Dear Lumpy (4 page)

xx

My father hated standing out in anyway, so a big faux pas for him was turning up at an event in his best bib and tucker and finding the other guests in casual wear. Nidnod gets the blame again.

Budds Farm

27 April

Dearest L,

I suppose your pillow has been soaked with tears as you lie in bed and think of the old folks (or is ‘soaks’ the more appropriate word) at Home. I miss you here as the house is tidier and the plug has been pulled in my loo. Your poor mother got ticked off by Aunt Pam for arriving late on Tuesday. Those two sisters!! Cringer slept almost on my pillow that night and I would have relished his company more had not his breath smelled strongly of rather ancient fish. I trust you will work hard this term. Take some exercise, too, and try and get into the Lacrosse fifteen or the football eleven or something like that. I will come down with a big smoked salmon picnic as soon as the weather is a bit warmer. Bring Snouter with you and one or two really cheeky friends. I met the toad in the herbaceous border again this morning and we are becoming friends. He has a crafty look so I address him as Harold Wilson. Cringer is very popular at the Carnarvon Arms where he dances for cold sausages. I had lunch at Ascot yesterday with old Lord Carnarvon and his bird who is about Jane’s age but not such a vast eater. I hear there is a beach at Corfu reserved for nudists. What price Emma landing up there?

Best love,

D

I loved going on picnics with my father, always a jolly affair. After one such picnic the school matron caught him doing the sailor’s hornpipe down the passage wearing my school boater.

Budds Farm

Dearest L,

Not much news from here except a cow got into the garden and did a lot of damage. Also an objectionable mole is creating much havoc and an elderly thrush elected to expire just outside the front door. Your brother is now living in London and I HOPE he manages to stay out of trouble! Your dear mother is flapping like an over-excited hen about various things to do with the Garth Hunt and I am expected to listen to her tales of woe and frustration. Your Aunt is back from Corfu and apparently enjoyed herself. When do you come home next so that I can lock up the silver and go away? How did you get on in your examinations? If you did badly, I shall probably export you to work in the salt mines in Poland so just WATCH IT!! The weather continues chilly, too cold even for croquet. I have not been able to wear my new leopardskin bathing pants yet.

The new car continues to go well and is much admired by one and all. I have no news from Jane but assume she is still alive, not having heard anything to the contrary. Everything in the garden is horribly backward and the strawberries do not look like ripening till the autumn. There seems to be a good crop of raspberries. What a pity they upset your stomach and you will in consequence be unable to consume any. I will ask your dear mother to provide a health-giving junket for you instead.

Best love,

D

In a moment of madness I had given Dad a pair of skimpily fitting leopardskin bathing trunks – they did not go down well. A few weeks later I caught him trying to palm them off on Mr Randall, the gardener.

Budds Farm

Dearest L,

I was very pleased to hear from you and I hope you are surviving the heat-wave and the novel experience of having to do some work. I expect it is dull for you down here but I sincerely hope you will come and visit your aged parents occasionally. You are always welcome, particularly if you can give a little notice of your impending arrival. As I am very old-fashioned in my ideas on the conduct of life, I would like to know quite clearly your position vis à vis Henry. Of course if you elect to live together there is nothing I could do about it even should I desire to do anything. But since I am your father and you are only eighteen, I would like to know more or less what the set-up is. Perhaps Henry would be kind enough to come down one day and explain his plans and what he visualises happening in the future. I think it would be only civil to your mother and to myself. I do not grudge you any happiness you may derive from your current arrangement and I am not in the habit of applying moral standards that have largely ceased to exist. All the same, I do feel a certain responsibility towards you, and apart from which I love you very much and have no wish to see you hurt. I had a long talk with Loopy the other day and he is far from happy about the way things are at present. That, however, is a matter for Henry to settle.

Pongo collapsed after a walk the other day. Luckily I revived him with cold water and was not compelled to administer the kiss of life. Your mother’s trip to Jersey was fraught with drama and one member of the party achieved the rare feat of breaking his ankle while doing a pee. Lucky it was only his ankle! A local lady has been bitten by an adder (on the Forestry Land where I go with the dogs) and is in a parlous plight. I had lunch with the B-Atkins on Sunday. They sent you their love and Rosamund is keen to meet you. Mark and William went to the Test Match and enjoyed seeing the streaker! Last night I took your mother to Longparish and gave that saucy rook a bag of nuts. He enjoyed the paper bag slightly more than the nuts. Lupin was here yesterday; he seems to be doing some rather peculiar jobs.

