Dearest Jane...

by Roger Mortimer

  ‘Sending a child away to school is merely a middle-class abdication of parental responsibility,’ my father would pronounce in grave tones. Nevertheless, the children of this responsible father were sent away to school. As his children’s trunks were loaded into the car for school, he found it irresistible to chant:

  Going to school, Father Goodbye,

  Take care of Mother and don’t let her cry.

  My small Hampshire boarding school, Daneshill near Basingstoke, had a friendly, family atmosphere. Our youthful headmistress could be depended upon for her humour and fairness as she steered her ‘little toads’ towards their O levels, assisted by a sample of sterling teachers along with others whose lessons increased a sense of the world’s mysteries but not our knowledge of them. By the time I was fifteen my father commented, ‘I’ve been paying for your education for ten years and you’re still as ignorant as a piece of lavatory paper.’ He once wrote to me:

  ‘Dear Wafer Head,

  You left those nice buttons I gave you on the mantelpiece. I think your head is full of eggshells, old socks and a copy of the Woman’s Magazine for 20 October 1937.’

  I attribute any mental deficiencies to the 1960s bedtime custom for females to wind their hair over great prickly curlers – ‘rollers’ – and pass their nights, apparently asleep, with these vicious porcupines anchored with pins all over their craniums.

  My father enjoyed stimulating his children’s idle brains with board games, cards, dominoes, quizzes and general knowledge tests designed by him. Our least educational game was played in the middle of Sunday lunch, between the roast and the pudding: ‘The Spinning of the Knife’. My father would take an ivory handled ‘best’ knife and spin it round on his tablemat. ‘Now, whoever this points at will win a gigantic prize next week!’ Cries of glee! ‘Whoever this points to will find a huge splinter in their left toe tomorrow!’ Cries of woe! The game often got completely out of hand, concluding only with my mother’s customary protest, ‘Oh really, Roger – I do wish you would back me up with the children!’

  That we were confident in the love of our parents did not alter, as far as I was concerned, the sense of confusion that they were inadvertently adroit at creating. They each expressed colourful opinions but there was little consensus between them. Having no original thoughts of my own, I soaked up my parents’ commentaries and exchanges like a sponge, storing them away for my own use. When, in naive ignorance, I reiterated their views, they sounded at best precocious, at worst pretentious and, to my own peer group, somewhat weird.

  My parents’ differences could only be exacerbated by their children’s progression – if it can be called that – into adolescence.

  For teenage Jane, shrouded in cigarette smoke, on went lashings of eye make-up under a curtain of hair hanging over skinny ribbed jumpers and miniskirts or skimpy purple dresses from Biba. As my parents pointed out with castigating candour, I looked ridiculous in such fripperies – common and tarty. One day my father drove me to the station to catch a train to London. He glowered at the feather boa round my neck, the donkey jacket beneath it and the plum, bell-bottom trousers from which peeped my white Courrèges patent leather boots: ‘I just hope you are not going to see any of my friends in London,’ he growled. ‘I hope I won’t either,’ I replied, smiling sweetly.

  As far as appearances were concerned – not only my own but that of my mother and sister – there were ‘teases’ ever at the ready, making us feel invisibility would be infinitely desirable. It is a wonder we ever left the house unconcealed.

  By now I was at a sixth-form college in Oxford, broadening my experience but not scaling any heights in exam results. There had been some hope as I had passed my O levels at fifteen-and-a-half.

  The most important status symbol was a boyfriend, ideally a young man who would enjoyably assist a young woman in dispensing with her virginity. It was an easily achievable ambition in a town teaming with fascinating undergraduates with similar missions in mind. ‘She was as pure as snow until she drifted,’ mused my father with a warning glint in his eye. Many a crisp paternal letter arrived in my college pigeonhole.

