There are at least five charity shops, or as we used to call them, op shops, in Masterton. Our favourite is the Hospice Shop, where I picked up a gently unravelling ancient cane chair I am particularly fond of. It was a bargain at 20 bucks. I like to put it, in summer, in the Apple Tree paddock, and sit and enjoy the sheep. They are fond of the chair. They like to nibble at it. The cats like it, too. Also in the summer, when the chair is not in the paddock, I put it outside for them and there is keen competition as to which cat will hold the coveted chair for the day. If one gets off another immediately leaps on. It’s a game of musical chairs for cats. We lead a terribly exciting life here at Lush Places, I can tell you.
Visiting op shops is an exercise in nostalgia and not just because they’re full of old stuff. I used to be a keen op shopper in my youth. My best-ever buys? A bottle-green 1950s satin dress with an enormous matching bow at the waist and a stiffened petticoat. It was quite posh and I wore it to the masked ball I put on for my 25th (I think) birthday. And an olive-green Junior Gaultier blazer with silver buttons. I got it for a tenner. I found the jacket recently in the cupboard where the unwanted clothes go to gather dust and sulk at being no longer desired.
I thought my young friend Charlotte, an accomplished op shopper, might like it so I got it dry-cleaned and offered it to her when she was last visiting Masterton where her uncles live. It looked perfect on her. There was a small stain on the front that the dry-cleaner didn’t manage to get out. She didn’t care. I said if she held her glass of rosé just so, nobody would notice. It is a nice feeling to pass on a piece of clothing you have loved to somebody you love. It is another exercise in nostalgia.
We were in chichi Greytown, a 40-minute drive from the old small-town New Zealand of Masterton. But it might as well be on another planet, one where people for unknown reasons apparently require an endless supply of scented candles and cushions with which to annoy visitors attempting to sit on their over-upholstered couches.
You can register the tenor of a small town by its charity shops, and by their smells. The Greytown charity shop smells of posh discarded stuff, of polished donated pretend-silver stuff and superior unused, quality tea towels. Only at a Greytown charity shop would you find for a tenner, as Greg did for me, Sir Harold Acton’s memoir of his lifelong friend, the writer Nancy Mitford.
I don’t really need another book about the Mitfords, the famous English aristocratic sisters, one of whom married a fascist, one of whom fancied Hitler and one, Nancy, who was a writer of satires about their kind. I know, or thought I knew, everything about them due to an early obsession with Nancy’s bitingly funny novels, in particular The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which are scarcely disguised observations of her bonkers family.
She turns “Farve” – her father, Baron Redesdale – into Uncle Matthew, whose idea of a jolly good time is to hunt, with hounds, his children through the woods. Farve read only one book in his life. It was White Fang and it was so good he never read another. He had famous rages and would throw young male visitors he deemed “sewers” out of his house. He hated abroad. In The Pursuit of Love, Nancy has Uncle Matthew denounce foreigners: “Frogs are slightly better than Huns or Wops, but abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.” Coming upon that dreadful quote is yet another exercise in nostalgia.
The Mitfords never get old. There is yet another telly series, Outrageous, coming soon about them. There will be vintage clothes. I can hardly wait.
