Authors: Louise Mortimer
Mrs Randall is giving all her relatives potatoes for Christmas: a sensible and most acceptable present. Would you like a sack of Arran Pilot’s or King Edward VII’s? I always knew there were some odd people in Devon, but Mr Thorpe and Mr Scott really do take the biscuit with an ease which is almost impertinent. Lupin looks better. His ghastly friend Shearer is back in the country. I regard him as very bad news, even worse than G. Rodney. A man was killed yesterday on the road to Beacon Hill, squashed flat by a huge lorry.
Best love to all, RM x
My mother had already had our house (Budds Farm) exorcised once before when she had insisted there was an alien presence which had apart from other things, walked noisily up the stairs and shaken her bed in the middle of the night.
Budds Farm
22 January
Dearest L,
Not a very agreeable day here, cold and foggy. Your mother is in very crusty mood so I am trying to keep well out of her way. She has taken a dislike to my dog which is not important but tiresome. I can’t say there is much news from this quarter. The strike has not affected the shops in the least and you can buy what you want anywhere without difficulty. Mr Randall has had a nasty cold: Mrs R says he is a silly old man and that he tries to live on strong tea and cigarette smoke. As he is 74 the diet does not seem to have done him much harm. Sarah Bomer and Sylvia Mayhew-Saunders came to lunch: one of them mentioned Pongo and your mother at once disappeared, slamming several doors on the way! Rather silly really at her age. Jane is 30 tomorrow. She will before long be entering the dreaded realm of Old Bagdom, never to return. I gather the weather has been hideous in Northumberland. Mr Parkinson came to lunch yesterday. He is terrified his mother-in-law, an aged alcoholic, wants to come and live with him. It is bad enough having his step-son who does no work and lies in bed till 11.30. The Surtees are having a dinner party for 18 in their barn on Saturday: I wonder how many guests will die of hypothermia. We have had a post-card from your brother who seems reasonably happy. I only wish I was with him. The gravediggers are on strike round here so corpses are being shoved into the deep freeze with the fish fingers and the Stork margarine. I hope your daughter is wintering well and maintaining her robust appetite. No sign of the new people moving into the cottage yet. This is an exceptionally dull time of the year and according to your mother I am an exceptionally dull old man, so it would be surprising if this letter was not almost wholly devoid of interest.
Best love,
D
Very sadly Pongo passed away and Nidnod was devastated. My father however, was secretly not completely distraught as the frequently smelly Pongo had been the bane of his life.
Budds Farm
5 February
Dearest L,
I trust that you and Rebecca have recovered from influenza and that Henry is successfully flogging immense quantities of drink to his numerous clients. Life has been fairly dreary here. The fact is that I don’t really like this house: it is too big for us and has a thoroughly depressing and unfriendly atmosphere though of course that may be due to the present residents. Also the garden is more than I can now cope with. I would like to move into a hideous but modern bungalow. Your mother seems unable to get over Pongo’s death and is liable to get hysterical if his name is mentioned. Mr Randall is in good form: he went up to London last night to watch a TV programme featuring some woman called Ranzen [Esther Rantzen]. At all events, he enjoyed himself. We went to a cocktail party with the Gaselees last Friday: a large number of people in a confined space and I never heard a word anyone said which in fact was not an intolerable deprivation. We had supper at The Swan at Shefford afterwards which is only slightly more expensive than Claridges but they do mushrooms in garlic rather well. Relations between your mother and Aunt Pam remain rather colder than those between Russia and America. I expect they will make it up eventually and then both turn on me and rend me limb from limb. I may come up to London this month as I have been asked to an oyster party at Bentleys and a lunch at the Savoy which will make a change from tinned spaghetti hoops. I really rather envy Lupin in Kenya. I gather he has taken over the hotel motor-boats with the result that none of them are working. I had lunch with Mrs Hislop last Saturday. As a non-stop chatter she is superior even to your mother and talks almost as much balls.
Best love,
D XX
Lupin is blissfully happy on the island of Lamu in Kenya tinkering with boat engines and in the evening reading out my dad’s letters to a small audience on the veranda of the Hotel Peponi.
