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A Tragedy
By LORD EGREMONT
WORSE than a malade imaginaire is a midecin imaginaire. Tragedy can be comic-for somebody whom it does not concern : comedy can be tragic for .P somebody whom it does concern.
These thoughts and others occurred to me when on a rainy afternoon
I was searching my book shelves- for a particular book with the object of verifying a reference for some work which I had in hand. For me shelves of books are all too often like shoals of red herrings—and that is what they were on this occasion. Before I could find the book for which I was looking, I happened upon Mr Michael Astor's charming auto- biographical book, Tribal Feeling, which I had much enjoyed reading when it was first published by John Murray in 1963. I abandoned my search and browsed in the book.
Obviously Michael Astor's father, Lord Astor, had a deep affection for his children. His concern about them and their health drove him to extra- ordinary lengths. When in the 1-920s Lord Astor travelled to Scotland with his family for the summer holidays, he took with him on the train a cow and a cowman from the home farm at Cliveden. The cow was milked at Edinburgh and the little Astors nourished without having to drink strange milk. Then the Astors and the train proceeded further north and the cowman and the cow went back to Cliveden. Whether the cowman and the cow were brought back for the return journey, Michael Astor cannot remember; but I should not be surprised. In any case the object of protecting the Astor children from infection, for that was Lord Astor's obsession, was not frus- trated. He was lucky. To be meticulous is to tempt fate. In this case Lord Astor got away with it.
But not so my grandfather, who was meticulous too. He was married in 1867. Seventy years later my grandmother, whom we loved, told her grand- children something about it. On coming up Hailing Hill to a beautiful Sussex house, Uppark, where they were to spend their honeymoon, the
postillion got off and could not get on again, My grandmother told us, `Henry' (that was my grandfather) `had to get out to assist him and apologised t'o me afterwards for having said damn in my presence.' Their first-born, Georg; was the apple of their eye, and well- he might have been. He had charm, good looks and intelli- gence. Everything was done to encourage George's undoubted ability. The best tutors were engaged to egg him on in the holidays. One of them was an extremely able young man called Quiller-Couch. Years later, when I was an under- graduate at Cambridge, I met the aged and revered Stir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Professor of English Literature (`Literature,' he would insist, 'is not a mere science to be studied; but an art to be practised'). Q—for it was he who had been George's tutor—was celebrated for his hos- pitality, his kindness of heart, his humour, his conversation, and the care which he took in choosing and wearing his - picturesque clothes. This last-mentioned practice may have been a reaction to be attributed to- the time when, very young and poor, he worked very long hours to support his widowed mother and his two brothers and to pay off some family debts for which he was not responsible.
Anyway, at Cambridge Q spoke to me about George. He said that of the exquisite surround. ings of his home, George seemed quite tin. observant. Yet, Q told me, a line of Virgil could move George well-nigh to tears, and a first glimpse of Plato affected him much as a child might be dazzled by the light of an unfamiliar doorway half open and surmise the wonderful world within. Q seemed still to be surprised about this. I was not. The grass is always greener the other side of the fence.
Lord Astor had his cow. What my grandfather had was barrels of water. Lord Astor was obsessed with thoughts about the risk of drinking strange milk. My grandfather's obsession was about strange water. When, for example, the family was in London (9 Chesterfield Gardens on the corner of Curzon Street: the site is now occupied by the hideous Leconfield House), he had barrels of drinking water sent up from his country home at Petworth. He said that he was not going to risk his children catching typhoid fever from drinking the London tap water. My father, aunts and uncles have told me how, as children, they could gauge, without going near the barrel, the level of the water in it by the degree of the brackish taste of the water in their glasses at table.
This mad business of carting drinking water from Petworth to Chesterfield Gardens went on until on January 13, 1895, Uncle George died of typhoid fever. Contracted at Petworth.
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