Dear Lupin... (8 page)

Your affec. father,

RM

A familiar theme: it's midsummer but as far as my dad's concerned it's time to get supplies in for the ‘rapidly approaching winter'
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Dear Charles,

I hope you are settling down to the routine of thermometers, enemas, bedpans, hospital meals at queer times, other people's awful noises, tepid Horlicks and so forth. It is not much fun to start with but it is apt to grow on you insidiously. I expect the weekend will be unattractive as the hospital will be crammed with proletarian visitors, including many children of repellent appearance and anti-social behaviours. I hope there will not be a strike by the NUPE workers during your stay. They have the reputation of being extremely militant (in other words, bloody-minded) at Basingstoke and are under the leadership of a black female communist. Let me know if there is anything you need. I will come and see you tomorrow. Your mother is coming today and I know I should not be able to get a word in edgeways. I hope the doctors are adequate: I shall be surprised if you should see one that is not as black as ten feet up a factory chimney. Audrey has just fucked up my typewriter which has put me in a bad temper. She is a very agreeable woman but possesses a capacity for petty annoyance almost beyond belief. In some ways she is a sort of human Pongo whom I would willingly exterminate about ten times a day, though I would be filled with remorse afterwards if I did actually slay him. Not much local news: three people were roasted to death in a car accident at Theale. Mr Randall is back on duty, thank God.

Yours ever

R

Entirely due to excessive consumption of hard drugs and alcohol I am rushed to Basingstoke Hospital with liver failure. Dad's synopsis of hospital life proves fairly accurate. My mother (sometimes known as the Bureau of Misinformation) is desperately worried and following my liver biopsy calls a distant cousin who is a doctor for advice: ‘I'm most frightfully worried about my son Charles, they've just done an autopsy on him.'

Budds Farm

18 November

My Dear Lupin,

I am so glad you are out of the woods and that your complete recovery is, with luck, just a matter of time and patience. You will, though, have to go slow for some time yet and take your convalescence seriously: no larking about. Cassandra rang up and may come and see you today. In the meantime, you will have leisure to plan in general terms for the future and devise some sort of scheme. Paul is in good form. Happily he is rising in the world with a speed comparable to that at which I am descending. I think he will end up with a château on the Tyne and as the local Master of Foxhounds. Jane will probably run the Red Cross and open bazaars in aid of the Conservative Party. Paul takes a fairly disenchanted view of Philps and thinks he is very tough and pretty hot, well capable of looking after himself. He (Paul) knows the man who bought the picture and rates him in the World Class as a creep. I gather the Tordays move into the wall-to-wall carpeted Castle quite soon. No doubt there will be a ball there (white ties: decorations will be worn). The more I see of Paul the more I like him. I wish I could repeat the remark in respect of HHH who in fact is probably no worse than a fearful bore who talks the most appalling drivel. However, he is apparently good at gutting rabbits (an example of Newton's Law of Compensation). Thursday is easily my favourite day as I draw my pension and for nearly twenty-four hours have an illusion of affluence. Cringer slept on my bed last night. His bad smells are so vile that they actually wake me up as effectively as a door being slammed. I see a Mrs Parker-Bowles married young Irwin yesterday. I wonder which Mrs P-B. that was? When I read of the goings-on in Parliament while the country sinks soggily into bankruptcy, I think that your Aunt Barbara would be entirely in place there. I am glad to say none of my family has ever demeaned themselves by becoming an MP. I believe your mother's uncle at one time represented Newmarket. He died of drink, thereby establishing a precedent followed by his wife and elder son. It is an expensive way of doing oneself in nowadays.

Try and keep reasonably cheerful (I'm sure Mr Boyce used to say ‘Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem' [‘Remember when life's path is steep to keep your mind even']). You may never have another opportunity to lie on your bed after breakfast and read ‘Playboy' or ‘Whitehouse'. (Newton's Law of Compensation again?)

