On 26 February 1969, Roger Mortimer wrote to his son, Charlie: ‘Your mother has had flu. Her little plan to give up spirits for Lent lasted three and a half days. Pongo has chewed up a rug and had very bad diarrhoea in the kitchen. Six Indians were killed in a car crash in Newbury.’
Even 40 years ago, the real-life buffer was a dying breed. Perhaps Roger Mortimer — Eton, Coldstream Guards, assorted POW camps during the second world war, then racing correspondent of the Sunday Times — was the last of the lot. If so, they went out with a suitably sclerotic roar.
For 25 years, he wrote regular letters to his son, Charlie. Like him, Charlie also went to Eton, but left without ‘a single, humble A level’. He then proceeded to rack up an astonishing number of failed careers, including managing a ‘multi-national rock band’ and manufacturing boxer shorts.
To begin with, the tone of his father’s letters is exasperated, despairing even. ‘Surely you can see for yourself that your idleness and refusal to do any little task that is in the slightest degree irksome renders you totally unfit for adult employment?’ But for all his harrumphing admonishments, Mortimer Snr has a wonderfully light and vivid touch.
March 1971 finds him sitting in the restaurant car of a train from Doncaster:
I was just getting my tongue round the Crosse & Blackwell’s tinned asparagus soup when the waiter says, ‘There’s a young honeymoon couple who don’t want to be separated. Do you mind moving and I can give you a single seat at a table with some very nice people?’ Like hell you can, I thought, but shifted with ill grace to leave the table to a very dirty young man with a beard like black cotton wool and a dark lady with the promising beginnings of a heavy cavalry moustache.
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