The Colonel’s ladies

At art school in the early 1950s I met “the Colonel” through his niece, a fellow art student.

It was a fortuitous meeting as he and I not only got on very well but he was also a patron of the arts and a collector of major paintings.

The Colonel was a very successful man in the City, thus able to live in style and in opulent surroundings.

When I sold my London house to travel the world drawing for a year, I gave my money to the Colonel who, despite a recession of the economy, managed to make a profit which enabled me to build a studio house in the country that I eventually sold to Francis Bacon.

In his art dealings he relied to a great extent on the expertise of the Mayor Gallery in London, where Freddy Mayor had the ear of top art dealers in Paris.

It was in Paris that we might all meet with me being their guide to the lower layers of artistic and cullinary orders. I was privileged to be their company.

I was also privileged to be invited to stay in the Colonel’s country seats of stylish good living where, for instance, breakfasts among the usual things, always offered Kedgeree, cold pheasant and partridge.

Coming from a country family, I was armed with country clothes, dinner jacket and fine 12 bore shotgun, inherited from my father.

Shooting was part of country life were I enjoyed “beating”. This consisted of a crowd of locals who, under the guidance of a keeper, would move more or less in line and use a stick to tap bushes and trees to make pheasants fly from woodland to allow “guns” to then shoot them out of the sky.

Sometimes I would be asked to follow the beaters with my gun to shoot at any pheasant clever enough not to follow the rest over the guns but to turn back over the beaters to escape and live. Then it was my turn to try to add those birds to the total bag.

I was not a verey good shot and seldom successful. But one time when a pheasant broke away from the others to escape toward the Deben Estuary in Suffolk, I fired and was delighted to see the bird fall to earth. A keeper picked it up and came to congratulate me. “Right through the eye, sir”, he said, which I imagine he was taught to say to any poor shot like me.

There was always camaraderie among the beaters and sarcastic remarks about poor markmanship were common.

Another gun/beater like me, was even less successful. A beater remarked, quite loudly, “if ‘e can’t ‘it that target, what’s ‘is misses going to do for a bit of pleasure.”

One of the Colonel’s earlier wives was the inheritor of a family fortune and raised in one of our far flung Dominions. She lived in part of the hall were I was staying to which no one was invited. She and I were friends and would drink beer together into the late evenings. Despite many enquiries no one knew, or would tell, what happened in her quarters. Did she live alone? No information was forthcoming. Later, after she died I enquired again, to be told that her rooms were found to be full of empty gin bottles.

But it was another, younger and prettier wife that I write about.

Staying in the manor house with me was a director of the Mayor Gallery. He and I changed into dinner jackets for dinner and were sitting by a roaring log fie waiting for the entrance of our host and hostess, when this lovely lady appeared wearing a fairly thin negligee of a dress to kneel and bend over in front of the fire to dry her hair.

It seemed so lovely that amid such constrained affluence, the lady of the house could, and would. Dry her hair in front of the log fire in the company of two youthful guests.

It was so nice to see that grand living could still be simple, domestic and charming. I enjoyed those days in the company and friendship of the Colonel and his ladies.

(A122)

Frances Bacon's Ventoux

 "Did you really know Francis Bacon?" I am sometimes asked, as if it was something special. But it wasn't.

We met because I offered for sale a one bedroomed studio house that I had designed and part built north of Andover, in Hampshire. 

He had seen my "One bedroom studio house in Hampshire for sale" in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

He read it, came to see it, and bought it.

We got on famously, I think probably because I was not gay, and thus different from his general crowd of friends and hangers-on, and that we were both firm believers in change.

I had bought the house as a tumbledown wreck from a Mrs Rampling (Mrs Ramp).

Its land and mouldy thatch were to be my roots in England after I had travelled the world drawing in 1958 and 1959.

Mrs Ramp lived next door in a cottage with a real and lovely cottage garden. Night soil from a bucket nourished it, especially her runner beans.

She owned an old gardening book called The English Flower Garden, 1901 edition. In it was an engraving of my grandfather The Rev F. Page-Roberts admiring his 12 ft eremurus flowers with a two page text on their cultivation. 

Mrs Ramp was so pleased to have a grandson neighbour of a men, also President of The National Rose Society, next door, that she offered it as a gift, or a garishly painted depiction of Mont Ventoux, given to her by Francis Bacon.

I suppose because of our friendship or joint pleasure in the garden, and now connections with her much treasured garden book, that I chose the book rather than the painting.

The book, is now part of the family archive. And the painting? Well, it may have been a Bacon - worth a million or so - or maybe not.

Mont Ventoux 

 

 Wyndham Hewitt

Picture a man, handsome, titled parents, King’s Scolar at Eton, racing driver, pioneer aviator, yacht-owner, homes in the South of France, Brittany and England, brilliant engineer, lover and (several wives, mostly famous models), bon viveur, accepted in Parisien society, cook, rather close relationship with royalty, and I am sure much else - my goodness, what a splendid person he must have been. But he wasn’t. And using a descriptive word of his times - a cad. And a very selfish one at that. 

Wyndham Hewitt was my uncle, my mother’s brother. Wyn, as he was known, had a famous anaesthetist father who helped to safv King Edward VII’s life just before his intented coronation, and was knighted for it. His mother was a beauty at court and those who now know the tastes of the king know what that might imply. In fact, stilll in the family is a magnificent brooch of blue enamel and many bordering diamonds, surrounding a royal cypher of diamonds. What might it have been for?

My first recollection of Wyn was a a child of perhaps four or five years. He had come to stay with us at our house in Silchester in the Hampshire countryside. That is where we first fell out, as I called him a pansy. A pansy to me was a flower, having, at the time, no idea at all that the word had a second meaning. 