  After my year-and-a-half at Oxford came the next stage. ‘Coming out’ was not about your sexuality, but becoming a ‘deb’ and ‘doing the season’. My father’s relief was as great as my mother’s disappointment at my indifference to this ritual – although with extraordinary graciousness, I conceded to go to what now would be called ‘awesome’ parties, thrown by my existing friends. Insufficient funds played a significant role in my father’s attitude to launching his daughter as a deb – and in my own. Both cash and confidence were thin. On that front and with a shared wariness of ‘the meat market’, my father and I were united.

  My mother longed for this bolshie daughter to get caught up in a whirlwind of upper-crust boyfriends with healthy tastes. ‘People from my world, Jane. It was all such fun. I mean the word “boyfriend” meant something quite different in my day – you had lots of them and they were just boys who were friends. I don’t know why you want to sit around having psychological conversations with all those bloody intellectuals [anyone who went to university]. I really wish you wouldn’t be so analytical, Jane.’

  ‘Cocktails and laughter, but what comes after, nobody knows,’ murmured my father from his armchair.

  But my father was proved wrong about my prospects of marriage. After half a handful of significant boyfriends, and a number of others who were not, at the tender age of twenty-two I had the very good fortune to marry a very nice, amusing and intelligent man, Paul Torday, the father of my two sons. We were to remain together for the next eighteen years.

  Marriage marked a great sea-change in the tone of my father’s letters to me. There was relief – delight even – that his daughter had won the heart of a really good man to take charge of her. From then on, my father confided many more of his personal thoughts to me, ranging widely over his reflections on our family and his life and times.

  ‘Via Dolorosa

  Burghclere

  6 February [1970s]

  Of course this perpetual letter-writing is sheer self indulgence. In fact it is a vice, egotism bordering on narcissism. Perhaps I ought to go and see a really good man about it before the whole thing goes too far and lands me in serious trouble.’

  We did not always agree – how dull that would have been. I debated with my father on his racist views, right-wing politics, anti-feminism, anti-religion, how to bring up my children, how to bring up his children, how to pacify my mother, vegetarian food and why I did not have enough red flowers in my garden. Two emotional events in my life caused my father great worry and distress. During these troubling phases, he demonstrated immense sensitivity and kindness, untainted by criticism or reproach. Inevitably one of these events was my divorce from my first husband, Paul, which occurred in my father’s final years. I can now empathize with his devastation in far greater depth than I could at the time. Apart from one brief meeting, sadly he never knew my second husband, Tommy Bates, a long-time fan of Roger’s writing, whose life I have happily shared for two-and-a-half decades. Meanwhile, Paul married Penelope, his second wife, in the early 1990s.

  As the oldest child, I was blessed with the longest period in which to enjoy my father’s unique company. From ‘first and worst’, I now appreciate that I was the ‘first and most fortunate’.

  My Dearest Jane . . .

  Barclay House

  25 October [early 1960s]

  Thank you for your affectionate and interesting letter this week . . . or am I thinking of someone else?

  Horserace Totalisator Board

  Monday, summer 1964

  You and your mother are entirely different in character and it behoves both of you to be tactful and tolerant. Remember this little quotation: ‘Intolerance is the compliment paid by second-rate people to those whose views happen to differ from their own.’ In the meantime, ‘Aequam Memento rebus in arduis sevare mentem’ (‘Remember when life’s pa
th is steep to keep your mind even’). And always remember things are seldom as bad as they seem except when they’re worse.

  In the predictably volatile climate of my adolescence, after leaving school I was speedily dispatched to France to polish my French chez the formidable Contesse de Bernard de la Fosse in her chateau in the Loire. Her daughter, Madame Watson, was my tutor. My subsequent destination was sixth form college in Oxford. I was not quite sixteen.

