Famous People

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I have to admit to not having actually met many famous people.

Seen a few at a distance, but that's not quite the same as meeting them.

I can remember as a child being taken out in the car with my two brothers for a picnic. At one point a policeman stepped out, stopped us and told my father to pull over onto the grass verge.

The Queen's car was coming this way and the 'serfs' had to step to one side. However, it made dad's day, for as she passed, he waved and she waved back.

I have, I think, only met two Members of Parliament, but after all this expenses scandal, I don't think we could consider them to be 'famous'!

But I have met a Lord.

Does anyone remember Lord Carrington, the former Foreign Secretary?

Well, his home is not far from here at Bledlow and I met him and his wife there on one of these "Open Garden Schemes".

His wife, Lady Carrington was a very keen gardener but sadly to say I have just read that she has passed away aged 89.

It was in 1943 the Carringtons took over part of the Manor House, Bledlow, in Buckinghamshire, an almost derelict house on the family's estate, half of which was then occupied by a tenant and half by evacuees. (The village of Bledlow was later the setting for some of the episodes of the television series Midsomer Murders). They set about renovating the house, finally moving in in 1946.

Lady Carrington was especially fond of the garden which she and her husband created at Bledlow, where she was invariably deep in some gardening book or catalogue. In the late 1960s, during a period when Lord Carrington was Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords, a fire, which started in an old barn, devastated part of the grounds, giving them an opportunity to design and redevelop a garden which eventually covered some 10 acres. Wooden bridges were constructed to span the ponds, which were fed by springs that in turn flowed into the river Lyde.

"My wife," Lord Carrington always said, "is the plantswoman," adding (in a reference to her encyclopedic knowledge of botanical names): "She doesn't really talk English, she talks Latin."

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