Dearest Jane...

by Roger Mortimer

  Cynthia had to be presented to her future in-laws in London. My father would have prepared his fiancée for the glacial gaze of her future mother-in-law and the likelihood of discomforting comment. His father, mild, genial and kindly, softened this and subsequent meetings, and welcomed my mother into his family. Did sweet young Cynthia meet my paternal grandmother’s criteria as a daughter-in-law? Not on your life.

  Cynthia’s family home was a rambling, stone farmhouse by the River Stour in Marnhull, the village where Thomas Hardy set Tess of the d’Urbervilles – a romantic detail not lost on my mother. Always enchanted by fantasy and poetry, she had a flowing facility for both and throughout her life was prone to break into long recitals at unexpected moments, veering between the divine and the disastrous, applauded more often by audiences other than her family. ‘A prophet is never honoured in his own country’, a biblical quote she sometimes cast before us. My mother’s powerful emotions found their ideal outlet in writing her own poetry; it was not a passing phase of her youth. The intensity of her poems did not find favour with my father but my mother had sufficient imagination and talent to write affecting verse that was, on occasion, delightfully coloured by her own humour. Like her mother, she was a dab hand at watercolours and pastels.

  Blessed with the kind of country upbringing found in the classic children’s books, Cynthia grew up on a farm, with the freedom to run wild, roaming the countryside with ponies and dogs – watched over by loving and accessible parents. It was an idyll that no later phase of her existence would ever quite match up to. Yet, as in most stories, there were shadows, and challenges to be met. Her unstable and erratic middle sister, Barbara, or Boo – ‘a real character’ by the time I knew her, but in Dorset days, a whole cartload of trouble – was often a draining and disturbing presence in her family.

  Cynthia was the youngest, prettiest and most spirited of three daughters. A decorated officer in the Royal Scots Greys, landowner, farmer, Master of the Portman Hunt and a dedicated member of local councils and committees, Harry Denison-Pender was her loyal and doting father. He was also possessed of a famously fiery temper, and some of its sparks were inherited by my mother. Her humour, sensitivity and imagination were her bequest from her gentle but spirited mother, Doris.

  As a girl, with nine indoor staff at one point, at her home, Strangways, Cynthia was not compelled to roll up her sleeves – except to groom her pony. The war altered all that. Her wartime jobs included being a FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), working as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross and being employed as draughtswoman at an Aircraft factory – a sixteen-mile bike ride there and back every day. A young man she was in love with had been killed in the war. By 1945, she had seen and experienced much, yet retained a kind of youthful naïvety that she never quite lost. It was a part of her charm. By the time my father swept her up, she was ready to be a wife and to do all she could to make a happy life and home for him.

  Newly married, in their own little house in Kensington, the continuation of rationing meant food and very many essentials were still scarce, but love, laughter and friends were in plentiful supply. In those days, there was no question of Cynthia working, other than as wife, and soon, as mother to me, born in 1949. There was a nanny and some domestic help. Labour was absurdly cheap and readily available.

  One day, before I was born, my mother walked through Kensington Palace Gardens with tears pouring down her face. She had understood from my father that he might have a brain tumour and have only six months to live. Roger was suffering from a period of bad headaches – they were entirely genuine. The brain tumour, mercifully, was not. It was Cynthia’s initiation into a troubled zone – Roger’s lifelong concern with the symptoms of his physical health, but probably, quite often, expressions of psychological difficulties. These anxieties always received my mother’s sympathy and she unfailingly took them seriously even when they aroused exasperation.

  Fevered brows, aches and pains were never dismissed in our family. Bed was always encouraged as a remedy. Looking back, I cannot think of a family whose combined numbers have spent more daylight hours in bed than my own. My mother was a caring nurse and forty years on, when my father’s health was truly failing, he referred to her as ‘Nurse Dillwater’ or ‘The Minder’.

  My parents hankered after the countryside. It would be much more convenient for my father’s work to live outside London within easier reach of racecourses. Everyone started to flourish when Roger, Cynthia and baby Jane moved from smoggy London to Hampshire – Barclay House, Yateley.

  In 1952 my mother acquired her first car, a silver Hillman Minx NJJ 166 – and also a son, the golden apple of her eye, Charles. Five years later, little sister Louise arrived on the scene. An utterly dependable and competent housewife, my mother was busy with all of us and the task of organizing our domestic staff who became like extended family members. My mother was proud of her DIY talents for fixing machines – ‘It’s a special knack.’ She was the one to mend the hoover, not my cerebral father.

