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This intimate and personal memoir of the present incumbent of Firle
Place, the home in the South Downs of the Gage family for 500
years, is described as follows by Charles Moore: In this book,
Nicky Gage describes his father's memoirs as 'masterly but short'.
The same could be said of his own. Both when being funny - which,
again and again, he is - and when being serious, he has a gift for
economy of style. Take this chapter opening: 'Sadly, the sexual
revolution of the 1960s passed me by, as I was either sitting on my
tractor looking after sheep or occasionally visiting my parents -
whose butler disapproved of my agricultural attire.' Without being
tediously confessional, Nicky is direct about his own failings. One
of these, he thinks, is that he took much too long to grow up. Is
that such a failing? No doubt it caused some difficulties along the
way, but his childlike quality is central to the charm to which all
his friends testify. It has allowed him to stay open to the world.
He became a father in his seventies and continues to paint and hunt
in his mid-eighties, an age when most men would long have put aside
such things. He possesses an invincible innocence, which lights up
his blue eyes, and makes this book a delight. Sir John Gage made
the family fortune in the first half of the 16th century. Nicky,
his descendant, writes admiringly of Sir John's good intentions
towards Firle expressed in his will. We should all admire Nicky's
fulfilment of those intentions in the 21st.
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