The Parting Years (1963-74) Read online

  At Temple Sowerby we find on the green in front of the maypole a charming, minute house called The Cedars, where my mother had lived as a child. I could easily imagine her being there. We went into the village church and saw the graves of Sissons (members of my mother’s family) in the cemetery and called on a Mrs Minnie Sisson who, though she had lived there for sixty years, said: ‘Of course, I’m Yorkshire’. She lives comfortably in a spotless cottage and with a well-tended garden. Good, country fare in a scrupulous hotel.

  We then paid a call to the lady who lives in Temple Sowerby Manor: a great character, with hesitant charm, slow wit, quick eye, untidy hair, dangling earrings, tartan coat and red Russian boots, and who happens to be a cousin of the Queen Mother. A delightful visit.

  On to Crossrigg Hall, belonging to a Mr Cornish Torbock — believe it or not — and his brother. Both eccentrics. The garden famous and obviously Cornish knows his various euphorbias. A Victorian house of unparalleled ugliness, a museum piece in shades of squashed strawberry and biscuit, containing not one single item of beauty to delight the eye.

  We motored on through rainclouds: Borrowdale, Honister Pass, Buttermere Lake, then to Scale Hill Hotel, but too wet and clouds too low to see the promised panorama.

  We made our way north. At Holyrood House we were guided by a relentless tyrant in green cap and tartan trousers. He regaled us with the impressive history of the place and stories of the Queen’s entourage and her visits to the castle (many facts obviously wrong). He said that the Queen has (hideous) modern furniture brought into the rooms for her comfort. The secret staircases used by Mary Queen of Scots, Rizzio and Darnley were mysterious and thrilling; stories of court ladies forced to collect any tears they may shed in bottles to avoid marring their thickly painted complexion.

  Marchmont House: pâté de foie gras-coloured stone, mansard roof — huge but not overbearing; wonderful plasterwork throughout — four seasons depicted in one pink room. Lady MacEwen, our hostess, was charming and remarkable — on a long refectory table in her sitting-room a huge panorama of small photographs of her family were interspersed with set pieces of flowers arranged formally. A tour of the garden — her personality impressive, her speech exquisitely precise, good jokes, intelligence, no selfishness or ‘cut-off’ feeling, though she is widowed and stays here all year.

  While travelling we notice how pop art has made one conscious of the aesthetic effects of quite ordinary road-repairing and maintenance signs and directions — the red arrow, the discs, the cones of rubber marking the borders of danger areas, the Day-glo colours, orange and apricot, of the workmen’s special jackets. High-tension wires are pure Klee or Buffet.

  Then to Pitlochry, where I last went as a child. I had not seen the Highlands since then and I was thrilled.

  The hotel, beautifully situated over an Altdorfer forest of trees, possessed none of its furnishings of fifty years before, and none of its powers to impress. However, it was good to savour this fresh Scottish air again, and the smell of the brooks and bracken and heather.

  On to Perth Castle. This was just what we were looking for — a riot of stuffed stags’ heads, antlers, weapons of aggression, guns, spears, all displayed with the tasteless meticulousness that is really an art in itself. Tartan beds, four-posters with mad ostrich feathers, Victoriana, early photographs, good and bad collections of every sort all jumbled together. The crowds were so delighted to find no guides to keep them in control that they ran in every direction, up and down polished staircases, in and out of bedrooms and bathrooms. The white pebble-dash with which the castle is covered is better than the usual cream, and the black roofs and turrets give the wild impression of Scotland that we have so far missed.

  Early departure for a hell of a drive — Scottish holiday over — now down to Durham at rush-hour in time to see the cathedral and the Venerable Bede’s tomb. The scale is tremendous — marvellous proportions, thick arches, decorated with the simple, crude design cut into the stone. The best cathedral in England.

  To step into Bindie Lambton’s world of children and dogs was quite a shock. We ate marrow bones for dinner in a room with the beautifully brought-up dogs asleep in niches, each with their brass plates on them, under the china cabinets.

  Long drive on main roads, including the M1, at tremendous speed. King’s Lynn for lunch at the delightful eighteenth-century hotel in the main square; delight at Norfolk Dutch atmosphere; pretty gabled houses; no Woolworths, no new building. A Festival of Constable, Henry Moore and Sybil Cholmondeley.

