Yesterday morning is the first time Bertie has seen snow. Beagles are inquisitive and he marvelled at this phenomenon, although it didn’t take him long to work out it was best appreciated standing under the garden table.
Robert took him to the cemetery to meet a snowman. You may notice he is wearing a harness. Last week he unexpectedly met his special friend Peggy Sue in the cemetery and excitedly slipped out of his collar. Just as we have been doing, he zoomed round and round releasing some of his energy, pent up for three weeks. Fortunately he is none the worse for breaking out of his lock-down regime and seems to be resigned to wearing a harness. Bertie is an optimist but also philosophic. Surprisingly, he is not greedy and Robert’s mission is to try to control the calorie intake for both of us. Bertie looks svelte while my kilos wax.
Have started on Duff Cooper’s diaries. It is 1915, he is twenty-five and working at the Foreign Office, a Reserved Occupation so he is unable to join up. It is a strange world. He seems to take most afternoons off but does go to his office on Sundays, sometimes, and on Christmas Day. He dines at the Junior Carlton, the Bachelors’ and the Bath Club. I can remember the drawing room at the Bath Club where my uncle was a member. He is conducting a stormy courtship with Lady Diana Manners, later to become his wife, but that doesn’t stop him having some success with women of his own class and some prostitutes. He frequently dines with the Prime Minister (Asquith) and plays bridge with him. If I may digress, Churchill liked to play bezique when he was PM – a distraction from the cares of office, no doubt. He takes Turkish Baths at the Automobile Club with Winston Churchill and generally moves in the highest social circles. Not bad for a surgeon’s boy from Norwich whose father specialised in venereal disease and piles.
The diaries run to almost 500 pages and end in 1951. I am greatly looking forward to the ride and cross-referencing with the unabridged Chips Channon diaries to be published this year although Chips, “the American boy”, is hardly mentioned by Duff.
Bertie (Wooster, not the dog- incidentally good to see him out and about again)) nursed a long standing grievance against Tubby Glossop because “He was the fellow, if you remember, who, callously ignoring the fact that we had been friends since boyhood, betted me one night at the Drones that I wouldn’t swing myself across the swimming-bath by the rings – a childish feat for one of my lissomness – and then , having seen me well on the way, looped back the last ring, thus rendering it necessary for me to drop into the deep end in formal evening costume.”
The real setting for this anecdote, well known to Wodehouseans, was the Bath Club and the Wodehouse expert, Norman Murphy, tracked down Judge Richard Vick who had been one of the victims of the jape.
The judge also told Murphy that the Bath Club was very convenient as it formed, in conjunction with Brown’s hotel, a short cut from Berkeley Street to Albermarle Street, enabling one to avoid people one did not wish to meet – “Policemen. girls, girls’ mothers- people like that”.
I wonder if Duff availed himself of this useful facility.