The nostalgic afternoon
Louisa is downsizing to The Dower House and her granddaughter Poppy has come to help. Inevitably they’ve been sidetracked from the dismal packing cases by photograph albums: those leather Smythsons are repositories of the past where they did things so very differently. They’ve come to the volume of Louisa’s debutante year from which she’s kept every photograph by Barry Swaebe (how one longed to be in “Jennifer’s Diary”!) and invitation. The tea parties (“What were those, Granny?”)
and the drinks parties: Mrs Henry ffinch-ffinch At Home for Henrietta, The Aviary, London Zoo. “How could she be at home if she was at London Zoo, Granny?”
“Ah, the search for original locations was savage, the boys just wouldn’t turn up if your party was in a house rented for the season in Kensington.” Then came the dances. “We stayed in house parties then, not Airbnb. You got a postcard from your hostess engraved Lady Bunbury, Bunbury Hall, Shropshire, saying she so hoped you would come for Charlotte’s dance at Herriard Towers. ‘Please arrive at tea time and there will be luncheon on Sunday.’ There might be a little puffing train engraved with the name of the nearest station. Otherwise you got a lift with a boy inevitably, in Julian Fellowes’s words ‘dull to the point of genius’. And you left a £1 note on your dressing table for the daily, asked if you had to use the telephone (and only after 6pm when it was cheaper), and wrote a thankyou letter. Always. For everything.”
To a girl of Generation Text this is sooo, like, weird. “Didn’t anyone have dances in London?” “Not many, darling. Claridge’s perhaps but it meant you didn’t have a proper house in the country.”
Louisa is similarly amazed that she was alive for this arcane ritual, eating egg mousse bouncy with gelatin at the endless dinner parties. No one had dietary requirements, fortunately, as the canapé had not been invented bar the Searcys’ asparagus roll.
“We were kinder then, more considerate because there were rules. But the one thing that has blessedly got better over the last 40 years is the food”.
‘Didn’t anyone have dances in London?’ ‘Not many, darling’