15 探望陆军元帅蒙哥利.doc

15. Seeing Field Marshal Montgomery
I drove to Alton in Hampshire to see Field Marshal Lord Montgomery at Isington Mill, his little country home. His place is really modest and simple. When I returned to London, I happened to pass Apsley House, the enormous mansion(almost a palace)on adilly given by the grateful British people to the Duke of Wellington1 after the Napoleonic wars. Montgomery did not do so well. Whatever one may think of him, he is undoubtedly the most famous British general since Wellington.
Monty was wearing a dark blue knitted sweater and over it an open leather windbreaker 2. He led me through the dining room upstairs to his study. The room was decorated with a lot of bad oil paintings, at least four of which were full-length portraits of Monty. Also hideous3 but not fortable furniture and an enormous mass of knickknacks4. Everything was in apple-pie5 order, including the desk. In a peculiarly ugly cage was the only other living thing in the house, a somnolent6 blue parakeet7 with a celluloid8 panion. There were at most twenty books on a shelf by his desk, and I imagine prises his entire library. Prominent9 were Burke's Peerage10 and the 1963 Who's Who. I could just imagine the old codger11 reading himself to sleep with those after his usual dinner of mutton.
Among the decorations in this study were several signed snapshots of King e VI together with Mo