  ‘Why didn’t you let me know before. All I can offer you is tea at five o’clock with the Queen Mother and twelve guests from Sandringham.’ In fact we welshed. We were too ragged in body and mind to make the necessary readjustment. But we did go to see Sibyl, and as we were going down the tall avenue on our way to her glorious house we were so impressed that we got out of the car and changed our trousers.

  The house and its furnishings are superb. Sybil, calm and funny, well-informed and no-nonsense, showed us all.

  Part II: The Chosen Ones, 1964-7

  LYDIA LOPOKOVA

  Thursday, July 30th 1964

  An American lady wanted to rent Reddish House. Her offer was accepted and within four days we had to turn out — sad, but this was an easy way of making money and it only entailed leaving the house four days earlier than intended.

  The packing up and emptying of cupboards, the tidying and scouring was an endless job. I had to fight to get some writing done and to get to Wilton for tennis.

  Never has there been a lovelier summer. For weeks the weather has held. The garden flourishing pink, white and grey. The trees have become dark, almost black, and all the flowers from childhood holidays — phlox, Japanese azaleas, nasturtiums and hollyhocks — have come out, which in a way makes it a melancholy time. For it means that when we return from our holiday, the long, long awaited summer will be over; there will be a different outlook; fires will be on and there will not again be the delight of leaving doors and windows wide open.

  However, our high spirits revived in the company of Lydia Lopokova, whom we visited in her farmhouse at Tilton. She is fatter, older, like a little Russian peasant and her clothes are as extraordinary as ever — Statler, Statler, Statler was printed on her apron, a twenty-year-old theft from the USA — but she has quietened a little. She did not laugh quite as much as she used to, and her gestures and pantomime were mostly done from her chair. But she gives freshness to everything and no one is less snobbish than she. She does not know the meaning of the word.

  When she comes to London her treat is to go to a restaurant in the Tottenham Court Road where she orders meat spaghetti con burro. She showed us two piles of clothes returned from the laundry. She praised a blouse she had bought for thirty shillings from Marks and Spencer, ‘and see how nicely it washes! It looks Russian!’

  She describes her life: ‘I like to eat dinner in the company of someone, so Maynard’s adopted son comes and we eat steak. I spend my day, naked to the waist, leaning over the raspberries on the cane. It is good with the sun on my back and I eat two raspberries for every one I put in the basket. I no longer use my arms and hands like a dancer.’ The hall was lined with cups, pots, pans, kitchen implements. ‘I love being alone — it’s so tiring to see neighbours. I love my house here. These aren’t my paintings.’ (Not true!) ‘They belong to King’s College, but I can have them for my lifetime — Cézannes, Picasso, Braque, Degas, Modigliani.’

  She described her shopping expedition to buy food. ‘The International Stores is wonderful, but such crowds. It’s like Auschwitz. I used to pick peas but they’re just as good from the deep freeze. I read the Manchester Guardian. I love the Beatles and went to see Lord of the Flies, and went to the ballet, La Fille Mal Gardée, at Eastbourne.’

  For two hours she talked, refused to be photographed, entranced us with the mot juste. Kin said that of all the houses he’d seen in England he would most prefer to have hers, with its quiet, arched courtyard
and simple decorations.

  Went on to Eastbourne. We walked up to Beachy Head and looked down on where St Cyprian’s had been. Schoolday memories flooded.

  Then to dine with old St Cyprian, Cyril Connolly. He was funny about Lopokova being like Duchesse de Guermantes.

  Finishing up Diaries, volume V — the last job before starting off on our journey abroad. One by one the phases of the summer are ticked off. The tour of Cornwall, Yorkshire, Scotland and Norfolk ... the packing up and preparations for Munich, Sienna, Venice, Turkey.

  Venice: Tuesday, August 25th

  I don’t know what happens to me in Venice, but after a few days in the sun and beauty the atmosphere depresses me. The unconscious moments before waking are sad, and on surfacing my thoughts are morbid.

  I am seldom a victim of depression, but today and yesterday too I felt I didn’t really want to go on living much more. I’ve been very happy this summer, and maybe I’m just tired; perhaps it’s being with someone thirty years younger than I am that keeps me invigorated, in touch, alert, and alive to new ideas.

