Rancid Pansies

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘And this other one –’ I hold out Dame Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis’s Emergency Cuisine. ‘It’s just as heroic in its way. Terribly rare, too.’

  ‘“HMSO 1942”,’ Joan reads. ‘It can’t be that rare, Gerry. The Stationery Office had huge print runs even with the wartime paper shortage.’

  ‘True. But the first edition was awaiting distribution when it was virtually wiped out in an air raid. I’ve no idea how this copy survived. I like to think it was Dame Emmeline’s own, of course. In its way it’s every bit as much a gem as the Major-General’s book. She was the one who invented Victory Paste, made from puréed cockroaches. She was full of splendid morale-raising zeal. I see her as a sort of Joyce Grenfell figure but grander. Wait a bit … Yes, here we are: “Threats from abroad cannot make a true Briton quail, but they certainly ought to make him look more closely at the generous defences Mother England has provided for her children in time of need. When we look in awe at a noble English oak we may reflect how its forebears supplied the ‘hearts of oak’ for our naval and merchant fleets that won us our Great Empire. But time moves on, and today’s ships have hearts of steel. Yet we would be badly mistaken if we thought our English oaks were thereby demoted to mere symbols of past glory. Not a bit of it! Did we but realise, they provide a way to beat rationing and help the fighting housewife eke out her family’s food with recipes that tease the palate and fortify the nation.

  ‘“You probably thought acorns were mere food for mediaeval pigs, or for Hitler’s Germans in the form of their despised ‘ersatz’ coffee. But they are much more than that, as England’s sturdy peasantry once knew, although the modern swain has misguidedly abandoned this valuable form of commons in favour of ‘labour-saving’ foods with half the nutritional value. I have frequently had words with the workers on my estate about this very subject. There is something about tied cottages, I find, that goes hand-in-hand with stubbornness and the wrong sort of conservatism. The truth is that British acorns can enable us fighting housewives to tap the strength still abundant in the very veins of Old England. Probably as a child you once tried to eat a raw acorn, as I did, only to reject it outright on account of its bitterness. This is due merely to the presence of tannin, a major ingredient of our national drink, tea, although in concentrations too high for our taste. But this bitterness is easily removed if you follow these simple instructions …” And on she goes about leaching and grinding before giving us a recipe for Acorn Polenta with Sparrow Sauce – and very good it is, too. I made it a few years ago. Anyway, Dame Emmeline’s a darling and I love her dearly. I just know we’d have got on. Honestly, Joan, finding these books has made my day.’

  ‘I’m glad. I think your lady would be a bit long-winded for today’s housewife, though, if that species still exists at all.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what I like about both her and the Major-General. They weren’t just writing about food. And I also like their determination to treat virtually anything as edible and make an adventure out of doing it. Vastly preferable to those spotty cheffies telling us about the only shop in London that sells mozzarella bufala worth dying for, don’t you think?’

  ‘What I think,’ Joan observes, ‘is that your film crew have arrived.’

  ‘Oh, no?’ But there is a new car parked with the rest, from which are emerging people wearing those beige waistcoat things with about twenty-five zippered pouches that TV correspondents affect when on assignment in foreign danger zones. An American friend of mine calls them flack jackets, with a c.

  ‘I’m so glad I put on my best boiler suit,’ says Joan as we stroll over to meet them. ‘I should hate to shame anyone. And with that shirt you look as though you might be about to break into the Lumberjack Song at any moment.’

  ‘I was hoping the boots might distract that sort of attention.’

  ‘In a way they do. Do you remember those old three-wheeler invalid carriages with a two-stroke engine? Of course you don’t – you’re far too young. But somehow your boots remind me of them.’

  ‘Thanks, Joan,’ I say a little stiffly. ‘They were all I could get at short notice. Actually, I can barely walk in them. They’re giving me frightful blisters.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ve got the authentic labourer’s slouch, even if he’d be the sort of labourer who calls for a lager-andlime.’

