The Stately Homes of England

I indicated in my profile that when I first came to America the more gullible USC students wanted to know if I was on speaking terms with the Beatles. Well, it was the era of Beatlemania. But now that we have entered the period of Downtonmania, no one has asked whether I was acquainted with the nobility. Toffee-noses, as my mother would have called them. We believed in Noel Coward’s views on the stately homes of England. Let me tell you a story. The history is a little vague and the assumptions are many.

My dad was an electrician, who spent his entire working life at the Enfield Rolling Mills. This factory was on the Brimsdown estate, in close proximity to the more famous Royal Small Arms factory, where Bren guns and Lee Enfield rifles were designed and manufactured. I do not know what parts, if any, the Rolling Mills supplied to the RSA. I do know that my dad was a foreman, and must have had a job of some importance, since he was excused from military service during the Second World War by virtue of his work being a “ protected occupation”. That's him, second from the right. In addition, his job got us a phone at a time when we would otherwise have put our names on a waiting list. And waited. The phone was a safeguard so if anything went wrong at work, my father could be notified and make his laborious way to work. On his bike. I wrote a bit about our transportation issues here.

Gorhambury House, St. Albans, Herts.

The chairman of the board of the Rolling Mills was the Earl of Verulam (Verulamium for those of you who remember your Roman history and those tedious roads) and the Earl had a stately home called Gorhambury House near St. Albans. I can only recall one time when the peons were invited there. My assumption is—there go those assumptions again—that it was to celebrate the end of the war, which would have made me five and a half and my brother just one, though I don’t remember his being at what my mother would have called “the bun-fight.” Nor do I remember how we got to St. Albans. Bus? Charabanc? But I do remember having to go to the bathroom. It appeared that his Lordship made an assumption too—that the hoi polloi didn’t need to use a bathroom —or perhaps porta-johns didn’t exist in post-war Britain. I remember my mother approaching a teen-age girl who was in some kind of authority position and asking her for help. I am sure she was embarrassed and I don’t remember what noun she used, surely not loo, but I remember so very clearly the girl’s reply, “You can use grandfather’s lavatory.”

So off we marched, through what was probably the kitchen garden and in the tradesman’s entrance. The corridors were dark and bleak and I began to feel sorry for grandfather. Then we arrived at the throne room. I can’t find a good way to illustrate it, but it contained a highly decorated receptacle (somewhat like this) with a high tank and a chain and the whole business was cocooned in dark wood. Spectacular, but I am sure grandfather must have had what my mother would have called a po in his room for use at night when the corridors prooved un-navigable.

And that is my experience with the stately homes of England.

What do I have in common with Kansas City?

We have both gone as fer as we can go. Will Parker was amazed by bell telephones, radiators, gas buggies and indoor privees. I am appalled by technology’s onward march.

 I have been gone for a while. My absence began with a computer malfunction. Not as if I didn’t foresee it. But instead of safeguarding the contents of the computer—I took a photograph of it for another blog I was working on.

I lost all the entries in my address book—though of course I had a photograph of the computer containing them! We bought not one but two new computers and moved on to other problems. My good and effective scanner wouldn’t work with the Mac version 10.6.8 nor apparently would our Dymo labeler. The scanner that came with the new ink jet printer is nasty. Then the laser jet had a problem. Then we got WiFi . . . I could have written several essays about the whole business, but then I realized Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had already documented the progression of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Finally I was reading an essay by Nora Ephron, a much better writer than I could dream of being. In her essay, I Remember Nothing, she writes,

I was curious about technology. I became a champion of e-mails and blogs—I found them romantic; I even made movies about them. But now I believe that almost anything new has been put on earth in order to make me feel bad about my dwindling memory, and I’ve erected a wall to protect myself from most of it.

She goes on to state that she has “resigned myself to my computer dealing with its aches and pains of old age, much as I am resigning myself to my own.”

I too am resigned and as I resume this blog I repeat what I wrote on July 28, 2005, “hold on to something, it's going to be a bumpy ride!”

Serendipity Once More

This photo shows my bedside table. I am about to read yet another book about K2 from the warmth of my bed. Anyone who has read this blog in the past may know of my couch-potato fascination with adventure. In that post was a reference to a book I had just read, The True Stories of the First Five Women Who Climbed K2 by Jennifer Jordan.

One of the five women was the English climber, Alison Hargreaves, so last night, when I checked in with Daphne, who is fast becoming one of my favorite English bloggers, I was astounded to read this post. Read her post—there’s really not much else to say—and follow the link to the Timesonline and look at the photo of Alison and her two small children shortly before she died.

