By Robert Bruce

It is sometimes difficult to decide when one day ends and another one begins, particularly when taking part in something as complex as a Wodehouse Millennium tour. It is the sort of question which indeed still rages over when the millennium itself ended or began. But suffice to say that for the sake of this short eye-witness account the memorable events of Sunday the 24th of July in the year 2000 started at 00.01 am. Though the most touching and significant event occurred around an hour further into the day. Witnesses proved unreliable later when it came to where the hands of their watches might have been placed when our chairman flung the first, and only, handful of gravel.

The revelries were almost ended. Elin Woodger, President of The Wodehouse Society based in America, and Jean Tillson, her fellow NEWT, had already headed off to their room. Only the most persistent of offenders remained. One of these was our noble and saintly chairman. He looked up at the building from his position just west of a flower bed. Like the rest of us he could see that the hotel had a valiant effort at a parody of a Blandings Castle tower. And to the south of that, tucked under a gable, was the window behind which the two female Newts were now surely asleep. The chairman’s instincts were still razor-sharp. He reached down for a handful of gravel and with unerring aim sent it rattling against the window panes. The two small windows shot open. Two female faces appeared. It was a touching sight. One to inspire a Fink-Nottle to essay the opening of a fairy tale. Valiantly they kept up a pretence of annoyance with furious suggestions that the noise be kept to a minimum, or words to that effect.

But instead our chairman launched into a selection from White Horse Inn, as he explained later. ‘Goodbyee’ roared into the night as he capered and a number of those others present did their level best to provide some kind of a dancing chorus line. It was the most excellent end or, depending on your point of view, beginning of a day.

When the party had reassembled on board its motor coach at 9.30 our chairman announced that there had been ‘grave disturbances’ at an early hour. He also apologised for having missed the high note he had been going for at the end of the chorus and quoted Aunt Dahlia in his defence. ‘It restored my faith in post-war whisky’, he said.

We then rattled on through the bosky countryside of Worcestershire and were regaled by John Fletcher’s reading of the prize-giving ceremony from Right Ho, Jeeves. This was so well done that in the end he put our lives at risk. Graham, our excellent driver despite not being a Wodehousean, was laughing as much as anyone.

Shortly we arrived at our first visit of the day’s programme. This was Cheney Court (pictured left), where the schoolboy Wodehouse lived with a menage of aunts. The clouds once more parted, as they did for every visit, and the sun beamed down. Colonel Murphy was in his element once more, pointing out that the only time the house appeared in the Wodehouse oeuvre was as Deverill Hall in The Mating Season. The name Deverill having been taken from the five villages running along the valley below the house: Brixton Deverill, Monkton Deverill, Kingston Deverill, Longbridge Deverill and Hill Deverill.

A commemorative photograph was taken of our chairman along with the American duo of Elin Woodger and Jean Tillson posing in the manner of an illustration drawn by one of the aunts, Aunt Louisa, for the book ‘Mr Zinzan of Bath’, which had been written by yet another of the aunts, Miss Mary Deane, who served partly as inspiration for Aunt Agatha. Pedants pointed out that the photograph was being taken in the wrong part of the garden. Our chairman pointed out that it looked better from the lawn than from the area which was now a car park.

The house, now used as a college by Linguarama to teach languages, contained a fine wooden staircase at one corner where we were encouraged to imagine the young Wodehouse falling down in an unruly fashion. Wide lawns stretched away towards cornfields and it was easy to see how a young Wodehouse could have escaped into the countryside. Above the door leading to the terrace was the carved message: The Sun Is Set But It Will Rise Again. Members deciding whether, in the great prizegiving tale, they would have been classed as pessimists or optimists, saw this as a pointer. Two aloof stone eagles either side of the steps down to the terrace might have thought otherwise.

Then it was back on the road again to pass Ditteridge and catch a passing view of the house which was home to Sir Roderick Glossop. Our chairman’s belief in this matching up was, he explained, confirmed by information that in Wodehouse’s time the local doctor, Dr Henry MacBryan, ran a private mental hospital just down the hill and did indeed possess an enormous bald head and beetling eyebrows. Our chairman also pointed out the solitary telephone box in the hamlet and described it as ‘the only centre of entertainment’. This was followed by an elderly sign on the post office describing it as a ‘Postal Telegraph Office’.

