IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE
by 
Miranda Seymour

This is an extraordinary book. Miranda Seymour has written a family memoir whose honesty appals even as it compels, but its secondary achievement is to
draw, almost from the corner of its eye, a portrait of Englishness in the last century that encompasses class, ownership, landscape, money, manners and
clothes. It is consistently fascinating and occasionally horrifying and will make a good deal of modern autobiography look feeble and colourless in comparison.


Also by Miranda Seymour
Fiction
The Stones ofMaggiare
Daughter of Darkness
Count Manfred
The Goddess
Medea
Madonna of the Island: Tales from Corfu
Carrying On
The Reluctant Devil: A Cautionary Tale
The Telling

Non-fiction
A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and his Literary Circle
Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale
Robert Graves: Life on the Edge
Mary Shelley
The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend

Children's Books
Mumtaz the Magical Cat
The Vampire of Verdonia
Caspar and the Secret Kingdom
Pierre and the Pamplemousse

Miscellaneous
A Brief History of Thyme
Elegy for an Obsessive Love

SIMON & SCHUSTER
London New York Sydney Toronto

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2007
A CBS COMPANY
To my beloved husband, Ted Lynch

Copyright © Miranda Seymour, 2007
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Miranda Seymour to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
Africa House
64-78 Kingsway
London WC2B 6AH

Simon & Schuster Australia
Sydney

A CIP catalogue for this book is available
from the British Library.

ISBN 13-digit: 978-0-7432-6867-7
ISBN 10-digit: 0-7432-6867-9

Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
The Bath Press, Bath
Bertrams

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like, for his perseverance and faith in this book, to express
warm gratitude to Anthony Goff, my agent and friend. I could not
have wished for a wiser editor than Andrew Gordon, whose
judgement proved invaluable. This book owes much to them both.
My gratitude also goes to Alan Hollinghurst for his unfailing
support and wise counsel. Thanks also to Edwina Barstow, Hannah
Corbett and to my excellent copy-editor, Robyn Karney. My
warm appreciation also goes to Reginald Piggott for sorting out
two complicated family trees.
I owe a debt of a different kind to my mother, whose support
has meant everything to me during the course of preparing and
writing what proved to be a difficult book for us both.
I thank my brother for having allowed me to feel that I could
write as I wished, and as I felt. This was generous, and made a great
difference to my approach.
I have been continuously grateful for the friendship and
excellent company of my son and daughter-in-law, and for the
restorative and understanding love of my husband -- and first reader.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The subject of this book is often referred to as 'my father'. He was,
in fact, 'our father'. As the son of the house, my brother knew him
from a different perspective.
This is the story of my father in relation to myself. It is, in that
sense, only a partial truth. It does not attempt to reflect my brother's
views, although I believe that he shares some of mine.
Some names have been changed.


'It seems, perhaps, a strange and unnecessary thing
to go prowling back into the recesses of the past
and to lift the decent curtain which has covered
the weary ugly follies. . .'

- Lord Howard de Walden, my mother's father,
in a letter to his five-year-old son; Gallipoli, 1915

'What do you know about your own family
anyway? They're such secretive organisms, I can't
be doing with them.'

--James Brooke to William Beckwith: Alan HoUinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

family corwectwns

fttv. lord Charles TitiRoy
4th son of 7thduki ofQrafton (1857-191!)
m. Hon.Ismay FitiOoy
daughter of 3d SaronSouthamptoji (/863-1952)
Leopold Stymour (I) m. MarySturgis m. (I) Bertram Fallt
(1841-1904)
(1851 -1942)	1st and last Baron fbrtsea
(1860-1946)





>	1	Šii
(lady)Victoria,m-Kichari'Dick! UMred Conway Edward
'Vita,'fttz&y
(1886-1965)
Charles sucaedtd as Edward (Udy)AntuFitzRjoy (lady) Violet (lord)John'Sammy'
lOtkduteofGrafton 1936 (1893-J9I7J (1S84-W6) FitiRoy Ktzftoy (1892-1970)*	m.lOthLord Byron (1883-1974-) (1399-1945)

Beauchamp Ethel Lionel
SturqisSeymour (mi- (1814-- 'Teddy' 'BoynU' (1881- (1889(1875-1959)
WO) 1948) (1677-1948) (1878-1965) l96$ W



Thomas Evelyn Scott-EMs m. 1912 ftUrgherite
van, Raalte
(1890-19 74)
8th 'Baron Homrd dt Maiden
(1880-1946)

John, 9th garon. Howard diWabkn (1912-1999)
Bronwen (1912-2003)
Elizabeth, (1914/9/6)
Prlscllia, (1916-1983)
faenor (1914-2002)
Hosemary m. George FitiRoy
Scott-EUis (1922)
Seymour (1923-1994)
Alex
(1914-2002)
m. CaplSamQurney
do
(1911-2000) m. Sheila, Butler


(Lord), (Lidy) = raised to title, on succession
of 10th Duke, offyafton in 1936.

* Fatherof Huqh, II tn Duke of Grafton (1919- )
and favoured cousin, Oliver (1923-19+4-).

Miranda
(ma- )

Thomas
09SZ- )

PROLOGUE

'Three obituaries!' a fierce old relation wrote after my father died.
'What on earth for! What did he ever do!
The point was fair. Her own late husband, a handsomely
moustached man with an outstanding war record, was of the type
who earn such tributes. But George FitzRoy Seymour - he was
concerned that the FitzRoy, recording some royal bed-hopping in
the seventeenth century, should never be overlooked -- had done
no such service to his country. He had no war record. Long and
dutiful service as a magistrate had earned him commendations
and praise, but no official honour. The fat red handbooks in which
he listed his London clubs - Pratt's and Brooks' in the issue of
1982 -- offered no history of worthy activities, while revealing
(father 'great great great grandson of Marquess of Hertford';
mother 'sister of 10th Duke of Grafton'; wife 'daughter of 8th
Baron Howard de Walden') that here was a man who took
exceptional pride in his connections. It saddened him that he had no
tide. His links to those who did were a solace.
Eccentricity has not always been encouraged by the prim editors
of Debrett. Invited to list his recreations, my father omitted
motorbikes and wrote instead: shooting, deerstalking and tennis.
Identifying himself as Lord of the Manor of Thrumpton provided
a greater source of satisfaction.
His address provides the clue to George FitzRoy Seymour's
most substantial achievement. Deposited with its childless owners
as a baby, he fell in love with the House that always seemed to be

his natural home. His vocation was announced in one of the first
roundhanded essays he wrote as a schoolboy. When he grew up, he
wrote, he wished to become the squ'arson of Thrumpton Hall,
combining the role of landowner and parson as his uncle, Lord
Byron, the poet's descendant, had done before him. He would
look after the tenants. He would be kind to his servants, especially
when they grew old. He would cherish and protect the home he
loved. The master who marked the essay, repelled by such
priggishness, scribbled a terse comment in red crayon, advising
young Seymour to find a style and topic more suited to his years.
The following week, my father handed in eight pages on the
importance of preserving the family monuments in Thrumpton's
village church. He was eleven years old. No suggestion had been
made that he would ever inherit the House to which he had
vowed his love. Uncertainty was not one of his failings.

My father died in May 1994. A gust of wind blew in through a
newly opened window, rippling the yellow hangings of the bed on
which he lay. My brother went along the landing to find our
mother and consult her about hymns for the funeral. I walked out
into the garden. Reaching up into the swaying branches of the
lilacs, I snapped them off until I stood knee-deep in the heavy
swags of blossom I had never, until that moment, been licensed to
cut. Returning to the House, I pushed at the wooden shutters of
the rooms on the ground floor, parting them to let in a flood of
lime-green light. Standing, hands on hips, at the far end of the
garden, I hurled shouts at the red-brick walls and arching gables
until they echoed back their reassurance: Free! Free!
In the little village church later that week, the vicar spoke of my
father as 'a man with a wound in his heart'. The description,
which startled nobody, could have been a reference to the anguish
he had recently experienced. It seemed more likely that the vicar,
a man who had known my father for thirty years, was thinking of
his aching need for a love greater than any one person had been
able to provide.
We buried his ashes privately, in the garden of the House to
which he gave his heart. The wording on the tablet that marked
the spot was borrowed from Christopher Wren's epitaph. 5/ monutnentum requiris, circumspice. The pride of it, loosely translated
here, felt right: If you wish to know me, look around you. Here I am.


We chose the words and here, still, he is. On troubled nights, he
comes to me in dreams, stalking back through the front door to
survey his home and take charge of it once more. He complains
that unknown people are sleeping in his room; that his cupboards
are filled with the sordid clothes of strangers. Speaking in a flat
voice, thinned by resentment, he explains that he intends to put the
House, his home, not ours, to rights. We buried a phantom, a
creature of our own wishes. We wanted him dead. Our mistake.
He never died. He just went travelling.
A white hand reaches out to pull down a parchment-coloured
blind at one of the library windows. Wearily, he reminds me of the
need to protect precious leather-bound books and rosewood tables
from the glare of daylight. Helpless, I watch him take his familiar
place at the head of the long dining table. Awaiting instructions, I find
myself dismissed to a side seat, far away. He observes, looking pained,
that the silver is tarnished, that the wine has been insufficiently aired,
and that the soup plates are cold. Standards have slipped, but all will
be well again. Everything, once again, is under his control.
I watch his body harden into the familiar lines of authority. I
long for him to leave. I know he never will.
It takes days for the sense of dread to wear off, not only of his
reproachful spirit, but of having failed the House, of having been
unworthy of his expectations.
His taste was not always for objects of beauty. This morning, I
came across a battered white plastic chair in the courtyard at the
back of the House, turned east to face the morning sun. The seat
is soiled, the shape is ugly. I want to throw it away. Sam Walker
disagrees. Sam and I read our first books together at the village dame
school where Sam's aunt kept order with a ruler and a whisde. Sam
has grown up to be a true Nottinghamshire man, plain-spoken and
reserved. He's worked at the House for forty years.
'You can't get rid of that,' he says. 'It's your father's chair.'
'The seat's broken. I'm sure he didn't mean us to keep it.'
Sam Walker's belief in preservation is legendary. Old lamp
fittings, massive radiograms, towel racks, broken deckchairs; they
never disappear. They go to rest in one of the stables to which only
Sam holds the key. Their return may be a matter of years, not
months, but their time will come.
Resolute, I fold my arms. 'There's no reason to keep it now.'
Sam looks at the wall behind me. 'Your father always sat on that
chair when ... he carried it down to the lakeside every afternoon
he was here after . . .' Hesitating, he stares harder at the wall. 'You
know. After it happened.'
Long-jawed and high-cheeked, Sam's eloquent face could have
been carved by a medieval mason. At this moment, it conveys no
expression. The message is clear. The chair may look empty, but
it still has an occupant.
The chair stays.

I can never hope to banish my father's presence from the House
that possessed his heart. I can make my peace by trying to
understand what made him the man he was. Sifting through the
drawers of diaries and ancient letters - like Sam Walker, George
FitzRoy Seymour was a man who threw nothing away - I can
assemble the fragments and see plainly what I always knew: that a
single passion governed his life, a love so great and so certain that
he was willing to sacrifice everything and everybody for it. 'Dear
Thrumpton, how I miss you tonight,' he wrote in 1944, when he
was twenty-one and had just paid a summer visit to his uncle's
home. 'As I grow older the House exerts an ever greater hold on me _ I love every tree and stone on the place, and every hold and
corner of the place. God send I never have to leave for ever.'
The House, constructed from rosy bricks and crowned with
curved stone gables, stands among the meadows flanking the River
Trent, in the middle of England, a hundred miles to the north of
London. Starting life as a modest Nottinghamshire manor house
built in the time of Shakespeare, it was enlarged twice. An
ambitious owner redesigned it in the seventeenth century, to
incorporate a large carved staircase and a grand reception room on
an upper floor. In the 1820s, the House gained a courtyard, a
library and a lake. The estate, easily encompassed by an hour's brisk
walk, is surprisingly varied in its landscape, incorporating traces of
an Iron Age fort and a Roman trading post. An eighteenth-century
stone weir breaks the level of the river that runs alongside the park's
expansive fields; pretty copses and airy beechwoods climb a long
line of hillside that blocks out all evidence of the twenty-first
century. (Until, that is, you walk the ridge along the hilltop and
look the other way, out to where a distant line of motorway traffic
snakes across a green plain and cooling towers puff steam clouds at
the wingtips of low-flying aircraft. This landscape has a different
kind of beauty, a kind my father did not acknowledge.)
'God send I never have to leave for ever.' There's no doubting
Thrumpton's charm, but what was it that could lead a boy of
twenty-one to make such a declaration? How could bricks and
mortar exert such power? What was 'the wound in his heart', so
painful to see, so difficult to comprehend?

To find the answer, time has to be turned back and confronted.

I'm sorry, but I simply don't see the point.'
My mother and I have been discussing my wish to write this
book for ten years. Anger and self-pity have kept me on hold.
Listening to myself as I talk to friends, telling them the stories,
polishing the details, I hear sourness in the tone, feel rage twist a
knife in my throat, and know the time hasn't yet come. I've
wondered if my mother's way, the path of silence, is the wiser
option. There are things it's easier to disclose in private than expose
to public view. There are things I've never understood, that I'm not
sure I want to examine.
'It's not as if you'd be writing one of your biographies,' she goes
on. 'He's your father.'
'Was,' I say fiercely. ' Was!
We're sitting late over supper in the kitchen of the House, our
faces lit, like uneasy conspirators, by a couple of candles.
'I don't know,' she says after a long pause. 'What do you want
me to do?'
'Be my conscience. Tell me when I go wrong.'
She gives me a sharp sideways look. 'I can tell you. It doesn't mean you'll do anything.'
'I'll listen.'
'It doesn't strike you,' she says after a pause, 'that you're too like
him to be objective?'
'Like him!' I can feel the heat of blood rushing to my cheeks. 'Like him?'
She winces. 'Is that so dreadful? Did you hate him so much? He
did love you, you know.'
'After his fashion.' Don't do this to me, I think. You know what he
was like. You know what we went through. Don't make me soft, not now.
'Well,' she says, standing up and brushing crumbs off her skirt,
'you're set on it and I can't stop you. But you've gone wrong already'
'I have?'
'I'm afraid so.' Solemnly, she nods. 'Cutting down lilacs?
Darling, do you still not know the difference between lilacs and a
buddleia, a butterfly tree? In our own garden? Good grief, George
must be turning in his grave.'
Even a phrase like that can summon him back. Later, brushing
hair before the dim glass in my bedroom, I catch the flicker of
shadow behind me, hear the sudden squeak of a pressed
floorboard.
'Goodnight!' I call. I wait for my mother's voice to answer me,
but the House is asleep inside the tall closed shutters. Not a sound
is to be heard now in the muffled quiet but the deep steady thud
of my own heart and the busy rattle of a distant train.
Part One

The House: Obsession

DICK AND VITA

'I expect you'll be talking about Barbara Castle,' my mother
remarks. We're having breakfast on a winter morning. When I
glance up, it's to see her feet stretched out towards the fire as she
admires a new treasure, a pair of slippers fluffed out to resemble
startled baby owls.
'I will?' Am I about to hear revelations of something too
improbable for fiction, news that my true-blue father had a secret
affair with an aristocrat-averse old politician who wouldn't - or would she? I want to sound casual, but I'm dismayed. This won't fit
the story I want to tell. It's out of character.
Sounds interesting,' I say carefully. 'Something I've missed?'
The owls withdraw under the table. My mother raps the dome
of her egg with a spoon and rallies herself from a moment of
slipped moorings.
Castle-maine! Who did you think I meant? You know, Charles
 mistress, the one he made Duchess of Cleveland. I can't
imagine anybody writing a book about George and leaving her
out. Dreadful money-grubber. Nothing to boast about that I could
ever see.'
I'm relieved - and she's right. It's inconceivable that I should
omit to mention the connection my father most treasured.
Snobbery is, after all, a significant aspect of the man. I can't, in
describing a passion for houses and great estates, undervalue the
Euston link, the precious ducal kinship.

Extract from Frederic Shoberl's The Beauties of England and
Wales, 1813:
EUSTON, a village, pleasantly situated on the Lesser Ouse, was
formerly the lordship of a family of that name. It afterwards
descended to the family of Pattishall, and from them to Sir
Henry Bennet, who . . . built Euston Hall; and left an only
daughter, Isabella, married to Henry Fitzroy, one of the natural
children of King Charles II, by the Duchess of Cleveland, who
was created by his father Earl of Euston and Duke of Grafton,
and was the ancestor of the present noble proprietor of Euston.

'I love your Euston,' my father wrote to his mother in 1942. He
was nineteen, and enjoying a rare overnight stay with his favourite
FitzRoy cousin at the Hall. It was the Hall, the Duke of Grafton's
country seat, on which my father always dwelt when he spoke to
us of Euston. I imagined that this was where his mother, the
Duke's granddaughter, had grown up.
This was a misconception. Vita FitzRoy had not lived at the
Hall. Her home, never alluded to by my father, was at the rectory
across the road.
Vita kept a diary from the age of eight. Her daily entries conjure
up a cheerful picture of life at the turn of the century in East
Anglia, a part of England that had not altered much since Frederic
Shoberl made his entry on Euston in 1813. Water was heated on
the rectory's kitchen range; oil lamps and candles lit the rooms;
Vita and her two sisters shared a bedroom, and a schoolroom
governess, until their mid-teens. On summer days, they knotted up
their long serge skirts and bicycled into Bury St Edmunds where,
on one occasion, they saw a blue man, a giant and a midget, who
were visiting the market town with Buffalo Bill's travelling circus;
in the evenings, they clustered round their mother, Ismay, while
she read to them from the novels of Walter Scott. Sometimes,
when their boisterous brothers came home from boarding school,
the girls played silly family games: Puff Poilliard, Rumble Puppy,
Teapot and Up Jenkins.
Vita was a lively, hot-tempered child. 'I fought with Fraulein at
my music lesson,' she noted during the summer she turned
fourteen. 'This morning [I had] another fearful row with Fraulein.
Afternoon. Row continued with fearful heat.' A day later, feeling
penitent, she noted that Fraulein had kissed her and did not seem
cross.
'I love your Euston,' my father had written. He never
comprehended how little affection Vita felt for the large, handsome
Hall and its owner, a grandfather who was rarely there. She
responded with excitement, not dismay, in 1902, when a large
portion of the Hall went up in a blaze. Five horsedrawn fire
engines lumbered up the village street, too late to save the grand
staircase and the finest staterooms. Vita, thrilled and awed, watched
the spectacle with her father, the rector, from the top of the church
tower.
A year later, Charles FitzRoy was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Less work, and plenty of rest in a warm climate: this was the
doctor's prescription. A handout from the rector's father would
have helped him to follow it. But the Duke of Grafton, glumly
contemplating the devastation of Euston Hall, decided that
restoration and enlargement of the family house came first. Charles
FitzRoy was forced to settle for taking holidays at Eastbourne; at
home, the dust of bricks, mortar and stone chippings blew across
the road, whitening the rectory windows and caking his throat.
Euston Hall, when the expensive work of renovation had been
completed, was larger than ever. The Duke, who preferred Wakefield
Place, his home in Northamptonshire, stayed away.

George FitzRoy Seymour's maternal grandfather, the Reverend
Lord Charles FitzRoy. He died of tuberculosis in 1911,
the year in which George's parents married.

The sense of straitened circumstances at the rectory comes
through the diaries more poignantly because it is mentioned so
seldom. Vita wore an old dress freshened up with new buttons and
a frill of lace for her first grown-up dance. When rich friends
invited her to stay, she was ordered to decline. The servants of rich
families expected lavish tips; the rector's family couldn't afford
them. 'Mother says it would be too extravagant,' Vita told her
diary; instead, she was sent on a cost-free visit to her grandfather's
house, in Northamptonshire.
Her stay began agreeably. Two days after her arrival, Vita
cautiously noted that the Duke had been quite good-tempered 'so
far.' On the third morning, a female guest sneezed at breakfast;
pressed to explain herself, she admitted to a cold. Typhoid fever
could not have caused more alarm. Rising from his chair at the
head of the table, the host waved away a whimpered apology and
stalked out of the dining room. He was not seen again. An order
was despatched, via the butler, that the house must be vacated by
nightfall; Vita was offered the consolation of a parting gift.
Unwrapping it at the rectory that night, she found only a signed
and plainly framed photograph of her grandfather.
At the beginning of 1908, Charles FitzRoy and his family faced
a domestic crisis. His youngest daughter, Violet, had fallen in love
with a military man; aristocratic genes did not console Nigel
Maitland-Wilson's parents for Miss FitzRoy s shortage of cash. They
wanted evidence that her family could support her; when Violet shed
tears, the rector decided to help raise money by selling his favourite
horse, and set about it without consultation. When he returned from
Bury market with a beaming smile on his face and thirteen pounds
in his pocket, even Vita knew he had been duped: 'Dad could never
be a good horse-dealer or a bargainer in anything! she noted. Still,
brightening, she thought that he was looking 'awfully well - for him'.
She was being optimistic. Tuberculosis had begun to strip the fat from
Charles FitzRoy s athletic frame. He had three years left to live.
Dancing offered Vita a release from worry as her father's illness became increasingly hard to ignore. At the age of eighteen, her
favourite treat was to stay over for a dance at one of the local big
houses. In the past, the three sisters had always gone together, often
sharing a bed in some freezing room up in an attic. Anna, the oldest,
announced that she was bored by dances; Violet (the MaitlandWilsons
had reluctantly consented to their son's engagement), was a
married woman. Vita, in the late spring of 1908, was obliged to
look for a new companion.
She found one in her cousin. Linda Nelson was smartly turned
out and boldly spoken. She smoked, drank cocktails, expressed
doubt about the existence of God, and drove her own car. Linda
shared Vita's love of dancing, but she was not eager to go about
with a girl who wore home-made dresses. When Vita admitted
that she couldn't afford to buy new ones, Linda urged her to write
to the Duke. Surely, however stingy he was, the old wretch could
afford to buy his granddaughter a dress?
Fuelled by Linda's untipped cigarettes ('we smoked until we felt
quite ill'), Vita concocted and despatched an elaborately affectionate
letter. The response, to her amazement, was prompt: for her next
dance, Vita wore silver kid slippers and a brand-new blue voile dress
with a shimmering glace lining, paid for by a cheque from the Duke.
'Hereward Wake and I had great fun dancing together,' she
reported to the diary the following day. 'He is most awfully jolly
and nice.' She had taken a tumble on the floor, but Hereward had
helped her to her feet, 'and I wasn't a bit hurt'. She wondered if
Sir Hereward's unusual name meant that he was descended from
the Saxon hero, a thought she found most romantic. (She had just
read Scott's novel, Ivanhoe.) A week later, Hereward and she were
in each other's arms once more. A dinner service of pure gold had
been laid out in the Marble Hall at Stowe, an architectural wonder
house in Buckinghamshire, soon to change use and become a boys'
school. Two bands had played in relays until the sun came up.
'Danced in the ball room, the drawing room, the dining room and
the Hall!' Vita reported with glee. 'We danced all night!' Later,
they walked beside a stream towards William Kent's Temple of the
Worthies, where she admired busts of Milton and Shakespeare. She
doesn't mention whether Hereward kissed her.
Perhaps Sir Hereward failed to live up to his heroic name;
perhaps Vita's zest for dancing wore him out; all I know is that she
never mentioned him again. A few months later, she was invited
to a houseparty in Scotland. The guests included the raffishly named
Tiger Howard, Lord and Lady Strathmore, Aubrey Herbert, Neva
Trefusis, Pdchard Seymour and a Mr Gore. 'All young,' Vita noted,
'and very jolly'
'Jolly' is just the word for it. They started by going to a fancy
dress ball, at which Vita showed up as a Romney painting of
'Flora', after having her cheeks rouged by Tiger Howard; on the
following night, they stayed home and had 'great sport' after
dinner, romping in the drawing room to the music of a pianola.
'Mr Gore dances too beautifully,' Vita noted, and added he was said
to be the best dancer in London. 'He is awfully nice, too,' she
added, 'most amusing - in fact, I like him far the best.' They
collaborated in a game of charades the following night; on the
next, Mr Gore and she beat all the rest in a game of billiards.
Hereward had been forgotten or surpassed; more surprisingly,
my grandmother had not a word to say about Mr Gore's friend and
companion, the man she would later marry. Her only reference to
Richard Seymour on this occasion was a brief mention of the date
on which he, together with Mr Gore, returned to London.
Am I missing the story of a love affair? Vita abandoned her diary
the following year; she did not resume it until well after her
marriage. Did Mr Gore - so graceful on the dance floor, so deft at
croquet, so swift on the tennis court - capture my grandmother's
heart that summer, only to break it? Did my shy grandfather catch
her on the rebound? The letters and diaries have nothing to say.
Vita married Richard Sturgis Seymour (he was always known
to his friends and family as Dick) in April 1911. Her father, who
took the service himself, died that autumn; her mother told Dick
that worries about the marriage had shortened the rector's life.
Ismay FitzRoy was a troublemaker who always showed a flair for
the dramatic statement; nevertheless, there was cause for concern.
Dick Seymour s career was flourishing when he visited Scotland with
his friend, Mr Gore. He had served both as First Secretary and as a
hard-working head of Chancery in Paris, Vienna and Berlin; now,
aged thirty-two, he counted on being summoned to head an embassy,
a position for which he was well prepared. Instead, in the summer of
1911, just after his marriage to Vita, he was ordered to prepare for a
transfer from Berlin to Copenhagen. This was a disagreeable shock.
Copenhagen was a charming city, but for a diplomat of Dick
Seymour's age and experience it meant only one thing: demotion. In
1911, a well-educated, hard-working man's career had abruptly been
thrown into reverse.
This was baffling to Dick, and distressing to his wife's family.
Seeking explanations, they found none. Dick's chief, Sir Edward
Goschen, pleaded for him in a private letter to Sir Edward Grey,
the Secretary of State. Richard Seymour was a man of complete
integrity, he pleaded; he was known for his conscientiousness,
his industry and his intelligence. He did not deserve such
treatment.
Grey never answered. Dick, bearing his humiliation with grace,
thought he knew why. Grey's secretary at the time was William
Tyrrell, a man referred to in all Dick's personal notes as 'the black
knight'. For reasons that have never been clear, Tyrrell loathed
Dick Seymour. The family think that Dick may have disparaged his
colleague's olive complexion (he had an Indian grandmother). All
that can be said for certain is that Tyrrell treated Dick as an enemy
and took steps to block his advancement. It was, my grandfather
wrote fifty years later, 'a dirty business'.
Copenhagen marked the beginning of an end to Dick Seymour's
career. In 1917, he was offered another disappointing position, at
The Hague; in 1920, he and Vita were despatched to the Legation
at Bangkok. Although awarded the trappings of success (a fine
house, plenty of servants, daily contact with Siam's young ruler),
Dick knew that his position carried no weight. He was coming
into middle age and his chances of being offered a decent post were
vanishing. Worryingly for a father of two young children, he still
had no home of his own.
'Surely we must some day get something if we only stick to it,'
Dick wrote to Vita from The Hague in 1917; five years later, back
from Bangkok and with a third, most unexpected baby on the way,
they at last found a house in Surrey that seemed affordable. Dick's
Bostonian mother, born Mary Sturgis and always known as May,
had meanwhile sold her vast mansion on Piccadilly. Grumbling of
fallen circumstances, she moved to a slightly smaller home, in
Eaton Square. May promised to provide her son with some
furniture; two weeks later, she packed up and sent off her
contributions: two brass-handled penwipers and a set of old
fashioned kitchen scales.
'Well, you know what that was about,' my mother comments.
'Beastly old woman: she was keeping the money to buy that
wretched Bertie Falle' -- she rhymes it with Hall -- 'a title. When
you think of the money she had! And the jewels!'
The only remaining evidence of May's wealth -- she was coheiress
to a banking fortune -- is in a portrait that she gave to my
father. (She liked young George for sharing her passionate interest
in ancestry.) Stroking the surface of the paint, I can feel the sharp
points of light with which the artist has dutifully picked out every one
of the two hundred pearls in the spectacular necklace that May sold
in 1930 to help buy her second husband a barony.
May was fifty-three when Dick's father died in 1904. Bertie
Falle, a broad-shouldered and chestnut-haired young politician
from Jersey -- he was considerably younger than May -- was already
her lover. In 1906, she married him. From then on, May's prime
object in life was to obtain a barony for her adored Bertie. It took
thirty years and half a million pounds; in 1936, Sir Bertrand Falle
(Bertie had been more respectably honoured in 1916, for his
services as MP for Portsmouth) finally became Lord Portsea.
Lack of furniture aside, Dick and Vita were overjoyed to be
settled at last in a home of their own. Hill House, a low, creeper
clad house near Godalming in Surrey, was where my father George

was born in 1923, when Vita was thirty-seven. The celebrations at
his birth were overshadowed by a sudden deterioration in Dick
Seymour's health. He felt pains in his side; his appetite waned; he
experienced difficulty in breathing. Lady Falle wrote to suggest that
her son should try eating less; Vita, remembering her father's slow
death, insisted that Dick must see a specialist. The verdict was
alarming; Dick had weak lungs, asthma and a bad heart condition.
A change of climate was prescribed.
He got it. Dick's career had been on hold since his return from
Bangkok. In 1924, he received a new posting. The London
specialist, when he heard that his patient was being sent to La Paz,
expressed concern. No middle-aged invalid suffering fom
breathlessness and a weak heart should be expected to take up a
new life fourteen thousand feet above sea level, where gasping
babies turned blue and strong men fainted if they walked uphill at
normal speed. La Paz was a deathtrap for the weak. The
appointment was surely a mistake?
There had been none. Dick, conscious that his old enemy had
become a force to reckon with in the Foreign Office, was
convinced that William Tyrrell had chosen him for the post.
The appointment was for an indefinite period. Hill House
would have to be sold. The two older children, Leo and Alexanda,
aged twelve and eleven, would remain at their English schools and
spend holidays with relations. But what, Vita wondered, was to be
the fate of her precious baby, the child she had lovingly named in
memory of her friend George Vyse, a cripple who had died at the
age of thirty?
It's possible that her memory of George Vyse's fragility and early
death heightened Vita's sense of her baby's need for special care.
Her first impulse was to take George with her to Bolivia; advised
of the potential risks to his health, she racked her brains for a
solution. George was such a delicate little creature: who would be
worthy of such a precious charge?
Dick's mother - bright, hard and engrossed in the social round was
out of the question. Violet Wilson, Vita's younger sister, had
gone to India with her husband; Anna, married at long last, but
possessing no children of her own, seemed an unlikely candidate
for baby care. This left only Vita's mother.
Ismay FitzRoy had been living alone for almost ten years when,
in 1920, she fixed a widow's eye on the dapper little baron who
was courting Anna, her eldest daughter. It was noticed that Ismay
had started to wear unsuitably girlish hats. A sharp-tongued cousin
commented that rouge must be responsible for such uncommonly
flushed cheeks in a woman past her prime.
Her children were outraged, and not just by the rouge. As a
mother, Ismay had never shown much affection for her eldest
daughter; surely, now that plain, awkward Anna was thirty-five, she
could be allowed some happiness? Charlie Byron, a shy bachelor
who had recently inherited a handsome country home from his
aunt, was an ideal match. True, he was capricious, old-fashioned





20
21
In My Fathers House

and nearing sixty; nevertheless, he owned a house in London and
two estates, in Essex and Nottinghamshire. Unlike his grandfather's
cousin, the poet, of whom he stoutly disapproved, this Lord Byron
possessed a character of flawless respectability.
Charlie Byron had never been much troubled by women during
his placid residence as the rector of Langford, on his family's Essex
estate. Forced now to decide whether flirtatious Ismay or bashful
Anna would make the better chatelaine for his new home, he
dithered, and declined to commit himself to either. Ismay became
imperious; Anna, seeing her last chance of marriage slipping away,
grew tearful. Urgent family consultations were held; Anna's oldest
brother decided to take the initiative. Escorting his nervous sister
to Nottinghamshire, Charles FitzRoy rang the bell at Thrumpton
hall, greeted his host, ordered him to take Anna into the billiard
room - and bolted the door. It was winter. The billiard room was
chilly. Lord Byron, growing a little shrill, demanded that he should
be released. Charlie FitzRoy sat still, and waited. An hour later,
Anna emerged, an engaged woman. Six months later, she became
Lady Byron.
Ismay FitzRoy was displeased, but undefeated. If she was not to
have a husband, she intended to have fun. Sammy, her youngest
son, a raffish lad of twenty-three with a weakness for drink, was
ready to help.
From a distance, I can warm to the old lady's spirit when I read
her accounts of vagabonding around England with young Sammy
in a splendid touring car, known as 'the hooter'. As a mother,
however, Ismay did not strike Vita as a suitable guardian for her
beloved George. Time was drawing on, and her options were
limited. It was true that Anna had no children and no experience
of caring for them. Thrumpton was, nevertheless, equipped with
servants, a large garden and, should George fall ill, a trustworthy
doctor in the next village. Anna sent word that her husband was
willing to give little George house room, so long as he caused no
disruption.

Photo of May, my father's paternal grandmother,
seen here shortly before her death in 1942.

Photo of George FitzRoy Seymour's maternal grandmother, Ismay FitzRoy,
in 1918, shortly before she set her cap at Charlie Byron,
the bashful rector of Thrumpton.




By the end of September 1924, Vita had made the decision that
would prove so momentous in shaping my father's life. As his parents
set off for the Liverpool docks in preparation for their journey to
South America, George, by then a toddler of almost two, smartly
dressed in a white wool knee-length coat, and clinging tightly to the
hand of his nursemaid, climbed the staircase to his new quarters, a
dimly lit range of rooms on an upper floor known as the Barracks.
Thrumpton Hall, a large and isolated house in south Nottinghamshire,
was to be his home for the undetermined future. He was, as
Charlie Byron impressively informed him, the only child to have
lived there for three hundred years.
him in frocks and rompers again.' Twisting her knife harder in the
next letter, Ismay wrote that she had not at first wanted to mention
how eagerly George had run out of the Byrons' house to greet her,
or how he burst into tears when he saw no sign of 'mummy'.
Shedding tears herself, Vita was tempted to wonder if she could
abandon Dick on their arrival, and take the next steamer back to
Liverpool.
I have kept a photograph of Dick and Vita Seymour in their old
age. Snapped by my mother on a summer afternoon at the seaside,
they sit beside each other on an iron bench. Dick looks wistfully
at the camera; Vita keeps her hands clamped together on her lap.
You could cut the photograph in half and never guess that these
two had once been a couple.
'I wouldn't have wanted to be on that boat to La Paz with her,'
my mother says. 'She could be quite cruel, you know, when she
was angry'


"'«; fi.-u'
Travelling slowly towards La Paz, Vita was torn between longing and
dread for the voluminous, close-written letters from her mother that
now formed her chief contact with the family. Reports on their
destination were discouraging. La Paz was said by everybody to be
quite frightful, Ismay FitzRoy wrote. Angry not to have been put in
charge of her grandson, she added a grim report of his situation.
Poor little George! She had seen him at Thrumpton and noticed
how hard he clung to his nurse's hand when he was brought
downstairs. The house was enormous and fearfully gloomy; scarcely
a lamp in the place and oozing with damp, not at all suitable for a
child so prone to coughs and colds. Still, George looked sweeter than
ever. Such a pity that Charlie Byron and Anna insisted on keeping
him hidden away in those dreary rooms on the top floor. What fun
he might have had, living with his grandmother!
Ismay's calculated words had the desired effect. 'Beloved little
George,' Vita wrote in anguish. 'I can't bear to feel I'll never see

My father's parents as I remember them, an old couple,
seated side by side but not companiably.