Budds Farm
26 February
Dearest L,
Thank you so much for asking me to the christening and the party afterwards. I enjoyed both of them very much indeed and I think they went off very well. Rebecca behaved with singular decorum. I hope I struck up rather a beautiful friendship with Henry’s grandmother but I am not absolutely confident on that point. I trust the photographs came out well! I had a baddish drive home as your mother was very cross and gave me a fearful bashing which continued till she went to bed.
At all events, thank you both very much indeed.
Best love,
RM
Rebecca’s christening is the first jamboree that both sides of the family have attended since the marriage blessing. Our best friend and Rebecca’s godfather, Andy Loch, kindly allowed us to use his flat in Lennox Gardens for the christening party.
Tuesday
Dearest L,
Very many thanks for your charming porcine card which I greatly appreciated. We motored up to London yesterday to go to the Press Derby dinner where I received a presentation. Those present were for the most part boring and ill-dressed. The Chairman, Lord Rothermere, made a ghastly speech but there were rather more entertaining ones by Wilfred Hyde-White and Robert Morley. I had a drink beforehand with Emma E’s father and step-mother: they are worried about E who is swanning about Brazil and no one knows quite where she is. At dinner Nidnod sat next to a son of the late Prime Minister, Lord Attlee, who was accompanied by a lady with lemon coloured hair and a slight impediment in her speech. Mr A himself was, I think, pissed and achieved the notable feat of outtalking your mother. I was next to David Langdon, the cartoonist who does a lot of work for Punch. I spent a night last week with Cousin John at Brighton. He has a superb flat overlooking the Marina and the nudist bathing beach. By a fortunate chance he owns a huge telescope which he says is for studying the stars. Douglas Byng came to dinner. He is 87 and used to sing in drag at the Café de Paris in the nineteen thirties – very funny and vulgar. He is still very much on the ball and obliged with ‘I’m Milly, a messy old Mermaid’ and ‘Twenty years a chambermaid in a house of ill repute’. Peregrine has been poorly and Nidnod has been in quite a flap. The garden is very dried up and ugly. We went to a fearful local party and got nothing to drink bar weak and tepid Pimms. I had a very coarse post-card from Freddy B-Atkins about Charlotte’s engagement.
Love to all from all of us,
D xx
My parents and their friends could be described as many things, boring not being one of them.
Budds Farm
4 August
Dearest L,
Thank you for your interesting letter. All is fairly quiet here though your mother’s conduct is liable to be unpredictable after 7 p.m. Audrey does very little work as she and your mother hobnob all morning. Neither of course listens much to the other. No news of Lupin: he is either physically incapable of writing a letter or else he cannot afford a stamp. We went to quite a good lunch party with the Roper-Caldbecks and your mother made sheep’s eyes at a very short man called Lloyd Webber. I have just cleaned out The Cringer’s run as it was beginning to pong in really alarming fashion. There is not a single apple on any of our fruit trees: all the blossom was destroyed by a late frost. It is going to be a good blackberry year but not a sign yet of any mushrooms. A horse has been stolen from a field in Burghclere: I haven’t told your mother or she will start hiring Securicor to protect Jester! There is a big concert in Sydmonton tomorrow but thank God I am not going. The awful thing is that I simply cannot think of anything more to say.
xx D
When my mother finally found out about the stolen horse she did not hire Securicor. Instead she could be found in her nightie and gumboots with the dogs and an enormous torch doing the rounds several times a night, armed with Lupin’s favourite shotgun nicknamed Crippen.
