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  The unexplained ups and downs of the grouse population are part of their fascination for anyone who is interested in what is now called ‘Wild Life’. Salmon used to have the same mystique, but now they are ‘farmed’ and found in every restaurant in the country – cheaper than cod, they have lost the mystery of Williamson’s Salar. But grouse are still truly wild and no attempt to ‘farm’ them has been successful. Even the gamekeepers, whose lives are spent on the moors, cannot always explain the swing in the numbers of grouse: from feast to famine and back to feast. The graph looks like a cardiogram of a desperately ill heart patient. After a record year, when too many birds are left on the ground, disease strikes and few survive. Such is their power of recovery that they can increase in number again in next to no time. I am glad that the ways of grouse and mushrooms remain unexplained. There are lots of books on mushrooms (but few on grouse) and the vast number of fungi we used to lump together and call toadstools. Experts arrange forays which you can join to learn about which kinds are edible and which will do you in immediately. Look out – the differences are not always as obvious as you might think.

  A new treat for us is puffballs – the bigger the better – super-delicious when sliced and fried. Luckily, few English people fancy them. In the same way that our fishermen throw away pike, puffballs are kicked to bits by disappointed mushroomers – to the dismay of any Frenchman for whom both are a delicacy. When you are tired of blackberrying and get bolder in the search for free food, try ‘Chicken of the Woods’. They are those whitish growths on the bole of an oak which look like enormous plates. You will have to carry a heavy and offensive weapon to dislodge them from their host, but it is worth the trouble when they are cooked and you discover not only a new taste but a new consistency.

  Our kitchen is being repainted and retiled, so a great clearing of decks is going on. Behind a wall of receipt books in the back of a cupboard we found a box of menu cards dating from 1893 to 1939. They are printed or handwritten on stiff white card with gilt edges. Buckingham Palace, Derby House, Seaford House, Londonderry House, Devonshire House, The King’s Guard St James’s Palace, the Foreign Office and the Astors at 4 St James’s Square evidently fed their guests very well. Some cards are tantalisingly anonymous, giving only the address. Who lived at 66 Brook Street in 1939? She gave a lavish ball supper there on 25 June. And the unknown occupier of 38 Bryanston Square6 did even better a month earlier. We know the vast number of courses people ate at grand dinners in Edwardian times, but it is surprising to find such feasts were still going strong till the last war. If you had been invited to Mr Baldwin’s farewell dinner at 10 Downing Street on 25 May 1937 you would have eaten Consommé à la Sévigné, Filets de Sole Impériale, Noisettes d’Agneau Châtelaine, Petits Pois, Pommes nouvelles, Cailles sous la Cendre, Salade de Laitues, Asperges vertes, Sauce Mousseline, Mousse glacé aux Fraises, Frivolités, Dessert and Café, plus five superb wines ending with Grands Fins Bois 1820. The indiscretions induced by so many fine wines would make any prime minister shudder now. And I don’t think they would dare offer Frivolités today. The humble grapefruit was a luxury then. Several dinners started with them; the only English words on the menus except eggs and bacon, for which there is no satisfactory translation into French. They were fried up for breakfast at 1.45 a.m. at every ball.

  At an afternoon reception given by His Majesty’s Government In The United Kingdom Of Great Britain And Northern Ireland for Commanding General Sir Kaiser Shumshere Jung Bahadur Rana KBE of Nepal, in 1937, the selection of teatime food is a child’s dream, or a grown-up’s for that matter. The guests were offered ices, cakes, éclairs, five kinds of sandwiches including foie gras, lobster and caviar, petits pains fourrés, wine cup and every soft drink imaginable, including Thé. I would love to know if Sir Kaiser went on to face a seven-course dinner at 8.30 followed by an immense supper at midnight.

