Home life
The restless earl
Alice Thomas Ellis
was watching telly yesterday and wishing wistfully that I could crawl into the set and throttle Brian Aherne or at least wring him out. He was portraying a writer of such wetness that one felt one should be wearing one's mac. He had a son who went to the bad and I don't blame him in the least. If I'd been him I'd have started off with parricide and ended up biting my nails. When it got too embarrassing I turned to Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and when that got too frightening I watched Brian Aherne again.
I was idling thus because until the daughter returns to school I regard this period as the hols. My hols. This is entirely irrational and I don't care. While I was doing this a small drama was enacting itself in the garden. Janet and the third son observed a strange couple out there and Janet enquired if she could assist them jn any way. 'We are just lookink,' they said, `because eet ees so beautiful.' Flattered, the son said she should have asked them in to look round the home but Janet took the view that it was kinder to leave them with their illusions intact. Admittedly they were foreigners but we racked our brains for some time wondering what could so have taken their fancy. There's nothing in the garden at the moment but masses of leaves `The difference is that now I don't trust anyone under 30 either.' and one battered sweet pea. Perhaps they hie from a barren and leafless land.
Scotland was nice and green. I spent a day in Ayrshire with my friend Wendy and we went for a walk on a cliff top. The sun was shining and we were suddenly almost deafened by the sound of popping. Look- ing closely we saw the gorse pods bursting open. Now, Wendy and I were brought up in the same patch of Wales where you couldn't turn without falling over a gorse bush and neither of us had ever heard them pop before. In Arran I saw my first mink — on the hoof as it were, although I am also far from familiar with the coats made from his brethren — and I was surprised to find him a little ferrety creature. I think I had assumed they were built more on beaver lines. It must take millions of them to make a stole. Then I went for a ride on the back of a motor bicycle and after that I went out on the sea in a titsy little boat to look in a lobster pot. To my intense amazement there was a lobster in it. We took it home to show everyone but the consensus of opinion was that he was too young to leave his mother so we put him back in the ocean. My host put his cat in the ocean too and got attacked by a couple of Guardian readers accusing him of cruel- ty. Actually the cat likes swimming and it would be mean to prevent him. Of course the couple had gone by the time we were being kind to the lobster.
Then we went to an evening of folk song and dance. Two wee girls hopped about a lot doing a highland reel and got an enormous round of applause, which led me to think it must have been cleverer than it looked; and then four more girls sang 'The Earl of Moray'. I am not, as I think I have said before, musical, but I happen to have a soft spot for ballads — they are so marvellously uncheerful — and I used to trill 'The Earl of Moray' under my breath day after day until I forgot about him. I had not given him a thought for years but now I am undone. The blasted Earl of Moray is soonding thro' the toon every waking hour. He is driving me mad, that braw gallant. I don't even know what it's all about. Who was Huntley? Why was — I mean woe — to him? Why did he slay the earl? What queen? What on earth was going on? It's like the vague village scan- dals I hear about whenever I go to the country. The locals assume you know the background and you leave it too late to ask so you never find out the details. I have the same problem with the song 'The Queen's Marys'. Who got whom in the club? I know that any normal person with a proper education could answer my questions but I also have a sneaky conviction that I was once told all about it anyway and I simply wasn't listening.
The Earl of Moray's back. His leddy is looking frae the castle doon. I wonder who she was and what she made of it all? I am humming under my breath. Oh please, God rest the Earl of Moray.
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