I answer that I think either of us would have been equally irate.
Vita, after all, had married a man who seemed likely to offer her
a pleasant future in Paris or Berlin, not indefinite exile on the other
side of the world. My mother, who has been reading a book about
diplomatic wives, takes the view that Vita should have accepted her
fate with a better grace.
'But it must have been so frustrating for her, feeling they
deserved a better posting and not being able to do anything about
it.'
'Why did you say that was?' my mother asks. 'Something to do
with Dick's temper?'
'His temper?'
'Dreadful!'
I'm astonished. I was ten when my grandfather died. I can
remember his wheezing chuckle, the slow blink of pale blue eyes,
enlarged by the thick lenses of old-fashioned glasses. Nothing
more. There's no image of violence in my childhood memories of
him; there's no evidence of it in the wistful memoir he began to
write while he was in La Paz, or in the mild letters written earlier,
when he was at The Hague during the War and longing to be
reunited with his family. He wrote to Vita of his bewilderment at
the way he was being cold-shouldered by the Foreign Office, and
of his love. 'I miss you and the children dreadfully' he told her; 'I
wish the time until we meet could go a little faster.' Dick Seymour
sounds kind and a little sad, just as he always seemed to me.
And yet. I'd forgotten something that may be relevant. Not long
before my grandfather's death, my father dropped me off to have
tea with the old couple at their London flat. The live-in
companion opened the door and told me that Mr Seymour had
gone to bed for the day. He was too ill to be seen. I was to go into
the front room and take care not to talk too loudly.
Sitting by the window that looked out across a flint-grey
Thames, I played a game of snap with my grandmother and sipped
the diluted orange squash which always tasted different in London
from the country, brinily chemical. I asked if I might go to the
bathroom. As I walked towards it, something darkened the end of
the passage and rushed at me with a roar.
Confusion and rage reddened the air; my fear could not have
been greater if a mountain bear had sprung out of a cupboard and
shown its claws. Turning, I fled back into the safety of the front
room. My grandmother stood with her back against the window,
looking down at me with an anxious stare that warned against
making a fuss. I picked up a book and opened it, pretending to
read while the words ran together in a jumble of black markings.
Behind me, I could hear my grandmother and the companion,
whispering urgently. They glanced at me and left the room.
Listening at the door, I heard two deep, harsh shouts, heavy
movements of something being dragged, and a moan. I sat down
quickly and began turning the pages again. It seemed as if my
grandfather's place in the flat had been usurped by a frightening
stranger, who had to be controlled.
The memory is a striking one and my mother insists that Dick
Seymour could be terrifying when enraged. Still, his writings offer
no confirming evidence. Even Ismay, who clearly despised her sonin-law,
never mentioned his temper in her troublemaking letters to
Vita. Call it family loyalty if you like, but I think my grandfather
was shabbily treated.
I think, too, that Vita's attitude may have hindered his advancement.
My grandmother was not the sort of woman who had
stiffened the Empire's backbone. Prepared to loathe La Paz before
even setting foot in Bolivia, she kept a record of life there that
made Job's trials sound lightweight. The rain never stopped. The
house was hideous. The housekeeper had no knowledge of English
or French (surely Vita could have tried to learn a few phrases of
Spanish?); the high altitude kept them both in a state of constant
exhaustion.
Marooned in a country she detested, among people with whom
she found no common bond - she despised the Bolivians and
made no attempt to hide her boredom from the ladies of La Paz's
diplomatic colony - Vita lived for the postbag and for news of her
children. Leo and Alex were said to be flourishing, but how could
she bear to think of George, so young still that he might - this was
her greatest fear -- forget her and begin to look on Anna as his
mother?
She had lost him; she was convinced of it. She had left him
behind because she feared the risk to a delicate child's health of
such a journey. Now, regretting her decision, she fumed at the
unhappiness her husband's stalled career had inflicted. Everything,
she confided to her mother and to Anna, was so unjust. The one
treat she had keenly anticipated, a train journey to Lake Titicaca,
Cuzco and Machu Picchu, ended disastrously when Dick turned
blue from lack of breath and had to be transported back to La Paz
and confined to his bed for a month. All requests for proper
medical treatment had, as usual, been ignored. Dick's new deputy,
meanwhile, put in a plea of ill-health and was granted permission
to leave on the spot. Embassy servants carried him to the train on
a stretcher; when Vita peered though the window of his
compartment, she saw the lively young deputy sitting upright and
laughing at her as he waved goodbye.
Surely, Ismay FitzRoy wrote, dear Lady Falle could use her
political connections? Was Dick entirely without - she might as
well have said 'guts' -- influence over his own mother? Timidly,
Dick wrote to beg for help and to admit, with characteristic
understatement, that life in Bolivia was becoming a little bleak. A
word to Lady Falle's friend, Mrs Austen Chamberlain, could do so
much for them (Chamberlain was the new Foreign Secretary to
Baldwin's government). Any assistance that his mother could offer
them to cover the older children's school bills would be gladly
received.

The response was worse than either he or Vita could have
feared. Lady Falle was afraid that she did not have a  penny to spare
for school fees, but she had done as they wished. She had spoken
to the Chamberlains. The news was excellent: Dick was offered an
immediate transfer: to Bogota. Such a chance would not come
again; she urged him to accept.
Dick was a dutiful son; even so, he flinched. 'We never had a
moment's thought about refusing,' Vita confided to her diary, 'but
the shock of such an offer after Bangkok and La Paz was really awful. Their colleagues agreed; better to stay in La Paz than sink
to Bogota.
The final straw for Vita came in a letter from her mother. It
brought the news that dear little George now addressed Anna
Byron as 'mummy'. She had suffered enough. Booking a passage
home, she left her husband to solace himself with the memories of
his schooldays. Arriving at Liverpool after a year's absence, she was
greeted by a letter from Anna. George had just returned from a
weekend with Ismay. 'And directly he got into the hall,' Anna
wrote with tactless pride, 'he said: "I've come home now!'"
How old do you have to be to form a passion that will endure
for a lifetime? The answer in my father's case seems clear.
Abandoned at the age of two, he had given his heart to
Thrumpton. No human love would ever displace it.
My mother has found a newspaper cutting about Mrs Wescomb's
Winter Ball, held at Thrumpton Hall in 1840. The gushing prose
('a scene of profuse hospitality and festivity ... a most elegant
supper ... the graceful pleasures of the dance ... a brilliant display
of loveliness and beauty') was churned out for every grand event
of the time. What startles us is the news that over a hundred people
were shepherded up the grand carved staircase to dance in what the
newspaper describes as 'the upper drawing room'.
'A hundred people!' My mother and I gaze at each other, openmouthed.
The frail wooden floor of this pretty rose-pink reception
room has collapsed twice in the last seventy years. The idea of
fitting a hundred dancers, not to mention Mr Quick's quadrille
band, into such a delicate structure, is beyond our imagining.
The Wescombs had plenty to celebrate in 1840 and no serious
concern for the cost of a collapsed floor. A bachelor uncle had
just left Thrumpton Hall to Miss Lucy Wescomb, a girl of seventeen.
At the age of twenty-one, she could claim her estate; until then,
Lucy's mother was formally in charge of: one large red-brick
Jacobean house, a thousand acres of land, four farms, thirty employees,
fifteen cottages, and three lively, strong-willed daughters in their
teens. As if that were not enough, Mrs Wescomb was still supervising
Langford, another estate of a thousand acres in Essex, east of
London, where the girls had all grown up.
Lucy and her favourite sister later married two brothers,
descendants of the celebrated Lord Byron. Since Lucy had no
children, her nephew became her heir. Charlie Byron - my father's
uncle - was born on the Essex estate in 1861; fifty years later,
he was still the bachelor rector of Langford, patiently waiting to
inherit - but only for the duration of his own life - a house he
scarcely knew.
'So cruel, those life tenancies,' my mother sighs. 'When you
think of having all the work and care of upkeep, and always
knowing that your home isn't your own.'
I glance at her. Thrumpton now belongs to me; does she mind
living as a guest in a house to which she gave the best part of her
life? Is that what she's thinking? Or is she remembering the Welsh
castle in which she grew up, always supposing that her parents
owned it, until the day the owners returned, and my mother's
family were forced to leave? I can't tell. It's not always easy to read
my mother's thoughts; she's had too long to learn how best to hide
them.
My father was brought up on tales of Lucy Byron's reign. To
me, she sounds a monster; to him, and to the Thrumpton villagers
who told him their memories, Lucy was a character. Why should
they have minded when she refused to have a pub in the village,
when beer was always available from the Hall's own brewhouse?
Hemming and repairing Lady Byron's bedsheets didn't strike them
as inappropriate work for girl pupils at the village school. Neither
could she be blamed for having an eye for a handsome lad (Lucy's
seven footmen were strikingly good-looking) or for keeping her
title after her husband died and she married her cousin Mr Philip
Douglas. Everybody knew her as Lady Byron; her tenants and
servants shared her pride in the name. Mrs Douglas didn't convey
the same glamour.
'Just like you,' my mother says when I comment that this was
rather hard on Lucy's second husband. 'Catch you changing your
name.'
'That's different. I'm a writer. It's my professional name.'
'Lucy employed over thirty people,' my mother observes.
'What's unprofessional about that? Anyway, she doted on Philip
Douglas. I don't suppose he minded.'
Didn't he? I remember the story my father loved to tell, of Lucy
sitting bolt upright each Sunday morning in the front pew of the
little village church she'd spent a fortune on making her own. (Her
first step had been to order all evidence of the House's previous
owners to be removed from the walls and banished to the bell
tower.) A plump lapdog lay between the iron hoops that fanned out
her long skirt; above the feathered crest of his wife's black crepe hat,
Mr Douglas, the rector, spoke mildly to the parishioners of God's
message. Lucy, who needed no advice from God, took out her gold
repeater watch and stared at it. At midday precisely, even when her
husband was still in mid-sentence, she thumped the tiled floor with
her ebony cane. The congregation rose for the last hymn; the rector,
putting away his notes, crept back down the pulpit steps.
'Dreadful old woman!' my father said, beaming approval.
It was good of Lucy to build a block of alms buildings for the
poor, and to allow the villagers the freedom of the estate for their
Sunday afternoon strolls. I've also heard how a sick coachman was
dismissed after twenty years of service for allowing Lady Byron to
catch a cold from him. I've heard of children being ordered to
curtsey and doff their caps whenever she passed by, and of a family
being evicted from their cottage because they missed a week's rent.
But time has softened the sharp edges in village memories and
these stories have to be coaxed into the light. The old ladies I
interview want to bathe the past in gold. They'll only tell me how
grateful their parents were for Lady Byron's garden fete and the
Christmas party up at the House, with supper for all the children
of the village, their presents stacked ready and beautifully wrapped
under a candlelit tree. Lucy lived in a handsome home cared for by
twenty-two house-servants, while her village workforce shivered
in unheated cottages with outside privies: the contrast doesn't
appear to bother their descendants at all.
'Of course it doesn't,' my mother says, sounding strangely like
my father. 'Village people didn't like to travel in those days. They
lived at home, they married locally, and they all worked for the big
house. It was a good system. They weren't just servants, you know.
They were our friends.' And she tells me about the laundrymaid
everybody in the village knew as Aunt Alice. 'She was still wearing
Lucy Byron's underwear when I came here,' my mother says.
'Beautiful, lace-edged. You'd never see it outside a museum today.
Lucy left every stitch of it to Alice.'
I don't know what to make of this. Did owning Lucy's lace
bloomers and being addressed as a relation make up for years of
scrubbing linen and for hands chafed raw with bleach and carbolic?
Alice seems to have thought so, and so does my mother.
'We were friends,' she says again. 'That's what your generation
never understand.'

Lucy Byron had been dead for over a decade when my father
arrived at Thrumpton for the first time on a damp autumn evening
in 1924. Her presence still governed the House. Lucy's last portrait
looked down the Carolean carved staircase which, on her orders,
had been coated with treacle-black varnish; her ugliest contribution
to the House, a Victorian billiard room, squatted beside it like a
crematorium; her laurels and yews filled the garden with clumps of
darkness. The household remained buried in the nineteenth
century, as it had been when Charlie Byron, Lucy's nephew and
heir, first visited it as a boy. This was how he was content for it to
remain. This was the rigid form from which my father took his
blueprint for the future.
Photo of Anna Byron, my father's childless aunt, sitting out on a garden wall
at Thrumpton in 1928. George FitzRoy Seymour, already adopted
as the child of the house, was five years old.

'Fancy if they take electric power through Thrumpton and you
have it and the telephone!' Vita wrote to her sister from La Paz in
1925. Anna, after four years of marriage, was still struggling to
accustom herself to life in a house that had no gas, no telephone
line, no electricity and no mains water supply. From the pulpit in
Thrumpton Church, her old-fashioned husband warned the
congregation against the dangers of progress; in Charlie Byron's
home, a jangling row of bells, each pealing an identifiable note,
called servants to their duties around the House throughout the
day. A single oil lamp was carried into the drawing room at dusk;
George's nurse, bringing her charge down to wish his aunt and
uncle goodnight, was given a small tallow candle to light their way
back to the top floor.
And yet this was the House that won my father's heart. I have
trouble in understanding how this happened. Some of the details
of his first years there are farcical: I can't imagine the feelings of
a small boy who is woken each morning by Miss Sarah Death (a
housemaid) and who has his small shoes polished by Mr Percy
Crush (a footman). Others make me shudder. I know that Anna
Byron was under her husband's thumb, but how could she have
allowed a frightened child to be left alone, night after night (Nurse
Ethel preferred to spend her evenings chatting in the Servants' Hall
with Mr Crush, Miss Death and Mr Shotbolt, the butler), in a chilly,
carpetless room at the top of the House? The Byrons themselves
slept in cosier quarters on the floor below; up at the top, so my
father always told me, when the wind rattled the windows, he could
hear the sound of a girl crying. Sixty years earlier, in Lucy Byron's
day, a housemaid, ordered to leave when she got pregnant, had
hanged herself from the skylight outside his bedroom door.
'Rubbish!' my mother exclaims. 'Absolute rubbish!'
My mother has no time for ghosts. I think those desolate and
unattended nights may help explain a fear of solitude so acute that
my father could not, in later years, even walk to the end of the
village without company.
This doesn't help. I'm not looking for an explanation of his
terror, but a reason for the passionate attachment he formed to the
House. From the time he first spoke of it as home at the age of
three, his love of Thrumpton dominated my father's existence. He
wedded himself to the place with a passion that knew no reserve.
How did it come about? Letters that he wrote later use 'an
oppressively Victorian upbringing' to justify his taste for a less
orthodox life. Oddly, it was one of the most Victorian aspects of
his life there that had most entranced him.
'Shotbolt was my ally,' he wrote. 'Shotbolt was my friend.'
Mr Shotbolt, the Byrons' butler, was an asthmatic ex-serviceman
who had been gassed in the trenches. (He died in 1938, aged
less than fifty, of a lung-related condition.) It was the butler who,
having discovered that music was the best way to check a small
boy's tears, took out his tin whistle. Shotbolt taught my father
to sing, whistle, and dance a jig: "Pop Goes the Weasel" and "I
Ain't Nobody's Darling" were their star turns in the Servants' Hall.
(It is so nice to hear of my little angel being fond of music and
dancing to the rhythm,' Vita wrote wistfully when Anna reported
on George's improved spirits.)
On his off-duty afternoons, Shotbolt obtained permission to
take Master George out in the park. From Shotbolt, my father
learned that a badger will share its sett with a fox's earth, and that
the hills at Thrumpton hide shards of bright pottery left over from
Roman times. On long Sunday afternoons, when Shotbolt went
fishing down by the ferry, my father sat beside him on the bank,
watching the play of light on water and listening to stories of the
butler's own country childhood, out on the Romney Marsh.
'Very poetic,' my mother says suspiciously. 'He didn't tell me all
that.' I suspect that she's forgotten, for my father wrote it all out and
typed it up, as a loving tribute to the man who first made him look
on Thrumpton as his home.
Shotbolt introduced him to the land; a young electrician took
him deep into the bowels of the House and, perhaps, gave him the
sense that it could be mastered.
Anna used all the persuasive power of which she was capable to
make her old-fashioned husband see that Life could not be lived by
oil-lamps and candles for ever. In 1927, worn down by her insistence, Charlie Byron gave his consent: the House would be
wired. (The image of 230 volts of power coursing below wooden
floorboards was too dreadful to be supported; sternly, he insisted
on the installation of a transformer to cut all power to half-strength.
The House might have become electrified; thanks to its owner's
decision, it grew no brighter than in the old, oil-lit days.)

Charlie Byron, looking quite dapper at the time of
his marriage to Anna FitzRoy.

It was my father's good luck that the electricians who undertook
the job brought with them a fourteen-year-old apprentice. Billeted in
the village with the family of the girl he later married, Jack Carter was
a gamekeeper's son, a square-chinned, thickset boy with untidy reddish
hair, wide lively eyes and, when amused, a grin that sliced into his
cheeks. Jack Carter enjoyed exploring the estate as much as Shotbolt
had done, and was as willing to share his knowledge of lairs, holes,
birds' nests and ferrets.
The occasion for which my father still remembered Jack Carter
fondly, after forty years, had nothing to do with woodland wanderings.
It was the day when the young electrician offered to show him the House's hidden world, on the other side of a small door
at the back of a bolted cupboard on the top floor.
This, given later developments, might seem to lay the ground for
suggesting that my father was given a stealthy introduction to sex as
a furtive pleasure by his new friend. Having known Jack Carter for
much of my early life, I'd take a bet of any size against that possibility.
This was an innocent escapade, a treat to cheer a lonely child.
The space between the floors is the best-kept secret of old
houses, a secret trail that can be followed, on hands and knees,
from the rafters down to the cellar. I've crawled through that
door myself as a child, hunting for lost treasure. Lying flat and
wriggling forward through long low galleries laid with rushes and
propped with blackened timbers, you become part of the fabric,
dusty with its history. Odd objects lie here, dropped through the
floorboards a hundred years earlier: a pencil stub, a necklace's lost
clasp, a scrap of carved wood. Listening, you catch from above
the muffled sounds of life - heels clacking across a floor, a bucket
being set down, a smothered laugh, a door being shut. Hidden
away from the light, you smell wood, straw and mystery. I don't
think my father ever read The Borrowers. Climbing down into
darkness and crawling behind Jack Carter's sturdy boots into the
heart of the House, he became part of their between-the-floors
world.
I'd like to think that it was here, lying alert and quiet while the
coils of wire were carefully unreeled towards the next electric
point, that my father made a pact with the sinews of the House
that possessed him so entirely.

Or was it made two years later, in 1929, the year in which a
Thrumpton neighbour's home, one of the loveliest in England,
went down in flames?

'Nuthall Temple!' My mother shakes her head. 'Now, you really
are romancing. What on earth does Nuthall have to do with your
father?'
These events took place almost twenty years before her marriage.
But when I remind her that her husband was at Thrumpton when
Nuthall burnt down, and of the horror of fire which he picked up
from his uncle's own terror, she hesitantly admits that there may be
a connection. She might only be humouring an obsessed daughter's
whim: I can never tell.
Nuthall Temple was a ravishing house, built in the eighteenth
century by the same team who had made Chiswick House an
exquisite homage to Palladio. Beautifully situated, overlooking the
lake from which the stone for its columned portico had been
quarried, the Temple's chief glory was a vast octagonal room,
soaring to the full height of the house and decorated with some of
the finest rococo plasterwork in the country, a playful riot of swags
and garlands.
Visits were exchanged on a weekly basis between the two
houses during my father's first years at his uncle's home. Charlie
Byron of Thrumpton and Robert Holden of Nuthall were both
latecomers to the task of running large estates; Holden's advantage
was that he had a son and heir who loved the Temple and longed
to live there.
Death duties made this impossible. Set at fifty per cent in 1918,
this tax on inheritance had just been raised once more when
Robert Holden died in 1926. Advised that he could not afford to
pay and stay, Holden's son agreed to an auction. He had hoped
to save his home from destruction by selling it as a country club;
nobody, unfortunately, wanted to make the commitment. In 1927,
less than a year after Robert Holden's death, the Temple's contents
were sold piecemeal.
The auctioneers stripped the house of all its glory; at the end of
the day, nothing remained but a magnificent shell and the empty
octagonal hall, its breathtaking plasterwork still intact. A few
enthusiasts urged that a rescue mission should be undertaken before
further damage was done; their pleas were ignored. Nuthall
Temple, from that moment, was a disaster waiting to happen.
Little help was on hand for the owners of country houses and
their estates in the post-war years. Farming had helped to maintain
them in the past; the ending of wheat subsidy in 1921 heralded
twenty years of agricultural depression. Increased death duties
didn't help. The National Trust was concentrating its limited
resources on the preservation of landscape, not houses; no system
yet existed for the listing and protection of property that was still
in private hands. A new Tory government championed the rights
of a property-owning democracy; country houses, with their large
empty parks, offered opportunities for development in a time of
housing crisis. Nuthall Temple stood just beyond the fringes of
Nottingham, a city ripe for expansion.
The end came on a warm summer's day in 1929. 'Nuthall Temple
Burned,' ran the local paper's headline: 'A Wonderful Sight'.
The newspaper's own reporter helped to start the blaze.
Contacted by a developer who had bought the Temple and wanted
to build on its site, the journalist agreed to lend a hand in exchange
for exclusive rights to the photographs. The two of them doused
the Temple walls with paraffin; at midday, the villagers strolled up
the drive to see what was going on. The developer threw in the
first lighted brand; the reporter followed suit. In an hour, the
Temple was on fire. Cameras snapped as the whole of the West
Wing collapsed. The Music Room, gracefully decorated with
Adam plaques, stood as a roofless wreck for a minute or two before
dissolving into a shimmering wall of heat; the cupola of the great
Octagon came down into the flames in a cascade of golden
fragments. Swaggering among the smoking ruins, a group of boys
from the village posed as conquerors.
Charlie Byron was horrified. Robert Holden had been his
closest friend in the neighbourhood. Miserably, Charlie blamed
himself for NuthaU's fate, for not having rallied up support;
fearfully, he dwelt on the possibility that Thrumpton might meet
a similar fate. This, in the late summer of 1929, when my father
was six years old, was the main topic of conversation.
Vita and Dick were both back in England by this time. Dick had
accepted a part-time desk job in the Foreign Office; Lady Falle
reluctantly contributed towards the purchase of a family house in
Evelyn Gardens, west of her own grander home in Eaton Square.
Formally, this was George's home; informally, he was spending a
large part of each year at Thrumpton.
The Byrons had grown too attached to their small nephew to
want to relinquish him when Vita returned to England in 1925; an
understanding was reached which allowed George to continue
paying long visits to Thrumpton. This was an arrangement that
suited everybody. Vita, glad to see him growing rosy-cheeked in
his spells away from the city, began to hope that Charlie Byron
might be looking for a suitable heir; Anna, regretting the absence
of a child of her own, liked having a little boy to spoil and hug;
George relished the sense of being universally loved.
Charlie Byron was already in the habit of talking aloud at meals
to his dog Bingo, a large and shaggy poodle. As George grew old
enough to hold conversations, he displayed a ready sympathy and
understanding for his uncle's worries that Bingo, even at his best,
failed to show. When Nuthall Temple burned down, Charlie
lectured his nephew on the importance of protecting the home
they loved from faceless villains: the local council; developers; a
land-hungry government. George took it all in as earnestly as if he
was his uncle's colleague, rather than a child of six. His mannerisms

were already copied from his uncle; in the larger family, George
was spoken of as being 'quaint'.
George loved his parents; it was simply the case that a tall,
featureless house in West London could not compete against the
charms of life at Thrumpton, where, indulged and adored, he was
now allowed to do as he pleased. Gradually, he was developing a
sense of his own small and slightly pompous person as the son of
the House, the heir apparent. 'I want to live at Thrumpton and
care for the village,' he wrote in his diary for 1934. He was eleven
years old. By then, the sense of commitment was absolute.
Was it the shocking destruction of Nuthall Temple that first put
the idea of himself as the saviour of Thrumpton into my father's
oddly unchildish mind? Was that the moment when he first
understood that a House cannot survive the failure of an owner's
love?
My mother claims that I'm being imaginative. I remember how
haunted my father was by his fear of fire, how he patrolled his
home on winter nights, ensuring the extinction of matches,
candles and cigarette butts, pulling iron guards forward to protect
wooden floors from a lively spark or smouldering log. I remember
too, after his death, coming across a folder of cuttings about the
Temple. One photograph had been circled with a heavy black pen.
It showed a few broken chunks of wall that had escaped the fire. Sic transit gloria, my father had written underneath, doubtless
congratulating himself that Thrumpton had, thanks to his single
minded endeavours, escaped such a fate.

THE BOY

Travelling home from La Paz, Vita agonised about the possibility
that she had forfeited her son's love.
There is no doubt that her desertion of him had been deeply felt.
Abandoned once, George never allowed her to forget how much she
was adored. (How did Dick feel on the day in 1944 when he was
invited to admire a handsome oil painting of Vita for which his
twenty-one-year-old son, not he, had paid a hundred guineas? 'Daddy
didn't say much,' gives the answer in George's diary.) Aged four,
George spent a month's pocket money on buying a pair of finches after
Vita's pet budgie died; a year later, fiercely resentful of the father who
had returned from Bolivia to usurp his place, he wrote imperious
letters from his bedroom in Evelyn Gardens, headed 'extreamly urgent'
and summoning his mother to come upstairs 'at once' to share his bed,
'because I am so fritened'. Such demands invariably won her consent.
'Honestly!' my mother exclaims. 'Imagine what would have
happened if I'd asked my mother that!'
'I can see, though, after she left him at Thrumpton - he must
have felt so insecure about her love.'
'He had Anna running after him as well,' my mother says. 'And
silly old Dar.' (She's talking in the language of family diminutives:
by Dar, she means Ismay, Vita's mother.) 'They all spoiled him.
The things he got away with! Do you remember the story about
his putting tin-tacks on the nanny's chair? Vita thought it was
frightfully amusing.'
'So did he. That's why he was always telling us about it.'
We've been chatting about my father this morning while
wrapping and putting away -- for good, I hope - six or seven
delicate sets of breakfast china. I never understood why we had to
keep so many of these ready for use; it is only this morning that I
have learned my father wanted his weekend house-guests to be
offered morning tea and biscuits with a wake-up call. Their
bedroom curtains would be drawn, the fire switched on, a bath
drawn: delightful, if you happen to be visiting a hotel that
specialises in Edwardian weekends. I ask my mother whom he had
expected to provide this elegant service. She grimaces.
'Who do you think?'
'Him?'
'Oh, quite!'
What age did he dream that he was living in? (This was during
the 1990s.) And who, by that time, when he had almost cut
himself free from aristocratic society, were the guests for whom a
woman in her seventies was expected to play parlourmaid?
'It's how it was,' she says, laying a flower-sprigged saucer in its
nest of paper, ready for storage.

A photograph taken in 1931, when my father was eight, offers a
pointer to the way things were to go. Taking part in a charity
matinee to raise money for The Women's League Services for
Motherhood (the celebrated ballerina Lydia Lopokova was the main
draw of the day), George Seymour strutted on to the stage of the
Cambridge Theatre as Lord Charles FitzRoy, a royal page in a tableau
of Queen Victoria's drawing-room assembly. His mother, priding
herself on the family connections, had chosen George's role with
care. She did not stint him on the cost of a costume: a splendidly
frogged silk coat, a feathered hat and silver-buckled shoes guaranteed
that her son would be noticed and admired. Intoxicated by his
transformation into a Lord, George began to take a keen interest in
his ancestry. Vita, who kept small prints of Charles II and the
Duchess of Cleveland, his mistress, on her dressing table, was happy
to indulge him. From the age of eight on, my father proclaimed his Roy-al connection on all possible occasions. There were Fitzroys -- and there was George FitzRoy Seymour, an altogether superior

This photograph of Lord Charles FitzRoy (his grandfather)
was the model for my father's appearance on stage in 1931.

being in the opinion of himself and his doting mamma.
Vita seems to have shed few tears over the older two children she
had left at boarding-schools when she travelled to La Paz; she was
grief-stricken by the departure of George, aged six, to a prep school
in Kent. 'The loss must fall heavily on you,' a sympathetic
headmaster wrote in a letter that can't have lightened her heart with
the news that her puny son showed little confidence in himself, was
useless in all forms of team sports, and had made no friends.
I'm ready to sympathise. 'Cream' and 'Dregs' were the two
categories into which newcomers to my own boarding school
were divided by their superiors; a list of those to be envied
(Cream) or despised (Dregs) was displayed each week on the
notice board, and studied by all. Being cast among the dregs was
a lesson in humiliation that nobody forgot. I don't suppose my
father's school was any kinder to its misfits.
He could have taken a hint from Oliver FitzRoy, his cousin and
schoolmate. Oliver was a good-looking child, the beau ideal of
boyhood, generous, sporting, open-hearted. My father worshipped
him. He glued himself to Oliver like a shadow, hoping for a share
of the sunlight through which his fair-haired, sleepy-eyed cousin
strolled with an air of untouchable ease. Oliver glows out of my
father's prep school letters like a burnished prince, the victor on the
cricket field, the hero of his set.
Why was my father so disliked? Was it for his selfishness? (Other
boys cheerfully shared out the spoils sent to them from home; my
father squirrelled away his stores of sweets and cakes, to be consumed
in solitude.) Was it because he was sickly and skinny? (He loved the
school san; it was, he told his mother, the only place at school where
the food was good, the bed comfortable, and the rules relaxed.)
Or was it, perhaps, because he struck his schoolmates as a prig?
Dick, since his return from La Paz, had begun writing light
verses which, from time to time, he circulated around the family.
Vita let it be known that she found Dick's hobby irritating, an
excuse to close the door on his wife and claim that he was busy.
She took more pleasure in her son's talent for poetry. George's
verses were also relayed around the family, after being copied out,
for clarity's sake, by a loving mother's hand. Dick's poems were
playful; George's were pious. One, composed when he was seven,
told of his wish to become a horse and pace along God's holy path;
in another, he hoped that no naughty deed would deprive him of
a coveted seat near the Saviour's throne. His schoolmates, in less of
a hurry to meet their Maker, kept George at a distance; the English
master, reluctant to discourage such ardent feelings, praised a
promising literary style.

Vita, my father's adored and indulgent mother,
as he first remembered her.

Abandoned once again by his family and bullied by his peers,
my father used his pen to salvage some form of control over trying
circumstances. Correspondence, assiduously maintained and elderly
in tone, became his weapon. Making notes for a letter he planned
to send to his aunt at Thrumpton, George reminded himself to
sympathise with Anna about the coldness of the village church, and
to 'enlighten' her about the unsatisfactory nature of heating provided
at his school. 'Ask her for butter,' he added to his memo.
Obsessively prompt himself, George expected payment in equal
coin. By the time he was ten, he knew just how to make his
displeasure felt when a correspondent slackened. Writing to his
parents, he observed that Leo, his older brother, must be very busy
indeed with dances and his new car (a snappy little MG) since he
found no time to write; every morning, he told Vita, he looked at
the school letter shelf in the vain (the word was fiercely underlined)
hope of receiving a note from his sister, Alex. Running short of
new victims in the family, he addressed himself to God, 'as no one
ever seems to write to you'. But even God was not to be trusted;
George ordered him to write his answer clearly (underlined) and promptly (underlined): 'Please have it there by tomorrow!
God failed to respond, although Vita lovingly preserved the
letter: George's earthly family found it wise to respond at length,
and with speed, if they were not to be rebuked.
A form of power had been discovered. A habit had been formed.
Fifty years later, my father was still hard at work. Crouched at
his desk in a corner of the hospitable Thrumpton library on a
Saturday afternoon, he peppered the desultory conversation of his
guests with the angry rattle of a tiny Olivetti typewriter. They
could talk and lounge; he, their host, had vital work to do; a pile
of letters - to the rural dean, to his stockbroker, to his lawyer, to
an unsatisfactory fishing tenant -- was underway. By four in the
afternoon, determined to catch the last post-collection of the day,
he was in top gear, cramming stiff little sheets of double-spaced
print into envelopes emblazoned with a phoenix perched upon a
crown. ('I was so intrigued by the crest,' one of the grander cousins
-wrote to him. 'I've been puzzling over its origins.' A message that
can be translated into blunt English as: You bloody little fraud.)
'Don't be silly' reproves my mother. 'Edward the Sixth was the
phoenix arising from the ashes of his mother Jane, who died in
childbirth. Henry VIII gave it to the Seymours for their family
crest.' Listening, I can hear my father tutoring her in the sacred
connection, another of those comforting bloodlines by which he
linked himself to the throne. He sits on the right hand of God the
Father. And then, remembering an attention-seeking child who
used to boast to visitors to the House of her own descent from
kings, I cringe. Oh mon semblable, monpere, I'm every bit as bad as
you.
As a snob, I can sometimes match him; as a correspondent,
George Seymour had no equal. Pouring letters out fast as water
flowing from a tipped bucket, he expressed disgust at those slackers
who failed to answer by return of post. What did these people do with their time? Had they no manners at all? Only the blessed
select, possessing either titles or fast motorbikes, escaped his censure;
they, lucky creatures, could answer as slowly as they pleased. The
rest of us were less leniently treated: if we hadn't replied within the
day, it proved that we were heartless, careless, ungrateful or even,
when his spirits were especially low, all three.
You couldn't win. He wrote like a survivor from Edwardian
times, when five daily posts allowed letters to fly to and fro as fast,
almost, as email. A prompt answer engendered an immediate
response; with it came a strong hint of trouble in store if you failed
to answer - again - within the day.
And so it went on.

A present from the Byrons almost compensated for the miseries of a dormitory bed, bullying schoolmates, and absence from the
country house George loved. Their present was a reward to a
nephew so affectionate that he had asked if he might spend the
Christmas of 1933 with them, rather than at Evelyn Gardens
with his parents. Charlie and Anna were eager to show their
appreciation. Vita had tipped them off that George wanted to
invite his cousin Oliver to stay at Thrumpton, but that he was
embarrassed because Oliver had a bicycle. The Byrons consulted
with each other and reached agreement: George must not be
outshone. When their nephew came down to breakfast on
Christmas Day, Shotbolt wheeled his gift up to the table: a Kildare
bicycle, bright blue, with a bell. Oliver also had a Kildare, but this
one was finer and larger, the new hot model for 1934. Forbidden to
bring it to school, where he had looked forward to showing off his
treasure, George made the Kildare the subject of a protest poem
('You aren't aloud (sic) a bicycle, for fear that you might crash').
Privately, he comforted himself with the prospect of showing his treasure
off to Oliver during the summer vacation, when he had been
promised he might spend five glorious weeks at Thrumpton.

George FitzRoy Seymour in 1933, a slightly
priggish prep-school boy.
The Byrons' gift offered their nephew a rare opportunity to
boast about something other than his blood. Aged ten, George was
growing embarrassed by his parents' modest means. He minded
that his mother wore dowdy clothes, not couture; an outing with
a schoolmate's mother in - he swaggered to his parents - 'the
biggest and newest Chrysler you have ever seen', sharpened his
embarrassment about their own, inferior motor. Writing to his
mother before sports day, he begged her to buy a new hat and to
park their battered Hillman out of sight. ('For goodness sake don't
bring that sky-blue car into the drive because the oldest car that
anyone else has seems to be about three years, and if you brought
in our old bus I should think we would be the laugh of the place.')
George's parents, as he was forced to realise, lacked the means
to buy a Chrysler; a brand-new bicycle almost made up for that
disappointment. The day on which he was given the Kildare, he
noted in his schoolboy diary, had been the most exciting of his
entire life.
Oliver FitzRoy s summer visit to Thrumpton provides another
marker in the stages of my father's attachment to the place. Vita had
given her son the 1934 edition of The Cyclists' Diary, complete
with useful tips about repairing punctures (ignored) and on places
to visit (carefully studied). The July pages of the diary are dense
with reports of journeys undertaken, and places seen. He already
loved the House and its park; cycling proudly alongside his cousin's
inferior Kildare, he became familiar with the row of fishermen
who crouched on the riverside tow path; with the road leading
away from the village to a plump wooded cone where the last of
the English witches had allegedly been burned at the stake; with
the smoke-grimed churches of Clifton, Ratcliffe, Kingston and
Strelley, in which alabaster knights and their ladies lay stiffly asleep,
a veil of reddish marble hooding their eyes.
Oliver left behind an addicted cyclist. Week by week, George
notched up the miles: seventy-six in one, eighty-two in another. The
marriage of his parents was going through a stressful period; glad to
escape, Vita became her son's travelling companion. Reading his
records of their trips, I'm amazed by the distances they covered: in
a single month, mother and son cycled across the Fens, up to the
Lake District, down to the Norfolk coast, and west to Cornwall.
Was it the easy freedom of those days that my father rediscovered
in his rejuvenated middle age, roaring through the
empty blackness of the Fenland night and out to the shores, the
headlights of his latest ebony-flanked machine glaring into the
dark? Was it?

