by Jilly Cooper
Blinkered she may be: one can only hope there’s light at the end of the tunnel vision.
THREE
Hunting With The Hoorays
IN MY YOUTH, hunt balls were held in vast country houses and were very, very wild. By midnight, the barrage of bread rolls was only exceeded by the squadrons of moths thundering out of the brocade as ancient four-posters heaved with occupants.
It was with excitement but some trepidation therefore that we accepted an invitation to the Cotswold Hunt Ball. Needing a dress, I borrowed my daughter’s black strapless. A mild fit of sulks, because my husband said I looked like a badly wrapped Christmas cracker, gave me the excuse to sit in the back. The dress would never have got under a seat belt anyway; when my brother took his wife and daughters to a hunt ball in Shropshire, he had to borrow a horse box to accommodate the crinolines.
We kicked off with champagne at the house of the Joint Master, Tim Unwin. Those making feeble attempts to pace themselves drank Buck’s Fizz. A hunting blade with a red Pentel was marking the list of forty people in the Unwin’s party: ‘Putting asterisks beside all the worst gropers,’ he said. He had to guard his wife, he explained, pointing to an exquisite blonde. ‘She’s Polish, I’m Welsh. It makes for a wonderfully volatile marriage. We throw telephones at one another.’
Another beautiful blonde, Princess Michael’s lady-in-waiting, floated across the room.
‘I’m official lech-in-waiting tonight,’ said my husband, pursuing her briskly.
The men looked even more glamorous than the women, gaudy peacocks in their different tailcoats, red with green collars for the Cotswold, red with maroon for the VWH (Vale of the White Horse), dark blue with buff for the Beaufort. Permission to wear the hunt coat – or one’s button, as it is called – is given by the Master, like getting one’s colours.
Soon they were capping each other’s tales of earlier hunt balls: erotic scufflings in the dungeons at Berkeley Castle, Masters riding their horses round the ballroom followed by hounds. Our host remembered dancing most of one evening with a lampstand. ‘Suddenly I noticed the then Master was solemnly chewing up a glass. My immediate unaltruistic thought was “Oh hell, he won’t be able to take hounds out tomorrow.” But he didn’t come to any harm. If the glass is good, one doesn’t.’
It was a bitterly cold night as we set out in convoys to the ball. Cars with silver foxes on the bonnets skidded over the roads, rattling cattle grids and lighting up the grey curls of traveller’s joy and the last red beech leaves. Flakes of snow drifted down as we arrived at Cheltenham Town Hall. ‘It’s already fetlock deep in Stow-on-the-Wold,’ bellowed a woman who had just arrived with a white windscreen.
In the Ladies, pale-shouldered women with weathered complexions fought for the mirror.
‘I got bucked off into a cow-pat today,’ wailed a pretty girl. ‘I’ll never get my breeches clean.’
‘Soak them in Nappisan,’ advised a large lady.
Soon four hundred people were tucking into a splendid dinner at £18.50 a head. On my left a late arrival seemed very familiar. Tall, raffish, handsome, like an unfrocked cherub making a guest appearance in Minder, he said he’d just left a crucial meeting in Maidenhead. He hunted with the Cotswold when business and racing allowed.
Suddenly I twigged: he was Michael Arnold, the Receiver who’d so audaciously hijacked the miners’ five million pounds from a foreign bank last week.
‘For what we are about to receiver,’ I said, attacking my smoked mackerel.
What was extraordinary, he went on, was that he had suddenly bumped into one of the foreign bankers he’d been writing to for weeks trying to recoup the cash, out hunting. Neither of them had had any idea that they were members of the same hunt.
‘Gosh,’ I said, having visions of wads of tenners being handed over as they whizzed over hedges.
Mr Arnold, forty-nine, started hunting only three seasons ago, but has, he said, no difficulty keeping up. ‘I’m as competitive about hunting as I am about business. Nanny hunts with the Cotswold too – she picks me up if I fall off,’ he added.
‘My cleaner used to hunt with the Beaufort,’ I said, to keep my end up.
On my right, the Master, Tim Unwin, said that one of the keenest hunts in the country was the South Wales Banwen Miners: ‘We keep drafting hounds to them. They always want a hound who’s a pack leader.’
Perhaps they should call it Arthur.
