Dear Lupin: Letters to a wayward son

I am on a final warning following a flogging from the headmaster as punishment for visiting a certain “Denise Bunny” in London one night. A couple of appearances in Maidenhead magistrates’ court for riding a 750cc motorcycle without a driving licence haven’t helped.

January 16, 1969: Unless Mr Addison and Mr Kidson [tutors] can provide strong arguments to the contrary, I propose that you leave Eton at the end of the summer. After all, you are not interested in work or games and you have no ambition to assume responsibility in your house or in the school as a whole, so what would be the point of staying on? I suggest that on leaving you either go into the army for three years or alternatively I will give you a single ticket to Australia and £50 and you go and earn your living there for a couple of years. You need to stand on your own feet and not rely on the efforts of others. I am very fond of you but you do drive me round the bend.

February 26: Not much news. Your mother has had flu. Her little plan to give up spirits for Lent lasted 3½ days. Pongo [her dalmatian] has chewed up a rug and had very bad diarrhoea in the kitchen. Six Indians were killed in a car crash in Newbury.

March 22: Naturally I am distressed at you leaving Eton so suddenly and with so little accomplished, but you have evidently been determined to leave and of course you have got your way. What next? I simply don’t know. Most unfortunately — and perhaps this is my fault — you cannot communicate your thoughts, fears and hopes to me and in all but the most trivial matters we are strangers. I feel very sad when I think of the fun we used to have in the old days. Perhaps something can be salvaged from the wreck before the gulf between us gets impossibly wide.

In a moment of madness I agree to go on a trial with the Coldstream Guards, my father’s old regiment. Unfortunately I am arrested for possession of drugs and a flick knife at the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park. My mother is particularly annoyed that I appear on the front page of the Newbury Weekly News, overshadowing the mention on the back page that her Pongo had taken first prize in the fancy-dress class as the Captain of HMS Pinafore. Because of the conviction, I am not able to join as a potential officer. I make an impetuous decision to join as a squaddie.

October 14, 1970: Give the army a chance. You simply must not think of quitting after five days. You say the life is unpleasing to you and will do you no good; I assure you that to bale out after a few days would damage your reputation among all who know you beyond repair and would do you far more harm than a recruits’ training course. I implore you to grit your teeth and stick it.

October 24: We often think of you here and everyone has faith in your ability to see things through. When I told Mr Randall about your friend with ringworm and scurf he laughed so much that he let out an extremely loud fart and was slightly embarrassed.

I had some drinks with a man with one eye and I was driving Mrs Wright home when I backed into an iron post. Very annoying and don’t tell Nidnod [my mother]. I have been using her car and people I give a lift to keep on asking me what the sign “Nidsky Nodsky” means on the dashboard. I say that your mother is a female freemason and it is a secret code sign.

My mother is badly beaten up in a robbery while visiting Kenya.

November 13: Nidnod is very nervous still and got into a really alarming flap when a police car drew up at 8.30pm last night and made inquiries about, of all really dreary things, a missing bicycle. Nidnod thought they were burglars dressed as police and made me check with Basingstoke police station. Nidnod talks of buying a revolver, in which case I think she is certain to pot a member of her own family before long.

The builder is here and found the floor in the loo by your room quite rotten. In a matter of days someone would have appeared feet first in the kitchen perched on the loo seat.

November 21: Your mother and Louise are hunting today and there is a great flap and general commotion on. Prince Charles flew to a neighbouring airfield on Thursday and made himself agreeable. Not so his equerry, [Nicholas] Soames, who was reported to me as incompetent, ill-mannered, uncouth and very badly turned out with filthy boots.

I suspect that if I were to remain a squaddie I would be perfectly content. On the whole life is very entertaining: “As for you, Recruit Mortimer, you’re marching like a donkey with an ’ard on.” But I become a cadet at Mons officer training school and am on the verge of becoming a second lieutenant. Dad is ebullient.

March 28, 1971: I suppose you’ll need a complete trousseau like a young bride when you become a second lieutenant. You can rely on me to cough up.

But . . .

May 8: I am still clearing up the mess of the remains of your military career. I enclose a letter from Lieutenant-Colonel JNS Arthur of the Greys. I do not know whether you have had the courtesy to write and remove your name from their list but I have informed Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur myself that you felt the call to minister to lunatics rather that serve your country as a soldier. Your mother is much better but she has you and your future on her mind for most of the time. The wound you caused by acting as you did without any warning to us or without the ordinary politeness of a son to his parents in asking their advice over a matter that was clearly very close to their hearts will take a long time to heal; perhaps it never will.

I am employed as a paint salesman. This lasts all of a week before I am fired. I then take up farming (of sorts) and second-hand car dealing.

