Saxonford: Vol. 1 Winter Into Summer

JANUARY

Combe Court, Kent. Friday, January 1th 1954.

Tues, Jan 5th

On the first of this year, with a solemn New Year’s resolution to write daily in this diary all resolve came to naught in a moment (See above). For I began as I did not mean to proceed and my hand upon the pen upon the paper froze in dismay at what I wrote, for in the short distance between brain and page so much alters, jumbles and overplays. Disappointed and embarrassed I quietly closed the diary, gingerly replacing the cap over the nib of my pen wondering why I allowed myself to give in to self-inflicted bullying. I knew I should advance boldly snatching up my pen and slashing away at the page perhaps in a frenzy of automatic writing, attempting a scribble in tough customer Gertrude Stein mode, or pour forth in a fierce existential journal genre. No, I ventured forth in a thoughtless and mundane manner as if some provincial Victorian ecclesiastic at the commencement of another leaden memoir. I must however remind myself I have put off writing any variety of diary or journal not for only five days but five decades.

What compels me to try again is irritation at these stark white pages of this spanking new diary, or journal, or do I mean ledger; for across these annoying white sheets I intend to write a slew of memoirs with the help of the few remaining tattered shreds of my mind. I dare say all will unravel plainly enough with wads of nourishing gossip and insalubrious personal histories all with accompanying scandals and clinky clanking skeletons.

By my side on the bed sits a tin box containing hundreds of photographs, from which I shall randomly pick, as a convenient memory metaphor, one photograph at a time on which to comment while the rest go ignored. In this way, I reason the task of writing a daily diary or journal of reminiscences may prove more interesting than turning laboriously each page of formally chronologically arranged photograph albums such as my mother liked to keep organised in a hefty bureau lined with green baize full of daguerreotypes on copper plates and photographs on glass. Either way one arrives at the end with the same information, only the direction and mode of getting there varies. A travel metaphor, for I am not much of the A to B traveller type, finding destinations more interesting to arrive at by circuitous and exotic routes rambling through mosquito-infested jungles and up the sides of rumbling lava spewing volcanoes, even if bitten or scorched and hopelessly lost. Or else stretching the point, rather like a sensual relationship – and getting lost in life reveals the naked flesh of existence one finds so appealing. Oh, dear, I am not exactly sure what I mean by ‘the naked flesh of existence.’ A romp through the years anyway with my tin box securely strapped to my naked flesh of existence.

My fingers flutter o’er the tin … and I hold in my hand, a much-faded photograph of my Nanny Eliot taken about the time she retired. She looks a vastly old woman in the picture though most likely not more than the age I am now. I remember she used to say, ‘as one ages the longer days appear yet the years grow ever shorter, so by the time one is elderly Christmas arrives every few months.’ Recently I understand the truth in her observation, for over the last decade my birthday and Christmas pass with astonishing and ever increasing rapidity yet how agonisingly long the days can sometimes seem. Writing in bed is strangely challenging, balancing this journal, and especially using a fountainpen, already sans cap managing a get-away and deliberately spoiling a good linen top sheet.

Temporarily laid up I will make the attempt and jot out a few reminiscences before my failing memory is cast upon the four winds where as sure as eggs is eggs one’s ashes are soon to follow. Oh dear, no, for this is hardly correct and mere sentimental invention for I recently decided upon internment – and one must watch out for these comfortable poetic cliché’s with unfortunate references to ash, eggs, and their associate wind.

No, I do not think Nanny Eliot, or any nanny a good starting point for anyone’s memoirs. These last few comments are most unsatisfactory and if writing is condensed thought and an art form, why does this expensive and stylish pen not perform as anticipated instead of bumbling and wandering about on sloppy tangents.

On this contradictory and unprepossessing note propped up amongst my pillows, I shall commence my tale. Perhaps though not before lunch as I see there is barely ten minutes before my tray arrives and pointless to get into the swing of reminiscence and interrupted in a few minutes by soup, and soup in bed also a tricky business if one does not fully concentrate. I must say I am comforted to know Mrs B’s soups are never prepared from the tailbone of an ox. An outlandish soup I remember from childhood Nanny Eliot enjoyed and whose particular thick and repellent odour lingers forever in my memory and can still threaten to tickle up a phantom gag reflex – the soup I mean, not Nanny Eliot. Mind you, Nanny often displayed a variety of her own odours I shall not go into right now, or ever.

Yes, daily diary, journal keeping is my number one New Year resolution.

Wed, Jan 6th

Duff Cooper, Viscount Norwich died on January 1st, a long-time friend, cabinet minister and envoy, and only 63 years of age – no age at all. He sent me a copy of his autobiography last year "Old Men Forget." Diana, Duff’s widow, whom I last saw at the Queen’s Coronation, says she does not like the title, Lady Norwich as this sounds too much like porridge so she decided to retain her previous style of Lady Diana Cooper.

Lying also on my plausible deathbed I wonder at my New Year resolution enthusiasm, for I nodded off after lunch yesterday remaining in a non-mind state until teatime; a tendency I exhibit these days with the witchdoctor supplying me with anaesthetic elixirs – so many possible beginnings … and getting underway in writing this a diary/journal trickier than imagined.

