TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

After a brief encounter with a famous person, don’t boast about it. Don’t try basking in some reflected glory – it only makes you look pathetic. Or so they say.

Personally, I can’t resist pointing out a chair in my front room where once, very briefly, sat the man who had marched into the office of the German Commandant on Jersey, pistol in hand, and ordered him to surrender. There’s no record of his actual words, but our man was a Channel Islander himself, well aware of the atrocities committed there, so I hope he abandoned the usual courtesies of war and simply gave the order, “You! Out!”

The German replied, “Where do I go now?”

Our guests one afternoon in the 1960s were Derek and Iris du Pré. It was he who had taken the German surrender of the Channel Islands. Today they were not having tea with their daughter Hilary at Church Farm, because Derek was giving a talk that evening to the Ashmansworth, Crux Easton and Woodcott Women’s Institute, and it was the rather civilised custom for the current president (at that time my mother) to offer rest and refreshment to guest speakers before escorting them to the village hall and introducing them to the meeting.

I didn’t hear the talk; I wasn’t a member. I think it, too, was about the Channel Islands. But I do remember it was illustrated with slides because he asked if he might run through the slides before the talk, to make sure they were all there, and in the right order: the sign of a practised speaker.

I set up the screen, pulled the chairs round and drew the curtains. But, what with the darkness, a couple of sherries and an armchair, I could see my father, a veteran of the first war, nodding off even before half a dozen slides had been shown. I doubt it would have bothered our speaker. An audience asleep in the darkness was a common hazard of slide shows, even the liveliest of them.

So my moment of ‘reflected glory’ comes not from his famous children, not from Hilary and Piers for the book and the film, not from superstar cellist Jackie, but from Derek du Pré himself, a star in his own right.

Agricola, March 2026