Dear Lumpy, by Roger Mortimer – review

After the success of Dear Lupin, Roger Mortimer finds himself facing something not normally experienced by former Guards officers who have been dead for more than 20 years — namely Difficult Second Album Syndrome. Lupin, a collection of letters written by Mortimer to his extremely errant son Charles (‘Lupin’) took everyone by surprise when it became a big hit last year.

Certainly its success astonished Charles himself. ‘It would not be an exaggeration to say that expectations for sales were not that high’, he writes here in his preface — hardly surprising as ‘I had barely read a book before, let alone compiled one.’ Unbeknownest to him, his younger sister Louise (‘Lumpy’) had also a stash of letters from their father — 150 of them locked away in a drawer since his death in 1991.

Mortimer’s tone here is much the same as before, shot through with bemused gloom, yet with one eye always trained on life’s grotesqueries — ‘Mrs Bomer has bought a new car: the colour is that of the messes made by dogs after de-worming pills.’ Several of the same characters who appeared in Dear Lupin make brief but stumbling bows here, among them the troublingly enticing ‘Aunt Boo’ who once stood for parliament on a ‘Keep Dorking White’ ticket.

What there isn’t so much of is the apoplectic exasperation with which Mortimer often addressed his son. True, there are occasional admonishments about Louise’s manners — ‘Your attitude sometimes borders on the oafish … At times you make no effort at all, possibly from shyness, more probably from sheer laziness.’ Mainly, though, there is tenderness — albeit dealt out with a properly restrained hand. ‘I enclose a small present. Don’t just buy milk chocolate or you will soon have the same waistline as the oldest and greediest elephant at Billy Smart’s Circus.