5. Jun, 2020

Pepy's Diary

London swaggers, awash with action
In the diary’s early days
Of General Monk and the Rump Parliament,
A symbolic roasting of it ablaze
On street fires
For rebellious feasting by all.
The army is drunk,
Soldiery staggering about, sodden
With sack.
‘The lads’ (apprentices)
Are putting windows in.
Ruffles are back.
Pepys dons his white suit and silver lace coat
For the first time,
Putting aside the black
And goes by boat,
Rowed by Scull the waterman but
Leaves the office where ‘little to do’
In favour of inns and butteries
With Squib, Spicer, Chetwind and Fage,
So wonderfully named,
To dine on two dozen of larks, a neat’s tongue,
And other fantastical dishes of the day.
He visits Mrs Jem,
Whom he discovers in a heated state,
As if plied with wine, he says,
Which he finds a worry,
Since she was down in the kitchen with her staff
When he arrived.
Still, the King’s sister, Frances, is ‘no worse’
For a bout of smallpox, he learns elsewhere.
Thence to fetch his wife home again,
Later to play his lute, or his flageolet
And in the future,
Being a practical man,
To bury a Parmesan cheese in the garden,
And so save it from the Great Fire of London.
A dreamlike sequence of events to read now,
Filled with grotesquerie
And quirky daily happenings,
It was to Pepys as sharp as a quill and
Recorded with the exactness of
His contemporary eye, being,
As he tells us, past imagination, the suddenness and the greatness of it.
And then,
He describes how he dined.

Ruth Enright