Best love,

R

My brother Lupin persuaded me to buy a vomit-coloured Fiat from a job lot of twelve that he had purchased from a bankrupt coach company, no mean feat as I did not drive let alone have a driving licence. His original offer of ‘buy two get one free’ was not of great appeal. By then Henry had been my boyfriend for almost a year and had already been given the nickname ‘Hot Hand Henry’ by my father for obvious reasons. Luckily, or unluckily depending from whose point of view, he had just passed his driving test and so we set off for a camping/fishing holiday in Scotland. Miraculously the car got us there and back. Instead of returning to my parents’ home afterwards, we drove to London and shacked up in a friend’s house in Fulham.

My parents’ hopes that I join the Foreign Office are dashed. Instead Charlie Shearer (my brother’s most disreputable friend) gives me a job working as a general dogsbody in a massive junk shop in Fulham called the Furniture Cave.

Budds Farm

24 October

Dearest Miss Plumpling,

A lot of people are coming to lunch and your dear mother is in a fine old flap. Lupin has gone to Derbyshire, looking rather yellow and with eyes like badly poached eggs, in the company of C. Hurt who is very pale and whose face now resembles a crumpled towel. Jane is apparently renting a country house with wall-to-wall carpeting and a large garden. Mrs Bomer has bought a new car; the colour is that of the messes made by dogs after de-worming pills. How is the revolting Chappie? Not too exuberant, I trust. Mr P. is back home after his kidney operation and feels weak. This afternoon I am visiting the Surtees in their new house at West Ilsley. The Income Tax Authorities are pursuing me with a relentlessness worthy of a nobler cause. I reply with insults and post-dated cheques later cancelled. Prison looms. Moppet was very sick yesterday after emitting three blood-curdling screams. Your great-aunt stayed here and is as deaf as a telegraph pole. The TV had to be turned on at maximum volume and gave me fearful headaches. Your mother was kissed by The Mayor of Basingstoke and called ‘Darling Cynthia’ when in an intoxicated condition (The Mayor, not Nidnod). She has had her hair done three times since and has bought some gaudy new clothes. Can you beat it? She got sloshed the other night and gave a monologue on religion that went on till 1 a.m. I went to bed at 11 p.m: the guests were too polite to do so. More fools them, I say.

Kind regards to H.

Love,

D

My parents’ dinner guests are a captive audience for my mother’s current obsessions and grievances. She is clearly firing on all cylinders and convinced that she is the talk of Hampshire after her encounter with the Mayor of Basingstoke. Not exactly Sean Connery.

The Old Ice Box

3 November

Dearest L,

V cold here and Nidnod is bedridden with a vicious brand of catarrh. We were asked to go away this weekend to Newmarket but declined. The whole business of packing up, coping with the dogs etc is too arduous. Old Queen Mary, when she spent a weekend with chums, used to take dressers, one footman, one page, two chauffeurs, one Lady in Waiting, one maid for the Lady in Waiting, and one detective. The Lady in Waiting wrote beforehand to request for a chair to be placed outside the Queen’s bedroom on which the footman or page sat all night: fresh barley water every two hours during the day; ice in the bedroom at 11.30 p.m; 6 clean towels every day. The Queen brought her own sheets and pillow cases.

The annual Budds Farm shoot took place on Wednesday and was a great success. Three pheasants were mown down, in varying stages of mobility, between the rubbish heap and the bottom end of the croquet lawn; after which the guns, or more accurately the gun, a boy of fifteen, retired for a cup of mazawatee tea and crumpet, or more accurately, crumpets.

Did you know (why should you?) that the last occasion that someone in France was eaten by a wild wolf was October 1918? In some remote parts of France there is still an ‘officier de louveterie’ or officer responsible for wolves. In some French regiments there is an ‘officier colombophile’ or officer in charge of carrier pigeons! Here is another piece of valuable information: eggs produced by pond ducks are much nastier than the eggs of running water ducks.

Farmer Luckes has had another stroke and is v groggy. A lady in Newbury has strangled her ever-loving husband with a dressing-gown cord. A row is going on about the proposed Highclere by-pass. If the alternative route is chosen, lorries will pass where our stable is now.

I see Blue Circle Cement is closing down several branches. I hope Loopy will not be made redundant. I hear betting shops are making a fortune in S. Wales and the North East where workers have been given fat redundancy payments. As the old song goes, ‘Cocktails and Laughter, what comes after? Nobody knows.’ I have sold Padro as a stallion which is a bit of luck. Christmas draws hideously close. As I have often said before, my ideal Christmas would be spent in a Jewish hotel in Eastbourne. Mabel, my old Nanny, rang up yesterday. She is 88 and completely on the ball. Her daughter, who held a good job in the Bank of England, has bought a small estate in Dorsetshire.

