When a child is murdered at Bratbe’s picnic, a public and family scandal erupts. Then it begins to rain.
Hytha Bratbe’s picnic is an annual event for about 800 invited guests, including the Prime Minister, at her estate in the West Sussex Downs, surpassing Mrs. Isabella Beeton’s picnic for forty persons—and crushing it.
The over-the-top menu includes cured beef, pork, and lamb roasts, mutton pies, cider, apples and plums of many local kinds, bread, butter, eggs, honey, soft cheeses, bacon, milk, cream, Sussex cake, beechnuts, striped tomatoes, lettuce hearts, cucumber, potatoes, spinach, parsley, and broccoli. From London, providers come cheese, fancy pastries, coffee, teas, rare fruits (unspecified), marzipan and almonds, herbs, caviar, frog legs, jellied snails, wine, and local beer. There is entertainment: swings, punts, a merry-go-round, croquet, a fortuneteller, a tape recording of guest messages, and a fly-casting competition. And because Bratbe is practical, there are many lavatories.
The picnic turns topsy-turvy when Bratbe’s daughter, Alexandra, watches a man swinging a child above his head. The child is laughing and squealing and crying. She is deeply touched and unhappily recalls her lack of love and interaction with her father and mother. She does not realize or even understand that what she is looking at is murder. The man holding the child is in the act of killing it. Alexandra wanders off, looking for a man she desires to seduce, no matter that he is her mother’s lover. When the murdered child is discovered, police are called, and the picnic is abruptly ended, Alexandra is because she realizes that the picnic is a kind of grisly illusion of pleasure. What she witnessed and what she thought about it were all horribly wrong. Unable to sleep, she walks out into the night and, in panic, screams, “Darling mummie, darling mummie, I saw it. I saw it, I saw it. Oh, darling mummie.”
See Jacqueline Wheldon. Mrs. Bratbe’s August Picnic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1966