We were to meet many times later, almost invariably when I was to be of use to him. These “uses” over the following years were generally to house-sit in one of his South of France places. In Cabris I had to feed the dogs and parrot, and pay the gardener and maid. This was fine for me as it was a chance to get away from my very small London Council rooms above the railway lines of Victoria station to have access to good food and wine and to swim in his pool in the sunshine.

I made a friend for life in the delightful form of a Yale Professor of History who had rented a villa nearby to write a book. Also nearby lived the mistress of a French scent baron with her six black poodles. The latter I met when painting a landscape, when each day she ran past my easel in heavy army boots while exercising herself and the dogs. 

I thought I had timed this particular stay beautifully as Wyn would return when arranged and then I could meet up with a fellow art school friend from England and drive to Italy. 

But the weather was unseasonable in Brittany where Wyn would usually spend the hot summer months. But it was cold in the North this time and he returned unexpectedly.

He learned that I had eaten not in his dark mid-Surrey heavely mahogonied dining room, but in the kitchen with the old and rather plain but perfectly pleasant maid. People of my standing did not eat in the kitchen with the cook. Also I had thrown stones for his bull terrier to retrieve - ruining the dog’s mouth. I drank local red wine which I collected in containers from Grasse, like the peasants, and made friends with the parrot that bit him but played swirling-arround games with me. I was told to leave. 

I was sad to part from dogs and parrot but had made two friends, both of whom invited me to stay - one of whom I did not want to distract from his writing and the other, soaked in perfume from Paris that was used mainly to keep ants at bay - without much success.

That was the last time that I went to Wyn’s house.

He died when still married to his 6th? wife, a Parisien model of note.

Wyn did have a daughter with whom he was estranged as he divorced her mother for having the  baby. She now lives, I believe, in Canada.

What happended to his wealth is uncertain as far as I  know. But he did keep gold bars for emergencies. These were somewhere hidden in the loft of his house in Cabris and were moved to a house he built in Mougins. There, we believe, they were actually built into the fabric of the house. They may still be there.

With the combination of French laws and lawyers, everything he owned went to his French wife who died shortly after he did. 

The Panorama Mesdag

The Panorama Mesdag

The Hague is very important for the Dutch. But for the outsider it is dull and a bit bleak and not a patch on Amsterdam where you can hardly turn without seeing canals and architecture of extreme beauty.

But The Hague offers some great surprises. Vermeers and Rembrants are to be enjoyed, a Chinese restaurant, called Fat Kee, and also a number 1 tram to take you in one direction to Delft and the other to the pier and seaside at Scheveningen. But, to me, there is something very special to see - something magical. 

On a road towards the Scheveningen direction (at Zeestraat 65) is an underplayed entrance to a museum of unexceptional paintings, leading to a staircase to climb. And at the top of that staircase you suddenly find yourself standing on a sand dune in about the year of 1880.

You are now in the midde of a late 19th century landscape with the sea on one side and the other overlooking the small fishing town of Scheveningen. This is the Panorma Mesdag, painted on the inside of a circular canvas contrived and executed by the artistic family Mesdag.

The boats, animals and figures do not actually move, but you are there - absolutely there. 

Boats are on the sand being unloaded of their fish and other goods. Horses and carts are there to transport these goods inland. Boats are under repair, sails are attended to and flap in the breeze. A regiment on horseback have appeared to exercise along the shoreline, children play, a minor seaside palace awaits the arrival of its royal owner, people scurry along narrow streets. You can smell the tar and the fish, hear the waves and bask in the light winds.

Few panoramas remain in these days of easy transport, but in their day you could visit the seaside from well inland. 

And for me, to be there is the best experience to be had in the Netherlands.  

Silchester - random recollections (some of the following I have written about elsewhere)

I was born on the 5th of February 1925 at the family home of Sawyers’ Lands, Silchester, near Reading, Berkshire, and delivered by Dr Daly, a Cambridge friend of my maternal grandfather’s. 

I was born for free in the days before National Health because Dr Daly had been involved in some sort of trouble at university and been helped out of it by my grandfather. So we were never charged for medical services.

When I was born my father had come out of the First World War after a nasty bullet wound inflicted by the Turks in Mesopotamia (Iraq). 

For an athlete who had been a scratch golfer, a fine tennis player and one who played cricket for his county, it was hardship indeed. He was on crutches when he married my mother in St George’s, Hanover Square, London.

Even in ’14 - ’18 wartime it was a normal society wedding, my mother ’s father being a knighted anaesthetist to King Edward VII. I still have somewhere a tissue paper souvenir handout as given to spectators outside the church who wanted to know who was getting married.

Together they built a house and started a chicken farm. My father had, before the war, been to Marlborough and Wye Agricultural College. Farming matters and nature were in his blood. Because of this, my father planned the setting for the house. From the road, the driveway led to a pear-shaped back drive. Around this grassy lawn were the ex-army hut barns, one for chicken food and ground-up oyster shell, and the other as  accommodation for the farm help. This was on one side of the pear and the back door to the house on the other. A shorter driveway led to the front door of the house. Then there was a barn for the car and stables. 

Tradesmen, like the baker, fish monger and wine merchant delivered to the back door around the pear. Wine and beer bottles were all recycled. And it was from the dregs of wine bottles that I drank must surely have given me a taste in the future for wine in a more generous quantity.

The kitchen garden and orchard were enclosed by a cupressus hedge as was a grass tennis court. The latter was of great importance to my father and was almost weed-free. In fact, there were times when we children were rewarded if we were able to find a weed. There was a summer house next to the court that housed an ACTO mower. And the wooden building could be turned to face any direction on a circular rail system. The drink for tennis parties was wonderful homemade lemonade.