Thu, Jan 7th

Today I decided I should like to write about old friends and loves, and about various travels and travails yet convey similarly something of the flavour of the specific periods in which I dwelt.

I must remember moreover not to censor myself now so many years have swept by, as the proverbial choppy and bloody waters under the rickety bridges of life… Yes, well, this cliché-free word handling and instant commitment to paper using indelible India ink is an exacting and tricky trap if one’s wits are not completely up to the mark; I see I should have started out with a simple B-pencil and a good India-rubber eraser.

My unexciting Nanny Eliot I am afraid I must reject as supplying any form of constructive stimulus, and instead pulled from my tin box a photograph of my old friend, Dudley. Dudley, the first person who tried to get me to write seriously, or at least to seriously write his school essays for him, so I shall commence with Dudley for after all did he and I not endure many years as schoolboys together.

An excellent first memory springing to mind is of Dudley and I clinking glasses at our club one night – the year in question 1924 and both of us forty-three years-of-age. I remember the year because the first Labour Government came to power and we believed them the harbinger to the end of our civilized and privileged way of life – and a labour government did in many respects herald such an end.

Anyway, at some point during the evening, Dudley excitedly put forward the extraordinary notion I should write his biography.

Malcolm, my man, he proclaimed, my oldest bosom pal – sharpen up thy trusty quills, order in the reams, and scribe the fascinating story of my life, tell all, leaving no stones unfurled.

Dudley spoke in this exaggerated manner when in his cups and frequently when out of them too, so I did not take much notice of his whim the hour late and the two of us fairly soused. Chaps in this condition often bring up subjects in conversation they would not ordinarily approach in the cool light of day, or even in a month of Sundays. I could not for instance imagine bumping into Dudley, say, some Monday morning on Bond Street and hear him exclaim, Ah, Malcolm, old chum, knock up a quick memoirs of my scintillating life will you there is a good chap? Righty-ho … well, toodle-oo. A completely unrealistic scenario and a situation both wrong in time and place, and in just about everything else, too.

One may wonder at my utter astonishment when the following Monday morning I did bump into Dudley on Bond Street– staggering the details one lodges in the thinkers when I cannot even remember what I ate for breakfast this morning. We spoke of this and the other passing time as school chums are wont to do; when all at once he socked me square between the eyes, figuratively speaking of course, asking me in what I thought an insouciant manner how I progressed with the story of his life. Not given his bio much or an iota of thought, I replied, Oh, all right, you know … one tries not to complain or dwell.

He eyed me in a way I can only describe as, the keen eyeball of suspicion, Dudley a cracker at suspicious eyeballing and soon I crumbled beneath his accusatory gaze. I remember a time at school when half a packet of Jaffa cakes went missing from his tuck box. Dudley fixed his flashing eyes upon the lot of us reducing the culprit – Wind’s-up Fatty, no great surprise there, to a heap of blubbering confessional suet.

Malcolm, Dudley uttered with a stabbed-through-the heart inflection, I must say I am shocked, nay hurt how an old school chum of mine could act so thoughtless, nay, negligently in the handling of another school chum’s bio.

How could one reasonably respond to such a harangue – so I suggested as the lunch hour approached we toddle up to the club for a session at the troughs and discuss the theme in a civilised manner.

Research is imperative in the doing of biographies, you know? Dudley counselled over his veal cutlet.

I agreed. Of the utmost priority I would say. One does not go wading in with actual writing without thoroughly researching the topic in question. First, one must slosh around in the murky shallows fact-finding, finding facts; facts are the factor and plenty of ‘em.

Yes, Dudley declared thoughtfully, honest to goodness facts tempered with a sensitive avoidance of some of the more unpalatable realities of life.

Dudley seemed to think there lurked within me a book on the strength of several short ten bob essays I constructed for him at school, saving him from a sticky wicket with Hodgkin the Latin master. Latin, not one of Dudley’s stronger subjects and his first form report card for Latin I remember read, ‘D minus – seems unable to grasp the fundamentals of the subject.’ I suppose myself a B+ Latin Scholar Dudley thought me relatively bee’s-kneesish in this area of scholarly pursuit.

And please, no Latin or Greek quotes in my bio either, Dudley continued. The plain King’s English is good enough for this lad, and I know the King’s English an absolute breeze for a chap of your infinite talents.

Whom, but the blind and deaf, I thought spearing a gravy-soaked Brussels sprout and perhaps the morally incorruptible could claim immunity to Dudley’s flattery and charm. Even though one knew much of Dudley’s charm spouted forth from the copious fountains of bunkum, he possessed the talent to ease himself into the softest, pinkest parts of the bosom and pluck there hypnotic airs on one’s heartstrings. Once in his mid-teens I witnessed Dudley’s charm sweeten the sourest, crustiest Duchess to the point of outright indecency. I have watched the toughest of sporty school prefect’s knees reduced to quivering aspic at the mere turn of Dudley’s handsome head; with his hint of a smile and piercing eyes suggesting all yet in most cases, or should I say at least in one or two cases, delivering zippo in the way of schoolboy ecstasies.

By the time our spotted dicks and custard steamed before us, one might have seen me jotting on the backs of menus copious biographical notes – one might, but I resisted for already I sensed the soft silken strands of Dudley’s web slowly encircle me as he spun his line to compel the automaton in me do his bidding.

