Budds Farm
28 January
Dear Lupin,
What an interminable month January is! Everyone is more or less ill and to some extent unhappy. Your mother is in her worst form and never stops complaining. I just keep my mouth shut and try and keep out of the way. I have booked for us to go to Crete in May. It will bankrupt me but at least it ought to be warm there. The Cringer is very senile and it is difficult sometimes not to get cross with him. I have an idea that certain people feel very much the same about me. Your mother is off to the opera (Rosenkavalier) with the Bomers tomorrow. I hope it will cheer her up a bit. I saw the Gaselees on Tuesday and drank far too much gin: I don’t think my driving on the way home was above criticism. I have been asked to do some work for the Sunday Times colour supplement but I don’t like the subject so I think I’ll decline. At the end of the month I am going to see the shifty Bengali who does the accounts for ‘Pacemaker’ and I may have to put the frighteners on him. He owes me for five months. A girl of eighteen is coming to see me tomorrow about getting a job in the racing world. I am told she is good-looking which helps, but I don’t rate her chances very high. I hear Jane’s car was broken into and she lost a bit of kit. I broke a bottle of orange juice all over the front seat of my car this morning. A very nasty sticky mess! Aunt Pam is better but I gather Uncle Ken is feeling pretty ropey still. Your mother is in a fearful flap over the water and gets hysterical if anyone turns a tap on. I talked to Cousin Tom yesterday; he is making slow headway. He is better in the morning than after tea when he is apt to be terribly tired. I can’t think of anything else to say.
Your v. depressed parent,
RM
Budds Farm
15 May
Dear Lupin,
I think you would be amused to hear I have been asked to appear in a radio programme called Down Your Way in which I would answer questions and then select a piece of music to be played. Alas, I shall be in Scotland and cannot oblige. I think I would have chosen some thing from HMS Pinafore or the Prize Song from Die Meistersinger.
Your mother insisted on giving Cringer some worm pills and he was hideously sick as a result.
Yours ever,
RM
The offer to become a minor celebrity is passed by.
Budds Farm
28 August
Dear Lupin,
V. dark and wintry here today. I may have to wear socks for the first time since June. I have just received a sweater (special offer) from a slightly bogus firm allegedly based on some remote Scottish Island. I think it is all right but rather unexciting, like most things from that part of the world. Baron Otto is settling down well; he is very affectionate and amusing. Peregrine hates him and has subsided into a permanent sulk. Major Surtees came to lunch yesterday on the way down to Somerset where he is trying to buy a house. He is taking twenty-seven pills a day prescribed by some quack doctor so not surprisingly he does not look particularly well. Mrs Burnaby-Atkins asked a lot after you when we went to dinner there. Also present was a former Governor of Nigeria with solid claims to be regarded as one of England’s deadliest bores. I drank too much and told his wife two thoroughly unsuitable stories, one about a French letter. She did not give the big ‘Ha! Ha!’ We had a barbecue with the Bomers which went off reasonably well and no one actually caught pneumonia. Mr Parkinson is still having trouble with his mothers-in-law. Gaselee’s stable were beaten in the final of the Lambourn tug-of-war competition (not very interesting but I’m short of news). Mrs Cameron comes to lunch tomorrow so I anticipate a fair amount of ear-bashing. This is Newbury Carnival Week – one of the most depressing functions in the whole of the year. Awful girls with dreadful acne riding in local commercial vehicles and claiming to be beauty queens! ‘Funny’ men in false noses being pushed in children’s prams! Straggling processions of bolo brownies and snotty wolf cubs! Dreadful! The Randalls have a much better time than your mother and I do. I think they are off to Wales tomorrow. A brown hen has come to live in the garden. I rather like it and am making friendly overtures, so far repelled with hauteur. Some hens are a bit inclined to be snobbish. Are you taking part in the Notting Hill Carnival? I imagine a good many of your clients in that area will have converted kitchen utensils into instruments of percussion and will be making a hideous noise. Tough luck on people who went to Biarritz for a holiday and got drowned. My