A REAL WINE MERCHANT

What I am about to write might well be cause to send me to the Tower of London. I will explain later.

I have always been interested in wine, about it, and drinking it - ever since consuming the dregs from bottles (recycled then) left out for the wine merchant to collect when I was a child in the country at the turn of the 1920s to 1930s. 

A good way to learn about wine is to have a wine book to record wines bought and years drunk, with opinions in explicitly one’s own descriptive words on its quality over time. 

The 1960s was the ideal period to start, when all but the great Châteaux in Bordeaux produced fine wine at plonk prices.

The 1960s was a decade when I knew the years but not necessarily the Châteaux. 

As most wine then was imported in casks and bottled by wine merchants in the UK, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t do the same. A customs officer, in the wine section of that organisation, who had bought a painting from one of my exhibitions, had done much for a Spanish sea captain and didn’t see why this sailor shouldn’t do something for him in return. 

So some pound notes changed hands and back from Valencia came two odd-looking casks strapped to the ship’s railings (94 litres of 16 grados and 90 litres of 15 grados). 

Bottles and corks had to be bought. Contractors then had agreements to take away all bottles left outside hotels and restaurants to be recycled. I visited their premisses where only Claret, Burgundy and Port bottles were recyclable, so there was a huge pile of broken glass formed in their East End yard of non recyclable bottles of all colours and shapes. So I decided also to collect my claret-shaped bottles left outside hotels and restaurants for free (at 4am), whereas I would have had to pay a shilling a bottle to those with contracts.  

Because of my unique position, the managing director of a famous cork company personally selected with me short-long Bordeaux length corks for my bottling. He was also rather fond of drinking Sherry, so we consumed quite a bit. 

Another wonderful importation was a hogshead (58 gallons) of Crianza Rioja Bilbainas, Haro and more from Prignac in Bas-Médoc, and so on it went.

Not all was straightforward. In 1969 a small cask (a quart de Barrique) of Châteaux Gallais Bellevue got crushed aboard a coaster on its way to a wharf on the Isle of Dogs in London, where it was found to have lost about half its contents. I would have had to pay duty as though it was full. But I had friends in the system and on the following day of its arrival my cask miraculously had a tin patch nailed to the wound and the barrel was now full to the shrive (bung). The wine that was used to top up my barrel must have been of the highest quality because the blend was absolutely delicious. 

For all my bottles, bottled and shared among friends, were labelled with my own designed label, and capped with a red tin/lead capsule, (whereas a firm, Corfe & Seccombe, could have provided me with a choice of many fancy labels of their design).

In those days, importers of wine could call the contents of their bottles anything they chose. So it was a period where knowledge and discernment came to the fore. 

It was about this time that I came across wonderful J Lyons at the Hop Exchange Wine Cellars in Southwark where most client’s bottles were washed and recycled on site. 

It was here in January1968 that I chanced upon Châteaux Cantanac-Brown 1959 which was the best wine I had ever, or since, drunk. So I bought a lot and had most kept in their paid reserve as I lacked space for it. The last bottle consumed was on the 4th of December 1993 and in my wine book I wrote: “Farewell dear old friend”. 

In those splendid Hop Exchange Cellars worked a wonderful lady. Her job was to stick the 

J Lyons house labels on their bottles. 

Beyond her gluing apparatus (two hands) was a large round bath in which was placed any wine the labels from which had to be soaked off and replaced by a wine in demand. 

Perhaps I should not have been witness to it, but at that time J Lyons were supplying Buckingham Palace with white wine (ordinarily just “Hock”) with rather grand royal labels, now stuck to the bottles by this lady. 

Is revealing such Palace secrets justification for a beheading? I hope not. 

A GARDEN SHED

There is something very special about a garden shed.

Perhaps it should be large enough to accommodate a spare bed, but most of all it should be a cosy retreat. 

An octagonal one made of cedar wood, and roof, coated with sun-reflecting paint, is ideal.

Six of its eight sides should be at least three quarters glazed, and its other two sides of overlapping cedar boards should hide garden accoutrements, like tools, wood, bamboos, compost bin and other unsightly items like bags of bought compost and emergency bags of sand if floods (even being remotely possible) are kept.

Through the glazed sides one should be able to admire the plants and trees that have been lovingly tended to display themselves at their best.