My parents were poor. But being poor in those days was tolerable if one was well, or reasonably well connected. So, with my grandfather a knight, my uncle a knight and MP, my other grandfather a vicar to the Duke of Wellington and President of The National Rose Society, and my great uncle a Dean of Salisbury, we counted, I suppose, as being reasonably well connected. So we fitted into local society. Even when my parents played bridge, someone would volunteer to cover their losses. Yet I recall my mother in tears when the local brass band appeared in our drive at Christmastime to play carols and we had no money to give them.

My sister June, was firstborn, later to become quite an athlete. My brother, Nigel, was so small at birth that his early days were spent in a hatbox on cotton wool soaked in olive oil. And then, unwanted, came me, my mother trying all the then ploys to be rid of me - like having boiling hot baths, swilling down lots of gin, and taking concoctions from quacks in London’s Soho. Obviously none were effective.

In the 1920s, like more recently, war surplus was available. So our barns were previously army huts, as were the chicken sheds on iron wheels. The wheels with bulbous tyres for our carts were from unwanted RFC wartime bomber aeroplanes.

Sport was of the greatest importance for my father. Despite his foot being held up with a spring attached to a collar around his leg, he still played golf and took great interest in other sport, so much so that he was not particularly interested in his children’s academic education but very keen on their prowess at sport. At a sports day where my brother was at school and told to work on his lessons instead of being on the sports field, my father packed up Nigel’s possessions and immediately took him away from that school.

We had a PYE radio that held an array of glowing valves that looked like light bulbs, and needed a wet battery, like a car battery, and a dry battery that was a heavy lump with several places in which to plug apparatus. This radio was able to tune into Australia via an aerial strung from it to the top of a nearby tree so that my father could listen to the cricket Test Match score from the other side of the world. When the wet battery needed recharging, it was sometimes my turn to cart it over an adjoining field to the Firth’s house. There they had an electricity-generating machine where the floor was covered in batteries to which ours was connected for recharging. The machine had a single cilinder and a flywheel. The room smelled of acid. 

Water for our house came from a nearby well, cut deep through gravel. It was pumped to a tank in the roof space by a Swift car engine set in concrete. When we couldn’t get this car engine to work, we all took turns at a hand-operated pump in the kitchen. 

My father was a dab-hand at water divining with a forked ash stick. He would often be asked for advice on where new house builders should sink a well. We had another well for the farm, located in the centre of a field, its supply being located originally and tracked by my father’s divining. 

The house, downstairs, was lit by a lovely system of petrol, and, I suppose, air. This was made by a shiny, green drum with cog teeth and was powered by a weight at the end of a cable strung between the machine and the top of a tree. We had to wind up the weight when it was seen to be too low.

The farm was the working centre of our life, even though my mother, whose upbringing had been in royal circles, found being a farmer’s wife not to her liking, though she virtually ran the farm, my father not having a head for business.

Beside tennis, there were plenty of other entertainments available. There were lots of dances and, when at our house, our sprung floor was much appreciated. My father was the drummer and saxophonist in a jazz band. I recall a “Nine to Ninety” dance where a comely lady wearing a backless dress of the day’s fashion, bent over to expose her well-formed breasts. As a boy I thought that was disgusting. There were whist drives and plays put on by the villagers in the village hall. Bridge was popular, to which I was sometimes taken. On these dull occasions at a particular house I was usually given marrons glacés, when I would have much preferred a Mars bar.

Weekend cricket was much enjoyed by all classes. And at our village field we children kept ourselves busy by harvesting wild strawberries that were plentiful outside the boundary. We all had bicycles, and as our village was completely hemmed in by fords, we would much enjoy riding through the water. Summer picnics were a regular treat. We were never bored, summer or winter.

Aeroplanes and flying took a major part in our lives. Not only were aeroplanes still in their infancy and naturally interesting, but we boys were devoted to making small models of them from Sybird kits. These were bought in a box holding pine and balsa wood, a lead pilot, some mica and a sheet of plans, with the purchaser left to carve and construct models of British and German aircraft. When Alan Cobham rented a farmer’s field in the district, we would visit to watch his aeroplanes. I flew as passenger in an Avro Tutor biplane for 7/6 that included a loop-the-loop. We would drive to the Solent to watch seaplanes race for the Schneider Trophy, and admire private aeroplanes, like Mew Gulls and Flying Fleas, when they flew low near our house in the handicapped King’s Cup Air Race. 

In a Fokker Trimotor plane, and in 7 days, my Uncle Wyndham Hewitt flew as flight engineer with Kingsford Smith in a record breaking Christmas mail flight in 1931 from Australia to Croydon Aerodrome in London. From Croydon Nigel and I were flown around London in a Klem Bat - a modern, cantilever wing monoplane, built by Germans to train pilots for yet another war. Kingsford Smith was due to come to see us in an aeroplane. We set out a landing T with sheets to show him the wind direction so that he could land upwind, but he never arrived, being very unreliable and rather keen on spending his non-flying time on women and booze.

Food at home was very much country food consisting  of steamed puddings, hearty stews, many vegetables and, especially cakes as we had a chicken farm. We children would beg Connie, the maid, to lick out her cake-mixing bowls. Fruit, both fresh and home-bottled, featured prominently, and my father, being a bit of a health freak, liked to boil cabbage in a pressure cooker placed on top of our kitchen range - a range that not only heated the kitchen in winter but supplied the hot water for the house from its back boiler. Game featured in winter but was hung for such a long time that the final taste would be unrecognisable today. Stilton cheese, again, was treated with port and was considered to be perfect when almost alive. We children were given the choice of menu on our birthdays. And despite living on a chicken farm, we would always choose roast chicken. It was, of course, free range and wonderful.

Digging in the vegetable garden and bordering the road, we would often find Roman coins. These were so commonplace that we just threw them into a hamper - where they eventually were destroyed when our cottage around the pear was burnt to the ground during the war.

