Zéro de conduite
Deborah Devonshire
PETO’S PROGRESS by Nick Peto Long Barn Books, £12.99, pp. 175, ISBN 1902421116 Nick’s progress takes us at a gallop on his trusty hunters, Willie and Archie, through private and public school, army, the City, wives and sweethearts (sometimes his own, sometimes other people’s) with tales of derring-do and a list of fun and games to stretch the eyes. Gambling, dancing from the grandest balls to a Northern Irish village dance hall — girls all the way, fishing, sailing, poker, racing, hunting, polo and shooting, all the tip-top best.
A brilliant games player and one of the best shots I’ve seen, Nick is also one of those rare people whose presence lights up a room and makes everyone feel better. He won, he lost — and always more than he won — but somehow he remained the one who raised spirits whether his own star was in the ascendant or plummeting to earth with a bang.
This book starts as it means to go on. An aunt said to the new curate, who didn’t catch her name, ‘Olive. But I’m not black, I’m not green and I’ve never been stuffed.’ So, we’re off. An unlucky French girl came to stay for the holidays to learn English. Nick’s sister’s ferret sank its teeth into her lip, she was taken to hospital, ferret still attached, and thus disfigured disappeared back to Paris in tears. At Eton our hero and a friend hid fold-up four-ten guns under their coats and walked to the local sewage farm to shoot their first snipe. Luckily health and safety were yet to be invented.
Practical jokes are recounted throughout the book and I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t still happen. They often involved fire extinguishers being put into suggestive positions in people’s beds and ‘then the beastly thing went off’ when a royal guest was hoping to get some sleep in whichever stately they were all staying. Some passages are plain disgusting. The lads were always being sick — and not in the American sense — and when they weren’t sick their dogs were.
I pity his parents who must have had their hearts in their mouths every time he brought friends home for the weekend. The merry crew of Henry Lopes, Rupert Lycett Green and others of that ilk shattered the peace and regularly spent nights in a police cell or hospital.
The vivid description of the results of the disastrous storm of 1952 when nine inches of rain fell in two days on Lynmouth in Devon, which he saw as a boy, stays with me. So does the account of a hazardous canoeing trip down the river Tana in Kenya on an inflatable raft. I could have done with a few more of such.
Nick was the last officer to be commissioned into the 9th Lancers. He was stationed all over the place, eventually finding himself in Germany as ADC to a general. A dawn duck-flighting expedition with two fellow officers nearly ended in disaster as a spot of trouble with the map took them over the border into Holland shooting geese in a Dutch bird sanctuary. The good general was accommodating and sent a staff car to get them out of trouble.
Time now to mount our second horses, Henry and Marble Arch, and trot off to the City to try commodity broking. The office secretary was a pretty ex-wife of Peter Sellers who brought her pekes to work and was required by the directors to climb a ladder in her mini-skirt to chalk up prices on a blackboard.
The partners prospered exceedingly, but then crashed again and ML Doxford & Co went into receivership. Nick had no income, no job, but somehow managed to hunt two days a week. Heaven knows how he raised the cash to become a ‘name’ in Lloyd’s and, you’ve guessed, chose the disastrous Feltrim syndicate.
Nick is a poacher who has never turned gamekeeper (a profession he would have excelled at). Or has he? Believe it or not, he is now a pillar of the PCC and a eucharistic minister, and has kept us splendidly entertained on the way.
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