With a twitch of the web Dudley reminded me with the London Season at an end and the doors of the fashionable pleasure houses bolted and shuttered, nothing much remained in town to occupy my piercingly intelligent mind or indeed to justify my existence as a lowly secondary status spare-man and reputation as an incorrigible and unmarriageable bachelor. He also kindly pointed out how at heart I remained a relatively youngish man of independent means, though with my famous disposition for boundless indolence I sank into the offseason position of little more than an underemployed societal lounge loafer.

Without taking the least or much umbrage, I informed Dudley of my toying with the proposal of joining a few likeminded pals and heading off for a quasi-philanthropic jaunt to sunny Morocco. Dudley feigning disbelief and disgust at such an immoral, loaferish idea spent a good five minutes nipping this plan in the bud, and insisting I spend several weeks with him at his family pile at Saxonford deep in the wilds of Buckinghamshire, to relax after our strenuous season in ballrooms and nightclubs and research his book. Initially the idea did appeal, Saxonford Castle one of the most beautiful domiciles and estates in England with excellent victuals and amenities; and with carte blanche to wade through the famous Saxonford library and ancient archives and since the last pernickety resident librarian’s demise no one in tow all the time breathing down one’s neck proved a definite incentive.

I know you will discover heaps of delicious skeletons, Dudley assured me. Every shelf in every closet you peek into contains at least two or three, and a superfluity of ghosts and phantoms roam the corridors; and you know all about the bricked up nun, and the gruesome headless aunt who haunts.

I gave in. Oh, all right, Dudley, I will come for a fortnight for whom but the grossly incontinent could resist a headless haunting aunt?

Now I want my biography strictly factual, Dudley instructed me as we left the club, though perhaps with a slight novelistic treatment, romantic yet with a hint of the Gothic … including a short, though extensive history of my ancient lineage, castle and estate, and in passing a brief mention of our picturesque market town of Saxonford, and ….

We took a stroll through Green Park to digest and discuss, but when Dudley’s ramblings began to transform the originally conceived single volume biography into three hefty illustrated folio editions, I drew the line. Look here, Dudley, old man, I poked my umbrella to shoo away an assertive pigeon disturbed by the rival he saw reflected in my highly polished footwear, I may joyfully sacrifice two whole weeks of my allotted span devoted to this work but a lifetime’s haul a bit much to ask, even from chaps at school together. Dudley smiled his winning smile and changed the subject.

We decided to drive down to the castle on Friday, but Dudley called on Thursday night remembering his good wife of twenty-four years, and better half, the delightful Lady Bunty entertained an end of season beano at the castle over the weekend. Dudley claimed he wanted us to avoid the event fearing frivolity unconducive on my part to any serious flowing of intellectual biographical juices.

The truth of our delayed departure I found out later, due to a Saturday night assignation for Dudley with Adonis in the form of an American sailor. We therefore beetled off to Saxonford on the Monday afternoon.

Fri, Jan 8th

I wonder at the artificial way many of the younger upper crust used to speak during the twenties, though at the time our speech did not seem markedly affected only tres modern. Trends in speech like all else change and one seldom hears anymore, stinko, guff, and toodle-oo, and old this and old chap. These days I have witnessed – smashing and super-dooper and groovy, and I do not know what else. I suspect I am what young people today might call a square old ungroovy cat.

I cannot think at this late stage in the game – seventy-two in two months, from where I acquired this compelling need to write in this journal. The idea invigorates me, and perhaps anxiety in the realisation of approaching demise and of some issue left tacit or incomplete. No, this is not right, for in a way I am looking forward to the great non-beyond and to a whole new angle on non-dimensional existence – or not. Naturally, one is apprehensive with the shambolic process of dying with the unreliable body and mind slowly breaking down. Jotting in this journal and by relating a story, not necessarily my own perhaps keeps the brain and memory functioning in a more proficient way; and so I shall begin, only I think tomorrow.

Sat, Jan 9th

Here to begin:

‘A True Story Wherein a Debutante Rebels and a Viscount Coerced.’

At six-feet-three inches tall and once described by a rude newspaper reporter as ‘effectively too handsome,’ Dudley, Viscount Saxonford knew the porcelain beauty, Lady Bunty Plumbright (silent ‘b’) for a full eighteen years before their engagement in the late summer of 1899.

They found themselves frequently as wee babies tucked snugly together in bassinet, cot and picnic hamper at hunts, shoots and family excursions; and for the first two years of their lives shared a nanny until the discovery of the woman’s habit of stealthy supping from the bottle a sight more habitually than her charges. Their parents, neighbours and the best of friends when not in their singular or combined sundry ill humours, the whole tribe exuding a high bred and thin-skinned temperament fashionable amongst certain strata of the much diluted blue-blooded aristocracy in the closing years of the 19th century.

Even at eighteen months people remarked how well Bunty and Dudley looked together, and both families harboured fancies of their two darlings and estates one day uniting in wedded and more importantly procreative and financial accord.