  Barclay House

  4 September 1964

  I hope you had a good flight. I shall look forward to hearing your first impressions of life at Blois. Barclay House seems very quiet without you and peculiar as it may seem, I really think your mother misses you very much. It certainly seems strange to have no one to ask me 45 times a day ‘How are you?’ as if I was a perpetual invalid! Charley B has given me a very nice present of a cigar and two bars of chocolate. Well, enjoy yourself and work hard; keep in touch and let me know if there is anything you want (except money).

  Barclay House

  16 November 1964

  I have had a letter about you from Madame Watson and doubtless to your intense surprise she speaks quite well of you! Would you believe it?

  Barclay House

  25 November 1964

  I hope we have fixed up for you to go to Oxford. It will give you a chance to learn a few things in the broader sense; the more you learn the more interesting life becomes and the more interesting you yourself become to other people. The trouble with so much of the female education in this country is that it stops too soon and girls are launched into the world knowing damn all except the top twenty and the latest fashions. That is tedious for them and more so for those with whom they have to associate. After all, you can’t live on teenage charm forever!

  Love,

  xx D

  Barclay House

  17 January 1965

  You will soon be grown up and presumably will then be regarding pop music with the same bored nausea as other adults. Try not to get into debt or into any other sort of foolish trouble (one false step, if you don’t think twice, bang goes your motto and mother’s advice). If you do, let me know and I will help; that is what parents are for. Well, behave yourself and go easy on the mascara.

  Horserace Totalisator Board

  4 October 1965

  I hear you have moved into a new house; no doubt you will add to its general tidiness and sense of quiet decorum. On the whole you were very helpful last holidays and it was good of you to cope with Louise so much, thereby enabling your poor mother to have a brief rest. A fatigue party is hard at work trying to tidy up your room. Try getting rid of a lot of your things; it is surprising how little you will miss them. Try and read a few books. I’m sorry you did not tackle ‘Decline and Fall’; I think it is one of the funniest books ever written. I particularly like the bit about Oxford. Captain Grimes is one of the great comic characters in English history. I enclose a small present for some of the peculiar meals you cooked in the holidays; I will give you another when you stop putting all that stuff on your eyes that makes you look as if you were in a No. 3 touring company of the Black and White Minstrels.

  Yours ever,

  RM

  I was not yet sufficiently sophisticated to appreciate Evelyn Waugh.

  The Sunday Times

  25 January 1966

  I’m glad you enjoyed your Geburtstag and it was nice of you to write. I very much enjoyed the lunch and have fallen in a big way for Sally. I wish I was 43 years younger. It was natural of your friend to assume I am a don: in fact I am one, and have been leading a double life for years, being Regius Professor of Islamic Studies at Reading University. Keep it to yourself, though, or your mother might ask for more housekeeping money.

  Sally Ann Roberts was a close friend I made at Oxford – a raven-haired beauty, intelligent, ambitious, of memorable integrity and wonderful company. Tragically, her potential was never fully realised. She died after an accident on her twenty-first birthday.

  Barclay House

  5 November 1965

  Guy Fawkes Night and all around I hear bangs and explosions. How the English adore standing out in the cold watching their children burn themselves quite badly with highly unpredictable squibs and rockets. I enjoyed seeing you last week but I would rather you did not wear a long discarded jersey, clearly from a male wardrobe. I trust you are working hard and not looking too farouche. If there is one type of adolescent that gives me quite a severe pain it is the male or female to whom the label of ‘student’ is unmistakably attached. Undergraduate, OK, but ‘student’, never. It makes me think of spotty young socialists at the London School of Economics. Avoid, therefore, if you can the cult of ugliness so distressingly fashionable with the young.

  Barclay House

  22 November [mid 1960s]

  Thank you very much indeed for sending me a charming and well-chosen card and a most interesting pair of scarlet braces manufactured from what appears to be genuine elastic. Thank you, too, for that odd looking stopper. Into what am intended to insert it? (Don’t bother to answer that question.) I received a bottle of liqueurs from your brother; he originally intended to give me a table for my lavatory, but unfortunately, due to a miscalculation in planning, the table was so big that when it was introduced, not without difficulty, into the lavatory, I was unable to get within three-and-a-half feet of the seat. By the way, Louise gave me two bars of chocolate.

