It’s Party Time in the gardens of the West End
This is the party season. Time was when I would go out virtually every night between mid-May and Goodwood, sometimes to three shindigs in an evening. Not any more. I am choosy. (My family say lazy and unsociable, rather.) But one festivity I never miss is the Ode to Joy Tom Stoppard arranges every year at the Chelsea Physic Garden. I say Ode to Joy because whereas most parties have a strong component of competitiveness, showing off, brittle malice and jealousy, this joyful party generates what Schiller calls ‘schöner Götterfunken’:
Alle Menschen werden Brüder Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.
And not only does Tom’s hospitality make people brothers, but sisters too, for this is a party for everyone, children being a large component, and the entertainment provided for them royal. All ages come. I counted 13 members of the Johnson family there, from 3 months to 76 years, and that is only my branch, not counting the Boris/Stanley/ Frank tribes. The garden itself, created to supply an immense variety of herbal medicaments before the age of modern medicine, is itself a delectable place to explore, full of strange nooks, secret arbours and hidden pleasances, perfumed with all the scents of summer. And Tom decks it out with swishy tents and awnings, where oysters and king prawns are served, delicious roasts, hamburgers and hot dogs, ices and strawberries. Clowns greet you, Rhinemaidens on stilts stalk and flaunt, an unexpurgated Punch and Judy show shocks the politically correct and rivets children of all ages. A superb oompah band plays the tunes of the first half of the last century with infectious gusto, and on this last occasion I saw a young couple, galvanised by its music, perform the Charleston with such superbly syncopated skill, such athletic elegance, as to bring tears to my eyes. I collected at my table on the lawn a ravishing group of witty ladies, of all ages and accomplishments, to enjoy languid, leisurely gossip about the passing scene — a touch of Garsington or Ham Spray during those long sunlit afternoons of the early 1920s. Only the English can mount these occasions properly, and I thought with complacency of the envious Frogs and uncomprehending Huns nursing their hopeless rage across the Channel. But perish such mean thoughts! A good party is a moral end in itself, with no agenda, hidden or otherwise. Tom’s party lasts, as the invitation says, ‘from midday to sunset’, a lingering eternity in early June, and not a cross or unworthy word is spoken throughout. How do I know? Providential intuition, as Coleridge would say.
There followed, a few days later, a party at my house, not on the same scale of grandeur or poetry, I need hardly say, but also a mingling of generations. Indeed it was given in honour of my latest grandchild, a robust young lady of five months, and there were troupes of little boys and girls, a famous baby not yet five weeks old, and no shortage of crawlers and toddlers, as well as masses of adults. For the occasion, I made over my garden studio as a crèche. I put away my immense architect’s work-table and various easels, moved paints and brushes well out of reach, and generally had a tremendous tidying-up, something a working studio seldom receives. I brought down from the old day-nursery the large battered Noah’s Ark. It is now over 40 years old, for it was bought for my oldest son, and most of the original animals in it have gone the way of all toys. But they have been replaced, over two generations, by a multitude of new ones — dinosaurs, gremlins, Bambis, spacecreatures and similar beings, wafted into the old Ark by the tides of juvenile fashion. It is by far the most popular object the household possesses, and has been played with by literally hundreds of children who have visited us. I think the secret of its appeal is that it has, in addition to two formal entrances, a roof that opens up, so animals can be put in and taken out in three different ways. It is a source of endless pleasure for children from two to ten to engage in the activity of populating and depopulating a universal container. It makes them feel celestial, gives them god-like power. And of course God himself gets a similar satisfaction from varying the habitation of his creatures — sometimes he stages a population explosion, and sometimes (as is now happening) he introduces an abrupt deceleration of global demographics, forcing all the idiot wiseacres of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, etc., to do an abrupt about-turn. Perhaps an astute toy-manufacturer should produce a capacious globe, on the lines of the Ark, on and in which sagacious infants can play games of Global Warming, New Ice Age, Energy Exhaustion, Ice-cap Melting and other nightmares and fantasies of the pseudoexperts and frauds. But it wouldn’t work, would it? Children are too realistic to give much attention to such claptrap. They prefer solid, graspable concepts such as a lot of rain, a flood, building a boat with a roof, and filling it with animals of both sexes. Though, of course, come to think of it, the Flood was the first end-of-the-Earth ‘scientific’ scarestory in history. There was a flood, as we know from the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh and other ancient texts, and it was probably quite scary for those who lived in the neighbourhood of Sumer. But it didn’t cover much territory, was soon over, and the world carried on exactly as before, just as it will when the global warming nonsense is a matter of history.
I also provided, in my studio-crèche, a lot of big pieces of paper and hundreds of coloured crayons, so that children could do drawings. And they did! The extraordinary imaginative concepts that emerge from a child’s mind on to the paper never fail to fill me with wonder and delight. There is one in front of me now. A human figure in a pixie cap touches with a magic wand a formless piece of ectoplasm, which gradually turns into a road, then into a railway-line, which goes through an embankment, emerging as a magnificent old-fashioned steam train with four funnels, each belching smoke, and a mass of little people in the passenger carriages. Like a mediaeval multiple painting of a saint’s life, this picture travels through time as well as space, and tells a story. Children have a lot to teach us, not least when we take the risk of inviting them to our grown-up parties.
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