Slightly Foxed

Decades ago wits, poets and dukes

Circled like planets round Gloria Jukes,

Bluestocking, tuft-hunter, grande amoureuse –

Was ever a salon brilliant as hers?

Her name still turns up though she’s turned up her

      toes,

You meet her in memoirs, they still quote her mots,

And old crones remember her faults and her furs –

Such foibles, my dear, such sables were hers!

A wrecker of homes and a breaker of hearts,

She talked like a book and encouraged the arts,

Political hostesses envied her poise

And said they preferred conversation to noise.

Her cook was a dream, her pearls were in ropes,

She furthered ambitions, she realized hopes,

Lent Dowson a fiver, put rouge on her eyebrows,

Enchanted grandees and reconciled highbrows.

Acclimatized novel Bohemian behaviour

In the stuffiest house in Victorian Belgravia,

And when St. John’s Wood was abandoned to orgies

Behaved like a dignified bride at St. George’s.

A Personage paid to her regal poitrine

A compliment royal, and she looked like a queen –

But of some Ruritanian kingdom, maybe –

All plastered with gifts like a Christmas tree.

When her guests were awash with champagne and

      With gin

She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin:

An abstemious man would reel at her look

As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book.

She twitted George Moore, she flirted with Tree,

Gave dear Rider Haggard material for She,

Talked scansion with Bridges and scandal with Wilde,

To Drinkwater drank and at Crackanthorpe smiled.

Brzeska and Brooke were among those she knew

And she lived long enough to meet Lawrence too,

D.H. and T.E. – she, who’d known R.L.S.,

Talked to Hardy of Kim, and to Kipling of Tess!

Now she’s been dead for more than ten years

We look round in vain to discover her peers;

The Gloria (it has often been said) is departed

And a new and inferior period has started...

But tucked right away in a Bayswater attic,

Arthritic, ignoble, stone-deaf and rheumatic,

There still lingers on, by the strangest of flukes,

Yes, Gloria’s husband – Plantagenet Jukes!

Ignored in her lifetime, he paid for her fun

And enjoyed all the fuss. When she died he was done.

He sold up the house and retired from the scene

Where nobody noticed that he’d ever been.

His memoirs unwritten (though once he began ‘em)

He lives on a hundred and fifty per annum

And once in the day totters out for a stroll

To purchase the Times, two eggs and a roll.

Up to now he has paid for his pleasures and needs

With books he had saved and that everyone reads,

Signed copies presented by authors to Gloria

In the reign of King Edward and good Queen Victoria.

They brought in fair prices but came to an end,

Then Jukes was reduced to one book-loving friend,

A girl of the streets with a smatter of culture

And the genial ways of an African vulture.

To this bird he offered the last of the lot,

A volume of Flecker beginning to rot.

She opened it, stormed: ‘Cor blimey, you’re potty!

D’you think I can’t see that the pages are spotty?

Your Flecker is foxed, you old fool, and I’m through!'

Then out of the door in a tantrum she flew,

Leaving poor Jukes, in the black-out, in bed

With his past, and the book, and a bruise on his head.

William Plomer (1903–1973)