{"id":2728,"date":"2016-05-14T12:06:59","date_gmt":"2016-05-14T11:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodvale.com\/?p=2728"},"modified":"2016-05-14T12:06:59","modified_gmt":"2016-05-14T11:06:59","slug":"alice-dilke-by-horatio-morpurgo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/alice-dilke-by-horatio-morpurgo\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice Dilke by Horatio Morpurgo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watching the pterodactyls by Horatio Morpurgo<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alice Dilke<\/strong> had already proved her worth as a reader for Victor Gollancz before she was taken on as a scout for Warner Brothers. She recommended a novel called Doctor No. It might, she thought, make a good film. Warner thought not. She recommended a play by Frederick Knott next. They listened this time. It became Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Dial M for Murder.<\/p>\n

Family life had long since supervened by the time I knew Alice, half a century later. These stories of her life in the London swim\u2014going up in a lift with Marilyn Monroe\u2014had in turn themselves become material, for what she termed her \u2018anecdotage\u2019.<\/p>\n

But the circumstances of our meeting still had something of the MacGuffin about them. In the breakfast room of a guesthouse in West Dorset, I overheard tourists asking themselves why Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident murdered by the KGB in London in 1978, was buried in a nearby churchyard. I\u2019d written about that part of the world myself, so I drove over to the village. The vicar thought that Markov had been \u2018married to a local girl\u2019 and gave me directions to the family home.<\/p>\n

\u2018The local girl\u2019 in question, Annabel, was by now a novelist living in London. Her mother, Alice, was returning from an evening walk with the dog as I arrived. After satisfying herself that I was nothing to do with the local press, she invited me in for tea and asked what I wanted to know. She opened a bottle of white wine and told me some stories. Good ones. The thread that had led me to her door felt tenuous enough at the time. But I was new to the area so this kind of welcome really mattered.\u00a0 We became good friends.<\/p>\n

She retained this gift for hospitality right to the end. In the village hall after the funeral last week I met many others who had been similarly surprised by it. I expect it derived in part from that touch of the displaced person which was hers by background and experience as well as temperament.<\/p>\n

Born in India, where her father worked in the Forestry Service, Alice passed her childhood at much-resented boarding schools or with Dorset relations. Her parents did not see that university was any place for a lady of her station. She was, manifestly, someone who would have known what to do with such an opportunity. A year at the Sorbonne, in 1936, was presumably justified as some kind of finishing school, but the far-right hoodlums of the Action Fran\u00e7aise disrupting lectures were never forgotten. And whether or not she was there to discover French literature, that is what she did.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it was her ambivalence about West Dorset which made her such an excellent guide to it for a newcomer like myself. Her humour about those to the manner born was barbed as only an insider\u2019s could be. She once hit off the deafness and the smiles of that world with a brief, pitch-perfect satire. Dorset Hostess: \u2018And what have you been doing today in this splendid weather?\u2019 Her Guest: \u2018I\u2019ve been watching the pterodactyls over at Studland.\u2019 Hostess: \u2018Lovely, isn\u2019t it?\u2019<\/p>\n

Dorset, pterodactyl-spotters and all, was her place. She remembered it from long before the foodies and \u2018the fashionistas\u2019 and the property casino. She had partied with Pitt-Rivers. And was proud of it. She had \u2018ridden over to Mapperton\u2019, for a picnic.<\/p>\n

But she and her husband, the writer Christopher Dilke, had also counted Cecil Day-Lewis as a close friend and shared his love of Thomas Hardy\u2019s poetry. It wasn\u2019t only its craftsmanship (though it was that) or Hardy\u2019s attachment to a landscape\u2014which she had defended herself, joining the opposition to a local bypass. Ezra Pound once noticed, rightly, that Hardy\u2019s learning is too often forgotten. Alice agreed. She thought she detected, for example, the influence of Catullus in his The Voice.<\/p>\n

She had on her shelf a little book of translations from Horace, inscribed by a student at Cambridge in 1719. Dryden, Milton, Pope, Congreve and Swift were all contributors. With well-heaped logs dissolve the cold \/ And feed the genial heart with fires; \/ Produce the wine, that makes us bold, \/ And spritely wit and love inspires; \/ For what hereafter shall betide,\/ God (if \u2019tis worth His care) provide.<\/p>\n

The official culture of yesteryear knew its poets. Or, on her ninetieth birthday, half way into a bottle of Sancerre, she volunteered the following: There was a young bride of Antigua, \/ Who said to her spouse \u2018What a pig you are!\u2019 \/ He replied \u2018O, my queen \/ Is it manners you mean \/ Or do you refer to my fig \u2013 u \u2013 ar?\u2019<\/p>\n

She remained canny about film\u2014watching Chinese noir (dismissively) with her grandchildren, in that same front room with the fireplace and the Horace. But it was writers she really knew. She had talked nightingales with John Fowles, when he came to look at some woodland nearby. She had talked Flaubert with Iris Murdoch (Iris: \u2018If he\u2019d sent me Madame Bovary, I\u2019d have sent it back and told him to rewrite it completely.\u2019) She had hit a conversational brick wall with Harold Pinter.<\/p>\n

She was a champion for the now forgotten Isaac Disraeli, father of Benjamin. He was, in the early 19th century, well known as a compiler of \u2018Miscellanies\u2019, a popular and constantly up-dated omnium gatherum of historical anecdote and literary quotation. Certainly to know Alice was, among other things, to know what well-stocked minds used to be like.<\/p>\n

But I run the risk of sounding too much like a \u2018miscellany\u2019 myself. Let me close with the kind of thing Alice could do when you turned to her without even realising that\u2019s what you were doing. Some weeks after a childhood friend of mine had died, I went to see Alice, still preoccupied I suppose. I don\u2019t remember now whether the story she told me was a direct response to what I\u2019d told her, or even if I did tell her. Anyway this was what she told me.<\/p>\n

A deer had broken through her hedge a few days earlier and lain down on the lawn. Proud of her garden, she tried to drive it away at first, before realising that it could not get up. She then called a vet, instead, but it died before the vet arrived. And now she couldn\u2019t get the episode out of her mind. It was somehow connected to a trip she and her husband and friends once went on together, sailing round the Aegean. She\u2019d told me about this before but never in such detail.<\/p>\n

The talk about poetry. How they woke, each morning, to the white sands of another island up ahead. Nobody is allowed to sleep on Delos, birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. But perhaps the rules were more lax in heady postwar days. Somehow they did get ashore one night and walked its avenues in the moonlight. It was the marble lions she recalled most clearly. She couldn\u2019t stop thinking about that time now. She wished she could go back to Greece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching the pterodactyls by Horatio Morpurgo Alice Dilke had already proved her worth as a reader for Victor Gollancz before she was taken on as a scout for Warner Brothers. She recommended a novel called Doctor No. It might, she thought, make a good film. Warner thought not. She recommended a play by Frederick Knott […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2729,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16,23],"tags":[49],"class_list":["post-2728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-articles","category-history-community","tag-horatio-morpurgo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}