ne of the most exquisite houses I know lies at
the head of a valley in Cranborne Chase in Wiltshire. It is not so much
the 18th-century architecture of Ashcombe, though it is the surviving portion of a once-grand country house, but more the position, secluded and yet facing down the long, twisting valley to the south, surrounded by hills as if in a three-sided amphitheatre. It was once the home of Cecil Beaton and the subject of his book, Ashcombe: A 15-Year Lease, first published in 1949 and reprinted by Dovecote Press four years ago. On seeing the lilac-brick façade. Beaton wrote, 'I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand.' He restored the house, which was almost derelict. It enchanted him so much that he never quite got over the termination of the lease, and would return to gaze sadly at it from the long drive that starts on the downs above, only to be chased away by the fierce owner. One of the circus murals he painted remains today, in a bedroom. I knew the people who eventually bought it. but they sold and it's now owned by Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie, so it is unlikely I'll go there again. The couple have been seen in local pubs where people tend to leave them alone. Ritchie and the actor Brad Pitt came into a pub I know and asked the landlord's partner what the attitude of the locals was towards famous people. As she didn't recognise either of them she was somewhat baffled by this but told them that celebrities were ignored. I dare say they weren't drawing attention to themselves, but hoping they could have a pint in peace as no doubt they've experienced boorish behaviour when they've been spotted elsewhere.
Bill Carter, a retired farmer in his eighties with a broad Wiltshire accent, told me that he'd lost a much-loved cousin in June 1944 in Italy and didn't know where he was buried. At the age of 25, he was killed when a shell hit his tank. I knew from the date that it must have been when the Allies were trying to force their way through one of the German lines north of Rome, near Lake Trasimeno on the Tuscan–Umbrian border, as I'd read the book about this two-week battle published last year in Perugia, The Trasimene Line. by Janet Kinrade Dethick. With two friends, Tim and Yvonne, who live in
Umbria, we looked up the name Corporal Gordon Hinton of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, and there it was, with the address of the cemetery and the number of his grave. We went there and took some photographs for Bill and his family to see. I find war cemeteries, though, difficult to take for long. In the next row was the grave of a young soldier of 18. This tranquil place of gentle birdsong is overlooked by Assisi and Mount Subasio and contains 954 Commonwealth burials. The white stone on Hinton's grave has weathered into a greyish colour, but it clearly bears the Yeomanry's badge of the Prince of Wales's feathers and is also inscribed with a short, simple poem: His battle fought. His victory won, Now he slumbers In a soldier's grave.
Bill keeps thanking me for solving the mystery but he needn't; it was no trouble and I learnt something.
When my literary agent told me she was giving up to start a family, I had to find a replacement. This is extraordinarily difficult nowadays. A well-known woman agent loved the first three chapters of a novel, a black comedy, I had sent her but, as she told me, had agonised about seeing the rest. In the end she decided against, writing, 'Yours is the best sample of work I have read in ages — head and shoulders above most of the material I get sent — accomplished, fluent, perceptive with a really good idea for character, manners and mores.' This was flattering but, she added, 'Everything has to be pigeon-holeahle, brand-able, analysable in one sentence. Lad-lit, chick-lit etc. . . . ' Not long ago I heard the admirable Norman Lebrecht of the London Evening Standard talking on the radio about his first novel and saying that the era of chick-lit and lad-lit was over. I am not so sure. I don't think publishers understand the middlebrow readership any more. They're familiar with airport bestsellers and highbrow fiction, but in-between? The air of unreality that has enveloped me is exacerbated when someone I don't know particularly well tells me, with genuine enthusiasm, that he so loved my first novel, Waning Powers, a comedy about the BBC, that he's desperate to read the next one. I can only shrug.
Uollowing a mention of a Fi Glover programme on BBC Radio Five in my radio column — both studio guests were pro-EU, one excessively so — Simon Clark, the director of the pro-smoking lobby Forest, emailed to say that something similar had occurred in another of her phone-ins, a discussion about banning smoking in pubs and restaurants. The two guests on this occasion, he says, both wanted a ban; one was a London restaurateur who also claimed that if food had been prepared by a chef who smokes, it tastes too salty — the implication being that the habit would have ruined his taste buds. According to Clark, Glover, who he says is an ex-smoker, dismissed the idea that improved ventilation might help by arguing that all it does is make smokers feel more comfortable, which in turn encourages them to smoke more. He believes that the programme was biased. I didn't hear it but I have long argued that bias is often evident in the selection of contributors, and this sounds to me a typical example, even if the callers and the senders of emails expressed differing opinions. On the subject itself, all restaurants and pubs have to do is divide areas into smoking and non-smoking, but the fanatics won't rest until they see a complete ban of the kind that has caused such disharmony in New York.
Iwas discussing with a friend this week the problem of remembering the Christian names of people one hasn't seen for some time, and was reminded of a social gaffe I committed some years ago. Bumping into a former flatmate and his wife in a London theatre bar, I struggled to recall her name so that I could introduce her to my then wife. An association began to form in my mind and I heard myself saying, 'And this is Fanny.' The woman stared at me and said, 'Pussy. He calls me Pussy.' Ah,' I replied in confusion, 'I knew it was something of the sort,' which, of course, only compounded the offence.
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