Lady Bunty’s coming out year and compulsory presentation at court came as a torturous ordeal, for her height of scarcely less than six-feet and head of thick honey blonde hair proved unfashionable liabilities during this era, and in her first season insurmountable obstacles within the highest echelons of the marriage market. Eligible young ladies presented to the Monarch submitted to a set of strict formal dress requirements, the long white dress with cumbersome train, long white gloves and in their hair three curled white Prince of Wales ostrich feathers – an extra two-foot of height Lady Bunty scarcely needed.

No gentleman of royal stature cared for the humiliating function of dancing or even standing next to a woman who towered above him. Even with Bunty’s fine redeeming features, her pleasant angularity and slimness, carrying herself with elegance and a confident fluidity, plus her large personal income and immensely rich family, nothing aided the unassailable problem of her height. As such Queen Victoria saw in Lady Bunty no breeding potential as wife to even a minor fringe or foreign prince or duke within her vastly extended Royal family no matter how tall, feeble, impoverished, or blue-chinned the foreign royal.

When Bunty as a lanky and precocious nine-year-old heard The Queen proclaim, "No, the Plumbright gal is built like a shepherd’s crook – and as a breeder certainly will never do. –summarily excommunicating Lady Bunty during Queen Victoria’s lifetime from acquiring any husband from the rank or the file of the first family. Bunty at nine understood completely the implications of Her Majesty’s pronouncement and this royal snub; and she smiled at the nefarious aged woman and her statement and did not care. For Bunty, although not fully aware of the reality stood as one of the first of a new breed of post-Victorian women – ‘a woman in her own right’ a woman who thought and did for herself and not merely an appendage, or extracted rib of some man. Even before the end of The Queen’s excessively long reign, Bunty rejected the cast of High-Victorian rigidity forced upon her mother and grandmother; for after millenniums women (or those who could afford to) at last set about living lives of their own on their own terms. Bunty looked forward with eagerness to the opening of the new century auspiciously coinciding with her eighteenth birthday, her final and official ascent into womanhood. She did admit her appearance might alarm the faint-hearted suitor, but she laughed asking herself, Why would I or any woman consider breeding with such a lily-livered weakling of a man anyway?"

She gazed at her long self in the glass of her room and saw despite the severe height and exceedingly un-dark hair a decidedly chic young woman. Chic – not a word much used in Victorian England, but Bunty saw her appearance as definitely chic. She appeared elegant in all she wore from the hautest Parisian couture’s when in London, to her father’s muddy green wellies when hacking about with the dogs in the countryside. Her beautifully unfashionable straight blonde hair she typically tied in a fat loose plait wound and pinned untidily to the back of her head, the whole mess covered with one of Nanny’s discarded hairnets, a coiffure on most women looking slatternly or worse spinsterish, but on Bunty looked entirely new and stylish.

… And so I have finished my out season in London, Bunty continued. I did my five curtsies at Buck House and my hair pinned up for life; and after all, Dudley … Dudley? she spoke peevishly, are you listening to me?

Dudley looked up, Yes, I am listening, he affirmed falsely.

I am saying we are about to enter 1900 – a new century and a whole new start … so what do you say? Come on, Dud, you know if we married we would make the muvs’ and farvs’ insanely happy. Bunty looked expectantly at the beautiful Dudley slouched in a wicker lounge chair languidly eating a muffin. The two took tea together in the white stone gazebo designed in early gothic revival Greek temple style.

Yes I know, and what a tiresome bore, Dudley sighed lazily gazing out across the vast green lawn and up to the south front terrace of Saxonford Castle where their parents took tea shaded from the afternoon sun. Look at the muv’s and the farv’s up there itching for a wedding, and the production of an heir and any number of spares. You are only out in society for five minutes Bunters and they want you breeding already … and all too disgusting, do you not think so?

"Yes, I know, but do you not see the utter divineness of our future life together, Dudley? I am dying to get away from home now I am out – and so are you. We will have a lovely house in town, carriages, and even a motored contraption, and friends to stay whenever we like. We are eighteen after all, and only think, no restrictions or chaperoning, parties whenever we want … we will live in complete heaven … Do you not want to live in complete heaven, Dudley? Oh, come on, Dud, do admit to complete heaven?"

Viscount Dudley sat pondering, pouring himself another cup of tea, giving Bunty a sulky sidelong look. Equally slim as Bunty they received their joint magisterial inspired nickname – … Lord and Lady Stick.

"Oh, how droll of you, ma’am."

"Yes, most amusing, ma’am."

Prepubescent Dudley often described as pretty though somewhat affected in manner, now close to attaining his majority metamorphosed into a strikingly handsome young man. His hair fashionably black, thick, and wavy Bunty craved and pulled when looking especially black and beautiful and so annoyingly wasted on a man. The pair at a certain distance and angle looked a tremendously fine young couple when posed against a fireplace in palace or castle chatting tête-à-tête, or walking the dogs together at Bunty’s home, Thorp Crest Hall. Frequently their parents heard terms such as, made for one another, and a great match, and the most handsome couple in Buckinghamshire. The pair, great chums since babyhood could but for their tresses passed for siblings. Related through the Anglo-Saxonford side of the family many times over, and like many who breed within the narrow confines of the English aristocracy their faces grew slightly long and perhaps a little on the horsy side – a great aid when humorously portraying in caricature the nobility of the land.

