Helping hands

 

   Two rather nice anecdotes from current reading:

    Julie Summers's Our Uninvited Guests: The Secret Lives of Britain's Country Houses 1939-1945 includes a chapter on Melford Hall, home to Sir William and Lady Hyde Parker, which was requisitioned by the army on the outbreak of war.

    With a new baby, and her husband recuperating after surgery following a dreadful accident, Lady Hyde Parker knew they must move out of the Hall - now overrun with soldiers - but had nowhere to go. She rang her husband's cousin Beatie who told them to come north to her at once. When they arrived at Beatie's Lake District home, Castle Cottage, so shocked was she at Sir William's condition that instead of putting them in the local inn as planned she handed them the keys to her other house, "the place where she went to be quiet when she needed peace," where they spent the next year "and benefited from the outdoor life in that beautiful corner of Cumbria." Cousin Beatie was none other than Beatrix Potter, and her retreat, Hill Top.

    Mr. C. is reading Pillar of State, the second volume of Elizabeth Longford's biography of the Duke of Wellington. In his 60s, and by then Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the Duke had time "to indulge his lifelong affection for children, one of his great charms."

    "Any child in distress could count upon the Duke," Lady Longford writes, "A tearful boy who had to leave his pet toad behind when he was sent away to school received regular notes from Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington to say that the toad was well; a girl despised for snob reasons by her fellow pupils at a smart Kensington day-school was presented with a bouquet of flowers from F.M. the D. of W. who had driven up personally in his carriage to deliver them."

    The Duke delighted in playing with children, and cushion fights, football, or games of chase round the ramparts at Walmer Castle were common pastimes. "You are a very nice little fellow," he said to one child playing in the garden, "when you are old enough I will give you a commission in the Guards." "But I'm a girl, Mr. Dook," replied the future Lady Spencer Walpole."

Comments

[Nicola]

Our Uninvited Guests sounds good. Will look out for it.

[Cornflower]

I enjoyed it very much, Nicola, though its focus does change with each chapter: sometimes it's the house and family which are examined closely, at others it's the new occupants and their roles in the war.

[Terence Jagger]

Mr C's reading takes me back to my mid teens, say 48 years ago (when I already knew Mr C!) when I devoured both Longford's Wellington books. Indeed, such was my interest in Wellington, that I was part of making a big model of the battle of Waterloo for a school anniversary. We ran out of appropriate model soldiers, so there were "cowboys and indians" battling for La Haye Sainte, and second world war infantry defending Hougoumont!!