MARY: When an old friend and neighbour died there were many outside her family who felt as upset as those within it. I’ve got loads wrong with me, but I have taken a few tips from my close observation of Georgia when she lived nearby, tips which I believe have enhanced the lives of others.
Georgia believed in helping your own immediate friends, family and neighbours – particularly the tiresome ones – rather than making donations to help strangers abroad. She saw the worth of continuity and having the same friends and doing the same things all through her life: e.g., holidays in the same place every year. In this way she is similar to HM the Queen whose remarkable productivity I link to the calm that is produced when seeing the future stretching ahead and knowing exactly what’s happening in it.
Georgia invited promising but lazy or hopeless artists and writers to her house where they met successful dynamos who gave them commissions, places to live at affordable rents, and she introduced others to their marriage partners.
She celebrated beauty instead of focussing on the negative and yet she kept an eagle eye on local newspapers and moved in to stop ugly developments.
She believed in ‘compartmentalising’. She knew that, in the words of William Blake, ‘Man was made for joy and woe’ and once we accept that’s the nature of life and stop taking the setbacks personally, ‘Then through the world we safely go.’
Georgia’s house, garden, vegetable garden, family and friends were perfectly maintained and yielding. She kept jobs, her figure and her husband in love with her.
But in a weird way it cheered me up to hear that, until after her death he hadn’t realised ‘how much she did’.
Giles and I are blessed by being members of the generation that can still use cultural and gender stereotypes without fearing someone snapping our heads off. It confirmed my theory that men in general – even men married to superwomen – have no idea how much their wives or partners do. It’s not just the thankless tasks that are only noticed if we don’t do them, we do all the emotional homework as well. We make the effort to go to the school sports day, prize-givings, end of term concerts; we make the children write thank you letters and clean their teeth; we hear out bores while they give us blow by blow accounts of things that have gone wrong because they clearly need to get them off their chest. We can’t enjoy the anticipation of social events because our male partners can only say ‘Do we have to go? I can’t face it. Why can’t people leave us alone? Let’s just stay in and watch television.’
It’s the not doing of these things that would cause everything to fall apart, but the doing of them goes virtually unnoticed and unappreciated.
But Georgia wouldn’t carp on about it since she realised life was too short and it’s clearly the human condition. And so I try not to. I want to celebrate the glorious and the positive and the laughs instead of wallowing in the negative and the nuisances.
Looking back on the year’s diary I can see that one or two misunderstandings have been cleared up. I now understand why Giles wants to keep the kitchen sink in the state it’s in – it’s not sadism, after all, but an admirable attempt to buck the trend against built-in obsolescence. I’ve also just found out that his objection to Louise Brewer bringing us what he refers to as a ‘threatening number of eggs’ is not negorrhoea, but rather a dislike of having his ‘cheese-paring cottage economy’, as inspired by William Cobbett, suddenly distorted by a glut which makes him feel he is no longer the master of his own house.
Moreover, the kitchen gives pleasure to friends who can reassure themselves by saying ‘At least our kitchen isn’t as bad as the Woods.’
It has sunk in that he does cook three meals a day, light a log fire each night, and grow flowers and vegetables (even if many of these turn out to be sacrificial crops as the pigeons and blackbirds get them first).
Using the voice memo on my iPhone and then typing up the arguments we have had I can often see that Giles had a point after all and I was being hysterical – but only because I was tired and had no time to listen.
GILES: It’s astonishing how many nuisance appointments there are throughout the year. The worst things for me are things that are blocked in months ahead and are uncancellable. Fixtures, so to speak, in the diary, that hang over my life like the Sword of Damocles. I am glad I wrote the diary because now at least I know what I have done in one year of my life. I can remember being interviewed for Wiltshire Life magazine when I had an exhibition in the Mount House Gallery, Marlborough. The journalist asked me what I had been doing in the last ten years and I honestly hadn’t a clue. I remember bellowing up the stairs to Mary, ‘Apart from mending the windows, what have I done in the last ten years?’ I did know that from 1988 to 1990 I successfully mended a few of the cottage windows using car body filler, and that I had searched for and made an assemblage of flints, arrowheads, scrapers etcetera from the Stone Age. The historian Paul Johnson once remarked that, ‘usually talent comes allied with ambition but not in Giles’s case’.
Looking back, I can see that when I won a music scholarship to Shrewsbury School it was entirely thanks to the pushing I received from my piano teacher Miss Anderson (Ma Andy) who kept me in over every break to practise like a Russian gymnast. It seemed at the time strict and cruel regime as the practising scales and arpeggios went on while other boys played outdoors. Once I got to Shrewsbury I never practicsed again.
Frequent kangaroo courts have taken place throughout my life with friends asking why I wasn’t using my talent. The only person who has never criticised me is my mother who has always been amazed at how much I achieve on top of driving Mary around and doing the shopping as well as producing meals from an ‘impossible’ poky kitchen. ‘You must be shattered’ is her mantra. Mary thinks she has overpraised me and it is true that when I stay with her in Anglesey I am aware of this much-appreciated positive feedback – although it has to be said she even praises me for having done my teeth.