  But suddenly I feel old, lacking in enthusiasm. I feel my work inadequate. Seeing the great masters brings one to despair. There is no time or energy left for me to improve; the old life is outmoded and done for. What to take its place? Perhaps these feelings will leave me on returning home, but Venice has activated something that is deep down in my bones. I don’t like it to come to the surface. For this reason I will be pleased to leave.

  A VISIT TO TURKEY

  September 1964

  I had not visited Istanbul since those years before the war when Ataturk was intent on bringing Turkey out of the dark Ottoman past. Men in the dusty, old-fashioned streets then wore the tarboosh, together with an appalling mixture of Oriental and Europeanized garments: braces on jellabas; bicycle clips on pyjama trousers. Today the tarboosh is forbidden, and the whole city is unrecognizable with skyscrapers, neon lights, apartment buildings, and a Hilton Hotel, where we stayed. From the windows we could see the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, a mêlée of ships, buses, motors, fishermen, scurrying pedestrians, pop-art advertisements, a world of flurry and movement, of steam and smoke belching from ships’ funnels, water churning in torrents in the wake of every sort of pleasure boat and barge, clouds parting to illuminate the ancient water tower, minarets like exclamation marks, and the appetizing-looking fish, fruit, and sweet stalls.

  We went across the Galata Bridge to see Santa Sophia: vast, an overwhelming effect of glowing gold and dusty decoration; an incredible dome, with four enormous, suspended shields covered with Turkish calligraphy; innumerable wrought-iron chandeliers hanging low to the ground appeared dwarfed in the huge space; in the gloom, unexpectedly, a mosaic head of Christ, some green, strange saints, huge Ali Baba pots; all very mysterious. The most beautiful of all Istanbul’s religious buildings is the small jewel box of the Kariye, which is in an astonishing excellence of preservation with fine frescoes, inlaid marble panelling, and sequin-glittering mosaic of infinite refinement.

  The next excitement was to visit the Seraglio — the mansion — place of the Moslem Ottoman emperors, the palace of the sultans — to see the possessions of former sultans; an extraordinary collection of unmatched luxury. There was more blue and white porcelain that I had ever seen before; Sèvres clocks under glass domes and much china. A jewel-studded ceremonial throne of thirty-six-carat gold, a pair of forty-eight-carat gold candlesticks with over six thousand diamonds in each, emeralds as big as ducks’ eggs, huge pink diamonds (bright violet pink), goblets of crystal inlaid with jewels, feathers made of diamonds, a blob of emerald weighing over three kilos, and the ‘spoon seller’s diamond’ of eighty-six-carats set in a circle of half a hundred huge diamonds. The central colonnaded gardens with rococo, wooden-carved doorways were a joy to come out into as we progressed from one pavilion to another. The costumes of the sultans on display were of boldly designed, magnificent silks, marvellous audacity of colour, reds predominant, and they undoubtedly inspired Bakst and the Diaghilev ballet.

  The Turkish landscape is dry, hot, and often of bare rock and hard desert, but it also offers a variety of lush plains, feathery forests, purple mountains and scented groves. It took me several days to realize that the sweetness so often in the air came from the fig trees. White cattle draw huge cartloads, people pick cotton in the fields, and there are camels — beautiful, touching, proud and ridiculous.

  High along the Bosphorus and among the clouds rises the invulnerable fortress of the Rumeli Lisar Castle, with its crenellated towers, a medieval castle par excellence. On a massive scale, it is the perfect realization of the cardboard, cut-out castles we played with as children. Today it is inhabited only by crows, and deserted except for an occasional production of Coriolanus.

  A trip by boat to one of the four neighbouring islands is the means whereby many Istanbulis escape the heat of summer. Boyokada, the favourite resort of the rich, has a pervasive pre-1914 war, or strangely timeless, feeling. Many of the houses, with their elaborately carved wooden facades, are reminiscent of those in the lazy southern states of America. This unreal, in-a-dream atmosphere is emphasized by the fact that no motor cars are allowed, and the castanet click of hooves is continuous as the population travel in fringe-covered wicker-basket carriages. In spite of the busy army of street cleaners, the scent of the pinewoods is mingled with the equally pungent aroma of fresh horse-dung. The smell of thyme or curry-like herbs is usually in one’s nostrils; even the smallest window is scented with basil, honeysuckle or jasmine.