It is an important place in which to pass spare time, relaxing with a glass of two, with added music and conversation.

After moving into my London house some 36 years ago I happened to be looking for plants in a country garden centre when I saw my shed, but lacking its door. As such, it was offered at a good price for both its cost and transport to London.

The country delivery lad and I assembled the shed, all of which had to be brought through the terraced house to be formed on paving stones at the end of the small walled garden. And for some fortunate reason it was now delivered with its missing door.

Its eight sides where easy enough to handle and be screwed together. But the roof, in one piece, only just managed to pass through doors when tilted at an angle.

This untreated cedar wood haven has matured in colour over the years and now houses two very comfortable chairs and two fold-up hardwood ones.

It is decorated with two large paintings, shelves for multiple objects, including a special robin feeder, garden fertilisers and several plastic containers for birdseed. 

It is 5.30pm on a balmy English summer’s evening and time for me to lay down my pen, leave the shed, and make a Champagne cocktail (using Crémant de Loire).

So then Margreet and I can enjoy talk of the day, listen to radio music, and consider our plants and birds. This is a lovely way to enjoy the approaching evening.

And as it is Margreet’s turn to provide dinner (we cook on alternate weeks) I wait to see what culinary surprises will appear. 

I smell that garlic is part of one.

TENDING ONE'S GARDEN

 

Voltaire’s Candide, one of my favourite books, ends with Candide, after a life of tribulations, just happily tending the garden. Having written about most interesting events of my past 100 years, I feel rather the same.  But then, I have always been, throughout life, happily getting my hands dirty with garden soil.

Gardening takes time and patience both of which enhance one’s latter years.  I write this in the spring, taking my time.

Always a success, I see that from the pots on my kitchen window sill have sprung runner bean plants that I have grown in homemade compost from beans harvested and dried from last year’s crop. 

They will be hardened off outside and then put into three plastic woven sacks to climb up a framework of bamboos to produce yet another crop of beans that we will gather at the four inch stage for five minutes boiling and then eaten with garlic, butter and sea salt. 

In my childhood, runners were allowed to grow large, then stringed, chopped, and eaten as a boiled vegetable or preserved in Kilner jars for winter use. For us now, when the beans are beyond the four inch stage, we allow them to grow as large as they like. We then harvest them as the bean pods begin to turn yellow, and then allow them to dry out, pod them, and use them for next year’s seed, for chilli con carne, stews and with vinaigrette as hors d’ oeuvre, or with drinks.  What versatile beans they are - so accommodating and so delicious.

Tomato blight has been in the past an unpleasant nuisance in the garden. But I persevere, even though the cost of plants, or seed, and the time spent (we don’t have a greenhouse) makes it easier and more economical, I expect, to just buy them in the market. But straight from the vine is something special. 

In a past year I liked a bought tomato so much that I extracted some seed from it in a 

springtime vinaigrette, planted the seed, and ate the crop that very same year.

I am doing the same with three test varieties this year as well.

Harvesting the seed, for this or next year’s growth, is easy. Extract the seeds from a ripe tomato with a teaspoon and spread the wet seeds over some absorbent kitchen paper. When wet or dry, cut the seeds out individually with scissors and plant them into pots of compost  with their bit of kitchen paper attached. Plant the resulting seedlings with delicacy into soil compost to harden off, then into good earth outside or in a greenhouse. 

I see a container of old runner bean seeds in the kitchen. I will use them in a kind of Tagine, first soaking them for 24 hours or so, then either boiling or pressure cooking them until soft. 

For the dish, I’ll cut up quite a lot of onion and put the pieces at the bottom of a casserole. Then on them with go a chicken or cockerel, surrounding this with the cooked beans (or chick peas) and some dried apricots. Now it is the time to pour over a generous amount of chicken stock made of dissolved chicken stock cubes and salt, mixed with many dried and powdered herbs and spices that happen to lie around the kitchen. Topped off with a layer of sliced tomatoes, and cooked in a 130 degree oven for three hours, the result will be meltingly delicious. Getting the bird out to dismantle it for the table is a delicate job. 

I plan to cook with other lesser cuts of meat this way, possibly with red wine, perhaps with some orange juice and lots of milled pepper and peeled garlic. 

