old tortoise is entirely an enemy.
The worst garden pest by a long way is Man (‘ignorant and lazy’), led in his assault on nature by the Jobbing Gardener. (Fifty years on, would the worst pest be the strimmer?) Birds are in a special category and have become ‘a serious problem…pestiferous to fruit’. RSPB please note.
Dip into this book and you will find yourself digging. Dig and you will be rewarded.
2006
The Organ Recital
When two or three old people are gathered together in the name of lunch, you can be sure of the subject of conversation to start the ball rolling. Illnesses of all shapes and sizes are the thing and the Organ Recital17 begins. Heads, bodies and legs are dissected; noses, throats and ears, skin and bones, arteries, liver and lights, and (Blair’s favourites) hearts and minds. Once you start on minds you are in for a basinful. Of the two it is better to stick to hearts and whether or not you are allowed to walk upstairs.
Hips and knees lead to bones. Stomachs, teeth and gums, closely allied as it is not much use having one without the others, can lead to a dissertation on dentistry. Impacted wisdom teeth are good but there is a trick called root canal treatment that takes almost as long to describe as the lengthy treatment itself, with your jaws jammed open till the cows come home. There is a strong sense of competition, even as to the waiting time at hospital (length of); tales of woe are capped and re-capped as the Organ Recital progresses.
Various syndromes that I’ve never heard of are trotted out as a part of everyday life and sympathy is expected from the listener. Doctors come in for praise or criticism. Surgeons are either haloed magicians or bunglers who ought to be struck off. A curious thing is that they are always described as ‘my GP’ or ‘my surgeon’, when they are ordinary independent people who don’t belong to anyone. Consultants are described as ‘you know who I mean, the big kidney man’ or whatever the man’s favourite bit of body happens to be.
Look out when it comes to food, which is either very good or very bad for you. Lumped together as ‘diet’ it is dangerous ground because the dish you are giving someone for lunch will have come in for a pounding before they sit down to it. An extraordinary phenomenon, unknown to our parents, is fads. An invitation, especially to a municipal or university celebration, often has ‘Special Dietary Requirements’ printed on it, with a space for you to fill in. What you and I never see are the replies, so we don’t ever know if the invitees just put ‘caviar’.
If a grand person is among the guests, his/her PA will telephone to say, ‘I thought you would like to know that X cannot eat…’ and then follow all the most delicious foods one after another. Next time this happens I plan to say, ‘Why can’t they just say “no thank you”?’ If the guest is very grand indeed and suffers from some strange religion, there is little you can safely offer. Better steer clear as such social life has become full of pitfalls.
You must leave at least ten minutes for the Organ Recital, which leads seamlessly, as they say now (what are these nonexistent seams that people go on about?), to Trolley Talk, the romance of the aisles, the thrill of the checkout, the way favourites are repackaged or moved round the supermarket and hidden from the most determined shopper. You will be lucky if you get away with six minutes on this subject. Then you can agree how wonderful it is that we never hear of Blair now and what a pity it was that Mr Cameron ever mentioned grammar schools.
August 2008
The Farmers’ Club Dinner
Thank you very much for asking me to come here tonight. I do not know how I dared accept but I was blinded by flattery and, as usual in these cases, the invitation came some time ago so I was sure I would be dead by now. The people at this dinner are the cleverest in the world in the profession I admire most in the world, and I ought to have known that if by some strange chance I was still alive, the terror of my role would induce a heart attack. But to propose the toast to Agriculture and the Farmers’ Club is a tremendous honour and one I appreciate more than I can say.
The only people who ever ask me to give a talk are the Women’s Institutes, usually the ones very near at hand and always in January and February when they think a proper speaker might get stuck in the snow. A few years ago I wouldn’t have been bold enough to do even that but I was thrown in at the deep end. I was staying with a friend in Sussex who is secretary of her local WI. The day of the meeting coincided with my visit and a secretary’s nightmare happened: the speaker failed. Faced with an expectant audience and nothing doing, she said, ‘YOU must talk.’ ‘I can’t,’ I protested, ‘what on earth could I talk about?’ ‘Tell them about Chatsworth,’ she said. ‘I can’t…’ In the end I did. They were bored to death. In deep Sussex I’m sure they’d never heard of Derbyshire, let alone Chatsworth. But polite as the WI always are, they listened to the end of this awful experience. When we got home I asked my friend what the real talk should have been about. She got the programme down from the mantelpiece and the title was, ‘Ramblings of an Old Woman’. So that is what you’re getting tonight.
