Whole hoggers
Alastair Best
Black Sheep Christopher Simon Sykes (Chatto & Windus £9.95) In his earlier and wholly delightful volume,
The Visitors Book, Christopher Simon Sykes introduced us to some of his ancestors — the Sykeses of Sledmere in Yorkshire. There was great-great-grandpa Tatton who rose at five and paced his 100-foot library — often covering three or four miles in the process — before breakfasting off mutton fat and gooseberry tart. There was great-grandpapa Tatton, a hypochondriac who, in order to maintain his body at an 'oriental' temperature, would don as many as six overcoats, each a different colour, and each specially tailored to fit one over the other. There was great- uncle Christopher, the butt of royalty, who suffered in silence while the Prince of Wales poured brandy over his head; and there was great-great-aunt Venetia who kept a thrifty table and at large dinner parties would be observed passing coded messages to her butler: DCSC, for example, stood for 'don't cut second chicken'. Carefully ex- cluded from this gallery of loveable eccen- trics and dotty aunts, and only briefly men- tioned in the present volume, was Mr Sykes's own Uncle Daniel. This unfor-
tunate figure was clearly beyond the pale. 'He was an interior decorator and a painter. He was homosexual. He dyed his hair. He wore make-up. He drank. He took heroin. He was paid to stay away. He died while I was at school. None of us ever met him. I have never even seen his grave. He was the black sheep of our family.'
Every family has its off-white, or even sepia-tinted sheep. The thing ab6ut the black sheep is that he goes the whole hog. He is incorrigible. In the pursuit of his chosen vice — be it drinking, gambling, sodomy, or big spending — he abandons himself with an utter disregard for the con- sequences. Between him and his embarrass- ed family there is a great gulf fixed, with lit- tle hope of a reconciliation. No one kills a fatted calf for the black sheep of the family. Fathers do not, on spying him afar, run and fall on his neck and kiss him; on the con- trary, they harden their hearts and take a firm grip of their cheque-books. They employ the language of Lord Lundy's grandfather: 'But as it is ... my language fails! Go out and govern New South Wales!' The black sheep, in other words, is seldom readmitted to the fold.
Black sheep are less common today than they were in the 18th or 19th centuries, the period from which Mr Sykes draws most of his riper case-histories. The reasons for this are not hard to find. A lax moral climate is not conducive to black sheepdom; it is dif- ficult to offend against a code which has ceased to exist. There is also the question of upbringing. Parents no longer believe that in order to bring up a child correctly they must first break its will with a stern regime of cold baths, deprivation and the lash. Mr Sykes argues that the principle of primo- geniture, too, played an important part in the production of black sheep. Under this system, he maintains, both the elder and the younger children suffered. The younger, brought up to enjoy a standard of living they could not sustain on their own, fre- quently ran into debt or resorted to crime; while the elder, with no incentive to lead a useful life, acquired loose habits as they awaited their inheritance.
Mr Sykes has assembled a magnificently reprehensible gang of bad hats, rotten ap- ples, incorrigible wasters and loathsome monuments to debauchery. A fairly typical example is Lord William Paget, a 'deep and lacerating thorn' in the flesh of his father Lord Anglesey. Lord William gets through a prodigious amount of other people's money; but he has not, it seems, devoured his father's living with harlots. 'Have I ever gambled, drunk or whored?' he bleats, in those characteristically self-pitying black sheep tones. 'Never!' The infidelity of his wife (nee Rottenburgh) provides him with one more lever with which to prise cash from a long-suffering parent. Connoisseurs of such matters will relish the report of a private detective who is lurking beneath a sofa during the seduction of Lady Paget by Lord Cardigan. 'Witness had not the slightest doubt in his mind at this time that Lord Cardigan and Lady William were hav-
ing connexion with each other and witness drew or moved himself forward upon the ground from under the sofa where he 10' and by so doing and although upon his hel. ly • • . saw the sofa in the front room n011 which two persons appeared to be lying, the one on top of the other.' Lord William set" vived, we are not told how, till the ripe age of 70. But for the most part the black sheep's excesses lead him to an early gale' 'Milord Spencer, fils aine du Comte `tr Sunderland, est mort cette nuit pour a0e bu trop d'eau de vie' is an obituary Nile which might serve for many. Mr Sykes takes an admirably disPais; sionate view of his subject matter. Yet, 'i the end his pathetic case-histories — sktb,,11,..e ly and lovingly assembled though they :', — make tiresome reading. One search of almost in vain among this dismal cast ei characters for some redeeming trait °, eccentricity, self-knowledge even. Perila?; Mr Sykes should have devoted less space ',. cataloguing infamy and rather more to_ee ploring its effects on the family circle•1111: tensions which exist between the hlaer sheep and the rest of the flock are surelY 0', crucial importance; too often, I feel, til° have been left to the reader's imaginati°n.
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