Sounds good. 

A EUREKA MOMENT IN THE GARDEN

(continued)

Mistletoe, an evergreen parasite, is steeped in the history of folklore, magic, superstition, ritual, religion, myth, the seasons, regeneration, growth, and much else. 

With me, it was, since childhood, an evergreen branch or two, often bearing white berries, and something that was hung in a doorway to encourage kissing at Christmas time. We bought ours, but I wanted to grow it myself. So I tried on apple trees (its favourite host) and I failed. And I have continued in life to try, try, and try again - failing each time. 

In 2008, son Peter gave us an apple tree in a pot, which we placed, still in its pot, in front of the northern-facing brick wall of our London garden. Now, here was my chance once more to grow mistletoe. 

So, in the winter of 2008, I tried my luck by pressing some sticky white mistletoe berries into the junctures of spur and trunk, employing several methods of attachment and protection. No luck. So I tried the same the next year (2009). Still no luck, and gave up. Then in March 2010, I found a bunch of dried mistletoe that someone had thrown onto a rubbish skip. Among its branches were plenty of now brown and shrivelled berry/seeds. So I tried these, tying them in with string, coating this with rubber solution and covering the “sowings” with earth. You could then hardly see my surgical efforts with their protective dressing. Still no luck. I gave up again. But now came my eureka moment. In 2013 (5 years after my first attempt with fresh seeds) a small mistletoe sprout pushed out from beneath the bark. I had done it - at long last. 

A year later another sprout from another planted seed appeared. And the next year even another - all creating their own nourishment through photosynthesis and using only sap from beneath the bark of their parent host for survival. 

Even now, when a new mistletoe sprout pushes out from the swelling of apple tree bark, 17 years since I embarked on this mistletoe saga, I hardly bother about it. 

Well, l was still rather pleased that I had grown mistletoe in the end. 

In the spring of 2025 (12 years after establishing mistletoe) more sproutings have appeared from the apple tree’s bark, well away from the original “plants”.

These sites are not to the detriment of the host apple tree in its pot as the tree has also created new growth - though no apples. 

AN ILLUSIVE HYPHEN

 

I have often wondered who, in my family, started to use a hyphen in our name. 

It would almost certainly be one of two men who were educated at Cambridge and made a career in the church as vicars and upwards.  My Grandfather was one of them, a Great Uncle the other.

We know that William Roberts (possibly from Birkenhead), probably a Master Confectioner, married a Prudence Page in the mid 1800s.  They had several children and all were christened with Page as their last Christian name. 

The two men both made their names in the world, so either could have done it as a prestigious move, the most likely one being Great Uncle, the Dean of Salisbury.

My modest research is through their books - Grandfather’s on roses and Great Uncle’s on religion -  both of which I have quite a few. 

Grandfather (the Reverend Frederick)  I learned from books, articles, reports and obituaries, was a much loved and gentle character.  He was Vicar of Scole, Halstead and lastly Stratfield Saye, and must have been quite a commanding figure in the world of roses as he became President of the National Rose Society around the turn of the century, writing extensively in their annual and editing other books on roses.  He generally used the hyphen, favouring it with his writings and the rose named after him.

The Dean (the Very Reverend William), on the other hand, used his gold embossed name with hyphen on the hard back covers of his religious books, but seldom with the inside text. 

The Very Reverend W. Page-Roberts with a religious past in Eye, Veere Street, London and (Dean of) Salisbury, seems to have been a far more flamboyant character than his brother. His obituary says he was a great traveller and noted raconteur.  He had a yellow and blue limousine car made for him by Scout (of Salisbury).  The covers of his books on religion seem always to have had the hyphen and title in gold leaf on their outer covers, but omitting the hyphen in the texts. 

He married a Baroness and (presumably it was him) had a coat of arms, crest and motto created.  

So, from my modest researches, in going through their books and articles, it would seem that the Dean instigated the heraldry and hyphen.

My own use of the hyphen might be considered as cursory.  I use it in my books and articles but no longer in my art.  And my youngest son, who is a Custodian at Holland Park in London, has not only abandoned the hyphen but the family name as well.  There’s flexibility for you. 

So as far as the hyphen is concerned, I think we might call it a “floating” one - used on a whim if desired, as a form of continuity and legality - or not at all. 