Growing up in the rooms at the top of the House where my father
spent his first years, I formed my reading habits at a nursery
bookshelf. Five foot across and climbing up to the low ceiling, the
shelves seemed as appetising as a box of well-wrapped sweets,
stuffed with fairy tales, myths, poetry, encyclopedias and -- I'm not
sure where these came from -- some sinister little German stories
with gothic print and inky woodcuts, of which the most vivid
showed two bad children being roasted alive, trussed up on a
garden spit. (A warning, I supposed, to my brother and myself of
what would become of us if we misbehaved.)
These were my father's books. None of them captured his
imagination so completely as Antony, a memoir presented to him
by Vita in 1936, when he was thirteen years old.
My mother detests Antony, despite the fact that my father chose
to give her a copy shortly after they met. 'Ghastly drivel,' she says,
'and so snobbish! I can't think what your father saw in it.'
Antony was a tribute, written by Lord Lytton shortly after his
eldest son and heir, Antony Knebworth, was killed in a freak flying
accident. Spoiled by doting parents, Lord Knebworth appears
to have excelled at sports, disliked hard work, and treated women
badly. My father thought him perfect. As soon as he finished
reading Antony for the first time -- he returned to the book each
year, with undiminished pleasure - he persuaded Vita to accompany
him on a twenty-mile cycling trip from Evelyn Gardens out to
Knebworth House, where his hero had spent his boyhood. Lord
Lytton, the bereaved father, was away; a gardener allowed the
visitors a brisk walk around the icebound garden before their long
journey home.
My mother wonders if George's obsession with a good-looking
sportsman offers us a first glimpse of what he was to become. She
may be right; we agree that it's strange for a boy of thirteen to have
shown no similar interest in girls. I'm more intrigued by the fact
that Vita chose to give her son Antony, a book about a glamorous
aristocrat, the heir to a title and a splendid house, in 1936. This was
a year of seismic changes in the ranking of the FitzRoy clan; was
Vita encouraging George to glory in his own connections? Was she
so foolish, and so irresponsible?
It's possible. Vita, too, was a snob. One of my relatives still
remembers how angrily she refused to yield her seat to Princess
Margaret at some charity performance of a play. Vita would not do
it, she said, because she was better born and had more right to the
seat than that common woman. (I don't think you need to wonder,
my relative added in an acid postscript to her letter, why Dick
Seymour's diplomatic career failed to prosper!)
In 1936, a cousin's premature death resulted in Vita's brother,
Charles FitzRoy, becoming the tenth Duke of Grafton and owner
of Euston Hall; his sisters were given appropriate upgrades. My
father, reading Antony, felt newly at home in this lordly throng; in
his school address book, he wrote out a list of all the noble ranks
and placed an asterisk beside those to which he had the closest links.
Schoolfriends were proudly informed that his uncle had become
a duke; tongue in cheek, surely, one wrote to congratulate him for
such a thrilling piece of information.
All George now lacked was a title of his own. This would cause
him pain until the end of his days. His yearning for one is apparent
in the Debrett's entries where, year after year, he linked himself to
the nobility ('father himself great great grandson of; mother the sister of; wife the daughter of. . .') Links, however tenuous, were
better than nothing at all.

'I love your Euston.' My father was nineteen when he wrote that
to his mother, after a visit to the Duke of Grafton's new Norfolk
home. At thirteen, shortly after Vita gained her title, George
launched a mission to see that she looked the part. Evelyn Gardens
was not smart enough for a duke's sister; helpfully, George
bombarded his parents with ideas for improving their London
home. He spent his holidays researching suitable carpenters and
decorators to refit and paint it. Instead of a birthday present, he
wanted Vita and Dick to do up their shabby bathroom. (George
had already picked out a pink-and-white wallpaper which would,
he assured them, prove ideal.) Alex, his older sister, was persuaded
to split the expense of buying Vita a fur coat, secondhand, in
which, he proudly noted: 'Mummy looked tres grande dame'.
Sending home dutiful accounts of the school sports day, he digressed
to mention an elegant set of velvet curtains he had seen for sale,
quite cheap, just the thing to give their drab dining room a lift.
A less passive father would have reined in such precocity and
told George to act his thirteen years. Dick, predictably, did
nothing. Dick's mother, meanwhile, expressed delight at her
grandson's enthusiasm for titles and connections. It was only two
years since May Falle herself had become, at a price, Lady Portsea,
a baroness. May was enchanted to hear about George's interest in
the future of Thrumpton, and the FitzRoy lineage. 'We share an
interest in the rock from which we are hewn,' she told him
approvingly.
George had observed that his grandmother generally got what
she wanted. In the summer of 1936, he told her how upset he was
at not being allowed to go to Eton that autumn with his cousin,
Oliver. May was outraged. How could her son be so foolish! Of course, George and Oliver must attend the same school. Had it not
occurred to Dick what damage might be done to a young boy by
such insensitive behaviour? To Eton George must go: in fact, she
herself would underwrite all the costs of the dear boy's education.
Reminded that she had done nothing of the kind for George's
older brother, Lady Portsea stood her ground. All the more reason,
she argued, that she should help this time.
This is the only occasion I have been able to find on which
Dick Seymour took a stand against his formidable mother.
Contributions would be welcomed, he told her, but a decision had
already been made. He himself had been extremely happy at Eton
(he did not quite say that he had been far happier there than at
home). He did not, however, feel it right to send George to a
school to which (thanks to May's refusal to help) he had been
unable to afford to send his elder boy. George had done well
enough in the exams to enter Winchester in the autumn of 1936.
He was an intelligent boy; Winchester was a fine school.
The decision was made.

May, on whose support her grandson had depended for a
reprieve, was silenced.
I'm visiting Winchester on a sultry summer afternoon, hoping
to find why my father hated his public school. So far, I'm
charmed.
Nestling behind the grey bulk of the Cathedral, the College
hides its beauties as cunningly as Oxford and Cambridge conceal
their lovely quads and cloisters. I'd forgotten that Jane Austen died
here, in a modest house staring out at a high, hard, pebbled wall.
Hawkins (Chawkers to the Wykehamists) is the house in which my
father began life at the College in September 1936. The
housemaster's tall, fresh-faced son opens the door. When I explain
my quest, he leads me upstairs to peep into the airy dormitories,
and down to the Study in which forty boys still carry out their
evening work in wooden booths known as Toys. Hawkins House,
on a sleepy day in early August, feels unthreatening. The ceilings
are clean and high; light pours through large windows. There's no
shade of the prisonhouse here, nothing sinister.

'Anything else you'd like to see?' asks the friendly boy. I shake my
head, feeling foolish. I'm baffled.
Back to the book of essays, then, to see what can be deduced
from a schoolboy's first year of compositions, complete with the
Master's comments.
The Master had to struggle not to lose his temper with his new
pupil. He asked for an essay on comic writing and was rebuked for
liking Wodehouse ('Personally,' George informed him, 'I do not
particularly admire his style.') The Master also liked Scott; George
expressed scorn. Scott, in his own opinion, was greatly inferior to
Harrison Ainsworth: 'I challenge you to find another book written
in such beautiful English . . . There is no other but Windsor Castle! This time, the Master showed his annoyance: 'Nonsense!' he wrote.
The subject of'Relations' gave rise to one of my father's most florid
pieces, inspired by memories of Charlie Byron's sermons. 'So does
death part us all,' he wrote. 'Our relations who love us die and we
stay on, and we in our turn have to leave those whom we have
helped. So time goes on, and I think a befitting ending for this
humble effort at entertaining the reader is the following verse of a
favourite hymn of mine: "Time like an ever-rolling stream . . .'"
The Master had begun to lose his temper; angrily, he reminded
George Seymour that he was thirteen, not seventy, and ordered
him to alter his style. My father didn't change his style one scrap.
The next set topic was 'Friends', a tricky one for a boy who had
made none. Tellingly, George expressed a preference for artefacts.
Pictures, in his opinion, were more faithful than friends. 'They will
still give you all the pleasure within their power. They do their
best.' For him, there was only one prevailing certainty, one
friendship that could never falter, never betray: the House. This is
true friendship, he wrote: 'a place of happy memories and a place
which seems in itself to welcome one on one's homecoming.'
Perhaps, on this occasion, the Master felt a little sorry for a boy
who had no friendships to celebrate. 'Rather ponderous,' he wrote.
The more wretched my father grew at school, the more fiercely
he clung to the House. Whatever the subject he was given to write
about, he always managed to turn it into a eulogy to the place he
thought of as home. (Evelyn Gardens was never mentioned; you
would never guess, reading these schoolboy essays, that their author
had a London connection.) Trying his hand at story-writing, he
remembered Nuthall Temple's fate and wrote of the destruction by
fire of a beloved family home. The features of Thrumpton -- tall
red-brick chimneys, stone gables, a lake, a library overlooking a
garden -- are easily identifiable.
At fifteen, my father at last began to acquire a few friends. All
of them were younger; all were impressed by his tales of a princely
mansion in Nottinghamshire. (Again, not a word had been breathed
about Evelyn Gardens.) 'You rotten worm, aren't you ever going
to ask me to that house of yours?' wrote one.
It might seem obvious why my father didn't want to ask friends
to stay. Thrumpton was not his home. He feared exposure and
ridicule. Another reason helps to explain why his essays dwelt on
the House with such intensity. He had, for no reason he could
understand, been banished.
It's possible that Charlie Byron, a capricious old gentleman,
was playing cruel games with a nephew who adored his home;
it's more likely, since some distant Byron cousins had revealed
themselves just at the time George went to Winchester, that he
was rethinking the future. Charlie's first duty, as Thrumpton's
owner, was to his own family, not his wife's; the Byron cousins had
a greater right to his property than Anna's nephew. This, it seems,
is why Charlie decided to bring an abrupt end to George's holidays
at the House. Other members of Anna's family paid regular visits
during this period; only George was excluded. This unexplained
act of ostracism, it seems fair to assume, contributed to my father's
memory of the Winchester years as a time of extreme unhappiness.
Death provided a solution to Charlie Byron's quandary. The
cousinly claimants both died young; George, who may never have
known how seriously his hopes of inheritance had been
threatened, was restored to favour in the summer of 1939, shortly
before the outbreak of war. A rambling and affectionate invitation
was issued; he was welcome again. He could visit Thrumpton for
as long as he wished.
When war was declared, my father was sixteen years old, with
a year of schooling left to run and no expectation that his secure
world was about to be overturned. Oliver FitzRoy was preparing
to follow his older brother to Cambridge; my father -- his academic
record at Winchester was poor -- had no such plans. He had only
one clear objective: occupation of the House he loved and to
which he had been welcomed back. Lulled by the tranquillity of
a golden autumn, he made a leisurely round of favourite haunts,
cycling around the sleepy little villages, fishing by the lake,
wandering through the high grass of ungrazed fields where, for
hours on end, he lay gazing up at an empty, unthreatening sky.
Writing a letter of reassurance to his mother (he had taken to
addressing Vita as 'Boo' because, he told her, it made her seem
nearer to his age), he took care to relate which of the Thrumpton
roses were in bloom, and to tell her that the House - his House -- had never looked so lovely.
War? What war? By the time he left Winchester in 1940, he was
convinced that all would be resolved. (This certainty, although
George did not say so, was based on Charlie Byron's politically
naive reading of international events.) All that mattered, here and
now, on the summer evening of his letter, was the scent of tobacco
plants, the deepening blue of the sky, the rich rosy glow of sunlit
brick. He felt so safe here, so at peace. Dearest Boo: she must not
worry. All was well.

A GOOD WAR

As a child, I used to pray, deep into my pillow, that my father
would die. I never had such violent feelings about my mother. The
only part she played in my fantasies of paternal obliteration was that
I wanted her to marry a more glamorous man.
A portrait of my mother, red-haired and slender in a wedding
dress of oyster satin, with the archaic smile favoured by Botticelli
lending a curve to her cheeks, was painted a year after her marriage.
It hangs in one of the rooms of the House that is always shown to
visitors. Below the painting stands a framed photograph of the artist,
Anthony Devas. Strangers, drawing the obvious conclusion, have
often asked if the photograph is of my father. I told them, until I
reached my teens and acquired a conscience, that it was. I liked to
bask in their admiration of the artist's handsome face and to hear
them find some faint resemblance to my own. I liked to think it
might be so, that my newly married mother had conducted a secret
affair, of which I was the unacknowledged product.
'Was he as gorgeous as he looks in the photo?' I ask my mother.
'Anthony? He was wonderful-looking, just like the photograph.
He painted that picture of me at his studio in Chelsea. He used to
take me to lunch afterwards, somewhere in Sloane Street. Augustus
sometimes came along. It was all such fun.'
I stare at her, dazzled by this easy jump into the past. 'Augustus
John? You never told me that before. What did you talk about? Did
he try anything?'
She smooths the bright cover of her book with a gardener's
hands, square and strong. 'Who, Augustus? I'm not sure he would
have dared, not after he fell out with Mummy about the picture he
did of her, the one she didn't like. I did know him already, of
course. He came and drew us all at Chirk, in the war.'
My mother has grown lively. Her book forgotten, she's ready for
a chat about life in the Welsh castle where she grew up. 'Are you
writing about Chirk yet? I was thinking - there's so much I ought
to tell you. Are you going to say anything about when Kipling
came to stay with us, and Shaw? And you mustn't forget about
Chesterton and Belloc!'
I'll have to remind her that this is not to be a book about her
family, but her husband. 'I haven't reached Chirk. He's only just left
Winchester.'
'Better hurry up, if you want my memories,' she calls after my
retreating back. 'I won't be here for ever.'
I'm suddenly full of the wish that she might be just that. It's taken
all of the ten years since my father's death for my mother to blossom
back to brightness as she emerges from the emotional bolthole in
which she buried herself in order to survive. I used to hope only that
her death should be merciful, quick as a blink or a dropped stitch.
Now, I can't imagine life without her. I want her never to die.

I chose Anthony Devas for my imaginary father because he looked
so attractive. I also chose him because he looked, even with a
paintbrush in his hand instead of a sword or a gun, as though he
could play a military hero; my father did not. As a grown woman
who has fallen in love with the House and its history, I'm ready to
admire the tenacity with which George Seymour pursued his grand
obsession; as a small girl, observing him with a hard judgmental eye,
I saw unmanliness in my father's caprices and fits of petulance. I
noted and disliked his readiness to use emotion to score a victory.
The fathers I admired never cried. Not in public. They were
bluff, capable men who lived up to their military titles. One
girlfriend acquired at boarding school was dear to me less for herself
than for her father, a nobly moustached colonel with a crop of thick
white hair and long cheeks striped pink by desert suns. I liked his
tales of war. I winced when his wife shouted at him for boring the
child stiff, my dear. She's heard it already. We all have. So we had,
but never often enough. I wanted to take this old warrior for
myself, to be the privileged recorder of his valiant deeds. If he could
only be my father! (Once, while he was teaching me how to tack
a sailing-boat across a small river near their family home, I found the
courage to whisper my secret wish; the colonel answered by giving
me a complicated set of instructions to keep me busy until we
moored and went ashore for lunch. At which point, kindly patting
me on the shoulder, man to man, he said that he was going to
forget anything I might wish I hadn't said. 'But I do--' He strode
ahead of me, letting the garden gate swing shut behind him.)
My love for the colonel was heightened by the fact that he and
his family lived in a cheerily modern house on a town street. The
house was in no way conspicuous. It was neither pretty nor ugly. It
represented all that I wished for, at an age when nothing about a
journey to London appealed to me so much as a drive through the
cosily interchangeable streets of Mill Hill and Hendon and Finchley.
There was such comfort in conformity when I was a child, in the
Fifties, such danger in being perceived as different. I didn't, dear
parents, mean to annoy you when I prayed to live in a house just
like the one near the local garage, where a dressmaker worked at a
sewing machine in the front window, seated in a theatre set of white
lace curtains pulled back with red silk cords. Her pocket-sized lawn
was bordered by pink and white flowers; her front door was picked
out in contrasting tones of cerise and powder pink. I loved her
home. I wanted nothing to do with a monster house filled with
creaks and ghosts and pictures with censorious eyes. I longed to
shrink our singularity to the colours of an entrance door or to the
choice of which tree, flowering cherry or weeping ash, should
throw a shadow-cloak over the pavement.
I know why I craved a soldierly father, and why I wanted to be
part of that world of reassuring sameness. I don't know why or
precisely when I began to wish my father dead. The urgency with
which I muttered my secret prayer, night after night, still causes me
to feel guilt. My mother doesn't find it strange.
'Children do find it easy to wish their parents dead; it's not just
you. I often thought like that about my mother, you know. It's
not a crime.'
I do know when I lost my respect for him.
The incident was sparked by some private grief of his in which
I, a little girl with fine, mouse-brown hair held back by an 'Alice'
band, had no share; my memory is only of the shocking spectacle
of a grown man crying. He wanted, he said, to kill himself; all reason
for wishing to live had gone. Sitting beside him, I looked sideways
at his bent head and the tears falling on to his knees. Sobs blocked
my throat when he told me that we would all be happy when he was
dead. How could he think such a terrible thing? Weeping, I flung
my arms around his neck and hugged him, rubbing my cheek
against his. Too young to understand that the atmosphere of drama
thickening the air was meat and drink to a nature such as his, I
agreed to the pact on which, still sobbing, he insisted. If he promised
to do himself no injury, I, too, must swear never to make an attempt
on my life.
That set me off. I only had to picture my body, stiff and cold as
a starched shirt, to feel emotion swelling to hysteria.
Tenderly, he stroked my hair. 'You and I are too alike, my
darling. We feel these things so much.'
'I won't. I'll never -- I swear it! But don't - please don't.' I
couldn't speak the words. Carefully, he mopped my blotched
cheeks with a freshly pressed handkerchief smelling of limes;
gravely, we shook hands on our agreement. I went to bed tearful
but exalted. It's not often a girl of nine gets to save her father's
life.
Readers will spot the flaw: if I wished him dead, I should have
welcomed this unexpected answer to my prayer. But suicide comes
under another heading; the word, even to a child, is heavy with
horror. Suicides, in the myths and folktales on which I feasted
during raids upon the tall nursery bookcase, were among the
damned, buried at crossroads, forbidden to lie in churchyards. I
could wish my father dead by accident. I could not wish that he
should take his life.
My father was in the best of spirits the following day. When
I asked, a little reproachfully, how he was feeling, he looked
surprised. The moment at which I lost respect for him was the one
in which I saw that he had no idea "what I was talking about. It was
all words.
In fact, as I came to understand, my father placed a high value
on his life. To approach him with a cold or cough was an act of
unforgivable selfishness; to feed him with a dish which threatened
to play havoc with his capricious stomach was tantamount to
threatening him with murder. Far from killing himself, my father
would have been happy to provide the reasons why he, of us all,
should be spared. How could we get on without him? Who but he
was indispensable to the survival of the House?
An old-fashioned phrase slides into my head. You wouldn't want
to be in a trench with--
'You're being unfair,' my mother says. 'He never had the chance
to fight. We don't know how he would have behaved.'
'We don't know. But--'
She shakes her head. I'm not going to win her assent to this. But
I wouldn't have cared to be with my father in a situation where
one life had to be sacrificed. It wouldn't be his.
Even as a child, I knew that the war was a bad subject. He was
happy to play us a crackling record of Churchill's speeches to the
nation, but direct questions were never welcome. The closest
I came to knowing what part he had played in his country's
defence was the clipped information that he had been ill. I
heard my mother describe how a bad-tempered sergeant made
her scrub canteen floors with a sanitary towel; from my father, I
heard not a word. No word of the bombs, of the Blitz, or the
dead: nothing.
The same hunger to conform that made me yearn for a small
suburban home fuelled my longing for a father with a military
record of which I could boast. It mattered, in the Fifties. Memories
of war were close; the recent past was as rich with action as a
storybook. Heroes had fought at Dunkirk, endured starvation and
torture in prison camps, come home with medals and rank that
paid tribute to their courage. But if it depressed a myth-fed child
to learn that her father had spent his war years working in a
provincial bank, how much more humiliation must it have caused
to him?
This was the error I made. It was true that my father was not
physically courageous. However, since he never was put to the test,
why should I assume that he lacked the moral fibre to act with
honour? Faith to do your duty was his family motto: given the
chance, mightn't he have acted on it?

My mother has unearthed an old photograph that she thinks will
interest me. It shows two young men in army uniform. These are
my father's first cousins, Lord Euston and his brother, Oliver
FitzRoy, and the picture was taken late in 1943. The wistful look
in their eyes may have something to do with the fact that they lost
their mother when they were children, or with the more recent
loss of a much-loved stepmother. Only a month has passed since
then, and their lonely father has already chosen her successor.
Their future feels threatened.
Hugh, the older of the two brothers, is about to set off for India
with the Grenadiers. As the son of a duke, he's due to be given an
interesting time, on the staff of the viceroy. Oliver, the boy my
father thought of as his soulmate, looks too young to be tested in
the skills of leadership. His is a sweet face, soft, but guarded. He,
too, has just joined the Grenadiers. In a year's time, he'll be sent out
to fight in France.

Hugh Euston (later eleventh Duke of Grafton) and his younger brother,
(my father's idol) Oliver FitzRoy, in 1943.
I like these studio photographs. There's another in this folder of Leo, my father's older brother, also serving as a Grenadier. Alex, his
sister, is giggling at the camera on the day after her engagement in
1939. She's twenty-five, and glad to be settling down in Norfolk
with a tall, agreeable young officer whose poor sight has spared
him from being sent abroad on active service.
Caring for Alex through her first pregnancy gave my
grandmother a reason to stay out of bomb-blasted London in the
first months of the war. Dick Seymour, staying on alone at the tall
red house in Evelyn Gardens, took new life from the sense of
constant danger. Telling his wife about his daily walk to 'the club'
in Carlton House Terrace, he joked about the plane fights
overhead, the falling bombs, the roar of defending guns firing up
from the backs of lorries along the borders of Hyde Park and
Piccadilly. 'You know how I hate agitations before breakfast,' he
wrote, with an almost visible twirl of his umbrella at the
impertinent Italian pilots he longed to see brought down.
'Blasted Ice-Creamers!'
For the first time in his life, Dick Seymour and his mother were
enjoying a state of mutual admiration. Lady Portsea was impressed
by her son's jaunty indifference to danger, and grateful for the
regularity of his visits to her home in Eaton Square. He, in his turn,
took pride in the old lady who, during some of the worst months
of bombing raids, still climbed into her black Victoria carriage for
a daily afternoon outing. The renaming of her two coach-horses
was her only concession to an altered life: Fred and Ginger had
become Churchill and Sarah.
On the subject of my father, however, they were at loggerheads.
Lady Portsea had always doted on her grandson. His announcement,
in the autumn of 1940, that he intended to take on
one of the Thrumpton farms, won instant support. 'I love to think
of you at work on the land - Mother Nature rewards those who
cultivate and care for her,' she wrote on paper newly topped with
a coronet. (I think I know whom to blame for my father's
inordinate love of crests and coats-of-arms.)
Dick Seymour was less sanguine. 'I can't understand how George
can be so foolish,' he wrote to his wife. He was disappointed already
that their son had shown no wish to follow his FitzRoy cousins
to Cambridge and take a degree; couldn't the boy at least be persuaded
to take a course in land agency and learn how to make a living at a
richer man's expense? Perhaps a job could be found for him at Ragley
Hall, home to the head of the Seymour clan, or even at Euston, if Vita
was willing to raise the idea with her brother, the Duke?
Dick, it is clear, had failed to grasp what was obvious to the
women of the family. George, after leaving Winchester in the summer
of 1940, had sped like a homing pigeon to the House he loved and which Charlie Byron was encouraging him to look on as his
heritage. University had never interested him - few men could use
the words 'clever' and 'intellectual' with such complete disdain. He
had no wish to be employed at Ragley, Euston, or anywhere else;
his plans for the future did not extend beyond the boundaries of
his uncle's estate. When it was explained to him that a seventeenyear-old,
with no experience of land management, could not be
given a farm for free, he simply lowered his sights and proposed to
work for one of the Thrumpton village tenants. Harvesting, and
planting sugar-beet, the principal victory crop in the Midlands,
required no special skills; a boy who was known to be Lord Byron's
nephew was unlikely to be overworked or ill-treated.
Nobody who knew my father ever doubted that he had a will
of steel. This was his first chance to use it. He got his way.
'No need to sneer,' says my mother. 'The farms were fearfully
shorthanded during the war. He was being useful. And, besides,
what else could he have done?'
'Taken the course to learn land agency?'
'Your father! Leave Thrumpton to help run somebody else's
estate? Can you imagine?'
Slight though the remaining evidence is of my father's year of
working on the land, the effect on him was profound. Bombs fell on
Derby, Nottingham and neighbouring fields; another hit the local
electricity station and blew out all the windows of Clifton Hall, the
nearest big house. At Thrumpton, the only evidence of war was the
placing of a searchlight on the hill and a request from the local
shepherd to bring his flock down to lower pastureland. Every Friday,
faces scrubbed, boots polished with spit, the farm tenants walked up
to the Hall to pay their rent; every evening, when his work was
done, my father walked through the park and back, with the sun
dazzling his eyes, towards the House. He knew, by now, the name
of every mound, copse and corner of the land on which it stood; the
threat of devastation heightened its value as a precious commodity.
Writing to his parents, his prose quickened with love whenever he
turned to the subject of the House and the landscape:
Dear Thrumpton. The moon was full last night. I went for a walk by
the lake and spent an hour down by the willows looking at the House. I
pray no harm will come to it.
He could as well have been writing of a lover, or a child.

Action could not be put off for ever. In May 1941, George put his
name forward for a commission in the Motor Battalions. The
Byrons, dismayed at the prospect of losing the company of such a
willing and solicitous nephew, grew fretful. What would they do
without George to run their errands, act as their chauffeur, keep
them entertained? Old Lady Portsea, picking window-glass off the
staircarpet after a bomb flattened the house next door to her own,
sent blessings to her grandson and congratulated him on having
chosen to join the 60th (the King's Royal Rifle Corps). Did he
know, she wondered, that two of his Seymour forebears had joined
the 60th and fought in the Transvaal? Prudently, she omitted to add
that they had both been killed.
George had left Winchester, with a glad heart, in July 1940. In
August 1941, he learned with dismay that he was to be drafted
back there for his first spell of military training. Bushfield Camp lay
west of Winchester, on the Hursley road. Tracking it down in the
summer of 2003, I found the way to an empty hillside blocked by
an iron farm gate. Beyond it, a derelict track climbed towards the
square silhouette of a sentry box; on the gate, the warning sign was
plain: Keep Out. Arrogance is one of the vices I have inherited
from my father; such restrictions apply to other people, not to us.
Like him, I expect a volley of cheap charm to rescue me if caught
in the act. ('It's your land? I'm most dreadfully sorry! But what a
wonderful place!' Parroting the lines, I can hear his own suave
drawl.) I climbed the gate and sauntered up the hill.
Bushfield Camp, according to local information, is a site ready
for development for housing, or a leisure centre, or a car park. At
present, it's abandoned. The neat grid of roads that once marked
out the camp's boundaries is just visible between steep banks that,
in high summer, are smothered with wild flowers. Bees hum; a
small plane drones in the distance; otherwise, there isn't a sound.
A rusty sink juts up from a clump of mallow and tansy. The bolted
metal doors that block my entry to abandoned buildings are
scrawled with messages. Nothing sinister: Ellie loves Paul; John
wants a blowjob; Marie thinks John should fuck off.
Standing on the windless hilltop, I try to imagine my father here
in 1941, an underweight and -- I'll guess - sexually inexperienced
eighteen-year-old with the mannerisms and attitudes of an elderly
country squire. Was he conscious, as I am, of the irony of his
topographical situation at Bushfield? I hadn't, until my visit, realised
that he was placed exactly between his two lives, the schoolboy, and
the snob. On the left, lay Winchester; on the right, lay Hursley, one
of the houses to which his grand connections had provided an
introduction. In 1935, he boasted to his mother of his lunch out at
Sir George Cooper's home. He had been given a splendid meal,
allowed to admire a set of Gobelin tapestries made for Madame de
Pompadour, and taken into a magnificent ballroom designed by Sir
Joseph Duveen. By 1941, however, Sir George was dead, his widow
banished to a farmhouse after Vickers Aircraft took over the estate
as their headquarters for Spitfire development. Did my father revisit
Hursley from Bushfield Camp, I wonder? Did he see how they had
daubed the Chinese silk wall hangings with a thick layer of grey
paint, turned the linen store into a lab and the dancing room into
a factory? (Dear Thrumpton . . . I pray no harm will come to it.) The fate
of houses such as Hursley must have pierced his heart.
The record of what my father actually did during his brief spell
at camp is minimal. His diary shows that he underwent drill from
six in the morning until four in the afternoon, with a break for
lunch. He was then at liberty to do as he pleased, to visit relations,
wander around Winchester, or spend the evening with John Persse,
a former schoolchum who was also at the camp.
Persse, a horse-loving, unbookish young man whose family
lived nearby, thrived on his time at Bushfield; my father was
wretched. It was, he lamented to his parents after five days at the
camp, 'a frightfully hard life'. Paying a visit to sympathetic elderly
relatives who knew how strings could be pulled, he told tales of
loneliness, bad food and a sadistic insistence on rigorous exercise.
The relatives promised to do what they could: two weeks later,
George was released, to spend a month of sick leave at Thrumpton.
No record survives to tell me how he felt, after a spell of successful
grouse-shooting in Scotland, about being tersely ordered to return
to military duties at the end of September.

'Pneumonia,' my mother says briskly when I ask what ended my
father's brief army career a year later. She frowns, doing her best to
remember what she was told. 'Did they give him the wrong pills?
Something like that.'
'He never mentioned anything about a driving accident? Before
the pneumonia?'
'An accident?' And she looks so blank that I know she's telling
the truth. 'Oh no, darling, he never had an accident. You know
what a good driver your father was.'
My father was a fast driver but not, until the last months of his Life, a reckless one. He prided himself on the speed of his reactions.
He was pitiless in his contempt for any guest who failed to stay on
his tail during a nerve-testing dash to some social occasion for
which punctuality stood high above kindness. ('Where on earth has
he got to? We're five minutes late! My God, that friend of yours is
so slowV)
Given his attitude, it is unlikely that he would admit to having
crashed an army vehicle shortly after his return to Bushfield Camp.
His family, while sympathetic, were plainly uncertain of the details;
George may not have been in a hurry to provide them. His first
request was that he might be sent to Thrumpton for his convalescence;
instead, he was despatched to the new military hospital at
St Hugh's in Oxford, to be treated for concussion and head
wounds. On 12 December 1941, he was moved again, to spend
two months at Middleton Park, a country house newly built by
Edwin Lutyens and handed over by its owner, Lord Jersey, for
wartime use by patients with head injuries.
Middleton Park, its claustrophobic teak and marble interior
contrasting strangely with the facade of an eighteenth-century
chateau, cannot be viewed as one of Lutyens' happiest achievements.
My father loathed the house, taking comfort only in the
survival of an unrestored family chapel in the park, and of a
peaceful library in which to keep up his correspondence.
Two days after his arrival at Middleton Park, my father sent what
he considered disturbing information to, of all inappropriate
people, Charlie Byron's underpaid deputy butler, a boy of twenty.
Bursting with indignation, George revealed that he was being
forced to share a bedroom at Middleton Park with communists (the
deduction was drawn from the fact that two of his fellow patients
had been complaining that workmen deserved better rates of pay).
The next step would be revolution; Lord Byron had better prepare
himself to be hanged from a lamp-post when he next left home.
In the meantime, he, George, intended to do what he could to
help these idiots to appreciate the selfishness of their attitude, and
the importance, while the country was at war, of preserving tradition and loyalty]
My father expected his correspondents to be prompt - he did
not expect them to dispute his opinions. A round, laborious hand
suggests that James Hopkins was not especially well-educated; the
tone of his letter suggests that my father had chosen the wrong man
with whom to share his alarm. Perhaps, Mr Hopkins wrote, my
father was unaware of how hard life was for those less privileged
than himself? Nobody wanted to assassinate the aristocracy or to
be paid above their merits; it was simply the case that society
needed to change. The war must be hard on men like my father,
Hopkins added kindly, but perhaps this convalescence would prove
a real blessing, a chance to listen to people who could open his
mind and broaden his views. Hopkins ended this candid and surely
unwelcome letter with the news that he was leaving Lord Byron's
service to sign up.
My father, for once, did not reply. A few months later, James
Hopkins was killed in action.
The only other surviving evidence of my father's stay at Middleton
Park is a spectacularly hideous rug: lime green was, to his annoyance,
the only available shade of wool. His diligence in creating this
monstrosity was fuelled by zeal: by showing the so-called communists
a representation of his beloved Thrumpton, he hoped to soften
and humanise these misguided men. His scheme was disclosed in
his diary. The results were not recorded.

My father returned to duty at Bushfield in May 1942. Two weeks
later, he caught pneumonia and was sent back to St Hugh's, Oxford.
His condition was serious; the fact that he failed to attend the funeral
of Lady Portsea confirms it. She had been, with the exception of his
mother, his favourite relative.
Family affection always came second to his love of the House.
When George was released from St Hugh's, he accepted an
invitation from Charlie Byron to complete his convalescence at
Thrumpton. The proposal was not without self-interest; gardeners
were hard to find in wartime and George, while never athletic, could
be relied on to help keep the lawn smooth with an iron roller.
Resourcefully, my father found a donkey to pull the roller while he
lay stretched out in a cane chair, describing an idyllic summer in
long, minutely detailed letters to his mother in Norfolk.
Three months at Thrumpton were enough to make even my
languid father impatient for a recall to duty; it came in September,
when he was ordered to join a training camp near York. The
discipline here was harsher than at Bushfield; four days after his
arrival, my father fainted on parade. Despatched to the local
military hospital for inspection, he was diagnosed as suffering from
'effort syndrome'. The specialist was not impressed by either
his physique or his attitude to being drilled (my father loathed
all forms of team activity, and reacted accordingly). Writing his
report, the specialist offered a personal opinion: this N.C.O. would
never be passed as fit for action. He urged that the young man
should be discharged immediately or transferred to an office
post.
Clerical work offered no appeal; George wrote to give his
parents the news that he was leaving the army. He begged them
not to intercede, or to pull strings; what was done was done. 'I
can't help but feel pretty depressed,' he admitted. He had no idea
as to what he should do next.
My father's despair sounds authentic; nevertheless, I feel dissatisfied.
The specialist's report has survived. It states that he was incapable of
strenuous exercise; in the diaries, however, he recorded his cycling
The House: Obsession

trips. During the early part of September, while he was still at
Thrumpton, he had been notching up as much as forty miles a day.
More tellingly, a letter from one of his Winchester classmates,
Philip Parr, congratulated him on the good fortune of his escape,
'knowing you loathe the army as much as I do.' (Philip wasn't so
lucky; he was killed on service in Greece the following summer.)
'Effort syndrome' sounds like a bad joke. When I investigate, it
turns out to be a new name for the condition known as 'soldier's
heart'. First observed in the American Civil War, this was brought
on by stressful situations. Soldiers on the Western Front suffered
from it; so, later, did those serving in Vietnam and the Gulf War.
But there's a difference. These men were on active service, living
under the daily threat of death. My father's effort syndrome was
a response to the unpleasant, but far from dangerous, routine of
daily drill.
'I won't have you saying your father was a coward,' my mother
says with the fierce loyalty that can still take me by surprise, given
all that she has endured. 'He probably got on the wrong side of
his drill sergeant. And you know he hadn't been well.'
'Then why didn't he take a desk job? He had a good brain.
Couldn't he have worked for the Ministry of Information, or at
Bletchley?'
But I've lost my mother's sympathy. Crossly, she reminds me
how poorly I always did at team sports. 'Just like him, you see. I
keep telling you so.'
'I had bad eyesight.' My voice is sharp and defensive; I hate
being reminded of my unhappy schooldays. 'And it was a completely
different situation. There wasn't a war going on.'
This opens the way for my mother to remind me, not for the
first time, that I haven't the slightest idea of how it felt to be at
war, or to experience training drill. 'You're determined to show
him in a bad light,' she says. 'And he can't answer back.'
This is the first of our discussions that has ended in disagreement.
My mother, who carried on as a hard-working member of the
ATS, even after suffering a nervous breakdown, doesn't want to
accept that she married somebody less courageous than herself.
Pneumonia had seemed a respectable reason for a discharge; the
idea that George suffered from this absurdly named 'effort
syndrome' is an embarrassment.
I look at the surviving evidence once more. If he had failed to
make a complete recovery, how was he able to go on those cycling
trips? If he felt as mortified as his letter to his parents suggests, why
was he ready to spend the first weekend after his discharge in a jolly
Yorkshire houseparty, eating like a horse and going on long walks?
And what about the letter congratulating him on a lucky escape,
'knowing you loathe the army as much as I do'?
Looking at that letter once again, I wonder if it is open to a
different interpretation. Was Philip Parr doing his best to make my
father feel better about a situation they both understood to be
profoundly humiliating? I may do better to stop being censorious,
and consider the effect that his discharge might have had on my
father. A combination of bad nerves and ill-health bought him a
ticket to safety, but the price, in terms of guilt, must have been
immense. How can it feel to know that your contemporaries are
risking their lives while yours has been spared? How can it feel to
read of their deaths?
Who am I, searching for an explanation of the wound in his
heart, to say that my father didn't suffer when he was told to go
home?