  A surprisingly extravagant entertainment was a souper de bal given by the Framework Knitters’ Company at Goldsmiths’ Hall in 1937. That night you could choose from twenty dishes, including consommé, chicken, cutlets, salmon, lobster, foie gras, quail, duck, chaud froid of more chicken, ham, tongue, asparagus, salad, compote of fruit, crème brûlée, chocolate mousse and meringues. This was supper. You had already eaten dinner. Lastly comes a refreshing reminder of Evelyn Duchess of Devonshire’s careful ways. The menu for luncheon after the wedding of her son Charlie Cavendish and Adele Astaire (Fred’s sister) at Chatsworth in 1932 lists several dishes, including French Pastries and two more puddings, crossed out. ‘Need not have these’ is in her handwriting. The Framework Knitters were not so economical.

  The roof is forever being mended, 1½ acres of it. Last week, the men found a copy of the Manchester Guardian dated 29 May 1877 under the old lead. The names of all who had worked on the roof then were recorded in the margin in thick pencil. Interesting, but not unusual here. And the headline on the 116-year-old newspaper seemed familiar: AUSTRIA & THE BOSNIAN INSURGENTS. SERBIA PREPARING FOR WAR. SPECIAL TELEGRAM FROM OUR RAGUSA CORRESPONDENT. There followed a description of atrocities…

  Windows. We have got to have them to keep out weather and burglars. As they are part of the architectural scheme of things, like walls and doors, their make and shape has changed over the centuries with fashion.

  In the nineteenth century newly invented plate glass was greeted with joy but it made the houses look pitifully blind from the outside. Now we have something worse; plate glass with a narrow slit above, the only part which opens. Any chance of pleasing proportion goes west and the afflicted house is like one partially sighted, with a frightful wink.

  The next door neighbour goes in for a thin brown lattice. How, or if, this kind of window opens and shuts I don’t know, but I do know that these disfigurements have spread like a contagious disease through our towns and villages and are more than a minor tragedy.

  They are everywhere, degrading the appearance of perfectly good buildings, whether built of stone or brick. There is no regard for the vernacular because they are just shoved in, new and uniform, from Glasgow to Glastonbury.

  Now here’s your chance, Mr Minister of Education. In your next curriculum do beg your teachers to add decent fenestration lessons to the indecent sex lessons so popular with the children. Not as exciting, I suppose, but windows last longer than sex whatever way you look at it.

  If you fail we must all go out and live in the Sultan’s palace in Zanzibar where there isn’t any glass to vex the eye and the birds, bats and bees fly in and out of the rooms on the balmy air of the island of cloves.

  I am fascinated by watching and listening to keen gardeners going round other people’s gardens. Something strange seems to seize otherwise normal folk and, although they have probably travelled miles for their treat, they show themselves to be only really interested in what they have left at home. People who haven’t got gardens of their own can stand back and delight in the big picture of someone else’s work, but the real gardener fastens on some small plant, pleased if it doesn’t look too well and triumphant if it is dead. They relate the plants to their own. ‘Oh we’ve got that but ours is much bigger. I think this one is planted on the wrong wall, it can’t stand east, well, wouldn’t you think they’d know that?’ When the boot is on the other foot and you are taken by the owner on a two-hour tour in foul weather it can be difficult to keep a continuous flow of admiration. Sometimes, before setting out, you are sized up by the hostess to see if you are worth it, and it is rather wonderful when she decides you aren’t. That is why it is such a luxury to be able to go round so many gardens in your own time by paying at the door. You can dwell over what you love and hurry by the kidney-shaped beds with raised concrete edges full of orange rhododendrons. My father-in-law (who understood plants) said people go through five stages of gardening. They begin by liking flowers, progress to flowering shrubs, then autumn foliage and berries, next they go for leaves and finally the underneaths of leaves. Alpines ought to come in somewhere. They can become a
n addiction, and they get smaller and smaller relative to their importance. In the Wisley collection there is a weeny blob of grey leaves in small stones of the same colour. In the spring a label with an arrow says ‘Please Notice Flower’. Charles de Noailles, a celebrated French gardener, ended by preferring labels to flowers, foliage or even alpines. I think the attendants of the stalls of the magic displays at the Horticultural Society’s shows in the Vincent Square halls are the most patient of beings. Just listen to some old trout describing to her trapped victim what has happened to her Desfontania spinosa hookeri and you will realise that the stall holder is taking the place of a psychiatrist for a free consultation while all is unburdened and the Desfontania lady gets rid of her feelings.