  Izmir (the ancient Smyrna of fig fame) is now a pulsating, ever-growing modern town, with clusters of skyscrapers and minarets piercing the skyline. In the pleasure gardens the Industrial Fair offered, in the pavilions of all countries, the latest in scientific inventions; a contrast to ancient works of art in the archaeological museum. The modern market, alas, did not please us; very little was locally made and all that one could buy were plastic gadgets, hideous, vulgar and impersonal.

  To me, many of the temples, agoras and broken theatres in Turkey are merely a picturesque shambles: the splinters and fragments of former greatness have a certain monotony. But the remains of Ephesus are different; it is its scale that impresses; marble roads, flanked with marble and stone buildings, stretching by the mile up the mountainside. Built in honour of Artemis in the eleventh century, it has been occupied by Lydians, Persians, Syrians, Romans and Byzantines, who have all left their mark. The entrance to the Temple of Hadrian is beautiful. The small Odeon, a theatre for chamber orchestra and intimate plays, delighted me more than the almost staggeringly large theatre nearby with seating capacity for nearly twenty-five thousand people.

  Priene lies above the curling Meander River (from which the word is derived) on a huge promontory like the prow of a ship. It is a masterpiece of town planning, with its buildings placed in grid design, and gives, as in San Francisco, vistas of great splendour at the end of each street. Here avid archaeologists wander among the relics of the gymnasiums, temples, and senate.

  1965

  Alan Tagg used to be so timid that it was impossible to hear his whispers hidden behind a curtain of fair hair. Now he has blossomed, and when given a sympathetic audience he can be devastatingly funny for long leisurely spans of time.

  He has been beguiling us with anecdotes of his recent visit to America and each story is told with such exactitude of dialogue, and is in itself so carefully chosen and individual, that one gets the very essence of his experiences. Likewise, when he described his ecstasy of amusement at the play Sin, and described the evening’s entertainment, we might all have been present at the performance.

  A delightful aspect of Alan’s humour is that once something has struck him as funny, it is always funny and can be enjoyed over and over again with pristine relish. Suddenly he will explode with mirth and in explanation tell us that he has just remembered something he heard one woman say to another in a bus ten years ago. ‘What was it, do let us share th
e joke?’ ‘Well, one woman said, “I washed it for her when she was eighteen, I washed it for her when she was twenty-one, I washed it for her when she was married, and I washed it after her first-born, but I’m never going to wash it for her again.”’

  We were talking of John Gielgud who had directed a little family comedy for which Alan had done the décor. John has always been tactless, and has developed the art of saying exactly what is on his mind to the most farcical extent. In his deep, throaty, almost military, staccato voice he keeps up a flow without ever noticing the reaction it may have on others. At one rehearsal he says: ‘You’re beginning to be very good. I’m very pleased with you all, except, of course, Berty — you’ve got it all wrong — no good at all.’ Berty explodes into noisy tears. John, stricken with embarrassment and avoiding a row at all costs, is not seen for dust.

  One poor girl does not see that a piece of scenery has been placed in her way, falls over it with a painful thud. ‘Oh, Dilys, do be graceful!’ remarks John.

  Alan decries himself, surprised when directors pay him a compliment. ‘They seem to like my work! Of course I’d like to do something with a modern author. But they send me things I don’t understand. This new Joe Orton play, for example, all the cast say the most awful things to one another!’

  DAVID HOCKNEY

  As a child I was, like most Edwardians, brought up never to waste a mouthful of food. ‘If you can’t finish your lunch, you’ll have it cold for supper. Waste not, want not,’ was drummed in and somehow my father always instilled into us a fear of the workhouse.

  How very different the youth of today. David Hockney arrived (to be painted) on his way from Bristol. He turned up in his car wearing the thinnest of synthetic windbreakers over a T-shirt. ‘Noh, I’m nut corld. Is it corld outside? I get into my car and the heat’s automatically on and I get out at the plaice I arrive at. You may think this cappe is a bit daft, but I bought ert at Arrods because I wasn’t looking whaire I was gohin and I knocked over all the hat stall and I put the mun to so mooch trooble, I thought ah moost buy sommut!’