LITERARY CONNECTIONS: 2006

The book club that I belong to is meeting tonight to discuss
Henry James's disturbing tale of corrupted innocence, The Turn
of the Screw. ('And I don't suppose you'll bother to mention the
family connection,' my father hisses. 'I know everything to do
with my family is dreadfully boring, but don't you think your
readers might be - just faintly - interested?' On this occasion, I'm
ready to agree. To hell with those fragile links by which my father
claimed kinship to the royal Tudors and Stuarts: it's more exciting,
for a writer, to think that Henry James used to spend weeks
at a time with May Portsea and her brother, Howard Sturgis. I
relish the possibility that their parents' home inspired descriptions
of the Touchetts' English country house in The Portrait of a Lady, and that May's father was the original for old Mr Touchett, a
transplanted Boston banker. 'And so', my father slyly whispers, 'do
tell me, darling, just what is the difference between your snobbery
and mine?')
The meeting ends with a frisson as we drain our glasses and
ponder the atmosphere that Henry James breathed into the fabric
of Bly, identified by him simply as an ugly old house in Essex.
'Make him think the evil,' he wrote later of his projected reader.
'Make him see it.' Suggestion was all that was required.
Later, as the tube train moves away from the station at Lancaster
Gate, I watch the bright posters slide past the windows, urging me
to visit Spain, to read the Guardian, to invest in a new online
account. I see the words, but my inner eyes are focused far from
here. Remembering the scene in James's novel in which the
intense, imaginative governess confronts the ghost of her drowned
predecessor, I, too, am staring across a muddy lake. No tormented
Victorian female stands there; instead, I'm watching a burly young
man. He stands at ease, his feet hidden by the rushes. Fiercely, I
wish him out of view; smiling, hands on hips, he holds his ground.
He takes up a fishing rod and flicks the line out carelessly, far
enough to catch my clothes with the baited hook if I don't
move back into the shadows, out of sight. Behind him, under the
tree, I glimpse another male figure, thin and languid-limbed. He
walks forward, stretches out a proprietor's hand, drops it on
the fisherman's shoulder. The fisherman leans back slightly, and his
mouth opens in a grin.
I know who these ghosts are. Like James's governess, I lack the
power to will them away. They, not I, are the masters here.
Shuddering as I come back into the rattling carriage, I catch the
nervous glance of a fellow passenger and manage a tight smile.
All is in order. All is bright and bland. Who ever saw ghosts on
a London tube?

A few days later, I'm lying in the bedroom where I've slept since
the age of fourteen. A four-poster bed hung with heavy white
curtains holds us close as we whisper into the tender skin of each
other's unsunned flesh, driving the past and its bad faces away from
The House: Obsession

troubled eyes. This is a newfound and late-come love, still strange
to me, and wonderful. But I'm not yet used to the fact that the
House can show one face to me, another to him, the newcomer.
He looks from the window and sees a heron keeping supercilious
watch from the top of a tree, a file of long-necked cygnets paddling
through the lake's summer coat of emerald weed. I see the shadows
of late afternoon and twist them into the shapes of the dead.
They're waiting for me behind every concealing bend in the
landscape, the two male figures, heads bent close together. Each
time I walk through the narrow passages into the back of the
House, I hear their laughter in rooms that I know hold nothing but
sunlight.
'They're gone,' he says. 'You know it. They're twelve years
gone.'
I pull away from his embrace to stare across the pillows. 'They
never leave. They just move out of sight.'
Later in the night, filled with joy, I reach out my arms and say
what we both know to be true, that I love him more than any man
I've ever known. In this room, that's unwise. My eyes are scarcely
shut before the window brightens like an angry moon. I look
through the diamond panes. My father's pale blue eyes are there,
looking in at me. Far away, I hear a startled nightbird screeching in
the fields.
'What?' He's trying to hold me still. 'There's nothing there. It's
only a bird.'
I'm out of control. Words won't come. Wailing, I shrink under
the soft pink quilt and pull it down over my head. Knees to chin,
I huddle in the dark body-scented hollow at the centre of the
mattress. It's wet with tears.
His hand reaches down to stroke the top of my head, conveying
a calmness he surely can't feel as he asks what it is that has scared
me so. I have no words. I can't tell him I conjured up that ghost
myself, to witness the moment of my betrayal, to warn me not to
give my love elsewhere. Here, in this House, only one man counts.
And he isn't, while I'm so quick with fear and guilt, dead at all.
Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad. Betray me and I'll come to
you, my daughter. He never left. He hasn't died at all.

The first novels that I wrote in my twenties featured beautiful
houses, tyrannical fathers and stories of obsessive passion. It didn't
surprise me, when I began to assemble a file of my father's writings,
to discover that these, too, had a common theme. At school, he
had written about a beautiful old house destroyed by fire.
Convalescing at Middleton Park and fretting about the dangerous
politics of his fellow invalids, he used his favourite house as the
setting for a story about the importance of tradition. ('"Changes
are evil things,'" the house-owner says, sounding like Charlie
Byron delivering one of his sermons against progress.) Another
story, 'The Fountain', records the sorrowful feelings of a young
man who visits a derelict house (the owners have been unable to
maintain its upkeep); yet another describes how an impoverished
squire dies of a broken heart when the demolition team arrive to
raze his ancestral home.
My father was writing these tales of neglect and destruction at
a time when the future of the English country house looked bleak.
James Lees-Milne, acting on behalf of the National Trust's recently
formed Country House Scheme, was doing his best to persuade
embattled owners to hand over their increasingly decrepit homes
to the Trust, together with an endowment for their maintenance.
Many, requisitioned for use as hospitals, schools, or by the military,
were past the stage of preservation. It's a curious fact that only three
historically important houses were damaged by enemy action
during the war; most of the wreckage was inflicted by indifferent
occupants. At Alton Towers, bored gunners took pot shots at the
glazed conservatories; at Blickling, airmen pillaged the mausoleum;
at Castle Howard, a homesick schoolgirl started a fire and gutted
The House: Obsession

the central block of Vanbrugh's haughty masterpiece. Evelyn
Waugh's image of the decline and loss of a great house, in Brideshead Revisited, spoke to my father's darkest imaginings. In his
own writings, over and again, he played out the story of his worst
fear, the loss of the House he loved. Thrumpton had not been
selected for functional use during the war; on the other hand, it
was operating with a skeleton staff, and the Byrons were getting
old. Without care, a large house can descend into a state of
irretrievable ruin in the space of a few years.
Reading the slender sheaf of my father's typescripts for the first
time (hidden away in a drawer, they had never been mentioned),
I wanted to scoff, but found it impossible. The style was old
fashioned and ponderous; the intensity of feeling was remarkable.
I knew the emotion, and the style, from my own first writings. It
was a shock to discover that, quite unconsciously, I'd used the same
outmoded voice, expressed the same concerns.
It doesn't strike you, darling, that you're too like him to be objective?
I wish I could get those words of my mother's out of my mind.

My own writing career began almost by chance. In 1971, I was
engaged as an under-secretary in the syndication department of the Evening Standard. Reluctant to admit to my family that most of my
working hours were spent visiting the postroom or making cups of
tea, I presented myself to them as a celebrity interviewer. Lists of
stars who were staying that week at Claridge's or the Savoy were
sent to the office every week: convincingly, I described Gregory
Peck's interest in ranching, Eartha Kitt's taste in jewelled slippers.
Asked where my interviews were to be seen, I mentioned the Tanzanian Times, the Wellington Gazette, anywhere, in fact, where
my parents were unlikely to have friendly correspondents.
The senior secretary -- she was three years younger than I -- cheerfully shouldered the work of us both and covered up my
mistakes (I had already been sacked several times for gross
inefficiency). Left to lounge at my desk with a heavy electric
typewriter, the first I'd ever used, I put it to work. 'Shadows under
the Cedars' was the result.
The book was to be unguardedly autobiographical, a poignant account of the vanishing life of a privileged minority. I wrote
rapidly and with no trace of irony, about summer picnics on newly
mown lawns, about crooling pigeons, sunlit gables and starlit skies.
By the end of the first chapter, I knew that I was producing a
masterpiece. Proud and confident, I left the pages exposed to view
and sauntered out to munch a ham sandwich on the Embankment
while contemplating a glorious literary future.
Returning, I found that the three young male journalists who
inhabited a smoke-shrouded room next to the secretaries' office had
spent a productive lunch hour. 'Shadows under the Cedars' had
acquired a new title: 'The Recollections of Aunt Matilda'. Reading
my way slowly through their account of Aunt Matilda's birthday
party and her distress at discovering a dead mouse in the tea urn,
I felt sick with dismay I struggled on with 'Shadows' for a week,
but without conviction. On a Friday evening, at six o'clock, I walked
down to Blackfriars Bridge and dropped the typescript in the
river.
A year or two later, while chastened by the usual experience
of rejection slips, revisions and, following the thrill of first publication,
a mortifying absence of sales, I knew that I wanted, for
better or worse, to write books for the rest of my life. There were
some low moments (my first and distinctly unappreciative review
was produced and slowly read aloud to a table of twenty acquaintances,
including myself, by our tittering hostess, a former schoolmate
of mine): nothing dispirited me more than my father's
withheld praise. My mother, doing her best to make up for this,
gallantly declared each new book I produced to be a masterpiece.
Having seen my father's stories, I can understand more easily
how he felt. Of course, it pained him to see his daughter's novels
being published while his own writings lay in a drawer, unseen and
unknown. Privately, he took out his old stories, typed them up,
with small amendments, and marked them as 'revised versions'
before putting them back in the drawer. Publicly, he punished me
by silence. When I gave him my second book, a gothic romance
featuring a Lord Ruthven as an aristocratic vampire, he returned
it unread after hearing me mispronounce the name. ('Riven, my
poor darling, not Ruth-ven. But why should it matter? I must be
terribly boring to want to get things right!)
Carrying On, an old-fashioned modern novel, was the first book
that I was certain would please him. The story was of a man in
thrall to a beautiful house. Confident of a warm response, I
presented the book to him in his own library, when it was filled
with weekend guests. I was aware that I had not yet given him
much cause for pride. This was to be my public compensation.
My mistake had been to describe the house as shabby. The page
at which he opened the book mentioned a sofa of threadbare
chintz. My father read the phrase aloud, gave me one long look of
bewildered rage, and snapped the book shut. Holding it away from
him, as if the pages smelt of vinegar, he strode out of the library
doors into the garden where, in full view of the startled guests, he
tossed my novel into a flowerbed. Returning, he asked my mother
how much longer we were going to have to wait for lunch. I never
heard him mention the book again. A friend of my parents, keen
that I should sign her copy, imported it in a brown paper bag, afraid
that the contents might be discovered.
'You said this book was going to be about your father, not you,'
my mother says sharply, when I remind her of this occasion. 'And
I don't remember him saying anything against your writing. He
was always praising you.'
'Not to my face, he wasn't.'

Evincing discomfort, she begins to tidy the objects on her desk,
laying out pencils in a row, making a neat pile of her unanswered
post. 'What about the Henry James book? Even you can't fault him
about that.'
I was amazed, at the time, by the enthusiasm with which my
father greeted my first attempt at scholarship. I hadn't, despite the
family connection, imagined that Henry James's elaborate style
would appeal to a man whose favourite authors were Noel Coward
and Lord Lytton.
It didn't.
The book looked at a circle of writers, of whom the youngest,
the most affecting and the most beautiful, was Stephen Crane. The
place where my father marked his own copy of the book was the
page that showed Crane as the newly celebrated author of The Red
Badge of Courage. Lightly moustached and large-eyed, his face was
appealing, even in a faded black-and-white reproduction.
Crane came to England in 1897 with Cora, his common-law
wife, who had previously managed a brothel in Jacksonville,
Florida. Cora fancied the life of an English lady; she persuaded her
lover to rent Brede Place, a manor house not far from Henry
James's new Sussex home, in Rye. Brede Place was tumbling
down; Crane's lease required him to put it into order. This was the
time when his commissions began to dry up and his health to give
out. It's no great exaggeration to say that Brede Place killed
Stephen Crane; its demands wore him out. He died of TB, aged
twenty-eight.
'Of course your father loved reading about Crane.' My mother
frowns, impatient with my slowness. 'Think how rundown this
place was when we first moved in. Think of them planting
daffodils all along the drive at Brede. It was one of the first things
we did here; such a job!' And she tells me something I never knew,
that Crane's story had so entranced my father that he drove off to
Sussex and talked his way into being given a private tour of Brede
Place. Back home, he bought every book by Crane that he could
find: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, took an honoured place on the
The House: Obsession

shelf of favourites, right between Earls of Creation (James Lees-Milne)
and Noel Coward's Collected Short Stories. Privately, I muse on other
aspects of Stephen Crane, the vulnerability and eagerness for which
Joseph Conrad loved him like a son, the large, beautiful eyes and
light moustache drooping over full lips. But my mother may be
right: what attracted my father even more than Crane's looks was the
idea of a man who committed his energy to the salvation of a house.
She may have missed the point. Reflecting on other aspects of
my father's life in 1988, the year when my book about Henry James
and his colleagues was published, I think he was most intrigued by
Crane's situation: his pride, his lack of money, his dependence on
the kindness of benefactors. These things would have spoken to
him. My thoughts turn back to the image of two figures by the lake,
my father's hand resting on the shoulder of the burly fisher boy, his
proud dependent. But making connections doesn't always bring
mysteries to light; here, they threaten to add confusion.

SHADOWS UNDER THE CEDARS

The search for my father's life after his discharge from the army
takes me to Lamas in Norfolk. Keen to live near Alex, their
married daughter, Dick and Vita bought a house here in 1941,
after selling their London home; at the beginning of 1943, my
father joined them as he started clerical work at the Aylsham
branch of Barclays Bank. (A member of the cousinship had pulled
strings to secure him this lowly position from which, it was hoped,
George would swiftly be promoted.)
Alex's daughter still lives in this area. A conscientious guide, she
can drive me through the narrow lanes along which Alex used to
guide their tall 'governess' cart on weekly visits to the Lane House
at Lamas. Recalling these trips, my cousin describes the fright it
always gave her as a small girl when Dick, having waited patiently
to play his trick, sprang out with a shout and wave of his stick from
behind a roadside oak tree. He didn't, by this stage of his life, have
much else to occupy him. Tucked away in the snug little study at
The House: Obsession

the side of Lane House, he retyped his recollections of the years,
long gone, when life for a young diplomat had been full of
promise.
'Here we are.' A narrow, roughly surfaced lane jolts to a stop at
the side of a red house. Peering through the branches of a gigantic
copper beech tree, my cousin and I can see the cliff over which the
two of us, as little girls, used to plunge in a wooden boat towards
an emerald ocean. We've grown; the land has shrunk: the cliff
bordering the Lane House garden is a shallow slope, the ocean is
a small square of rough turf. Beyond, a dark hedge shuts out the
old view across wheat and cornfields; behind us, as we turn to press
our noses to the dusty windows of the house, there's no such
evidence of change. The Lane House staircase is narrow and dark;
the kitchen has gaunt, ramshackle cupboards and a cracked floor
of red concrete, laid down for economy in the war. The study,
without a fire, looks musty and damp. My father spent hours
arranging flowers in these dim rooms; bright branches and
blossoms helped to keep despair at bay.

In 1944, the year my father turned twenty-one, he noted the date,
twelve years earlier, on which his uncle became the tenth Duke
of Grafton and owner of Euston Hall. Nineteen forty-four was
the year in which the Duke, having lost two wives, married a jolly
divorcee who welcomed younger company. Lamas was no great
distance from Euston; my father, to his delight, was encouraged to
pay regular visits. Invited by the new Duchess to offer suggestions
as to whether diamonds could be worn with a country suit and
which size of paper to order for stationery, his heart swelled. He
had always prided himself on knowing how things should be done.
In the absence of the Duke's eldest sons (Hugh was in India; Oliver
was keeping out of the way while he adjusted to the idea of a new
stepmother), George felt that he had been given a role. In his
mind, to judge from the tone of his proud, excited letters home,
he was almost a son of the house himself. At a time when Charlie
Byron was once again dithering about the future and keeping his
nephew at a distance, this was a solace.
Euston was not in good shape in the Forties, the time my father
knew it best. One of the rebuilt wings was housing 150 boys from
Barnardo homes; the gardens, laid out by the diarist John Evelyn,
were neglected. Flaking paint, chipped plaster and threadbare curtains
contributed to the air of gloom.
George noticed none of this. Advising the new Duchess on how
to behave, talking to old employees who remembered the days when
his mother had been a young girl about the place, gathering peaches
in the hothouse, ready to be packed in tissue and despatched to Vita's
ailing mother, he felt in his element. All that irked him was the
contrast between Euston and Lamas. Why should his mother, so aristocratic
in appearance and title, be obliged to live so humbly? Why
should he himself be condemned, from time to time, to kneel like a
parlourmaid on cold stone, lighting fires and blackening grates? They
were FitzRoys, too, and bred for better things. Life was not just.
In fact, as my mother remembers, George's parents loved their
little Norfolk home. The Lane House was not distinguished. It had
no grand history. But it was their own. My father's disdain was
more wounding than he knew: his mother gratefully recorded in
her journal that it had been 'so nice' when a visitor remarked that
she thought their house delightful.
George's new alertness to the ducal connection was reflected in
his reading habits. This was the time when he started to show an
interest in the history of the Stuarts. Immersing himself in a
biography of Charles II, he took proud note of the fact that the
king's long liaison with the Duchess of Cleveland made him into
a direct ancestor. The connection was remote; nevertheless, this
was the time at which George came to see himself as (almost) royal.
I can't resist reading my mother an extract from her husband's
wartime diary.
'Listen! He's talking about the Duchess.'
'Bloody woman,' my mother says. She takes a bite out of her
Lincolnshire sausage as fiercely as if she had the Duchess of
Cleveland's white neck clenched between her teeth, not a plump
column of pork. 'Go on then.'
Gleeful, I read the entry out to her. 'It is refreshing to feel that at
some period of history one's family - that's the Duchess - have milked
vast quantities of wealth from the country. And it gets better! This bit's
about why it matters to buy your shoes in Jermyn Street, and to
have your hair cut at the Savoy. / am always convinced, more and more
as time goes on, that it pays to get the best, and nothing but the best. Was that what he was like when--?'

But my mother has gone, her breakfast abandoned, shuffling
rapidly away and out of reach. Malice has made me forget the need
to be courteous. I'm talking, after all, about the young man she
chose to marry.
Well-made shoes and a smart haircut were my father's protective
devices during a period of insecurity. He hadn't made friends
during his time at training camp or in hospital; he was not making
more headway at the local branch of Barclays Bank where he was
now employed. But how, when he referred to his superiors as
'dreary little men' and regaled the clerks and secretaries with the
interesting history of his bloodline, can he have expected to be
treated as one of themselves? 'I, who am so lonely,' he wailed,
when his fellow employees set off for whisky-steeped nights of
jitterbugging at the local aerodrome. 'I, who so long for
companionship.'
Life in London was more congenial. Just as the diary is leading
me to pity him, I turn a page and find George speeding away from
Norfolk in his little Morris car, fashionably yellow string-gloved
fingers clasping the wheel and gear shift, lips pursed in a whistle,
all ready for a weekend of socialising. He writes about his special
table at the Savoy and going to dances at the Dorchester; he
describes the joy of lying stretched in a hot, lily-scented bath,
before he set off from the Chelsea home of one of the well-housed
cousinly tribe to see a 'simply killing' new Rattigan play. The army
discharge papers present him as suffering from exhaustion and
neurosis; how am I to reconcile them with these accounts of
dinners and theatres and dances that went on until dawn?
The diary for 1943-4 ends with a ten-page index of people he
has mentioned. He seems to have acquired a vast circle of friends:
I'm puzzled that so few of them kept up the connection. I've
tracked one of them down, however, and persuaded him to meet
me. He's a man in his early eighties, burdened by a title as magnificent
as his girth. We're lunching together in a large, old-fashioned
restaurant near Piccadilly; I'm having difficulty in distracting his
attention from a pert-bottomed waitress who's been assigned to
take care of our table.
'You were saying? I was never close to your father, I'm afraid.
You're going to find this is a bit disappointing.'
'I'm sure not.'
I'm impressed by the elegance of his suit, and puzzled by his air
of courtly blankness. The diary led me to suppose that this might
have been one of my father's closest friendships. It's plain that this
man doesn't know what he's doing here. His eyes stray again: I
cough.
'I think you used to go to the same dances? The Leek-Melvilles?
At the Dorchester?'
'I'm sure we did. Still - your father wasn't really one of us, you
know.' He smiles kindly, softening a possible blow to my pride.
'You mean, because he didn't have a military record? Did that
make him the odd one out?'
He dissects a crimson slice of beef with care, pops a potato in
his mouth, and nods approval. 'We didn't think about things like
that, my dear.' (He's already told me twice about his year of service
in France.) 'It's possible that he might have felt it.' He leans forward,
brightening as he finds something to tell me. 'I know! He had a camera hanging round his neck. That's what I remember. He was
always taking photographs of us. It was rather odd, you know. One
didn't take snaps of friends in those days, not in public. But I can't
remember a word he said. Letters? No, he wasn't a letter-writer,
was he? I wish I could be more help but -- two o'clock? Is it really?
No, I won't have cheese. Or coffee.'
Talking about my father hasn't given him any visible pleasure;
my impression is that he is relieved to bring the meeting to a close.
But he has helped, more than he knows. I'd wondered what my
father's role had been when he rejoined this smartly social world,
so remote from his daily life at the Norfolk bank. I'd guessed that
he felt like an outsider, painfully aware of his lack of an officer's
rank. A camera gave him a form of control; even if he didn't know
these people intimately, he could shape the groups, command the
smiles. When conversation turned to military matters, he switched
off, to become the recording eye. Cameras keep life at a safe
distance.
Our talk leads me to wonder how deeply my father felt his lack
of a military record at the time. I'd missed something: now, from
this new angle, it jumps out. He wasn't a letter-writer, was he? His
schoolfriends, going off to squad training and active service, were
good about staying in touch with the one they'd left behind. They
wrote to him. But here's the thing: my father, the master of
correspondence, the man who couldn't let a letter pass unanswered
for a single day, my unstoppable father never wrote back.
The most striking example of these one-way correspondences
to have survived among my father's papers was with John Persse.
All I know of Persse suggests that he was an affectionate young
man, lively and popular. His housemaster's reports, while harsh
about his academic limitations, praise his brilliance as a mimic.
Persse was my father's closest friend at Winchester. In 1941, they
were stationed together nearby, in the training camp at Bushfield;
In 1942, they met again. They clearly enjoyed each other's company.
And yet, after my father left the army, he shut Persse out. 'Write,
curse you, write!' his friend entreated, but my father never did.
Persse grew angry, then wistful. On the verge of being sent
into action in 1944, he wrote to ask what he had done to cause
offence. Two months later, Persse was dead, shot down as he went
to help a wounded comrade. My father, expiating his guilt, showered
reminiscences upon the dead man's family until, with the politeness
of desperation, they begged for silence.
Discomfort about his army discharge could explain my father's
strange failure to maintain contact with such a good friend. His
vaunted connection to Thrumpton offers another possibility. All
Persse s letters allude to Thrumpton; all describe his eagerness to
visit this wonderful place. Clearly, he'd been led, ever since their
days together at Winchester, to believe that Thrumpton Hall was
George's family home. The little house at Lamas had never been
mentioned; neither, in earlier letters, had the Seymours' home in
West London. Living close to Winchester, the Persse family had
been unfailingly hospitable to John's school chum; by 1942, John
was showing his hurt at not being offered a reciprocal courtesy.
Was this the pitiful reason why those last, plaintive letters from
Persse received no answer? Was my father so afraid of admitting the
truth: that Thrumpton was home to him only in his dreams, that
all he could offer Persse was a dark back bedroom overlooking a
Norfolk lane?
'I don't like the way you keep running him down.' My mother
brushes out her hair, still a reddish-gold in her eighties, with fierce
straight strokes. 'It isn't fair. He paid for that lovely portrait of his
mother by Oswald Birley out of his own pocket, you know. And
he was only twenty-one.'
'Snobbery. He'd just seen the painting Birley did of the Duke,
at Euston.'
'Goodness, you can sound unpleasant,' my mother says with
The House: Obsession


feeling. 'Well, then, what about all those landscapes of Thrumpton
that he had done for Charlie Byron and Aunt Anna?'
Triumphant, I fold my arms. 'Well, actually, if you really want
to know--'
She covers her ears. That won't stop me.
My father came across Major Drummond-Fish on one of his
visits to Euston, where the artist had just completed painting a
series of views of the house and estate. Offered a new commission
at a time when he was short both of money and a place to stay, the
ageing major gladly agreed to do the same for Thrumpton. The
Byrons were not consulted; my father, on this occasion, simply
acted as though the House was his own. When the paintings were
finished, he invited the Byrons, together with their tenants and
employees, to admire the results at a private exhibition in their own
library. A few of the more discerning farmers had, he noted with
approval, shown real taste in preferring his own favourite view,
across the lake. He then had the paintings packed up and taken to
Lamas, where he hung them, close enough to touch frames, facing
his bed. Here, in the privacy of his room, he possessed the House
entirely, from every angle. Just so, perhaps, one of his revered
ancestors might have hung up a painting of some shapely odalisque,
for private delectation. No voluptuous naked female could give my
father what the House had never failed to provide: an image of
permanence, security and consolation.

Not even the House could comfort him, in the summer of 1944,
for the steady flow of reported deaths of the young men he had
looked upon as his closest friends. In August, his parents sat him
down in the front room of the Lane House and told him to prepare
himself for a cruel shock: Oliver FitzRoy, the cousin my father had
thought of as his twin brother, had been killed in action shortly
after his twenty-first birthday.
The news came when a shrinking workforce was leading to





92
93
In My Fathers House

rapid shifts of location for employees of Barclays Bank. My father
had just received orders to move from Norfolk to the branch near
Liverpool Street in London. He went to no parties during this
period and stayed away from company. For once, there is no
mention of the ritual haircut. Dazed by grief, he walked the streets
all night, hoping that a bomb would fall and put an end to him.
'Half of me has died,' he wrote in his August diary: the following
month, after news of a further spate of deaths, he made a bitter
little note on the worthlessness of his own survival. 'They are all
gone now,' he wrote.
It's hard to withhold pity during this stage of my father's life.
Dick and Vita were not emotionally demonstrative; his married
brother and sister were absorbed in their own young families.
Abruptly ordered to move once more, to another Norfolk branch
bank at Fakenham, he lodged at a nearby rectory and spent his
evenings playing card games with the vicar's small children. Every
weekend, he took a bouquet of flowers to old Ismay FitzRoy and
listened attentively to family gossip. Here, at least, he could feel that
he was appreciated; conscientious George had always been her
favourite grandchild.
Family letters show that Vita, Anna and Ismay had been busily
scheming for George's future behind his back. The possibility that
he might one day be allowed to live at Thrumpton had been raised
once more; Anna Byron dropped excited hints to her nephew that
he should prepare himself for news of great expectations. The
news, when it came, was very different. Charlie Byron did not like
plans to be made behind his back. The House was not a FitzRoy
home; sharply, he reminded his wife and her sister that he had
connections of his own to consider. A savage row broke out; harsh
words were spoken, tears shed; hopes dashed. 'Poor George!' Vita
noted sadly. 'When we knew his grief [we thought] he'd really be
entitled to anything! Recently, she had been fretting about her
daughter Alex's loss of a nursemaid; the new drama put the smaller
The House: Obsession

mishap into perspective. 'I feel quite livid with CB (Charles
Byron),' she wrote with indignation: 'What a man!'
This upset took place towards the end of 1944. By the spring,
old Lord Byron was ready to eat a little humble pie. Their only
gardener had just left; the footmen and the chauffeur had already
gone; the cook's threat of a forthcoming resignation was the final
straw. Servants could no longer be found; might dear George be
willing to consider helping out a fond old uncle who still hadn't quite decided who his eventual heir should be?
George felt, to judge from the ecstatic tone of his diaries, as
though invited to walk back into Eden. Fatigue forgotten,
despondency gone, he set to work scything nettles, mowing the
lawns, hacking down undergrowth, losing himself in manual labour
until, late in the afternoons, he slumped in a trance beneath the
lakeside willows, watching the lines of the House he adored
dissolve into the dusk. Sitting at his little desk in the Fakenham
rectory, he had written of loneliness and a sense of isolation closing
in on him like a vice; now, in a moment of epiphany, as he sat out
beside the lake on a summer night, he understood all that
Thrumpton meant to him and that without it, he was lost. 'God
send I never have to leave,' he prayed.
Everything, in that season of luminous beauty, seemed to take
place in a dream. No guests were staying. In the drawing room,
behind drawn blinds, his aunt played Liebestraum on the piano;
sitting in the garden with Bingo, the old poodle, asleep at his
side, his uncle Charlie dozed the days away in a deckchair. At
dinner one night, laying a line of cherry pits across his plate of fruit,
George played a private game of divination. The cherry stones
promised marriage before the end of the year, and riches. 'I wonder?'
he wrote in his diary. 'I wonder!
Preparing to travel back to Fakenham and the bank, he snipped
a branch of orange-scented philadelphus from the shrub beneath his
bedroom window and wrapped it in wet cloths. For a week, the





94
95
In My Fathers House

cloying fragrance filled his little Norfolk bedroom with memories.
Three months later, he received two dismaying letters by the
same post. One, from his aunt Anna, pleaded for his forgiveness;
the other, from his uncle, sounded a more aggressive note. The fact
of the matter, Charlie Byron wrote, was that the time had come for
things to change. The House had become a burden, too heavy a
one for two old people to bear. It was too late for argument: the
advertisements had already been placed. The House was to be sold.
Shock numbed my father's mind. When he tried to describe his
feelings in his diary, his hand trembled. 'It has been my life,' he
wrote; it had represented all that he loved most. Nothing could fill
such a gap. 'I am completely and utterly heartbroken.' A day later,
his mind was made up: 'This shall not be.'

Time, my father wrote three days later, was his greatest enemy. He
knew now that his uncle and aunt's plans were well-advanced.
They had already made a journey to Essex and taken stock of
Langford Grove, the tall, hard-featured house in which Charlie
Byron had spent his early life and which was still owned by him.
It was not easy to see how they could move back there in the short
term, since army troops were still occupying the main rooms and
the gardens had been destroyed, but the Byrons were resolute and
optimistic. Upkeep costs would be far lower, they believed, and it
would be delightful for Charlie to return to the landscape of his
early years. Besides, the eighty-five-year-old rector of Thrumpton
piously informed his distraught nephew, it hardly mattered where
you Uved if you had the kingdom of heaven in your heart. This was
not my father's view of the landowner's position and obligations;
infuriated, he struck back with a list of all the houses he had seen
which were tumbling down after being abandoned. Did they not
care if Thrumpton was ruined? Lord Byron's answer was to let
his nephew know that Earl Spencer of Althorp had already
requested particulars and was arranging a visit of inspection. This
The House: Obsession


information caused his nephew a fresh stab of pain: to picture a
stranger prowling around the rooms, handling familiar treasures before negotiating a satisfactory sale price, was as painful as the
thought of its becoming an untenanted wreck.
Action had to be taken, and swiftly. Hearing that his uncle and
aunt were paying a September visit to the Lake District, George
took a fortnight's holiday from the bank and dashed north to offer
them his latest idea. Might they, he asked, consider installing him
at Thrumpton as their tenant if he allowed them to remain with
him as honoured guests? And where, his uncle demanded, was the
money to come from? Did George intend to become a borrower? This was just what my father had been planning - he had already
been in touch with a mortgage company to arrange the sum. His
uncle's tone and stare were so dismaying, however, that he lost his
nerve and claimed not to have thought matters through. Crushed,
he retreated to his room.
Two weeks of determined argument and skilfully deployed
charm produced the compromise my father had fought to achieve;
worn down by such persistence, Charlie Byron agreed to defer the
sale for a year. If George could find a solution before the following
summer, Thrumpton might yet be saved. In the meanwhile, the
advertisements were withdrawn and Earl Spencer was informed
that the House was not, at present, on the market.
Luck, now, was all my father needed.

FALSE TRAILS

Yorkshireman, leant across me to refuel his glass of claret while he
explained how unjust it was that his father was still ensconced in
comfort at the Hall while he, his wife and their three children made
do with a house that had once belonged to the estate manager. The
old man was a fool, he said, hopelessly impractical, caring for nothing
beyond his right to enjoy expensive holidays abroad and to dine at
White's Club or the Savoy when he came down to London. The
estate was going to the dogs, all because he refused to transfer control.