  Fun-loving though she was, my mother carried the aura of one who is constantly engaged in pressing activities. With appreciative affection, it was at that stage that my father christened her ‘The Buzzer’. Yet her frantic energy exhausted her. Her frequent exclamation (unacceptable today) was ‘I’ve been working like a black all morning. I’m out on my feet!’ The antidote to her nervous energy was riding in the open countryside. There was nothing to compare with the ‘rapport’, as my mother called it, between rider and horse – or, as she also loved to say, being ‘d’accord’ with any animal. When my mother was in a position to take up hunting again, the reviving effects of riding took on a different aspect. Her adrenalin levels soared. There was palpable sigh of relief from my father when each hunting season ended, which can be felt in his letters.

  Horses were at the centre of the lives of both my parents but in entirely separate spheres: my father wrote of racing and my mother rode to hounds.

  The ignition key to most conversations at home was my mother. Her loquacity was considerable. She rose like a trout to the bait of the teasing of her sharp-witted husband. Her adventurous spirit was always leading her into minor scrapes. My father loved dining out on her escapades, with exaggerated invention. ‘But you’ve got it completely wrong, Roger!’ expostulated my mother, whose own anecdotal accounts might be much repeated. She too relished the fun of fabrication and should anyone question her veracity: ‘What does it matter? Don’t spoil a good story!’

  In those halcyon days of early childhood, I remember my mother as affectionate, attractive and fun. How much I loved her company, particularly when I had her to myself.

  A tomboy in sensible trousers, climbing trees and riding fearlessly, I was not. My mother found herself with a quaint little chatterbox of a child, who preferred indoors to outside, obsessed with dressing up and far too interested in what the grown-ups were doing for her own good. Enchanted by her mother’s femininity, that daughter would hide in her wardrobe rustling with fur coats, evening dresses and Ascot outfits – or creep between the pink damask curtains of the forbidden territory of her dressing table to sample deliciously scented potions and creams.

  Meanwhile, little brother Lupin – then known as Charlie B – manoeuvred his toy cars around the nursery floor, smiling engagingly and providing no problems for anyone. Our later and younger sister added a new pleasure as the baby of the household. I was very fond of them but as their conversational skills were not to develop for another twenty years, their company was not noticeably stimulating.

  ‘Go and ask your mother if she’s up for a lark,’ my father would ask of a summer’s afternoon. Picnic packed in the car, family dog Turpin’s tail wagging, we would set off to Finchampstead woods. Hide-and-seek followed tea from the thermos and sausages sizzled on my mother’s paraffin camping stove, which once nearly ignited a forest fire. A fire engine hoved into view and our mother was given a good dressing down. ‘Perfectly ridiculous. I had things completely under
control. Damn it all, I used to be a girl guide,’ she exclaimed as the firemen drove away.

  My mother, irretrievably known as Nidnod, gathered a few extra bonus points in the nickname stakes for certain tendencies. They need no embellishment: ‘The Minister of Misinformation’ and ‘Mrs Malaprop’, which she graciously accepted. Finally, one day when we had been guided round a historic house by a female volunteer whose cut-glass tones were a match for the Queen, my mother pressed a tip into our guide’s hand, declaring in her own resonant tones: ‘So lovely to have been taken round by a person of our calibre.’ From that moment, my mother had yet another name – the P.O.C. or Person of Our Calibre.

  The humour of our parents was poles apart. ‘Having a sense of the ridiculous’ was a shared standard to be met, the highest comic accolade that could be paid by either of them, but their definitions of ‘ridiculous’ did not always coincide. ‘Do laugh!’ my mother would cry, even though my father would sometimes admonish her for ‘taking things so terribly seriously’. ‘The world is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think,’ quoted my father. ‘Your poor mother falls into the former category.’ I was at times in sympathy with my mother.

  ‘Remember I was head girl of my school, Jane. I’m not completely C3!’ my mother frequently reminded me, her testing teenage daughter, in the 1960s. If a squeak of fear escaped me in the car as she overtook as oncoming traffic roared towards us, it was, ‘For goodness sake, girl, I drove an ambulance in the blackout during the Blitz.’ The further the war receded into the far distance, the more my mother tended to romanticize it as the most exciting period of her life. The older she became, the greater the number of boyfriends and fiancées who had apparently attended her in her youth. The past became ever more golden as the shadows deepened.

