MARY: ‘Hugo has diverticulitis,’ said Giles this morning. How did he know? He doesn’t answer the phone and no one had come to the cottage for the last 36 hours. He looked uncomfortable when I put him on the spot asking for proof.
‘All right, he hasn’t got it,’ he confessed. ‘But his cleaner has it.’
‘Oh Giles, I can’t cope with your Hatrollalia.’
GILES: My mother and I both talk on occasion through our hats – a condition Mary, with her medical background (her father was a doctor), has dubbed Hatrolallia. In a famous example, my mother responded to my brother’s news that he had bought tickets to watch Sir Roger Norrington conduct Berlioz’s Harold in Italy at the Royal Albert Hall by saying, ‘Don’t be silly, darling. Harold is only ever performed at the Festival Hall. It’s a tradition.’
‘How extraordinary!’ said Pip. ‘I could have sworn it was the Albert Hall.’ Reaching there and then into his wallet for the tickets, he showed the words ‘Royal Albert Hall’ to my mother who retorted, ‘Well don’t jump down my throat, darling! I just said the first thing that entered my head.’
Mary was particularly annoyed by me one day, nearly thirty years ago, when, in an example of my own Hatrolallia, she heard me tell Rebecca, a journalist/writer friend that she, Mary, was now doubly incontinent following the birth of Fleur, our first daughter.
MARY: Giles loves negative news, so I could pick up from the enthusiastic tone of his voice that something must have gone wrong for Rebecca. (See Giles Wood’s ‘Encyclopaedia of Mishaps and Miseries’, his mental compendium of things that have gone wrong for friends and family – even nightmares that they had forty years ago all dutifully recorded.)
Then I heard him say, ‘Well that’s awful – but Mary’s actually doubly incontinent now, since she gave birth.’
Not only was I not doubly incontinent, but even if I had have been, it would not be an ideal image to have circulating about someone (me) who was at that time editor of the supposedly glamorous Bystander social pages of Tatler magazine.
Naturally I snatched the receiver and told Rebecca it wasn’t true and forced Giles to admit the same.
Afterwards Giles told me off for ‘barracking’ him when he was on the phone. ‘I was just trying to cheer Rebecca up,’ he explained. ‘She was just telling me she had to have an operation after her baby was born and she couldn’t stop peeing. She’s written an article about it in Cosmopolitan called “Sex after Stitches”. I felt sorry for her so I thought if I told her you were doubly incontinent it would make her feel better. But then you have to go and spoil what was probably the only piece of good news she’d had all day. Poor Rebecca!’
GILES: By the way, when I told Rebecca that Mary was doubly incontinent, I can remember now why I said it. I had just heard the phrase ‘doubly incontinent’ for the first time and wanted to try it out.
MARY: Giles has never had the ability to see ahead to the consequences of the Hatrolallia remarks he makes.
There was a similar incident many years ago when Giles was working as a painter and decorator for a now world-famous actor, then appearing in one of his first major stage roles in Another Country. A minxy friend of ours was secretly having an affair with this then-aspiring thespian. ‘What do you think of him?’ she asked Giles who, of course, had no idea that Minx and he were romantically linked.
‘He seems a bit of a cipher,’ Giles had replied, beaming. Giles told me later that he’d just heard the word ‘cipher’ for the first time and, though he wasn’t quite sure what it meant, he wanted to ‘try it out’.
Little did he know that our minxy friend would go straight to the actor, and report the comment back to him with devastating effect. We all know, of course, how supersensitive and insecure an actor can be and the upshot was that the actor, who did know what cipher meant, went into a deep decline.
Giles has since speculated, however, that it might have been the very charge of being a cipher which spurred the actor on to such great heights, since directly after the blow to his ego, his career made a meteoric take off. He became a world class actor by means of his thorough and total immersion of the roles that he chose. For this Giles takes all the credit.
MARY: Our cul-de-sac village at the foot of the Downs was, until thirty years ago, rarely penetrated by strangers, since everyone living here, except for the two spinsters in the Old Rectory, worked for the farmer who lived in the Manor Farm. It was a feudal village with all the front doors painted the same shade of red to signal allegiance to the Farm. The only people who came through the village would be itinerant knife grinders or people selling clothes pegs. The sight of anyone else would excite suspicion.
Eventually, in 1985, the venerable farmer died at the age of 98 and new farming practices came into play. The human workers were inevitably trumped by machines and sprayed chemicals and had to take up other professions. One villager became a chimney sweep, one a postman, one a bus driver and two went onto the bins.
But old traditions die hard and vigilance is still exercised when strangers come to the village. Hence, during an attempted afternoon power nap in Room Two, I was surprised to hear a dialogue between two unfamiliar voices going on under the bedroom window for around ten minutes. Eventually, I gave up and took off my eye mask. Looking out, I could see Giles himself, leaning on the gate leading into our field, talking with a wayfaring youth who lived here as a boy but now under the lee of the local hill fort of Martinsell. He was roaming through the local lanes to exercise a dodgy knee. But why was Giles mimicking the young man’s Wiltshire yokel accent?