THE TIMES SATURDAY MAY 25 1
968






The occasion is one my father would have relished, a reception in
the Lord Chancellor's opulently refurbished River Room, held in
2005. This is a gathering of Nottinghamshire gentry for the posthumous
publication of a book by one of their own. Conversation is
more animated than I'd remembered; we've all, with varying degrees
of competence, become businessfolk, reshaping our homes as conference
centres and wedding venues. Rivalry wears a friendly face; we
swap notes on websites, civil licences, the merits of in-house catering,
marketing strategies.
I'm struck by the change of attitude, the sense of renewed energy
and goodwill. Ten years ago, attending an official dinner for the future
generation of stately home owners, I heard nothing but resentment.
The old couples were clinging to their heritage; the middle-aged heirs
didn't hide their frustration. Looking down the table and studying the
faces, hawkish even by candlelight, it wasn't hard to pick up the subtext
beneath the well-bred chatter. My neighbour, a portly, pink-faced

Lear was the ghost at that particular feast, a tough old king who
hadn't yet relinquished the reins. He'd pay for having kept his
children waiting; that much was clear. My father had sketched out
just this scenario in one of his unfinished stories, rationalising his plan
to keep control of the estate until he died. I winced when I first read
it and saw the depth of his mistrust. That evening, sitting down to
dine with the impatient and resentful heirs, I understood his fears.
Times have changed. Stringent regulations for the transfer of
property and soaring maintenance costs have forced the stately
home owners to change their attitude. House tours and farming tenancies don't bring in enough income to cover maintenance
expenses; it's fair to guess that, ten years from now, even the
wealthiest private owners will be running their homes as businesses,
converting courtyards, derelict barns and estate cottages into craft
centres, farm shops and office space.
I'm glad. These houses were never intended for sole occupation.
They suit large occasions; they need to be alive with warmth, light
and people. The weddings and conferences help to pay for their
costs; they also give energy back to rooms designed for crowds and
show. Better still, since little divides a family so savagely as a
withheld legacy, the owners have begun to look with kinder eyes
on heirs who can offer professional skills for free. From viewing
them as a threat to their own security, the older generation of
owners have come to see their hardworking sons and daughters as
allies and even, when they prove their worth, as friends.
Commerce is the thing that marks the change. A heritage home
is divisive; a business forms a bond. Mutual interests, shared
expertise and a perception, at last, that trust can be a wise investment,
have reaped rewards. Warmth has replaced hostility a cordiality born
of a determination to see these splendid, history-drenched estates
through, and help them to survive. There are cases, I'm sure, where
Goneril and Regan will still have roles to play, where my father's
terror of the old folks' home and oblivion will be fulfilled; tonight,
standing in the crowded River Room with its windows looking
across a darkly glimmering Thames, I see no sign of this. Goodwill
abounds, fathered by recovered confidence.
I have an ulterior motive for coming to this occasion. I'm
looking for the face of another of the acquaintances so carefully
indexed in my father's wartime diaries. Since then, he has become
a celebrated right-wing journalist and editor. He enters the room
late, a dapper, white-haired man. He's smiling as I approach him,
but with a wariness that suggests that he can't quite place me. I
introduce myself, with care, as my father's daughter. I explain that
I'm writing a book about him.
'You used to meet my father in London towards the end of the
war,' I say, prompting his memory. 'I was hoping you might be able
to tell me what he was like then. He was quite a friend of yours,
wasn't he?'
His smile, while still in place, is straining at the corners of his
plump lips. I'm causing embarrassment.
'I think you've got the wrong person, my dear,' he says. 'I don't
remember him at all.'
'At the Orchid Room,' I say, insistent, knowing I'm right. 'The
Bagatelle?'
'Ah, the Orchid Room.' Something's stirring, but not, it seems,
the memory that I seek to revive. 'So sorry I can't help,' he says.
And, while not quite turning his back, a shuttered glance indicates
that further questions will be pointless.
I'm beginning to wonder how much trust I can place in my
father's wartime diary. The first old friend remembered my father
only as a skinny young man who always had a camera in his hand.
He may have been delivering one of those coded messages at which
the English aristocracy excel (taking snaps of your chums wasn't
socially elegant in the days when photographers were always assumed
to be working for the press). Were those carefully indexed names
only of people near to whom George Seymour hungrily loitered,
using his camera as an excuse for his presence? Why is it that he's
been so completely effaced from their memories, if not because he
never enjoyed the friendship that his diary seeks to record?
I find, to my surprise, that I'm angry with these smiling, smoothcheeked
old men. I've plenty of reason to hate my father, but his
achievement matches theirs. They've no cause to be disdainful.
They fought for their country; he gave his life to save a house.
After leaving the River Room party, I go to dine with my
younger brother. We sit in the corner of a small restaurant in Soho
and talk, as we always end up doing when we're alone, about our
father. Sharing the memory of what we endured is, as we both
know, dangerously addictive. We'd like to break the habit, cut
ourselves free from the past; we haven't as yet managed to do so.
We don't meet often, alone; when we do, we can be sure there'll
be a third presence at the table.
'It's an odd thing to say, I know', my brother says, as though reading
my thoughts, 'but do you ever have the feeling that he's still there?'
'A ghost?'
'I'm talking about dreams,' he says. 'Dreams when he comes
back, as though he'd never gone.'
I stare at him across the table. 'Comes back where?
He looks exasperated by my stupidity. 'To the House. Where
else do you think he'd be?'
'Always?'
'Always. Why?'
'Because I have dreams, too. Bad ones. Is yours like this?'
Almost whispering, we swap images and discover that our dream,
our terror, is the same. No death has taken place, only a journey
to some distant place. Now, our father is back for good, restoring
everything, making sure that his home is just as it was twelve years
ago, when he appeared to die. But there's no possibility of his dying
in this dream. There's no way out, no end. Past middle age, his son
and daughter are back behind the bars of childhood.
Dismayed, we look into each other's eyes, searching them for
reassurance and finding none.
'Who knows, perhaps you're going to exorcise him for-us,' my
brother says, kindly, as we say goodbye on the crowded midnight
pavement, trapped in a jostle of bare arms and edgy hips outside a
new dance-club. 'I hope so.' And, although he is not often physically
demonstrative, he adds a brief hug. 'We'll get clear of it all one day'
Later, sitting at my desk in the bleak hour before dawn, I rest my
chin on my hands and stare into the laptop's grey screen. A
photograph of my father stands propped on the windowsill beyond

My father shows off a dapper suit under Dick Seymour's
furlined coat, a relic from diplomatic days.

my desk. He's posed at the garden entrance to his House; he's
wearing, to entertain the unseen holder of the camera, a mangy fur
lined coat that once belonged to Dick Seymour. He's laughing at the
lens and holding the coat wide, like a stripper in a burlesque show.
Encased within, he's immaculate in a three-piece suit, the country
gentleman at leisure, down to his well-polished shoes. Sunlight has
faded his features out, made a ghost of him in the twelve years that
he's stood at my window. I don't see him clearly any more.
If you wish to know me, look around you. That's what the proud
epitaph stolen from Sir Christopher Wren proclaims in Latin on
the stone that marks my father's burial place in the garden of his
House. Look, then: what's on show? A noble old building
weathering its prime; a garden filled with trees chosen for the
future, not the present; a park of sunny outspread fields, well
proportioned hills, restful inclinations, springing woods. All my
creation, he liked to say, mocking his own hubris. The claim was not
absurd: he gave his life over to ensuring that this beauty should
outlive him and remain secure. A heroic endeavour, surely? Passion
or obsession, the result is there for all to see. It outweighs the price
that we, all of us, paid. It must. It has to show its value.
My brother writes to tell me of a new dream, bred like a bad
child from our last meeting. In the first scene, he saw our father
striding across the hill above the House, a dog trotting at his side.
The season was high summer. My brother watched as the walker
stopped and turned, shading his eyes as he stared down. Below
him, the land lay under a spell, sunlit fields dotted with sheep, the
cricket pitch, the silver fine of the river snaking away behind a row
of feather-leaved willows, the sturdy tower of the village church,
all in place, as it had always been. It's an image, we agree, of the
precarious serenity he fought to safeguard.
The second part of the dream comes near to my own night
terrors. There's no sign of our father here, only a view of the
western stretch of the lake, lit orange by a neon sky. Mud swirls
thickly under the water's surface; black bubbles force their way up.
They burst, exposing, just for a moment, a glimpse of slippery
substances twitching and quivering below, as if in pain. These are
things that must not be seen.
I know where this dream comes from. Like my brother, I
remember the time towards the end of our father's life when he
decided to deal with his estate's last unclaimed area of land.
Bonfires smouldered through the nights, devouring the remains of
a jungle of twisted creepers and stunted trees that had smothered
the western end of the lake, obscuring it from view. They burned
through the length of a windless summer, while long-armed
machines scooped out the gathered filth of a century and the stink
of dredged mud seeped through the cracks in closed doors,
contaminating everything we touched.
My brother offers an analysis. At a time of life when any other
man might have felt it wise to undertake a little self-examination,
George Seymour preferred to exorcise his land, to decontaminate
his property. Better to cleanse a muddy lake than to risk taking a
look into his own murky depths.


WELSH CONNECTIONS

'No!' My mother's hands grip and twist the plastic handles of her
floral shopping bag as we turn into the melancholy retail park
where, two hundred years ago, George Gordon Byron and his
cronies came sauntering down into scrubby meadowland to watch
a display of cockfighting. Above us, the square bulk of Nottingham
Castle looms from the rain clouds; around us, dark figures scatter
across the glistening tarmac, fleeing towards the large lit doorways
of the stores. I turn off the engine. We sit in silence, waiting for the
rain to stop.
'We mustn't forget to buy coffee,' I say. I'm feeling wretched at
the distress my questions about her marriage have caused her. 'And
camomile tea. Oh Ma, I am sorry.'
'If you were sorry, you'd stop writing,' she says. Unexpectedly,
she reaches out to touch my arm. 'You're so tense!'
'Of course I am. I hate upsetting you.'
'I know.' She stares ahead at a row of shopping trolleys, snugly
huddled under a plastic canopy. 'Can't you understand how strange
it feels for me? Your father and I worked so hard to get the House
back to rights. And we did love each other, you know. In spite of
everything.' She sighs. 'I keep trying to remember the good times
and then I start seeing him. He always looks so cross.'
'Perhaps he doesn't like us to be managing so well without him.'
'He certainly was bossy. Just like you. You'd have thought I was
brought up in a pigsty to hear him lecturing me on how to behave.'
'And to look. Do you remember how you had to have your hair
set every week, in that style like a Greek helmet?'
As I say it, I remember being taken into a hot many-mirrored
room with my mother and watching active but unfriendly fingers
force a miniature version of the helmet to sprout in lacquered curls
around my glowering face. Worse even than the strain of meeting the
hairdresser's interrogative stare with a satisfied smile, was the lack of
speech. All around me, well-tended ladies twittered bright floods of
repartee; thirteen and wordless, I sat shuttered in self-consciousness.
She flushes. 'I liked it done that way. And some of the clothes
he chose for me were lovely. What about the apricot silk dress from
Worth? You must have liked that?'
I can't remember it. All I see, thinking back, are the tweed suits
of sensible cut, adding twenty years to her age. 'Was he always like
that, so controlling?'
'There you go again, always against him.' But she says it without
rancour. 'Not when we first met. Everything I did and said was
perfect. I must say,' she adds wistfully, 'I did enjoy it. Being adored.'
Packing our laden shopping bags into the back of the car twenty
minutes later, I return to the subject. First, I press a bar of chocolate
into her willing hand. 'I can't write the book without saying anything
about your marriage, you know. It wouldn't work.'
Peeling off the wrapping, she breaks the bar into squares and pops
one in her mouth. 'Nice nice,' she says, with a child's pleased smile.
'Not like those awful violet creams your father was always eating
after we went to bed. He kept them in a locked drawer, greedy old
thing. He thought I didn't know.'
I ask if he ever told her about reading the cherry stones at
Thrumpton. 'It was just before he met you. And the stones told him
he was going to make a marriage and grow rich within the year.'
'Just like him to be so superstitious. Remember when we went
to the circus at Olympia and he wouldn't come out of the fortune
teller's tent?'
I remember it as a night scene by Edward Hopper, lights fading
from the carousels and slides, music grinding to an end, my mother,
brother and I clustered glumly in a doorway staring at the drawn
blind behind which my father, then in his mid-forties, sat transfixed
by an old woman's warnings of grasping hands and indifferent
hearts. She was, he had no doubt, speaking of the future of his home,
warning him to keep fast hold of it.
'As for being rich,' my mother says. 'I suppose money might
have helped. But he wasn't so badly off, you know.' Always vague
about finance, it's possible that she never understood how little his
four hundred pounds a year amounted to in 1945. 'He did keep
wanting to know how much income I had,' she adds. 'Too boring.'
I watch the familiar gesture of a piece of silver foil being
smoothed and refolded, occupying her hands while she considers.
'We used to laugh about all sorts of silly things,' she says after a long
pause. 'I hope you're going to say something about that. We did have
fun.' An unexpected giggle spurts out of her, so girlish that I turn in
my seat to catch a glimpse of her face. She's pink, her eyes screwed
up with merriment. 'I was remembering the time when we were in
Hyde Park late one night after dancing at the Orchid Room,' she
explains. 'We were kissing in your father's car and a policeman stuck
his face up against the window. He told us he'd been standing there
and shouting at us for half an hour. We never even noticed!'
'Did he tell you about Thrumpton straightaway?' I ask as we
drive slowly home. 'He must have been in such a state about it
being sold.' And that, I think to myself, is why he would have been
so pleased to meet a pretty and rich young woman who, even if she
didn't return his love at once, seemed glad to be courted. I've
checked out the dates. They fit.
'Sold?' My mother gives me a disgusted look. 'The things you
ask. Whoever said it was being sold?'
I'm so flustered that I almost overshoot the turning into the
courtyard at the back of the House. 'It's in the diary. Uncle Charles
had decided to go back to Essex, to Langford, you know, after the
troops moved out of the big house there. Thrumpton was put on
the market for sixty thousand. George was frantic. It happened just
before you met. He must have told you?'
'Not a word.' Halfway out of the car, she stops and gives me a
glance that expresses more amusement than annoyance. 'So that's
what you've been thinking all this time, that he married me for my
money! A nice thing.'
I don't want to offend her, but I can't dismiss the idea of a
connection. The Byrons agreed to take Thrumpton off the market
for a year in September, 1945. My father had a year in which to come
up with a solution. 'I'd do anything to save Thrumpton,' he wrote that
month. 'I realise now that it means more to me than anything else in
the world.'
Did anything include persuading the daughter of one of England's
wealthiest men to marry him and provide the funds he lacked?

I'm looking at a picture, painted in 1930. In the foreground, two
skinny teenage girls kneel on the floor, playing chess. These are my
mother's sisters, Gaenor and Pip. Behind them, near to the fireplace,
my grandmother sits at the piano, chin held high: Bronwen, her
eldest daughter, known always as The Beauty, plays a viola; Elizabeth,
the musical prodigy of the family, draws her bow across a cello's
waisted heart. Across the room, their brother turns his back; a tennis
racket swings from his hand like a hunting crop, hinting at the
impatience he surely felt at having to pose for a family portrait. Facing
him, perched on a long window-seat, my grandfather is identifiable
by the baldness of his head and the plumpness of his crossed thighs.
'I suppose Pa's fond of us, in his way' my mother wrote to my father
at the time of their engagement, 'but he's a queer person.'
The Irish artist John Lavery has painted this domestic scene in
deep, glowing colours that pull the eye towards the centre where,
in a short lemon-yellow frock, a child stands. Her feet are neatly
pointed like a dancer's. She's watching the game of chess, but the
artist has placed her apart, separate. She could have been curled up
by one of the two dogs or sprawled beside her sisters in the
foreground, but Lavery has made a focus point of her solitude.
This is my mother. Eight years old, she stands firm as a young
warrior in the drawing-room of Chirk Castle, a fourteenth-century
fortress in the Marches, the borderlands that divide England from
Wales. This, until the year she marries my father, will be her home.
She will be the last to leave, helping Margot, her mother, to fold
curtains, store books, check the inventories, say farewell to the house
that always seemed to be their own. Her parents were only a couple
in the most formal of senses by 1945, but Margot took care to return
to Chirk that year. She knew her husband; left to himself, Lord
Howard de Walden would have cared only for the preservation of his
library, his writings, and his hawks.

Writing her memoirs years later, my grandmother claimed that
Tommy chose her as a bride because of her hands, which were
large and capable. They needed to be.
Erudite, absent-minded and notoriously dishevelled in person,
Lord Howard de Walden made up for an unglamorous appearance
by living like a Renaissance prince. Invited to join the Olympic
Fencing team in 1908, he transported his colleagues to Athens on
the Branwen, his private yacht; the Royal Welch Fusiliers' regiment
under his command in the First World War was equipped to fight
The House: Obsession

with medieval daggers from his own collection. Lacking a country
home of his own and learning of a family link to the property, he
rented and repaired a beautiful, haunted house in Essex until the
ghosts -- a mighty hound that raced around the dining table and
vanished into the wall; an old man who sat on visitors' beds; an army
of spectral knights who came clattering up the drive on moonlit
nights - grew too obstreperous for the tenant of Audley End. In
1911, he undertook another romantic project: the restoration of a
Welsh castle that the resident family could no
longer afford to
maintain. This was where my mother was born in 1922; by that time,
the Howard de Walden family looked on Chirk as their home.

Lord and Lady Howard de Walden enjoyed
dressing up for pageants at their Welsh home.






no
in

I

II-
My mother has taught me to venerate my grandfather and the
home he brought to life. I like her youthful memories of being led
around the hilltop gardens by the hand of Rudyard Kipling, of
being talked at ('never with; you couldn't!') by Shaw. I love to
think of her galloping bareback over the Welsh hills on her father's
Arab mares. ('There you go again! Bareback! You know perfectly
well that we always used saddles.') And of my grandmother calling
her tribe of daughters home by hooting Briinnhilde's cry across the
Ceiriog valley. ('Well, that's true.') I relish the story of an intrepid
aunt setting off to nurse in the Spanish Civil War (wrong side,
unfortunately) before marrying a philandering aristocrat whose
baby-smooth cheeks and confident smirk won him a few film
appearances (famous titles, undemanding roles, always playing
himself, the charismatic cad).
Hearing how five-course banquets were borne across a
courtyard from an underground kitchen, I'm amazed again by the
ease with which my mother has adapted to a different life. Doesn't
she mind wearing velour tracksuits and secondhand shoes when
she looks back on those years in a many-towered castle, set high on
a wooded hill, with maids to unpack for her, to press her clothes
and draw her bath?
I should know better than to wonder; the key to my mother's
survival and good humour is that she never occupies her mind with
-what's gone. It may be that the last memories of Chirk are so bleak
that they blot out earlier pleasure. I can't imagine how it felt, aged
twenty, to escape a court martial (her misplaced chart pins had sent
an American convoy, quite harmlessly, to Scotland instead of
Devon). Broken and lost, she came back to Chirk, to recuperate
from a nervous collapse in an abandoned house. This isn't a time
she talks about, but I've heard enough to know my mother suffered.
I've heard her describe sitting alone at meals with her father, staring
at the bald dome of his head as he bent forward, oblivious, diligently
tracking a line of text in some obscure manuscript. 





Here are the photos in the centre of the book.
Euston Hall, the Norfolk home of the Dukes of Grafton.

Dick and Vita Seymour pose, looking a little subdued, at the Legation in Bangkok.
Leo and Alex are sitting on the small carpet at their parents" feet.

George FitzRoy Seymour takes his six-year-old grandson for a first
and last - tearaway ride on the Duke.



My father's headstone, in the garden at Thrumpton.
Once, unable to
bear the silence, she shouted at him. He flinched, as if a stranger
had broken in on his dreams, but he didn't speak. She says it was
a mercy when Margot returned from Canada, a warfree zone to
which she had agreed to take those grandchildren who could least
be cared for by their busy parents.

My mother as a small girl,
posing in her tutu; and as
a teenager (on the far left)
at a fete in Chirk village,
1936.
Back in Britain, Margot looked at her youngest daughter's
trembling hands and listened to her frightened laugh; furiously, she
lambasted Tommy for selfish indifference before taking control of
the situation. My poor mother: hustled off to a local agricultural
college to learn the rudiments of farming, she found her metier just
in time to be deprived of it. A girl must have a season; Margot
insisted on it, even when the girl in question was in her twenties.
Measured and fitted into a fluid sheath of flame-coloured silk,
another of emerald green, my mother was launched, bright-eyed
and apprehensive, to find a mate and make a life of the kind for
which she had been bred.
In later years, my mother developed a comfortable shape. By the
time she had turned twenty-two in the summer of 1945, worry
and a poor diet had stripped her of flesh. Large-eyed, and thin as
a weasel, she was pale-skinned, her head crowned with a mass of
copper-gold hair. (Think Moira Shearer; you're not far off.) She read
with voracious indiscrimination, spoke a little French and German,
spelt atrociously and was financially innocent. ('Unless I can see money
or know it's there, I feel insecure,' she admitted in an early letter to my
father.) Her nervousness was hidden by an insouciant manner. She
didn't, beyond a couple of tender flirtations, of which one had been
with an unseen military pen-pal, have any sexual experience. This was
a dove, I'm ready to conclude, who was ripe for being caught and
plucked.
My mother shakes her head. 'You make me sound such a ninny.
I wasn't looking for a husband. My father may have rented Chirk,
but he owned lots of farms in Wales. I'd talked to him. He was
going to let me have one of them at half rent. I had everything
planned out.' She looks past me, her eyes bright with affection for
the picture of something I have never seen. 'I'd have kept a few
goats. Hens. A donkey. Pigs. It was going to be just outside
Wrexham, near Chirk.'
Life on the land she'd loved. I remember reading the letters that
The House: Obsession

Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon wrote to each other in the
closing months of the Great War, two poets planning out a farming
future. Unchanged landscape comes to symbolise a lost idyll in
wartime. Old-fashioned paintings of pastoral scenes sold well
throughout the 1940s; fields of corn helped mask the stench of
war: of sulphur, and of death. Of course my mother wanted to
farm: what could life offer that was more tranquil, more reassuring?
'And your father,' she says firmly. 'He was just as keen, you
know.'
Remembering the wartime diary's notes of visits to the
manicurist, and of a certain flower-scented hand-lotion reserved
there for George Seymour's personal use, I can't help smiling. 'Just
read his letters,' she says, indignant. 'He was just as keen as me. The
letters will tell you how it was.'
I tell her that I have been unable to find them. 'But he kept
yours in his desk, every single one. All tied up in ribbons and put
safely away'
'So are his,' she says swiftly.
'Oh?' I'm sceptical. I've searched through every cupboard and
drawer in the House, but they're gone, those voluminous screeds
of adoration which demanded instant response, out on the ash heap
or in the fire. She can't remember a word from them now, or even
from her own.
'Listen!' I quote one of my favourite lines, when she informed
her husband-to-be that her mother thought him '"oh! A perfect
pet! (Although she doesn't say what sort.)".'
My mother looks delighted.
'Did I say that? Did I really? I'd no idea I was so funny!'

READING ROMANCE

In November 1945, my father went to a London dinner party and
found that he had been placed next to a slender, hazel-eyed girl
with pale freckled skin and red-gold hair. With the writer Ludovic
Kennedy sitting on the other side of her, she had little time for an
arrogant but shy young man with a small head, round spectacles
and neatly slicked hair. Nevertheless, she smiled. My father,
smitten, noted in his diary that he had fallen for Rosemary Scott
Ellis, the youngest daughter of Lord Howard de Walden, and that
she had agreed to dine with him at the Savoy. (This was not such
an extravagant invitation as it sounds; London's best hotels offered
low-budget meals to keep their restaurants filled during the frugal
war years.)
I want to like my father at this crucial stage of his life. I want to
see him through my mother's (by slow degrees) admiring eyes. To
do so, I must overlook a gloating note in his diary about a FitzRoy
family wedding at which ('ha! ha!' he wrote) he sat in a grander pew
than some of the envied ducal cousins. I need to forget that the
future of the House lay so near to his heart, and that he must have
known that he was in with a chance to save it, if he could but charm
this millionaire's daughter into backing his passion with substance.
I know that there must have been an element of calculation, but
the diary tells a different story. From that first meeting at a dinner
party, my father lost all sense of decorum. He did not behave like
a cunning opportunist. He behaved like a man under a spell, or
overwhelmed by love.
He could think of nothing but Rosemary. When they went
dancing, he was tortured to see her smiling at another man. When
she casually addressed him as 'darling Georgey' and suggested that
he might care to visit her Welsh home, he accepted by return of
mail and told his diary that he would treasure the endearment until
the end of his life. When she cancelled a dinner date the following
week, he announced that he was ready to kill himself with grief.
When she consoled him with an invitation to a drinks party, he
sent her a copy of Antony, his favourite book, together with a
declaration of unconditional love.
Her answer, to his dismay, was a rebuff. 'I must admit I do think
of other things than you,' she told him, and warned him that her
feelings were less passionate than his own. 'But if because of this
you must go into a monastery, I pray you, don't consider it.' The
following week, however, she reminded him of his promise to
visit her in Wales: 'I am ordering and beseeching you to come
here,' she wrote, and added that he had best bring his riding things.
(She rode every day; my father did not dare admit that he had
never yet sat on a horse.)
'I hope you're not going to criticise me for sending him back
that awful book about Antony Knebworth,' my mother says. 'I did
try to read it, but really!'
The reason for my mother's air of indifference was simple: she
was in love with another man. Shortly before Christmas, this other
suitor told her that he was about to propose to someone else. If his
first choice turned him down, he was willing to marry my mother.
Passing the news on to my distraught father, she told him not to give
up, as she was also fond of him. 'I do like being truthful,' she added.
A week later, her lover's engagement to his first choice was
announced.
'And what if he had chosen to propose to you? Would you have
married him?'
'Don't be so difficult,' my mother sighs. I'm answered.
The fickle lover's engagement was announced on 15 December.
The following day, my mother lunched with my father at
Claridge's. She wore her favorite rust-coloured suit; a matching
beret was pulled aslant on her red-gold curls. My father, enchanted,
told her she looked ravishing. They went to the Tate gallery and
discovered that they both hated the Pre-Raphaelites. Later, they
had dinner at the Mirabelle.
'We did live it up, didn't we!' My mother is beaming at these
remembered pleasures.
A night of dancing ended in a passionate embrace across the
small front seats of my father's Morris Minor (this was the occasion
on which the policeman knocked vainly at the driver's window).
A week later, flushed with love, they drove out of London on the
winding road to north Wales. There were storms along the way
when my mother refused to wear a diamond brooch on which my
father had spent most of his savings.
'That was mean of you.'
'Well!' My mother sips her wine and gives me a little sideways
look.
'Not good enough?'
'You've seen me wear it. Perfectly nice.'
I'll never be able to make the word 'nice' sound so lethally
dismissive.
It's mid-October 2005. I've persuaded my mother to visit Chirk
Castle, and to act as my guide. She hasn't been there for over forty
years; I've never seen it before. I need to imagine the impression
it might have made on my father when he arrived here on a chilly
night in December 1945.
'Where's the sweetshop gone?' cries my mother, gazing with
distracted eyes at a village restaurant that announces itself as the
Chirk Tandoori. I'm staring past it at the war memorial, and the
clean-cut bas-relief of a soldier marching, head bent, into action.
I can't believe it.
'Eric Gill? For a village memorial?'
'Why not? He used to come and stay. Pa asked him to do it.' Of
course. What could be less remarkable than that Eric Gill should
come to Chirk for a weekend and turn a small commission into
one of the finest war memorials in the country?
We drive on a winding road up a hill - 'Mountain! Welsh mountains, Miranda!' my mother admonishes me - so that I can
admire the Roman aqueduct spanning the broad flanks of the
Ceiriog valley. Returning, we pass between gates as proudly
delicate as peacock tails, opening the way to a drive that twists like
a strangling rope around the castle hill. Mist swirls in and wreathes
back, to show a flock of black sheep cropping grass, a view of
distant slopes and, rising above the trails of wispy cloud, a square,
four-towered castle of grey stone. Sedate as a hearse, we cross the
narrow drawbridge on which, during the war, my grandfather
parked a horsebox to keep invaders out. Below, grass smooths the
banks of the old defensive moat. ('I remember it filling up with
snow,' my mother says with delight. 'I jumped in and lay there for
three hours, quite snug, with a little hole to breathe through. I
cried when they came and pulled me out.' She was five years old.)
This wasn't just a house. It was a world. As I register the splendour
of its scale, my mother, smiling, walks back into the past. I climb the
winding stair to my grandfather's refuge, a stone room with six-foot
embrasures and broad views across the Ceiriog valley. My mother
talks eagerly to the curator about a keeper's pet owl and the laundry
room where she kept two angora rabbits. I peer down narrow slits
through which oil was poured on to the heads of medieval intruders;
my mother has found the walk above the castle chapel from which
she dropped paper streamers upon the bald head of a visiting
minister. I'm down in a dungeon, contemplating the life of Henry
V's twenty French prisoners, kept in windowless gloom fifty feet
below the tower where my grandfather, centuries later, would hide
from view. She's walking along the Long Gallery, recalling the
elaborate family pantomimes in which she, as the youngest child,
invariably took the smallest part.
Sitting in the Chirk Tandoori that night, while rain beats against
the windows, we replay our favourite moments from the day. Mine
was climbing an airy flight of stairs to the upper drawing-room, still
lit by candles and the silvery reflections of the long glasses on its walls.
I didn't need to close my eyes to see the little girl squaring up to the
artist in her lemon-yellow frock, centre stage. Nothing had changed.
'And yours?' I ask. I'm sure she'll pick the garden where she
walked beside Rudyard Kipling, listening to the stories he shaped
to fit the setting. I'm forgetting that her last companion at the castle
was a haughty tabby cat. The moment she chooses is the one in
which, stalking out of the mist and along the gravel path, a grey
tabby advanced to whisk a bushy tail around my mother's calves,
before vanishing behind a wall of clipped yew.
Her eyes are shining at the memory. 'He was welcoming me
home, wasn't he!' And she reaches forward to pat my hand. 'I'm
glad we came!'

I've asked my mother whether, back in 1945, she was told about
the deferred sale of Thrumpton. Her memory is only of the fact
that my father talked about the House with a tenderness that
touched her heart. She had just become aware that her family were
about to lose their own home. Chirk, which had never belonged
to them, was about to be reclaimed, in its newly repaired and
improved state, by its owners, the Myddleton family. This was to
be her last Christmas at the Castle.
Of course, as she is quick to point out, she had no expectation then
that my father would inherit a splendid house of his own. All she can
tell me is that the misery of leaving Chirk allowed her to understand,
at once, the intensity of his feeling. This was a bond, and a strong one.

The proposal was made, accepted, and announced to the family
within hours of the young couple's arrival at the castle. (The letters
and diaries are annoyingly reticent, stating only that George made an
offer and was accepted.) My grandfather, descending from his turret,
gave a cautious nod. He could rely on Margot, who was arriving
from London the following day, to establish how they should react.
'She [Margot] seemed quite pleased,' my father noted hopefully
in his diary; in fact, Margot was not pleased at all. Aching from
his introduction to riding, and sleepless from a night of embraces
on the drawing room sofa ('nothing more,' my mother says sharply),
George had been briskly ordered to account for himself, his
income and his prospects. It was delightful to see him so aglow
with love, Margot remarked acidly, but how, at the modest age of
twenty-two, did he plan to support their daughter? My father had
no immediate answer; prudently, he kept Thrumpton out of the
picture at this stage. He described his bank work; Margot's expression
chilled. Rosemary was extremely delicate and sensitive, she informed
him; a nervous breakdown had weakened her stamina; with no experience
of handling her own finances, she needed a husband who
would shoulder responsibilities, cherish and protect her. Was George
Seymour, a mere bank clerk, that man?
Margot's scepticism acted as a spur to my father's love. 'Precious
Rosebud, I will love you and take care of you as long as we live, forever! he wrote before he left. En route to join his parents for a quiet family
Christmas in Norfolk, he found time to dispatch two telegrams and
An exchange of photographs: Rosemary to George
and George to Rosemary. My father was proud of his
elegant hands, and liked them to be admired.
three long letters to his fiancee. They had been apart for just two days.


My mother's elusiveness had given her the lead in the relationship
during the first two months; now, my father began to establish
control. He did so by one of his most effective techniques: the
letter. My mother had always enjoyed writing spontaneously: she
was not used to writing to order, or to a required length. 'There!
I've written five pages!' she told her fiance with evident pride; the
following day, she was reproached for such clear evidence of her
indifference. Love, for my father, was judged by the volume of
words in which it was expressed. Two pages of heartfelt passion
were worth less than four of modest intensity. To let a day pass
without writing was proof of a cold heart.
Keeping pace with my father's own almost relentless flow of
letters was hard work; my mother remained saucy and unsubdued.
'I still adore you,' she wrote a week after their engagement, and
added that her cat did not feel the same way. When George sent
her, unsolicited, a large and solemn studio photograph of himself,
she told him that she had given it to her maid, who thought he
looked sweet. ('There's another conquest you've made, you
Casanova!') This could be dismissed as girlish teasing; my father
was more seriously alarmed by a letter that announced the arrival
of a new country neighbour ('26, with a vast house, servants galore
and lots of farms'). Her mother, Rosemary added, thought him
quite perfect. She did not say for what purpose, but it wasn't hard
for an anxious lover to guess. George was already conscious of his
fiancee's passion for farming and her attachment to Wales.
'Who was it?' I ask, inquisitive. 'You don't mention his name.'
'Can't remember,' she says, a touch too briskly. She couldn't -- could she - have made him up? I can't guess. The more of this
story I write, the more I realise how little I know about the sharpwitted,
strong-willed old woman who has been my chief
companion for the past two years.

12

NEARER, MY HOUSE, TO THEE

Retrospectively, it seems as though fate was on my father's side. At
the time, however, he was disagreeably conscious of having come
up against a character as forceful as his own. Rosemary could be
managed; her mother was another matter.
Margot had been frank with him at their first interview. She did
not regard a junior bank clerk, however glorious his family
connections, as a suitable consort for her daughter. Rosemary's
heart was set on farming; it followed that George, too, must look
in that direction.
Margot spoke with her husband; the result was the offer of a
shared tenancy of one of his finest Welsh properties, Croes
Newydd. Rosemary had already been encouraging George to
think of himself as a man of the land ('my great big, strong, tough
farmer to be'). Now, she urged him to consider the charms of
Croes Newydd and the pleasure they would have in running a
farm together. Her mother, meanwhile, made it clear that if he did
not apply himself to farming, their consent to the engagement
might be withdrawn. (She had already insisted that it should remain
secret for three months.)
On 13 February 1946, five days after his twenty-third birthday,
my father took the plunge. Resigning from his job at the Fakenham
branch of Barclays, he ended, for good, his days as a paid employee.
With no future prospects, he was terrified.
'Promise you will never leave me,' he wrote anxiously that night
to Rosemary.
'Woman is said to be fickle, but I am notV she reassured him.
This was comforting, but he was disturbed to note, a little further
on in her letter, that 'darling Mummy' had been demanding an
answer about the offer of a Welsh farming partnership. Rosemary
was unsure about spending her first married years in a house which
was not her own. 'I don't fancy the idea of sharing,' she admitted.
Neither did George, but he was in no position to turn down the
offer of a free home and a source of income. At that precise
moment, he had neither.
This was the week in which a promising letter arrived from
Thrumpton: his uncle had formed a new plan that might,
conceivably, be of interest to his nephew. If George could spare the
time from gadding around nightclubs and meeting members of
Rosemary's illustrious family -- Charlie's Byron's notes were always
spiked with malice - perhaps he would care to pay a visit.
He went at once, and was received with warmth. 'We had a
most excellent dinner,' he noted (my father loved his food), 'bonne
femme soup, roast pheasant, vanilla ice bombe with hot chocolate
sauce, and cherries in brandy!' Champagne was produced, and
toasts drunk to the happy couple, before the new offer was made.
Smiling benignly, Charlie Byron announced that he had thought
things through. While conscious of the claims of his own distant
relations on the House, he felt that it was only right that George,
with his great love of the place, should enjoy it, in due course, as
a life tenant. Later, George must understand, the House would
have to revert to the Byrons. For the present, since George was
unemployed, perhaps he and Rosemary would consider running
the Home Farm at Thrumpton -- and acting as companions to a
fond old couple. He wanted, did he not, to be a farmer? He
wanted to live at Thrumpton?
Charlie, in other words, had finally recognised the convenience
of having a dependable, affectionate nephew around to work for
the estate and act, if necessary, as general supervisor. No Byron
cousin was likely to show him the same devoted care. My father
accepted the proposal at once. Nothing, he told his uncle, would
please him more.
Breakfast the following morning was taken after prayers. Charlie
Byron, encased in what had once been a dashingly fashionable
teddy-bear coat, retired to meditate on the Sunday sermon in the
lavatory. Anna clasped her nephew's hand and led him down the
drive. Her pride was evident and glowing; halfway to the village,
she stopped to boast that she had been the mastermind behind the
scheme for George's happiness. Proudly, she pointed between the
trees to the home she had singled out for him.
Her satisfaction was well-founded. I, like my parents, have only
happy memories of the house where, a few years later, I was born.
A friendly, unpretentious building with ample gables, an
eighteenth-century barn and a spacious garden, Thrumpton Lodge
was where I would have liked to grow up, had I been given the
chance. For my father, it was ideal; only a low brick wall separated
him from the House he now looked forward to inhabiting, when
the time came; in the meantime, he could enjoy all the beauty of
Thrumpton's benevolent atmosphere, introduce Rosemary to his
favourite walks through familiar scenery, and have the added
pleasure of feeling that he was doing the old couple a favour in
lifting some of the burdens of ownership from their shoulders.
There was only one problem, and Anna was confident that he
would solve it. The present tenants of Thrumpton Lodge were
family friends who had no plans to leave; Charlie had already made
it clear that he was not prepared to serve notice on them. What,
then, was to be done? Aunt Anna tapped George's arm with a
gloved finger. He could be such a persuasive boy when he set his
mind to it, she said archly; this was the time to show off his
negotiating skills.
I have no records to show what form of emotional blackmail
was deployed on the tenants whom my father visited at the
London flat before the day was out; I do know how impossible it
was to resist his will, when he set his mind on an objective. Perhaps
he simply wore them down; perhaps they were charmed at the
prospect of helping a young and homeless couple. All I can
discover is that his ends were obtained. They ended by agreeing to
cut their tenancy short; their house would be his by late autumn.
'A triumph!' he wrote to Rosemary from London late that
night. 'A complete triumph!'
It's hard to disagree. Nevertheless, the shock to my mother
when she paid her first visit to Thrumpton two weeks later was
considerable. Nothing in George's lyrical descriptions had led her
to expect the House's air of wan neglect (she still shudders at the
memory of pea-green painted walls, dusty piles of prayerbooks,
moss-grown drives, broken windowpanes, and rats). This was not
what she had grown used to at Chirk, or what she had anticipated
for her married future.
'But you can't just say that!' my mother says anxiously. 'Of
course it was run down, but that doesn't mean it wasn't beautiful.
You ought to say how thrilled I was when your father took me for
my first walk on the hill, and we could see the House below us.
You must say something! Not just that I thought it was shabby'
This was the moment at which my mother's fondness for the
solemn, old-fashioned man she had chosen to marry deepened into
love. Enthusiastically, she began to lay plans for a herd of Ayrshire
cows, to ponder where they would keep horses, and what sort of
hens would make the best breeders. The flirtatious tone of her
earlier letters gave way to real tenderness. Together, she told
George, they would make a splendid team. 'It will be such fun!
Such fun together, won't it darling.'
'I meant it, you know,' my mother says, blinking her eyes and
hunting for a tissue. 'It -was so touching. I'd never met anybody
who loved a place so much. I never have. Well - you know how
he was.'

