All readers of Jane Austen will remember Mr Woodhouse’s objection to his daughter’s portrait of Harriet Smith. “It is very pretty,” he said to Emma, “just as all your drawings are, my dear. The only thing I do not thoroughly like is that she seems to be sitting out of doors with only a little shawl over her shoulders, and it makes me think she must catch cold.” “But, my dear Papa,” protested Emma, “it is supposed to be summer, a warm day in summer. Look at the trees.” “But it is never safe to sit out of doors, my dear,” replied her Papa.
We may be sure that Mr Woodhouse would have regarded the suggestion of a meal out of doors as not only dangerous but almost indecent, and that the meals prepared by the impeccable Serle, who understood how to boil an egg better than any other, were served in a room from which all draughts were rigorously excluded. It is true that he travelled to the picnic at Donwell Abbey in his carriage with one window down, but while the others were enjoying themselves in the open air he was safely ensconced by a fire in the most comfortable room that the Abbey contained.
Breakfast in France
Among my friends I know only one – I will call him X – who inclines to the Woodhouse view. On his strong recommendation I once spent a few days at a charming little inn on the banks of the Seine, where, weather permitting, it was the custom to serve all the meals under a fragrant lime tree in the courtyard. When I expressed my pleasure in this custom to the landlord, “Ah monsieur,” he said, “your friend, monsieur, did not share your taste,” and he pointed out a draught-proof corner of the bare salle à manger as the place where X had preferred to plant himself and his family for the two chief functions of the day. Since that revelation I have never felt quite the same towards X.
Breakfast out of doors? The words stir many memories of pre-war journeys, and I can see myself seated in the open veranda of the little Hotel Beck in Brand in the corner first reached by the rays of the sun as he rises above the eastern barrier of hills. Most of the guests came later and I was glad to be alone, for one’s fast should be broken gently and not with a crash of boisterous greetings and common-place chatter. But best of all breakfast stances was the eastern veranda of the Hotel Tre Croci above Cortina, where as one made play with coffee and rolls and quince preserve the eye could range over the forest of San Marco to the serrated outline of the Marmarole mountains.
Lunch in the Alps
The best lunch out of doors is the lunch carried in a rucksack and eaten at the top of a mountain pass before one descends into the new world on the other-side: where the austerity of the snow-patch is tempered by the timid soldanella, where the rock waste is relieved by clusters of forget-me-note and anemone, and where the silence is broken only by the strangely human whistle of the sentinel marmot as he keeps watch for his little tribe.
Tea in the Highlands
The perfect tea out of doors is the tea freshly made over a fire of sticks in some sheltered nook beside a running stream or on the wooded shore of a mountain loch. The word is redolent to me of the moorland lochs of the Central Highlands: Loch an Eilein, Loch Garten, Lochindorb, the Green Loch, Lochs Laggan, Insh, and Alvie; with the heather in full bloom, the leaves of the birches twinkling, and a gentle soughing in the pines. In the uncertain glories of a Highland summer one takes the foul weather with the fair, and I remember with a thrill my last tramp in the Highlands when having ascended the Garbh Allt in drenching showers to the saddle in the fastnesses of the Cairngorms, I snatched a hasty Thermos-flask tea in the shelter of a friendly rock, and, uplifted by the sight of a herd of deer running along the skyline, descended to Loch Avon and returned to Nethy Bridge by the Little Lairig and the Ryvoan Pass.
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Dinner in the Dolomites
The alfresco dinner is a rarer proposition and is only possible in Alpine lands when one is on the tramp and freed from the restrictions of the table d’hote, but when it is attained under perfect conditions it is one of the greatest of earthly joys. Memories of wiener schnitzel with various appetising accessories and perhaps a kirschtorte to follow, eaten in the shady garden-wirtschaften of western Germany after a long day’s tramp in the Black Forest or in the side valleys of the Rhine, seem now to belong to another world than this.
Fontainebleau and certain little townships on the Seine understand the art of open-air dining, but in all my memories of travel Botzen (or must we now say Bolzano?) stands supreme. To get the full flavour of Botzen one should spend a week tramping over the passes of the Dolomites, sleeping in the Alpine Club huts and enduring Spartan rigours. Then one can relish to the full its Capuan amenities. There in the Walther Platz the little tables are set out under the trees before the Hotel Greif and the Hotel de l’Europe. Waitresses with such sweet-sounding names as Olympia or Paula or Teresa flit to and fro at the diners’ beck. The white statue of the Minnesinger surveys the scene from the centre of the Square and far to the north the range of the Rosengarten turns to flame in the rays of the dying sun. The late Mr Ferrer in his charming book on the Dolomites recommended the local wine called The Magdalene’s Tears as the libation best fitted to such occasions. I still live in the hope of one day testing his opinion.
Meanwhile I am tethered, and my open-air pleasures are this year chiefly confined to my garden. As I write these lines under the apple tree an earwig falls upon the paper, and that ping! Can it be a mosquito? The very sound brings memories of the torment of midges in the Highlands. Perhaps there is something to be said for the Woodhouse view after all!
