Mind your language
I SUPPOSE we all give ourselves away by our choice of vocabulary and, as it were, 'emotional register'. Thus it was that, when I listened to the wireless extracts of Lady Fortescue's Perfume from Provence, it was with creepy fasci- nation.
This is the woman who married the 55-year-old Sir John Fortescue in 1914 and, short of money, as the Depression began, moved with him to Provence to spend the final few years of his eighth decade there. He was a military histori- an (Edward VII made him librarian at Windsor to fund his authoritative histo- ry of the Army); his wife was, at least in writing, slightly dewy-eyed.
This is a woman who at dinner to cel- ebrate the anniversary of her marriage to her septuagenarian husband always put on her wedding dress; I can't say I have ever thought of pleasing my hus- band in this manner. This is a woman whose ideal of plastic art was the Elfin Oak in Kensington Gardens. In her prose she uses phrases such as 'from whence', 'baby rabbits' and 'the birds and beasts of our little domaine', with its 'little garden gate' and 'little cas- cade'. Over what is stretched the shirt of a Provençal peasant? A lumkin', of course. And what is the Provençal heat? `Sweltering'. Lady Fortescue always refers to herself in the third person (a bad sign; Arthur Scargill does it) as Madame.
And yet, and yet .. . she couldn't have been as soft as she sounds now. It was just that she wrote in the tone expected of her time, the 1930s.. All we get in the Nineties is Peter Mayle.
Dot Wordsworth
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