We both know how he was. I'm glad to look into his diary and
find this insecure and unfulfilled young man - he was just twenty
three and looked less in his round schoolboy spectacles - declaring
that he had found happiness at last, with the prospect of bringing
together the two things he most adored. 'I must be the luckiest
man in the world,' he wrote.
Love, however overwhelming, placed no curb on my father's
snobbery. It gave him a sense of singular joy on 4 March 1946
('the very great day') to see that the official announcement of their
engagement took top place in The Times gazette, 'at the head of the
column!' It tormented him that the announcement came too late
for his name to be added to my mother's invitation to a ball at
Buckingham Palace. My father became as avid as Mr Pooter, one
of his favourite fictional characters, for details of this elegant
occasion. (It horrified him that my mother did not make a special
visit to the hairdresser or even have a manicure.) To whom had she
sat next at dinner, he wanted to know? What kind of china and
glasses had been used? And what had the young princesses worn?
But my mother, who took little interest in such details, could only
remember that the food had been tepid. He was comforted a few
weeks later when the two of them shared a dinner table with
Princess Elizabeth - among twenty others -- for a dance. George
seized the opportunity to take a good look at his royal neighbour.
She was pretty, he conceded, but not a patch on his Rosebud, 'by
far the loveliest woman in the room.'
Love coloured everything. He had, until now, shown no taste
for classical music; now, when he visited his parents for an
occasional weekend, they were amazed to hear Liszt and Bartok
crackling down the staircase from the portable player in their son's
room. The very mention of ballet, in later life, was enough to curl
his lip; three weeks before his wedding, seated in the stalls of
Covent Garden for a performance of Sleeping Beauty, George was
in a state of entranced joy. 'It was heaven: the music, the dancing,
the decor all lovely - and my adored Rosebud sitting beside me
looking like a dream.' He wanted the world to share his awareness
of her beauty; if not the world, his entire family. Thrilled by the
chance to show his prize off to his grandest relations, he paid
twenty pounds for tickets to a charity ball at Euston Hall and
fancied they might be asked to stay the night. No invitation came,
although my parents were the last to leave.
The visit to Euston spurred him to enliven their long journey
home with reminders of his royal connections. Rosemary's family
were fine, to be sure, but who could cap the glory of claiming
Charles II for an ancestor? (A considerable number, if we are to be
honest, after a span of seven generations; to my father, however, the
cherished connection had grown close enough for him to thank
goodness, for Rosemary's sake, that he had not inherited the king's
lax morals.)
My father was in ecstasy; his fiancee was in a state of nervous
exhaustion. 'Those endless visits to relations!' she groans. 'Aunt this
and cousin that - it never stopped. I never knew a man with so
many cousins. And all the worry about how I dressed: I'm sure the
FitzRoys couldn't have cared less which hat I wore to church.'
'It was the way he showed his pride. Come on, Ma, you know
he was wild about you. And your family: what did they make of
him?'
'They thought he was all right.' She fidgets. 'He hadn't read
much. At Chirk, we were always talking about books and music
and things. George didn't have a lot to say, except about family
history' She pauses to think, anxious not to sound too harsh. 'I
mean, there was Thrumpton, and the wedding plans, and his new
car - such a wretched thing. An Alvis.'
I know about this. 'You made him buy it. You certainly paid for
it. It's always described as yours.'
She looks baffled. 'But I didn't drive.'
'Then you bought it for him. It's not a crime to have been
generous.'
'Horrid car,' she says with feeling. 'It never stopped breaking
down and you know how useless your father was at mechanical
things. That's why he found it so useful later to--'
Breaking off, she gives me a sideways look. 'You know. Have a
friend.'
The difficulty about holding these conversations with my
mother is that I never know which way she'll want them to go. It's
apparent that she's in the mood today to discuss the years in which
we lost him. I'm not.
'I'm longing to know more about the honeymoon,' I say.
'I'm sure you are.' Her tone is drily discouraging.
'I didn't expect to find you going off to a film on the first night
of your marriage. Do you remember? You were staying at the
Savoy as a present from your parents. That must have been fun: I'd
love to stay there.'
Babble babble. I'm prattling while I bait my trap, hoping she'll
fall into a web of compliments and tell me: why Why did my
parents go to a silly costume drama (the young Gene Tierney and
Vincent Price in Dragonwyck) when they could have been behind
doors and locked in each other's arms, bruising their lips with
newly legitimised kisses? Standing above her in the half-light of the
curtained library, I stare down, willing her to read my thoughts.
Her fingers are plaited together and she's looking at them intently,
circling her thumbs around each other. There's earth under her
nails and the cheerful red varnish has chipped away from the rims.
Her hands have looked this way for as long as I can remember.
'Shall I open some wine? We could have a glass before supper.'
'I don't want any' she says in a low voice, then glances up at me.
'I haven't objected to your writing this book. I haven't tried to stop
you, have I?'
'Not yet!'
She doesn't smile. 'You don't have to put in everything. I've read
your biographies. You didn't say what Henry James did in bed, or
Mary Shelley'
'They weren't around to tell me, but you . . .' Eagerly, I rattle off
a quote from one of her own letters, forgetting that this is a sure
way to antagonise an interviewee, let alone a mother. 'You called
him "my clever, mathematical, neat, precise and altogether perfect
person", and that was just two weeks before the honeymoon! It's
not passionate. You must admit that.'
'Letters don't tell you everything.' Her voice is still so low that
I have to bend to hear her. 'All that side of things was lovely. It
always was. Can't you just leave it at that?'
No, I can't, I want to shout. I need to know. Lovely, in what
way? Lovely, because of what? But she's slipped away from me,
back behind the door she keeps closed on anything unpleasant. I'm
my father's daughter in my volatility and imperiousness; each time
we talk, I see more clearly that she is hers in the way that she
protects herself from intruders and their judgments.
Staring down in thwarted silence at her bent head, I remember
the time I first made love and how, full of glee and complacency
on a summer day, I tracked my mother through the garden
shrubberies to boast about it. Nothing much had happened -- the
affair was over in less than a month - but I glowed with foolish
pride that afternoon. My body was hot with remembered pleasure;
my mind shimmered with the memory of tangled limbs,
smothering kisses. Kept down for so long in a state of lowered
confidence, I had my parents beat at last. I'd discovered things they
could never have dreamed about. I told it all in triumph as she
stood there, looking smaller than myself, trowel in hand. The
-words came rushing from my mouth as I searched my mother's face
for -- what? Wonder, I suppose, wonder and envy.
What I did not anticipate was the outstretched hand, the gleam
of sudden secret pleasure in her eyes. And wasn't it marvellous, she
said, when--
Horrified, I cut her off and backed away. I wanted her to be
abashed by my revelations. I wanted none from her, a middle-aged
woman, an untouchable in the hard eyes of youth. I didn't see, as
I do now, the generosity and warmth of her response.
And now, when I want so badly to uncover her sexual feelings,
there's no way to get at them. The door has been tight shut. It was
lovely. It -was always lovely.
I'll have to continue my interrogation another day.

They were married at St Margaret's Westminster in June 1946
('509 guests!' my father noted, rejoicing at the lavish number of
wedding cheques he had received). Since foreign travel was still
prohibited, their prolonged honeymoon was taken in Britain. In
Wales, they spent a fortnight at one of Tommy Howard de
Walden's properties, a seventeenth-century house called Plas
Llannina. The summer was a scorching one, too hot for excursions
until the end of the day, when they strolled along the beach
towards New Quay, past the spot where my mother remembered
having seen Augustus John stretched out on the stony shore like a
beached whale after emptying a decanter of whisky with her father,
his host. Coming back, they peered into the semi-derelict
applestore where Dylan Thomas lived while he began to dream up
the story of Milk Wood. With the oil lamps lit, they sat reading
each other chapters from old-fashioned novels about foxhunting--
'Seriously?'
'Why?
Any objections? You haven't become one of those
activists, have you?' my mother inquires with sudden suspicion.
'It sounds so unlikely'
'Not at all.' My mother is her jaunty self again this morning. 'It
just goes to show how little you really know about your parents.'
Snugly tucked up in a big double bed, with the oak door shut
against the creaks and whispers of a house more haunted than any
other my mother can remember, they opened the window to gaze
at a full moon above the sea and to listen for the bells that, so the
stories went, rang up from Llannina s submerged church to -warn
of coming storms.
'And don't forget Valentia.' She sighs. 'Such views: I've always
meant to go back there.'
My father's diary tells me less about the little rainswept island
lying to the west of County Kerry than can be gleaned from a
couple of internet sites; one entry does record that my parents
spent time 'very pleasantly' in their hotel room. Does 'pleasantly'
hint at unmentioned pleasures? I can't tell and my mother can't or
-won't -- remember. It's easier to pick up the note of outrage in
his account of a visit to the skeletal ruins of a Kerry mansion, burnt
out by a careless smoker on a wild weekend in the twenties. My
father was too upset to eat his supper that night. Emotion, as he
unfailingly reminded us in later years, went straight to his stomach,
proof of his exceptional sensitivity.

Hints of troubles to come surfaced in August, when my parents
were in Norfolk with George's parents, enjoying the last sleepy days
of a glorious summer. ('They seem so entirely happy' his mother
noted, adding that she was glad Rosemary seemed to be a fit and
energetic young woman. George's health must be carefully watched,
Vita warned her daughter-in-law. This project of farming was all
very well, but poor George was too delicate to undertake more than
the lightest tasks. Advising and overseeing were his real strengths.)
A letter from Charlie Byron cast a sudden chill upon the
pleasant experience of admiring a last magnificent clutch of
wedding presents. (My father had been shameless in advertising his
need for furniture and paintings of a kind appropriate to his future
home.) Capricious until the end of his days, Charlie was reviewing
his plans once again and wondering if he had been too generous
to his nephew, too hard on his Byron cousins. Perhaps, he wrote
now, George imagined that the Home Farm and the Lodge were
being given to him for nothing? He had better take note, now and
for the future: no special privileges were being offered. He would
be expected to come to financial terms with the land agents -- 'and
ME!' the old man wrote in shaking capital letters, forgetting that
the proposal for George to run the estate farm had come from
himself.
Vita was alarmed by the letter - perhaps Charlie was planning
to leave his home to those Byron cousins, after all? My father was
irritated, but not unduly worried. Charlie had changed his mind
before and would doubtless do so again; at the end of the day, the
only surviving Byron claimant was a Catholic and Charlie Byron
would not even let a Catholic through his door. True, my father
would have preferred to hear he was going to inherit the House
outright, but a life tenancy still secured his future. Charlie, he told
his mother, was just playing games.
Overall, as my father settled into his new life as a young farmer
with a pretty little manor house in the village he adored, his
situation was enviable. Rosemary's relaxed attitude to money was
due to her possession of a substantial amount of it, to be shared
with him; her parents were both fond and lavish. They had helped
to find a young Scot who was willing to oversee the Home Farm;
three girls from Chirk village were persuaded to come and form
a domestic household at Thrumpton Lodge. Anna scurried around
to find them a chauffeur, a dairyman and a day-labourer. The final
feather in my father's cap was the news that Margot Howard de
Walden's personal maid wanted to return to her Nottinghamshire
roots. Word arrived that she had settled in a nearby village, on hand
to sew, press clothes and pack cases. The level of elegance at
Thrumpton Lodge was now, as George joyously noted, almost
ducal.
At twenty-three, then, my parents were fitted out for a life of
unusual comfort. When my mother, misty-eyed, talks of her
farming years, I want to know how many farmers' wives had a
chauffeur-driven Daimler in 1947; unkindly, I comment that she
reminds me of Marie Antoinette tending vegetables behind the
Petit Trianon.
They kept no diaries during the four years they lived at The
Lodge; my mother remembers these as the happiest of her married
life, marred only by a requirement to dine with the old Byrons at
least twice a week. This, as George's uncle began to slip into
senility and Anna grew correspondingly fretful, was not a cheerful
experience.
My mother believes her memories. She remembers creating a
pretty garden at the Lodge ('I put in those borders!') and a cheerful
home. ('All the family loved coming there. The Lodge was such a
cosy place.') The meagre documentation that has survived shows
this to have been a period of dismay, confusion and enforced
economy. Can both be true?
The main agent of change was the unexpected death of Tommy
Howard de Walden within months of his youngest daughter's
marriage. That June, Rosemary noted how ebullient her father
seemed, as if he had already managed to put the memory of Chirk
behind him. In September, she worried that he was looking tired.
In October, he was taken into the London Clinic for an operation.
On 5 November, a date she has ever since associated with
misfortune, her father died. He was sixty-six. The given cause was
jaundice.
George Seymour had married a young -woman whose income greatly exceeded his own. In the late autumn of 1946, at the
beginning of the coldest winter in living memory, when snow
buried the hedges from view and the roads around Thrumpton
were blocked off as impassable, bad news came in. Tommy Howard
de Walden had never liked lawyers; convinced that they were out
to rob him, he had put off the unpleasant business of dealing with
them. As a result, scant provision had been made for his five
daughters. My mother and her older sisters were no longer
heiresses; instead, to his dismay, my father found himself married
to a young woman whose means were almost as modest as his own.
'I will take care of you forever! George had promised Rosemary
at the beginning of the year. He had not imagined that this would
involve economic support. Eleven months later, preparing to
celebrate a family Christmas at Thrumpton Lodge to which he had
proudly invited his parents, his married siblings and their children,
my father had to beg for a delay in paying the fuel bills. His plans
to buy three young pigs for the Home Farm were cancelled.
I have said that I would not want to be in a wartime trench with
my father; I'm proud to see how well he performed in less
dangerous circumstances. The Christmas plans went smoothly
forward; Vita praised her son's generosity as a host and scolded him
for buying such lavish presents: a pair of crystal vases for herself and
a really beautiful cocktail frock, off the peg, that might have been
made just for Rosemary. Vita had no idea that her son had paid for
these Christmas gifts, and the traditional turkey, by cancelling his
order for a new suit - his own was threadbare - and recalling the
deposit.
'I'm a fool about money' my mother had blithely announced in
one of her early letters; my father now began to discover that she
was, indeed, an innocent. Arithmetic had never been her strength;
The House: Obsession

she understood only that her bank statements must always show her
account to be in credit. Asked by her husband to perform some
simple feat of addition, Rosemary gladly offered a prompt answer.
Unfortunately, she had halved the sum instead of doubling it.
George could not, it was plain, rely on his wife for the keeping
of ledgers and cash books, by which he hoped to control their
rapidly shrinking funds. All accounts, bank details and household
reckonings would, from this time on, lie in his province.
I was scornful when I first encountered the Telephone Ledger.
Begun a month after my grandfather's death, the ledger-book was
maintained, with only one break, until a few years short of my
father's death. I looked at it, initially, as a potential hiding place for
awkward secrets. 'Black Boy' sounded promising; so did three
entries for 'artificial insemination'.
Closer inspection showed that the ledger had no shocks to offer.
The Black Boy was the name of a pleasantly old-fashioned hotel
in the centre of Nottingham; the entries on artificial insemination
referred, not to procreational difficulties between my parents, but
to the herd of Ayrshire cows they had purchased, at ^70 a head,
during the first ambitious weeks of taking on the farm.
The entries told me little that I did not expect; there was no
surprise in finding that each call to a person of illustrious birth was
fully recorded, with titles, while those of less genealogical interest
were briskly noted by their surnames. The unexpected aspect was
that the entries had been maintained, with a note of the length of
time spent and subsequent cost of every call, over a period of fifty
years. The ledger brought into question the haste with which I had
dismissed my father's service to Barclays Bank (such meticulousness,
such dedication, could not have gone unremarked). The ledger
showed me that, despite the capriciousness with which my mother
had once held him in thrall, my father now controlled the
marriage.
My father's entire life had been driven by his passion for Charlie
Byron's home. I wonder what was in his mind in 1948, when he
made a visit to another Byron landmark in the neighbourhood.
Newstead Abbey was where his uncle's celebrated ancestor had
spent his youth; since then, it had become a desolate ruin. Was my
father thinking about Thrumpton as he peered through the
Abbey's grimy windows at dusty wooden floors, peeling wallpaper,
sheeted furniture? Was he wondering, for the first time in a lifetime
of obsessive love, if a neglected, inconvenient old house, in which
his children would never have the right to live, was worth the
wait?
My father's feelings were about to be severely tested. The
following year, in a glorious June, Charlie Byron died. It was not,
at this point, apparent just how little he had done to safeguard his
family property.

13

THE FULFILMENT OF A DREAM



My father had been anticipating only a lifetime's tenancy of the
House he worshipped; outright possession was the unlooked-for
gift magnificently extended by a devoted aunt. Anna took frank
delight in the naive expectation that she was free to dispose of her
late husband's home as she wished -- and to exclude his surviving
relatives from any part of the House's future.
In the autumn of 1949, Anna went to a meeting with the family
lawyer and two trustees appointed by her husband to act for the
interests of the estate. Gently invited to explain how Lord Byron
had dealt with his correspondence, she grew flustered. Charlie was
always prompt in answering handwritten letters; it was the other
kind he didn't like. And how, the principal lawyer asked, did Lord
Byron respond to this other kind? Had he answered these letters
later? Anna shook her head. Had he answered them at all?
The answer was reluctantly given. She had noticed that all
official-looking letters lay on his desk for a certain time, unopened,
after which they disappeared. Did she know where to? Anna was
growing impatient: after all, there were so many places! Good
heavens: drawers, boxes, the backs of cupboards. When space ran
short, she added helpfully, Charlie often stored tiresome-looking
letters behind the House's heavy cast-iron radiators. Should she
start a search?
The lawyer shot a discreet glance at the trustees and shook his
head. This was when Anna learned that Charlie had unwittingly
thrown away eight years' worth of dividends. A search would be
a waste of time; their present value was nil.
Worse was to come. Charlie Byron, an inveterate procrastinator,
had failed to act in the best interest of the House's future. The tax
bills raised by his death were enormous; they could only be met by
a sale of the Estate, the House, and its contents. Anna must not be
too alarmed, the lawyer reassured her. She would not be homeless.
Lord Byron's principal home in Essex had recently been
demolished after a fire, but a smaller house on the same estate was
available for her use - if she remained a widow. Dazed, Anna
listened to the one condition over which Charlie had taken real
care: all of her future benefits were to be cancelled if she remarried.
George's affection for his aunt was sincere; his first instinct was
to comfort her. But what reassurance could he offer?
Little correspondence survives from the period following Anna's
dismaying interview. All I know is that the University of
Nottingham put forward an offer to buy the House as an
investment, and that my father persuaded the trustees to reject it.
'And then?'
My mother shoots a wistful glance at a pile of creased cloths
stacked on the ironing board. 'It's almost eleven,' she says. 'I wanted
to go shopping this afternoon.'
'I'll take you. What happened after the University backed out?
I've nothing to do until lunchtime but listen.'
She sighs. 'But you know all this. George must have talked
The House: Obsession

about it. The trustees knew how much your father adored the
House, and that he'd been told he was going to have it. They made
us an offer: fifty thousand pounds and a year to find the money. If not, the House and the estate went up for auction with the
contents.'
'But you didn't have anything like that sum of money'
'Of course we didn't. We had to borrow.'
I'm trying to picture it. Fifty thousand pounds, in 1949? Fifty
thousand pounds, for an underheated, underlit, decrepit mansion
which, following the auction of contents to pay the Inland
Revenue, would be empty of all but a small clutch of Byron
heirlooms preserved for his relatives by the old man's will? Why not
sit tight at Thrumpton Lodge and wait for a friendly and more
prosperous buyer for the Hall who would be delighted, surely, to
have them as tenants and neighbours?
'Weren't you terrified? How did you think you were going to
pay such a sum back?'
'Oh, I know!' she says. 'But think of owning the House, of its
really being ours, not just somebody else's home!' (She's thinking,
transparently, of the Welsh castle her family had loved, not owned.)
'It was something we were going to enjoy doing together,' she
explains. 'A real adventure!'
It's rare to look into the face of a woman in her eighties and see
the girl she once was smiling back at you. This, as I know, was the
first great test of their marriage; I expected an admission that she
felt coerced, trapped by my father's obsessive love for the House.
But what I see across the ironing-board is what I glimpsed when she was describing her first visit. Today, the same eagerness
brightens her eyes and spreads a flush of pink across her cheeks. She
loved the House as much as he did; she was with him all the way.
As an addict to the House's charms myself, I can understand a
commitment of passion. Feebler justifications follow, about how
people in the village would have felt betrayed if Charlie Byron's
nephew had turned his back on them. I'm not convinced; another
family might have done just as well by the House, employed the
same people, grown to feel the same protective love for the estate.
But my mother is persistent; she reminds me of the fate that
overtook Clifton Hall, the nearest large house to Thrumpton.
Clifton's land, conveniently close to the boundaries of Nottingham,
had been requisitioned by the state during the war, and then
retained for residential development; Clifton's owners, by 1949,
were already planning to sell up and leave. They were not alone: fine
old family houses were being abandoned at an unprecedented
rate during the late 1940s; some of the most glorious had been
uninhabited since the war. Nobody, in 1949, would want to take
on a derelict mansion, or so argued my father, seeing himself as
a knight riding to the rescue. Nobody would care to save the
House he loved. Except himself.
This was not, of course, entirely true; the National Trust, formed
in 1894 to save areas of outstanding beauty, had enlarged its scope
during the 1930s, in order to acquire and protect significant houses
at a time when many of them were being demolished. Since 1942,
when the Trust consisted of four dedicated amateurs, a typist and
her fifteen-year-old assistant, James Lees-Milne had been visiting
embattled owners in the Trust's old Austin car, or on his motorbike.
In cases where the house seemed worth it, and where there
was an endowment in land, money or chattels to be offered for its
future maintenance, he and his colleagues would negotiate an
arrangement.
The Trust's achievements were impressive. Nevertheless, an
overseeing body with a duty to justify its work by making these
houses more accessible to visitors, was at odds with my father's
mission; in this case, I'm on his side. The Trust, increasingly, has
come to view its properties with the eyes of a Victorian schoolmaster.
All furniture and paintings must be in keeping with the
date of the House; all works of art must be fiercely preserved, even
The House: Obsession

if it means keeping them bathed in perpetual gloom; all owners,
once they have ceased to contribute to the maintenance, must accept
that the Trust knows best. If the Trust decides that Kedleston in
Derbyshire is better off without the fountain that Lord Curzon put
there himself, Lord Curzon's descendant has no option but to agree
with them.
Lord Curzon's descendant was not pleased when the fountain
was taken away because it was not chronologically appropriate to
the building; my father, in later years, used this example to explain
his own dislike of the Trust. Had he known it, Lees-Milne was on
his side. He, like my father, saw the old squirearchy as the ideal
system of management: benevolent, eccentric and enlivening. But
what Lees-Milne recognised, as my father did not, was that the
days of feudal patronage were numbered.
My parents, having decided to see their venture through, were
fortunate. They found a relative of my mother's who was prepared
to help raise the required sum from a group of bankers. The sting
in the tail came in the terms: ten per cent interest and full
repayment in less than a year. Ruthless steps had to be taken to
meet such conditions: two-thirds of the land belonging to the
Thrumpton estate was sold, together with the main farms and all
but a handful of the tenanted properties. A shrewd investor, eyeing
the line of Nottingham's expansion, would have kept the flat
farmland that offered the greatest potential for future development;
my father, predictably, relinquished this outlying and least pretty
part of the property in order to preserve the small heartland of
cottages and houses that clustered nearest to the House,
safeguarding its beauty, but adding little to its income.
Cutting costs now became the central issue. The Daimler was
exchanged for a more modest Humber; there were no more
impulsive trips to London, no evenings at the Mirabelle and no
lunches at Prunier, unless by invitation. When it came to the
business of shifting a houseful of possessions into his new home, my
father decided to save money and do the work himself. This, as he
noted dolefully at the end of the year, was a miscalculation: after
a month of heaving furniture on to trailers and pushing
wheelbarrows of books along half a mile of pitted driveway, his
back had been permanently weakened, while his wife was sporting
sprained wrists and a twisted ankle.
Anna, significantly, sent no assistance from the House. The
move took place in May. The hedges were foaming with blossom;
the river was alive with ducks and coots; the neglected garden was
a jungle of colour. Thrumpton had been her home for almost
thirty years. At the point of departure, she looked back on all she
had done: the laying-out of flower borders, the copying of ancient
documents, the endless sorting of letters, maps, diaries,
indentures and contracts, reaching back in time to the House's
earliest beginnings. This was how she had occupied her time; this,
her husband had always told her, was a wife's work.
Perhaps she felt anger against him for having contrived that she
should only be allowed a home on his Essex estate if she remained
a widow. Perhaps she felt resentment at the newcomers, usurpers
of her territory. Perhaps she had entertained hopes of staying on
at the House, as my parents' cherished guest. Perhaps . . . Who
knows? For whatever reason, Anna Byron made a bonfire and
burnt, on a sunny afternoon, as many historic documents as she
could find. It took about three hours for her to destroy almost
every trace of the House's former owners and their work; it took
her rather longer to dig up every shrub, bush and herb that she had
planted, ready for transportation to her new home in Essex. My
parents arrived to take tea with her that day and found the
flowerbeds stripped, the archives reduced to ash and cinders. Anna
didn't, my mother remembers, look in the least ashamed; her
expression was one of nervous defiance.
(This is the accepted version; I've also heard that Anna tipped
all the papers, disordered, into the cellars of the House; that my
The House: Obsession

parents, unable to cope with a sea of uncatalogued documents,
gave up in despair and threw them out themselves. There's no way
of knowing which way the House lost its history; all that can be
said is that it's gone.)
One of the few documents to have survived from this period is
a bound catalogue of the four-day auction ordered by the trustees
and held in November 1950. I read it as another testimonial to my
father's passionate wish to keep the House as he had always known
it. In the margin, with a red pencil, he marked the lots most closely
connected to its history. The presence of a number of dealers
pushed up the prices; he retrieved only a third of what he had
hoped to save. The hardest task, my mother says, was trying to
rescue the splendid library assembled by Lucy Byron's uncle
especially for the House. Porters had swept the leatherbound books
from the shelves and bundled them on to trestle tables under a
canvas awning, poor protection on a day of driving rain; jumbled
together, they were sold in casually arranged lots. The result is that
the House now boasts enough one-volume gothic novels (from sets
of three) to fill a couple of sentry-boxes.
'What about help? Did you have any when you moved in?'
'Not enough.' My mother sighs. 'Life before the washing machine!
I never seemed to stop washing or dusting. Let's see: your father
found a rather frightening woman who came with a rabid Alsatian.
She told your father and I that we could do the work ourselves. So
she didn't last. And then there was a most peculiar cook who tried
to stab me with a carving knife.'
But when, perplexed, I ask the reason (my mother is goodnatured
and singularly undemanding), she can't remember. Neither
does she appear to hold a grudge for the assault. 'They were a
funny lot, the people who came and went in those years,' she says
dreamily. 'I wonder you don't write about them instead.'
My father planned to do so; his comments tell me more about
him than about the person he describes. 'Mrs Easom's cat shot.
Departure of Easoms.' Omitted is the fact that my father, annoyed
by the cat's prowling ways, shot it himself, claiming to have
mistaken it for a rabbit. 'Mrs Zauner, temporary cook, stuck in
tub.' This is shorthand for a farcical incident that ended with a visit
from the fire brigade to extricate Mrs Zauner, a large woman
whose love of Hitler earned her a rapid dismissal, from one of the
House's narrow, old-fashioned bathtubs. The list, a long one, is
confined to employees who flitted across his path, and fled, or were
despatched; the bedrock, slowly assembled, was a small and loyal
workforce who never told tales out of school and never questioned
my father's capricious ways. They receive no mention. Were they
less eccentric, and thus less easily characterised, or was it the case
that long connection turned them into extensions of himself, no
longer identifiable as individuals?

I'm trying to imagine those first years of occupation: the carved
staircase draped in dustsheets, stone passages inadequately carpeted
by cracked brown linoleum, plaster swelling and peeling from the
pale pea-green walls, the biting cold of winter winds stabbing
through cracked panes of glass so frail -- a few remain to cause a
shuddering chill -- that they shiver at a touch. I look at the book
in which, always meticulous, my father noted the lists of tourists
to whom they opened the House, week after -week, from 1952. I
can easily see him, thin shoulders hunched against the cold, sitting
in the doorway with a roll of tickets that still, fifty years later, looks
almost untouched; I see my mother, wrapped in a heavy coat,
conducting tours around rooms which, although efforts had been
made to brighten them, can't have seemed to justify the twenty
four old pence that was asked for entry. The rewards were small;
after the euphoria of receiving three hundred visitors on their first
open day (the incoming revenue repaired three -wooden shutters
and gave the dining room a one-bar electric fire), numbers dwindled
rapidly to twenty, ten and often, in bad weather, to none at all.
The House: Obsession

My parents ranked low among an heroic band of older survivors.
James Lees-Milne, touring the countryside on behalf of the
National Trust, was welcomed into houses that had lost their roofs,
or had their windows blown out by bombs. Some of the ancient
owners were surviving with only a supply of water that had to be
fetched, by themselves, from an outside well. Several large houses
had no electricity whatsoever. Had Lees-Milne visited Thrumpton
at the time my parents took it on, he would have told them they
were lucky. This house had not suffered from wartime occupation;
although neglected and in poor repair, the foundations and roof were
secure.
Above all, the new owners were young. Many of the house
owners visited by Lees-Milne were in their seventies and had lost
their heirs in the War. My parents were in their late twenties, filled
with energy, determination and hope. My father, although he lost
the knack in later years, proved clever enough at investing to build
up enough money by the mid-Fifties to pay for a nanny, a nurserymaid,
a cook, a chauffeur and a gardener. I admire what my parents
did; nevertheless, these, in the dour Fifties, were not straitened
circumstances.

The House was the grail my father had pursued throughout his life.
It came as a shock to find he held an empty cup. The glorious
aristocracy, about whom he knew so much, did not perceive the
new owner of Thrumpton Hall as one of themselves. He achieved,
with persistence, occasional triumphs, but a letter to the Duchess
of Devonshire, complimenting her on the excellent conversion of
Chatsworth's kitchen into a restaurant and inviting her to
luncheon, brought back only a well-phrased note of regret at the
fullness of her diary which, alas . . .
Such rebuffs were felt as wounds. The Duchess got off lightly;
other displays of indifference to his treasure and himself were stored
away for vengeance. One grand connection, having neglected
either to visit or to issue invitations, was punished when my father
bid against him at an auction, deliberately driving up the price of
a cherished family portrait that he had no intention of buying for
himself. Asked by the irritated purchaser what the devil he'd
thought he was playing at, my father giggled, twirled his umbrella
and replied: 'Fun!'
My father's impish sense of humour (he was a good raconteur)
earned him some reputation as a wit; the problem was that he had
no sense of where the boundary lay between sport and malice.
Jokes of the kind he practised on his relation in the auction room
lost him more friends than he won by telling the stories.
From the point of view of social achievement, the capture of the
grail was disappointing. In another respect, it brought liberation,
although not of the kind that could have been easily predicted from
George Seymour's earlier life.
From the date, almost, at which he acquired the House and its
estate, a rift began to appear in his personality. On the one side, the
more predictable one, he easily adopted the trappings, traditions and
obligations of squireship. One of his first acts was to restore the Hall's
Victorian habit of holding a Christmas party for the children of the
village, complete with games, a handsome tea and carefully wrapped
presents. He sat on committees, supported the county, and fought
small wars on behalf of the village's preservation, with tireless zeal. As
a proud patron of the living, with rights over the church, he subjected
each new vicar to a searching interview. A little too conscious of the
need to set an example to his own small flock of tenants, he never
failed to attend the Sunday service, impeccably dressed, or to read the
first lesson in a voice of sonorous certainty, whether condemning the
profligate or blessing the pure in heart. Disdainful in his reception of
newcomers to the village, he was tirelessly thoughtful of the needs of
the older inhabitants, whose nostalgia for the past tallied with his own
views. If my father had not been such an autocrat, he could easily
have become a beloved paragon, a model of old-fashioned patronage.
The House: Obsession

Few can play Dr Jekyll's role without chafing at the traces of
being constantly good-mannered and conscientious. Hyde is always
there, biding his time for the moment of release. An imaginative
mind might guess that the moment of Hyde's escape wasn't too far
ahead from the family portrait which my father commissioned in
the mid-Sixties.
In concept and setting, the picture is as conventional as the place
in which it hangs, in the family library. (Tellingly, it faces the
smiling portrait of Vita that my father had proudly commissioned
when he was twenty-one.) This painting is set in the House's most
formal room, an ornate saloon on the first floor. I sit at the piano,
off to one side, tidily dressed in a white shirt and dark skirt. (My
father, who disliked short hair, had decided that his eighteen-year
old daughter looked best in a shoulder-length wig.) My mother,
implausibly dressed for an afternoon scene in a smart blue cocktail
frock, also wears a wig, a replica of her best Greek helmet style. She
sits bolt upright on a sofa, ankles crossed, hands folded, looking on
with apparent interest at the scene that occupies the centre of the
painting.
Here, two players confront each other across a backgammon
board. (My mother's enthralled gaze convinces nobody who knows
her; backgammon registers itself with her only as an irritating
sound of clattering dice.) My brother, a fair-haired schoolboy, faces
both the artist, and his opponent. He leans forward a little, intent
upon the game, meditating his next move as he poises his hand
above the counters.
In the family painting by John Lavery of my mother's family at
Chirk, she had occupied the central place, all lines converging
upon her. Here, the lines meet on the image of my father, the
second player at the games board. The picture had been his idea,
and was paid for by him. But - was it by choice? - his back is
turned toward the viewer. All that can be remarked is the fall of the
jacket from his shoulders, the slight stoop of his head over the
board. He is at the centre, but the face of the dominant figure in
this family portrait is entirely hidden from view.
Artists are often prescient. George Gissing, in his fictions,
predicted the troubles that lay ahead in his own life; Millais,
painting Lizzie Siddal as a drowned Ophelia, looked forward to the
model's early death; Shelley, mourning his fellow poet Keats in Adonais, foretold his own watery end. Did the young artist who
lived with us while he worked on our family tableau catch a
glimpse of another, secret self, yet to emerge, and choose to hint
at it with that resolutely cloaked view? Did he intuit that, as time
unrolled, the hidden face would become a cipher, that the act of concealment would become the most significant feature of what
seemed, at the time, to be a conventional representation of a
country family, at ease in the interior of their home?
The House: Obsession

I don't know. Neither can I do more than guess what the same
handsome young artist was thinking when my father, glorying in
his new role - all jokes about Robin Hood were banned for that
year - posed for him again a little later, as High Sheriff of
Nottinghamshire, in full, magnificent regalia.
My father liked the portrait of old Lucy Byron, standing on her
grand carved staircase, looking down on the viewer. The artist was
invited to paint him in the same position. The clothes - black silk
stockings, silver-buckled shoes, velvet suit and foaming lace jabot both
mock and honour their wearer's pose as the aristocratic owner
of a stately home. My father had a redeeming sense of the absurdity
of his pretentions. It's likely that this portrait was intended, in part,
as a joke. What interests me more now is the strained expression upon
his face.
These paintings were done in the late Sixties. By then, my
father was struggling to unite two quite different forms of life: one
as a conventional squire and family man; the other, as a fun-loving,
risk-taking Jack the Lad. This second aspect of his complex nature
was, at the time he became High Sheriff, still under wraps.


George FitzRoy Seymour enjoyed posing for this portrait of him
as High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, on his favourite staircase.
Part Two

The House: Possession

I HATE AND I LOVE
(THE LISTS MY FATHER NEVER MADE)

Depressing Things
A time-consuming letter, replete with carefully composed items of
news, is mailed to a former friend who (unaccountably) does not
answer, thus gradually prompting the revelation (after three further
epistles have been written and despatched) that the friend in
question has been dead now for some number of years. Oh, how depressing!

Discovering that the only place at which one's favourite variety of
chocolates (violet creams!) could reliably be purchased will in
future no longer be stocking them ('insufficient demand'). Oh, how depressing!

After encouraging guests to enjoy a hot bath before dinner, finding
that one's own bath runs cold (this misfortune compounded by the
impossibility of disclosing the fact). Oh, how depressing!
Discovering, during a perfect summer's afternoon, that clouds of
smoke from the newly constructed neighbouring power station,
have obscured the sun and cast the garden into deep and enduring
shade.
Oh, how depressing!

Rare Things
A person of impeccable taste.

A well-fashioned pair of shoes that fits uncommonly narrow -- aristocratic! -- feet.

A woman of wit.

A young person who is not bored by the company of an older man
who has come to possess youthful tastes. (Alas!)

Annoying Things
A postal clerk -- the last collection having been made just before
one reaches the post-office -- adamantly refuses to have further
letters added to the outgoing sack. (Bureaucracy!)

Guests who produce sheaves of holiday snapshots, and yet fail to
admire the house in which they are fortunate enough to be staying.

At church services, the use of texts other than those derived from
King James's Bible.

Women who refuse to allow men to sit together in the dining
room after dinner. (Barbaric!)

Any detailed response to one's simple and courteous inquiry as to
how a guest has slept.

Splendid Things
The lace collar of a young Prince, painted by Van Dyck.
A magnolia grandiflora that has just unfurled its petals.
A full-length coat of sable.
A loved, and impeccably maintained, old family house.
A Ducati, unthrottled. (The Duke!)