  Best love,

  D

  Barclay House

  24 January 1966

  I expect you to have fun but at the same time you have reached the age when you have got to come to terms with reality. I wish I could detect in you some signs of wanting to plan your life; drivelling on about clothes and parties is perfectly permissible and natural at your age, provided it is not the main theme of your life but just a gay background to some more serious purpose.

  If you can decide what you want to do and how you intend to do it, I will try and help you, but the tiresome fact that you have to digest is that I have spent my earnings on education for you all; once your education is over you’ve had your lot as far as money is concerned; I have not even anything saved up for my old age or for your mother when I give the bucket a resounding kick. Please take this in and start planning your life accordingly.

  I must now get some gin out for Mrs Hislop who is coming for a drink.

  Yours ever,

  RM

  Barclay House

  [1966]

  I have just had a letter from St Clare’s complaining that you are extremely casual over your work, that you are missing classes, and that you are obviously not giving sufficient time and thought to your homework. I expect you to enjoy yourself at Oxford, but I also expect you to have sufficient common sense and strength of mind to work properly.

  As regards the future, I suggest you pull yourself together and try to get into your foolish little mind that in just over a year’s time you will be completely self-supporting, and I emphasise the word ‘completely’. Your standard of living will depend on your own industry and intelligence, not mine. At present you are too scatty and disorganised to hold down the job of waitress in a Camberley coffee bar.

  It is really up to you. I don’t mind spending all the cash the tax collector permits me to keep on children’s education provided the children respond and make the most of their opportunities. It infuriates me to be told that you are chucking those opportunities away. Hard work is almost entirely a matter of self-discipline and moral courage; I trust you are not devoid of those qualities.

  Just get that finger of yours out and at the risk of spraining your brain, just THINK.

  Your affectionate and exasperated father.

  Barclay House

  [Mid 1960s, postcard]

  Good News for You! I will let you off that £1 you borrowed from me and were just about to send off.

  Love,

  D

  Barclay House

  18 May 1966

 
; I have just read your letter with some concern. Most of life is a compromise, and until you are 21 and completely independent there will probably have to be a compromise between your ideas and wishes and those of your parents. I don’t claim to know what is right for you; I can only offer advice based on experience. In an imperfect world, money is of considerable importance and you are not, in my opinion, the sort of person that would be really happy in poverty. Therefore I want to prepare you to earn your living. If I had the means I would be only too willing to support you financially until I become a pillar of greasy smoke at Woking Crematorium. But unfortunately I am getting on for sixty, which is horribly old for a journalist as at that age one loses any facility for new ideas or originality of expression. At any time now I may be given a kindly reminder that I have out-served any useful purpose that once I had.

  I do not seek to control your life, only to equip you to cope with the modern world. I wish I felt certain I knew what was best for you in the long run. As the old Field Marshal observed: ‘It is easy to do your duty; the difficulty is in deciding where your duty lies.’

  Best of British luck and much love,

  x D

  Barclay House

  3 August 1966

  I really am sorry you are having such a rough time but try and realise that for all their faults and follies, your parents are on your side and will do all they can to help. That’s what parents are for! Let me know at once if there is anything I can do for you. I love you very much and will do anything I can to help you solve any difficult problems satisfactorily.

  Best love from your occasionally well-meaning father,

  xx

  Barclay House

  3 April 1967

  Could you please, by 10 April if possible, let me know your plans for the future? Much as I like having you at home where you do much useful work, I feel that the time has come for you to earn your living. I do not think I am being particularly unreasonable in suggesting you get down to work, as except for a spell at Miss Wilson’s Secretarial Academy, you have been unemployed (bar some Christmas work) since you came home from Oxford last July. In the words of the old song: