Turn Right at the Spotted Dog

by Jilly Cooper

  A fat woman glared at me. ‘There’s that Linda Porter writes for the Mail,’ she said.

  ‘No it’s not,’ said her friend. ‘It’s Gilly Potter.’

  Another bonus of the villa was the perfect waste disposal provided by six goats, who survived somehow in a burnt bladeless field next door and who ate everything we gave them including the Mail on Sunday. Goat Cuisine, said Leo.

  One problem about holidays, if you normally lead a pressured life, is how exhausting it is doing nothing. Nor can I unwind unwined, so I was left with hangovers at dusk and dawn. I had to face the fact too that despite valiant efforts to be jolly, poor Leo was bored out of his skull, not just by the prattle of three teenagers (he includes me) but, because I don’t drive, by having to ferry us round on every trip. The children’s needs were also different from ours. Having devoured Mills and Boon in the sun all day, they were raring to get off with Sting and Rupert Everett look-alikes in the evening. It was too far for them to walk to Pollencia; anyway we felt they shouldn’t be left entirely unchaperoned. But there was no doubt the presence of parents inhibited the hovering Angels and Ernestos, who would have snapped the two girls up as the villa cats pounced on scraps if they’d been alone. Nor do the discos really get going until around two in the morning, by which time, having been woken by assorted cocks at dawn, one was nearly asleep.

  By the sixth day, three more cats arrived, and a billy goat, who, despite being hobbled, jumped over a wall, and really enjoyed baked beans and The Spectator. The word had obviously got round. In the afternoon a beautiful grey mare and her mule friend trotted up the drive, rushing round scattering hibiscus petals, until an embarrassed owner retrieved them. Perhaps we should start a restaurant called Olivar Cramwell.

  Seven in the evening was the witching hour, when the setting sun slanted across olive and almond groves, gilding the pale grasses, warming the parched brown earth, and turning houses and rocks an apricot pink.

  We usually drank before dinner on the front at Puerto Pollencia, watching the crowds, the yachts swaying in the harbour, and the lovely soft colours of the windsurfers’ sails.

  As teenage girls pedalled by on bikes, with boyfriends with skin as smooth and brown as butterscotch standing on the pillion, Emily and Catriona’s longing was palpable. Oh Life where is thy Sting!

  On the day we left, the weather tactfully went cloudy. Leo, whose bathing trunks had lost their elastic, walked up and down the pool, hands behind his back like Prince Philip to hold them up. The cats all had Falstaffian bellies, the goats finished up everything including Woman’s Own.

  I wished it had been more fun for Leo, but felt, despite a shortage of Angels, the children and I had had a lovely time. We reached Palma airport to find the place in chaos, with all flights hopelessly delayed by a strike. Having lost a fortune trying to ring England, Leo came back with the information that This Was a Major Cock-up, and We Certainly Wouldn’t Be Home To-night.

  ‘I say,’ whispered Emily. ‘Daddy’s really really cheered up.’

  Not In Front Of The Children

  MRS VICTORIA GILLICK, that self-appointed custodian of teenage morality, has been on the war-path again, chuntering furiously about parents’ wishy-washy attitude to their children’s sex-life.

  But surely she must heartily approve of children’s attitude to their parents’ sex life, which is invariably both vigilant and disapproving. Most single parents trying to find a new mate discover they have a Mini-Gillick in the house rotting up any attempt at amorous encounters twenty-four hours a day.

  Take my friend Fiona, who is thirty-eight, widowed and very beautiful.

  ‘I have one admirer who rings up occasionally from abroad,’ she says. ‘Instinctively my two daughters, aged ten and twelve, know it’s him and go into an incredible routine of slamming doors and shouting at each other, so I can’t hear myself speak. Last week, he took me to Annabel’s, the sort of treat I haven’t had for years. Next day he dropped in unexpectedly bringing a box of chocolates. Knowing I was frantic for them to behave, the children were appalling, hanging round boot-faced, playing green-eyed gooseberry, constantly referring to my admirer in the third person: “What’s HE doing here? When’s HE going to go?’”

  Normally these are sweet polite children but, having lost one parent, they regard any of their mother’s suitors as a threat and play up accordingly.

  Added to this antagonism from the Mini-Gillicks, is the astronomical cost of courting for the single parent. One mother, knowing her children will act up if she brings her lover home, spends her entire salary from her part-time job on an all-night baby-sitter twice a week. Others opt for the home fixture, and have all the expense of feeding their lovers. Whereupon the Mini-Gillicks, smelling Boeuf Provencal in the oven and seeing kiwi fruit and out of season strawberries marinading in kirsch in the larder, naturally kick up when they are fobbed off with spaghetti hoops and early bed. Repeatedly the candle-lit dinner will be sabotaged by little faces peering through the bannisters, complaining of sore throats and tummy aches, or embarrassingly demanding why mummy’s put freesias on her bedside table.

  Away fixtures are often even more traumatic. Take the single parent returning shattered from the office, having to change gear into devoted mother for two hours as she supervises supper and baths. Toenails drying, hair in Carmens, she reads a bedtime story. Then, guiltily shrugging off tearful suffocating hugs that mess up her make-up as she sets off, she has to change gear again into party temptress. Invariably, just as the party’s hotting up, and the only attractive man in the room is sidling towards her, she has to bolt home to relieve the baby-sitter. Sometimes she makes the error of smuggling the only attractive man home with her.

  ‘I tried it once,’ said a friend sadly. ‘Both children, woken by the dog barking, wouldn’t go back to sleep. The cat had been sick in the bath. The landing was strewn with toys, and finally he tripped over an un-emptied chamber pot in the bedroom doorway – hardly a lover’s bower.’

  Nor do locked doors provide one hundred per cent security. Another friend, having ensured her daughter was asleep, bolted herself and her lover, Peregrine, into the dining room. They were just warming up on the Wilton when four-year-old Natasha, apopleptic as any Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street, burst through the hatch, thundering: ‘What are you doing to my Mummy?’

  To which Peregrine, through gritted teeth, replied: ‘Trying to keep her warm.’

  It must be a terrifying experience for the child, but not much fun for the lover, particularly when an eighteen-month-old Mini-Gillick with sodden nappy, running nose and ice-cold feet clambers into bed to play chaperone at five in the morning.

  One suitor was put off for good after the child burrowed down the bed and, after a pause, emerged, enquiring: ‘Why isn’t your willy as big as Daddy’s?’

  But it’s not just a question of the child frantically fighting to hang on to his mother. The stumbling block for children of all ages – from J.R. rotting up Miss Ellie’s relationship with Clayton to Adrian Mole bristling over his mother’s amorous capers – is that they cannot handle their parents’ sexuality.

  The whole ambiguity is summed up by six-year-old Max, when asked by his mother if he liked her boy friend. ‘Yes and No,’ he replied. ‘I love him when he drives his car fast, but I hate him when he’s in your bed.’

  Or six-year-old Scarlet, who when told that her mother had died comforted her father that at least he could sell his double bed now, as he wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

  Textbooks claim that children need time to adjust, that the suitor should make a friend of the children before moving in with the parent. But that doesn’t always work. A year later, Scarlet’s widowed father met a lovely girl, who played everything by the book, taking Scarlet and her brothers to the zoo, kicking footballs, mending punctures, building snowmen, until they were clamouring for her to move in.

  But when she did, Scarlet became quite hysterical and had tantrums for weeks because she discovered her father a
nd the lovely girl were sharing the same bed, not sleeping in separate rooms.

  The potential stepmother found it easier to get on with the brothers than with Scarlet. Just as a male suitor can usually cope with a sweet little daughter who clambers on to his knee, but feels threatened by a small boy who is often neurotically bound up with his mother and sees himself as the surrogate husband.

  When the children reach adolescence, however, the Mini-Gillicks are more likely to be of the opposite sex. In direct competition with their mothers, they will sabotage the relationship even more ruthlessly. One of the most poignant stories I know concerns a very attractive middle-aged man who fell in love with a widow the same age, and moved in with her very happily. Then her two teenage minxes came home from boarding school, and drifted round the house, bath towels slipping. Unable to handle the pressures, the man moved out.

  But is the future that bleak? Is the single parent destined to face the arctic sweep of the double bed alone each night, until she becomes so set in her ways she resents any intruder. She must remember that Mini-Gillicks in the end grow up and leave home, and while respecting that they may feel threatened, she shouldn’t kowtow to their bullying and blackmail. Take things slowly, hang on, and remember an awful lot of people make happy second marriages.

  Scarlet of the tantrums, for example, has been contentedly living with her father and stepmother for eighteen months now. Natasha, who burst through the hatch, is also happy that Peregrine has been keeping her mother warm at night for three years.

  Finally the most touching wedding speech I heard was when the bridegroom beckoned to the bride’s seven-year-old son saying with genuine warmth: ‘Where’s my good friend, Henry, without whose approval this wedding could not have taken place?’

  Turn Right At The Spotted Dog

  WE HAVE NOW spent eight long months in this wonderfully hospitable county, but as Nouveau-Rustics, we are still trying to come to terms with the social complications of rural life.

  Dining out, for example, is great fun – if you get there. There’s no A-Z in Gloucestershire. Most people are too grand to put names outside their houses, and my rusty shorthand is quite incapable of getting down those rattled-off instructions: ‘You turn right at the Spotted Dog, then you come to a hideous modern bungalow – well that’s not us . . .’

  The result is blazing rows on the way to every party, with Leo careering round the same perilous country lanes saying he’s bloody going home, and me, tearfully envisaging no dinner and social ostracisation, saying: ‘I’m sure they said left at the Spotted Dog.’

  In the end we always have to ask. It must be hell being a yokel in Gloucestershire. Every Saturday your evening viewing is interrupted by twerps in dinner jackets saying: ‘Can you possibly tell me the way to the Smith-Binghams?’

  The chief problem, however, for the Nouveau-Rustic is sartorial. In London it never mattered what I wore. Here I get it wrong every time. The first dinner party we went to was very grand. I rolled up in high heels, a knee-length velvet skirt and a pleated satin shirt (which had pleats going both ways after twenty miles under a seat belt) to find my hostess in pink cords and a Guernsey sweater.

  On my second jaunt, Leo was away. I was invited this time for supper in the kitchen. Natch, I put on cords and a jersey, to be greeted by a vast dinner party, the men in dark suits, the women in silk shirts and velvet skirts, all the silver on the dining room table, and – most un-London of all – a spare man for me who wasn’t queer.

  The next invitation said ‘black tie’. So I deduced we should dress up this time. Alas, the week before, Leo split his dinner jacket trousers at some binge in London, and borrowed a pair from a friend of six foot six. Consequently his cummerbund had to be tied under his armpits like the top half of a strapless bikini. He also found a large wine mark on the lapel of his white dinner jacket, and covered it with an Animals in War badge. I wore a long black dress, which plunged to the navel.

  We arrived to find all the women very covered up, mostly in short wool dresses, several of the men without ties, and our host wearing green cords, an old green coat, a blue striped shirt, a green bow tie and brown suede shoes.

  As the evening sun slanted cruelly on Leo’s white dinner jacket and my over-exposed, middle-aged bosom, we felt like two Crufts poodles with pompom tails and diamanté collars let loose at a rough shoot. Happily it turned out a marvellous evening, with poodles and gundogs frisking merrily together – and, unlike London, no one talked about house prices or education. And that’s another thing, never ask men in the country what they do for a living. Very few of them seem to do anything.

  I also notice that it’s the drawing room tables who seem to wear the long skirts down here, and everyone covers up not only their bosoms but also their plant pots – with flowered vases called cache-pots. Perhaps I should wear a cache-pot to the next party.

  But having received all this lovely hospitality, we now have to pay it back. In London we never gave dinner parties. During the week we were knackered, and at the weekend everyone pushed off to the country, and anyway we’d got nothing to give them with.

  Consequently, when we had our first dinner party in Gloucestershire, we had to go out and buy three sets of plates, three sets of glasses, knives, table mats, even napkins. Kitchen roll – like patriotism – is not enough.

