Diamonds at Dinner by Hilda Newman

Author:Hilda Newman [Hilda Newman and Tim Tate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782197829
Publisher: John Blake
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Who wouldn’t want to explore such a place? I laced up my sensible shoes and set off to the east in search of it. I think it must have taken a good half an hour of steady marching through open parkland and dense shrubbery to track it down. When I did, my first thought was, ‘Why would anyone build such a structure?’ And the second was, ‘What is it for?’

Of course, I was being both silly and sensible all at the same time. The Rotunda – like so many buildings on the estate – wasn’t ‘for’ anything: it had no real purpose and the rich ornamentation promised by the guidebook had long since disappeared – probably for the eminently sensible reason that no one would want to trek for half an hour simply to sit there in splendid isolation. The real reason for the Rotunda, of course, was simply that there was no reason: when it was designed and built, the gentry had a great love of creating what they called (with unabashed accuracy) follies.

‘Well,’ I thought to myself, ‘it must be very good to have the money to put up a fine stone building like this without any use for it.’ But if I’m honest, the thought also slipped into my mind that here would be a very fine and private place to sit with a young man, if a girl happened to be courting.

The same rather risky thought crossed my mind on another expedition when I crossed the river and the ha ha – a sort of deep turfed ditch, which split what the guidebook called ‘the pleasure grounds’ in two – and made my way over the vast expanse of parkland to find the Temple. This turned out to be a truly stunning limestone building, constructed to look like an ancient Greek temple, with six huge columns supporting a frontage on which intricate stone carvings had been sculpted. When it was built, it was intended as a greenhouse and, so I learned, it had vast sash windows to protect the flowers within, while catching and magnifying the sunlight. It also had a highly innovative system of under-floor heating, powered by a brick ‘bothy’ at the back. It struck me that here was a measure of the eccentricity of the English aristocracy: they would spend a fortune to keep their flowers warm, while the house they and their servants occupied froze them to the bone. It is as they say: the rich are different. But to my mischievous mind, the Temple was admirably remote and just the sort of place where a boy and girl could meet – not, of course, that I would allow any such thing but, if I did, well, this would be quite the location for it.

I think I need to tell you a little bit about courting when I was young enough to think about it. Because times were very, very different then and the more open – not to say forward – way young people behave in our modern world was quite unthinkable in the 1930s.

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