A book, a bottle, a bower set in an ancient garden: you think that if you walked round the right corner, there would be England, putting manure on the roses. Kipling reminds us that gardening is hard work and that beauty depends on bent backs. True enough, but they also serve who only sit and admire.
There was a further contrast between hard work and sedentary admiration, for the book was the first volume of Kenneth Rose’s journals: the easiest of reads, yet the product of hard labour. Kenneth was an exemplar of his craft. There has never been a more meticulous journalist. If only the same were true of those who edited the volume. Kenneth did not believe in an afterlife, but if he turned out to be wrong, he will have begged leave of absence from whichever region he found himself inhabiting, in order to inflict haunting and persecution on those responsible for the apparatus criticus.
That said, there are delights on most pages. In the 1920s, Cosmo Gordon Lang, then Archbishop of York, was painted by William Orpen, a better artist than he deserved. But he complained to Hensley Henson, the great Bishop of Durham, that the finished oeuvre made him look ‘proud, prelatical and pompous’. Henson replied: ‘May I ask Your Grace to which of these epithets Your Grace takes exception?’ None of them prevented Lang’s promotion to Canterbury, where his sanctimonious attitude during the abdication crisis provoked a gloriously vicious piece of doggerel, including the line: ‘You auld Lang swine, how full of Cantuar.’
At Eton, it was customary that the parents of leavers should reward their boy’s housemaster with a gift. A beak called Richard Martineau, who had evidently retained a surprising degree of unworldliness even after decades spent among boys, once received a case of magnificent claret.
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