Reckless and Criminal Cookery, Garlic, and the Stiff Upper Lip of Diplomacy

When I think of the Durrell family, it’s Gerald who comes to mind as the one with the sense of humour. Back in my teaching days, the scene with the mother scorpion in the matchbox who launches herself at brother Larry (see sidebar) was always a surefire hit and led to all kinds of lively writing assignments.

I’d always thought of Lawrence Durrell as the prolific producer of deathless prose – and as Gerry’s rather stuffy and insufferable big brother from My Family and Other Animals.

All of which is, of course, both ignorant and undoubtedly unfair. But there it is.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to discover his lighter side through the inclusion of one of his stories in L. John Harris’s delightful compendium The Book of Garlic. Harris includes the story, but I wanted  to read the whole thing –  so I did.

Stiff Upper Lip (1958) is a set of comic adventures featuring members of the British diplomatic corps (known as “dips”) stationed in the imaginary nation of Vulgaria, which – though not geographically identified – seems to lie somewhere near Ruritania, in some indeterminate corner of Central Europe.

And given the prominent role of comic cookery, it might well border the former Soviet republic of Voynovia, as invented by James Hamilton-Paterson in Cooking with Fernet Branca  (See The Culinary Capers and Comic Catastrophes of Gerald Samper)

I found Hamilton-Paterson’s trilogy hilariously over the top. Stiff Upper Lip by contrast is good for the occasional chortle.

Reckless and Criminal Cookery

The stories are presented as a series of reminiscences by an old Foreign Office buffer called Antrobus. If Garlic Be the Food of Love recalls his time serving under Polk-Mowbray – and over De Mandeville – in the British Embassy in Vulgaria.

“Bitter days,” he mused. “And perhaps one shouldn’t talk about them.”

But of course, he does.

He relates an escalating chain culinary catastrophes. There are “the table decorations that made that otherwise fairly festive board look like an illustration from The Jungle Books. One could hardly carry a fork to one’s mouth without biting off a piece of fern by mistake. Slices of decorative pumpkin and marrow gave a Harvest Festival note to things. One peered at one’s guests through a forest of potted plants.”

Then the Madras curries “of such a blistering intensity that the entire Dutch Embassy had the inside of its collective mouth burned away – peeled off like bark from a tree, old boy. The Minister called on Polk-Mowbray in tenue and wanted to know if a state of war existed between England and Holland. His wife had to be treated for soft palate.”

And then comes the outrage of the garlic, and De Mandeville is forced to confess to his oversight of reckless and criminal cookery:

“Think of the Naval Attaché! What has he ever done to merit that unspeakable lunch? … Surely you know that to feed a Naval Attaché garlic is like stoking a coke furnace with dead rats?”

Garlic is summarily banished:

“I tell you that from now on there is to be no more garlic. Sage, yes. Thyme, yes. Rosemary, marjoram, dill, cumin—yes, emphatically yes. But garlic, no!”

And so the edict went forth, and the sale of peppermints in the NAAFI dropped off again.

Something à la Carte?

This story tells the tragic tale of Mungo Piers-Foley, posted to the Embassy from the Blues as Military Attaché. He’s a gallant and carefree young colonel, an officer and gentleman of unblemished reputation, and a sportsman devoted to all things horse.

He is undone by the accidental ingestion of horse meat in a Paris restaurant. Covered in shame and ignominy, he disappears from public life, later to be found in a remote outpost of Kenya where he offers his guest elephant for dinner and dreams up dishes worthy of Gerald Samper.

Mungo settled himself on his camp-stool and said: “Yes, old boy. If once the readers of The Times found out just how edible everything is, it would be all up with the Wine and Food Society.” Then in a slow, dreamy voice, full of naked luxe and volupté, he began to recite softly: “Leeches à la Rémoulade … Giraffe Truffée aux Oignons … Boa-Constrictor Chasseur … Ragoût de Flamingo with Water-Rat Flambé…” He was sunk in a deep trance.

