WE HAVE NOW spent eight long months in this wonderfully hospitable county, but as Nouveau-Rustics, we are still trying to come to terms with the social complications of rural life.
Dining out, for example, is great fun – if you get there. There’s no A-Z in Gloucestershire. Most people are too grand to put names outside their houses, and my rusty shorthand is quite incapable of getting down those rattled-off instructions: ‘You turn right at the Spotted Dog, then you come to a hideous modern bungalow – well that’s not us . . .’
The result is blazing rows on the way to every party, with Leo careering round the same perilous country lanes saying he’s bloody going home, and me, tearfully envisaging no dinner and social ostracisation, saying: ‘I’m sure they said left at the Spotted Dog.’
In the end we always have to ask. It must be hell being a yokel in Gloucestershire. Every Saturday your evening viewing is interrupted by twerps in dinner jackets saying: ‘Can you possibly tell me the way to the Smith-Binghams?’
The chief problem, however, for the Nouveau-Rustic is sartorial. In London it never mattered what I wore. Here I get it wrong every time. The first dinner party we went to was very grand. I rolled up in high heels, a knee-length velvet skirt and a pleated satin shirt (which had pleats going both ways after twenty miles under a seat belt) to find my hostess in pink cords and a Guernsey sweater.
On my second jaunt, Leo was away. I was invited this time for supper in the kitchen. Natch, I put on cords and a jersey, to be greeted by a vast dinner party, the men in dark suits, the women in silk shirts and velvet skirts, all the silver on the dining room table, and – most un-London of all – a spare man for me who wasn’t queer.
The next invitation said ‘black tie’. So I deduced we should dress up this time. Alas, the week before, Leo split his dinner jacket trousers at some binge in London, and borrowed a pair from a friend of six foot six. Consequently his cummerbund had to be tied under his armpits like the top half of a strapless bikini. He also found a large wine mark on the lapel of his white dinner jacket, and covered it with an Animals in War badge. I wore a long black dress, which plunged to the navel.
We arrived to find all the women very covered up, mostly in short wool dresses, several of the men without ties, and our host wearing green cords, an old green coat, a blue striped shirt, a green bow tie and brown suede shoes.
As the evening sun slanted cruelly on Leo’s white dinner jacket and my over-exposed, middle-aged bosom, we felt like two Crufts poodles with pompom tails and diamanté collars let loose at a rough shoot. Happily it turned out a marvellous evening, with poodles and gundogs frisking merrily together – and, unlike London, no one talked about house prices or education. And that’s another thing, never ask men in the country what they do for a living. Very few of them seem to do anything.
I also notice that it’s the drawing room tables who seem to wear the long skirts down here, and everyone covers up not only their bosoms but also their plant pots – with flowered vases called cache-pots. Perhaps I should wear a cache-pot to the next party.
But having received all this lovely hospitality, we now have to pay it back. In London we never gave dinner parties. During the week we were knackered, and at the weekend everyone pushed off to the country, and anyway we’d got nothing to give them with.
Consequently, when we had our first dinner party in Gloucestershire, we had to go out and buy three sets of plates, three sets of glasses, knives, table mats, even napkins. Kitchen roll – like patriotism – is not enough.
The party was a moderate success. The paté tasted of blendered thermal underwear, the pudding of uncooked marmalade. But the venison produced by Leo and my housekeeper Viv was brilliant. The guests included two local landowners and their wives, a couple who weekend down here and their house guests, who turned out to be a boilermaker from Stockport and his wife.
There was a sticky moment when the boilermaker announced to the straighter of the landowners that he always kissed his son on the mouth when they met.
‘How old is your boy?’ asked the landowner.
‘Twenty-seven,’ said the boilermaker.
And a riotous moment when the boilermaker’s wife asked Leo how he’d cooked the venison, whereupon Stan, my housekeeper’s husband – who was serving the pudding – proceeded to tell her. Five minutes later, despite vicious kicks on the ankle from Viv and nine people unserved, the venison hadn’t even reached the oven but was still being larded with green bacon and garlic pellets.
No one appeared to drink too much. But after saying goodbye to everyone, I found Leo crawling round the kitchen pretending to be an outside labrador, and Stan sleeping peacefully on the landing.
And now summer is here I am getting nervous about the garden. When people come to dinner, it’s still light and they can gaze out of the window on the crimes, as Nouveau-Rustics, we’ve already committed: planting poplars, which obscure a view, or, even more heinous, putting in strident colours.
‘Never have red in a Cotswold garden,’ my neighbour told me the other night. ‘Pink, blue, yellow, silver and, best of all, white, and do plant your clumps in odd numbers.’ And I prayed that my two newly installed red-hot pokers wouldn’t suddenly let me down by flashing at her over the terrace wall. But to prove her point, the local nursery told me that recently Princess Michael completely denuded them of plants – but only white ones. It’s better to be dead than red in a Gloucestershire garden.
But we’re getting on very well. Last week we gave our second dinner party. Among the guests were the new Lord and his wife, who moved into the village even more recently than we did. Viv got so carried away she took the afternoon off to have her hair put up, and wore her wedding dress. The new Lord, perhaps feeling that this was what an aristocrat should wear to dine with the literati, rolled up very handsome in a Fair Isle jersey and one of those hairy tweed coats heroines bury their faces in at the end of romantic novels.
In fact local interest has been slightly diverted away from this New Lord on to an even newer Lord, who’s just moved into the next door village and who dropped in on Monday to warn us that his new sheep had jumped out of their field and been chasing dogs all over the valley all the weekend.
He was another surprise. I always thought people who kept sheep wore dung-coloured clothes to blend into the countryside, but he turned up in a pink polo-necked jersey and tartan trousers. Not unlike my very good friend and social adviser, the milkman, who raised two fingers to massive Tory bias on polling day, going on his rounds in a scarlet sweater and a red check shirt. I nearly asked him to stand in the garden beside my two red-hot pokers and form an odd-numbered clump.
The answer, of course, is not to care what anyone thinks and be yourself. But I’m not sure who myself is. I went to a party recently in the London house immortalised last month when Anna Ford chucked a glass of wine in the face of her ex-boss Jonathan Aitken. As I entered the room, my hostess advanced towards me smiling: ‘Hullo Polly,’ she said.