Poor Little Rich Gays at Sensational Rural Extreme in Normandy «

Poor Little Rich Gays at Sensational Rural Extreme in Normandy

Saturday 30^th July 2011

As every summer, I’m drenched in the deep rural simplicity at Matt Driver and Laura Malcolm’s Norman second home. Otherwise they are palatial and Bruce-MacBain-extended in Fulham/Chelsea borders.

Here Laura is inclined to wear an ancient frock which gives an air of declining mental health. The batterie de cuisine is an old camping set from her father’s caravan (Cornwall: the 70s). Yesterday we were hours in the hot sun, with the divine daughter (brains and looks), Ivy Driver, gathering plums from under their tree, then stoning outdoors at the table (as in Anna Karenina) before bearing our triumphant labours indoors to be boiled for jam. Meanwhile Papa Driver, whose salary exceeds loathed Robin Smallmeal’s, head of landfill in this country or whatever, in pyjamas from BA First Class, was upstairs creating a false wall from plasterboard in a bedroom, then, accompanied by his son, Kelm, in complete harmony as to choice of accompanying music (no generation gap now) applying Cats’ Paw by Farrow and Ball.

I’ve had a word with Kelm. He’s at Art School, you know. He knows someone called Joplin who might be suitable.

Now Matt is laying a brick path in the garden. He’s got to get it level. ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ he says, ‘but one gets obsessed.’ Yesterday I met him on the stairs bearing the local paper. ‘I’m going to study the property pages,’ he said doggedly. This demesne is an excellent pastoral fastness; roses, fruit trees, a huge poplar planted years ago by an unknown former owner for his unknown eldest son, no other houses visible, even from the roof. Laura hurling debris from the refurbishment out of an upper window and the lawn otherwise strewn with paint rags cannot diminish its glory.

‘They’ll be building houses all around soon,’ Matt says. There’s some truth. Horrors have sprung up quite near. Hence the need to see if a larger manoir with 100 acres is for sale.

But meanwhile this Norman retreat is to be aggrandised. They’re knocking through to the abutting barn. There’s to be a grand salon and a 4^th toilet. Matt says status is now measured by number of toilets owned. He’s got 8.

Poor Esmé Manning had to lie in a darkened one day. Such money worries. But she bucked up in the evening and did all the voices as we viewed How Green was My Valley on DVD in the attic TV/bedroom (net worth £6m approx crammed in, £1.2m being Esmé’s). Her impersonation of sickening kiddie-star, Roddy McDowall, was superb. Kelm said: ‘He looks like a little lesbian.’ The part was to squeak, ‘Yessir’, ‘Yessir’, ‘Yessir’, with the occasional daring variation: ‘Yes indeed sir.’ He and his mother fell into an icy brook and the doctor said their legs had been frozen to the bone. Two years in bed seemed to thaw them out nicely but Esmé was outraged at the mother’s earlier recovery: ‘Why’s she got her lallies back before the boy and no weight loss?’ Last night our selection was Gentleman’s Agreement with Gregory Peck. The love interest appeared in a gorgeous gauzy evening get-up. ‘She’s fallen into a net-curtain factory,’ Esmé said.

Kelm is still doing his rendition of when Roddy McDowall got butch and had a boxing match.

Aunt Lavinia’s sister, Joan Burnish-Saner, was great friends with Roddy McDowall in Los Angeles. That was when he was grown up and an old queen.

Esmé could easily take over from Maureen Lipman or Miriam Margolyes if she put her mind to it.

Well, do come back later to hear about our trip to Deauville (we thought: just a tiny touch of luxe couldn’t do any harm) and the encounter with volcanic mud, Ivy Driver’s self-created ‘Come Lunch with Me’ competition, her mother’s new direction in the kitchen (Ottolenghi now struggling for a foothold) and how Esmé’s fortunes took a turn for the better.