The front cover shows a mature English beauty in an Oriental doorway, elegant in a turban, with twinset and pearls. On the back is a Country Life portrait of a radiant English rose. Both are Ann Allestree, who for 30 years supped at the high table of grand society, travelled, and set down her impressions. Seize the Day is an insider’s view of the wilder reaches of privilege.
She met ambassadors, Eastern potentates, and enduring stars — Freya Stark, Harold Acton, Rebecca West. English eccentrics wander through her pages — barmy lords, batty old ladies, posh grotesques to set a Marxist drooling. Lord Binning invites her to dinner, and waves her into the kitchen ‘over a large pool of blood’, having just eviscerated a deer whose liver he intends to serve. Sir Francis Dashwood plans a birthday dance for his wife with ‘a string of dusky women naked to the waist … They will wear turbans and serve champagne. I have already laid down a thousand bottles of Mumm.’
Ann Allestree is the pseudonym of the journalist Penelope Ann Craig, (House & Garden, English Heritage etc.), whose husband Tom, a director of Christie’s for nearly 20 years, features prominently in the book, taking them to stately homes where he assesses valuables. Allestree is no Lees-Milne, her style closer to Daisy Ashford and The Young Visiters. In the first entry, family lunch chez Lord and Lady Gainsborough is served by Bottomley the butler: ‘fish fingers, followed by two family-size blocks of vanilla ice cream, an accompanying hot chocolate sauce exuded from Bottomley’s silver sauceboats.’ She has a cavalier way with language and grammar, and the non sequiturs can be beguiling: Lady Gainsborough ‘is excessively compos mentis having had seven children’.
From time to time Allestree attends private views. At the Guards Museum she is shown round by a 60-year-old beauty ‘who has just completed a military-style novel. What is it about? “F***ing and fighting in fancy dress,” she answers proudly.’
Life spins on; champagne flows — how it flows! Caviar is piled high, there is music and laughter and sunlight in the gardens of great houses. But, like the bad fairy at the Sleeping Beauty’s christening party, a shadow darkens some of these jolly pages: for many years Allestree has been ‘drowned and bludgeoned by inexplicable depression’. She is familiar with The Priory. She writes of all this bravely. On holiday ‘at the magnificent ruins of Ephesus and Didyma I longed to bury myself and my secret misery in the nearest Neolithic tomb’.
Her introduction suggests readers may find some juxtapositions disorientating — a canter through Richmond Park followed by a sultry Baghdad the following afternoon. Other juxtapositions are more disorientating still: in Peking, paragraph one recalls her operation, ‘a haemorrhoidectomy’, paragraph two the student massacre in Tianan- men Square. Over the page, we’re back to the piles and prunes. In Lima, ‘we drink champagne and flirt with foie gras’ while hearing how the Peruvian guerrillas, 12 young men and two 18-year-old girls, were shot dead by the police.
In Tuscany she lunches with Ronnie Tree, private secretary to the Ministry of Information in the second world war:
Ronnie is 75 and enjoys £200,000 a year income. He cannot afford to live in England and winters in Barbados … In the autumn he sojourns at Baden-Baden; New York houses his more valuable works of art … It was not so long ago that he and his children would take their own monogrammed sheets when travelling British Rail.
There are some breathtaking comments de haut en bas: fears that at Glyndebourne
with standing room available for £10, the jeans and sweatshirts will infiltrate; city suits, stale and crumpled, will merge with the dinner jackets.
The entries stop in 2001, in Kenya, where the author gallops alongside their safari leader, a dynamic ex-officer in the Blues, ‘a sportif Wykehamist’. After a torrential storm has cleared, he sets up the dining table under the stars:
‘In Africa you have to get on with life,’ he reminded us. His bearers, immaculate in white gloves and mess-jackets, served us roast zebra.
A useful bedside book — there are soporific pages — it is often laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes intentionally, and lids are lifted on old scandals — Lady Lucan shrieking abuse at the author is a highlight. At nearly 600 pages Seize the Day is an oddity that eludes category: rambling, gossipy and curiously entertaining.
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