I do see your point, Bunters, Dudley sighed again, but are chaps not meant to … well you know, love the person they are engaged to or some such rot? Are there not a set of rules and standards covering these issues?

Oh, what an out of fashion darling you are, Bunty chided, of course not. We are in 1899, Dudley, not 1799. – And to illustrate her modern self she eased a small cheroot inexpertly into the end of her new ivory holder. Arranged marriages are all the rage again and the love business comes much later on, if at all. I mean, we are fond of one another and have heaps in common. We both love dogs and horses, and animals … we hunt … play croquet … and what is more think how gruesomely rich and independent when we marry. So come on, Dud, and stop playing the meanie … what do you say?

Well, he hesitated wondering if he might manage another muffin. Expectant silence radiated from Bunty. Oh, all right, why not?

Oh, Dudley! Bunty wailed excitedly, pulling from her pocket an engagement ring once worn by her great-great-grandmother. She waited.

Dudley eyed the ring suspiciously.

"Well, go on, Dud, ask me."

What …? Oh, all right … Bunty, will you marry me? he proposed flatly reaching for the muffin salver.

Oh Dudders, yes, yes I will, and smartly slipping the ring onto her finger she looked over at the terrace. They are going to die of happiness is all, and leaping to the steps of the gazebo holding her ringed finger high in triumph, she shouted across the warm summer afternoon.

"Hello! I say … you, up there!"

Four noble English heads turned in her direction.

She waggled her sparkling ring finger at them. "Look, Dudley and I … we are engaged!"

Dudley attempted a smile through his vague biliousness thinking he must remember and tell Mason to ask Mrs Wheeler to use less butter on her otherwise delicious muffins. He remained in his chair but could see his father, Lord Dennis, Earl of Saxonford shake hands vigorously with Bunty’s father, Lord Rupert, Earl of Plumbright, slapping him squarely on the back. While their mothers, Lady Joan, the countess of Saxonford, and Lady Constance, countess of Plumbright hung on one another’s necks for a moment, hands searching pockets and sleeves for handkerchiefs to dab at their happy crocodilian tears.

The taste of melted butter clung to the warm air in the gazebo and Dudley closed his eyes wondering if he could avoid throwing up at all the excitement and butter.

Tue, Jan 10th

With the last of the weekend guests departing after lunch, Dudley and I arrived at Saxonford Castle in time for dinner on the Monday.

Dudley’s father, Lord Saxonford continued in residence though along with his chum, Bunty’s father, Lord Plumbright. I grew a trifle miffed with Dudley as I expressly asked him if my long-standing nemesis, Lord Plumbright resided as a guest at the castle and he told me no definitely not for he knew I would not have accompanied him if I thought him anywhere near the place.

"Book! Lord Plumbright spat across the dining-table as he might roar ‘poacher’ or ‘murderer. The honourable Malcolm Ford-Griffiths here writing a book? He plonked down his knife and fork, and loudly guffawing drained his wine glass motioning the footman to refill. Huh … now I have heard every last bit of damn nonsense."

Oh daddy, you are such an ogre, Bunty interjected playfully. Malcolm is a talented writer … or so we believe … are you not a talented writer, Malcolm? Is he not, Dudley?

Oh, yes, rather. Particularly talented I would hazard to say … are you not, Malcolm?

Well no, actually I ….

"Talented? interrupted his Lordship. Yes, well we are well aware of the particular, or should I say peculiar talents of the Ford-Griffiths clan. More proficient at entering the backdoors of horse guards’ billets I would have thought, ah?" He again guffawed at his own wit, grinding his teeth and staring at me.

Take no notice, Malcolm, Bunty intervened. Poor daddy spent the whole weekend forced to behave himself entertaining our royal guests, and only playing fire-breathing dragons with you to let off a bit of steam.

Lord Plumbright growled.

I endeavoured for over quarter of a century to take no notice of Lord Plumbright. Yet whenever I relaxed and thought Lord Plumbright’s malicious words mere water off my duck’s proverbial he struck me a square one between the kidneys and I muttering, "Oh, I say!" and gathering up my dignity sweep away from him across enclosure, park, theatre or ballroom. With a muttered defensive exclamation rising in me right now, Dudley kicked me in the ankle under the table unnecessarily hard I thought and catching my eye conspiratorially winked.

The crux of this whole dismal debacle with Lord Plumbright occurred in part through his forced fagging for my father at school when a young teen, where my father as a senior boy used him fairly brutishly as custom decreed, making Lord Plumbright’s young existence a decidedly debauched business for the whole year. As a result, Lord Plumbright did not love my father or me by association – including a few other minor offences of mine to which he took umbrage. For a naturally gifted blighter like Lord Plumbright who chalked up any number scandals of his own over the years, I thought him a bit thick constantly casting first stones in my direction and bringing up the unfortunate guardsmen incident yet again, wherein Dudley, his son-in-law stood equally implicated. During and after this sordid debacle I evolved my invaluable motto – ‘let sleeping guardsmen lie.’

