Past times
Petronella Wyatt
My life is being packed away in boxes: papers, photographs, letters, even old school reports. You know what they say about dying — that pictures of every significant past experience flash before your eyes. So it is with moving. You only die twice. Once when you die and once when your house is being underpinned.
My immediate future, thankfully, is less unsettled. The Lanesborough Hotel on Hyde Park Corner has been good enough to accept the mutt. Well, they accepted Michael Jackson, so what's the difference? My dog and I are moving there on 7 April. Meanwhile all the allegedly breakable objects in the house have to be put in storage. This includes the dining-room chairs which weren't even broken when a fat Tory politician sat down on them, so I don't see how a builder could do much harm.
Clearing out the attic has been like exca vating an Assyrian site. Over the years objects have become as encrusted as Sennacherib's throne-room. After my father died we stored his clothes and papers up there. Now, sadly, the clothes have to go to Oxfam, unless there is a generously built Spectator reader who wouldn't mind the suits of a former Labour MP. Going through my father's clothes has been a piece of social history. Some of the suits were made in the 1960s. All the trousers have braces. What ever happened to braces? Were they simply replaced by belts or was it that men started taking off their jackets?
In one box were old photographs of my mother. It is unnerving seeing pictures of one's mother when she was one's age. Mothers are supposed to be perpetual matrons, not gilded things with curves like the hull of a racing yacht. This elicits unwanted comparisons with one's own physical attributes. Were her legs better than mine? There was a photograph of my mother in a bathing-suit that made this painful suggestion. I took exception also to a still of her looking assured on top of a hayrick. It was too unmotherly for my liking.
Verse is to come. Further excavation uncovered poetry my father wrote on the occasion of my birth. As Sherlock Holmes said of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, this is something for which the world is not yet prepared. A similar sentiment may be expressed about pictures of my young self. I must have been the hairiest baby in existence. My mother coos over the photographs and says she had to put rollers in for the christening. That is, in my hair, not hers. She ought to have sent me for a leg wax instead. Things improved when I was three however. The hair fell out. I look at a photograph of myself wearing a dress decorated with a giant daisy. Odd. All my life I have had strange flashes of memory about that dress, but until now I was never sure it really existed. My mother said, You wore it in Dubrovnik. Don't you remember how you walked down the street throwing oranges at people?' I fail to recall this early sign of aggression.
In another box is a note my father wrote to the headmistress of my school when I was about 13. It said, 'I must insist that my daughter not be given milk during the morning break. Milk is full of dangerous saturated fat and may lead to her having coronary problems in later life.' Underneath this is my first ever school report from Stepping Stones in Swiss Cottage. The final line reads, Petronella is a very sensitive little girl. We are sorry that she sometimes finds the boisterous element in the Tigers difficult.'
How mortifying, when I had hoped for something like -Petronella is a very intrepid little girl. She will have no difficulty in coping with army field trials designed to test the ability of women to serve in front-line combat units.' But my military career was not to be. Never mind. When I move to the Lanesborough there will be the Duke of Wellington outside my window staring reproachfully, A newspaper recently claimed that the original statue of the Duke stood on a plinth next to Apsley House. This is not so. It was taken away because Queen Victoria didn't approve of so conspicuous a tribute to one of her subjects. Judging from my school reports, the future King William will never have that problem with me.
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