Discussing obsessions with hunting, Tim cited a former Master who’d left a clause in his will saying he wanted his body fed to hounds so he could enjoy one last run.
‘We got round it by scattering his ashes on the hounds’ porridge.’
A diversion was caused by the late arrival of three young men from the Cambridge Harriers, all with ironed hair and smooth faces, who’d gone to Gloucester Town Hall by mistake. ‘Fast man across country,’ said Tim approvingly as one of them sat down opposite us. He was certainly the fastest eater, and raced through three courses in as many minutes.
The band was playing ‘Red Red Wine’. The brilliantly lit ballroom beckoned. Tim swept me off to dance. A wonderful dancer, his only problem was that, being Master, he knew everyone . . . and every time he raised his hand, which was firmly clasping mine, to hail some chum, I shot right out of my dress – a chintzless wonder.
As the vast floor filled with couples, red coats with flying tails clashing gloriously with the stinging fuchsia pinks and electric blues of the girls’ dresses, the ballroom looked like a shaken kaleidoscope. I couldn’t help feeling that as well as class hatred, an element of sexual jealousy must motivate the hunt saboteurs: people in hunting kit look so good.
‘If we went out in rags on rough ponies we wouldn’t get half the flak,’ said Tim Unwin. ‘People get completely the wrong idea. Hunting isn’t a rich elitist sport – people of all ages and classes come out with us. We’ve got millers, doctors and farmers as well as knights. I always think of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.’
To prove the point, at that moment our fishmonger bopped past with his comely wife, and I was able to order some cod for the weekend.
It was also nice to see the huge number of young people who’d paid £11.50 for an after-dinner ticket. Sartorially there is a complete divide between the young girls, who all wear mid-calf dresses and look as though they are going to a drinks party, and the wrinklies, whose dresses go down to the ground.
‘Ever since a short-sighted brigadier mistook my varicose veins for patterned stockings I’ve stuck to long,’ sighed one woman.
With the richness of royalty in the area, each hunt is proud of its royal patrons. Princess Anne and Captain Phillips hunt with the Beaufort, Princess Michael also. But Prince Michael remains loyal to the Cotswold. Maybe it is the secret of a happy marriage for each to hunt with different packs.
Prince Charles goes out with the VWH. ‘HRH has got a triffic sense of humour,’ said a VWH stalwart. ‘The other day a bobbed-tail fox went past, and he turned to me and said, “Looks more like a bloody corgi.” Bloody funny, what?’ he brayed with laughter.
Everyone was having a great time. The Receiver turned out to be a wonderful dancer, too, what with twinkling black suede feet and long muscular arms (presumably as a result of humping all that money around).
No one poured champagne over anyone else – at £15 a bottle they couldn’t afford to. And with so many starving birds outside, people were far too conservation-conscious to hurl bread rolls.
12.30 a.m.: There was a rumpus in the hall. ‘No, you can’t come in,’ a bossy official was saying to a group of people with snow in their hair. ‘The doors shut at midnight.’
The next minute a pint-sized individual in a red coat, furious as a hunt terrier, was yelling into the official’s navel.
‘You don’t understand, you must let us in. They’re hunting over me le-and tomorrow.’
Three thousand acres near Winchcombe tipped the scales, and the doors were opened.
Hungry as hunters, we fell o
n breakfast. Back on the floor, the fastest eater, obviously still hungry, was nibbling his partner’s bare shoulder. One local Casanova, with patent leather hair and an overdeveloped little finger from winding women round it, had the unenviable problem of having both his wife and current mistress as well as his discarded mistress present. The former two smirked slightly as the ex-mistress flounced up to him, breathing fire.
To shut her up, he bore her off to dance, and all round the floor one could see them rowing in that rigid-jawed upper class way, as though they’d had too many injections at the dentist.
Why do hunting people have such a reputation for adultery? Perhaps it is because they’re so fit – at three o’clock in the morning no one was flagging – or because if you like chasing foxes, you enjoy chasing other things, or because, as one man explained to me, ‘Only time one can really sleep with one’s wife is two weeks in November. Then she can have the baby in August, and be back in time for cubbing.’