  Gardening is almost too difficult to contemplate, but arranging flowers is impossible. I wonder if the arrangers get cross because their work doesn’t last. My mother’s explanation for the uncertain tempers of cooks was the inevitable destruction of their art thrice daily being enough to unhinge their minds. If the flower people don’t get cross they must be sad when the products of hours of work end in the dustbin. It has all become too complicated. There are rules, and criticism is fierce. I marvel at the skill which goes into the feats you find in hotels, at wedding receptions and flower festivals in churches, but I do not wish to see them in my own house. Everything is too contrived and clever, the flowers spring out of squashy green stuff instead of a good old vase or pot. Since the invention of plastic flower pots it is a joy to see one made of proper earthenware but I expect it would lose points in a Floral Art competition. The whole subject needs simplifying and straightening as well. Those sideways stalks are worrying and against nature: but then, nature hasn’t got much to do with it. I think the Americans are miles ahead in the art. In a long life in which I have had the luck to be surrounded by beauty I have never seen anything better than the flowers on the tables at the grand dinner given for the lenders to the ‘Treasure Houses of Great Britain’ exhibition in Washington. About two hundred diners sat at round tables of eight in a vast hall which goes up the whole height of the National Gallery. Some genius put tall narrow vases on plinths with equally tall flowers high above the heads of the diners so they could see the people opposite without interference. The result was stunning. Had I done them I should have had no better idea than a dreary plate with a few heads floating about in it.

  I wish gardening wasn’t so difficult. It is almost impossible to look with pleasure or interest at the lists of wallflower seeds to be planted now for next year when this year’s are beginning to go over and look as depressing as only dying flowers can. You must steel yourself to do it if you want wallflowers next year.

  Another problem is the bewildering choice. Open the catalogue at delphiniums, for instance, and you find page after page of descriptions so glamorous you want them all and need the concentration of Einstein to reduce the list to something reasonable.

  Then you must wait till the year after next to see the fruits of your labour. As likely as not the supplier has sent the very ones you didn’t choose, but you will long since have lost the carefully marked catalogue, so there is nothing to be done.

  It is the same with roses. They all sound irresistible and you must pinch yourself in midwinter, when they are dormant, to remember how monstrously ugly the man-made orange ones are, retina irritants to a rose.

  I prefer vegetables, but still there is the difficulty of choice. Pin down the best pea or bean, remember to plant a few every fortnight to avoid feast or famine, and you are indeed a real gardener.

  Someone has had a jolly time thinking up names. Even the professors who have so kindly written to me to tell me what a quantum leap is may be stumped by Howard’s Lancer, Black Velvet, Captivator, Leveller and Whinham’s Industry – gooseberries all.

  The National Rhubarb Collection, believe it or not, contains more than a hundred varieties. I won’t weary you with all their names, but you might fancy Grooveless Crimson. I don’t think Early White Stone is an advertising man’s dream description of a turnip, but whoever christened the parsnip Tender and True was a poet of the kitchen garden.

  The oddest of all is the radish called French Breakfast. I have never seen a Frenchman tucking into radishes for his petit déjeuner, but that is what they would have you believe.

  The prettiest flowers I have ever seen in a small dining room were in a New York flat; lilies of the valley bolt upright in twos and threes in a bed of moss all down the middle of the table. The best at a dance were white foxgloves, one at a time in proper flower pots, round the floor of a sitting-out room. Trying to do as well myself, I bought some china vases made like old Crown Derby crocus pots with holes in the lids to stick the flowers in. Delighted to have found something which forced the stalks to stand up straight I showed them to a Floral Art friend who said, ‘What, ten little soldiers?’ Yes, ten little soldiers are just the thing. One Easter at our Devonshire Arms Hotel at Bolton Abbey I had what I thought was a good idea; birds’ nests on the restaurant tables with marzipan eggs. So I asked the dried flower ladies if they could make birds’ nests and along came some good tries. They looked really nice till the customers ate the eggs. As a robbed nest is the saddest sight going and looks like a cowpat with a rim, the manager soon banished them.