GILES: I have just explained to Mary that my own father (who had a fireplace manufacturing business in Stoke on Trent) used to talk to his slabbers in a thick Potteries accent. It was their own patois and so he modified his voice to talk to them. This would be a different voice to the one he would use when meeting other Company Directors in the Potteries.
MARY: I said to Giles that was all very well but Daniel Crowbourne has seen Giles on television and knows he doesn’t speak with a Wiltshire accent. Giles retorted that I can’t talk because I have permanently changed my own Irish accent and this is absolutely true. I have had to change it for the simple reason that when I first came from Northern Ireland I could make no conversational progress as everyone imitated everything I said back to me in a sing-song whine rising up at the end of the sentence.
But at least I stick to the same accent now instead of varying it depending on to whom I’m talking. There are certain words I can never pronounce un-Irishly though. These include iron, path, bath, shower, scoop, route or boost. To say nothing of Prague and Cannes.
MARY: If I’m reading quietly in Room Two and Giles, coming in from the garden, doesn’t realise I’m there, I can overhear him using the telephone in the room below, Room One. He doesn’t answer calls on the grounds that he doesn’t like surprises but he does make them.
Around this time of year, he will usually ring up his sister, his brother and his mother to be negative about the fact that they are ‘missing’ each other’s gardens.
‘Your garden and Ann Wood’s garden both peak in June, but June’s over,’ I hear him say to his sister who lives near Oxford, ‘and I’ve been too busy to see it.
‘Pip Wood’s garden peaks in the second week of July but, although Mary’s only just got back from Austria, she’s off gallivanting again and she’s forcing me to go with her to Mull next week. There may be a slot in August for you to come here, but you’ll be in Wales for most of the month and my garden will be over by then. Because of global warming everything comes on at once.
‘It makes a nonsense of our gardening lives if Mary is always going to force us onto this relentless social treadmill so that we all miss each other’s peak moments. I have absolutely no desire to trek to Mull but Mary has press-ganged me into it.’
This was an example of Seancespeak. I knew he was looking forward to going to Mull. I’d taken the precaution, that morning of recording, on my mobile phone voice memos app, our ‘Parliament’ as we thrashed through the pros and cons of him joining the house party on the island and he had concluded that he would love to go.
Seancespeak is when Giles says things he couldn’t possibly mean. It’s when he channels other people – not himself, as he imagines how these other people might respond to something that has happened. I first coined the phrase when I heard him declare ‘You can’t beat a battery chicken for value and they taste just as good as free range’ and was dumbfounded until I suddenly realised he was channelling my stepfather, Eric, from beyond the grave.
So, when he said he had absolutely no desire to go to Mull, he was in fact channelling his friend Gerry, who would have had no desire to go there as there’s no signal in the house and not enough retail outlets nearby. I lift the extension and tell his sister Jackie that, if she’s interested, I’ll send her the voice memo by email so she can listen for herself to the reasonings which helped him to arrive THIS MORNING at the decision that he would absolutely love to go to Mull.
Jackie is deeply loyal to Giles and so she laughed uncomfortably. She always feels she should side with him.
GILES: Mary has roped me in to another house party for twenty. My desire to meet real, genuine people – people interested in cetaceans (porpoises, whales and dolphins) – struck me forcibly on the way to this house party in Mull when I came across, on the ferry, an earnest-looking, but fascinating group who were excitedly discussing sightings of the rare basking shark. They were going to camp on a remote peninsula of the island to study these gentle giants (not the Jaws variety) and I got into a conversation with them about whether or not we should all dispose of our fleeces. I had just read an article about how when fleeces are washed they release toxic microbeads and they were very interested, and began picking self-consciously at their uniform of choice – a fleece. I felt that I could easily spend a week happily chatting to them.
On arrival at the lodge I immediately went fishing with one of the oldest members of the house party and was amazed to find he could not identify one of the most common birds in Britain – a heron – despite being a Scottish landowner himself. How do I meet other ecologists in general? Or deep ecologists in particular?
MARY: I flew up with John and Veronica without Giles, who only decided to come at the last minute and had to travel by train. To me it is pure bliss to spend a week under the same roof as about eighteen other pleasant people with an age span between three months and seventy. There is always someone to chat to, and every breakfast and dinner is cooked while we make our own picnics for outdoor lunches each day.
I don’t know how Giles gets away with it but his popularity seems undimmed by the fact that he sneaked away last night after dinner instead of playing the Book Game. When I came upstairs he asked me how the ‘charades’ had gone. When I told him it was the Book Game and not charades he said, ‘Oh no! Why didn’t you come up and get me then? If I’d known it was the Book Game I’d have been happy to join in. It’s just charades and Scottish reeling that I can’t stand.’
As a matter of fact, I had gone up to the bedroom to quickly get something and Giles hadn’t been in it.
‘But you weren’t even here when I came up,’ I said.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’d popped out to look for bats in the gloaming. But you should have made more of an effort to find me.’
