Washing your hands
Sir: Mr Beverley Nichols (9 April) writes of a hostess giving 'great offence' to a young American by asking him if he would care to 'wash his hands', and receiving the disdainful answer that he had ' already had a bath'. I suspect that what he in fact said was 'I already went to the bathroom', still the most usual circumlocution for having a pee.
When the late President Jack Kennedy's sister-in-law, Lee Bouvier Radziwill sometime Canfield, was trying to find a bottom rung to hoist herself out of Cafe and into High Society, she went for the weekend to Blenheim, more of a Snake than a Ladder one would have thought in that struggle for survival. I asked her had she got on with the Duke (his present Grace's graceless father, 'Bert). 'Oh, it was fine,' she said. 'Only the Duke "went to the bathroom in the fireplace": I could only sigh, 'Will you never learn English?' But I readily understood the feelings of my betters when the late Lord Egremont, on suggesting to his master, Harold Macmillan, that some gesture of support for JEg was at that juncture required on political grounds, received a reply to the effect dia. t there was really nothing more to be done in that direction for had he not advised the Sovereign to have the Radziwills twice to meal 'in one reign'?
Alastair Forbes 1837 Chateau d'Oex Vaud, Switzerland
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