Love to all, x

My father enlightens me on his idea of an ideal Christmas.

Budds Farm

Dearest L,

I trust you are all thriving. Your Mother is up in Northumberland and I hope the change will do her good. She was a bit overwrought in Ascot week and was very tired by the end of it. One night at dinner we had the well known door slamming act followed by a brief speech in which she expressed the fervent wish that my final departure from this vale of tears would not be long delayed. The guests looked slightly surprised but gallantly went on pecking away at the tinned prawns in rice. Lupin’s god-father Fitz Fletcher stayed here. Not long ago he went with his daughter to a party in Somerset. There were 53 guests and fifty developed acute food poisoning from the curried turkey. They were very ill indeed and six were in ‘intensive care’ for a week. Ascot was quite fun but it is getting shoddy. The Royal Enclosure lawn might be the Mayor’s annual garden party at Basingstoke. The clothes were dowdy and the number of pretty, well turned out girls could have been counted on the horns of a goat. We had lunch one day with Jamie Crichton Stuart and his wife. Luckily I found an ex-girlfriend there and had a cosy time on a sofa. Your mother cornered an elderly woman and favoured her with a lecture on hepatitis. On Saturday I lunched with the Beaumonts at Ascot, got slightly sloshed and made what I now realize were some highly unsuitable remarks. I saw James Staples looking unbelievably clean and smart in the Royal Enclosure. Stephen Willett is doing Hotel Management and Catering at Surrey University. He heard there was a waiter shortage at Ascot and offered his services. He was detailed to serve in the private chalet hired by Mr. K. Abdullah who has several oil wells at the bottom of his garden. Mr Abdullah took a fancy to him and at the end of the afternoon gave him a little tip of £50. In addition Stephen got £18 in wages for the day. Nice work if you can get it. Tiny Man has just rolled in a singularly repulsive mess and I must give him a bath. There was a 15 mile queue into Newbury on Saturday for the air display. Dean Swift wrote: ‘I am grown so hard to please that I am offended with every unexpected face I meet where I visit, and the least Tediousness or Impertinence gives me shortness of breath and a pain in the stomach.’

Kind Regards to H.

Best Love,

R

P.S. Your Mother and I had tea with Mr Abdullah. I enjoyed seeing your mother in full flood of verbosity with him as he understands English about as well as I understand Arabic. There was a rather sinister man there, a combination of valet, chauffeur and armed bodyguard.

Language was a meaningless barrier to my mother once she got the bit between her teeth.

Chez Nidnod

Much Grumblings

Berks

16 February

Hullo Fatchops!

Thank you for your saucy Valentine which was much appreciated. How is the cooking going? Can you make clear gravy soup without great eyes of grease winking up at you from the plate: fishcakes that do not crumble at the first fork-prod yet actually contain fish: and rice pudding with a brown top that does not taste like very old brown paper? I expect Henry is already putting on weight. How is his stomach, by the way? Nidnod is no barmier than usual but just carries on doing and saying the most extraordinary things. She had a drink with the Gaselees on Sunday and dropped a cigarette on their best sofa, burning a hole in the cover. Some French people were there who talked faultless English. Nidnod insisted on addressing them in a series of weird sounds that she imagined had some connection with the French language. Needless to say no one could understand what she was getting at and I was covered with mortification and confusion. Pongo’s inside is in poorish order and his output of really appalling smells has been increased to an almost unbearable level. Poor Lupin. Most of his friends now seem to be in prison; others doubtless ought to be. They are a very seedy collection of social misfits. Not much news from here. Mrs Black appears to be shacking up with an eighteen year old moron whose father keeps the chemists shop at Kingsclere. I criticise her conduct not from the point of view of morals but of taste. People are so apt to confuse the two. Sarah Bomer’s mother is very ill and Sarah has had to go down to Wales to help her father. I saw a huge rat near the stables yesterday. It leered at me in a manner I found distinctly objectionable. I resent that attitude from members of the animal kingdom. No news from your sister, the ever-popular Hexham housewife and culture queen. I suppose she is still busy laying carpets at Scroggs’s Bottom or whatever her new semi-detached chateau on the Tyne is called. I hear the ghastly Shearer has been married in America. I dare say the lady of his choice will soon be regretting her rashness. I would not trust him as far as I could throw a full size piano.