AN RAF AFTERMATH

 

Now that I have pretty well finished my Autobiography in Words and Pictures, an event has allowed me to add a postscript to A100 to A102 that dealt with my posting to RAF Coastal Command’s 279 Squadron at Davidstow Moor where I flew as a student pilot being just another pair of eyes in a Warwick aircraft.

I did about 20 hours in various sorties over the Bay of Biscay with a lifeboat slung beneath each aeroplane, ready to drop it to save aircrew who were desperate to survive, having been shot down by German aeroplanes. 

It so happened that after the war I was having an exhibition of Aircraft Shadows framed for a show at the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street, London.

The framer was interested in the fact that I had been a pilot in the war and told me that his grandfather had also flown (as a pilot) in Warwick aircraft from Davidstow Moor. Not only that, but at the very same time that I had done so from the same airfield.

I might well have flown with him as the lookout for the German Condor aeroplanes that were faster and much more heavily armed than our Warwicks.

So we checked in his grandfather’s logbook to hopefully find my name as a trainee pilot gaining combat experience in his Warwick.

And there it was - but only as “passenger”.

So had we been shot down and drowned, our gravestone might have had all our aircrew names on it - and “passenger”.

Thank heavens it never came to pass. 

THE ICKNIELD WAY

The Icknield Way is one of those ancient routes in England, one that people, goods, and cattle have used for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. In my mind, and perhaps in reality, it was used by dinosaurs when our islands were part of mainland Europe. Only some of its tracks remain, some missing, some lost, some covered in tarmac, and some left to conjecture. There is a magical aura surrounding it. 

Around its path lies the history of Great Britain through the ages, from the Palaeolithic through the Neolithic to the Bronze and Iron Ages. After such a long and tumultuous history, its time within the Roman Empire is so close to us and short that the Roman occupation here seems almost like nowadays.

Great routes, like the Icknield Way, must have had many feeder lanes to make each civilisation work. And these lanes sometimes now take the form of deep tracks where hooves, wheels, and hobnailed boots loosen the chalk surfaces for rain to wash away the crumbling chalk to deepen the roadway.

 

It was near the Icknield Way that I was looking for a house. 

Passing by a steep bank, above which stood a lovely four up four-up-four-down brick-built farmhouse, was a water overflow from the house’s rainwater tank on which it rested. The house was for sale. 

The owner was an old farmer who had applied for permission to build a bungalow out of sight but not far away for his pig man. He had neither man nor pigs, but obtained permission to build. He moved out, and I moved in. 

The sight with its sunken road was undulating but not unusual, separating itself from cornfields by old hedgerows, were mistletoe grew on a bush instead of usually high on an apple tree.

The drains emptied into a deep hole in the chalk, but not with bath water, as there was no bath or bathroom in the house.

An owl liked to rest among cabbages.

I created a kitchen garden there and my first experimental vineyard.

To prevent fruit theft from the usual crowd of birds and animals, I also established a fruit cage - one with a netting roof that could be folded up and put away for the winter, as the area was pretty bleak, wind-swept, and prone to heavy snowstorms.

A feature of the surrounding countryside was spasmodic rows of Scots pines, trees that decide on their own shape and which branches to develop and which to leave to die and fall. 

They had been planted originally to provide nesting cover for partridges and to make the birds fly high for King Edward VII and his friends to shoot them down.

I had some more newly-planted Scots pines in the garden under which I would record in paint the glorious East Anglian skies and the giant sinking suns.

Beneath the Scots pines I would imagine and paint those who passed by in ancient times and those in families with their animals who might rest and huddle around a fire beneath the trees. 

These were of moments past, depicted with my present imagination, with no hard historical evidence. 

Then, one sunny day, I was planting strawberry runners in the fruit cage when an object of blue/green verdigris caught my eye. It was a broken Roman fibula, the pin/brooch that held up the toga.

Here was a metal object outside my imagination of olden times. How, when, and why was a piece of jewelry belonging to a Roman or Anglo-Roman doing in my fruit cage? 

I contacted the local society that specialised in such matters. They were not interested.

When selling the house, I gave my fibula to the new owners. Perhaps I should have left it in the ground where I found it for someone from a future age to have the pleasure of discovering this item from a past age again.