Happy Families

By LORD EGREMONT

I WAS at a family house- party with several elderly relations. After dinner they went on talking to each other yackety-yack in the drawing-room. When Aunt Maggie screeched: 'Guess what Queen Mary said to me? No — guess!' I politely withdrew. I had had enough.

Shakespeare wrote: The lark, that tirra-lirra chants, With, heigh! with, height the thrush and the jay, Are summer songs for me and my aunts, While we lie tumbling in the hay.

Well, I have tried most things, but I must say that I never tried tumbling in the hay with my Edwardian aunts.

Benjamin Franklin wrote about family rela- tionships: `Visit your aunt, but not every day.' I heartily agree. It equally applies to an aunt visiting her nephew.

Nevertheless, you have got to put up with her when she comes. But (unless you have ex- pectations from her) why? Other creatures don't.

All I can say is that family life is all very well for those who can stand it. Most women can. If a man disrupts family life clumsily, he may find himself like a monkey at bay in a den of lionesses. I am blessed with the most happy family rela- tionships. I am only too delighted to meet my relatives. I married one of them. She was a Wyndham-Quin and I am a Wyndham. We Wyndhams often marry those Quins. I am the third one to have done so. We Wyndhams have injected some sort of idea of civilisation into those wild Irish Quins and they, for their part, have contributed beauty to the ugly Wyndhams.

Not that human beauty really matters. Human hope is what matters.

I have seen smiles on hard and ugly faces,

I have seen flowers in dry and stony places, I have seen the Gold Cup won by the worst horse in the races.

So I still hope. • My favourite relations are my Wyndham- Quin cousins. They are headed by Lord Dun- raven, who lives at Adare, County Limerick. They are, among other things, a great sporting family. There are many stories about them.

Beginning a speech in Los Angeles in the course of a United States presidential contest, the Democratic candidate, Governor Stevenson, after saying that he was very glad to be there, went on to say that the last time he had been there was during the war when he had been a backroom boy for Knox, Secretary for the US Navy. He said that Frank Knox had made a very good speech then and that he himself wouldn't make as good a speech now. He added that he knew—for he had written them both.

Well, most of the stories about my Wyndham- Quin cousins are untrue. I know. I made them up. I can't think why I made up stories about them. The current ones were interesting enough.

For example, take Windham Wyndham-Quin, fourth Lord Dunraven. His successor was also christened Windham. I don't know why my cousins christened these people by their sur- names and then spelt them differently.

Well anyway, the fourth Lord Dunraven was interested in spiritualism. With this in mind he sought out D. D. Home, who had become well known in that connection. One day in one of Lord Dunraven's houses Home said that he felt in the mood for a bit of levitation. He lay flat on his back and then became levitated, floating horizontally in the air about the room. But it was a hot day and they were in an upper chamber with all the windows wide open. Home floated out through one of the windows.

Dunraven was beside himself with worry. Where was Home going to come down? What if he crashed? Dunraven rushed to the window and looked out. He found that Home had turned to port and was now floating at a slow speed alongside the façade of the house. With great presence of mind, Dunraven dashed into the passage and the next-door room, through the window of which he retrieved Home by Home's legs.

That is the sort of scrape we Wyndhams and Wyndham-Quins are apt to get into. But Dun- raven and Home should have known that you should never try levitation with the windows open.