Who Will I Look Up to Now

I am so sad that Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, former 'Mitford girl', has died. She seemed to me to represent everything that was best about a certain kind of English person. If I could emulate even a fraction of her commonsense, wit and good manners, I'd be happy. She was the product of an age that viewed self-obsession dimly. I wish that at least that aspect of the era would return.

For years, I kept a little article about her from a colour supplement, but good old DHL, (yes, I do still hate them), managed to lose it. It had all sorts of interesting bits of information about her, plus photographs, both of her and her collection of Elvis memorabilia. It's gone now though, so, as some kind of rather measly tribute to her, I am reposting a review I wrote a while ago of her book about her life. The review was posted on The Dabbler blog - but today that site seems to be not working - so rather than linking I'll paste the text in here instead.

Somewhere in this blog I think there may also be some quite amusing bits from her letters to Patrick Leigh Fermor. I'll go away and look for them and maybe find the link - if it exists - and put it up tomorrow. Meanwhile, try to get hold of Wait for Me - I was glued, my dear fellow. In fact, I think she wrote other books so I might go off and cheer myself up by buying some of them as well.

1p Review of Wait for Me

Wait for Me, the autobiography of Deborah Devonshire, is worth at least 1p for its first section alone. This part of the book – an account of the author’s childhood surrounded by a Wodehousian collection of relatives, most notably her father, (who it transpires was not only unintentionally hilarious but also, during WWI, quite incredibly brave), and hangers on, (including a governess who spent school hours teaching her charges how to gamble at cards), is so funny you cannot read it in a room with other people, because you are liable either to drive those around you completely crazy with your shouts of uncontrollable laughter or irritate them dreadfully by being unable to resist reading bits of the thing out loud.

Once the author leaves home and we see less of her father, who I still cannot quite believe worked for a time at The Lady, the laughs, although never entirely absent, do grow thinner. All the same, the book does not lose its charm or interest, as the sheer absurd hilarity of the author’s anecdotes about her family is replaced by well-described, often comic memories of life in the upper classes after the war – which, thanks to rationing, does not sound all that much more pleasant than life for any other section of society at the time:

"Mr Thacker [the butcher] let me help him cut up the meat in the back room and get a few scraps for the dogs. Tongue was offal and therefore not rationed. ‘Any chance of a tongue?’ I would ask. ‘You’re thirty-sixth on the list,’ was always the answer … One day a wounded soldier repatriated from Italy brought home a lemon. Such a luxury had not been seen for a long time and it caused a minor sensation when he put it on the post office counter at Ashford-in-the-Water and charged tuppence a smell – proceeds to the Red Cross."

As time goes on the Duchess gets to know a number of famous people, including JFK and Hitler, Evelyn Waugh, Givenchy, Osbert Sitwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Nancy Astor – who she overheard saying, when “a dreary educationalist from the Midwest was droning on and on … "That’s very interestin … but I’m not interested" - as well as many who are less well-known but equally intriguing, - the Howards, for instance, whose father "had a glass eye and used to surprise people by tapping it with a fork at meals". She recounts amusing stories about all of them, and also devotes space to her famous sisters, about whom she is admirably loyal.

While two of those sisters, Nancy and Jessica, have already given us fairly vivid accounts of their father, (about whom it is impossible ever to hear too much), in Wait for Me we are also provided with a clearer picture of the Mitford girls’ mother, who, we discover, enjoyed belting out tunes on the piano from The Daily Express Community Song Book and once, in answer to the question of how old she was, replied "Nineteen …no, sorry, seventy-three", a response anyone over the age of forty-five – or, indeed, nineteen - can probably sympathise with.