My father once grew some impressively large gooseberries in the kitchen garden. He was about to show some at the village fete and bottle the rest, when at dead of night, gypsies from Tadley broke in through the hedge that separated our garden from the road, and stole them - every single one, and in the dark, too.

We preserved fruit and vegetables in sealed glass jars for winter consumption. Making jam was important as it was used in puddings and on bread  for tea. Wild food featured prominently. Bilberries (blueberries) were harvested in the woods, mushrooms dried and blackberries gathered from brambles for pies and being cooked with apples for pudding fillings.

Bread was very special as most villages had access to a baker nearby and bread from each tasted better than loaves from our own bakery.

Cheese was made in many a farm. We would bike to Sherfield-on-Loddon’s Lilly Mill for a variety of Cheddar, and near to Silchester Pound for a type of Camembert.

At Yates, the local grocery shop, bacon was cut from the smoked side of a pig. Salt was cut from a large block and sold by weight in a sugar-paper bag, as were currants. Butter was cut from a large block and shaped with two wooden paddles. And at Ellinghams, the sweets and tobacco shop, we children bought lemonade crystals to lick from the bag, chocolate drops, and sherbet fountains where sherbet was sucked up from a paper tube via a hollow licorice stick. 

We children did not live stagnant lives at Silchester. Strathfield Saye Rectory, just a five mile bike ride away, was the home of my grandfather and then the Rev John Barker who was married to my aunt Nancy, one of my father’s sisters. There we would stay and have the run of my grandfather’s Glebe Lands and the river Loddon in which to swim, fish and catch crayfish. And it was there that another aunt (Dorothy) ran the Brownies, of which I was made one, being the right age but not the right sex. 

And we would often stay at Shelleys, in Knockholt, Kent, the home of yet another of my father’s sisters (Margery) who was married to uncle Waller (Sir Waldon Smithers MP). There I got on well with the gardener who, when I was there recuperating from TB plied me with the best vegetables to take back to London.

At home in Silchester we had governesses. One of them was Jenevieve Chapuis who came from Vevey, in Switserland. We remained friends with her, and I was staying in Vevey, supposedly to learn French, 14 years old, when the Second World War was about to begin. I was put on a train and made my way back to England. All I recall about my brief stay with the Chapuis’s family was the wooden, slatted slide down which we slid into the water of Lac Léman. But first one had to slosh water down the slide to give it an element of slipperiness, which I failed to do - causing meaty burn stripes on my backside.

Connie, our maid at Silchester, did about everything, cooking cleaning, bathing us and much else. Her lover was the local steamroller man, who would leave his bike in bushes at the bottom of the drive and climb through a very small window into her downstairs room, when it would have been far easier to turn around a corner of the house and use a much larger window. 

Connie’s family came from Tadley, where the gypsies came from. I went to her house once to see, just inside the front door, a huge black pig hanging from a hook.  I suppose it was to be de-bristled and butchered. But for a small boy it was a rather sudden and yet impressive sight. 

An occasional visitor to our house at Silchester was my formidable grandmother (Lady Hewitt). She always wore black clothes and was rather grand and ladylike.

I was a bit of a dab-hand at snaring rabbits for the pot. One day, when she was staying, I had caught a rabbit and was returning to the house to deal with it, when grandmother said that she would like to paunch and skin it. So she rolled up her sleeves, cut and cleared out its innards, skinned it, and then cut it into pieces suitable for the pot. 

From then on, never having known of her Irish origins, we concluded that she might have been a farmer’s or a butcher’s daughter. 

So I suppose, those early days of childhood at Silchester did influence my later life of becoming an RAF pilot, artist and a writer of books, articles and blogs. 

So I suppose, those early days of childhood at Silchester did influence my later life of becoming a RAF pilot, artist and a writer of books, articles and blogs.

A Simple Standard Lamp

Some years ago we bought and transported home a standard lamp from Holland that had magic in its makeup, inasmuch as near to its bulb was a small stem that by touching it with one's fingers it would change the volume of light from degrees of dull to brightness.

As with all electrical goods, planned obsolescence or not, it came to the end of its life. We had to find a replacement.

This replacement had to be simple, unobtrusive, and to spread light around generally and in particular upwards and downwards.

To find one should have been simple. But somehow standard lamps are generally "feature" items, with fancy mouldings, tassels, voluptuous shaped shades and all the rest. So to find a simple and practical design turned out to be extremely difficult. 

That was, until, when browsing around a Scandinavian shop when looking for A4 picture frames, I spied on a shelf just the kind of lamp that I had been looking for - but was unavailable at the time. The                price? £7.

I persevered. And on another occasion I spoke to a supervisor, who found the last one in the shop. I thought it was a mistake when a smallish cardboard box was handed over in exchange for £7. "Is that really it?" I queried. "You have to make it up yourself." came the reply. 

For that price one doesn't expect precision engineering. So to make it up would require patience and imagination. 

The pictorial instructions were cursory. And the manufacturer had difficulty in describing how a springy bit of material in a paper tube could be converted into a circular lampshade.

Much later and with the help of four hands, two clamps and superglue, the shade took shape. Bits that parted from the construction too easily were superglued in place. Finally plugged in, the lamp was in one piece and just what was wanted.

Then when I was turning the Dutch one into small pieces for the dustmen to cart away, I found that its shade was not only well made, but fitted over the Scandinavian one as if they were meant to be together. Again, with the invaluable superglue, the old shade was used to partially cover the smaller new one and the result was not unlike lights of the 1960s that had louvers to direct their beams of light.

It is unique, charming and, well, all for £7. 

As this will be the last blog of the year 2022, we would like to wish all our loyal readers a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year. 

