There'll always be an England when the rain pours down
ii– t was a quintessentially English occasion. About 16,000 people attended an open-air symphony and opera concert at Leeds Castle in Kent. They came equipped with all kinds of apparatus: small tents, folding tables and chairs, ice-buckets, stoves and portable fridges, giant umbrellas, oilskins, blankets, tarpaulins. Before the concert began, they ate elaborate three-course meals, banquets indeed, in some cases washed down with vintage claret a la Roy Jenkins, or iced champagne. I am told some brought their butlers with them, to serve, but I did not actually see this. Nor should I give the impression that this was an upper-class event: rather painfully middle-class, I'd say, with many people carrying musical scores and reading from them during the performance.
Once we were all comfortably ensconced in our seats, the heavens opened. There had been premonitory spots of rain before, but now it was an Ararat deluge. Occasionally a remission intervened in which the flood became a mere sluice, but such periods of comparative respite did not last long before Niagara resumed its sway. Huge black clouds built up overhead carrying the message 'More to comer, and sizeable Windenneres of chocolate-brown water began to spread on the ground. One thought of Passchendaele.
• The effect on the English was nugatory. Some produced and spread another blanket over their saturated persons. Others donned a second plastic raincoat. Most sat stoically in their seats, determined not merely to get their money's worth (i25 for the complete works) but to enjoy themselves. And they did. Not a single person, so far as I could see, left. Even at the interval there was no exodus. The rain came down harder than ever, and there was some furtive swigging at available bottles, but the spirit of the Blitz lived again. I wondered how, say, the Italians or the French — or the Brazilians, Iraqis or Congolese — would have behaved in similar circumstances.
Of course the occasion was anglophilic in other respects. Once the music began, a Hawker Hurricane survivor from the Battle of Britain buzzed about overhead and looped the loop. The Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra was joined not only by a huge choir but by the band of the Royal Engineers in scarlet full dress. The conductor arrayed himself first in red, then in emerald, and finally in a Union Flag tailcoat. Two 'Opera Babes', first spotted, like Eliza Doolittle, in the piazza of Covent Garden singing for their supper, then recruited to lead the roar of a football crowd at Wembley, gave us full-throated renderings of 'Jerusalem', 'Land of Hope and Glory' and 'Rule Britannia'. During the performance of Tchaikovslcy's 1812 Overture, increasingly popular because of its anti-Frog message, a battery of Royal Artillery fired blanks from their so-called Light Gun, which produces a hell of a noise, and from one of the towers of the castle a red, white and blue firework display shot defiantly into the pewter-and-lead sky. The crowning moment came when the ensemble played the waltz Tales from the Vienna Woods, and grotesque couples, each attired in two or three oilskins, emerged from the dripping audience to dance on the spongy turf, stomping and galumphing uproariously in the monsoonal steam, like boors in a kermesse by Old Brueghel. I longed for a Henry Moore to sketch their distorted shapes as he once did the comatose snorers in the Tube shelters.
These occasions, wet or fine, are all in the day's work at Leeds Castle, which is, I think, the tenth most visited place in the British Isles, hosting exclusive conferences and mass gatherings of every kind. It is a stupendous place by any standards, with an even bigger moat than Chenonceaux (the best the French can do). Its history stretches back to Norman times, when it was, I imagine, a simple matte and bailey. It is associated particularly with English queens, including Catherine of Aragon and Catherine of Valois, widow of Henry V, whose courtship by the great victor of Agincourt (a word M. Chirac will never allow to be spoken in his hearing) is so charmingly conveyed in Shakespeare's Henry V. This flirtatious creature, still only 21 when the great warrior died, fell in love with her Clerk of the Wardrobe, a cunning Welshman called Owen Tudor. Both were promptly locked up, but escaped, married secretly and in due course produced a son, Edmund, father of Henry VII and the remarkable Tudor dynasty. The last Queen of Leeds was Olive Paget, Lady Baillie, Anglo-American by birth, cosmopolitan by taste, by good fortune rich and long-lived, who reigned there from 1927 to 1974, restored the crumbling pile, adorned and embellished it, filling it with enchanting bits and pieces from rapturous sketches by Constantin Guys to bejewelled dog-collars. Her own rooms are an amber-trapped exercise in opulent interwar taste, and the chapel was resuscitated by the nearby Archbishop of Canterbury a generation ago, when this prelate had better things to do than write impudent letters to the Prime Minister criticising the work of British troops who are defending civilisation from the assaults of Muslim savages.
On her death, Lady Baillie left the castle to a foundation governed by trustees bidden to run it in the public interest. The chairman is that wily old bird Lord Armstrong, once Cabinet secretary and head of the Civil Service. He is chiefly known for his expression 'economical with the truth', which our semi-literate media presented as an official justification for lying. Actually it is a quote from Edmund Burke, who argued in justification of the need-to-know principle that there is an economy in all things, including truth, which is to be distributed with due prudence. Lord Armstrong in retirement has fingers in many succulent pies, an activity justified by the skill with which he exercises his power. There can be few large but delicate institutions better conducted than Leeds Castle, which has 400 staff, highly disciplined, courtly and professional from kitchen (Lady Armstrong is a professional cook) to garden. After the great inundation, the staff worked all night to clear up the debris left by the visitors, and by 7 o'clock next morning not a single piece of litter was to be found and the whole vast domain was spotlessly tidy. The swans, black and gleaming white, floated serenely on glittering waters, peacocks were in full dress, making a reassuring din, and a beatific calm embraced the entire majestic scene of ancient stones and bosky woods under a reconquering sun. Here was England at its best and most beauteous, tinglingly efficient in its post-Thatcher culture, enjoying the best of its long past, the prosperity of its present, and the promise of a golden future, sturdily independent of Continental failure and regimentation. Long may it remain so!
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