Mirth with the Mortimers

 
Dear Lumpy: Letters to a disobedient daughter by Roger Mortimer. Collect picture Charlie, age 12 and Louise Mortimer age 7, returning from holiday in France
18 April 2013

Dear lumpy: Letters to a Disobedient Daughter
by Roger Mortimer and Louise Mortimer
(Constable, £12.99)

Dear Lupin was one of the surprise hits of last year, a deftly witty collection of letters from exasperated father Roger Mortimer — former soldier, ex-PoW and racing correspondent for the Sunday Times — to his wastrel son Charlie. Now it turns out that Charlie/Lupin’s sister Louise/Lumpy had her own stash of letters from dad, and the selection presented here are just as drily funny, just as succinctly evocative, and arguably more moving than Lupin’s lot.

This is a rare case of a sequel being an equal, though if the third sibling Jane (aka Miss Bossy Pants) makes it a trilogy we may finally see diminishing returns.

Here, the undertow of despair at Lupin’s dedicated fecklessness is replaced by a father’s deep affection for his youngest daughter. There is one genuinely wounded letter, where Roger expresses the hurt he and his wife feel on learning that Louise has secretly married her none-too-popular fiancé, Hot Hand Henry (Roger’s nickname, obviously).

Otherwise, it’s a similar mix of dispatches from the gin ’n’ Jag stratum of suburban life in the Seventies and Eighties: hunting, racing, pungent drinks parties, gossip, and the odd startling bit of casual prejudice. Quotidian detail sits alongside flights of fancy, with a particular emphasis on wives strangling husbands with dressing-gown cords in Newbury.

Roger was a natural, less-is-more comedian, with an innate sense of rhythm and a superb turn of phrase. Enclosing a cheque to Louise he cautions: “Don’t spend it all on gin and improper magazines.” On a visit to Ascot in 1976 he observes: “The number of pretty, well turned-out girls could have been counted on the horns of a goat.”

He was not just a prolific correspondent but an original one. I only noticed one phrase repeated in both books: “It is odd how demon sex is always obtruding into fox-hunting.”

A cumulative portrait emerges of Roger, a self-aware Mr Pooter, sitting quietly down to write while a series of smelly, mess-making dogs and an increasingly unruly wife clatter around in the background. That long-suffering spouse and “ever-loving mother”, Cynthia, is variously described as being “crusty” “nervy” “on belligerent form”, “slightly controversial” or “making low whirring noises”. She gets worse after 6pm, the implication being that drink has been taken, and talks “utter balls”.

Here, though, there is a greater sense than in Dear Lupin of the arc of Roger’s life, and the changes wrought by age. As infirmity takes hold (“I find old age fairly revolting but at least it does not go on forever”), Roger reminisces more about his early life in a house full of servants in Cadogan Gardens, when there were few cars, “about six aeroplanes” and “the country began in the Edgware Road”.

Four years before his death in 1991, Roger and his wife find themselves trapped in a restaurant called the Galloping Crayfish in Hungerford, while Michael Ryan shoots dead 16 people and wounds 15, before killing himself, outside. Yet the overall mood of the book remains buoyant, in love with life and language, the letters expressing durable bonds of family affection that you just wouldn’t get from an email.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £11.69, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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