Disagreeable Things
A certain gentleman -- who (in modesty) shall here remain
nameless! - having gone to enormous trouble to restore his family
monuments to positions of appropriate prominence within his local
church, subsequently discovers that the congregation, instead of
showing their gratitude, complain that their generous benefactor
had not first secured their permission.
The faint odour, from beneath a woman's clothing, of unclean linen.
Nylon sheets . . . Morris dancers . . . Medieval music.
Conversations about Proust (or any other French writers).
Unpolished wine glasses upon a dining table.

Things Worth Seeing
Fred Astaire movies.
'Race of the Aces' at Snetterton!
Valmouth (the musical), with Fenella Fielding as Lady Parvula. (Heaven!)
Other people's carved staircases (for purposes of comparison to
one s own superior version
Pleasing Things
A guest who appreciates the amount of work that must go into the
maintaining of proper standards in hospitality.

A newspaper article (about oneself) or television appearance (by
oneself) when remarked on and admired by persons of discerning
judgment.

A trim woman, fully conscious that she looks well in her clothes,
walking briskly along a Mayfair street to keep - one can only
suppose! - an appointment most agreeable in nature.

A friend who, spending time in one's company, deigns never to
consult his watch.

The least sign (from one's children) of any recognition (however slight!)
of all that one does (and continues to do) entirely without complaint.

Embarrassing Things
A conscientious host, discovered while thoughtfully drawing the
curtains in the bedroom of guests, who appears to them (quite
without justice) to have been spying.

One's adolescent daughter, having put on weight, so that her
clothes, once appealing, now appear unpleasantly tight.

One's wife, oblivious, on a public occasion, that her slip is showing,
or that she possesses traces of lipstick stains upon her teeth.

Upon the birth of one's first grandchild, discovering that it is
impossible to feel pleasure at this sudden intimation of one's
mortality.

Learning that one's children dislike one's most intimate friend.

Things That Have Relinquished Their Power to Charm
An enchanting house, from which its rightful occupant has been
compelled to depart.


Surprising and distressing things
A conversation with one's daughter which leads her on to
criticisms of oneself, the precision of her analysis suggesting that
she has been pondering these (supposed!) flaws for some time.
an electric fire, a rocking chair and a big, old-fashioned doll's house
with rooms large enough for a small child to hide in. To a visitor,
climbing the stairs from below, the children's wing must have
seemed cheerful enough.

FAMILY SNAPS


'Miranda is so completely happy up there,' my grandmother wrote
to my father in 1952, the year my brother was born. Vita, while
staying at the House, had visited the nursery -- the same that had
once served as my father's - on the top floor.
I don't remember this occasion. I do remember crying when I
was taken away from a more comforting room, my home for the
first year that we spent there, in the lower part of the House.
To a small child, the House was not welcoming. When I
described my father's early days there, I was drawing on my own
fear-laden memories. The Byrons, with no children of their own,
had made no provisions for reassurance or comfort. The top floor
of the House, when I arrived, was as it had been in the 1920s, a
chilly, desolate region, shut off behind doors.
Later, after the birth of my brother, our parents tried to brighten
the garret-like rooms and narrow passages. My bedroom walls were
papered with garlands of roses; the nursery acquired a tall bookcase,


A birthday note delivered from the top floor.

'We'd have kept you nearer if we could,' my mother says. 'But
there wasn't any room, not with a nanny and nursemaid. And you
were happy. Don't go pretending you weren't. You never stopped
reading! Whenever I came upstairs, you were always sitting by the
bookcase.' I ask her if she remembers the time -- I can still see her
turn and go crying down the stairs -- when she asked if she might
take me into the garden at some hour that had not been previously
arranged. The nanny, even though she did not particularly like me,
grasped my hand and squeezed it. ('Whose little girl are you?'
Squeeze. 'I'm Nanny's little girl. I want to stay with Nanny!')
'Nasty little thing,' my mother says. And she does, for a moment,
after fifty odd years, still look distressed. 'Why would you ever say
something like that?'
I've no idea. I only remember the pleasure it gave me to see
that I could cause pain to a parent, somebody who seemed, at that
thwarted age, so beyond my reach. "I think', I say, "I wanted to punish
somebody. I was so scared.'
'Scared!' My mother puts on her sensible face, the face of a
woman who has no truck with terrors. 'What nonsense you talk!
What did you think was going to happen?'
"I didn't know. That was what frightened me so much. I never
knew.'

Three terrors ruled life on the top floor: ghosts, fire and floods.
The ghosts, as I now know, were imaginary. Then, however, I
had complete faith in my father's story of the pregnant housemaid
who hanged herself from a skylight outside the little room in
which he, a quarter of a century later, would sleep. My father had
been subjected to this story himself; the room in which he had
shuddered was now mine. (No record, other than the testimony
offered by my father, suggests that a hanging actually took place.)
Like my parent before me, I felt the ethereal housemaid's soft skirt
brush the back of my neck each time I went down the four steps
beneath the skylight; like him, I heard her weeping in the night,
whenever the wind was up, and trembled.
I had other companions as well, of my own making. I believed
in a sharp-faced, skinny-tailed devil who pressed his face to my
window each night after the curtains were drawn, hoping that I
might have forgotten to shout, before I jumped into bed and pulled
the sheet up over my head: 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' I believed
in witches who hid in the garlands of roses strewn across my newly
papered bedroom wall. (Poor sight helped to foster this delusion.)
I believed in the power of the moon to strike me and lay me under
a spell.
If, during the long night, I wanted to visit the lavatory, I had first
to pass through the hanged housemaid and then, after opening the
door on to the high carved staircase, dodge past the long,
treacherous moonspokes that barred the way to the top floor's only
watercloset. Bedwetting, although frowned on, often seemed
preferable.

But pictures present a different story; here, I look
extremely cheerful in my new party dress.

Fire, fear of it bred in him by his uncle, was my father's greatest terror.
Years later, laughing, he told me about Sammy FitzRoy's visit to
the House in 1928, when he himself was five years old. Sammy,
Anna's wild younger brother, was in unusually subdued spirits:
never lucky, he had just burned down a house - his own mother's by
dropping a lighted cigarette. Charlie Byron, frantic with alarm,
imposed a smoking ban during his stay at Thrumpton; Sammy, for
the first six hours of his visit, was the model of abstinence.
A pre-dinner glass of sherry brought on the crucial return of the
urge. Sammy felt for a cigarette, remembered orders, shook his
head, looked firmly around the room and announced that he was
in need of a rest. An hour later, climbing the stairs to bed, my
father encountered his uncle Charlie kneeling outside Sammy's
bedroom door, nose to the keyhole, hands clasped, as if engaged
in prayer. (Which, as a devout clergyman, he may well have been.)
This performance was repeated, every evening, for a week before
Sammy, bored with frightening an old man out of his wits, called
for his car and left.
I'm not sure whether my father realised how close his own
behaviour came to that of his uncle. I witnessed him undertaking
precisely this ceremony whenever my brother or I invited any
smokers to stay. If caught hovering outside one of their bedrooms,
he was unembarrassed and unrepentant. The House, and its safety,
came first.

The burning of Nuthall Temple was the first fire I heard about.
Described by my father with horror -- what could be more wicked
than the wanton destruction of a family home! -- it took on the
proportions of a mythic devastation. A gaudy oil painting by Frank
Brangwyn (or someone who admired his style) hung on the flight
of stairs leading to the top of the House. It showed flames belching
out of a black fortress, with figures streaking across the canvas in
front of them, orange-tipped by the firelight. This, I supposed, was
the Temple.
I had never visited the site of the Temple. All I knew was that
it had burned to the ground in the course of an afternoon. If a stone
temple could be destroyed in a couple of hours, little imagination

was needed to guess how quickly a house like our own, comprised
largely of wood, plaster and brick, could be reduced to ashes.
Fire threatened our lives. Fire kept our household warm. The
windows of the House looked out upon country fields, but this
was also coal country, ten miles from the notorious pits of D. H.
Lawrence's Eastwood. Sometimes, sitting beside my father for
the half-hour before bedtime when he would read aloud from The
Pickwick Papers, I might see a glowing lump of coal jump the
low brass fender and land upon the library carpet. My father always
noted it in time, but what, I wondered, if nobody had been watching?
What if the fireguard were one time forgotten, or if it should fail
to prevent the leap of a smouldering fragment?
Mrs Bardell shrilled with fright at Mr Pickwick's innocent
invasion of her bedroom; I couldn't pay attention. Fiery tongues
were already licking their way across the carpet to the bookshelves
and out towards the closed door. The encyclopedia in the nursery
bookcase had informed me that fire burns through a seasoned
plank of timber in just four minutes. In four minutes, the flames
would be past the library door and enfolding the fruit-crowned
wooden pillars at the foot of the staircase that climbed all the way
up to the last oak door that shut off the nursery wing and the
sleepers who lay trapped inside it.
We, my brother and I, would burn in our beds.
Not true, my mother says. We children were never in danger.
We had The Chute.
The Chute, hacked out of a thick interior wall on the
recommendation of the local fire department, led directly from my
bedroom into our nanny's bedroom cupboard. Here, it was
imagined that Nanny, neatly dressed and ready for action in any
emergency, would receive her little charges with open arms and
carry them down a blazing staircase to safety.
I had no faith in this scenario. Nanny, a gaunt, anxious,
passionate woman with the improbable name of Ruby Rose, often
expressed the wish that she might have a little boy of her own. She
didn't feel the same way about girls. My brother was clear-eyed and
pink-skinned. He had a mischievous smile and a mop of flax
yellow hair. I knew which of us Nanny Rose would save.
Our parents were not unloving; they certainly had no wish for
their children to burn. Further precautions were eventually taken.
An iron bar was attached to the nursery windowsill. Inside the
window, a hemp rope lay coiled, neat as a cobra within its wooden
box, long enough to stretch three storeys down to the flagstones at
the foot of the House. Today, I wonder whether either that box or
that rope could have survived a fire; at the time, all we objected to
was the sensation of coarse hempstrands rubbing our tender thighs
and clenched palms raw as we practised the descent, drilling against
our father's stopwatch. (Later, despatched to a school that rated
pupils by their ability to saddle up a horse or hurl a ball through
a ring, I shone at the gym exercise that required skill in rope
climbing.)
My father's terror of fire conflicted with his aesthetic views. He
was terrified of a fire; still, he could not bring himself to get rid of
the old flexes, plugs and fittings that had been part of the House
for over seventy years. They reminded him, he said, of its golden
age. At the time of his death, most of the electric fittings spat blue
flame when they were connected to plugs. Edwardian flexes, long
stripped down to naked wire, trailed potential firelines across the
wooden floors. One bulb, still burning dimly at the dark end of a
passage, had 1926 printed on the underswell of its globe.

Water held even more terror than fire. In books of mythology, I
read about Neptune, who struck the earth with his trident to raise
the floods. Rivers raced across the plains, and waves lapped the
mountain peaks, until all was a shoreless sea and fish swam in the
branches of the trees in the woods.
Water rose from the dreams of my childhood like a smiling thief,

Our parents were not unloving: here, I help my mother to steady the
old-fashioned perambulator which holds my younger brother.

stifling each room in turn with clammy outstretched fingers, filling
the cupboards and drawers with the stench of river mud, burying
the House as deeply as the trunks of tall willows that are sealed
from sight by a sudden tide of winter floodwater, the whole
reflecting, at its loveliest hour, the salmon blush of early evening,
of twilight at Thrumpton.
Fire, like ghosts, lived in the dark world of nightmare. Water was
real. Each winter, as the river spilled over its banks and joined the
lake, water seeped up from the earth and into the warren of cellars
beneath the House, spreading a net of slime below the polished
floors of orderly rooms. This was the season in which the smell of
death taunted the ceremonious life of the House with the impolite
stink of rotting fish.
This, in earlier times, was when the House's owners took long,
quiet holidays on the Riviera, for the protection of their lungs.
The life of our ritual afternoon walks was changed by floodtime.
To the west of the House, the flat fields lay under a surface of grey
silk, a shroud for the puffed corpses of rabbits that had been either
drowned or poisoned by hostile farmers. Walking carefully on the
hillside above this seasonal lake, my brother and I avoided looking
at the bobbing bodies. Instead, we admired the high clumps of
yellow bubbles that danced across the surface of the floodwater. We
thought of these billowy products of pollution as pretty playthings.
Watching the waters spread, we imagined the House as an ark,
ourselves as its crew.
Once, escaping from the House, the two of us strayed off the
village road, down to the river, and into flooded pastureland. Trying
to turn back, we found we could not stir. Greedy river currents
sucked and swirled around us, pouring grey water into the funnels of
our small rubber boots, holding us fast, as if under some spell. Wailing,
we reached towards the high bare hands of the willow branches at the
edge of the field, begging them to bend and to save us.
Eventually, the pasture-owner waded in and scooped us up, a
howling child pressed each to a broad hip, as he strode back to land
and up the drive to the House.
Afterwards, we talked about our escape. Would our father have
ventured into a flooded field to rescue us? We were unsure.
In the event, we found we had never been missed.

Water was at its most bewitching in the landlocked Midlands
during the deceivingly brief season of high summer and parched
fields, when a stroll beside the river brought cooling thoughts. This
was when my brother and I wandered down to the far end of the
park. Here, at the foot of a cliff of red clay, lay a secret world: a

small marina, complete with lock, bridge and a sweetshop selling
aniseed balls and fizzy lemonade. Here, hours slipped past as easily
as the trickle of licked ice cream while we watched the lock gates
swing closed and the watery pit begin to surge, bringing a
bargeload of cheerful river-travellers up to the level of the path.
Red-checked curtains twitched forward to mask the cabin rooms
from sight; saucepans rattled; glasses clinked. Hungrily, we watched
the bargees chug away, adventurous and free.

Watching life on the canal, I imagined it winding away to
flamingo-bordered, cobalt blue lakes, and to undulant turquoise
seas that might spread their lapping waters to the earth's far
continents. (Fed with Fifties-style colour postcards from the travels
of our parents, my brother and I pictured the larger world in bilious
enamel tints.) Digging a hole, after the flood had receded, in the
gravelled laundry yard at the back of the House, I was hoping,
quite soon, to reach Australia.

A photo of  where I sit on my father's knee for a family snap with Dick
and Vita, who is trying to hold my brother still.

Familiarity with the power of floods, increased by our adventure
in the farmer's field, bred a respect for water that bordered
on terror. I didn't mind paddling when our parents took us on
summer visits to the seaside; I screamed if anybody tried to coax
me further than the water's edge, out to the point where the sand
sheered away and nothing lay below but the sucking depths, cold
as the clasp of mermaid's hands.
My introduction to swimming as a pleasure came with the
arrival at the House of Slav, who was both fond of children and
good at swimming.
Slav was an Ethiopian. He had been castrated and sold, so he
told us, as a slave in the market of Addis Ababa. Bought by an
Englishman for unspecified use and taken to Southport, he escaped
at the earliest opportunity. We never heard what happened next.
Slav did not like questions about his past. What he did like, he
made abundantly clear from the very start, was the personal freedom
of physical nudity.
Slav arrived on a bicycle, one summer afternoon, clad only in
a khaki shirt and, in a temporary concession to propriety, a thin
pair of shorts. He knocked at the back door, introducing himself
by his first name -- we would know him by no other -- and asked
for work. He took pains to emphasise that he expected in return
little more than his bed and board. My mother was doubtful; my
father, keen for cheap workers, was enthusiastic. Slav was hired, on
the condition -- this was laid down by Nanny Rose -- that he
would always wear, at a bare minimum, a loincloth, while working
in the House. My mother, after some thought, produced the
remnants of a silk dressing-gown that dated back to her family's
visit to King Farouk. Egypt, surely, wasn't too far from Ethiopia?
Slav wore his loincloth dutifully, but without any show of pleasure.
The presence of our new employee caused talk in the neighbourhood.
My father had, until this point, been regarded as faultlessly
conventional. The arrival in the household of such an outlandish

figure brought his reputation into question. Did gentlemen employ
such people for normal reasons? What, precisely, was Slav's function?
This, so far as I am aware, was the first taste the neighbours were
to receive of my father's waspish humour. A Baron de Charlus
might have appreciated it, but this was the Midlands in the late
Fifties and such sense of humour as the majority of my parents'
country neighbours possessed was uncomplicated by wit.
On a fine July day, a lunch was held. The dining room blinds
were drawn; my father, masked by dark glasses at the head of the
table, proclaimed a headache. Plunged into a yellow gloom, the
guests exchanged desultory chat and did their best not to stare too
eagerly every time the door from the kitchen swung open.
Time ticked away; nothing out of the ordinary had transpired.
Glances were exchanged, followed by knowing nods, indicating
that the guests believed they had, perhaps, been led up a garden
path. Conversation grew louder and less deferential.
Then, as coffee was announced, my father walked idly towards
the window and snapped up the blinds. The gasp from behind
must have given him as much pleasure as had the planning of the
scene now unveiled. For there, stalking across the lawn, in all his
(possibly unselfconscious) glory, strode our tall, beautiful, coffee
brown Slav, a tiny watering-can dangling from his fingers, a shred
of yellow and scarlet silk knotted about his naked hips. The
pretence of his engagement at a task was quite perfunctory.
In retrospect, and in the light of my father's obsession with
physical appearance, Slav must have provided him with an aesthetic
pleasure that compensated for the fact that, as time went on, he
showed increasing reluctance to actually do anything. Observing
him from one of my many hideouts -- a clump of bamboos; a
laurel thicket; the lower boughs of a densely covered ilex, or holm
oak - I watched Slav strolling to and fro across the lawns, doing
nothing except, with no personal effort, to look magnificent. Sometimes,
looking past him to the House, I would see a shadow
etched on one of the library blinds. Behind it, my father sat at his
desk, writing a letter or, perhaps, simply gazing at the figure on
the lawn.
Too young to understand what castration meant, I asked Slav
to explain it. He did so, at length and without embarrassment.
Castration could affect you in two ways, he told me. For most
men, the result was a high-pitched voice, like a lady's. For him, the
operation had produced only extreme sensitivity to temperature.
This was his reason for not liking to wear many clothes. But what
about the winter, I asked? If he grew very hot in summer, didn't
it follow that he would grow very cold in the winter? Why, then,
did he wear just as few clothes in December? But Slav, who had
a proud, capricious streak, grew suddenly bored with the conversation.
Closing his eyes slowly and looking, to my admiring eyes,
more than ever like a beautiful marching soldier from Darius Is
army in my history picture-book, he walked away.
Slav was as sensual in his pleasures as a cat. In winter, he liked
to roll naked in snow; in summer, he waded, without a stitch on,
into the lake and swam sleekly up and down, his head held high
above the water, like a ship's prow. Watching him one day, I admitted
that I was scared of water. Slav smiled sleepily and suggested that I
get my bathing suit.
Being lifted on to Slav's shoulders and carried down the grass
bank, out into the dark water, was the most delicious sensation I
had yet known. Even so, I panicked as he pushed my legs away
from his chest and out into the treacle-dark lake. Still clasped by
strong hands, I flailed and choked and floundered - and found, to
my surprise, that I had reached the rushes. Clutching them and
kicking while I cried with fear, I raised up my legs to level with the
frantic paddling feet of a startled coot.
'You're there!' said Slav, and pulled me back to try again.
One afternoon, two years after his arrival, my parents, my brother
and I walked up the village street to watch the home team play
cricket on the field they called Twentylands. The pitch lay close to
the road, enabling us all to see, as the batsmen paused to change
ends, that Slav, wearing his shirt and khaki shorts, topped off, on this
occasion, by one of my father's panama hats, was bicycling gracefully
past. This was surprising -- Slav had left his bicycle, untouched, in
one of the old disused stables at the back of the House, since his
arrival. Comfortably, my mother suggested that he must be trying
to get his weight down. (Slav, although still elegant, was no longer
so lithe as he had been on his arrival, possibly because Nanny Rose
had taken to baking him a weekly batch of scones.)
Perhaps Slav heard my mother's words and took offence. The
House, when we returned from the match, was empty. Slav had left
a bundle of possessions behind, but he never came for them. He
had gone, without warning, as suddenly as he came. We hadn't,
until then, realised how much he had become a part of our lives.
Nanny Rose remarked that the House seemed quite empty
without Slav about the place. Peeping out across the lawns from
my hideout in the bamboos, I closed my eyes to slits, willing one
of the long straight shadows to turn into the silhouette of my hero.
My father was quite irritable after Slav's departure.
The hat that Slav had taken away, he explained, was one to
which he had been particularly attached.
To my eyes, one panama hat was much the same as another. But
there was only one Slav.
I am sorry, both for the reader and myself, that no photograph
of Slav has survived. My mother says that he did not care to be
photographed.

Everything in the House leads back to the lake.
Up above the top floor, a steep staircase leads to the roof, and a
walkway hidden behind the gables. Above it, accessible by scrambling
up a gutter, a square platform of lead, bleached pale as birch-bark
by a century of sunlight, overlooks the landscape.

The Turn of the Screw is a story I always connect to the House. It
does, however, have a flaw. Henry James, bringing the governess
back from one of her first strolls outside Bly, the country house
to which she has been despatched, makes her look up. She has to
do so, in order to see the ghost of the dead butler, Peter Quint,
defying her from the rooftop. As a dramatic scheme, it works; in real
life, it's implausible. People, unless called to do so, look ahead, not up.
A roof is the place to go, not to exhibit oneself, but for concealment.
From the high platform, my refuge through all the years of my
father's life, the view stretches out to the distant railway line, where
it spans the river, beyond a hill massed thick with beeches. Come
back. Follow the slow snake of the river to its bowstring tributary,
the lake. Perched up here on the leads, you can watch a world of
activity below: herons staking out their watchpoints in the rushes,
cormorants balancing on treetops, swans skimming low enough to
ruffle their own reflections. From here on the roof, all is visible.
Looking down now, I might see myself being carried out into
the water on Slav's shoulders. I might, but I don't. What I see is
always the same. I see my father.
He's sitting on the bank, the boy from London at his side. The
long plumes of the willows overhang them and keep the bright sun
away. My father is reading aloud, from one of the old-fashioned
humorous novelists that his own father relied on to keep sadness at
bay. The boy is leaning forward, laughing and enjoying himself.
My father's arm isn't quite touching his.
Here's happiness and ease. Here's what he never found with us.
I'd be frightened now to look at my own face, or to hear my
own voice, when I hid up on the roof, spying on the usurper,
hating them both. My screams sounded so ugly that I'd put my
hands over my ears to keep them out. It shocks me, today, even to
acknowledge that the screams of an angry, jealous child were still
coming out of my mouth when childhood had long been left
behind.

A QUESTION OF APPEARANCE

My father had hoped for so much from the House. It was his
Camelot, his grail, his lost land redeemed, from which all good
would flow. But the House couldn't give more than it was. It
couldn't confer friendship, or success. This was a source of
bewilderment, sadness and disappointment.
Increasingly conscious that the House alone was not doing all
for him that he had expected, my father looked harder at possible
areas of improvement. Standards must be raised higher. The family,
above all, must make more effort to live up to the beauty of their
surroundings.
My brother, by virtue of being male, escaped the onus that fell
on the shoulders of my mother and myself to be fitting inmates of
the House. Intelligence was neither required nor desired; my father
himself could be relied on to provide conversational vivacity and
wit. Our role was to contribute an appearance of beauty, or, failing
that, a show of good old-fashioned elegance.
My mother, in her eighties, wears whatever she pleases.
Throughout her married life, she wore what pleased her husband.
He, as we were all made aware, had impeccable taste. No matter
that it was a taste formed by living in the company of elderly
female relations who would have thought it daring to go for a
summer walk without parasol, a veiled hat and gloves; he, who had
lived, however tangentially, among duchesses and countesses, must
surely be deferred to, conceded to know what was right?
'And hadn't you known a few people like that, in your family?'
I ask my mother. 'Why didn't you ever stand up for yourself?'
She shrugs. 'You knew him. We did have that one time when
you took over. Do you remember what a success that was?'
I'm unlikely to forget. This was the occasion that I think of as
the mermaid dress disaster.

I was fourteen, and the BBC were to film a Hunt Ball at the
House. It was the kind of moment for which my father had lived,
a homage to his home and his achievement. Cleaning and
dusting reached an unprecedented level that week; a temporary
butler was recruited on the strength of his impressive appearance
when dressed ready for the cameras in my father's second-best
evening suit, and his skill at polishing silver. A big houseparty
was invited; I was given special permission to come home from
school.
During the last week of the preceding holidays, I persuaded my
mother that she should take my advice, not my father's, about the
dress in which she should appear at the Ball. Never having been
allowed to buy anything more revolutionary than a khaki belt, I
was wild with excitement at the prospect. This was to be the night
on which, invisible for too long, she was at last going to shine. And
so, reflected in her glory, would I, her daughter.
Walking through the hushed rooms of a London department
store, we crossed acres of pale beige carpet to reach a section
marked Evening Wear. An assistant appeared and was waved away:
this was to be our own joint stab at independence.
It was hanging on a rail that smelled expensive. Silver sequins
trailed lines over turquoise silk net as prettily as patterns on the
surface of the sea; the neck and back plunged boldly down; the
arms were bare. This was a dress for a goddess or a mermaid, and
who better to be a mermaid than my mother with her red-gold
hair and creamy skin? It fitted closely on her generous breasts and
hips; this was good. The saleswoman clasped her hands in admiration;
I was ready to skip with joy, until the price was whispered.
'Fifteen?' my mother said pleadingly.
Fifty-four pounds was what the mermaid's dress was going to
cost; and this was 1962. My mother wasn't used to independence.
She never had more than, at most, a twenty-pound note in her
purse for a London visit. In 1962, the only way she knew of
obtaining more without consulting her husband or going to
Drummonds, the grandest London branch of the Royal Bank of
Scotland, in Trafalgar Square, was to make a visit to Bond Street.
Here, two old brothers ran a silversmith's shop that had benefited
from the shrewd tips given out by my mother's grandfather. In
return, the brothers gladly cashed cheques for my mother and
her sisters on their expeditions to London. Unfortunately, the
shop we were visiting was on the opposite side of Hyde Park,
and my mother had an afternoon appointment to keep with her
hairdresser.
'Oh dear,' my mother sighed, as she began to search for a way
to unhook herself from the glorious dress. 'What a shame.'
Assistants who worked on the clothes floor of big department
stores still received part of their pay in commissions at that time.
Sweetly and swiftly, as she saw her percentage receding from view,
the saleslady produced the solution: Mrs Seymour should take the
dress home, let her husband see how beautiful she looked, and then
see how glad he would be to pay the bill!
Of course! We brightened. Once he had seen it, how could he
not applaud our choice?
The weekend came. Mr Alan Whicker arrived with his crew. It
was decided, for the benefit of the cameras, that the houseparty
would assemble for drinks upstairs, in the graceful upper drawing
room where old Lucy Byron had presided over her first
Thrumpton ball at the age of sixteen. This was perfect: my mother
would be able to make a dramatic entrance by the side door
leading from her bedroom (I hadn't yet read Rebecca).
The film of the Hunt Ball, when it was finally seen by us,
proved disappointing. Nothing registered but the sound of drawled
vowels, the angled thrust of heads, the tap and shuffle of dancing
feet, the yelps of laughter. Mr Whicker hadn't travelled all the way
to the Midlands to celebrate my father's rescue of a handsome old
house, but to show blue-blooded bumpkins at play.
We weren't to know this at the time. The room was aglow with
bare skin and soft light and the buttery chat of those who are bred
to sound bored. Glasses chinked. My father, alight with pride at the
celebration of his home, sped from group to group, a dragonfly of
joy. Too excited to care, for once, that my forehead was sprouting
pimples and that my long feet looked large as boat-paddles in new
and uncompromisingly flat gold sandals, I watched the door in the
corner, willing it to open before the cameras were switched off.
'I helped choose my mother's dress!' I boasted. 'It's got sequins
on! It's beautiful!'
A tall, cold-faced lady bent to waft scent into my face. 'How
very brave of your mother,' she said. 'And your father? What does
he think of it?'
'He hasn't -- oh, look! Look!'
The door swung open. And there she stood, my creation, a
white-skinned, wide-hipped mermaid in a dress that clung to her
soft body like the flowering tendrils of some tropical aquatic tree.
My father, across the room, with his back to the door, was pouring
a glass of champagne. Framed by the door, she stood still in a way
that was at odds with her usual reticence. She knew that she looked
lovely. She was happy to wait for his admiration.
Her husband turned, at last, and stared. 'Oh my God,' he said
and then his voice shifted up from disbelief, to shrill rage. 'It's
dreadful!' my father cried. 'Absolutely dreadful. For God's sake, go
and put something on that suits you. Anything! Anything but that!'
The guests must have been her friends, too, but nobody said a
word. My mother turned and closed the door quietly behind her.
When she returned, perhaps ten minutes later, she was wearing a
pale brown dress in which she looked quite unnoticeable. My
father complimented her warmly on her recovery of good taste.
The cameras left her out.
The dress was not, contrary to my expectations, sent back to the
store. Instead, it languished at the back of my mother's cupboard,
like a turquoise teardrop, unworn and unloved until, in the late
Eighties, it left the House for sale in a charity shop, after being
ignominiously bundled into a black trash bag.
I still don't understand why my father reacted with such hostility
to the dress. Was it because he considered sequins to be vulgar, or
the colour too loud? Or did he dislike the fact that'it exposed so
much of my mother's luscious, creamy skin? The clothes he bought
her, I noticed, never exposed her shoulders or her back. It seemed
strange that while he had been amused and even delighted by the
spectacle of a near-naked employee wandering around his House
and gardens for two years, his wife was encouraged to cover herself
as thoroughly, almost, as a woman in purdah.
In the same year as the episode of what I came to think of as
'the unfortunate dress', my father sold a small piece of land. Avarice
was not one of his vices: when he had paid for the recarpeting of
the two main staircases of the House, a surprise was announced.
He was going to take his wife, his mother - Dick Seymour had
died three years earlier - and his son and daughter on an Italian
holiday. No expense was to be spared: we were booked to stay at
the Cipriani hotel in Venice, before visiting Rome, Amalfi and
Positano. We would eat lobsters and see St Peter's. I had never, until
now, travelled further than Scotland and the West Country. The
prospect of a European adventure was quite thrilling.
Up in the nursery (I still slept in a child's bedroom on the top
floor, although I had now been at boarding school for two years)
I practised my phrases -- perpiacere; vorrei andare a; bella vista! -- and
stitched together a continental two-piece of my own design. The
result, when I posed sideways, the thinner view, was pleasing: a hot
pink linen crop-top and low-slung bellbottoms. Che bella! I could
hardly wait to show my new look off to the world.
The Cipriani was grand, isolated and not, I thought, the kind of
place in which to show off my costume. Rome was a blur of
humiliation, caused by the sudden loss on Capitol Hill, in a wind,
of one of my new and uncomfortable contact lenses. (My father,
who had worn spectacles all his life, couldn't bear the ugliness of a
woman or girl in glasses.) My grandmother was convinced that the
wearing of one lens without the other would ruin my sight for life;
spectacle-less and almost blind without artificial aids, I was forced to
try out a small and mean-looking patch which had come free in a
first-aid pack. James Joyce might have got away with it, or Samuel
Beckett. Perched askew on the pink and moonlike face of a chubby
fourteen-year-old, the patch looked sinister and ridiculous. I wept
and said I had rather go about blind. My father agreed: the patch, he
said, did nothing to improve my looks. My grandmother, annoyed
at the ingratitude being shown for her (freely provided) remedy,
instructed him not to upset me. My father said that it was a pity
nobody ever thought about his feelings. He, after all, would have to
be seen with me. And I looked, if he had to be frank, a perfect sight.
'Gracious!' says my mother. 'I mean, what a lot of fuss! About
a patch! As though it mattered! You didn't look that bad!'
My mother had suffered from the opposite extreme. She could,
as she says, have sat beside her own notoriously vague father with
a cardboard box on her head, and have been judged to look in no
way strange. Being noticed, in her view, remains preferable to
being invisible. I'm not so sure.
We sped down to the Amalfi coast in a sky-blue Zephyr. My
father, tieless, in dark shades, tipped panama and striped blue shirt,
spun expertly around the dizzy coils of the coast road, whistling
'Volare!' while Vita, bolt upright between my brother and me in
the back seat, entwined the fingers of her beige suede gloves,
determined not to show her fear.
Luxury, by this stage of the holiday, was becoming an agreeable
habit. My father had booked us into the best hotel; after we had
admired our balconies overlooking the sea, and lunched on lobsters
and cold white wine, Vita announced that she was ready for an
afternoon nap in her room, while my mother wanted to wrrite
postcards. All smiles, my father proposed to take my brother and
me out for a trip across the sparkling bay in a speedboat. At last!
The perfect opportunity to show off my new costume! Removing
the patch, and with it, my remaining contact lens, I passed the
afternoon in a haze, confident that my pink top and smart hipsters
had been admired. Clear vision was not required for me to know
that I was being observed, discussed and praised. Che bella! What
a lovely young girl!
Flushed by triumph and the sun, I glowed all the way back to
the hotel. Here, over a candlelit supper table, my father told the
family what he had heard whispered under someone's breath as I
scrambled out of the boat. Nice girl. Pity she's so big.
It could have been worse. They could have said I looked like
a pig; there's no doubt that I was overweight. What hurt, and sent
me crying all the way to my elegant bedroom with a sea view, was
the scorn and anger in his voice. So little was expected from me, and
still I had let him down. Was it so much to ask that his daughter
should appear . . . thin!.

Che bella! Shades and a large hat help hide the eye patch, and divert
attention from the plump form of which I had just become aware.

Minding so much himself, he tried to hide disappointment behind
a joking manner. The story of'Pity So Big' was produced, over and
again when we returned home: in front of me, he told it to visitors,
guests, relations.
'Can't you shut up about the girl?' an outspoken old cousin once
said to him, coming to my rescue. 'It's not her fault she's got a big
bottom.'
This, although well-meant, was not altogether comforting. My
father paid no attention at all. But it was, he said when I challenged
him, just a funny story; had I no sense of humour? Didn't I understand
how affectionate he was being when he referred to me in public
as Melon-Face or, when I streaked my make-up, as Tiger Tim?
A more confident girl -- but what adolescent female has the
confidence to doubt a father's view of her looks? -- would have
ignored or ridiculed him for this obsession with her appearance.
Instead, I grew increasingly eager to win his praise. I managed to
gain it, in my late teens, but at a price.
My hair had always disappointed him. Instead of being luxuriant,
it was fine, straggle-ended and fiercely resistant to my attempts to
make it curl. The colour ranged from dark blonde (winter) to light
mouse (summer). Always keen on self^improvement, I decided to have
it cut in a bob. This, the hairdresser explained as tufts of hair scattered
around the chair, would create an illusion of thickness.
I had forgotten, when I presented myself for inspection, that
short hair was one of my father's pet hates. After covering his face
with his hands and declaring that it was painful even to look at me,
he produced five pounds and told me to buy myself a wig. (My
mother had already delighted him by agreeing to wear a full wig
for all formal occasions.) Bearing his fondness for long hair in
mind, I bought a cap of captivating blonde nylon tresses that spilled
over my shoulders. My father was thrilled.
'You look really pretty,' he said, with delight. 'Don't ever take
it off.'
I didn't. Having found the way to please him, I didn't dare. For
three years, I wore my wig night and day.
This was not an easy task. Swimming in the Caribbean sounds
like a fate that anybody would be glad to endure (my father, after
one of the palmy moments when his investment hunches were
successful, had bought a house in Jamaica); swimming in hot water
in a shoulder-length wig is surprisingly uncomfortable. An
additional problem is the fact that wig-hair doesn't dry in a natural
way. I envied the girls who sat chatting to each other on the beach, styling damp hair with their fingers, while I slunk away behind a
bush where, unseen, I could safely remove my waterlogged false
locks and tweak them into shape. On another occasion, when I
was dancing, the wig suddenly flew off, leaving me with a rats' nest
of hairpins exposed to view and nothing for it but to crawl through
a jigging forest of trouser-legs and silky calves until I correctly
identified a small, pale, dead Pekinese dog as my lost head of hair,
spread out across a corner of the dance floor.
I was consoled for these trying experiences by the fact that my
father, for so long as I wore the wig, was unfailingly complimentary,
kind and good-humoured. The downside was that my
own hair fell out: the trichologist I consulted when I was twenty
was succinct.
'Screw him,' he said when I explained about my father. 'You
don't ever put that thing back on your head again. Not ever!'
But my confidence had already been undermined. The week
before my wedding, four years later, I bought myself a long blonde
wig. Pleasing my husband was the last thing on my mind.
My mother's looking guilty.
"I should have said something. I hadn't realised he hurt your
feelings so much.'
I pat her hand. 'You couldn't have made any difference. He had
us beat.'
The technique by which this in many ways unremarkable man
kept two strong-willed women under his control was simple and
invisible; he made us feel worthless. Without value, you have no
power. No physical force was employed, no threat, except of his
displeasure.