3.45 a.m.: Sadly mindful of icy roads, we called it a day. Outside there were already three inches of snow. As the long dresses trailed over the white pavements, flurrying flakes blurred the Regency houses, and young blades engaged in a snowball fight, we seemed to have gone back a hundred years.
Not unamiably, the attendant manning the Gents sleepily imitated them: ‘Going to Georgie’s drinks party? Ya. Is Rose going? Ya. Hunting tomorrow? Ya. Think they’ll cancel? Ya.’
Suddenly the horn called and they all swarmed back, view-hallooing, to join the stampede of the ‘Posthorn Gallop’. A passionately embracing couple, nearly knocked sideways in the rush, reluctantly disengaged themselves and joined in.
The anti-fox hunting brigade don’t seem to realise that by trying to abolish hunting, they are taking a pair of scissors to the whole social tapestry of country life, which has lasted for generations. For, as R S Surtees commented, over a hundred years ago, the real business of a hunt ball ‘is either to look out for a wife or look after a wife, or to look after somebody’s else’s wife’.
It has very little to do with foxes.
Arsenic For New Lace
I SHALL ALWAYS be grateful to Shirley Conran. Halfway through last summer hols, when my children were about to murder one another, my daughter bought Lace. For five days total peace reigned, until she emerged from her bedroom declaring it: ‘Absolutely brill, far better than Jane Eyre.
Unable to have a read, because another teenager whipped the book, I had to wait for Lace Two. Sadly it’s a frightful disappointment, pretentious, pornographic, with non-existent characterisation and excruciating dialogue.
‘The secret of a best-selling novel,’ Shirley Conran advised me recently, ‘is to write about rich, very successful people doing things the public aren’t familiar with.’
Thus in Lace Two, we have Maxine, the French Countess, ‘with only ten guests to consider, organising a simple programme: partridge shooting on the estate, riding through the vineyards, cards and conversation for those who hoped to say warm inside, and on Sunday a stag hunt on a neighbour’s estate’.
During the stag hunt, the Countess, who has abandoned her sables, ‘so heavy and dark’, for more flattering red fox, is rewarded for her sartorial discrimination by a bunk-up in a hayloft with an old admirer.
Thousands of readers perhaps do justify getting a cheap thrill from such junk on the grounds that they are acquiring knowledge at the same time. Thus as well as stag hunts, we learn about female circumcision, stocks and shares, motor racing, women’s magazines, middle-eastern customs, how to decorate our houses and ourselves tastefully, and how to improve our sex lives. Superwoman rides and rides again.
All Miss Conran’s female characters are, like herself, achievers – even the tarts. In a totally unnecessary flagellation scene, Therese is only conscious, as she whacks the hell out of an ancient client, of how much she is improving her backhand drive.
Silliness reaches pyrotechnical levels when King Abdullah, of goldfish fame in the first Lace, bangs Lady Swann on a billiard table in a London club during a bomb scare. Detail is so elaborate, one half expects the King to chalk the tip of his member before play commences.
Despite her regret that she is only wearing ‘chainstore pantihose’, Lady Swann enjoys it all enormously, telling herself: ‘I am lighting up like the sun rising over the Swiss Alps, when the mountain peaks get that living pink glow that spreads slowly down the valley.’ Sounds rather like German measles.
The jacket blurb tells us Miss Conran is an experienced textile designer and colour consultant. Certainly no fabric or paint shade goes unremarked on, no garment undescribed. But why doesn’t she provide us with out-of-town stockists as well?
She is also heavily into fruit and food imagery, what with peach négligées, apricot sofas, cinnamon-tipped nipples, and best of all ‘claret-coloured private parts’. I guess they only perform at room temperature. Perhaps I’m needled by Miss Conran’s pronouncements that brass beds are passé (I’m very fond of ours) and, even worse, that no woman over thirty should wear grey – which means junking half my wardrobe.
Worst of all was the information that the sex goddess heroine has breasts weighing a pound each. Whimpering, I rushed to the bathroom and watched in alarm by several cats and dogs, measured my length on the carpet, and tried to weigh one of mine on the bathroom scales. Utter horrors – only two ounces. Reminding myself the bathroom scales deliberately underweigh, I tore downstairs, and tried the kitchen scales. By cheating and leaning heavily, I notched up three kilograms, but a straight single boob could only achieve four ounces. Frightfully depressing being only twenty-five per cent sex goddess.