I could not imagine why the dear elderly sausage, Lord Saxonford, who sat indifferently slurping up his dinner with a spoon put up with this monster under his roof; but of course the two were at school together – at about the time of Christ I believe. Unfortunately, Dennis Saxonford, Dudley’s father, suffered a hereditary disorder causing gradual loss of memory, deafness, blindness, enfeeblement and a general lapse into early senility; though his loud bombastic chum Rupert Plumbright engaged his attention keeping him more active and interested in life than otherwise. Lord Plumbright in his blustery manner would stimulate Dennis, dragging him about their houses and estates bellowing on about nothing throughout the day – this Lord Plumbright’s general approach and conduct towards virtually everyone.

Do you not think our dads like an adorable old married couple, Malcolm? Bunty asked as Dudley and I joined her for coffee in the white and gold drawing-room. Since the general absence of Bunty and Dudley’s mums busy as ladies-in-waiting at court or out and about in high society, the two Lords kept each other company, and Bunty thought touching to see them arm in arm wandering about the place.

Adorable? I questioned. No, adorable does not spring immediately to mind – unappealing however positively leaps, and we escaped as soon as we dared leaving them to their brandy and primeval reminiscences.

I wonder, Dudley pondered, what your farv will do if my muv and farv croak first. We do not want to find him stuck on our hands … do you think we might encourage him to remarry?

Oh, please, Dudley, Bunty grimaced, how repugnant, the man is sixty already. Bunty turned to me. You know, Malcolm, Daddy acts like a hell’s demon towards you, but actually in his way he is genuinely fond of you.

With a coffee cup tipped to my lips, I refrained from imbibing lest I choke and splutter in astonishment.

Pardon me, Bunty, I asserted lowering my cup, one may on occasion think me naive, but I fail to detect the slightest hint in your father’s attitude towards me of anything loosely resembling genuine fondness … loathing yes, contempt yes – fondness, no.

But Malcolm, you should understand by now, daddy is in reality a shy person, Bunty insisted, and pretending fierceness his irregular way of dealing with most people.

I made a sound of protestation – I am forty-three, dear, as are you and Dudley, and since I met your father at age sixteen, twenty-seven years ago, he persists in harassing me at every turn. Are you suggesting your father’s fierceness towards me over this twenty-seven year span is caused by mere shyness, preventing him from clasping me to his ample bosom and declaring his undying fondness for me?

Actually, Dudley cut in, if he truly despised you he would either ignore you or show you nothing but silent disdain.

Exactly, Bunty affirmed, and never bother with you in any way.

Yet any time you or your family name crops up, Dudley continued, he behaves like he means to devour you all alive. So saying, if you review his attitude, consider the facts and available evidence, I think you will have to agree, well … the man simply dotes on you.

I laughed them to scorn.

No, Malcolm, Dudley is right, you genuinely appeal to him in some strange way, as once did your father. I think partly on account of your father’s fleshly schoolboy attentions … of which I am happy to say I cannot even begin to imagine.

Here again prevailed the famous Plumbright-Saxonford anti-logic at work.

Soon I excused myself to go through to the superb Grinling Gibbons library for an hour or two of biographic research and scribbling before bed. As I left the drawing-room Dudley stage whispered to Bunty, … yes, and Malcolm’s farv roger’d your farv well-nigh every night of the school year, and some say your farv noticeably took to the ordeal, and some even say he grew to secretly love his abuser.

Now as apropos to nothing much – apart from the United States still and forever looking to grab our Hawaii and suck the islands into their union. I am therefore surprised to read in The Times today a former Governor of the islands, Ingram Steinbeck commenting on how, ‘the United States should not admit the territory of Hawaii into the union, as the left wing unions have a strangle hold on the islands.’ Well, what I say is – Good for them! In my opinion, the wise Hawaiian citizens could do no better than to elect to advance themselves as a firm independent member of the Great British Commonwealth, and not exist as purely another commonplace state of the Empire of the United States; and Hawaii already displays such a nice part of our Union Jack on their flag, too.

Mon, Jan 11th

On sunny wintery days such as today, when I am well and cannot imagine what ill health and I have in common I want to leap up and dash headlong out into the snow to build a snowman. Instead I sit as I do now, content enough in the sun-drenched conservatory heavily swathed like an Egyptian mummy, one arm extricated from my wrappings to scribble off a few hieroglyphs and read The Times – and the abysmal news of a BOAC jet liner from Singapore to London crashing into the Mediterranean Sea killing all 35 people on the aeroplane. I have never flown in an aeroplane nor do I ever wish to – travel to me is about trains, boats and legs, not wings, though I suppose if in a great hurry, but in such a great hurry to do what, and risk one’s life in doing so I cannot conceive.

I notice the dialogue I wrote over the last few days perhaps rather modern for 1899, and doubtless for 1924, too, although the gist and facts are correct enough; but one must take into account I have written little apart from letters since up at Oxford half a century ago.

Bunty compelled me to commence Dudley’s biography with her account of the day of their engagement. Her coercive techniques as marvellous as those of her hubby, and one of the sturdier points of her personality – rather unsubtle at times (acquired from her father?) but appealingly direct and rarely failing her and working wonders with all manner of dogs and horses, servants and royalty, too.

You need to start off Dudley’s life with an attention grabbing bang, darling, I remember her saying, No one wants to read about how Dudley at the age of four fell from his pony and cracked a collar bone or how he wet his bed until the age of six.

Did he – until six?