The reason I feel so proud to be here is because the people who work the land are the men I like and admire more than any others – especially the men of the hills and hard weather, men who live for and by their land, their cattle and their sheep, who are not ruled by clocks and train times, who are not parasites living off other people’s efforts, or critics (except of course of governments), who are not always looking over their shoulder wondering what other people are thinking of them, but are totally independent and go about their hard and exacting tasks according to the seasons, as their fathers and forefathers did before them. They are the men who do the work and they are the men who command my respect.
Since marry
ing and moving to Derbyshire during the war, I have been surrounded by such people. Several characters stand out: one was George Hambleton, who died not long ago at a ripe old age. He had walked a Shire stallion and then became a cowman. Little is said or written about the stockmen, horsemen and shepherds whose lives are spent with the animals in their charge. On them depends the welfare of the stock, and therefore the success or failure of their division of the farm. George was one of those men who understood his animals by instinct and was in total sympathy with them. He could see at once if there was anything wrong and was as good as any vet at diagnosis – and as good as any nurse at treating the ailment. Hours mean nothing to such men – cows don’t calve to order during weekdays and it would never occur to them to be absent at crucial times. George was quietly critical of some of the young men, fresh from agricultural college, who thought they knew the lot. ‘They don’t know as much as they think they do,’ he once said to me, ‘well, some don’t even know what a swingle tree is.’ Such are the people who produce the superb stock for which this country is renowned. No praise or thanks can be high enough for them and no men expect it less.
Anyone born after George’s generation will be puzzled by all the horse expressions in our language – kicking over the traces, working against the collar, taking the bit between the teeth, being trotted out, keeping on a tight rein, put out to grass, can’t take his oats – all from a lost world where the horse and its ways were an essential part of life. Gone too are the binders, stooks and ricks, and the threshing days when all the boys in the village enjoyed going ratting. With the changing look of farming, the poets must also change when writing about the country. The first line of Kipling’s ‘L’Envoi’:
There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield
And the ricks stand grey to the sun
would have to read:
There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield
And the plastic bags shine black to the sun.
Not quite the same thing somehow.
My husband’s grandfather, the 9th Duke of Devonshire, loved his farm and his Shires and Shorthorns far more than the extraordinary works of art he lived among. He was no beauty, and was what could be described as ‘of bucolic appearance’. The Royal Show, which at that time moved to a different place annually, was one of the highlights of his year. When it was held at Newcastle, the sleeper train from London waited in a siding till it was a reasonable time for its passengers to get up (railways sought to please their customers in those days). Two farmers walking down the platform saw the recumbent figure of the duke, sound asleep in true Cavendish fashion, his pink head on a pillow. ‘That’s a fine Large White,’ said one farmer. ‘That’s no Large White, that’s the Duke of Devonshire,’ answered his companion – a Derbyshire man, no doubt, who could tell the difference.
The duke kept diaries which are a joy to read and are an antidote to the wordy ways of our masters, the bureaucrats of today. Many entries referred to Shire horses and cows. One describes an equine tragedy in just six words: ‘Tremendous thunderstorm. Mother Hubbard dropped dead.’ Others read: ‘Butterfly cast her calf. Very troublesome.’ ‘Mrs Drewry’s funeral – sad little ceremony. Much warmer. Shot a few rooks after.’ ‘Went to see the new church at Flookborough. Thought it rather askew.’ But my favourite entry, headed ‘London’, reads: ‘Important meeting in Buxton. Missed train. Rather glad.’
Nowadays, the third Saturday in September is one of the most important days in the year for Chatsworth Farms. It is the day of the sheep sale and, in four hours or so, the harvest of that enterprise is gathered in. I am told it is the biggest one-day sale from a single owner in the country. At daybreak the shepherds start to pen some 6,000 sheep in a field above Edensor. Cattle lorries squeeze up the lane where the notice ‘Unfit for Cars’ is covered by a fertiliser bag. Children play in tiers of straw-bale seats before the tent begins to fill with men whose Breughel-like faces proclaim their intimacy with the long English winters.