Spalding, the visiting dip, “could bear it no longer. He tiptoed out of the clearing and ran like a madman in the direction of Nairobi.”

The Football Match

We all know that sport is war by other means. There’s a farcical football game designed as a diplomatic maneuver which goes wildly wrong. The British plan to lose the match strategically to unruffle Italian feathers and win their diplomatic support.

“We had all constructed heavy shin-pads from the Master Files. I had nearly a week’s economic despatches down each stocking. 

We had all taken on that frightfully decent look as we puffed about, showing ourselves plucky but inept- in fact, in character.”

Of course, it all goes wildly wrong and ends in disaster.

Stiff Upper Lip 

The lovelorn Junior Military Attaché, Trevor Dovebasket, sits on the air-conditioning outlet during a wine-tasting, with predictably farcical results.

Dovebasket’s poetic wooing of Angela had already alarmed Antobus:

“It was the sort of stuff that could lead directly to Nudism. It was clear from all this that he was terribly oversexed, and I for one felt that he would end in Botany Bay or the Conservative Central Office or somewhere.”

Angela rebuffs his attentions and instead takes a fancy to Serge, the Russian military attaché. Dovebasket flies into a jealous rage:

“A cry of fury broke from his lips to find that she preferred this revolting foreigner who had apparently been named after an inferior British export material; he banged his fist upon the nearest table and cried out, ‘If I cannot have her, nobody shall!’”

In a fit of vengeful pique, Dovebasket positions himself over the wine cellar air vent. The crowd of wine-swilling, multi-national dips – now deprived of oxygen – begin to show the effects.

“It was Serge, I think, who first noticed the cause of our plight. With a bound he was at Dovebasket’s side crying, ‘Please to remove posterior from the breathing,’ in quite good Satellite English. Dovebasket declined to do so. Serge pulled him and received a knee in the chest. Dovebasket settled himself firmly once more and showed clearly that he wasn’t letting any more air in that week. Serge seized a wicker-covered bottle of the Chianti type and tapped him smartly on the crown. Dovebasket was not going to be treated like a breakfast egg by his hated rival. He dotted him back. This was fatal. One could see at once how wars break out. Poland and Rumania came to the assistance of Serge, while Canada and Australia answered the call of the Mother Country. It looked like some strange Saturnalia, armed dips circling each other with wicker-covered bottles.”

The Unspeakable Attaché

Dovebasket reappears in a later story, The Unspeakable Attaché:

“Now of this fellow, Trevor Dovebasket (he was then assistant Military Attaché), I have only this to say: it was clear that the youth was in league with the Devil. Some fearful Faustian compact had taken place. You could tell from his appearance – eyebrows meeting in the middle. It was clear from the way that he bit his nails that he read Popular Mechanics in secret. More, his office was always full of Meccano and string. He was always tampering with electrical circuits, fuses, and using that beastly sticky stuff and so on. A really vicious streak.”

Dovebasket meets his Vulgarian diplomatic doom after a diplomatic dog show goes disastrously wrong. He is promoted and posted to Delhi.

I enjoyed these mock-serious stories about the self-important trivialities of diplomatic life. This Foreign Service is populated by the mildly eccentric and the moderately incompetent, ranging the full gamut from harmlessly dotty to the full-blown batty, barmy, and bonkers.

There are some clever lines and genuinely funny situations but it doesn’t always work and the farce sometimes misses the mark. It all feels a bit creaky and dated now, like a transmission from a long-lost world where poking fun at stuffy bureaucrats could still seem a little risqué. Durrell makes fun of their vanity, self-importance and incompetence but it’s all very civilized and genial. The dips can chuckle at their own foibles while the mayhem unfolds harmlessly around them.

This was an enjoyable easy read  There’s another collection of Antrobus stories, which I might get around to reading – but it’s not top of the heap.