  ‘I do hope our relationship isn’t going to degenerate into vulgar butcher-than-thou competitiveness.’

  ‘Not a chance, sport,’ says Joan, merrily giving me a whack between the shoulder blades.

  But we have now come up with the TV party, who are unloading equipment from their car. The lead flack does in fact have a face I vaguely recognise despite my practically never seeing British TV. The celebrated Leo Wolstenholme is quite short and stubby with a radish nose and an expression of mulish equanimity like that of a garden gnome used to being lied to. Her lack of glamour seems a hopeful sign. Nobody looking like that could possibly flourish in television these days unless she had genuine talent.

  ‘Leo Wolstenholme? I’m Gerry Samper and this is Joan Nugent, the close friend of Millie Cleat’s I mentioned. You’ve doe well to find us up here in the wilds.’

  Hands are shaken. A girl in her mid-twenties with fashionably butchered hair and a face bristling with pins and studs is presented as Leo’s personal assistant, Sappho.

  ‘Not Saffron?’

  ‘No – Saffron’s in London. She’s the one you spoke to on the phone.’ The same Marlborough tones, though.

  ‘Good name, Sappho.’ I suppose I’m hoping to cheer up this dour and charmless creature. ‘I mean, in the circumstances.’ The girl looks blank. ‘Your name? It’s an anagram of “Posh PA”. Rather appropriate.’ But she goes on looking blank even as her lips mime a baffled smile.

  ‘And this is Jonti.’ Leo presents a lean young man with what looks to the eagle Samper eye like a half-smoked spliff parked behind one ear. Jonti is obviously sizing up the site for suitable locations and the sun’s direction. He looks as though he’d tried it all by the age of twelve and been bored by everything that didn’t involve electronic technology. ‘And Olly.’ Olly is a puppyish elf who at a guess has tried nothing other than being a sound-man in a TV company. He is already wearing a pair of cans around his neck.

  ‘And this is what’s left of your house?’ asks Leo incredulously. ‘They warned us at the hotel that there wouldn’t be much left to see. They were right.’

  ‘It did fall from right up there,’ I point to where a few onlookers are still visible at the plateau’s edge. ‘It’s quite a way.’

  ‘Shit. Your whole house?’

  ‘The lot. Everything I owned in the world. It’s all under there, somewhere.’ I indicate the moraine with a suitably casual gesture. The four from Global Eyeball are silent, evidently awed by the idea of material belongings being so quickly and impressively annihilated. ‘Except for my car.’ They take in the battered hulk of the Ass Vein and the excavator still snorting away busily behind it.

  ‘That’s pretty tragic,’ says Leo thoughtfully. ‘Good job you weren’t in the house.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘At the hotel they said something about your having got out by a miracle. I think they mentioned the ghost of Princess Diana, but the desk clerk’s English was a bit iffy.’

  ‘Oh, one of those local bits of superstitious gossip,’ I say dismissively. ‘Typical republicans: they’re obsessed with royalty and tragic glam. Beautiful mothers dying young, apparitions, Catholic kitsch with erotic overtones, all that stuff. We are in Italy, after all.’ I do feel a bit disloyal, not to say hypocritical, but these people are here to talk to me about Millie Cleat. Nothing else need concern them.

  ‘Mm. So let’s make a start, if that’s all right by you? We’d like to be done and dusted by tonight. Our flight’s tomorrow morning early. Jonti?’

  ‘I was thinking over on those rocks? Sun’s right and you’ve got that busted roof on the ground behind with the excavator coming in an
d out of the frame in the distance. Obviously we can vary the shot, pan around as you’re speaking.’