Budds Farm
16 August
Dearest Lumpy,
I hope you are plump and well and are not finding your work too arduous. Your mother departed on Saturday to stay in Northumberland with Miss Bossy Pants: I have heard nothing since, so assume there haven’t been any major dramas. I have been having quite a merry time since as I was out to lunch and dinner on Sunday & also on Monday. It does occur to me that I am invited less for my social charm than because I am regarded as a semi-helpless geriatric who has lost their marbles. I must be getting (have got?) fairly gaga as I crawl out of bed at 7 a.m. and work in the garden before breakfast, cutting down dead rhododendrons and removing brambles and nettles. My arms look as if I had been flogged with barbed wire. I have been doing a little experimental cooking. I drummed up some beef rissoles which looked fairly normal but it needed a hammer and quite a large chisel to dent their surface. At least I have invented a new type of bread. It does not look like bread and it does not really taste much like bread either. An unkind critic might suggest it looks and tastes like a sodden lump of decomposing dough. Mr P. had quite a good holiday down on the Kent coast bar the fact that his daughter got chicken-pox and his au pair girl turned bolo. I think he is restless and would like to move when he retires next year. I suppose he will become Sir Desmond P. when he leaves the Foreign Office. Major & Mrs Surtees are off to Salzburg for the Mozart Festival. They were keen for Nidnod and me to go too, but your mother declined, being as musical as a pair of policeman’s bicycle clips. Tiny Man is in very good form but his breath would drive a No 19 bus. Moppet is old and frail, like me. Your cousin Caroline Blackwell is to marry a very rich banker of 41, Tim Holland-Martin. He bred the Derby winner Grundy and has ridden a good many winners at Cheltenham etc. Old Farmer Luckes has been a bit truculent lately and sooner or later he and your mother will have a ghastly row which will be a bore for me as I shall be compelled to listen (several times over) to a blow by blow account.
Best love to you and kind regards to H,
XXX D
P.S. No news of Lupin who is supposedly due back this week.
Despite senility being one of my father’s favourite subjects, he held on to his marbles and continued successfully writing into the last year of his life.
Budds Farm
27 August
Dearest L,
I hope you are all big and well and thriving. I had three days at Rose Cottage where Jane was staying. There were occasional signs of exasperation between Jane and Aunt Pips. Jane never stopped talking, very fast and very indistinctly, and Aunt Pips got browned off as she could not hear half of what Jane said and could not understand the rest. Jane got fed up when she told a long banging story and found that Aunt Pips either had given up listening or had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. We went out for drinks with some people and were rather put out to find a dead dog on the lawn when we left. I think your mother quite enjoyed Jersey. She brought back two crabs which we had for lunch on Sunday. I felt a teeny bit sick afterwards. Two geese came into the kitchen and made a ghastly mess. I have had a v. rude post-card from France with a very cheeky message in French. I have no idea who sent it. Your mother thinks I have a French lover which unfortunately is not the case. Lupin drops in here every now and then. I gave him dinner at the Riviera which is now extremely expensive. The geese have eaten all my flowers and I can’t wait to have them killed and shoved into the deep freeze.
Best love to you all,
XX RM
It was always a pleasure staying with my Great Aunt Pips. She had certain similarities to Dr Evadne Hinge of Hinge and Bracket. She had an amazing musical ear, hearing a piece of music once she could play it straight back on the piano.
Budds Farm
31 August
Dearest L,
We enjoyed having you to stay and hope you will come here again before long. I foolishly went to sleep in the sun last week and got a touch of sunstroke which was singularly unpleasant. The Surtees were meant to come to dinner last night but Mrs S has developed some fearful allergy and has a hideous rash from head to foot. By the way, I think Nidnod is the worst bridge player I have encountered in all my life – and the most talkative, too. Your mother’s dog shows no sign at all of becoming house trained but luckily his messes are not very large compared with Chappie’s. He pursued a small girl riding a bicycle but luckily attempts to make a meal of her right leg proved unavailing. The Cringer’s leg has healed up where he was shot. Mr Jackson of the Post Office had a fatal heart attack last week. Your mother is not all that well and is going to see a nose and throat specialist when she comes back from Wales. She gets terribly tired these days but of course she is very highly strung. No news of Lupin getting a job yet. He claims to have caught a shark in Devonshire: in the sea, presumably! I hope Nick Gaselee will come to Henry’s dinner. Henry will have to help him with his speech if required to do so. In introducing Nick, it might be worth mentioning that he is a successful trainer of jumpers and has had good winners on the flat as well. He was one of the best amateur riders of his day and has ridden in the Grand National. At one time he was on the racing staff of the Evening Standard and he has also had experience as assistant clerk of the course at Ascot. Mrs Mayhew-Saunders came to lunch yesterday. She is just back from Corfu. Her 14 year old son went snorkelling (is that how you spell it?) and strayed into the area where the nudists bathe. He was rather surprised to see through his mask a nude couple having a stand up go in the water!