DIARY
DEBORAH DEVONSHIRE The first sentence of a diary given to a nine-year-old child at Christmas, written on New Year's Day and kept faithfully till at least 10 January, was `Got up, dressed, had breakfast.' The first sentence of a book is a different matter and very difficult indeed. I have been pondering over this for some time. I asked my sister Jessica what to do. She tells me that in America, if you pay some money, you can get advice as to how to begin and then go on to be a famous author. They say put down 'the' on a bit of paper, add some words, keep on adding and Bob's your uncle (or the American equivalent), you're off and the rest will follow. It doesn't seem to work. Just try. So, hopelessly stuck and faced with the empty page, see how other people manage. Lately we have been reminded of `I had a farm in Africa. . . ."I had a farm in Derbyshire' somehow doesn't sound as good and anyway it would be a lie because in England things like farms seldom belong to women. Having failed with 'the', try `and'. `And it came to pass', too affected and you can't go on in that Biblical style. When you open books to see how it is done it seems so easy, set down there in the same type as the rest as if it was no trouble at all, the second sentence flowing out of the first like one o'clock. Believe me, the writer has suffered over those words. As 50,000 books are published every year they must add hugely to the level of anxiety in an already anxious race.
Gardening is almost too difficult to contemplate, but arranging flowers is im- possible. I wonder if the arrangers get cross because their work doesn't last. My mother's explanation for the uncertain tempers of cooks was the inevitable des- truction of their art thrice daily being enough to unhinge their minds. If the flower people don't get cross they must be sad when the products of hours of work end in the dustbin. It has all become too complicated. There are rules, and criticism is fierce. I marvel at the skill which goes into the feats you find in hotels, at wedding receptions and flower festivals in churches, but I do not wish to see them in my own house. Everything is too contrived and clever, the flowers spring out of squashy green stuff instead of a good old vase or pot. Since the invention of plastic flower pots it is a joy to see one made of proper earthenware but I expect it would lose points in a Floral Art competition. The whole subject needs simplifying and straightening as well. Those sideways stalks are worrying and against nature: but then nature hasn't got much to do with it. I think the Americans are miles ahead in the art. In a long life in which I have had the luck to be surrounded by beauty I have never seen anything better than the flowers on the tables at the grand dinner given for the lenders to the `Treasure Houses of Great Britain' exhibition in Washington last autumn. About 200 diners sat at round tables of eight in a vast hall which goes up the whole height of the National Gallery. Some genius put tall narrow vases on plinths with a burst of equally tall flowers high above the heads of the diners so they could see the people opposite without interference. The result was stunning. Had I done them I should have had no better idea than a dreary plate with a few heads floating about in it.
The prettiest flowers I have ever seen in a small dining room were in a New York flat; lilies of the valley bolt upright in twos and threes in a bed of moss all down the middle of the table. The best at a dance were white foxgloves, one at a time in proper flower pots, round the floor of a sitting-out room. Trying to do as well myself I bought some china vases made like the old Crown Derby crocus pots with holes in the lids to stick the flower in. Delighted to have found something which forced the stalks to stand up straight I showed them to a Floral Art friend who said, 'What, ten little soldiers?' Yes, ten little soldiers are just the thing. One Easter at our Devonshire Arms Hotel at Bolton Abbey I had what I thought was a good idea; birds' nests on the restaurant tables with marzipan eggs. So I asked the dried flower ladies if they could make birds' nests and along came some good tries. They looked really nice till the customers ate the eggs. As a robbed nest is the saddest sight going and looks like a dreary cowpat with a rim, the manager soon banished them.
Moss is the thing. I have been given (by Americans needless to say) a moss tree, extremely pretty and more or less everlasting I'm told, unless you put it in the sun when it will fade. I pulled it to bits to see how it's made. It is a ball of moss about 18 inches in diameter mounted on chicken wire and stuck into place with huge hair pins. It is supported by a stem of birch stuck in a basket filled with plaster. The base of the `tree' is covered in more moss of a different kind, to hide the plaster. The Librarian at Chatsworth happens to know all about moss; he is no less than the treasurer of the British Bryological Socie- ty. Seeing this beauty he said without hesitation, 'Oh that's Leucobrym glaucum, it only grows in the south of England.' So I see myself taking a van to some distant damp spot like West Sussex to get the precious raw material. I expect moss gathering is against the law, like picking primroses, and I shall have my head cut off; but if any of us here can succeed in making such a decorative object it will be worth it.
Packaging has gone too far and the simplest things have become impossible to open. If you buy a toothbrush or a pen or tweezers you need a strong and sharp pair of scissors to cut through the armour plating of plastic which encases them. No house has enough scissors so you go out and buy some. But they are similarly encapsulated in a thick shiny film, which human hands and nails are not designed to penetrate. You pull, drag, stamp and bite but to no avail. You can see your longed- for object in its close-fitting jacket, shining and clean, which makes it all the more desirable, but there is no hope of getting at it. You buy another pair of scissors and another, till they are ranged alongside the things they are meant to open. If there is a Scissor Package Opener lurking among the terrifying objects in John Bell and Croyden you may be sure it will be asceptically sealed so only a scalpel will do the job. Oh, misery me.
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