  ‘Yes, I like the idea of some action going on behind me. Otherwise this film is going to be all shots of yachts plus some newsreel footage. We can’t afford to have the talking heads too static. OK Gerry, you’re the writer – brilliant book, by the way. Best I’ve ever read of that kind of thing – do you want to go first, or what about Joan here? I’m hoping you can add some details about Millie that don’t appear in Gerry’s book, Joan. Especially towards the end when she seems to have lost the plot over those Deep Blue environmentalist fanatics. However, I do want to make it clear to both of you: this isn’t going to be a knocking film. Millie’s a heroine and she’ll stay one. But I’ve read enough to realise she was a complex and fascinating character. We’re trying to investigate why she captured the public’s imagination to such an extent. I want some warts to go with the normal picture. She wasn’t a saint, after all.’

  For a bizarre moment I have to remind myself it’s Millie and not Princess Di Leo’s speaking about. As we all move towards Jonti’s favoured site our attention is distracted by shouts in the distance. It appears that something else has come to light. Joan and I excuse ourselves and hurry over. There’s now a rather depressing heap of old rags piled up on one side that I recognise as part of my wardrobe, sadly aged. But they aren’t the centre of attention. They are not what the boys from Il Tirreno are busily photographing as one of the Forestale officers holds it up. It takes me a moment to recognise it as an object I’d clean forgotten I owned. You know how it is: you get so used to certain things in your house that you no longer see them. Wives, children, pets, of course, and pictures. Especially pictures. After a few years on the wall the only way to see them again is to re-frame them and hang them somewhere else. This object being held up is a piece of campery that Derek gave me as a joke years ago when it became briefly notorious: the twelve-inch tall porcelain doll of Diana wearing that high-collared ‘Elvis dress’ studded with fake pearls. It was marketed by the Franklin Mint, the American company the Diana Memorial Fund later unsuccessfully sued, in the process making an ass of itself besides losing thirteen and a half million pounds. And as soon as I see it I realise this is one of those potentially awkward moments when it’s necessary to think on one’s feet, even if they do hurt. The two from Il Tirreno come hurrying up, the eager hack-light gleaming in their eyes.

  ‘Excuse me, signor Samper,’ the elder addresses me in Italian, ‘but can you confirm that this exquisite statue of la principessa Diana was in your house when it fell?’

  I take it from him gingerly as though it were a little antipersonnel mine that had been unearthed. ‘Er, well, yes, I suppose it must have been. It’s just, you know, an ornament.’

  ‘Ah, like a household god? Like i Lari e i Penati?’

  O-level was a long time ago and I’d forgotten about the Romans’ gods, Lares and Penates and Vesta the goddess of the hearth watching over their elegant villas with courtyards and pools and those bedrooms with improper friezes. But I must club this hare he’s started before it can run another step. ‘No, absolutely not. It’s just one of those bits of junk that gradually accumulate in everybody’s house. A mere nìnnolo: it has no significance whatever, although by now it may be a collector’s item for all I know.’

  ‘But you can’t deny its survival is pretty miraculous,’ the hack perseveres. ‘Just look at it. È porcellana, è fragilissima, yet it’s not even chipped. It’s perfect, even after falling at least a hundred metres in a shower of rock and rubble, lying buried for nearly half a year and being brought to the surface by an excavator. Don’t tell me that’s not miraculous.’

  ‘It’s remarkable, certainly,’ I concede. ‘Even wonderful.’ Now, Samper, be careful here. Your new home depends on it. ‘But I’m not sure I’d dare call it a miracle. We’re not priests and it’s hardly for us to make judgements of that kind. And as a matter of fact it isn’t perfect. She was holding a ghastly silk rose in her right hand – the stem went through here, look. I’m glad to see that’s gone.’

  ‘Eh bé, signore, a detail. A missing rose, though? Some would see that as significant. My judgement tells me that Princess Diana is somehow bound up with your life and, miracle or not, here you are and here her statue is, both of you intact. I can assure you, very few of my readers will have any doubts.’

  ‘That I can well imagine. After all, a good percentage of them believe they’ll win the Lotto each week.’ Suddenly I notice the saturnine Jonti has his camera on his shoulder and is filming this little scene. ‘Hey, stop that!’ I cry. ‘Come on, you guys, you’re not here to film this stuff, you’re here to do an interview about Millie Cleat.’ I turn to Leo for support. ‘Can’t we get started?’

