Rancid Pansies (22 page)

This find thoroughly redeems the day after all. These two volumes are quite irreplaceable. The older is as much an adventure book as a cookbook: Major-General Sir Aubrey Lutterworth’s
Elements of Raj Cookery
(1887), printed in Hyderabad. How very much more readable the recipe books of today’s winsome TV cheffies would be if they included detailed instructions on how to catch the ingredients, as well as asides on the language and grosser habits of the natives in the area where the ingredients once thrived! The one thing the Major-General seldom did was go around the local market hoping to find interesting cuts of bandicoot, although he would regularly send his batman down to the bazaar for fresh spices. ‘“The animal we know as the bandicoot,”’ I read out aloud to Joan, ‘“the Teloogoos call
pandi-kokku
or pig-rat, and a deuced intelligent little beggar he is, too, often requiring quite a measure of ingenuity to trap. It is almost as if he knew that his own flesh, lightly seethed in the juice of green
mangoes
, attains a delicacy as perfectly suited to the discernment of a crowned head as to a rough-and-ready camp fire repast. In truth he is fit for any table although it has proved best to
conceal
his true identity from the Memsahibs by means of
harmless
misdirection. Trubshawe, our Colour Sergeant, informs me that the phrase ‘Malabar Mutton’ passes muster and has never yet been enquired into closely. To take Master Bandicoot you must lay your springes well before dusk and bait them with new leaves of
khati-sakhi
, which he has little enough
mind to resist. Your artificer having also procured you an ounce of ordinary black powder …” Oh, you’ve no idea how many times I’ve read myself to sleep with old Aubrey’ – and in an unbridled moment I kiss the book’s mildewed cover. ‘It’s brilliant to have him back.’ I notice the onlookers now gazing at me in surprise and disappointment. No normal man goes into ecstasies over a mouldy old book,
per carità
, not even the Bible (although possibly a woman might). At the very least they were hoping for one-handed magazines depicting
criminal
acts or even a box full of gold watches and other heirloom trinketry. Old books simply don’t hack it. Losing interest, they start to move away.

‘And this other one –’ I hold out Dame Emmeline
T
yrwhitt-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 and 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.’