  The party was a moderate success. The paté tasted of blendered thermal underwear, the pudding of uncooked marmalade. But the venison produced by Leo and my housekeeper Viv was brilliant. The guests included two local landowners and their wives, a couple who weekend down here and their house guests, who turned out to be a boilermaker from Stockport and his wife.

  There was a sticky moment when the boilermaker announced to the straighter of the landowners that he always kissed his son on the mouth when they met.

  ‘How old is your boy?’ asked the landowner.

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ said the boilermaker.

  And a riotous moment when the boilermaker’s wife asked Leo how he’d cooked the venison, whereupon Stan, my housekeeper’s husband – who was serving the pudding – proceeded to tell her. Five minutes later, despite vicious kicks on the ankle from Viv and nine people unserved, the venison hadn’t even reached the oven but was still being larded with green bacon and garlic pellets.

  No one appeared to drink too much. But after saying goodbye to everyone, I found Leo crawling round the kitchen pretending to be an outside labrador, and Stan sleeping peacefully on the landing.

  And now summer is here I am getting nervous about the garden. When people come to dinner, it’s still light and they can gaze out of the window on the crimes, as Nouveau-Rustics, we’ve already committed: planting poplars, which obscure a view, or, even more heinous, putting in strident colours.

  ‘Never have red in a Cotswold garden,’ my neighbour told me the other night. ‘Pink, blue, yellow, silver and, best of all, white, and do plant your clumps in odd numbers.’ And I prayed that my two newly installed red-hot pokers wouldn’t suddenly let me down by flashing at her over the terrace wall. But to prove her point, the local nursery told me that recently Princess Michael completely denuded them of plants – but only white ones. It’s better to be dead than red in a Gloucestershire garden.

  But we’re getting on very well. Last week we gave our second dinner party. Among the guests were the new Lord and his wife, who moved into the village even more recently than we did. Viv got so carried away she took the afternoon off to have her hair put up, and wore her wedding dress. The new Lord, perhaps feeling that this was what an aristocrat should wear to dine with the literati, rolled up very handsome in a Fair Isle jersey and one of those hairy tweed coats heroines bury their faces in at the end of romantic novels.

  In fact local interest has been slightly diverted away from this New Lord on to an even newer Lord, who’s just moved into the next door village and who dropped in on Monday to warn us that his new sheep had jumped out of their field and been chasing dogs all over the valley all
the weekend.

  He was another surprise. I always thought people who kept sheep wore dung-coloured clothes to blend into the countryside, but he turned up in a pink polo-necked jersey and tartan trousers. Not unlike my very good friend and social adviser, the milkman, who raised two fingers to massive Tory bias on polling day, going on his rounds in a scarlet sweater and a red check shirt. I nearly asked him to stand in the garden beside my two red-hot pokers and form an odd-numbered clump.

  The answer, of course, is not to care what anyone thinks and be yourself. But I’m not sure who myself is. I went to a party recently in the London house immortalised last month when Anna Ford chucked a glass of wine in the face of her ex-boss Jonathan Aitken. As I entered the room, my hostess advanced towards me smiling: ‘Hullo Polly,’ she said.

  When Daddy Came Marching Home

  VICTORY IN EUROPE – forty years later, the three words still bring a lump to my throat and make the hairs on the back of my neck prickle with excitement. But it is difficult for anyone to appreciate the euphoria and colossal sense of achievement we felt on VE Day, unless they realise the gruelling hardship people endured in Britain throughout the war.

  Not that it was hard for me. Only two when war began, I had never known anything else. My first hazy memories were of my father going off to fight in France in 1939, and my mother, my brother Timothy, my Nanny, Jamie our Scottish terrier and about forty-five teddy bears making a nightmare fourteen-hour journey up to Yorkshire to stay with an aunt.

  There was no heating on the train, no lights and no food. We wolfed our dried egg sandwiches in the first half hour, and the queues were so long at all the station buffets that my mother never dared buy any food in case the train moved on. As night fell, she kept opening the blackout curtains a fraction, desperate that we might have passed our destination as unlit stations flashed by.