Sunday 14th November 2010

‘Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.’ John Donne, Meditation XVII

Not what you were expecting – as an opening?

Miles Kent has written a double biography of his parents-in-law, as it were, the parents of his partner, Leon de Vere. Wednesday was the launch, at Daunt Books in Marylebone High Street, where Poor Little Rich Gays were seen twice last year if you recall.

Sir Melton Drax de Vere was a poet, knighted for his poetry and services to literature. He died in the 80s. His wife, Lady Hanna, yet lives, adored, although too ill to attend on Wednesday. Launching the book, Miles spoke of home, how Sir Melton and Lady Hanna’s home was home to him. He and Leon actually lived in the house in St John’s Wood in the 80s; but there was a larger sense too. It was a home for gays; Sir Melton had a gay past, Lady Hanna was keen. In those days, even today, parents did not normally embrace without question and bring to lodge in this way. Miles mentioned the stray electrician, who lived in the attic for three years, supposedly re-wiring the house. But there were great names coming through the front door downstairs. This home was snug at the heart of this nation’s creative life. I visited it myself several times, as did Robert Nevil, who tried on Lady Hanna’s frocks. Grandeur and a reassuring vintage cognac pervasion of old money,fading a little, was also its allure; the drawing room was lined floor to ceiling with museum-type paintings in gilt frames. Some of them later turned out to be worth a fortune.

Yet this home was on a short lease from the Church Commissioners. There was always anxiety lurking about its future. Sir Melton had been, until his forties, an unhappy gay. Then he met the much younger Hanna, herself virtually an orphan, lonely and vulnerable. They married and blossomed. Miles, as I’m sure he won’t mind my mentioning, is himself a kind of orphan who found home in the home of two such people.

What of the happy home life of other Poor Little Rich Gays? Where is home for them? The actual home, as we know, might be being heaved over, up-heaved, made new. It rarely rests. Or in, at home, is dull. Out is really home. Out, perhaps, at the office, achieving, proving, rising, earning, running the country. Or home is the full diary, full months in advance. Home, for some, means no home for others. Poor Little Rich Gays must be in charge, must be mother. Or there is making, incising the pork’s skin with a scalpel every 5 millimetres, as Val did in Glasgow last year, to get the crackling right; the raw material, whatever it may be, must be styled, shaped, re-made, got right. Few Poor Little Rich Gays, especially those with mothers or ever at prep and public or both would echo or believe the words of Gordon Brown in May, ‘And as I leave the second most important job I could ever hold I cherish even more the first, as a husband and a father.’ Today I visited Strawberry Hill with Robert Nevil (I’ll tell you soon). He was wearing, with superb prancing, glancing aplomb, a coat passed on, because either not fitting or not liked, by his partner’s other special friend. It fitted Robert Nevil all right.

So let us remember those Poor Little Rich Gays who do not know or do not choose to know a normal home life: Val, Harry Rollo, Reggie Cresswell, Joshua Baring, Robert Nevil, me:Adrian Edge, Lord Arrowby, Arjan Bose, Ned Boule, Stephan Jäger, Conor Cadeaux, Prince Dmitri Hersov, Angus Willis, Marcus Cargill, Sebastian Archer, Fergus Strachan, Simeon Bond …