Last Curtsey by Fiona MacCarthy

Author:Fiona MacCarthy [Fiona MacCarthy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571265817
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Not surprisingly these optimistic travel plans very often went awry. One summer evening I thought I had caught a train to Newbury but discovered when I got to Reading that I was on the Didcot–Oxford line. I shot off the train and travelled on by taxi, panic-stricken, to find the whole house party just sitting down to dinner. I had somehow scrambled into my evening dress en route. In an age long before the mobile phone these ventures into unknown territory – geographical and social – could be testing to a deb’s initiative.

In our mother’s generation house parties in the country were quite formal, very laboured. Robert Altman caught the mood precisely in his movie Gosford Park. A young girl would often be sent with her own maid who would unpack for her and dress her and also discreetly act as chaperone. If she did not bring a servant then a housemaid would unpack for her. In our own more makeshift days this was no longer usual. The lavish style of entertaining my sister and I had been startled by at Somerhill had become exceptional by 1958. You would not necessarily be going to a grand house. A private drive, even a short one, was more or less de rigueur: there were only rare occasions, a desperation billet, when debs found themselves staying in houses in a road. But the substantial halls and manors in which we mainly found ourselves were often a bit shabby, bashed around and dog-haired, in the days before ‘shabby chic’ became a style to aim for. In post-war Britain this was the real thing.

House party guests would be instructed to arrive in early evening: late tea or early drinks time, according to the strictly timed rituals of consumption in such households. Sometimes there would be a little throng of you together since, as so helpfully suggested by your hostess, you had met up at the ticket office before travelling or located one another on the train. These were not always people you would ideally have chosen to spend a whole weekend with. ‘The other people who are coming to stop with us are Caroline Butler, Brian Dykes and Philip Fazil’: sometimes the heart sank. As soon as you arrived you were shown up to your room. You never knew whether you would be assigned a draped four poster or a camp bed in the now abandoned nursery. As a child, at children’s parties or church fêtes, I had loved the tense exhilaration of the lucky dip: pushing my hand down through the sawdust in the dustbin to extract a surprise package that might be a dud but might equally well be the thing I had most wanted. The charm or, to some, the nerve-racking quality of these country-house weekends was that they were always a total lucky dip.

Though often architecturally fine and stacked with the inherited treasures of the ancestors, few of these houses were up to date in their equipment. There was a striking shortage of mod cons.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.