Low life
Making hay
Jeffrey Bernard
Recent investigations into rural low life lead me to believe that my neighbours could do far better if they really tried. They love to tell an ex-city dweller and newcomer like me, with a wink and a nudge, that they're frightfully wicked and that hence in the country is where it's all going on. But in fact they're a pretty harmless lot not far deep down and their unhealthy obsession with hard work seems to give them little time for cavorting. What goes on down here in racing Berkshire has little connection with my preconceived idea that, once I'd moved, I'd be living like Tom Jones.
There are others so meek as to be not worth their salt. One local stable lad who recently became besotted with a barmaid actually paid out a considerable sum of money for beer, ham sandwiches and prewrapped fruit cake for an official engagement party in the village hall. He explained that having publicly announced his honourable intentions towards the girl it would now be perfectly in order for him to avail himself of the said girl's favours in bed. In bed mark you. Gone, obviously, are the days of haylofts, hedgerows and straw stacks. What makes it all the more mad is that he, she and everyone, including both sets of parents, know full well that they never will get married. I suppose it can be put down to a lack of drive, and if ever that was apparent in a man it's there for all to see in Phillip. Now, he really is a source of embarrassment. Yesterday he confessed to me that he was suffering pangs of guilt about a lettuce he'd stolen from someone's garden. The way he went on about it you'd have thought it was a cauliflower. One can only hope that, given time, Phillip will progress to larger and more worthwhile objects, although it's to be hoped that he falls short of the wholescale plunder perpetrated by Jock who stole six prints from the drawing room of one of our leading trainers.
A thing that does stick out like a sore thumb down here, by the way, is that hardly anyone at all looks remotely like either of their official parents. In a lot of cases this is a blessing for the offspring but I find it rather disconcerting to find myself playing mental Happy Families when least my eyes around a room at a cocktail party. You'd think that some of the so-called fathers would twig but then in the case of the Upper middle classes they pay very little attention to their children until they're of an age to be either ashamed or proud of. When they do come of age in the bigger houses and on the more prosperous estates around here they then usually go through the ritual of being bailed out of trouble by their dads.
Like working for the BBC or having been( on the staff of a national newspaper f°'f some time the bailing out takes the fano ° being kicked upstairs. There are a few Orstanding local examples of trainers Whr'd were originally bought yards and foil°, owners when it was realised that they fit for absolutely nothing else but unci,e'; going alfresco hangovers, driving to races and then returning home to entertaw, the said owners and neighbours to furthe' cocktails. My own favourite in this categ°,,,IY is the man who's opening a bottle of eha,:y pagne whenever I telephone him. I s'ti 'Hello' and he says 'Hallo, hang 4301.i moment will you?' Then there's the rePle of a Krug cork being removed from v's, parental bottle, a sigh and then he saYo 'That's better.' While I ask him whatg the day's programme there's a gentle fizr,ve and then he invariably replies,
got a lot of work to do today, but I'M " going to let it get in the way.'
If only there were a few more people that sort of civilised attitude down her!,g suppose I'd lose those sudden urges to irs on the train to London. As it is I'm spend/I:4 far too much time in the companYi affianced stable boys, vegetable bandits at God only knows whose children. Eve,flor this very moment, looking out of mY " a dow, I can see a farm labourer buildiirlfacl hay stack that I'd defy any red-blooden and his girl to climb. Perhaps, after all IP don is the place to make hay.
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