father used to like Biarritz, not least because my mother would not go there. He had a bird there, a fearsome old trout called Mrs O’Malley Keyes. During World War I, I was made to appear on the stage with her at a charity concert at the Wigmore Hall. My role was insignificant but my sense of embarrassment still lingers. I have never made my mark on the boards. Nor has my sister: we are both far too gauche. On the other hand Tom Blackwell sang the new boys song ‘Five hundred fresh faces’ at the Harrow School Concert, while his younger brother Charles obliged some years later with ‘Dear Little Buttercup’ from HMS Pinafore. I wrote a short play when in prison but it was not produced on the grounds that it was likely to cause grave offence. In fact, that had been the sole object of the exercise. I seem to have a dim recollection of a play got up by the Blackwell’s governess, Miss Neighbour, in which Cousin John played the part, not all that successfully, of a mushroom. Pongo won the fancy-dress prize at the local dog-show in the guise of Sherlock Holmes. My mother once had a dwarf kitchen maid called Minnie who played jazz rather well on the piano. She was given the sack because her playing made the butler over-excited. In those happy days we had a chauffeur called Percy Samuel Woods who committed suicide by lying face downwards in a large puddle. Talk about doing things the hard way! I suppose we had some fairly weird servants, e.g. Kate Murphy who was pissed at a dinner party and fell face downwards in the soup; and a butler who had been wounded in the head in World War I and was apt to pursue Mrs Tanner, the cook, with a bread knife. To these could be added Brett who forged cheques: Ellis, who emptied the cellar and peed into the empty bottles; and Horwood who thought he had droit de seigneur in respect of the footmen.
Yours ever,
D
Dad recounts unusual stories about the goings on downstairs in his family home in Knightsbridge during the 1920s.
The Old Leaking Shack
Burghclere
11 October
Dear Lupin,
I enclose a Daily Telegraph cutting which might interest you. I have submitted a claim on the off chance of getting something. Whether I am entitled to anything I really don’t know but it’s worth having a go. The worst that can happen is a reply telling me to piss off. After settling my tax affairs this week I could do with a slice of cake. It is v. cold and wet here. Your mother has been busy decorating the church for a three-day flower festival and I must say she did her section very well. Needless to say some nosy old trout went and altered it which made Nidnod mad with rage. She went cubbing today and got frozen. However, she made friends with a rather tedious old colonel which cheered her up. I visited Major Surtees in his new office, a real tycoon’s room with space for two billiard tables. I drank a lot of port and felt sick later but luckily wasn’t. I have been busy doing a book review for the Times Literary Supplement, the assistant editor of which is Andrew Hislop. Tomorrow the Lemprière-Robins come to lunch: I intend to keep Mrs L-R. under strict control. Did you know Lillie Langtry’s old dad was Dean of Jersey? He was known as ‘The Dirty Dean’ and sired a large number of illegitimate children. One man that Mrs Langtry used to bed down with was an oafish Scottish millionaire. After a row with a girlfriend he used to send as a present a tomcat with its throat cut! I heard a funny story about a peer who kept a private zoo. Not the Toad’s father, I hope. I will tell you the story when I see you. It is about the peer’s wife and a gorilla.
Yours ever,
RM
My mother tends to get ‘dangerously excited’ about fairly trivial matters. ‘Crash helmets on, boys’ is a familiar cry from my father when the calm of a quiet evening at home looks like it is about to take a sharp turn for the worse.
Budds Farm
22 November
My Dear Lupin,
Thank you so much for your card and kind message, both greatly appreciated. Frankly, I never expected to reach the age of seventy-four; still less did I anticipate a seventy-fourth birthday spent cleaning out the grate, washing-up saucepans and answering a disobliging communication from the Inland Revenue Authorities. Tonight I give a dinner for four at La Riviera; it won’t be very good and there will be no change from £60. Unfortunately, as far as I am concerned, getting sloshed merely induces suicidal depression.
Your affectionate father,
RM
Birthdays were always an opportunity for my father to concentrate on the more positive things in life.