Undated: I suppose that writing a serious letter to you is about as effective as trying to kick a 30-ton block of concrete in bedroom slippers, but I am a glutton for punishment as far as you are concerned. I may be wrong — you tell me very little — but you seem to be drifting along in an aimless fashion with no plans for the future at all. When I am asked what you are doing, I don’t know whether to say “part-time farm labourer” or “second-hand car spiv”.

I start a new job with an upmarket estate agent but within a week resign, full of plans to go to South America with the only boy, I think, ever to have gone straight from Eton to borstal.

Undated: Mr Shearer [father of my friend, Charlie] agrees with me that this jaunt to South America must not take place. He spoke to me about his son with a candour that must have been painful to him. I gather that this boy of 19 (or less?) is unfortunately, according to his father, typical of young persons involved in the drug scene in that he is incapable of speaking the truth and is devoid of moral values. Surely, unless you prefer to remain wilfully blind, you must see the poor boy is totally unsuited in every way to be your sole companion on an “adventure” trip to South America?

I am getting old and tired and I can’t last for ever. What sort of a head of the family will you be? Will you really be in a position to look after — or at least help and advise — your mother and sisters? You won’t be much use if you are in Venezuela with a juvenile junky. Surely you are old enough to know your mother is exceptionally highly strung and family worries can throw her off balance to an extent that is genuinely alarming. You must surely have known you were going to upset her badly. The consequences are being borne by me, not by you.

I cannot forget that you told me you left the army as you wanted to look after under-privileged children. Perhaps Charles Shearer comes into that category?

The adventure is put on hold. Dad good-naturedly resigns himself to yet another of my rapid career changes.

April 3, 1974: Have you considered the church? There is much to be said for the quiet life of a country curate. Fortunately in the Church of England an ordained priest is not committed to any but the vaguest beliefs. Mrs Hislop [a racing friend] wants a gardener at £1 an hour. I don’t know if any other duties would be expected. How about butler to a rich Kensington widow? You can never tell how things will work out in a job like that.

Dad retires from The Sunday Times.

July 11, 1976: I stayed with Cousin Tom last week. Among the guests were Sir D Plummer, head of the Betting Levy Board, and Lady P. He is very ambitious: she is the epitome of Dorking and Reigate. Lady P dipped her nut a bit too far into the martini bucket and became more or less unplayable. We got her up to bed and she kept on sending urgent messages down to her husband, intimating that he was to come up at once as she could not wait for him. Next day Lady P looked like a pug recovering from distemper.

We went to a good midday party at the Herns [horse-racing friends] yesterday where there was a lot to drink and your dear mother took advantage of that fact. Nor, in fact, did I stint myself. We had lunch chez Surtees where I dropped asleep with a glass in my hand and spilt the contents all over my trousers. Of course, ill-natured persons suggested I peed during my brief period of repose which I am happy to say was an unfounded allegation.

August 1, 1977: Your dear mother is endeavouring to live on a purely liquid diet with unfortunate results. One evening she popped my dinner into her car and drove off with it, saying she was going to give it to the poor. I was a little surprised, therefore, to find she had dropped it at the Bomers [well-off neighbours].

Undated: I did some baby-watching for the Bomers last night (the baby is 11 years old) and your mother departed for a beano at Inkpen. I think gin was in fairly abundant supply there and it had the customary effect of making your mother behave like Queen Boadicea on her return home. Your mother is still convinced that a poltergeist whipped away a sausage she was cooking and I expect she will call in the Rev Jardine for consultation.

January 21, 1979: I have been reading the proofs of a book of mine due out in April. The lady who compiled the index must have been pissed when she did her work: no sober individual could have done such a lamentable job. Your mother is quite worked up about the strikes and is keen to go out with a rifle and pot a flying picket. She really is quite capable of doing it.

Undated: I have come to the conclusion that I hate publishers: they combine inefficiency in their public duties with intolerable complacency over their private lives. I dislike them, in fact, almost as much as naval officers. I once caught crabs off a naval officer’s wife called Myrtle who had red hair and a hint of BO — and when I say hint I am giving her the best of the argument.

January 26, 1980: We are off to the Surtees tonight — dinner for 20 in a shed. What price a touch of hypothermia? Your mother has a septic nose, a septic finger, a cracked elbow and an inflamed antrum but under the circumstances is remarkably cheerful. Surtees and I will have a party next June to celebrate having been friends for 40 years. I first met him soon after becoming a PoW. [Dad was captured — wounded and unconscious — after a desperate rearguard action in which most of his men were killed at Dunkirk in 1940.]

November 26: Life here is fairly normal. Your mother tried to annoy me by putting a dead rat on the kitchen table just as I was about to consume my usual hard-boiled egg but it really did not put me off all that much. We get v few invitations nowadays: as I am an aged and repetitive bore and your mother suffers from an incurable form of verbal diarrhoea, it is hardly surprising. The Surtees asked a local general and his wife to dinner. The general duly arrived but explained that unfortunately his wife had been too drunk to get in the car.