GILES: Mary is away in London for a few days, so it falls on me to keep the show on the road and, being colour blind with no specific training about different fabrics, I tend to dive into the laundry cupboard which is situated – against common sense – in the kitchen near foodstuffs. Conditions which, if replicated in an Indian restaurant would force its closure. After some rummaging I mix and match the dirty washing and set the load going in a batter wash.
What comes out of the machine is sometimes grey and tighter fitting than erstwhile. But my philosophy is that even if some of the fabrics come to grief by being washed at the wrong temperature, we have too many clothes cluttering up the cottage anyway so it will do no harm to cull some of them. And at least we will have made progress.
There’s nothing worse than a cupboard with a lingering load full of clothes which have been ‘basted’ into. It was long ago explained to me by our older friend Anne, with whom we often stay in Kensington, the difference between honest sweat and nervous sweat.
‘The former can be triggered from an act of exertion such as chopping wood, the latter might be triggered by shame,’ she tittered. Or indeed an official letter from Wiltshire Police, following an incident of entrapment, informing me that I was doing 38 mph in a 30 mph limit exiting Hungerford for the M4, and I would need to decide between penalty points or a time-consuming speed awareness course near Newbury.
At the risk of being indelicate, or offending readers, this letter may have triggered a fight-or-flight reaction complete with nervous perspiration redolent of the kitchens of a kebab house in the Uxbridge Road, Shepherd’s Bush (no offence), but why does the body have such a ready supply of ‘tincture of onion and inferior badgerburger’ and would a change of diet fix it? I have watched Cowspiracy, the documentary credited with converting so many of the young into vegans and vegetarians and I can hardly call myself an environmentalist without giving up meat, but I haven’t.
The most compelling argument for me would be if giving up meat permitted one to ditch the deodorant…But, are vegetarians free of body odour? I don’t think so. The dread word ‘sprouty’ springs to mind when one thinks of the air quality in a room with even one vegetarian inside it.
There was a red-haired boy at my prep school in North Wales called McDonald who swallowed the entire dormitory’s supply of Haliborange (five bottles) in one go. He liked the sweetness of them in those days before sweets were so widely available to children. He had to go to the san for observation. Apart from turning orange, all his freckles joined up together and he smelt of tangerines for two weeks thereafter, which serves him right. One of those bottles was mine.
Of Mary’s many faults, doner kebab-type bodily emanations are not one of them. So, obviously, being a considerate sort of a fellow, I like to frequently change my shirts, even though this leads to a charge from Mary that I have been producing ‘vexatious’ quantities of ironing for her to tackle.
MARY: I am cross with Giles when he produces too much laundry because otherwise, when there is a manageable quantity of ironing to do, I enjoy it. My sister, who has more common sense than me once asked baldly, ‘Could Giles not wear a boiler suit rather than ordinary clothes?’ And then, ‘And why is the washing machine constantly churning with table clothes, napkins and chair covers? Could you not just stop spilling things?’
I love ironing for the warm feeling of competence as I observe a visible transformation from chaos to order and all of it executed by my own hand.
The truth is that I would be far happier cleaning all day than doing the sort of complicated jobs requiring thinking that I have got myself involved in. Earning the money to keep the cottage over our heads comes first in the pecking order of time parcel distribution. Writing-work is time consuming because what’s easy to read is hard to write.
I enjoy ironing not just for the heat and the instant result, as well as for the obvious metaphor. The pile of things needing to be ironed is altered from crumpled to smooth. I can make a miniature stack worthy of an Irish linen store and, as Giles has observed, ‘the process of ironing settles the molecules of the mind into flat layers rather than chaotic ones’. It is so enjoyable I have to stagger the ironing and only allow myself one piece of ironing for every five pieces of grot filing.
Time was when we had a nanny and we also had Meg Vardens to do the ironing. How did we afford it? These days I have to do it myself. At first I resented the chore but then I moved the ironing board up to the only reliably hot room in the cottage – Room Two, our own bedroom and sometime office, which has the best view. Positioned in there looking out over the Downs with, in sequence, Nick Ferrari and James O’Brien of LBC booming out of the radio as I iron I am rarely happier. But only if I have the time.
And lately Giles, who has too much time on his hands, has developed a phobia about his personal ‘freshness’. Correction: I believe he is pretending to have developed such a phobia as he so enjoys seeing me toiling away on his behalf that he is deliberately using more clothes than he needs. I call it vexatious laundry.
One of the problems with a cottage of this size and with the opportunity for water outlet pipes being confined to only one side of the room-deep cottage is that we have literally no space empty in which we could put a tumble dryer. At least we no longer drape our laundry over the banisters and radiators (which broke a few years ago and we haven’t had the money to replace them). Now we have a pop up electric clothes horse from Lakeland which does the job. But lately we have also read alarming news which may explain why our asthmatic daughter has developed an allergy to the cottage. Apparently airborne moulds thrive on indoor drying laundry.
