Rendy Woby

Ruddy Poshes

I don’t know why it has taken me so long to get round to reading Clarissa Dickson Wright’s autobiography, especially when I have a special fondness for mad books by raging Tarquins. It seems to me you end up reading two books; the breezily unsentimental words on the page, and then, the gaps between them. Aristos, it seems to me, are capable of recounting extraordinary events with an unsurpassable amount of bustle. 

Anyway. Spilling The Beans is completely batty and though what follows is no substitute for shoving the whole thing quite briskly into your face with no thought for the working classes, I do have favourite bits I was driven to underline in pencil. Do bear in mind the first one is on page two. Two!

// Lady Wright’s little black page boy complained once too often of the cold and she, while flown with wine, put him in the bread oven to warm him up; sadly the oven had not cooled down sufficiently and the page-boy died. //

// On my arrival I would be offered my usual, which was four double gins and two small tonics with ice in my pint mug. //

// He took me back to Chesham Street to show me his hunting buttons and that was how it all began. //

// I remember telling Gerald Durrell that I had eaten lammergeier, a type of bustard known as the Egyptian stone breaker and a very rare bird, and he was not very amused. // 

// I picked up a claw hammer and told him to go before I knee-capped him. He went. I expect I seemed quite mad sometimes. //

//She was very good to me but sadly she fell for an ex-con with one eye who was into sado-masochistic gay practices. //

// It was at Selmeston that I first had occasion to cook peacock. //

// I had developed a habit of flipping cars into the ditch. //

// When the music stopped and I staggered to a chair, I discovered – heart attack my foot – I had broken my underwired bra! //

Goodness. If you haven’t read Mary Lovell’s The Mitford Sisters or Alexander Waugh’s terrific Fathers And Sons you really must. They don’t live in our world, and they don’t realise they don’t.