January 9, 1981: All (fairly) quiet down here. Nidnod went to Dorset on Friday for the funeral of Dr Hollick who made a pass at her at the Portman hunt ball in 1938. In the evening she went to the Old Berks hunt ball with her boyfriend, Rodney Carrott, a portly, middle-aged insurance director, very rich and divorced from his wife who has been divorced again since. He gave me a large bottle of calvados and did not kick up a fuss when the Cringer [a fox terrier] made a mess in his room. The dance went off well and the next day Nidnod and the boyfriend went off for a ride on the downs. Their pleasure was slightly marred by the boyfriend’s horse dropping dead, I think from old age. I hope you like Rodney Carrott as he might be your stepfather once Camp Hopsons have wheeled me off to Swindon crematorium.

Undated: I have suddenly remembered it is your birthday. I am unfortunately not in a position to give you a cheque for £1,000 as I am distinctly short of do-ray-mi at present so I fear you will have to make do with some smoked salmon which I have ordered to be sent to you. If my arithmetic is correct (it usually isn’t) you will be entering your thirtieth year. It is an unlovely age: receding hair, shortness of breath, growing pomposity and in general a feeling that life has singularly failed to bring you your just rewards. However, cheer up. Forty is better as you then tend to give up caring.

April 12: No one is coming here for Easter. I look back with nostalgia to the days I used to buy you all Easter eggs at Southport when I was staying there for the Grand National. Colonel Draffen mutinied on his eightieth birthday and told his wife he was never again going to do anything he did not want to. Very sensible.

October 6: Your mother was hoping to have her first day’s cubbing last Friday but it was cancelled as the head groom at the Old Berks stables had peppered a female employee with a humane killer and then blown his own head off. He had worked there for 25 years and the girl, whom Nidnod knew well, is 30 years younger than he was. It’s odd the way demon sex keeps on obtruding into fox-hunting.

August 28, 1983: My mother once had a dwarf kitchen maid called Minnie who played jazz rather well on the piano. She was given the sack because her playing made the butler over-excited. In those happy days we had a chauffeur called Percy Samuel Woods who committed suicide by lying face downwards in a large puddle. Talk about doing things the hard way. I suppose we had some fairly weird servants, eg Kate Murphy who was pissed at a dinner party and fell face downwards in the soup; and a butler who had been wounded in the head in the first world war and was apt to pursue Mrs Tanner, the cook, with a bread knife. To these could be added Brett, who forged cheques; Ellis, who emptied the cellar and peed into the empty bottles; and Horwood, who thought he had droit de seigneur in respect of the footmen. Monday: How are things going with you? Are you (a) on the verge of becoming a millionaire? (b) on the brink of insolvency? (c) the subject of investigation by the fraud squad? (d) or cruising along like me in genteel poverty?

A mixture of (b) and (c) would describe my situation fairly accurately. To quote my older sister, I “arrived in the sort of Mercedes which usually conveys six bookmakers driven by a chauffeur in dark glasses”. Finally, I succumb to the inevitable and book into a drink and drug rehabilitation centre in Weston-super-Mare. I throw my empty brandy glass out of the open sunroof as I drive through the entrance gates. When Dad visits me he says, “It seems very pleasant here, old boy . . . Any chance of getting your mother in?”

Monday: Old age is full of surprises, most of them unpleasant, and is rather like being punished for a crime one has never committed. My inside is giving me hell but if I go to surgery for soothing medicine I will be whipped off to hospital, deprived of the last tattered shreds of human dignity and tubes will be inserted into every orifice I possess. The biggest mistake I ever made was to come round after passing out when buying cut-price gin in Newbury.

My father’s health was in decline. He died on November 27, 1992, aged 82.

© Charlie and Roger Mortimer 2012

Dear Lupin . . . Letters to a Wayward Son is published by Constable at £12.99. Copies can be ordered for £11.69, including postage, from The Sunday Times Bookshop on 0845 271 2135

My brilliant career

I have had many jobs over the decades. In Los Angeles in 1977, right, I was selling a luxury Mercedes with my friend Charlie Shearer on commission for his father. Besides being a vintage car restorer, I have also been a Coldstream Guards recruit, proprietor of a mobile discotheque, paint and cement salesman, agricultural labourer, construction labourer, painter and decorator, estate agent, property developer, oil rig roughneck, pop group manager, second-hand vehicle salesman, mechanic in Africa, maker of backgammon boards, scrap metal dealer, heavy goods vehicle class 1 driver, antiques dealer, manufacturer of boxer shorts, law student and financial and legal adviser (unofficial).