  ‘Oh, Jonti was just getting some light and sound levels. General location shots. Anyway, it’s interesting, Gerry. This statue really came from your house?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. It’s just one of those silly camp gifts that friends give each other as a joke. I bet you’ve got plenty of similar things at home. I mean’ – I swing around and sweep an arm over the boulder-strewn scene – ‘somewhere under this lies a farting teddy bear I was given. If that had survived, would these goons be calling it a miracle? Of course not.’

  ‘Still,’ Leo says musingly, ‘it does rather tie in with what they were saying in the hotel this morning. Maybe you really are under the protection of Lady Di’s spirit even if you don’t know it.’

  She laughs, but not as though the whole things is as risible as I find it. A weight of irritable hopelessness envelops me like a leaden cape. All at once the excavator stops and falls silent with a wheeze. People begin drifting towards their cars. Midday already. Leo agrees to send her crew down to the nearest bar to have some sandwiches made up for us and also bring us back something to drink while she stays behind with Joan and me to prepare the interviews. I wander off and kick moodily at my heap of ex-finery. I notice it includes my famous pair of Homo Erectus jeans that a mere two or three years ago were denim couture’s equivalent of a Vacheron Constantin watch and now look as though they’d been used to stuff a drain. Strangely, I feel no pang. Since I’m hiring its driver by the day, the digger can carry on this afternoon but if nothing else turns up I shan’t bother to continue. What’s the point? I’m sorriest about my books and CDs, many of which (if I could ever remember their titles) would require a good deal of money and effort to replace. All the rest is just stuff that can be bought anywhere. Of all things it would be Derek’s blasted Di doll that should have come to light. True, ten years ago I was happy to have it as a piece of topical kitsch. In her bobbly bolero she used to stand behind the bath taps and gaze down at bathers’ languidly floating genitalia with her curiously American, Pepsodent smile. She kept dropping her rose into the bathwater and after sundry immersions it was looking faded and tatty. Still, I do wonder at the physics involved not only in the statuette’s freakish survival but in its complete isolation. There was not a shard of broken hand basin nearby that I could see, nor even one of the sundry Floris bottles that had shared her perch. Strange indeed.

  The film crew returns, we eat our lunch, the day wears on. As the excavator comes to life again Leo interviews me perched on the rock in an uncomfortable posture that reminds me of Copenhagen’s mermaid readying herself for curettage. My boots will, I hope, go some way towards dispelling this image. Even as my feet throb I wonder whether an important part of my decision to halt all further excavation after tonight isn’t down to my determination never to wear these things again. I’m equally determined never to be interviewed again. Leo’s questions are disappointingly the tired old stuff of someone who is afraid of eliciting responses that imperil the line she has already decided to take. What was the great Millie Cleat like to work with? (Grim.) How close was she to her family? (Not.) Do I think she had mystical experiences during her lone voyages? (If you knew how I’d prayed for her to try walking on water.) When things appear to sag I at
last break the story of Millie’s yacht Beldame cutting across the bows of that EAGIS survey in the Canaries and confirm that the scientists have it all on video. This promise of some enlivening drama is just what Leo wants to hear. It means being able to show footage the viewing public has never seen – unlike the newsreel shots of Millie’s death in Sydney harbour which constant repetition has rendered no longer visible, along with the fall of the Twin Towers or the wives, children, pets and pictures in our own homes. Leo becomes quite red with excitement. She looks like a gnome on hearing it’s going to be a bumper year for toadstools.

  ‘Obviously a perfect instance of a natural-born sportswoman being competitive to her fingertips. It’s that killer instinct: Go for it!’

  ‘It was certainly a perfect instance of an egocentric and ignorant sportswoman ruining a major European scientific survey of vital interest to half the countries in the northern hemisphere with an Atlantic coastline.’