Finally I suppose one must grudgingly admire Miss Conran for making so many millions. Perhaps, as a fellow author, I’m just suffering from Pennies Envy.
Dashing Away With The Smooth Iron Lady
‘YOU’VE GOT THE Iron Lady at the Winter Gardens and Rambo at the ABC – not much to choose between them,’ said my taxi driver with a sniff, as he dropped me off at the 1985 Tory Party Conference. It was plain, though, as I fought my way through a forest of friskers into the conference hall, that the Iron Lady and the Tory Party were hell-bent on softening their image.
Labour’s renaissance at Bournemouth had put the fear of God into them. To stop Mr Kinnock cornering the market in compassion, ministers were falling over themselves to appear the most caring.
Mrs Thatcher’s hair and make-up were softer. The powder-blue platform subtly emphasised her blue eyes, which filled with tears during ‘I Vow To Thee My Country’. Now she was gazing besottedly up at Transport Minister Nicholas Ridley, who was rabbiting on about buses, as though they’d just got engaged. There was Willie Whitelaw radiating paternalism, and Leon Brittan like a short-sighted camel, gazing mournfully out of its cage on the ills of the world.
Also on the platform under the sign saying ‘Serving the Nation’ sat my old friend and fellow panellist on ‘What’s My Line?’, Jeffrey Archer. I resisted the temptation to wave and ask him: ‘Does your party really provide a service?’ Poor Jeffrey’s had a bad time since he joined up, but I’m sure he’ll bounce back. Maybe he should try some remedial exercises for fallen Archers.
Mr Ridley’s speech finished, the main problem – as one boring cliché-ridden speech followed another and dull-egate followed dull-egate – was to keep awake. Everyone harped on the caring theme. Mrs T looked enchanted. I looked at her ministers. When I did a piece on parliament about ten years ago, I found the Tory men great fun, drinking like fishes, and exchanging sizzling eye-meets with any pretty girl that came along. Alas, Sarah Keays has had the same inhibiting effect on them as AIDs has on Hollywood. Now when they were not exuding compassion on the platform, they gazed stonily ahead, terrified of catching a lady delegate’s eye, ignoring the odd bits of Central Office crumpet passing by.
There was a distinct shortage of pretty girls at the conference generally. ‘All the good-looking ones have defected to the SDP,’ said a photographer in disgust.
Despite these problems, and a poll saying fifty-one per cent of the electorate think Mrs T ought to be replaced before the next election, she seemed very chipper.
Speculation, however, is endless about her successor. On the one hand there are the Hair Apparents: Douglas Hurd, with his white woolly mop and pepper-grinder voice, and Geoffrey Howe of the silver curls. Sir Geoffrey’s really perked up since he’s become Foreign Secretary and presumably escaped abroad from Nanny Thatcher. Chief of the Hair Apparents, however, is the conference darling, the amazingly sleek Michael Heseltine. No one delivers clichés with more aplomb, but he does make the audience roar with much-needed laughter. His blond locks flopped about so much that I expected a lady delegate to rush up and lend him a Kirby grip. I suspect that, although gentlewomen prefer blonds, they tend to end up with brunettes, and both the party and Mrs T will settle for the Not-Much-Hair Apparent: Norman Tebbit.
Until he smiles, the excellent Norman looks like the second murderer in Macbeth. The perfect lugubrious stand-up comic, his forte is ripping apart the Opposition and Mrs Thatcher’s enemies within the party. Once Tebbitten, twice shy. The conference was enchanted to see him back on such vitriolic form after his appalling ordeal at Brighton. Mrs Thatcher awarded him even warmer glances than Mr Ridley. ‘Wave Norman,’ she whispered, as the delegates cheered.
I don’t think Norman Fowler has leadership potential. I fell asleep during his speech. His claim, that his caring Social Services Ministry had raised single parent allowances to the highest level, didn’t seem to carry much weight with Miss Keays. Ironically, her ludicrous revelations in the Mirror cheered up the delegates enormously. Nothing unites the Tory Party like a good bitch. It’s also terrifying when one reads of Cecil’s vacillations to think he might easily have been the next leader. Perhaps Miss Keays ought to adopt ‘Serving the Tories’ as her new motto.