The Path to Avernus: 3"given another use. It became their mausoleum"
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| Thinking about visiting the cinema? Let me enrich your visit, but only if you were going to see the new, live-action Thunderbirds. I can't be the only man who longs to find the woman to whom he can naturally say, "Yes, m'lady." And who came to be that way because of a voice. Did I hear it again as I walked where the new Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward would be driven up the long drive to her stately mansion? Did I imagine her vehicle taking her in regal fashion past me? Perhaps. I was walking up the drive at Cliveden on the Thames. Sometime earlier the film company had been there. It was odd perhaps that this last part of my visits to the Thames valley and its stately homes should take me to yet another mausoleum, as well. Cliveden has one overlooking the Thames from high above the river. And odd, too, that West Wycombe House, which I had seen the night before, should have been featured in a film not long before. Or, perhaps, that I was being lead to the picturesque. Let us go forward thirty-five or fifty years. Lady Penelope will be born in 2039, and be a mature woman by the time she is the elegant possessor of Creighton Manor (or Creighton-Ward Mansion, or Creighton Mansion - information seems to become corrupt as it is passed back to us through time), standing on the outskirts of Foxleyheath in Kent. The house will be intently private so that when it was represented on TV in a series of time-travelling docu-dramas (also called Thunderbirds), the model used was Stourhead, near Stourton in Wiltshire. Like Cliveden today, Stourhead is a National Trust property. If its restaurant is as good as that at Cliveden, where we shaded ourselves from the hot sun, then it is very good indeed. It is Cliveden, though, that stands in for Creighton Manor in the new film, and the pink Rolls-Royce will drift down that long drive. Imagine me walking where it seems to glide, should you go to the cinema. We were hungry when we arrived, hence our making for the restaurant. Not only had we walked around the Royal tomb and grounds of Frogmore, and shopped in the Royal farm shop at Windsor, but we had walked from the Cliveden car park up the long drive - behind us the great fountain playing over nymphs, ahead the house with its white stone and Italianate flat lines. The restaurant, in what must have been an orangery, stands at the side of the house. Thus, when we left, we walked on and around the front of the house - gazing inside at the function rooms (the house itself is run as a hotel) from the terrace on the front. Before the house a long parterre stretches - it seems - as far as the eye can see. The reason it seems to stretch so far we discovered is that at the end of another long walk the grounds drop away steeply over the Thames, the drop mostly being hidden in trees. And away in the distance, it seemed that an almost mythical England - unspoilt, green, dotted with villages - stretched away towards the Chiltern Hills. We looked back to the house - built and re-built over the years. Now in its white colours it seemed some Marchesa's palace transferred from Italy. It has not had so innocent a history, of course - bought in the nineteenth century by the publishing magnates, the Astor family, in the nineteen-thirties it was here that one of the family brought together the British leadership happy to appease Hitler and his gang. The visitors were nicknamed The Cliveden Set. And it was here thirty years after that, that a new generation of British leaders would meet to play. It was here that Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were introduced to John Profumo, to begin the plunge into Britain's moral decline so recently condemned by The Dear Leader. We looked for the swimming pool where Miss Keeler was said to have first been seen by Mr Profumo - seen more than somewhat, as she is said to have been skinny dipping - but it must lie somewhere in the courtyard at the heart of the building, which we could not reach. Instead we walked up the side of the parterre - a great flat sward, and maze of low box hedges - and found the domed observatory. Once used for admiring that view over the Berkshire countryside from its vantage point high above the river, when it came into the possession of the Astors it was given another use. It became their mausoleum. The doors, though, were closed, and the seats occupied by trippers. We walked on into the shade of the trees. I was asked if I could take any more - in fact, if I wanted to take afternoon tea at Hughenden, former home of Benjamin Disraeli, at Beaconsfield (hence his taking the title, Lord Beaconsfield when he went to the House of Lords). But this day of experience and sun had been too intense, and I had an evening of entertainment ahead I knew. I needed a period of recuperation in between. But, oh how I wished I had been asked, and could have replied, "Yes, m'lady." |
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