Birds, wild flowers, and Prime Ministers
Isabel Colegate
OTHER PEOPLE: DIARIES September 1963-December 1966 by Frances Partridge HarperCollins, f 18, pp. 297 Staying at Charleston with Duncan Grant in the autumn of 1964, Frances Partridge writes: Plunged in this old Bloomsbury civilisation I am overpowered with pleasure and emotion at the sense that all round me real values have been arrived at and achieved, and that the house, garden and all it contains is a unique work of art ... Even now when nearly all of them are dead, it is the same ....
Frances Partridge In the fourth volume of her diaries to be published, her faith in those values sustains her as she shoulders the burden of a new grief, the unexpected death from a heart attack of her son Burgo only three years after the death of her adored husband Ralph Partridge. The Bloomsbury belief in rigorous clarity, whether of thought or emotion, gives her a dogged honesty as she confronts bereavement, and as friends, books, music, travel, talk, re-awaken her interest and curiosity. The beloved friends are not immune from criticism. Nor are people in public life, nor the rich, the reli- gious, the pretentious, all of whom arouse a certain instinctive suspicion. She is vio- lently irritated by what she sees as Sonia Orwell's shallow trendiness, shocked by `the self-satisfied line-up of the rich, how- ever civilised, against all that I think of value'. Her stout scepticism about people she suspects of wrong attitudes is uncom- promising and sometimes very funny. At a weekend house party in Lincolnshire, she is driven round the countryside by Peter Hes- keth, who turns out to be the 'delightful Peter', once suggested as a possible match for Frances's extraordinarily neurotic friend Julia Strachey. He leads his hapless passengers past various relics of properties with which he has a family connection while they pass the time in social chit-chat ('Who was she?' Oh yes, that belonged to old Lord Liverpool."Oh, was he the one with the wooden leg?"Yes, did you know him?"Why, very well indeed!' Oh really?'). Delightful Peter's final coup is to make a detour on the long drive back to London in order to pass the modern block of flats which has replaced the house where his family once lived; the diarist's indignation knows no bounds. Nor is she well-disposed towards C. P. Snow, by then ennobled, and his wife Pamela Hansford- Johnson, when they appear to be patronis- ing her good friend Raymond Mortimer. World events to which the general public reacts emotionally also tend to leave her cold. She fears that the fuss about Churchill's funeral may only reveal nostal- gia for war. When Kennedy is assassinated she comments:
Last night came the extraordinary news of the assassination of President Kennedy. After his excellent speech about international understanding to the American universities fear this may make nuclear war more likely. Poor Alix [Strachey] began to suffer with her false teeth last night and removed some of them, which gave her a rather terrifying witch-like appearance.
In the end it is the friendships, old and new (for she is intrigued and often charmed by the young), which engross, concern and comfort her — those and the love of natural beauty, which one suspects in the absence of religion goes some way to take its place. Staying in Italy near Lake Orta with her friend Eardley Knowles, she is told by two elderly aristocratic ladies whom they discover living in a magnificent though half-closed house, and who admit to being `abnormal' in their love of wild flowers, about a certain remote valley. The two friends set off to find it.
We entered a new world which I hope I shall never forget the look of in all my life. A high valley, a basin of short turf, with the snow mountains all round and melted snow from them running in a stream down the middle. The smooth slopes were thickly sprinkled with marvellously clear-coloured Alpine flowers, a beautiful mixture of purple and white crocuses, very blue forget-me-nots, yel- low pansies, gentians big and small, primula farinosa, orchids yellow and red, a glorious pale yellow pasque-flower and two other anemones. My reaction was certainly 'abnor- mal', worshipping and intoxicated.
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