Ian Lawton, the auctioneer, stands in his stall and gives an inimitable performance, like the conductor of an orchestra with a bit of Mr Punch thrown in, stabbing and embracing the air while reciting his exhortations to the expressionless company at breakneck speed. ‘Look sharp or they’ll walk away. Listen to me now. Keep waving, sir. £37.80 settles it. Square ’em up. There’s a lot of service in these. Away they go. A change of tup now and we have Bleu de Maine…’ At the same time he is able to spot the bidders, invisible to you and me, most of whom have announced they will not be buying today, the lambs are far too dear. Ian keeps up his virtuoso one-man show for three and a half hours without a break, and his gavel, bound in layers of sticking plaster, bangs down ninety times an hour, as the same number of pens, each holding twenty to twenty-five sheep, is funnelled through the sawdust ring. I would give a lot to see him on the rostrum at Christie’s. He would make the Bond Street dealers sit up and look sharp or the Rembrandts would walk away: ‘Here come the Botticellis, sound in reed and udder, change the tup and you’ll get a Van Gogh…’
Chatsworth has a Farm Shop, which, although successful, does produce some rather odd complaints. I have had two letters from women who bought a whole lamb for their freezers. Their messages were the same: ‘When I drive through the park at Chatsworth, I see the lambs and they have four legs. When I unpacked the lamb I bought from you it had only two legs. What happened to the other two?’ Farmers looking for diversification please note – breed a sheep with four legs, forget the shoulders and you’ll be made!
This rambling old woman has seen strange changes in the world of agriculture. It seems only yesterday when farmers were heroes, the growers and providers of our food during and after the war. Now we seem to have turned into the enemy, the spoilers of landscapes (which, by the way, farmers invented), poisoners, torturers, perpetrators of all that is wicked. If that wasn’t enough, a new language has been foisted on us, impossible for a simpleton like me to understand or keep up with because it is always being added to. Gatts and Caps, Variables and Clawbacks, now Iaccs – all too difficult. The hours of work and frustration caused by hordes of pressure groups, led by well-meaning, single-issue, muddle-headed people who are not countrymen and find it hard to understand the processes of nature, are unbelievable. I’m sure you all know the kind I mean and suffer from them.
Arising out of the enthusiasm of these new rural dwellers, I confidently expect the ones we know will soon be joined by Save the Rat Society, the Protection of Maiden Aunts in the Country Association, Family Planning for Rabbits (this will need a large staff), the Barbed Wire Heritage Group, the Single-Parent Frog Club, the Married Deer Association of Great Britain, the Society for the Rights of Moles and the World Fund for the Promotion of Dry Rot (the Wet Rot Club will be the junior branch). I look forward to hearing from the secretaries of these fruiting bodies, all of whom will be asking for £1 million to get going. I am longing for the findings of a government enquiry into the Fouling of Fields by Farm Stock, and the ensuing legislation which may be difficult to enforce, and new regulations making it illegal for anyone to go out of doors without wearing rubber gloves. But the best of the new societies is a London one. I’m proud to say my sister-in-law is its president. It is called the Society for Neutering Islington’s Pussies – SNIP for short.
My family and I spend August at Bolton Abbey, in a magical spot in Yorkshire, where the straight-talking people are economical with words but not with the truth. A man who lives at the end of our lane is wonderfully gloomy. Once, when we had just arrived, he was telling me of the changes in the village during the year. ‘So, how’s the new postman getting on?’ I asked. ‘The new postman?’ Pause. ‘He’s made a bad start.’ Long pause. ‘He’s dead.’
I think you’ll all be dead if I don’t stop, so may I thank you again for a lovely dinner in excellent company and ask you to rise for the toast: ‘Agriculture and the Farmers’ Club.’
December 1991
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Derbyshire
I was brought up on the borders of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and have the unassailable affection for that beautiful part of England that everyone who has had a happy childhood feels for their native heath. When I moved to Derbyshire in 1943, Andrew was with his regiment in Italy and I settled into our first proper home in Ashford-in-the-Water with a baby, a pony and cart, two dogs and a pig.
I thought I should never get used to the scale of the Derbyshire landscape, to the size of the hills and valleys, to the hardness of the stone walls, bare of stonecrop and lichen, and to the length of the winters in a climate where May can be as cold as February. I have lived in the county now for nearly forty years and have grown to love the space and the remote places and would not change them for any other.
There is infinite variety in Derbyshire. Some of the most important quarries and related heavy industry in England are just a few miles from high, lonely, limestone hills, criss-crossed by light grey, drystone walls. Thorn and ash trees, bent to the wind, grow along the wall sides, and limestone outcrops show through the thin soil in the sudden rocky clefts of the dales. It is a landscape like no other in England, where you can find globe-flower, Jacob’s ladder, water avens, several kinds of orchid and even lily-of-the-valley growing wild. There are old lead mines, windswept villages of stout stone buildings, and incomparable views of a green and grey landscape inhabited by sheep and ubiquitous Friesian cows. The scenery of the dales is made more dramatic near Buxton and Wirksworth by immense quarries, the man-made cliffs outdoing the natural ones, and just as beautiful in their own way – Derbyshire’s answer to the white cliffs of Dover.
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