Your affec. father,

RM

I am finally due to leave hospital after eight weeks
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Budds Farm

30 March

Dear Lupin,

I am delighted to have you living here and enjoying the modest facilities and comforts that your mother and I provide. All are free BAR THE TELEPHONE. If my name was Onassis I would probably (though not certainly) permit you to have free calls but frankly I cannot afford that particular gesture. Moreover I am by nature unsympathetic to all telephone users. Our last two telephone bills have amounted to some £275. The one received today adds up to £117.38p. I think my share of that is about 10p. I hope I am not being grossly unfair (a little unfairness is always to be expected in matters of this sort) if I charge you £50 as your share of the last two bills. A lot of your calls are due to Unimog and presumably can be charged to your firm, assuming there is sufficient money in the kitty.

Your affec. father,

RM

Convalescence at home has the odd hiccup, the phone bill being one of them. In a moment of insanity a friend buys 300 ex-Army Unimogs (four-wheel drive trucks) all stranded in a wood in Germany. He employs me as sidekick/salesman
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Budds Farm

1 August

Dear Miniwad,

I hope you are well and keeping clear of the more tiresome sort of trouble. I gave little Miss Bossy Pants lunch at the Ladbroke Club and she ordered smoked salmon mousse, the most expensive thing on the card! Also she ordered tomato juice but kept on taking jumbo swigs at my martini. Afterwards Paul joined us and we went to Heywood Hill's bookshop; then on to Major Surtees where he was in conference with some bibulous Dutchmen, one of whom lives next door to Paul's factory in Holland so they got on pretty well. For some reason or other I got on the wrong train at Waterloo but luckily I quite like Bournemouth. Hot Hand Henry complained to Jane that I don't like him. There is indeed substance in his complaint. In fact, I don't like any of his family but Louise chose them, not me. Your dear mother is endeavouring to live on a purely liquid diet with unfortunate results. One evening she popped my dinner into her car and drove off with it, saying she was going to give it to the poor! I was a little surprised, therefore, to find she had dropped it at the Bomers. The next night with unerring aim she threw a fairly revolting plate of charred mincemeat over my chair. Stirring times indeed! We went to a big lunch at the Roper-Caldbecks yesterday. Your mother is mad about a short man called Lloyd-Webber whose wife has diabetes. Mrs Boxall has gone to live in Hannington. She is due to marry again soon but the child is likely to be born first. I believe the husband-to-be writes TV scripts (a polite expression, usually, for being unemployed and short of treacle). I went to Goodwood which is v. democratic these days. In the Richmond Stand I saw a stout lady remove her shoes in order to massage the huge expanse of her escort's stomach. His response was minimal judging from the lady's language which was very frank indeed.

Your affec. father,

RM

Expect you back in the autumn.

My mother is christened ‘Meals on Wheels in Reverse' after she removes Dad's dinner and delivers it in her car to our rather surprised neighbours
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Budds Farm

Dear Charles,

In the lavatories of my preparatory school someone had written up on the wall the time-honoured couplet:

‘How eager for fame a man must be

To write up his name in a W.C.'

How eager for fame (or something) a man of twenty-five must be to give, unasked presumably, an imitation of a defunct pop-singer during an auction in London. However, few of our relations, fortunately perhaps, see the Daily Mirror. The Daily Telegraph kindly concealed your name.

I have no particular feelings about your performance beyond finding it, as I find most amateur entertainments, mildly embarrassing. I trust the incident will not affect your election to the Turf Club: some people may not have cared for it all that much. However, if you are blackballed, then it will give me the excuse to resign myself and join some dinner club more in keeping with my diminished income.

I have not entirely avoided publicity myself and saw myself described in some publication as an ‘engaging raconteur', which is doubletalk for an egocentric and longwinded bore.

I trust that you are keeping moderately well and finding the occasional odd job to keep you partially occupied.

Your affectionate father,

RM

In honour of the sudden and premature demise of Elvis Presley some antique-dealer friends bet me £300 to jump up on the display table at a big Sotheby's sale and give my impersonation of ‘The King' singing ‘Blue Suede Shoes'. It is an essential component of the bet that a lot of leg-shaking is evident. My father is frankly unimpressed. However, I do make the front page of the Daily Mirror: ‘Cheeky Charlie goes for a song.'

Dear Little Mr Reliable,

Thanks a million for doing the wood baskets as promised. My word, your employer is going to be a very lucky man!