  How lucky I was to have experienced the very best of my mother as a little girl. She always endeavoured to be scrupulously fair with her children and it was not until I was eleven that some small incident revealed to me that Charlie B held the master key to my mother’s heart. Devastated at the time, I never held this preference against my amiable brother. He never abused his prime position then, even if he was to misuse himself in the years to come. My mother suffered much on this account, which became a regular aspect of divisions between our parents. My father was to write to me: ‘Your mother loves her son not wisely but too well.’ Now, the bottle was added to my mother’s recreational repertoire.

  Alcohol did my mother few favours. Jekyll became Hyde. Dark and dreadful evenings could be followed by days of sweetness and light, with not a troubled word recalled. Whenever my father could raise the flag for his wife and celebrate her love and goodness’ he did so. Comments now published about ‘Nidnod’s noggin in the old martini bucket’ – and this book has its share – were his way of making light of the pain of my mother’s difficulties. Had my father understood how to take my mother in hand, he would have done so. He was not proactive by nature: retreat was preferable and, at times, essential.

  My mother was someone who inspired affection; her own conspicuous loyalty and kindness brought her, in turn, many loyal friends. Those who worked for us tended to stay and she would remain in touch with them long after they had departed. Whenever my mother entered a contented phase and the bottles of spirits stood nearly untouched on the sideboard, her youthful zest for life, her pretty face, her warmth and generosity would smile on us all once more.

  My mother outlived my father by fourteen years. She always maintained that whatever else, she was never bored by Roger. He was frequently very bored by our mother, yet he loved her deeply and depended on her completely.

  My Dearest Jane . . .

  Barclay House

  25 January [early 1960s]

  It is very quiet with you and Charles both away but your mother has not been feeling well and is not in the mood you usually describe as ‘merry’. I have just signed a contract to appear on TV one evening soon. The programme lasts between 30 and 40 minutes and I am to give the commentary. I think I shall wear my Beatle wig and the sweater I knitted during the war. I am starting to grow a beard from tomorrow.

  The Sunday Times

  14 February [early 1960s]

  I got your mother a jumbo style Valentine; it is about the same size as the ‘Daily Express’ and conveys some doubtless charming sentiments. Charles is still demanding a drum for Christmas and if he works on your mother hard enough, I have little doubt she will be idiotic enough to give him one. I shall insist he plays it at the bottom of the garden in the summer house.

  Barclay House

  17 June 1963

  Next week we have a lot of parties and your poor mother is already beginning to spin like a sputnik. Have you learnt your part for the school play yet? Your mother seems rather muddled about it and I cannot quite gather whether you are in ‘Macbeth’, ‘West Side Story’ or ‘Toad of Toad Hall’.

  Barclay House

  Sunday [mid 1960s]

  Your mother is in very good form and as placid as a bowl of semolina. I think her holiday really did her good.

  The Sunday Times

  [1968]

  I fear you had rather a disturbed period of convalescence. However we are a resilient family and no one seemed to be greatly put out for more than a few minutes by your mother stepping out of a first-floor window on to one of my better shrubs, on Saturday; then endeavouring to bring off a flying tackle on a moving car 48 hours later. Thank you for all your help on those two occasions.

  Good luck in your new job and best love,

  xx D

  With a bandage over my nose following surgery, as my mother drove me home through Burghclere she insisted that I held a newspaper over my face so as not to attract attention.

  Budds Farm

  Monday [late 1960s]

  I am not sure whether I shall be able to hack my way through the jungle to your residence in darkest Islington tomorrow as your mother is off to Buxted Park at dawn on Wednesday (i.e. about 11.15 a.m.) and will want to discuss arrangements to be made during her absence, that is to say whether it will be kedgeree or fish pie for supper on Friday.

  Budds Farm

  6 May [late 1960s]

  Your mother is in bed sending out lunch and dinner invitations to persons who do not want to come here and whom we do not wish to entertain. She is off to London tomorrow; keep an eye on her. I think she has an assignation with a Newbury car-salesman, whose left shoe is always done up with parcel string so I don’t suppose he’ll be standing her hot lunch at the Mirabelle.