  Moss is the thing. I have been given (by Americans needless to say) a moss tree, extremely pretty and more or less everlasting I’m told, unless you put it in the sun when it will fade. I pulled it to bits to see how it was made. It is a ball of moss about eighteen inches in diameter mounted on chicken wire and stuck into place with huge hair pins. It is supported by a stem of birch held in a basket filled with plaster – the base of the ‘tree’ is covered in moss of a different kind, to hide it. The Librarian at Chatsworth happens to know all about moss; he is no less than the treasurer of the British Bryological Society. Seeing this beauty he said without hesitation, ‘Oh, that’s Leucobrym glaucum, it only grows in the south of England.’ So I see myself taking a van to some distant damp spot like West Sussex to get the precious raw material. I expect moss gathering is against the law, like picking primroses, and I shall have my head cut off; but if any of us here can succeed in making such a decorative object it will be worth it.

  At this time of year I am struck by the racist ways of that mild section of our fellow countrymen – people who feed the birds. They go to great lengths to ensure that only the charming little birds, preferably prettily coloured and able to sing later on, get the delicacies provided. The ‘country’ magazines carry advertisements of complicated arrangements which keep out the big, ugly, floppy ones, or any species the bird-table owner doesn’t fancy. Yet these same people are mad on raptors of all kinds, even the murderous magpie, but at conveniently far remove. It would be interesting to see their reactions if a sparrow-hawk or a merlin chose to swoop while they happened to be watching and the loved tits, robins and chaffinches were reduced to a flurry of feathers in a split second. If they saw a pair of magpies hunting a hedge for eggs and nestlings in the spring they would surely be sickened by the sight of the desperate attempts of the parent birds to distract their attention. But people don’t see the balance of nature acted out beak and claw, so they follow the fashion, which is to preserve all birds of prey whatever the cost to the rest. Unless there is a change of heart soon, the bird-tables will no longer provide the pleasure that once they did.

  Last week I went into the garden to look at something the hot weather has brought out. While I was staring at it and thinking of nothing in particular, there was a rush of wings and a murderous sparrow-hawk dived from nowhere and caught a blue tit which let out a small bird’s version of a scream. The hawk, usually so precise in its fatal sweep, somehow entangled itself between a rose hedge and a yew hedge where my ancient spaniel was happily mousing. His reaction was to grab the hawk, thinking, I suppose, that it was that bird of very little brain, a pheasant. I nearly got to them, but, alas, the old dog realised his mistake after a vicious nip from the
hooked beak, and the hawk extricated itself. It flew away to catch and pluck while still alive its daily ration of three songbirds plus a racing pigeon or two, so precious to their owners. Parliament has decreed that these hateful creatures are ‘protected’. If the spaniel had hung on would he have been sent to prison for killing it? I must ask our policeman. It never ceases to surprise me that the same people who enjoy watching the violent and often revolting wild life films of birds and animals disembowelling one another on the telly are against fox hunting and for hawks and the other disembowellers. The Great British Public is very contrary. So are our legislators.

  The pullets arrived early this year. The old hens were moved into one house to make room for the young ones, so smart and neat to look at. All were shut in for two days to make sure they went back to the proper house at night. In spite of this time-honoured way of explaining to chickens where home is, several of the old girls went back to their original houses, only to find the pullets installed. They were not pleased. They looked as puzzled as you and I would be if we returned to our bedroom to find it crammed full of strange teenagers. Some of these teenagers have started laying very small eggs of superb quality, which are not appreciated by housewives as they are a far cry from the big eggs we are told we must eat. To explain their lack of size, we put a notice in the Farm Shop saying: ‘Pullets’ eggs, half price’, but this means nothing because few know what a pullet is. Oh dear!

  If second childhood means going back to first loves in old age then I am deep in it. As children, my sisters and I kept poultry and sold the eggs for pocket money. Now I have pens of Light Sussex and Welsummers in the garden at Chatsworth, and the pleasure I get from them is enormous.