The Gourmet's Guide to LondonNewnham-Davis, Lieut.-Col. (Nathaniel)
General
The Gourmet's Guide to London
Newnham-Davis, Lieut.-Col. (Nathaniel)
Restaurants -- England -- London -- Guidebooks
My little French cousin who has married the Comte de St Solidor (if
that is not his exact title it is, literally, next door to it) has
brought her Breton husband across the Channel to make the acquaintance
of his English relatives, and is desperately anxious that he shall not
be depressed by London. He is a jolly, round-faced Frenchman, with
a rather straggly light beard and a great head of intractable light
hair, and, were it not that he cannot speak a word of our language,
might pass for a young Yorkshire squire. My little French cousin
was particularly afraid that Robert, that is his first name, would
suffer all the tortures of ennui on Sunday, for her mother, who was
English-born, had told her that the English in England spend their
Sunday afternoons, when they are grown-up, in singing hymns, and
when they are children in repeating aloud the catechism. I told my
little cousin to have no fear, that London Sundays are no longer what
they were when her mother was a child, and I offered to take charge
of Robert and herself on their first Sunday in London, from after
lunch-time till bed-time, and to try and keep them amused.
I asked my little French cousin whether rag-time had penetrated to
Brittany, and she, pitying my ignorance, told me that at Dinard, last
summer, they had talked to rag-time music, and bathed to it, and had
even played syncopated _chemin de fer_ to it, as well as danced to
it. But, when I asked her if at Dinard she had ever eaten to it, she
said, "But no," and gave a mimetic sketch of eating food to the air of
"Everybody's doing it now," which was very funny. That settled where
we should dine on Sunday, and I wrote off at once to the Imperial
Restaurant to secure a dinner-table for four, and asked another cousin,
a British one, to complete the _partie carrée_.
The afternoon of Sunday caused me no anxiety. Robert is devoted to
music, so I took him and the Comtesse to the Queen's Hall to one of Sir
Henry Wood's concerts, and on to the Royal Automobile Club to tea, and
neither of them showed any sign of being oppressed by Sabbath gloom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account