T he other day in Whiteley’s shopping centre in Queensway —
somewhere I usually try to avoid — I suddenly found myself engulfed by a gang of over-exuberant and oddly menacing adolescents. ‘Hey, you!’ their leader, a wellfed girl of some 12 summers in expensive sportswear, addressed me. ‘I like your umbrella — where d’you get it?’ My mumbled response to the effect that the lurid lime golfing number happened to be a present from my bookmaker failed to ease the strange tension. ‘Give it to me,’ she commanded. ‘Show some respect.’ Her male minions took up the Blairish chant: ‘Respect, respect, respect!’ I edged my way towards the exit and instinctively, like Jeeves’s cab-addicted aunt, hailed a taxi. My jeering persecutors made an elaborate ritual of handing me into the back. Through the open window, the girl said, in a chillingly throwaway tone, ‘Hope you die soon.’ Iam still brooding upon esprit de l’escalier. Perhaps I should have emulated my uncle, an ADC to the penultimate Viceroy of India, Lord Wavell. When dressing for dinner in Simla his toilet was interrupted by a nationalist agitator popping his head through the window and shouting, ‘Quit India!’ ‘My dear fellow,’ replied my demobhappy uncle, ‘I’m leaving as soon as I can.’ I am ashamed to confess that, as I sat there numbly in the cab, I was wondering whether it would have made any difference if I had told the termagant that I had a stage IV cancer. But, as an Aunt Dahlia fox-hunting figure once warned me, one must ‘beware of SP — whether self-pity or starting price’. Actually, just as paranoiacs are people in full possession of all the facts, hypochondriacs are always prepared for the worst. When diagnosed, I heard myself muttering, ‘I’m not surprised.’ It’s only when well-meaning people say, ‘You are looking well, indeed one would never guess that there’s anything wrong with you!’ — in paranoid terms this translates as ‘Either snuff it or stop whingeing’ — that I become twitchy.
The high points of my year included sitting in the pavilion at the Oval for all five days of the final Test, fortified by Lincolnshire pies from F.C. Phipps of Mareham le Fen. By the last day the members were even talking to one another, if only to lament the absence of Graham Thorpe from the victorious England side. Once more another Surrey stalwart, Alistair ‘Lordy’ Brown (shamefully ignored by the Test selectors despite being by far the most entertaining batsman in the country for the last ten years), afforded me much joy, as did Timmy Murphy, the most stylish rider over the jumps since Ferdy Mount’s father. Then there was the indefatigable Moray Watson’s 100th performance as Jim Lees-Milne in my play Ancestral Voices at Fonthill (though the notional ‘understudy’, I have never been called upon), followed by a slap-up lunch at my beloved canteen, Kensington Place. The chance to imitate Edward Fox in Craig Brown’s audio-tape of 1966 and All That. Jonathan Cecil’s exquisite comic timing in his one-man show I Thought You Were in Bournemouth, and, above all, the luminous look on my daughter’s face a few hours after she had given birth to her son, Jack (shades of the catchy number Michael d’Abo sang with Manfred Mann back in the 1960s). I signed my congratulatory card ‘Grandad’, but my wife made me change this to ‘Grandpa’. She clinched the argument by reminding me of Clive Dunn’s dreadful ditty.
Earlier this week I entered my 60th year and I resolved to write some more obituaries (possibly even my own) as well as to polish off (i.e., start) a book chronicling my 40 years as a family-seat fancier to be entitled Country House Creep. It will portray me in the part of gauche fall guy committing countless faux pas and suburban solecisms while sucking up to the squirearchy, and being thrown out of such piles as Highclere and Badminton (where ‘Master’, the late Duke of Beaufort, took exception to my asking about his Uncle Arthur’s adventures in Cleveland Street). Another page of memory relates the time I turned up at Chatsworth with my soaked pale trouserings reeking of the urinal at Chesterfield station into which I had tumbled. But probably I will fritter away the free time between ‘chemo’ (with a hard ‘e’, of course) slumped, as usual, in front of the box watching reruns of The Duchess of Duke Street. Of the coming year’s centenaries, the celebration I am most eagerly looking forward to is the programme of jollifications masterminded by my heroine Candida Lycett Green in memory of her dad, Sir John Betjeman, and in aid of Parkinson’s disease. A.N. Wilson’s forthcoming study of the sublime poet promises to be the book that that divine genius was born to write.
Aconference of the Anthony Powell Society to mark the great novelist’s centenary was held earlier this month at the Wallace Collection (where the excellent exhibition ‘Dancing to the Music of Time’ runs until 5 February) and it went with a swing, though I ground my teeth when one speaker earnestly stated, as if it were accepted fact, that Powell ‘wanted to marry a Lady’. How does one nail such nonsense? Unfortunately, several readers of Michael Barber’s biography seem to have swallowed whole Malcolm Muggeridge’s apparent claim that Tony Powell had told him ‘that the two things he most wanted in life were a wife with a title and a house with a drive’. The source for this was given as ‘information from Richard Ingrams’. For my part, I do not believe that Tony ever expressed such a vulgar sentiment; apart from anything else, the Widmerpudlian language simply does not ring true. I suspect that it was a case of old Mugg — who, incidentally, did not even meet Powell until more than three years after the novelist’s marriage to Lady Violet Pakenham — fantasising that Tony might conceivably have thought along these lines. Now this absurd ‘quote’ is in danger of becoming an accepted myth.
Idid finally make it on to the boards recently in an entertainment, called ‘Love & Art’, which I devised from Powell’s Dance. Basking afterwards in the thrill of having shown off what I fondly imagined to be my histrionic range, I was taken aback by the candour of those who ‘came round’. ‘It was well written,’ offered one old girlfriend cautiously. ‘What about the acting?’ I begged. ‘Well, to be quite honest, I died a thousand deaths of embarrassment.’ I could hardly have followed Rex Harrison’s example. Before his agent’s wife got any further than the ‘honest’ bit, he snarled, ‘Why don’t you shut up, you clockwork c—-!’ But Ivor Novello had the right idea. When kind friends such as Noël Coward, ever ready with a backhander, arrived at Ivor’s dressing-room door, the star would stop them in their tracks by simpering, ‘I just knew you’d love it, duckie.’
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