Читать книгу The Lost Diaries - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 29

My Dear Lady Cunard,

Thank you so much for that lovely stay last weekend. We both enjoyed ourselves very much. It was really very kind of you to have us.

I do hope my little ‘diversion’ on Saturday evening wasn’t too awfully inconvenient for you, and that your servants have managed to get most of the mud out of the carpets! From something you said –or was it just a look? – I came away thinking that I may, in your eyes, have done something ‘wrong’. If so, I can only apologise, but what is a man if he cannot seize the moment to strip off all his loathsome lily-livered clothes and wrestle his fellow man naked, strong, tumultuous, full of the very urge of life that lies within them, and all in a deep, soft, dirty – real dirty – and splodgesome sea of mud.

You may argue – in your typically grey, bourgeois, corrupt, stinking, decaying way – that I had no ‘right’ to order your gardeners to load ten, eleven, twelve wheelbarrows high with sludge from the ditches, wheel them into the blue drawing room and offload them in the area in front of the blazing fire. And you may also argue –loudmouthed bitch – that I could at least have rolled up your priceless carpet – symbol of all that is petty and extravagant and worthless in this age – and placed it to one side.

Away with your arguments! An end to your grey, sniffy, hoity-toity objections! When I rolled with your stable lad in the mud, as we pummelled each other with our fists and each felt the brute within and the mud without, I at last felt free and open and alive and triumphant and, yes, pure! How dare you suggest that mud-wrestling between two men should be confined to the outdoors, should be shunted away into the barns and the brooks, should be well away from all the upholstery and fine furnishings. There is nothing dirty in mud! This pervasive and wretched belief in household cleanliness is the sign of a decrepit age! There is no good carpet, no good sofa, that has not been splattered with the mud thrown off as two or more bold and muscle-bound men come a-grappling! Your priggish mud-hatred fills my blood with contempt.

Finally, once again, many thanks for the most marvellous stay. You made us feel so ‘at home’. We both came home greatly refreshed, and full of wonderful memories of a really terrific weekend.

Yours ever,

David

D.H. LAWRENCE,LETTER TO LADY CUNARD

I spoke to TB and started drafting resignation letters. I felt desperately sorry for Peter Mandelson. He had clearly been crying, and needed my support.

I went over to him, said this is all absolutely dreadful but we just have to get through it. I put one arm around his shoulder, and with the other I eased the knife, as gently as I could, between his shoul-derblades. By this time, he was writhing in pain, but I assured him that I would be strong for him, and do everything physically possible to ease his passing.

He kept saying why, why, why, but I reassured him that it just had to be done. As the tears cascaded down his cheeks, I sat alongside him and comforted him and read him his farewell resignation letter, and I gripped his shoulder and told him he had to be strong and then I gave it one last thrust. ‘You don’t deserve this, Peter, you really don’t, you’re one of the greatest ministers this country ever had,’ I said.

Bumped into JP on the way home, and he congratulated me on a very smooth operation. We agreed that Mandelson’s no better than a cartload of bollocks and we’re 100 per cent better off without him.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL