DIARY
JILLY COOPER
AChairman of Bisley Cricket Club, my husband Leo imports a side to play against the village. A thrilling match in even more thrilling hot weather ends in vic- tory for Leo's team in the last over. Hope this is not due to the inattention of the umpire, who turns out to be Theodore Dal- rymple, The Spectator's medical correspon- dent, who has been, simultaneously, at Square leg reading a copy for review of Freddie Forsyth's new novel which he says isn't as good as The Day of the JackaL In the flesh, Dr Dalrymple is rather sexy with rumpled black curls. Also a workaholic, he can later be seen talking to a pretty mother with a baby, researching some future col- umn on the horrors of health visitors.The pretty mother says having one's husband present at the birth is an added pressure. Encouraged during labour to try a new, frightfully Islington-sounding position called the Supported Squat, she was held up on one side by a six-foot black midwife and on the other by her five-foot two hus- band, who shortly turned blue with effort and keeled over. She is understandably amazed at the latest fad among young cou- ples of showing videos of the birth at din- ner parties. One father who gathered up the baby as it slithered out was ecstatic when the gynaecologist congratulated him on the perfect slip catch.
Oblong bales of straw litter the fields like school trunks on a station platform. One advantage of boarding school is that nothing will ever be as bad again as the going back. I suspect it is less harrowing today: 'Mummy cried so much at the begin- ning of last term,' a small boy told me, 'that I felt I ought to cry too to make her feel better.' Amy, returning to the Royal School, Bath, seemed so excited that her mother reproachfully asked her if she pre- ferred school to home. To which Amy replied after a long pause, 'Well, that's a difficult one, Mummy.' Today, children seem to get away with anything. I remem- ber a kindly housemaster unsuspectingly helping my son Felix to carry a laundry bas- ket groaning with booze up to his study. That was the same term that Felix smug- gled in my long black Sixties wig as a dis- guise for when he sloped off to the pub. Private schools are, of course, businesses reluctant to expel any pupil unless really necessary. One of the lines cut out of the recent television programme on Eton was when a friend's son complained bitterly that, `If one is caught in bed with a girl ' here, one gets sacked, but if it's a boy, one only gets two hours' gardening.' Returning from Gozo, Felix bemoans the lack of bet- ting shops, but is delighted that the might of communism has been toppled by Boris
Yeltsin: 'Rather like Goliath and that little kid he used to hang around with.' So much for private education.
Thanks to the gentle enthusiasm of my instructor, Peter Clarkson from Painswick, I am actually enjoying learning to drive. Together we explore the splendours of the Gloucestershire countryside and get so engrossed discussing Disraeli's Sybil or Princess Michael's new Harpo Marx hairstyle, that we fail to notice a half-mile tailback of cars behind us. Peter's pupils range from schoolboys who collapse on the steering wheel moaning they've been trip- ping all night, to an intrepid Chinese lady who has clocked up 100 lessons. Progress is impeded because she is avidly househunt- ing and keeps rally-driving the car up rock- eries of Cheltenham bungalows and send- ing the latest status-symbol garden gnomes with cordless telephones flying as she jerks across the lawn slap into some kitchen- dinette window. Without the aid of dual control, my own family are less sanguine about taking me driving. Despite having taught Africans to drive lorries during the Mau Mau crisis, Leo is the most nervous, 'You know what's wrong with our marriage? No direction. No drama. No soundtrack.' claiming people can only do things by instinct. 'But even Mozart must have had to learn the piano in the beginning,' I say crossly as the car stalls noisily at a cross- roads. 'Mozart,' says Leo heavily, 'was not in the business of killing people.' So, irritat- ed, I lose concentration. Next minute the car chassis is propped at 80 degrees against a steep bank, the dog and I are biting the tarmac out of side windows and Leo hangs above us from his seat-belt, purple in the face and furiously mouthing. Mutter that I've always wanted a husband I can look up to. Even the dog joins in the hysterical laughter.
Back home without incident, we find one of Leo's authors, who also writes for the tabloids, has rolled up with a ravishing girl reporter. Both are very high on their recent infiltration of a witch's coven in Lichfield, where they witnessed communal bonking, orgiastic dancing and naked high jump over the camp fire. Leo's author com- plains that witches were hideously fat and ugly and the length of the women's armpit hair was a positive fire hazard. Dobermans have replaced witches' cats and Newcastle Brown any cockerel's blood. The ravishing reporter is off next week to infiltrate a wife- swapping ring in London which, she adds excitedly, 'involves loads of top barristers.' Hope she doesn't mean the Garrick.
Appalled by John Junor's savaging of Princess Diana as 'the patron saint of sodomy', but suspect that the Princess's extreme sadness at Adrian Ward-Jackson's death may partly stem from a loneliness in her own marriage. It must have been com- forting to have an intelligent amusing male friend who was attracted to her conversa- tion rather than her dazzling sex appeal. It seems tragic in her position that she can only be close friends with men who are gay. Imagine the hullabaloo the press and the Palace would make if she haunted the bed- side of some dying heterosexual. Charity can only begin at homos.
Walk the dogs early to avoid the heat. Cows lumber to their feet like pupils when a headmaster enters the room. Unsupport- ed by their rotting stems, a symbol of Mr Major's classless society, the orange berried heads of Lords and Ladies litter the foot- path. My heart lifts at the first harebells. Still and predatory as his namesake in the film of The Day of the Jackal sits a fox in the long grass watching an unsuspecting pheas- ant. Perhaps he is planning a new edition of Fox's Book of Martyrs and hopes Theodore Dalrymple will review it.
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