We agreed childhood years in bio’s make for generally gruesome reads if not approached at a correct angle involved as they are in much tedious childish hooey. In my opinion, a good angle on childhood years in biography remains undiscovered.

Consequently, over brandy a few nights after our arrival at Saxonford Castle and as the result of my intimate chinwag with Bunty, I presented Dudley with the first few pages of my revolutionary novelistic yet factual biography.

After reading my short account of his engagement, he stared at me hard. Are you completely mad?

What? I responded slightly aggrieved. You asked for facts, did you not?

"Yes, and you may well have caught the nub, but do you not see how I come across as more than a tad wet, if not monumentally ineffectual … I mean, muffins and butter? I did not barf either, only thought I might through nervous excitement at the occasion; and besides one is forced to ask, can a muffin ever hold too much butter, for a muffin can only hold as much butter as a muffin can hold, no?"

Exactly the point I made to Bunters when she related the tale to me near verbatim. Facts are facts, Dudley, and facts are what you desire?

"Not exactly, no … facts are all well and good if not well, not too meticulously factual. Dudley sulkily let my effort drop from his limp fingertips and float to the carpet where a curious house hound passed his wet nose across my snubbed and now smudged effort. To begin with, Malcolm, I think we might proceed in a more general and historical direction before plunging into pure biography with delicate and intimate engagemental material."

Okeydokey, I replied happily enough – anything for a relaxing trouble-free two weeks before popping off to vigorous Morocco.

I again complained to Dudley about his father-in-law’s presence at the castle, who at every turn took to staring at me like an aggressively formal rabid dog. Dudley merely repeated his unawareness of his father-in-law’s residence at the castle when he invited me down. I did not believe him. I remained perplexed and nearly confronted his Lordship one afternoon when we passed in a corridor and he mumbled some assertion as to sequestering guardsmen under my bed.

Why did the man enjoy tormenting me? Well, apart from the reason of his remaining a literal and mental sore-arse over the debacle of fagging for my father, he blamed me entirely for an incident involving guardsmen from years earlier shortly after Bunty and Dudley’s marriage. An incident in which Dudley and I and other personages, nearly implicated ourselves in a scandal bearing the ingredients of a right royal kerfuffle and if gone public reached giddy-making dimensions, toppling governments, igniting revolutions, and at a pinch overthrowing thrones.

Lord Plumbright also considered my youthful self as a mere younger son of a peer with barely a foot on the bottom rung of nobility the lowest form of life imaginable; and I might add for the record, his Lordship a notorious snob of the shoddier type. Hence, in his mind I evolved as the cause of the whole tragedy and thereafter his favourite and enduring scapegoat in the matter. One can imagine therefore finding myself continuing to coexisting under the same slates as this demon did not leave me overly thrilled. Even though the castle stood like a vast warren I asked my man, Robert, to put word out below stairs and beyond, so as quarry, I might receive warnings as to the exact position of my lurking adversary thus avoiding him as the pestilence. In this way, apart from the occasional lunch party and inescapable dinner, I would not have to view the bilious walrus too often. I found the library a safe sanctuary, for Bunty commented, as far as she knew her father never voluntarily entered the library at Saxonford Castle or any library, not even his own at Thorp Crest Hall claiming libraries caused him to wheeze and sneeze, and just looking in the direction of a book gave him a headache.

You are reasonably Earl-free amongst the dust and the bookworms, Bunty counselled. You know I am not a one to tittle-tattle, darling, but daddy is so funny; only the other morning he commented how persons of your stripe, Malcolm, need good bi-weekly oiled thrashings with his crop, and if he ever got his hands on your privates he would boil them in a vat of your own cold-cream. So you can see what a sensitive sweetie he is at heart by the way he imagines so nicely about torturing you, so precisely and perceptively … I mean to say, how many men would even think to boil up another man’s privates in their own cold-cream.

Yes, I am sure you are right, Bunty. I gently crossed my legs, and how violently graphic you Plumbright’s are.

Tue, Jan 12th

I read in The Times today, John, Viscount Simon whom I knew well at one time passed away yesterday age 80 – and fifteen years at least since we last met. I remember we took tea on the terrace at the House of Lords but I cannot think now why I went there, a place I generally avoid – the institution of the H of L I mean not the tearooms. John Simon never did live down the statement he once made before the last war when acting as Baldwin’s foreign secretary, calling Hitler, an Austrian Joan of Arc with a moustache.

Though I also remember the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George about the same time declaring, Hitler is a born leader, a magnetic dynamic personality with single-minded purpose, and I only wish we boasted a man with such supreme qualities as head of affairs in our own country. In retrospect an abysmally unfortunate statement.

I at only 72 am still youngish as far as Viscounts go – though if only my brain would obey more and not struggle to perform as an entirely free agent. At least the doctor reports my alleged ‘condition’ does not encompass yet any form of creeping senility, so thank heavens, but as he ….