If you click on my photograph, you will be able to read the subtitle: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain. I don’t know, I really don’t know.

Horticultural Error

It’s THAT time of the year again. This year I want to point out a horticultural error. All winter long I have been able to dig under the snow in the little herb patch outside my back door and find a reasonable amount of sage and thyme. Enough to dress up a pork loin or make a pathetic attempt at what those guys on Top Chef refer to as “presentation.” But what I really want is parsley. Not that curly stuff that people leave on their plates beside a barely nibbled orange slice, but the flat kind that I put into soups and stews and even meat loaf and sprinkle recklessly on just about anything to give a lovely touch of color.

So here’s my complaint. When the big gardener in the sky moved on from fauna to flora, he divided plants into perennials and annuals and that totally incomprehensible variation, biennials. Parsley was a mistake. It should have been a perennial and allowed to flourish all winter, even in cold climates.

I can’t wait to open the back door and snatch up handfuls of parsley (and not have to surreptitiously chew on a leaf in the grocery store to make sure it isn’t cilantro.)

And that is all I have to say about parsley.

I Just Wish . . .

. . . I had listened more closely to my brother-in-law’s conversations with us. It wasn’t that we didn’t talk to him often. We did. There were long phone calls, either on special occasions or just to check up on each other. I greatly admired the fact that in his late seventies he faced —and overcame—the challenge of conquering a computer and our whole family exchanged frequent e-mails. In spite of his delight in his new skills, he never lost the practice of sending hand-written letters, often accompanied by clippings from papers and magazines. He usually painstakingly underlined the passages that were of most importance to him.

It wasn’t that we didn’t see him often in person. We did. Family was important to him and he spent a great deal of time with Ernie and his two sisters. He loved and showed much interest in his nephews and nieces, marrying many of them, traveling as far as Montana and New Jersey. But because he was always stationed in small towns in northern rural Iowa and eventually retired to one of them, it seemed easier for him to travel to visit with family members. He spent many holidays with Mary Ann in Chicago, because he often couldn’t travel until services were over. He loved to drive, so vacations in Montana, Michigan and New Mexico were frequent. We did on occasion visit him in his various parishes, but for the most part he came to us. So when he talked of his friends and his activities at home, there was no “hook” to hang his narratives on. We knew of the Pilgrims, a group of farmers for the most part who shared his love of Harleys. Together they traveled around parts of the mid-west and even took trips across America. Bob rode in all forty 48 contiguous states. The Pilgrims married and had children and they adopted Bob as a second family. We heard their names and anecdotes about them, but we were often too busy with family obligations to etch their stories in our brains. I heard about much, listened carefully to little.

It was hard last week to stand by Bob’s casket and shake so many hands and realize that I should have known more about the myriads of people from miles around who came to pay their respects. My knowledge of the surrounding towns was sketchy; my understanding of the lives of Iowa farmers was abysmal. It was Bob’s readiness to listen to the words and the stories of these people that made him so beloved. I wish I had been more like him.

Sad Hiatus

Last week we were in Chicago, now we are back home before a trip to Iowa for the funeral service and burial of a beloved brother, brother-in-law, uncle and great uncle—a priest for over fifty years. More later.

If You Build it, I Will Come

You know by now I am a great fan of trashy mysteries. I’m not a fan of futuristic books, trashy or otherwise. There is one author, however, who combines murder and police investigation with just enough of a futuristic edge that I look forward to her next book. And I am soon satisfied; she’s wonderfully prolific. I refer to J.D. Robb and her series with titles that end, “in Death.”

The heroine—Lt. Eve Dallas. The time—somewhere around 2060. The setting—New York, where Lt. Dallas lives in the palatial mansion of her husband Roarke. He’s gorgeous, by the way, and fortunately doesn’t expect much from Eve, who is totally domestically challenged. What he does expect is not fodder for a family blog.

J.D. Robb does not push the “life in the future” aspect. Police work certainly seems a lot easier with an identification system that the American Civil Liberties Union would have great trouble accepting. Roarke has no need of Martha Stewart when he can go to a wall unit and program a meal. Most of the other household appliances seem pretty normal—except for one. After a shower, Eve just walks into a drying tube/cabinet. No towels, no rubbing, just a flow of warm air. Doesn’t that sound like a great idea? And the thing is, there is no reason why such a convenience shouldn’t be a standard appliance even today. Perhaps they are in some snooty bathrooms. I checked and I find cabinets for drying surgical instruments and herbs, evidence or damp clothes. None as a bathroom fixture.

Anyone know the address of the Patent Office?