We then drove to Corsham, where Corsham Court was noted as a possible source for the idea, though little of the detail, of Blandings. Wodehouse visited when he was seven years old and recalled skating on the nearby lake where the Court looms on the skyline much as Blandings did to lovelorn souls mooching by that lake.

We then noted the peacocks walking down the High Street and ate a hearty meal of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and apple pie at the Methuen Arms. Speeches were made. Our self-styled ‘Oldest Member’, Wim Duk, thanking the whole party for being such enjoyable and happy people. He then announced the old Dutch custom of saying goodbye by kissing the nearest person to you. And promptly raced to the other side of the room to kiss the tour organiser, Hilary Bruce. She was spared no blushes as our chairman then presented her with a copy of In Search of Blandings signed by every member of the expedition.

There then followed the briefest of visits to the local cricket ground where Corsham were playing Trowbridge in a key cup-tie. American visitors had ten minutes in which to decide whether cricket was preferable to baseball or whether it indeed could be classified as a game at all. But their insistence that it was a game so slow that you could fall asleep watching it and not notice any change when you eventually woke up were proved incorrect. A much-weakened Corsham attack was dealt severe blows by the opening Trowbridge batsmen. We saw some flashing cover drives, the odd six driven back over the bowler’s head, a sharp chance spilled by cover-point and were forced to leave at the point where thirty-three runs had been scored off five overs. The American jury remained out despite the ground being one where WG Grace had once played.

Then it was back onto the coach and to a taped reading of "Crime-Wave at Blandings" we headed Londonwards to what the chairman had only announced as ‘a final surprise’. After some time the coach left the motorway and headed perilously but skilfully down some increasingly tight, narrow and leafy lanes arriving in the end in a farmyard.

The surprise was that we were to see some prime Berkshire pigs. We were met by Sir Richard Body (pictured, below), the crusading agricultural Member of Parliament. He was clutching a copy, not of the immortal Whiffle on the Care of the Pig, but the equally comforting 14th edition of Fream’s Elements of Agriculture and regaled us with tales about Berkshires. In particular he told us of the great Newbury show chase when his prize pig had bolted. Body had given chase around the ring as ‘it knocked over the judges’. It had then escaped from the ring and disappeared before reappearing with some pigs of a quite different breed when they were being shown. His daughter told us tales of how she had ridden Berkshires when a young girl. She reported that they were ‘surprisingly biddable’, particularly when bribed with food laid down in front of them.

The sun was now shining again. ‘The sun has come out for the Empress’, said our chairman in triumph, ‘as it always does’. And we were all as happy as pigs are said to be when in clover. Enormous Berkshires grunted happily as we scratched their backs. Tiny piglets went into a huddle at the back of their sty as we stuck our snouts over the wall. Marilyn MacGregor and others were pleased at being able, at last, to settle the great tail controversy for once and for all. ‘They curl anti-clockwise’, went up the triumphant shout. Our chairman tried out the ‘Hog Call’, which visitors from Cincinnati had given him earlier in the week. Two Berkshires promptly turned tail and went back inside their sty.

We departed a remarkably happy band of Wodehouseans. And we spent the short drive back to London studying the criteria for the ‘standard of excellence for the Berkshire breed’, as laid down by the Berkshire Pig Breeders Club. Some mused on how it is understood that people begin to resemble their pets, or their objects of affection in the animal world. Who did we know with ‘a fine face’, with ears ‘fringed with fine hair and a light jowl’, with shoulder blades ‘fine and well-sloping’, with a back ‘set high’, with flesh ‘fine and free from wrinkles’, with hair ‘long, fine and plentiful’, and, the clincher this, ‘standing well on toes and a good walker’. Why, this was none other than our chairman, Colonel NTP Murphy, the beloved Norman.

And with that we arrived back at the hotel by Kensington Gardens to say fond farewells and drift away, exhausted but supremely happy, to our respective homes to muse and to dream about a wonderful week.