Smoke, Fog, Lung, and Work or Peasouper

 The war had ended. There was no further a need for pilots, so I was grounded and became an RAF Photographic Intelligence Officer.

Having missed the years I should have been at school because of the war, I used the "grounded" time to acquire enough qualifications to become a medical student at St Thomas's Hospital.

Having joined the RAF when I was old enough in 1942, I had to await my turn to be demobilised after the war had ended (first in first out).

Just before that date I was found to have contracted TB in the lung. There was no cure at that time. I must have acquired the affliction in 1947 when the winter was exceptionally cold and both fuel and food were rationed (even for those in services).

So, after being invalided out of the RAF, I started to become a medical student. But after more spitting of blood, it had to be the conclusion of my medical ambitions.

Then came the start of what turned out to be a seven-year process of being screened every week or so, and having a thick needle shoved between my ribs to allow air to enter an induced gap between my ribs and lung. This was thought to "rest" the lung, and was as unpleasant to put up with as it sounds.

Being invalided out of the RAF entitled me to a Council flat. This consisted of two minuscule rooms above the railway lines outside Victoria Station.

It was still the age of steam trains, coal burning, smoke and dense fogs. Below my window, steam engine drivers kept their engines boilers in readiness by the continuous burning coal. This meant more smoke. From my abode, the general noise of railways was punctuated by the occasional shock-inducing blast from the release of excess steam. 

Inside my studio room I kept warm by burning coal in a small grate, thus adding to the atmosphere that could become thick fog. One of these "peasoupers" as they were called, was so thick that the only way of navigation outside was to walk with one foot on the pavement and the other in the road.

I needed to move to cleaner air, and did so by buying a bombed-out house in the Fulham Road and restoring it (less the top floor, because of the cost) to become a comfortable place in which to live and work.

In the meantime I went to the Central School of Art to paint with Bernard Meninsky and then to the Old Vic School of theatre design. 

Now working as a scene painter at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and then designing and constructing sets for repertory theater and touring shows, and creating sets for television (black and white then - actually various greys). I still managed to paint landscape that sold well from several of the best London galleries.

It seems extraordinary that breathing in the dirty air of that period, and coping with the building work and food rationing, not to mention the almost weekly high dose of screening radiation involved with the chest pneumothorax, that far from killing me I seemed to have thrived on it. 

(A119 (A1)

Foxes

 Foxes seem to have been part of my life.

As a child they were the enemy and I was somewhat afraid of them.

We had a chicken farm (all free range then) where the chicken houses, where the birds laid their eggs, were old army huts on iron wheels. These were moved around a large field. 

At night, if foxes gained entry to a shed they would slaughter all the chickens there, just, it seems, for the pleasure of it.

Gamekeepers may have trapped or killed foxes, but mostly they were the target of The Hunt.

The various hunts in that part of Hampshire/Berkshire met in front of some large mansion or other with men and women on horseback, surrounded by a pack of excited hounds. The men wore pink (red) coats, and the ladies, often riding sidesaddle, wore black.

After draughts of sloe gin or brandy, handed up to them on their horses, the horsemen and women would move off (blow away) under the control of the master, to find, and kill a fox. The sounds of the master's hunting horn would indicate to hounds and people what was happening and what to do, like "blowing away" (start) or the long note calling the hounds ("blowing out").

It was then that we youngsters with bicycles, who knew the country well, would position ourselves where the foxes might run. There we would see them in daytime and witness the hunt in full cry after them, as their quarry raced across open land from copse to copse to escape death.

When close to a fox in the open one felt a sense of danger, magnified by the noise of the hunting horn, the shouting and the baying and barking of the hounds.

So I saw foxes as dangerous creatures and, for the sake of the farm, the more killed by the hounds the better.

Those were country foxes. Now I see town foxes.

My first town fox was spied from an underground train, above ground, basking in the sunshine beside the track. It made a fine sight with its sleek shape and chestnut colouring.

Now they are commonplace around the London streets where I live.

They do damage in town, trashing gardens in a comprehensive manner and, in a neighbour's case, leaving a cat's head behind.

Two doors away, after hearing much squealing we saved a cat from being mauled to death by a fox. The owner of the house where this occurred contacted the cat's owner, who, because of the animal's serious injuries, suggested that it be put down. But it was taken to the vet, patched up, and has turned out to be a charming cat, but a wild one, which would much rather be wild like the foxes than cooped up, like it is, as a house cat.

When I get up at night I look into the still, lamp-lit night outside and sometimes foxes running (fox trotting, I suppose) along the road and pavement. But recently I have seen in the early hours, a fox curled up, apparently asleep, right in the centre of the road outside the house. From that position it is able to see up to two streets.

Is it just a warm place on which to curl up and pass the time of night? Or is it guarding a corner of its territory?

Like dogs, let sleeping foxes lie. So I would not think of disturbing it. Indeed, I have to admit I'm still a little afraid of them. 

An Apple Store

 I have recorded previously in my An Autobiography in Words and Pictures about how, as an airman posted to RAF Hornchurch in late 1944, I volunteered to be a roof slater of bombed-out housing while waiting for a posting abroad for pilot training.

When at last, I was waiting no longer and on my way, the first move was by train to Liverpool to board the New Mauritania liner bound for Canada.

We were allotted hammock space, and I was given the job of being in charge of the refrigerated apple store.

This had the advantage of, having left a strictly raisioned nation, I now had access to as many apples as I wanted. They were American apples of a deep red colour, all perfectly shaped, and scented the one-bulb-lit cold store in which I would spend my refrigerated days.

That was an advantage. A disadvantage was my location should we be attacked by Nazi submarines.

In eight days we docked in Moncton, New Brunswick, and were offloaded into barracks. 

There, my only recollection was of a hill where gravity worked the other way around. One peddled a bicycle down the hill and free-wheeled up it.