Oh, go away! No, no, these interruptions by this intolerable new nurse must cease. This woman, this so-called nurse will have to go, and today. I cannot put up with her for another moment – a dreadfully common and conniving female of the public barmaid variety who uses her supposed wily feminine charms with men to get her own way, and this specimen of the opportunistic gold-digging type I can well see. Well she is barking up the wrong tree stump with this geezer. Does the woman actually think to sway me by her coy tarty smiles, horrible powered phizog and scarlet lips, with her ridiculous conical-covered breasts like a couple of badly tethered dirigibles continually manoeuvring about one’s head. She insults all my senses at one time and I told her so when she rudely interrupted me just now while I started to write about senility. I told her outright, "We live in the year 1954, dear, and not the in era of bad high Restoration comedy; and nor are we enjoying your hackneyed comedy del arte routine – so please leave off, all right?"

She gave me a coquettish smile and expounded the sound, "Rrr-U!" – speech I failed to translate or find any apparent human meaning. I swear the creature did not understand a word I uttered either, but she certainly got the gist by my tone and inflexion. If women sincerely want equality with men, in my opinion they are going to have to start conducting themselves a bit more like men, and stop using the convenient lie of this weaker-sex nonsense and cease using their sex as a tool of cajolery. Her figure-hugging clothing and make-up rub me in completely the wrong direction – how and why would any woman want to act, dress, or look like a tarty circus clown is beyond me?

Bunty would never have done so or used any such caper, not for a second. Even though brought up in the so-called un-enlightened era, as far as I know Bunty did not use her sexuality as a bargaining tool, nor as an instrument of extraction. I know men can execute their fair share of ridiculous rudimentary masculine posturing, yet I have generally found the male ego far more delicate and easily bruised than the female. At their core, I believe women a much hardier breed than are men. I wonder they have not used this trait more to their advantage throughout the ages, and the potential power they could wield over mankind if they used only slightly more intelligence and reason, and discarded the rouge and the beguiling saucy wink. Admittedly, many men are most partial to the painted woman image – woman as whore, ready and willing. Obviously, this must work at some deep level or why should women after thousands of years still practise their horrid hoydenism.

All this chat is beside the point – this showgirl in nurses guise must go, and by this evening. Where did the agency dig up this appallingly un-nurse-like female?

As a divertissement from all this nurse nonsense, I shall this afternoon relate some of the history of Saxonford and of the noble families residing thereabouts, and the setting in which the story takes place with my friends, and adversary, Lord Plumbright.

A Concise History of the Market Town of Saxonford and Vicinity, in the

County Buckinghamshire, England.

As the crow flies three miles to the south-west of the fatefully romantic scene of the engagement at Saxonford Castle between a Lady and a Viscount, lay the market town of Saxonford and though picturesque at no date especially remarkable, first mentioned in the year 1088 in the second appendices to the first edition of the 1086 Doomsday Book. The village of 1088 remained primitive, consisting of sixteen rude mud-walled, rough thatched dwellings and according to the eloquent Doomsday Book not much else, for the following five obliterated sentences are lost to posterity by a careless mead-drinking monk in the early 13th century.

Saxonford, as the local and controversial guidebook, written in 1832 by the scholarly historian the Revd William R. Pritchard informs us, existed as a settling place for early man for many thousands of years before 1088.

Through this area ran the course of the ancient river named Oink, the region previously rich in woolly mammoth, with the rare and fluffy-type angora mastodon inhabiting the west, and a highly aggressive carnivorous sabre-toothed gazelle, in the river a fine early two-foot stickleback – already long extinct before a substantial cave-dwelling community sprung up along the high banks.

The guidebook goes on to inform the doggedly inquisitive: – Over the years the primitive Mud- and Stone-Age dwellers of Buckinghamshire began to realise their involvement in evolving into Iron-Age peoples, putting this new metal to all manner of interesting and imaginative uses; there even remains evidence at various excavation sites of early metalware parties. Then before they knew what happened the Bronze-Age arrived, proving pleasant, too. Although certain backward people found trouble adjusting and would not give up their iron pots for anything. These iron pots are still seen millennium later in use in Modern-Age kitchens atop of stoves, even as one writes. Bronze though became all the rage with heaps of perfectly lovely jewellery and whatnots with which to array self and home.

Much later, the Rev. Pritchard writes of an unfortunate and barely known period in the history of the area, when a young entrepreneur of great initiative decided the people of the small settlements along the then named river Onkford, should enjoy their own period. His name – Ethellead the Heavy, and he developed the short-lived Lead-Age, and as excavations divulge, poisoning off most of the inhabitants of the vicinity.

As time moved on a fortified wooden stronghold called East Saxon-hold upon whose lintel read Rex Saxonum and where Saxonford Castle stands to this day, arose by the newly re-named river Saxon. This transpired shortly after the wholesale slaughter of the semi-indigenous Celts. These Celts killed off most of the Jutes, who could not stand the Scots, who received a massacring by the visiting Visigoths and their sworn enemies the Vandals, and Huns, who wiped-out the Gauls.

‘The brave and manly Vikings,’ I quote, ‘eventually won the day with their innovative, daring and modish use of horned headwear, along with unsettling revolutionary yet fascinating new methods in the fine arts of genocide, rape, and general village pillage.

‘Sometime before the end of the 5th century the last of the Romans gave up and left, leaving behind their civilizing influence in the form of miles of walls, villas, and straight roads all over the place. A charming rose-marble villa complex constructed on the foundations of the Old Saxon Keep did not last too long, for the Barbarians soon arrived with wads of nauseating customs and practices learned from the Ostrogoths and Suevi. As is written,