My Uncle Oswald Read online

  'Were you ever a gym teacher?' I asked her.

  'Shut up and concentrate,' she said, rolling me around like a lump of puff-pastry.

  It was lucky for me I was young and pliable otherwise I'm quite sure I would have suffered a fracture. And that got me thinking about poor old Sir Charles and what he must have gone through in his time. Small wonder he had chosen to go into mothballs. But just wait, I thought, until he swallows the old Blister Beetle! Then it'll be her that starts blowing the whistle for time out, not him.

  Lady Makepiece was a quick-change artist. A couple of minutes after our little caper had ended, there she was, seated at her small Louis Quinze desk, looking as well-groomed and as unruffled as when I had first met her. The steam had gone out of her now, and she had the sleepy contented expression of a boa constrictor that has just swallowed a live rat.

  'Look here,' she said, studying a piece of paper. 'Tomorrow we're giving a rather grand dinner-party because it's Mafeking Day.'

  'But Mafeking was relieved twelve years ago,' I said.

  'We still celebrate it,' she said. 'What I'm saying is that Admiral Joubert has dropped out. He's reviewing his fleet in the Mediterranean. How would you like to take his place?'

  I only just stopped myself from shouting hooray. It was exactly what I wanted. 'I would be honoured,' I said.

  'Most of the Government Ministers will be there,' she said. 'And all the senior Ambassadors. Do you have a white tie?'

  'I do,' I said. In those days, one never travelled anywhere without taking full evening-dress, even at my age.

  'Good,' she said, writing my name on the guest-list. 'Eight o'clock tomorrow evening then. Good afternoon, my little man. It was nice meeting you.' Already she had gone back to studying the guest-list, so I found my own way out.

  4

  The next evening, sharp at eight o'clock, I presented myself at the Embassy. I was fully rigged-up in white tie and tails. A tailcoat, in those days, had a deep pocket on the inside of each tail, and in these pockets I had secreted a total of twelve small boxes, each with a single pill inside. The Embassy was a blaze of lights, and carriages were rolling up at the gates from all directions. Uniformed flunkeys were everywhere. I marched in and joined the receiving line.

  'Dear boy,' said Lady Makepiece, 'I'm so glad you could come. Charles, this is Oswald Cornelius, William's son.'

  Sir Charles Makepiece was a tiny little fellow with a full head of elegant white hair. His skin was the colour of biscuits, and there was an unhealthy powdery look about it, as though it had been lightly dusted over with brown sugar. The entire face, from forehead to chin, was criss-crossed with deep hairline cracks, and this, together with the powdery, biscuity skin, made him look like a terracotta bust that was beginning to crumble.

  'So you are William's boy, are you?' he said, shaking my hand. 'How are you making out in Paris? Anything I can do for you, just let me know.'

  I moved on into the glittering crowd. I seemed to be the only male present who was not smothered in decorations and ribbons. We stood around drinking champagne. Then we went in to dinner. It was quite a sight, that dining-room. About one hundred guests were seated on either side of a table as long as two cricket pitches. Small place cards told us where to sit. I was between two incredibly ugly old females. One was the wife of the Bulgarian Ambassador and the other was an aunt of the King of Spain. I concentrated on the food, which was superb. I still remember the large truffle, as big as a golf ball, baked in white wine in a little earthenware pot with the lid on. And the way in which the poached turbot was so superlatively undercooked, with the centre almost raw but still very hot. (The English and the Americans invariably overcook their fish.) And then the wines! They were something to remember, those wines!

  But what, pray, did seventeen-year-old Oswald Cornelius know about wines? A fair question. And yet the answer is that he knew rather a lot. Because what I have not yet told you is that my own father loved wine above all other things in life, including women. He was, I think, a genuine expert. His passion was for burgundy. He adored claret, too, but he always considered even the greatest of the clarets to be just a touch on the feminine side. 'Claret,' he used to say, 'may have a prettier face and a better figure, but it's the burgundies that have the muscles and the sinews.'

  By the time I was fourteen, he had begun to communicate some of this wine passion to me, and only a year ago, he had taken me on a ten-day walking tour through Burgundy during the vendange in September. We had started out at Chagny and from there we had strolled in our own time northward to Dijon, so that in the week that followed we traversed the entire length of the Cote de Nuits. It was a thrilling experience. We walked not on the main road but on the narrow rutted tracks that led us past practically every great vineyard on that famous golden slope, first Montrachet, then Meursault, then Pommard and a night in a wonderful small hotel in Beaune where we ate ecrevisses swimming in white wine, and thick slices of foie gras on buttered toast.

  I can remember the two of us the next day eating lunch while sitting on the low white wall along the boundary of Romanee Conti - cold chicken, French bread, a fromage dur and a bottle of Romanee Conti itself. We spread our food on the top of the wall and stood the bottle alongside, together with two good wineglasses. My father drew the cork and poured the wine while I did my best to carve the chicken, and there we sat in the warm autumn sun, watching the grape-pickers combing the rows of vines, filling their baskets, bringing them to the heads of the rows, dumping the grapes into larger baskets which in turn were emptied into carts drawn by pale creamy-brown horses. I can remember my father sitting on the wall and waving a half-eaten drumstick in the direction of this splendid scene and saying, 'You are sitting, my boy, on the edge of the most famous piece of land in the whole world! Just look at it! Four and a half acres of flinty red clay! That's all it is! But those grapes you can see them picking at this very moment will produce a wine that is a glory among wines. It is also almost unobtainable because so little of it is made. This bottle we are drinking now came from here eleven years ago. Smell it! Inhale the bouquet! Taste it! Drink it! But never try to describe it! It is impossible to put such a flavour into words! To drink a Romanee Conti is like having an orgasm in the mouth and the nose both at the same time.'

  I loved it when my father got himself worked up like this. Listening to him during those early years, I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.

  We visited Clos de Vougeot and Bonnes-Mares and Clos de la Roche and Chambertin and many other marvellous places. We went down into the cellars of the chateaux and tasted last year's wine from the barrels. We watched the grapes being pressed in gigantic wooden screw-presses that required six men to turn the screw. We saw the juice being run off from the presses into the great wooden vats, and at Chambolle-Musigny, where they had started picking a week earlier than most of the others, we saw the grape juice coming alive in the colossal twelve-foot-high wooden vats, boiling and bubbling as it began its own magic process of converting sugar into alcohol. And while we actually stood there watching, the wine became so fiercely active and the boiling and bubbling reached such a pitch of frenzy that several men had to climb up and sit upon the cover of each vat to hold it down.

  I have wandered again. I must get back to my story. But I did want to demonstrate to you very quickly that despite my tender years, I was quite capable of appreciating the quality of the wines I drank that evening at the British Embassy in Paris. They were indeed something to remember.

  We started with a Chablis Grand Cru 'Grenouilles'. Then a Latour. Then a Richebourg. And with the dessert, an Yquem of great age. I cannot remember the vintage of any one of them, but they were all pre-phylloxera.

  When