We (our Flight of about 100) were soon on a train to the USA, specifically to the RAF, 3 B.F.T.S airfield near to Miami, Oklahoma.

From being transported from war-torn England, where strict rationing was in force, we were bombarded with kindness at railway stops where locals came aboard to ply us with candy, tobacco and much else. This bountiful generosity seemed quite unreal to us ordinary airmen. It was as if we were heroes.

(A 113)

Prignac

 I was just coming to the end of casting my eye over bottles of red wine in a supermarket, when I saw the name Prignac on a front label. Though a bit above our usual price range I bought it. And this is the reason why.

In the early 1960s I travelled to the Bordeaux region to drink and learn about their wines. 

I settled in the unfashionable region of Bas Médoc, selecting a rather primitive auberge as my base. I was offered a sort of shed to sleep in and when asking for its sanitary arrangements, was directed to the surrounding trees and bushes. This was good advice as the lavatory in an outhouse of the establishment was quite disgusting. 

It was that kind of place where the patronne and her daughter augmented their income doing other matters, so food might be delayed before being cooked and served. But the copious amounts of red wine consumed there by guests and locals was delicious ordinary Prignac. The wine came from the local co-op where it was made in an atmosphere so thick with fruit flies one could hardly breathe within its concrete construction without ingesting some of them.

Before leaving, I ordered my first cask (une demie barrique) of their 1966 to be delivered to me in London, fut perdu (non returnable barrel), fob (free on board). 

When it arrived I paid carriage and duty (another tale), and bottled 150 bottles (gathered from outside bars and clubs at 4 am in the mornings).

I was later to order the same quantity of their '67 and '68 red.

Not knowing how to work the system, I was later to import a hogshead (353 bottles) of wonderful Rioja from Bilbainas, in Spain.

Those were the days when most fine wines came to England in cask and was bottled by the wine merchant. Now, barrels are used mainly for ageing good wine. With lesser quality, wine is either bottled at the château or co-operative, or imported in bulk and bottled in quantity where there is a market for it.

So from those very hands-on days of negotiating, and then bottling from barrel to bottle, the Château Tour Prignac, year of vintage, branded cork of fine quality, and price, still has much of the character and charm of the Prignac that I loved in the 1960s. 

From the first sip of that newly discovered bottle, it was like meeting an old friend once more - but a much smarter friend who had come up in the world considerably. 

Bee up the shorts

When I was designing for the theater and landscape painting in 1950, I was beginning to think that a wartime gap in my education needed to be fixed. A Grand Tour around Europe was what was wanted. I would feast on paintings and the theater, let alone the food and wine from foreign parts.

Painting scenery at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and designing and painting sets for repertory theatre was artistically and creatively rewarding but poorly paid. 

But when I worked on background scenery for an ice show (I still had my RAF flying boots to keep my feet warm on the ice), I had enough money to buy an old, flat-back, Ford, builder's van on which to construct a sort of mobile living space.

I made my vehicle to fit my body shape, with a most comfortable, deep, rubber seat, canted up in the front for me to lean back and, in so doing, raising my knees. On the flat part of the truck was enough space for a blow-up bed, cooking kit, stores, water, paints and other stuff.

As it would be hot in Europe, on the roof above the front seat I installed two large air scoops - the kind seen on old-fashioned steam ships. These would scoop and duct down fresh air and, should it rain, they could be turned to face the rear. And as an anti-mosquito measure, combined with a net, they could stoppered off with two large diameter corks. 

Then I added a horn that would waken the dead. My personalised Grand Tour vehicle made an unusual sight with its added streamlined bodywork, made of moulded ply and canvas. I gave it new Michelin tyres, brush-painted it British racing green, and set off. 

It was when travelling along a main road somewhere near Genoa in Italy, and amid a throng of workmen returning home on bicycles, that a bee was scooped in and down through the vent above my head, directly entering my shorts. 

I glanced at the consternation in my more view mirrors but was otherwise more concerned about that bee. 

Back in England, my live-in car was eventually sold to a Scottish Laird and may have been used to round up deer or other animals. Armed with a mosquito net and corks he may well have got the better of the midges in the course of travels around his estate.

As for that Genoese bee....? I can't recall. 

Gardeners' World

 In 1984 I was living in the country north of Andover in Hampshire. A car accident had ended my life as a sculptor of large lumps of elm trees and I had started to write on wine.

A not-too-distant neighbour, called John Cherrington, and I became friends. He was a famous farmer who had a weekly column in the Financial Times. Through his recommending me as a writer, the Editor of the FT published my pieces on any subject not covered by his regular journalists.

Also, through John Cherrington's auspices, I was introduced to the producer of Gardeners' World programme for BBC2, who liked the garden and my ideas so much that a date was fixed for a programme to be made on it.

Other than the overall design of its wedge-shaped Leylandii hedges in serpentine form, and a focal point of an old and broken stone fields roller on end, there were, I seem to remember some nine designs of weathervanes around the garden, mostly made from copper sheet and tube. One, the most common, least elegant, but most successful, had a plain vane at one end and a four-bladed propeller at the other. This told not only the direction of the incoming wind but by the speed of propeller rotation, its force.

Another took a tube shape with a vane at one end and an inserted kitchen funnel at the other. This supposedly would scoop in the wind to a sub-sonic whistle, which would tell the birds in the district that this was a nice garden to visit. Unfortunately, a spider liked to take up residence in the funnel and block it with its web. If the cleared weathervane ever worked in attracting wildlife, I will never know. But it might have done. 

Another piece of interest to me and possibly others, was an experiment with wood preservation. At the end of a small wooden stable block was an exterior wall made of vertical planks. As these faced the wind and weather I thought I might treat each one with a wood-preserving substance, leaving an untreated control panel every so often. I recall that I used oil from a fish and chip shop, creosote, paraffine, bought wood-preservers, petrol, linseed oil, engine oil, caustic soda, urine, paint stripper, roofing solution, drain cleaner  and other substances. After four years the outright winner was used sump oil from a diesel tractor. And when powdered burnt sienna powder was added, the result was excellent, warm-coloured wood-preservation.

The television crew arrived in three great wagons and parked them in a field next door. Their operators numbered some 13 men. Cables were dragged around the garden and my sculpture of a large elmwood horse placed on trestles in the middle of the lawn.

It was raining when we started to made the programme, only noticeable in the end result by water running down the side of the horse.

The presenter of the programme, Geoff Hamilton, would isolate himself from everyone to practice his lines. When we came to discuss the wood-preserved woodwork he might suddenly utter a vile oath, this, he explained to me was when he was not pleased with his words so that those in the wagons would be unable to use them in the programme. So he would carry on without swearing until word perfect.

At the end of filming, the entire programme had been completed in the wagons and ready to be broadcasted the next day.

A few days later I received a letter via the BBC from a fellow wartime pilot. He and others had visited my last address in London, to be told by the landlady that "I had gone". From this they presumed that I was dead (as I had been invalided out of the RAF with TB). Now, here I was, after some 40 years, alive on television. So I joined these fellow pilots, with whom I had trained in the USA, for their annual get-together.

It is somewhat ironic that now I am still very much alive and they, sadly, may all be dead. 

Binder and Pub

In wartime 1942 I had returned from the USA to become an airman in the RAF, and then, because of congestion, told to return to temporary civilian life to await pilot training.

The first job that I took was as a labourer on a farm where rotation of crops was the order of the day, and horsepower (literally) drew wagons and worked machinery.

Harvest time was physical backbreaking but much enjoyed by everyone involved.

We grew wheat, as one of our crops, for making rationed bread. For this, a binder, drawn by two cart horses, would bend the grain stalks toward oscillating blades where it was cut and then gathered into sheave tied by twine, which were then tossed out on to stubble. 

The binder would start by working around the periphery of the field and then toward the middle. in doing so, rabbits were corralled toward the ever-diminishing uncut centre. Then out would come the village families, armed with sticks, to dispatch this valuable food source as the frightened animals scampered, now with difficulty over the stubble, to safety - or death. Rabbit pies augmented our meagre rations and were very much enjoyed. 

The sheaves, now lying on the stubble left by the binder, had then to be gathered up by us labourers into stooks. The process was called "shocking up".

As no one wore gloves and, as thistles abounded, our hands and fingers became pierced with painful spines. 

The stooks, of some six sheaves each, were left in the field so that the grain at the top of them could dry. This might take days to weeks depending on the weather. In this time the wheat became a feast for wild birds. 

When  the straw and grain were dry enough, the sheaves were collected by horse and cart, with us tossing them up with pitchforks to whoever was stalking it. The cut straw ends formed the outside wall of the load. Then off they would go to the rickyard at the farm where, on staddle stones (mushroom-shaped, short stone pillars to make them rat-proof), a rick was formed. This was then thatched, awaiting the arrival of the mighty steam traction engine and threshing machine.

The resulting grain from the threshing was directed from the threshing machine into sacks (only the strongest of us could handle them - not me) and taken to the barn for storage and sale. Dust was tick in the air and the noise deafening. But the smell of the traction engine, wonderful (as was that from steam railway engines of the time).

The grainless straw was formed into another rick in the yard and used for bedding and fodder.

Nowadays this process is conducted by a combined harvester in the field, with the grain carted away to the barn, and dried, if necessary, by heat and fan.

After our day's work we repaired to The Bell Inn where weak beer was consumed and needles used to extract thistle bits from our flesh.

I now realise how lucky I was to have had some experiences on a wartime farm and been able to paint and write about the laborious and enjoyable harvesting days.

Frames and Framers

 Talking about picture frames past and present, Margreet asked me why I haven't written about frames, especially when I was well known and selling in the 1950s? In a way, she suggested, it would be of period interest. So here goes.

I suppose that those early frames surrounding portraits of queens, kings, noblemen, sailors, heroes and villains were carved beautifully out of wood and finished with gesso and gold leaf. They are generally works of art in themselves if we care to look at them closely. Later, with less noble sitters, there was less carving and more gesso used. Then came moulded gesso and gold leaf or gold paint. Machines have now mainly taken over the framer's art. But gesso is still much used - especially by the framers of international art. What is gesso?

Well, the girlfriend of a neighbour works for a famous framer in London. She tells me that gesso is not necessarily made of just chalk and glue, as I had supposed, but of many different powders and glue binders. And these vary, depending mainly on restoration work and the re-framing of "collector's art".

We have a large mirror in our bedroom that is surrounded by a gilded gesso moulding. This plaster stuff falls away from the wooden backing frame at the slightest touch. The gesso therefore, was of poor quality.

A 1933 painting in its original frame hangs on our wall with gesso moulding that is so strong that a hammer blow would hardly disturb it. So gesso quality is of great importance when dealing with frames that are not of the "manufactured" quality.

In the 1950s I believe there were far fewer framers around. And those that were, were very professional. Not only that but there was generally a close relationship between the artist and his/her framer. That closeness was, and is, good for framing.

I used Ernest Wheatley, who had a premises close to Carnaby Street in London. Two key men worked there. One was an Italian gilder, called Dino de Biasi, and the other, Len. Len was a genius. He could paint a frame by dragging various colours over it,  and could cut a cardboard mount with a scalpel and by eye. He had amazing skills. I never used Robert Siell (if that was how his name was spelled). He would put a painting on an easel, stand back like an artist, and apply various mouldings before painting the appropriate one. I have a painting of a nude lady in one of his frames. His own design of a moulding for this is a simple spoon-shape, painted a dark grey, with the forward edge a ripple of gold leaf. It is a frame made by a master.

