Singing as we go
OH, but you have to meet Daphne and Ethel. Burly middle-aged sisters are they, hefty of shoulder and colossal of thigh. They’re stripping back a 19th-century graveyard in the village I discovered I own and which, after 70 years of neglect, had been utterly engulfed by brambles and self-seeded yews. They’re doing a splendid job: old tombstones are being exposed for the first time in living memory.
David English, our local garagiste, is a restorer of Triumph Spitfires and part-time male model. I enthused to him that we’d found not only his great-grandfather William (photographs exist of his time as head gardener here— one quite as powerfully built as Daphne or Ethel), but also of his great-uncle, whose name appears on the village memorial to the fallen of the First World War, and of his four-times-great-grandfather, too.
David couldn’t have been less interested, but there you go. It’s sort of amazing that, in our un-suburbanised corner of west Norfolk, there should be families dwelling here who reach back that far.
Daphne and Ethel were visibly uneasy, however, when they unearthed one fine memorial to the old Norfolk family of Bacon. Daphne and Ethel, you see, are Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs.
Our villagers’ children can still just about afford to live here; we have the unusual luxury of historical continuity. House prices are scrawny compared to those of Dorset, which have been pressure-cooked by the second-homers.
I was singing last weekend at the ravishing Domesday manor house of Minette Walters, who was hosting a fundraiser for Dorchester Arts. The Crime Queen, petite and pretty, bustled about her kitchen making coffee and bemoaning the slow extinction of nearby Weymouth, as one by one the local families (and industries, amenities and affordable housing) are starved out.
Her latest thriller, The Last Hours, is set in her native Dorset at the time of the Black Death, which appears to have had rather less impact on the community than the present-day Londoners who snaffle the decent houses, but live in them only sporadically. This event, raising cash to convert Dorchester’s Maltings into an arts centre—much like we’re doing at Wells-next-the
The smokey-voiced siren of the French Nouvelle Vague cooked us spotted dick
Sea—might go some way towards patching a few of the rips.
Ionce spent a fortnight with the equally alluring Jeanne Moreau, in the sybaritic confines of the Château de Beychevelle, outside Bordeaux, at a residential workshop for screen writers. Delicious wine lubricated our raucous after-dinner duetting of old Gracie Fields numbers.
Moreau’s father was a Parisian restaurateur, but her Mam, a showgirl at the Folies Bergère, hailed from Oldham. The smokey-voiced siren of the French Nouvelle Vague spoke English fluently, if with a broad Lancashire accent, and cooked us spotted dick (with Bird’s Custard) for pudding, which we washed down with St Julien 4ème Cru Classé.
Outside my bedroom window, I remember, was the château’s weathervane: a ship with lowered sails. The Duc d’eperon, the 16th-century owner, was an admiral so revered that ships sailing along the river below would thus salute him. This week, I lowered my metaphorical sails at the passing earlier this month of a great lady and sang her a lusty threnody: all five verses of The Biggest Aspidistra in the World.
Remembering Moreau reminded me that I have been a screenwriter. I had the chance to go to Hollywood, but who would want to bring their children up in Los Angeles? Its shallowness is fathomless and uprooting yourself from everything that feeds you creatively strikes me as foolish. I don’t regret it.
The 30-year anniversary of Maurice has been marked by its restoration in 4D. I have no idea what that means, save that they’ve put Hugh Grant on the cover. It was his first big film and he does look shockingly beautiful in it. He acted it extraordinarily well, too: they all did.
The internet has gone a little bit beserk, calling the 1987 film ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘way ahead of Brokeback Mountain’. Well, that’s very kind of folks and stiffens my confidence to give a lecture on it this coming weekend at Cambridge, where much of it is set.
The story has, unusually, a happy ending, but it is ‘beautifully paced’—meaning long —and, as I have to continue up the A1 to the Edinburgh Festival, I may well have to slip away before Rupert Graves finally, heart-wrenchingly, snogs James Wilby.
‘Kit & Mcconnel: Pheasant Laughter’ is at the G&V Royal Mile Hotel, Edinburgh (venue 412), until August 26 Next week Jason Goodwin