Given the fact that the Duchess endured some of life’s bitterest blows – the stillbirth and neo-natal death of several children – this book could easily have become a misery memoir. However, its author is made of sterner stuff. Describing situations where most of us would claim to be heartbroken, she restricts herself to the wonderfully understated phrase, "I minded terribly". Rather than pouring out her heart, she does her best to see the humour in most situations, as well as trying to give us a picture of the England in which she grew up – and the pre-chain store London in which she 'came out' (in the old-fashioned sense of that phrase):

"A coat and skirt from Mr Nissen, tailor of Conduit Street – a major item, but one that lasted, cost 8½ guineas. We were never without Madame Rita's hats. Our hairdresser, Phyllis Earle in Dover Street (reached by a number 9 bus, getting off at the Ritz), charged 3/6 for a wash and set. My shoes, which came from Dolcis in Oxford Street, were cheap and decent to look at but painful after a few nights of round and round the dance floor. Muv gave me some of her elbow length evening gloves made of doeskin, so gleaming white and smart they set off the dullest dress. They had to be cleaned each time they were worn and were posted to a firm in Scotland, so famous that 'Pullars of Perth' on the printed labels was enough of an address."

While even the talented Duchess cannot extract much entertainment from her involvement with a company called Tarmac, she has such a brilliant eye for the interesting or amusing detail that it is only in this episode – mercifully brief – that her writing slightly flags. She claims not have read a book in her life, but she certainly knows how to write a good one. Her tastes are occasionally surprising – she is a keen Elvis fan – but her character is charming and it is a pleasure to spend a few hundred pages reading the story of her life

No More Home Among the Gum Trees

Should anyone have missed me, (and I don't for a moment want to suggest I'm assuming anyone did), I've been moving, in a rather stately fashion, from one side of the world to the other.

But now, at last, my bags are unpacked and I can relax - at least until my boxes arrive.

Or at least those boxes that we didn't consign to DHL, which have arrived, although much later than they were supposed to and severely damaged. My guess is that someone managed to drop them somewhere between here and Australia and they then furtively repacked them, hoping nobody would notice that some of the things originally in the boxes had gone completely missing and others had been severely damaged in transit.

Well, DHL - we did notice, and we hate you very much indeed now. In fact, I may well dedicate my life to deterring others from using your useless services.

But enough of obsessional vendettas. Let me tell you some of the things I've seen en route to my home.

First, I stopped in Sydney and slept a night at the Intercontinental Hotel, from whence I set out to dine with my brother and to which I staggered home some hours later, having consumed a great deal of that wine Australia does so well - Cabernet Sauvignon.

Thus, to atone for my self-poisoning, I tottered up to the gym the next morning. And it just so happens that the gym in the Intercontinental is situated right next to a swish private dining room - which young hotel managers in training were scurrying around getting ready for that day's big event:

I'm not even going to mention the misspelling of squad - what I thought telling was the fact that the KFC HR squad had no intention of rewarding themselves for their services to their great company by noshing on a bucket of the finger lickin' good stuff.

Now perhaps I'm wrong but it seems to me that, if you're in the food business, it's a worry if you don't actually choose the food you're selling when you sit down for a slap up meal yourself. Frankly, in the circumstances, if you don't put your money where your mouth is but you expect other people to - if you don't actually want to reward yourself at a celebration meal by eating what you're flogging - then what you're flogging is a very, very, very dead horse.

That's how it strikes me, but KFC sales figures probably tell a different story and prove me utterly and completely wrong.

Anyway, enough of the speculation about things of which I know virtually nothing - it was off to the airport and up and away after that, and, following a brief stay in Singapore, which I hope is not a vision of what the whole world will be like in the future - oh please not, oh please not; and I feel just the same only more so about Dubai - plus one or two other dawdlings, we eventually arrived at our new home.

Which is pretty nice really, if you really have to be not allowed to live in Ainslie, ACT, for a few years, which it seems I do.

We haven't been here long - only two days, in fact - but one thing I've noticed already is that our new neighbour has intriguing taste in garden ornaments:

Thus far, the major problem I'm having to wrestle with is the mother of all so-called first world problems. We now share our lives with someone who can cook absolutely brilliantly, including lovely cakey/biscuity kinds of things:

For the first time in my life, I think I'm actually going to have to join a gym.