Dino de Biasi left Wheatley to set up on his own, and I used him for a part gilded frame of some width around one of my first landscapes painted after the war. But the large area of gold detracted from the leafy green subject, so I had to rub a thin mixture of wax and oil colour over it to soften its power. The change was surprisingly successful. Dino left for Wales. I hope he did well there.

When someone buys a painting from me, I would rather that they have it framed by their own framer, but for the mounts on A4 small works I like to paint a mount around the subject to get the effect that I think is appropriate. And I don't pay much for the frames as I expect the new owners to have different ideas from  mine. 

My present framers are Llexia, run by a charming Japanese lady, called Matsue, and her husband Patrick. 

I wrote earlier of the close relationships between artists and framers. Now came an even more surprising relationship between Patrick and myself.

I had taken into his shop one of my larger paintings to be framed for a one-man show at the Mayor Gallery, in Cork Street, London. It was one for the exhibition entitled "Aircraft Shadows". So we started to talk of aeroplanes, and he to learn that at one time in the war, when I was training to become a pilot, I was stationed at RAF Davidstow Moor in Cornwall with Coastal Command to gain operational experience. I was simply another pair of eyes and sitting in the co-pilot's seat of Warwick aeroplanes on the lookout for the highly armed German Condor aircraft. We had a lifeboat slung beneath the fuselage to drop toward baled-out aircrew. It transpired that Patrick's father was also at Davidstow as a pilot, flying the same aircraft. In the often rather casual way we treated flying then (there was no Health and Safety regulation), my name might or might not be in his logbook. So we looked up dates and they coincided. But instead of my name he had recorded "passenger".

So had we been shot down over the Bay of Biscay, drowned, and our bodies recovered, perhaps my gravestone would have simply stated "A Passenger".

Recalling a child's life in the late 1920s to the early 1930s

People made their own entertainment, and there was plenty - often centred on the village hall. Here there were evenings for plays, whist drives, jazz music (my father played the drums and saxophone) and dances, sometimes in fancy dress. Though small, we actually had a sprung dance floor in our house. On a grander scale was the 9 to 90 ball (I must have been 9 years old or over), where I remember a lady in a simple red dress held up from behind the neck, that when she bent over revealed her comely breasts. At that age I thought that it was rather disgusting. And there was the occasional ball at my grandfather's 18th century Strathfield Saye vicarage where, being gauche and young, I untied the bows on the dress of a girl I fancied. That was not the thing to do.

Foreign governesses, to educate and look after us children, came and went. One in particular hailed from Switzerland and became a family friend. I was staying with her family in Vevey when the war was eminent, so was put on a much overcrowded train and returned to England. 

We took part in plenty of other activities, too. We gave tennis parties, our grass court being so good that we children were often given a prize should we find a weed on it. 

Home-made lemonade was the thirst-quencher, dispensed from the shade of a wooden shelter that could be rotated as desired for sun or shade. There was the Schneider Trophy along the Solent to watch, where seaplanes of several nations raced. The British aircraft were powered by the newly-developed Rolls Royce Merlin engine, later to power many of our fighters and bombers in the upcoming war. The King's Cup air race sometimes took a course above our house. The mixture of private biplanes and racing monoplanes flew quite low in a handicap race around markers. They made a wonderful and colourful sight. There was car racing at Brooklands where we watched from the Home Banking to see such as Napier Railton and ERA cars race around. But for me it was aeroplanes and flight that fired my imagination. Alan Cobham would bring his Flying Circus to some farmer's field and take passengers up in an Avro Tutor biplane. I went for a flip at 7/6 had a loop-the-loop included.

But that was nothing compared with a flight from Croydon Aerodrome (then a large grass field as London's airport). It was 1931. Kingsford Smith had just flown in there from Australia in an Avro 10 Trimotor aircraft with the Christmas mail. It took a record breaking 17 days, crewed by an all-Australian crew - except that my uncle Wyndham Hewitt was his flight engineer and very much English.

Anyhow, Kingsford Smith's plane had a broken tail skid, so we were taken up (my brother Nigel and I) in a German Klemm Bat monoplane. We sat in the forward open cockpit on a bench, and had to hang on like mad in the wind and the exhaust of its in-line, air-cooled engine. I think it must have been a sales aeroplane with advertising words on its side and, unusually, had a prop boss fared into the streamlining of the fuselage. The type was very modern for its time and was used for training Luftwaffe pilots. It was made in many configurations, and a quantity were sold to Czechoslovakia and the USA.

The excitement and potential danger of flying stayed with me until I obtained my wings in the USA at the end of the war. 

The Silchester house was built next to a Roman road. Because of this it was quite usual for us to find Roman coins in the kitchen garden soil. The coins were of little interest to us as they were found so often, so they were thrown in a hamper. 

After my father died of radium poisoning (Madame Curie's triumph), we sold the main house and lived, mainly for weekends, and me alone in some school holidays, in the re-designed, and then thatched, ex-army sheds situated around the pear-shaped back drive. Much later, after I had joined the RAF and was working as a prop swinger, waiting for a place as a trainee pilot, I heard that the thatched house had burnt to the ground. No one knew quite how it had happened. Perhaps a tramp had broken in and set fire to it, perhaps an electric bed-warmer had been left on by mistake? Anyhow, all the Roman coins had melted away, and only an iron cooking pot and a lump of gold, found below where I had placed my watch in a drawer, were recovered. 

Although now much older and able to become an RAF airman, that was the end of my connections with my youthful existence at Silchester. Its time capsule had now been left behind - some of which I have now remembered in haphazard form and recalled here in print.