  Loose Chippings

  Soames Forsyte

  Wilts

  14 June 1970

  The new family name for Nidnod is ‘The Apricot’ because she is always liable to end up canned. She is in fair form but can be tedious about the election. She attributes Mr Wilson’s popularity solely to apathy and cynicism on my part and if the Tories are slammed on Thursday, I know who will get the blame!

  Le Petit Bidet

  Burghclere Les Deux Eglises

  Berks

  Sunday [1970]

  A police car called here the other night and your poor mother managed to convince herself that the two bucolic occupants were the unexpended portion of the Kray Gang masquerading as the Basingstoke Fuzz. The subject of the call was some way short of enthralling, dealing as it did with the loss of a bicycle at Tadley’s by a man from Penwood called Herbert Mortimer. By the time this trifling error in identity had been cleared up, your mother wanted to drive straight off to Reggie Maudling and lodge a complaint. However, she has simmered down since and really enjoyed herself by showing a film of allegedly wild life in Kenya – her aunt, a black cook called Tombo and three guinea fowl – to a captive audience of George, Jenny and Ian the garden boy. I’m sure you would regard this as a typical exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie.

  Reginald Maudling was the current Home Secretary. My mother had a natural affinity with those whom she described as ‘salt of the earth’. They ins
pired the best in her, creating bonds of mutual sympathy and affection – and amusement. That she was usually in the commanding position in these friendships and connections made them all the more rewarding.

  Schloss Buddestein

  Worms

  [1973]

  Your dear mother’s greatest virtue is her loyalty. Not infrequently she would like to bend an iron bar over my cranium and in general she finds me a very annoying and perverse old gentleman. Nevertheless, she really feels quite sad at leaving me (Query: or is it really her dog Pongo?) and going over to Jersey tomorrow for a week on the Lemprière-Robin’s steamer.

  My godfather Raoul Lemprière-Robin, known as ‘The Buggerdier’, and his wife Sheelagh were top dogs in Jersey. My mother would join them on adventurous sailing trips. Their lovely daughter Emma often stayed with my parents at Budds Farm and seemed possessed of all the virtues so absent in their own children.

  [1970s]

  I find a fairly large proportion of Nidnod’s verbal output, which is extremely high, sheer drivel, and sometimes annoying and contentious drivel at that. Nevertheless I know I shall miss the old trout very much even though I do get a break from her views on politics, religion, Jane, Charles, Louise, Mrs Hislop, the lack of values in the modern generation and the highly undesirable qualities she finds in most of my relations.

  The Crumblings

  4 August 1973

  It is very quiet here without Nidnod and I really miss her very much. I hope the holiday does her good.

  17b Via Dolorosa

  Burghclere

  [August 1973]

  The brief heat wave is over and the weather is dark and clammy like a woman I used to know in Alexandria before the war. Your mother came back on Aug 6. In the morning there was a fearful storm and water poured into my bedroom, the bulk of it falling on my bed. It rained pretty well the whole day and the sky was as dark as in late November at teatime. At 4 p.m. I set off to meet Nidnod at the airport. I parked in a space reserved for directors of some obscure company and proceeded to the ‘reception hall’. This was crowded with dissatisfied travellers and revolting children. At the information desk I learnt that Nidnod’s plane was still grounded in Jersey. I thereupon bought a copy of the Daily Telegraph (good on books on Thursdays) and retired to the car for a good read. Having made myself snug, I discovered that I had been sold yesterday’s paper. I slogged back to the bookstall where a young lady tried to appease me with yesterday’s Daily Express. Eventually I bought a woman’s magazine with knitting patterns rather than have nothing to read at all. On my way back to my car a 30-ton lorry passed me at high speed through a patch of flood water. If I had been thrown into a pond I could hardly have been more comprehensively soaked from my head downwards. Luckily I only had 75 minutes to wait in dank discomfort before Nidnod arrived, full of bounce and ponging strongly of fish, which was not surprising as she carried a sack containing sole, mackerel and a crab that in size and conformation resembled a 1916 tank. We had some mackerel for lunch the following day, Nidnod employing an old French recipe. After a few mouthfuls, the unexpended portions were tipped into a dustbin and the remaining mackerel were fried in an orthodox manner with excellent result. We had the crab in the evening which was quite good and managed to survive Nidnod’s special sauce!