Failure to bore

Philip Ziegler

MOMENTS OF VISION: A MEMOIR by Elizabeth Basset The Ledburn Press, £15, pp. 160, ISBN 095491810X He sees Dickens and Jerrold performing Every Man in his Humour. He sees a 2,000strong choir sing Handel’s ‘Messiah’ at the Crystal Palace, and isn’t too much impressed. He seems to think, having seen an early demonstration of chloroform, that the invention of general anaesthetic was the best thing before sliced bread, and how right he was.

One of the most attractive aspects of Greville as a diarist is the way he does what we all do: exaggerate like mad and then forget. Those of us exposed at a young age to literary theory have been trained to hope for, if not demand, something called Radical Alterity from the inhabitants of the benighted historical periods before the emergence of Karl Marx or Terry Eagleton. Greville’s world may be different to our own, but his worldview is pretty intelligible. He was silly, like us. His gift survived him.

Obituarising friends or colleagues, Greville’s habit is to make daft, sentimental ‘never the same again’ claims; and then, with the clarity which is his best recommendation, to gainsay them. So, on the death of the painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, he writes on 9 January 1830:

He was the longe primus of all living painters and has left no one fit to succeed him in the Royal Academy ... remarkably gentlemanlike, with very mild manners ... agreeable in society, a very great talker ... he was an irreparable loss; since Sir Joshua there has been no Painter like him...

On 22 January he reports on Sir Thomas’s ‘magnificent’ funeral:

The ceremony in the Church lasted two hours. Pretty well for a man who was certainly a rogue and a bankrupt, and probably a bugger.

Lord Holland, at whose salon Greville was a frequent visitor — he was, no bad thing, an intellectual snob — fared likewise:

His death will produce a social revolution, utterly extinguishing not only the most distinguished but the only great house of reception and constant society in England [he wrote in the autumn of 1840], an irreparable loss to the world at large.

By January:

I dined with Lady Holland yesterday. Everything there is the same as it used to be, excepting only the person of Lord Holland who seems pretty well forgotten.

If nothing else, the diaries serve as a brisk reminder that this, too, shall pass. At the beginning (6 August, 1821) Greville wrote:

For ever be this day accursed which has been to me the bitterest of my existence. The particulars will remain too deeply engraved on my memory to need being written down here.

In 1836, rereading the manuscript, he added a marginal note:

The devil take me if I have any idea to what this alludes. I can’t guess.

For most of those who remember her, Elizabeth Basset was an old lady of wisdom, generosity, seraphic good-nature and an inexhaustible interest in other people. She took life’s problems with proper seriousness but was always ready to find the antics of humanity, herself included, delightfully ridiculous. The five anthologies of verse and prose which she published, most notably her first, the best-selling Love is My Meaning, revealed the sources of her own spiritual development and provided inspiration and comfort for many thousands of readers.

Shortly before she died she completed a volume of memoirs, which has subsequently been put in order and is now published. The childhood she describes is today so alien as to seem from another world. At luncheon at Patshull, the vast 18th-century James Gibb mansion which was the home of her grandfather, the Earl of Dartmouth, ‘little baskets with pottery linings’ were laid out on the radiators and filled up with whatever food was left over at the end of the meal. Each afternoon Lady Dartmouth would drive around the estate, distributing the baskets to whatever households seemed most in need. Today, Elizabeth reflects, ‘this would be considered patronising ... But at least it meant that Granny was in touch with people.’ There was a bevy of aunts; ‘the auntheap’ as they were known collectively. Great-aunt Fanny ‘suffered from hurt feelings and was usually in tears’, Aunt Joan, who kept goats, was emotionally more robust but eventually fell down a precipice while collecting plants in the Himalayas. Elizabeth took a fancy to the goats and refused to accept the tradition that they were destined for hell while the sheep found their way to heaven: ‘I cannot help thinking that judgmental, exclusive Christians, who think they are “best”, do much harm to our Christian faith.’ After the first world war Elizabeth’s parents settled at Godmersham, once home to Jane Austen’s brother and believed to be the model for Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s Rosings Park. Lady Catherine would not have approved of the goings-on in Elizabeth’s day. Elizabeth’s father, at that stage Viscount Lewisham, farmed in an amateurish way: a cart-horse used to stand on the front steps with its head in the hall; there were often sheep in the kitchen; not surprisingly the family was known in the neighbourhood as ‘the mad people from Godmersham’. In spite of this bucolic background, however, Elizabeth grew up in total ignorance of the facts of life. When she was 16 her host at a party kissed her chastely on the cheek. She was convinced that this would make her pregnant and suffered agonies of anxiety for months thereafter.

Her father in due course became Lord Great Chamberlain and Elizabeth felt quite at home in royal circles; she still had doubts, however, when in the 1950s she was invited to become lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. ‘But I’m so boring,’ she expostulated to Arthur Penn, the Queen Mother’s private secretary. ‘Oh that does make a difference,’ replied Penn, with something less than perfect tact. The Queen Mother quickly decided that Elizabeth was not in the least boring and kept her in her service for 40 years. Anyone looking for scandalous titbits about life at court must seek elsewhere, but this is a moving picture of a close and loving relationship. Elizabeth pays tribute to the warmth, the dedication, the humanity, the sense of fun, which made the Queen Mother’s life in many ways so remarkable; in so doing she tacitly makes clear how much those qualities enriched her own life as well.

Obtainable from selected bookshops or from the Ledburn Press, Ledburn Manor, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire LU 7 0PX for £17 including p&p.