D

It takes real skill and irony to craft such an effective dressing down in so few words
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Budds Farm

26 August

Dear Lupin,

I am delighted, even if slightly surprised, to hear that you are adding cricket to your growing list of accomplishments. I shall watch your performance at Burghclere with much interest. I hope you peppered the grouse successfully and did not perforate your fellow-guests to any marked extent. Your mother enjoyed her trip to Jersey and returned bringing a crab the size of a whippet tank. It needed a sledge-hammer to crack the shell. At Whitchurch yesterday three men forced their way into a house at lunch-time, tied up the occupants and removed all the kit of any value. Martin McLaren's brother dropped down dead on holiday in Scotland. Pongo has been unwell and the vet has put him on a most expensive diet. We had drinks with Mrs Hislop yesterday and for once your mother was utterly out-talked. The Dowager Lady de Mauley bred Totowah who won the big race at York at 20/1. I spent the morning cutting down weeds and brambles: unfortunately the belladonna (I think) proved allergic to my skin (or vice versa) and my arms have come up in purple golf balls, which is disconcerting. We are having dinner tonight with the Gaselees: I hope we don't get mixed up with the Lambourn Festival, which is in full swing. Little Miss Cod's Eyes has got Lizzie Jamieson staying with her. The Basingstoke dustmen have been on strike for three weeks and you can now smell that revolting town two miles away. I fear we may be in the throes of a General Election soon. I think it would be better to have one year of total boredom with a General Election, American Presidential Election, the Election of the Pope, the World Cup and the Olympic Games. Any spare time on TV to be filled by show-jumping and by groups of earnest parents discussing either sex-education for children or the problems of bringing up a family of spastics. I have just discovered my passport is invalid; so is your mother's but it was not noticed when she arrived at St Malo last week! I hope there are not a lot of Arabs in SW6 or sooner or later you will come under fire. I remember the panic in SW1 in 1921 when Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, an awful old shit as a matter of fact, was shot in Eaton Square by a one-legged Irishman. A lot of people who had served under Wilson in the war wanted to get up a subscription for the man who had potted him. Wilson was in uniform but unfortunately his scabbard was rusty and he could not extract his sword to have a slash at the assassin.

Your affec. father,

RM

P.T.O.

The most interesting murderer I ever met was Ronald True who did fearful things to a woman in the Fulham Road area. He could be quite amusing but suddenly it would become apparent that he was totally bonkers. You ought to read about his case. Mrs Willett (the first one) had her fridge repaired by that vampire man who melted down Mrs Durand-Deacon into sludge. I met at Aldershot a gunner officer's wife who had murdered her loving spouse with strychnine put into some roast partridge, but it could never be proved. The murder Oscar Wilde wrote about in ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol' was a Lifeguardsman who cut the throat of a lady working in the Eton Post Office.

I am (for some extraordinary reason) asked to play in a cricket team by a well-known local impresario against the cast of the musical Evita. To everyone's shame I am forced to bowl underarm to complete an over and am caught out first ball by ‘General Perón'
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Chez Nidnod

26 September

Dear Lupin,

We are off to France this evening so a certain degree of flip-flap on the part of your dear mother is only to be anticipated. The cottage seems to be in demand. Yesterday a plump, jolly young man came down and I found he is the son of an old friend of mine, Pat Rathcreedan, who lives at Henley. The young gent, whose name is Thornton, owns a horse and a wife and wants to settle down here. Old Lady Norrie, whom I knew fifty years ago, wants to have a look round, and a couple from Sussex called Andrews have offered £27,000 (subject to survey, of course). They are in the thirties and seem respectable middle-class. We had dinner chez Surtees on Sunday. When they went to their villa in Elba, they found it had been broken into, vandalised and stripped by American and German hippies. They spent a week on hands and knees scrubbing up unspeakable filth. The hippies prowled around outside accompanied by large and extremely ferocious dogs. Anne Surtees did not dare go out by herself.

It has been v. hot and on Sunday we sat outside drinking champagne with the Bomers. The Grissells stayed here, neither in good form. I have evicted a platoon of exceptionally hairy and hostile spiders from our bathroom. The effort of producing a baby seems to have exhausted HHH more than Louise! Your godfather F. Fletcher is doing well as a pottery-mender: I have seen some of his work. It has been a good blackberry season and I have picked a lot, accompanied by an amiable bullock who now answers to the name of Nigel.