Blogetty Blog 6: Idyllic Days

My mother’s photo album illustrates a tradition of summer seaside holidays, starting when I was aged two in 1928 and continuing to 1931. Successively at Sandwich, Littlehampton, Westgate, Alnwick and Broadwater, my younger brother Rupert and I ‘bathed’ at the water’s edge in the company of an inflatable rubber seal and look happy building sand castles with tin buckets and spades and sitting on an assortment of donkeys and ponies, then traditional beach attractions. A row of beach huts where bathers changed also features at most of the sites.

At Sandwich we stayed with my godmother Lady St. Just, nee Florrie Henderson. At Broadwater we resided at cousin Gordon’s home, with one or both my parents. Otherwise we were in the safekeeping of Nanny Smith and her assistants while my parents were free to spend their own holidays in more interesting circumstances on the French Riviera, usually at Monte Carlo.

When not staying with relatives, I assume we were accommodated at suitable boarding houses adjacent to the beach. I have almost no recollection of these simple activities. I do remember an incident at Westgate – perhaps because I was often old about it later. I saw a scarlet blazer with brass buttons in a shop window which took my immediate fancy, and I bugged Nanny, invariably clad in a dark cloche hat, to buy it for me. Ingeniously she told me I could have it if I gave up the habit of biting my fingernails. So I did. Permanently. I was immensely proud of my brilliant red splendor.

In 1933 and 1934 the arrangement changed. My father rented a salmon fishing ‘beat’ on the Helmsdale River in Scotland, for the month of June and took his family with him. Suisgill Lodge was a mansion set in the largely treeless heather landscape of northern Inverness, about halfway between the river’s loch-head and its mouth at Helmsdale harbor. The upper class who could afford to enjoy the luxury of jealously-protected private sporting rights took their comfort very seriously and built large comfortable houses on their secondary estates all over Scotland: earning substantial rents from deer stalking, grouse shooting and salmon fishing tenants when they were not enjoying these activities themselves.

My mother used to say she knew no pleasure like waking in her sleeper and pulling the blind to reveal that the train was carrying her through Scotland. The 1932 visit took us first to the immense Gleneagles Railway Hotel where my father played the two famous golf courses with our first cousin Jack Lucas. Rupert and I were instructed to amuse ourselves by searching for lost balls outside the fairways. It was an impossible task in the dense heather and we immediately grew bored and abandoned it to return to the hotel with my mother, while Linfield, our chauffeur, drove Nanny and other members of our staff north by road.

It was the time when Al Capone dominated the transatlantic press as Public Enemy Number One. My brother and I naturally had not slightest conception of the meaning of the name or its context, but Cousin Jack had decided it was our turn to have fun. Over lunch he announced with deep seriousness that the Head Waiter was Public Enemy Number Two. It would be our job to assist him with surveillance of this dangerous character. At the end of the meal he led us, puzzled but excited by our absurd task, through the public rooms and gardens in search of likely mobsters among the guests and staff.

And then we went onto Suisgill. It was a paradise for boys. A small stream called a ‘burn’ ran down the hillside behind the house and its fine formal garden. It provided endless opportunity for creating dams and waterfalls.

The weather was perfect that summer and we often ate meals as picnics outside where we much bothered by wasps attracted to our food. I remember that Cousin Jack, devised a trap in which wasps would be overcome by his cigar smoke. While a wasp was supine he attached a thread from a cotton reel so that when it recovered from the fumes it was supposed to fly off unwinding the thread as it went, revealing the site of its nest for destruction.

Most victims did not recover. For the one or two that did the thread broke almost instantly on release, allowing the fugitive to fly away trailing a wisp of cotton to disappear without trace or consequence. Jack laughed contagiously, highly amused by the repeated failure of his scheme. In recollection I cannot remember ever meeting him again – a genuine regret for he was clearly a devotee of absurdity. His home was in Warwickshire, which was then a long way from our home in Sussex.

In due course Cousin Jack was replaced by my uncle, Joe Lucas, an equally skilled fisherman, who gave me my first delicious taste of ‘Terry’s’ bitter chocolate sitting on a boulder beside the rushing pristine highland water of those days. Perhaps he and Jack shared the substantial rent with my father.

What golden days these were, these days of peace, prosperity and promise. How infinite they seemed. And what was it that interfered with this enviable pattern of life – this apogee of class privilege – which would shortly collapse never to return fully? That lay seven years ahead behind the gathering threat – which Britain tried to ignore – of Fascism in Germany and Italy and the disaster of WWII to come. But in my personal life it was the intensifying demands of school with the horror of ‘boarding’ and separation from home approaching all too soon.

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I am much disturbed by the feeling that in writing about such insignificant events in such cataclysmic times I am fiddling while Rome burns. I find an excuse in thinking that there is no harm in looking back provided it does not obscure one’s view of the present. Legend says the Emperor Nero fiddled while he burned his city; our President – the Great Buffoon – tweets while he burns down both our democracy and the planet.

What did unthinking Roman citizens do while their mad Emperors abused their democracy? They went to the Games in the Colesseum to watch gladiators slaughter animals and each other. And the thinkers? No doubt they suffered the same horrified disbelief I do today. This cannot be: it cannot happen here! I personally remain terrified and appalled by the possibility that Trump will deceive his way into a second term. And that we are helpless in the face of power so ruthlessly abused by conceit, mindless stupidity and media misinformation.  

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