Wait For Me by Devonshire Deborah

Author:Devonshire, Deborah [Devonshire, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Murray
Published: 2010-09-08T23:00:00+00:00

Our weeks at Lismore were enlivened not only by a stream of visitors from abroad but also by neighbours, including a number of friends and relations who, disenchanted with England and its Socialist government, had decided to emigrate. Pam and Derek were among our first guests and they fell for Ireland. Derek was attracted by its lack of bureaucracy and bossiness, not to mention Attlee’s penal taxation, and decided to buy Tullamaine Castle in County Tipperary, where he set up a racehorse training establishment. He and Pam entertained a great deal – too much for Pam to manage single-handed – and they employed a succession of cooks. None of them came up to Pam’s high standards and she used to come over to see me and regale me with her kitchen woes. ‘Stublow, ordering with Mrs B is a nightmare,’ or ‘Isn’t game soup the richest and loveliest soup you ever laid hands on? Well, a milky affair came up.’ This said in a dramatic voice that grew lower and more urgent until the last sentence might have been recounting a world-shaking disaster. To Pam it was. Between cooks she produced the meals herself. I telephoned one day to ask if she could come to lunch. ‘No, of course I can’t,’ she said crossly, ‘I’m much too busy making egg mousse for sixty.’ (I had forgotten it was the day of the Tipperary point-to-point that was run over the Tullamaine farm.)

Derek was a human time-bomb ready to explode and was not cut out for an enduring marriage. As time went by and he had no success with the racing venture, he began to grow restless and miss his scientific work – a part of his life that was impossible to share with the Tipperary locals. Robert Kee, knowing of Derek’s brilliance, once said to him, ‘I’m afraid all I know about maths is that two plus two equals four.’ Derek thought for a bit and said, ‘I’ve often wondered.’ In the 1945 General Election I asked him if he was going to vote Conservative. He exploded and, hardly able to get out the words, said, ‘How can I vote for a man who speaks of the third alternative?’ A rare grammatical error from Winston cost him Derek’s vote.

Derek had always been unpredictable, darting off to left and right, and he now spent more and more time away from home, leaving Pam with the racehorses as well as a large house to look after. It became obvious that their years of marriage were at an end. As always when life seemed to conspire against her, Pam faced the separation with courage. After Derek left, she must have had an impossibly difficult time but carried on as best she could and never complained to her sisters, though Diana and I were aware how unhappy she was.

Tullamaine was sold in 1958 but Pam stayed on as a tenant until 1960. We all knew she was careful, but sometimes her watching of the pennies was so comical it has to be recorded.

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