IT MUST HAVE been the summer of 1987 when Father and Mother decided to move the scene of our family holidays from Tuscany to a small peninsula north of Rome, called the Monte Argentario. Father was by now approaching his seventies and the attractions of a dry inland climate had faded when compared with the gentler ones offered by the azure waters of the Mediterranean.
We rented a villa above a small fishing village called Porto Ercole. The house, which overlooked two medieval fortresses of Spanish provenance, belonged to a member of the Bucci-Casari family, descendants of Napoleon’s sister, the livelily lubricious Pauline Borghese.
It was an inspired construction. One entered a garden where bougainvillaea blossomed in bright sunlight and, later, the mesmeric scent of hibiscus filled the night air. Lawns leapt past sculpted urns of ochre on their way to the sea. Down below in the port, white fisherman’s cottages were set back against the yellow hills and broad-bottomed boats bobbed in the bright marina.
Porto Ercole was one of those towns that had been settled intermittently by a variety of nationalities so that its genealogical lines met and moved away from each other like the veins on a Stilton cheese. By the time we arrived there it was the summer haven for, among others, ex-Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. At the very centre of the village, however, was an Italian family whose members had over the centuries provided that nation with some of its greatest sons.
The Corsini forebears, as Father was fond of repeating, included three popes and one saint. When the Tory MP Hugh Fraser, throughout his life an enthusiastic Roman Catholic, was introduced to a Corsini princess, he fell on the floor in an act of the humblest homage. The Porto Ercole Corsinis lived with a wild and weird austerity that would have pleased all those noble ancestors. They lived, in short, in a vast botanical garden.
This arboretum, which stretched all the way down the hillside to the sea, had been conceived by a nineteenth-century ancestor called Baron Ricasoli. This Ricasoli had led the Italian troops in the Crimean War. His remuneration had been in human souls. Ricasoli was permitted to take back with him to Porto Ercole one hundred Russian prisoners of war. These men, their Slavic features an exotic contrast to the gentle olive mien of the natives, were set to work planting what the Baron intended to be the most ambitious private garden in Europe.
Fable had it that so content were the Russians with their new lives that when the Peace of Paris was declared, they declined to return to their homeland, preferring to settle down with local wives and become fishermen. An alternative story, quite probably true given the Baron’s renowned wiles, is that he deliberately omitted to tell them that peace had broken out.
The fruits of the Russians’ labours meanwhile flowered into a garden of almost mythical enchantment. Lofty palms from the Indies; upright cypresses, gothic shrubs and plantains, all rare examples of their kind, bordered an intricate design of picturesque lakes and fountains which, when the summer Sirocco blew, shimmered like oases in their deserts of golden grass.
Sometimes the call of history is irresistible and the mysterious voice of blood, which is quiet for generations, speaks in a more intelligible language. Then race claims its own and forgotten ancestors assert their rights. The present occupant of the garden, Marchese Cino Corsini, could only be understood through such spiritual atavism. Of middle height, his profile resembled the pale, precise lines of a painting by Bellini and his eyes, which had seen some sixty odd years, retained their fierce brightness. He was respected by everyone – so much so that those who believed in aristocratic government would point to the Marchese in justification. It was often felt that if there had been more people like him, Italy would not have fallen into the unfortunate state that it did earlier this century. He was a man, then, who never did anything small or mean. His whole existence seemed to tend toward the common good. Cino befriended everyone. His strays included an insalubrious but travel-hungry local fisherman whom he took with him to a society wedding in Gloucestershire, introducing the man, somewhat optimistically, as ‘the Count of Orbetello’. Little did the English know that Orbetello was a stinking pissoir of a harbour north of Porto Ercole and the only counts it had ever seen had been quite out for it.
Each August, Cino and his wife Aimée, an American lady of the utmost probity and charm, held a cocktail party in the botanical garden. Those invited included ex-Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard, as well as the English, Americans and Germans who had holiday houses in the vicinity and would arrive with their guests trailing colourfully behind them like members of an Eastern caravan. This mixture of nationalities had from time to time caused confusion. On one occasion, the late Marquis of Bristol, then Viscount German, had introduced himself to a couple thus: ‘How do you do. I’m German.’ The pair had responded delightedly. ‘Ja, gut. So are we.’
One regular house guest of ours at this time was Norman Lamont. Norman’s unlucky public image never did justice to the warmth of his charm and the bright intelligence and humour of his conversation. When Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, his visits were characterised by a peripatetic hide-and-seek with members of the British paparazzi.
One year, two journalists from the London Daily Mirror attempted all sorts of wheezes to inveigle our address from the locals, including the unlikely subterfuge of claiming to be members of ‘Lord Wyatt’s pop group’. The vague presence of the journalists proved inhibiting even to Father, who contracted what might be described as severe page fright. He decided to make the ultimate sacrifice to prudence and curtail his early morning naked bathing until they had departed for England.
Eventually the journalists gave up the chase and holiday life returned to something approximating normal. The week of the Corsinis’ cocktail party came round once more and we looked forward to an indulgent evening among the botanical delights of Cino’s garden and the restorative ones of his wine cellar.
The two representatives of the House of Orange were always excellent entertainment for the reactions their presence provoke in the European bon ton. There was, for instance, a Swiss couple who loved anything royal – this emotion was genuinely disinterested, as they loved them quite as much in exile as when they were in power. The wife’s curtsies, however, never resembled an aspen swaying gracefully in the breeze. She scrambled down like a dromedary searching for water and quite often had to be hauled to her feet by her husband, whose presumed discomfort was belied by the most beatific of fixed grins.
The party fell on one of those sublime summer evenings. The white stars, cleansed by the sea winds, were large and clear. We glanced up among the trees, half expecting to see some awful vision there.
The arrival of the House of Orange dispelled our contemplations. A ritual was to be enacted. Like a mongoose distracting a cobra, our host would feed Prince Bernhard and his queen with human titbits so that conversation continued uninterrupted. Cino was delighted by our arrival with Norman, who counted as a very big catch indeed, one that would doubtless satisfy the appetite of the royal pair for much of the evening. He enquired of Father at once: ‘May I take him off?’
Presently, though, our host returned with a worried expression on his usually sanguine features.
‘What did you say your friend did?’ he demanded. Father replied, somewhat surprised, ‘He’s the British Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ The Marchese looked crestfallen; he clapped his hand to his forehead in a gesture of great distress. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘I told Prince Bernhard he’d won the Tour de France.’
Father and I burst into laughter. We rocked back and forth. The more we roared the more melancholy Cino became. It transpired that the Marchese had confused Lamont with a famous American cyclist called Lemond, who had indeed won the Tour de France a few months before. Delighted to have found such a prize to put before the Prince, who was something of a sports aficionado, Cino had introduced him as such.
It later transpired that Prince Bernhard had been puzzled by Norman’s appearance. ‘My dear fellow, I imagined you would be somewhat leaner!’, he had said, and ‘What a thing to have achieved given your figure! Miraculous!’
Norman, to his credit, took the episode in great part and merrily related the story to everyone he met for the remainder of the holiday. But when Cino returned to the Prince and reported that Norman had not won the Tour de France at all but was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer he lost interest completely. A chancellor evidently was of scant importance compared with the victor of Gaul.