'I don't remember,' my mother says, when I ask her about the
charm game.
Memory is being kind.
The charm game, devised by my father on our Italian holiday
in 1962, revealed the depths of his own insecurity more profoundly
than I realised at the time. Then, the game excited me. The game
was my chance to be as cruel as he, and to feel that I was not, after
all, the most disappointing member of the family.
The rules were simple, as simple as the way in which the game
was introduced among us, and must be allowed to develop, if my
brother and I were to benefit. Our father controlled the family
budget: if we wanted to enjoy a good dinner, and go to bed feeling
loved, then the game's originator must score well. To give him bad
marks was unwise.
But somebody had also to be the loser, and our father made it
clear who that somebody should be. High marks for him; low
marks for her; it never failed to give him joy. (Possibly, he was
taking revenge for the first humiliating months of their courtship,
when he had been at her mercy.)
We played it first in Amalfi, after my grandmother Vita -- she
would never have tolerated such a vicious game - had gone early
to bed. He laid out the rules; my brother and I didn't even need
to glance at one another. We knew what we were meant to do.
'I thought,' my father said, lounging back in his chair, crossing
his legs and smiling at us with unusual graciousness, 'that we might
start with -- charm? Now, how do you think I might score -- truthfully?'
We hesitated, debated, looked solemn, and had to tell him the
absolute truth: on a scale often, he scored nine. (The mark "was not
outrageous; our father could, when he chose, squirt charm more
efficiently than a tom-cat sprays musk.)
We'd done well. He looked delighted, even though he tried to
smother the smirk in a handkerchief.
'And now: your mother. Rosemary? Well, darling, I wonder
what we should give you.' Pause. 'Do you know' --pause -- 'I don't
know that I would say charm, not exactly charm, is one of your
strongest points. What do you think, yourself? Honestly now.'
Let her damn her chances, out of her own mouth. He knew
she'd do it. And she did. Smiling, but not happy, she said that he
was probably right and that she was feeling tired. She wasn't
allowed to escape so easily.
'And you, Miranda darling? What do you think about Mummy
and charm? Do you think she's charming? Truthfully?'
She hadn't spoken up when he mocked my size, and laughed at
my spectacles, and sighed regret at my skimpy hair. She'd let me
carry the blame for the mermaid dress, said that it wasn't her
choice, but mine.
'I'll give her four,' I said, and watched her wince.
Divided, we fell.

BETRAYAL

My mother has been asking about my memory of earlier years. She
thinks it odd that I've written nothing about my relationship with
my father before the age of fourteen.
'You can't', she says reproachfully, 'have forgotten everything.'
'Such as?'
Fluently, she rattles off a list of scenes, the after-tea visits from the
nursery to the library downstairs to listen to a chapter from The
Pickwick Papers, our father's favourite of Dickens' novels; the
Christmas party for all the children from the village, with old
fashioned games being played around a candlelit tree; our annual
winter visits to the pantomime and the circus; playing croquet in the
garden; eating impromptu picnics up on the hill above the House;
walking through fields thick with buttercups, down to the foaming
weir . . . 'You had a wonderful childhood. I can't imagine anybody
being better looked after.' She's plucking at the pockets of her purple
velour suit. 'And now, all you remember are the bad things . . .'
I don't know what to say. I remember all the scenes she cites, but
in black and white, like old photographs. There's no emotional freight.
It startles me to discover that I have hardly any memory of her
at these occasions, but I think I know why. Married to a volatile
man with high expectations and a short fuse, my mother had
already embarked on the path she kept to throughout her marriage:
to comply or keep quiet. When hurt, unnerved or in doubt, she
smiled. I do remember her smiling more than seemed reasonable.
I can't remember her voice.
I can see him far more easily. The first image to surface is the
fluttering, languid movement of the long white hands on which he
prided himself; this is followed by the deceptive impression of
weakness delivered by a soft and loose-fleshed chin below the
narrow, unpredictable knifeline of his mouth. His grey-brown curls
are slicked flat to the sides of his head; his pale blue eyes are hidden
behind dark glasses. That's how he liked it; he could look out, but
we couldn't see in and guess at his thoughts.
'It isn't that I remember only the bad things,' I say. 'It's just that
they're more personal. I know they happened, the scenes you're
talking about, but they don't seem quite real. It's as though they
were part of a stage play'
My mother flinches as if I'd struck her; nevertheless, I believe
I'm telling the truth. The upbringing that had been devised for
my brother and myself replicated, as closely as possible, our father's
idealised memories of his own first years in the House. Revisiting the
past through the expeditions, games and pastimes he arranged for
our enjoyment, he left no room for us to receive new impressions.
Everything, as we were aware, was a repeated process. These
secondhand experiences have left only the faintest of traces behind.
I remember them less well than pictures in the books from the
nursery bookcase: Cuchulain's head being kicked around some
Irish field; a sharp-faced villain being hurled down a precipice, long
hair flying up behind him like parachute strings . . .
'So it didn't mean anything to you that we did all those lovely
things?' My mother rarely shows emotion. 'Anything at all?'
I must try harder, but none of the images I recover will serve to
satisfy her need for reassurance that they, our parents, did well by
us. I can see his fingers making a pile of pale shells from the tiny
shrimps we caught for his tea on summer seaside holidays. I can
remember the erectness of his carriage and the smartness of his
shoes treading back towards our family pew after he had read a
lesson; the scent of the handkerchief with which he once dried my
eyes; the hot sense of shock and shame when he first mocked me
for being overweight, for not incarnating that ideal of what he had
imagined for his daughter.
I remember the back of his neatly rounded head, as I sat in the
car behind the driver's seat, willing him into extinction . . .
'I remember when I moved into my first grown-up bedroom,'
I tell her.
Sighing, my mother walks away. I know I should have offered
more. There's nothing there to give.

Connected memories of my father begin in the year that I moved
down a storey in the House, to a large - and chilly -- white bedroom,
overlooking the lake, a room which, to this day, is still my
own. I was fourteen, young and fearful enough to sleep with my
knees tucked up hard against my stomach, away from any nasty
surprises. (This was the room in which, in his nineties, old Charlie
Byron had died; I'd heard it whispered that he returned to lie
there on the bed, from midnight until dawn, in his coffin.) Placed
within easy reach of my parents' room, and without a key to lock
my door, I found I had acquired a new role. I was to be my
father's confidante, a receptacle for the sufferings of a sensitive
heart.
Our bonding had not, until this point, moved beyond the
occasional and unwanted invitation to enter the intimacy of
his dressing room. Here, awkwardly, I stood with my back turned
towards the bathroom, anxious to catch no embarrassing glimpse
of his pale, unclothed body. The rules were now reversed. Friendship
of a new kind was being offered. It included, to my considerable
dismay, a father's right to walk into his teenage daughter's room, at
any time he chose, before or after bedtime. The given reason, on
most occasions, was that he had received a letter that it would interest
me to hear (this was seldom so) and on which my opinion would be
welcome. (The notion that personal correspondence should be treated
with discretion was as alien to my father as the idea that I had any
rights to privacy; all handwritten letters were read aloud, analysed
and -- if they contained gossip or material that had the potential
to cause damage -- passed along to whoever might help to stir the
brew. This, I realise now, was a trick he had picked up from old
Ismay FitzRoy, herself an arch intriguer. Letters, in the view of
herself and her grandson, were to be shared, not spared.)
I did not especially mind being asked for my opinion. I did not
at all like to know that, during any stage of undress, the door
might suddenly open to reveal him. He never apologised; my
discomfort was ignored even when I crouched on all fours behind
the bed with a blanket tugged down over my naked back. He
spared my blushes by appearing oblivious to my state. Walking past
the rumpled bed to the window, he looked down at the lake, out
to the young woods beyond it, and launched into the matter in
hand.
'Perfect morning! I couldn't resist letting you know what X
wrote. Quite incredible!'
All squeaks of protest were ignored. Astonishingly, my father
maintained this habit of casual intrusion during the whole of
my first marriage, and through most of my second one. I was
never able to convince him that the habit was a strange one, or
that a grown daughter had some right to privacy. Neither were my
husbands, when we visited Thrumpton for weekends and festivals.
He came with the territory. His House. His Daughter. Theirs not
to reason why, but to smile, share and endure. They did so with a
grace that, while it speaks well of them, says more about the force
of my father's personality.
It was during these earlier, pre-marital invasions that my father
began to draw me into his confidence. Staring out of the window
while I tried to dress, invisibly, beneath a bath-towel or quilt, he
spoke casually of various young women who had caught his eye.
Nothing serious, as he was always keen to explain; nothing for me
to give him such looks for!
'What a face! I must say, darling, it's a pity you don't try to make
the best of yourself. And aren't you going to get dressed for breakfast?'
Enraged both by the invasion of my privacy and by the
expectation that I would applaud his good taste in girls, I punished
him in the only way I could. He wanted my approval; he couldn't
force me to grant it. Stubborn in my silence, I willed him to stop
talking and go away.
'Not that he ever did anything,' my mother says with a sniff.
'Talk, that's all it was.'
'What about Carole?'
'Good griefl You're not putting her in!'
'Why not?'
On the rare occasions when I had been invited into the
nostalgia-drenched sanctum of my father's dressing-room, I always
noticed a large portrait quite out of keeping with the rest of
his private hoard: the dreary prints of Tudor Seymours; the tiny
framed photographs of venerable and plain-faced relatives. This
picture could have been copied from a Fifties poster; it showed
a deep-breasted young woman with dark hair, gleaming teeth, and
parted red lips. The prints and photographs offered no competition;
the room belonged to her.
This was Carole, with whom, apparently, my father had engaged
in some lively bouts during the early years of his marriage. Incapable


of keeping a secret, he confided in his wife. This, he explained to her,
was a different kind of love.
'I should say so!' my mother exclaims. 'She was in here with him!
On the library sofa! Anybody might have come in! Just as well I
didn't. I might have hit them both over the head with a frying-pan.'
In fact, as we both know, my father always waited until his wife
went to visit her mother in London for a night before making an
arrangement with Carole.
'And what did you do?'
My mother sits up straight, looks demure.
'You know! And you're not to go putting his name in! I found
that London art dealer. He'd always looked as if he'd like to get to
know me better. We did what we shouldn't. It was--'
'Quite nice?'
'Oh, quite! And then I went home from London on the train
and told George. He was livid!'
'And did you ever do anything like that again?'
'What do you take me for? Certainly not. As for him, well, if
he wanted to make a fool of himself after that, chasing girls young
enough to be his daughter -- let him! They only laughed at him.
Silly old thing!'
It isn't the first time that I've been struck by the way my
parents' generation dealt with their moments of sexual weakness. I'm
impressed by the fact that what really outraged my mother was the
use of the family home. Had her husband gone, discreetly, to a hotel,
she'd have let it go. Appearances -- of our selves, of our conduct, of the
House - were what mattered most.
It wasn't hard for my father to charm girls. At his best, he looked
like a cross between wistful-eyed Leslie Howard and a posh playboy.
He had charm enough - even when he'd mocked my shape, my
hair, my spectacles and my choice of clothes -- to make me ache
for his admiration. I'd seen others bask in it, watched how he
could, when he chose, work magic.
I first felt its power when I was fifteen years old.
Home for the holidays, I was thrilled when he suddenly asked
if I'd like to be taken to dinner with him, alone, in the local city's
best hotel. (My mother was away for a night, visiting one of her
sisters; I wasn't yet old enough to comprehend the strength of my
father's loathing for solitude.) After all the talk about the pretty girls
whom he took dancing at clubs in London, I was flattered. I'd
never had a boyfriend, never been kissed, and never - yet - been
asked out to dinner. This was a rite of passage.
My hair was brushed neatly to my shoulders (this was in the pre
wig days). My stocking seams were pencil-straight, shirtwaister belt
pulled in until my breath came in gasps. The mirror gave me hope.
I didn't look, that night, especially fat or plain. My father even used
the word 'elegant' when I came downstairs. He swung open the
door of his red sports car and helped me in. He sang along with Ella
Fitzgerald on the radio as we glided through the darkness. Arranging
my legs sideways, as I had seen film stars do, I felt sophisticated.
'This is rather fun, isn't it?' my father ventured, kindly. 'It's nice
having a grown-up daughter! We must do it again.'
That evening, I was given a taste of the charm my father could
deploy, when he was in the mood. He asked about my friends
at school, made jokes about the headmistress and told me that
having dinner with me was the greatest fun he'd had all month.
The sense of having glamour draped around my shoulders, like a
silk cloak, lasted all the way through the prawn cocktail and well
into the main course of scampi with tartare sauce. My plate was
almost clean when my father leaned forward.
'It's been wonderful, darling, but now -- there's something I
want you to know.'
A smudge of sauce on my chin? Anxiously, I dabbed.

'Not you. Me. Don't frown, darling. It spoils your looks.'

I put down my knife and fork and, trembling, folded my hands
on my lap.
'What? Please tell me?'
He was dying, I suddenly realised with a rush of love and guilt.
I'd spent all those years praying for something dreadful to happen.
Now it had, and I could only just hold back the tears.
He told me. Of course, there had been girls before, nothing
serious, just a little fun, nothing to worry about. But now, there
was a woman. And then he named her.
'She is wonderful, isn't she?' my father said, insisting on an
answer. 'And she's tremendously fond of you. I know how much
you admire her.'
I felt sick. He was, of course, quite right. The woman he had
mentioned was everything I most wanted to be. She had a tiny
waist, large eyes, glossy, long brown hair and a low, slightly foreign
accent. My parents were friends with both her and her large, quiet,
kind-eyed husband. When she came to stay, the woman played
tennis with my father and went on long walks around the garden
with my mother. I liked the woman for giving them both an equal
value, and for bringing a spirit of serenity into the House. It had
never occurred to me that she could be my mother's rival.
'But she's married,' I whispered.

Divorce was a word I didn't even like to say. The only girl at
my boarding school whose parents were divorced was treated as
a tainted alien. I turned my head to one side when I spoke to her,
as if divorce was something I could catch from her breath. My
reaction to my father's words was entirely selfish: I didn't want to
be treated like my unfortunate fellow-pupil. A tear plopped into
the little puddle of tartare sauce at the side of my plate.
My father was too absorbed in what he had to tell to notice my
reaction. The story, I began thankfully to realise, wasn't about to
start: I was hearing about a finished event. Of course, nothing was
going to happen, he said. It simply wouldn't have been fair to us,
his family, or to the House. That was what he wanted me to know.
I mustn't be upset. All thoughts of his own happiness had been

renounced. The price had been high, but all would be well. The
only real victim was himself, for this had been true love, and hard
to sacrifice.
I watched him remove his glasses to blink and, with one of his
immaculate handkerchiefs, dab moisture from the corners of his
pale, blinking eyes. Stiff with anger now that I knew we were safe
and that I myself had been frightened to the edge of tears for no
good reason, I allowed his hand to clasp mine. I heard that I was
a dear daughter, so sympathetic and loving, when I wanted to be. It
meant so much to have shared his secret sorrow. Well, time to call
for the bill.
Lighthearted again, he sang along with the radio all the way
back to the House.
'It sounds,' my mother comments, 'almost as though you were
jealous. Not of me. Of her.'
'Oh not at all!' I say. She doesn't look convinced.
'Really,' I repeat, 'not in the least!' My voice sounds, this time,
too emphatic.
A few years later, travelling abroad by myself, I spent a couple
of nights staying with the couple in question. They had lost touch
with my parents since leaving England; nevertheless, they both spoke
warmly of their visits to the House and of the careful attention with
which my father, in particular, had always seen to their comforts. I
listened attentively for some hint of a more nuanced relationship. I
heard none. But this was to be expected: why would she want to
give her secrets away? It was possible that her husband had never
known of the romance.
Towards the end of my visit, however, I found myself alone with
her. She was still a graceful and beautiful woman. I could understand
my father's passion, and the pain that renunciation might have
cost him.
'I wanted to thank you,' I said suddenly, and I told her about the
dinner of revelations, and then I thanked her again, for allowing

our family's happiness to take precedence over what clearly had
been a serious affair.
She looked astonished, and, as I came to the end of my pompous
little speech, faintly amused. Hurt, since this had not been easily
done, I asked her to tell me what was so comical. Only, she said,
that the mildest of flirtations, a couple of lunches, a postcard or
two, a birthday present of some nicely bound book, could be so
misrepresented by a charming, but rather silly man. She had been
fond of my father; the idea that she would ever have dreamed of
ending her own marriage, or expected him to leave my mother,
was absurd. Quite absurd, she repeated, and shook her head over
the version with which I had lived for all those years.
While ready to suspect that she was playing down the impact of
her own beauty and flirtatious manner on a susceptible man, I
believed her. I do not think now that this was a passionate relationship
or a profound one; my father may have enjoyed none of it
so much as the moment when he could overwhelm his teenage
daughter with the tale of a grand amour, heroically renounced for
the family's sake.
The relationship described here was one of several that marked
the passing of my father's fortieth birthday. This was the decade
during which he took advantage of the new motorway, the first to
be built in England, cutting the journey between Nottinghamshire
and London by an hour. The proud owner of a sporty little open
top car, he used the motorway like a private racetrack, roaring off
to take some merry-faced bachelor girl to supper and to dance at
his favourite, old-fashioned nightspot, the Four Hundred, before
he returned to the more decorous life of a father, husband and
country gentleman. Here, in his other life, we saw an opener of
fetes, cutter of ceremonial ribbons and -- a new role -- a conscientious
magistrate who took an entirely respectable interest in the welfare
of juvenile criminals.
'That's innuendo,' my mother says sharply.
But it's not. My father's visits to approved schools for boys looks
bad in the light of later events. I'm sure now that this work
increased his sympathy for young men who had lacked his
privileged upbringing, but I see nothing sinister in it. He worked
hard. He tried to get their living conditions improved and to put
in a kind word when he felt that a remedial sentence had been
unjustly harsh. This was in keeping with his self-perceived role as
a patron. No boundary lines were crossed.

My mother's singular absence of jealousy during the years when
her husband was discovering the joys of flirtation was based on
common sense. She was well aware that none of these pretty,
cheerful young dinner partners threatened her position. Why
would they want to take on a shabby stately home, and the care of
a petulant country squire? And which of them, however delightful,
could compete against George Seymour's passion for his home? It
was just conceivable that he might be prepared to abandon us; he
would never desert the House. And the House, without her
willing commitment to the role of its drudge and slave, would not
survive. She was, so long as she kept smiling, entirely safe.
The flirtations were, however, a form of betrayal, and their
existence helped to drain my mother of authority and confidence.
The smile, a bright gash of vermilion in those days, stayed in place.
Her feelings were never publicly expressed. As a girl, she had
watched her reticent father encase himself, for a pageant, in a suit
of mail from his collection of medieval armour; now, hooking her
girdle tight, she pulled wool sleeves down to her wrists and planted a
bright tam-'o-shanter upon her spray-fixed waves, a reminder to herself
of the jaunty girl who had once held at her mercy the insecure,
obsessive man to whom she now was married.

Flirtations and a taste for fast cars marked the onset of restlessness
in my father, and a terror of approaching middle age. Depression
accelerated the process. Some causes for this were trivial or
imaginary; others were real. The news that one of the largest
power stations in England was likely to be built on the doorstep of
the House to which he had given all of his energy and love headed
the second category.
The Trent, running across the centre of England, has been
rated highly by business interests since the days of the Industrial
Revolution, when fast-running water was needed to fuel the
mechanical enterprises of Arkwright and Wedgwood. In the postwar
decades, as power stations and pylons reshaped the skyline of
the Midlands, the Trent played a key role in determining their
location. Today, watching the shadows of clouds scud across
their pale exteriors, and steam puffing up from their stacks in
soft white clouds, spectators can bewitch themselves into seeing
such architecture as the twentieth century's variation on the castles
of crusaders and conquerors. This view was not shared by George
Seymour.
The first hint of a threat came in 1963. Two sites had been
selected in the Nottinghamshire area, of which we were one. The
new station, if it came into being, would be built just beyond the
Thrumpton estate, within half a mile of the House.
My father was incredulous. He had only just, after twelve years
of ownership, succeeded in bringing his cherished House back to
its former glory, from a state of semi-dereliction. The years ahead
were the ones in which he planned to harvest the rewards of a
lifetime's dedication. The House, the landscape, and the part of the
village he loved best, were his. Luck and skilful investments had
procured him enough money to support a leisured life; a closely
knit family circle consoled him for a dearth of intimate friends.
(Letters written to my father during this period draw attention to
the four of us as a unit, tight-packed, like a Roman phalanx.
Friends declared that they envied his good fortune in having such
affectionate children, such a marvellously competent wife.) All of
The House: Possession

this, now, lay under threat for how, conceivably, could Thrumpton
survive such a transformation? We would have to leave -- and
without his House, my father knew that he was a lost man.
('I am under no illusions,' he wrote to me several years after this,
in a letter which tried to explain his enduring commitment to the
House. 'Who, if we did not have lovely Thrumpton to offer to our
friends, would give a damn about a middle-aged couple who had
achieved nothing, and who lived in some quite ordinary home?'
I had not, until then, understood that my own lack of confidence
was as a drop to the ocean of my poor father's insecurity.)
From 1963 on, he waged a five-year battle. By 1967, the matter
was settled. There was no way out. Fields would be flattened, lanes
buried, trees uprooted, making way for an edifice as alien to this
drowsy landscape of little hills and wooded bluffs as the outsized
funnels of the cruise ships that often, in those less protected times,
overtopped the palaces of Venice's Grand Canal. The difference
was only that the funnels could always be dismissed. This change
could never be entirely undone.
The slow stages of the station's growth were the hardest for my
father to bear. Each phase was like a death. The towers came first,
sprouting above the hilltop like the decapitated stalks of gigantic
concrete mushrooms. I, entranced by their hollow hearts, spent
illicit weekends prowling over the internal scaffolding and listening
to the booming echoes of their muffled vacancy; my father moved
the garden benches to face away from the devastated hilltop, and
discovered a new enthusiasm for fishing in the lake. (The lake was
one of the few places from which the towers could not be
glimpsed.) Leylandii, trees that he had always dismissed as suburban,
were suddenly found to have a certain stately grace: no other trees
would grow fast enough to preserve his favourite views.
The towers could be managed; the chimney was beyond his reach.
Even I, who had enjoyed annoying him by defending the station's
right to co-existence with a private family home, grew silent as the
column of concrete reached that height for which we had fearfully
prepared ourselves - and then doubled. Swiftly, our hill shrank to a
hillock, overshadowed by a giant snout from which, we were
reassured, an invisible plume of smoke would silently rise and pour
its waste, not upon us, but Norway. This, too, proved an illusion.

From left to right, with the towers behind: my brother, mother, father and a visiting friend, Cornelia. From the collection of Warner Dailey.

My father was not stoical about his trials: old acquaintances, fed
with too many station tales, fell away like dead flies. He had reason
to be wretched. The noise, during the first years, was like living in
the middle of some Victorian factory, complete with clanks,
explosions of steam, and shrieks of suddenly-vented air, all of it
calmly acknowledged by the authorities. The rose-coloured bricks
of the House's walls, unpitted through three centuries of rough
weather, became newly pocked with black holes. Each year
brought further assurances from the station authorities, boasts of a
dramatic fall in the level of sulphur emission; each year, smarting
eyes and cankered leaves argued how slight that fall must be.
It was the visual impact that most affected the spirits of my
father. We had to be sure to warn each new guest to the House not
to mention the looming presence of the station. Taken out for a
walk or drive in the park, they must look only in the direction
indicated by their host. Jokes - a favourite was alluding to the
chimney's always visible crown as 'George's Folly' - would
assuredly not be well-received.

The power station has increased in size by almost a third during the
past twenty years; the tall chimney can still blot out the brightness
of a summer day and its red lights - a warning to low-flying
planes - still wink down on us like dragon's eyes. Now, however,
I see it as a friendly presence. As old laws protecting the landscape
grow weaker by the year, and the population of provincial cities
and towns continues to increase, it's apparent that the closure of the
station would open the area to the threat of new and less contained
forms of development of the kind that swiftly blossom around city
fringes: shopping centres; car parks; factories; warehouses; housing
estates. These would feel no obligation to beautify a location that
had already been ravaged. The station, however, conscious of its
massive size and the poUution, both visible and invisible, that it
creates, has always worked hard to offer compensation. A golf
course lies at the foot of the cooling towers; visitors are encouraged
to take tours of the site and listen to the overwhelming roar of the
turbines thudding at its heart in the sealed box of the powerhouse;
around it, new woods and banked plantations soften the impression
of a desecrated landscape.
It's sad to think that the remains of a Roman bath-house
lie irretrievably buried under the station; still, unlike my father,
I admire our modern neighbour. Standing on top of the hill
that separates the tall Jacobean chimneys of the House from the
concrete towers and cloud-challenging pillar of the station, I find
it hard to say which building I prefer. Both are magnificent. Both
are of value.
My father was too engaged by his memories of the past to take
this view. Watching black smoke-clouds belch out into a bright
blue sky to screen the sun and make winter of yet another summer
day, he cursed the burden that had been laid upon us by our
hideous neighbour. Living beneath the shadows it threw across his
fields and his House, he mirrored these dreary eclipses in the
darkness of his moods. The only difference between him and the
station, it came sometimes to appear, was that one produced energy
while the other sucked it out.

ON THE ROAD







II

I
Turning sixteen in the summer of 1964, I had reached an age at
which to dread the family's annual pilgrimage to the seaside. Bored
by the present and apprehensive of the future, I saw charm in
nothing, except the make-up counter at the High Street chemist
and the slick-haired boys in black leather jackets who clustered like
a nest of vampires about the doorway of the local expresso bar,
sucking cigarettes in moody silence.
This was the birthday for which I received, to my delight, a two
tone Honda blue-and-cream motorbike, brand new and capable of
doing (downhill) seventy miles an hour. My father immediately
asked to try it out; I didn't object. He climbed on, revved it up and,
with a flourish of his hand as he recovered from an initial skid across
the gravel, shot round the corner and out of sight. I smirked without
tenderness: whom did he imagine he looked like, riding his
teenage daughter's motorbike, decked out in a borrowed helmet
that made his head resemble an upturned eggcup? Alain Delon?
I show off my new Honda 50, above the Cromer promenade,
before my father decides to try out its capacity.

He came back only at sunset, all aglow at the speed with which
he'd covered a hundred miles. The following morning, he left the
house before breakfast. Returning late that afternoon, he casually
informed us that he'd spent the day with the son of a local
shopkeeper. The boy - his name was Nick -- knew about bikes.
They'd been to a garage and picked one out, a real beast, a black
Norton. Fascinated, I stared. I'd never seen my father's eyes look
so alive or heard such relish in his voice, as though each word were
being licked clean by the tip of his tongue. Catching my glance, he
shot me a little twisted grin.
'You aren't planning to buy it, are you?' I enquired.
'Oh dear,' he said, pulling his mouth down to mimic my
disapproving gaze. 'Isn't it awful? I already did.'

This was the moment at which my father and I entered a new stage
of a relationship that already reeked of conflict. I had, until this

The House: Possession

point, led an unusually sheltered life, while my father, despite that
series of merry flirtations, had been acquitting himself well in the
role of the model squire. I am willing to think that, in presenting
me with a motorbike, he was hoping to enlist my support for his
own future escapades.
It didn't work out like that. I, too, was ready to let rip and to
escape from the claustrophobic closeness of our family unit.
My adventures were not destined to be momentous (even the experience of performing as the only white topless dancer in the
black ghetto of Watts during the riots of 1966 came about
entirely by accident); all I wanted was independence. But having
freedom myself did not mean that I felt inclined to grant it to my
father. The further I removed myself from the old, orderly life
of the House, the more important it became to me that life
should continue there just as it had always done. The last thing
I wanted was to end by competing with my father for the rebel's
role.
This might explain how it was that in the summer of 1966, just
before I set off to explore America by Greyhound bus, I wrote my
father a censorious letter. I didn't like the fact that an enormous
motorbike now blocked the tiny entrance to my parents' London
home. I didn't like the fact he was spending time away from my
mother. I didn't like his friend, Nick, who seemed to me both
sulky and dull; above all, I didn't like the fact that he was beginning
to live a life more suited to his children's age than his own. I made
all these things clear.
My letter was disagreeable enough to produce a long and
defensive answer. Biking, my father explained, was a necessary
compensation for an upbringing that he now perceived as 'most
unnatural and oppressive'. A week later, he wrote again, to explain
that his 'trouble' came from the fact that he retained 'a zest for
doing things more suitable to people much younger than I,
coupled with the opportunity for doing them.'

Put simply, he had begun to realise that there was a life beyond
custodianship of the House he loved. Mr Jekyll would continue to
do his bit as a pillar of the community and holder of traditional
values; Mr Hyde was ready to play. This was the stage at which the
family portrait was commissioned, the painting in which my
father's face was turned away from the viewer.
My mother is looking thoughtful. It wasn't, she says, as uncomplicated
as George's letter to me suggests. What he needed, as much
as the sense of danger and speed which motorbikes offered, was
company.
'You know what he was like,' she reminds me. 'I always found
it so odd. He couldn't bear to be alone. You and your brother
weren't around as much as you'd been in the past. And I - well, I
couldn't always be with him, could I?'
She's right; my father's horror of solitude had become stronger
with age. I remember another letter that he wrote to me, in 1969.
Four years earlier, he'd bought a house on a Caribbean island,
without thought for the fact that this exotic getaway, for a
man who wouldn't set foot on a plane, wasn't going to be easily
enjoyed. The letter, written on the way home from his last v^inter
holiday there, exuded self-pity. My mother had already returned
to England by air; my brother was at boarding school; I, back from
my American adventures, was off in London, listlessly employed
as a secretary. Travelling home on a Fyffes line banana boat,
along with eighty fellow passengers, my father was consumed
with despair. The captain was stupid; the passengers were uncongenial;
the sea was flat; the bananas smelt. 'I am,' he wrote,
oblivious of the irony, 'entirely on my own.' Four months later,
the Caribbean house was sold, having failed to provide the long
sought panacea.
Loneliness plagued him; acts of duty filled his days. Appointments,
no matter how tedious, were never cancelled: discussions
with his land agent revolved interminably around the minutiae of
the estate. The old and sick, whatever their role had been in his life,
could rely on my father to be a faithful attendant, bringing flowers,
books and a surprisingly easy manner to brighten the dreariness of
a hospitalised existence. All that virtue and no reward: no wonder
he felt low. No wonder, riding pillion with Nick, by now
established as his regular motorbiking companion, that he was always
ready to turn back the clock, roar out from under the power station's
shadow and plunge into an experience of visceral excitement.


As a magistrate with a keen interest in juvenile offenders,
my father was a regular visitor to Lowdham Grange,
a prison for underaged boys.

A car, at whatever velocity, is still somehow comparable to a
home. Four wheels and a chassis marry it to the ground; a bike, by
contrast, is an extension of the body and soul of its rider. It
expresses his power; it makes him one with the world through
which he rides; it allows him to register life, its blur racing past like
unspooling film, as he speeds along the horizon's edge. This is the
line between dawn and dark, life and death. The thrill of the ride
lies in its intensity, the need to live in the moment, never outside
it. Here, everything extraneous falls away. Cocooned in his black
leather uniform, masked against the night wind, hugged close as a
twinned spirit with his fellow rider, my father found the happiness
he'd searched for all his life. Here was the elixir of youth that could
be drained over and again, and never lose its power, never fail in
the effect of its ambrosia.

By the 1970s, biking had become as necessary to my father as the
drugs with which he blotted out constant worries about the House
and plunged into insensate sleep. Nothing, in life, had turned out
as he'd hoped. The House, albeit beautiful, was marred by the
presence of the power station, an intrusion that had possessed his
mind for nearly a decade. Old friends, settling into their maturity,
were unable to share his new enthusiasms. His wife seemed always
to be preoccupied with the garden; his son was off at university; his
daughter had become a married woman. And he, in 1973, turned
fifty years old.
My marriage, the previous year, to a scholarly author rather than
to the friendly young viscount on whom my father's hopes were
pinned (he had already planned which grand relations to humiliate
by demoting them to seats at the back of the church), had not gone
down well. The revelation that I was pregnant, a respectable year
after my marriage, caused active dismay. Newly cool behind his
shades, clad in jeans and leather jerkin, he wasn't prepared for
grandchildren; asked to come and celebrate, he wanted to know a
good reason why. Surely news of this nature should be concealed,
he begged: 'too boring for you to have to endure boring things like
people examining your appearance to see if you have got larger!'
(The anguish in that doubly-stated 'boring' was hard to ignore.)
Kind though it was of me to suggest that he should visit, he didn't
care to see me looking so heavy and, besides, his diary was fully
occupied. "I do realise,' he added in a guilty postscript, 'that all this
sounds dreadfully unfriendly and unloving.'
Although disconcerted, I was not surprised; a man who found

it difficult to tolerate the sight of an overweight woman was
unlikely to relish the spectacle of a pregnant daughter. It hurt me
more, when my son was born, to realise that my father had no
plans to come and admire his first grandchild. (His letter of apology
mentioned a troubling cold; his diary reveals that he went off with
Nick on a two-day bike trip to Cornwall.)
Seven days later, my father finally managed a visit. Wearing an
expression of frozen distaste, he asked what I planned to call 'It'.
When I told him 'Merlin George', he expressed unexpected
delight. I was slow to grasp the reason: I appeared to be honouring
his beloved sports car, a green MG. I never disillusioned him. My
son's lack of affection for cars - and indifference to bikes - later
became a source of keen disappointment to a devoted grandfather.
'I don't feel fifty-two,' he wrote me the following year, adding
a rhetorical question: 'Should I?'
The letter brought me up to date on the other life in which my
mother played no part. He had just taken Nick to see the musical, Godspell, and then on to hear some late-night music at Ronnie
Scott's. It seemed that Nick was not much of a jazz fan; he'd shown
more enthusiasm at Snetterton, where, awed, the two of them
watched, over twenty laps of a two-mile track, the Race of the
Aces. Nobody could have failed to sense the thrill of a bike that
day, proclaimed my father; it was plain that he was still looking for
support from me for his late-found passion.
My own wild days, briefly enjoyed, were over; at the age of
twenty-six, I asked nothing of my parents except that they should
be conventional. I did not want to hear about my father's adventures
with Nick; in fact, the more I heard about his friendship with Nick,
the more uneasy I felt. There was nothing there that could be
defined as wrong; nevertheless, it seemed strange that my father
should be spending so much time with this young man. Frankly,
other than biking, I couldn't - I didn't want to - imagine what
they might have in common.
Prim in my new maternity and offended by his absence of
interest in my newborn son, I wrote to thank my father for his
news, and to convey a pious hope that he was not over-exerting
himself with all the biking and late nights. His answer covered four
pages, complete with a photo of his newest toy, a magnificent,
black and gold 750cc Ducati, on which he had just been out for
a night ride with Nick. Keen to remind him of his age, I wrote
back that I was sending him a present, a charming antique
wheelchair that might soon come in useful.
Surely his darling daughter was still just a little young to be
taking such precautions, my father snapped back by the afternoon
post. But how touching that I was so concerned about my
approaching decrepitude!
Thwarted, I fell into a sulk.
The two sides of his nature still maintained, during this period,
an equilibrium. The thrill of hearing that a neighbour was to bring
along an ancient member of the Royal Family to lunch at the
House was matched by the joy my father was experiencing upon
his glorious new machine, to which he always referred, with a little
snort of laughter, as 'the Duke'. My mother, while she had once
been a fearless horsewoman, never mastered the art of driving a car
and was not keen to attempt a bike. It's a testament to her loyalty
that she asked to be taken pillion, and came back declaring that it
had all been a most wonderful experience. Any hopes she may
have had of displacing Nick were quickly dashed; no further
spousal expeditions were suggested. The family had, by 1974,
fallen by the roadside.
It wasn't, at the time, clear to me how much hurt my mother
was feeling, since I myself had already fled. Under-educated (my
father felt university would only corrupt his daughter's fine
upbringing) and, consequently, hungry for any scholarly
knowledge I could get, I was making the most of my marriage to
a man who loved to teach. No love was lost between my husband
and my father since they were both competing for the same
dominant role. Paying increasingly rare visits to the House, I felt
each time as though I was entering a war zone. Away from it, my
father was enjoying his new, more youthful life; when he returned,
he was more insistent than ever on the maintenance of order,
etiquette and routine. When breakfast had ended, the time had
almost come for pre-lunch drinks. Lunch rarely ended before
three; at five, the ceremony of tea commenced, bringing us close
to the hour for a glass of sherry, or two or three, before dinner.
Trapped together by this endless series of meals, my husband and
my father eyed each other like two boxers squaring up to a fight.
A good weekend was one in which we left before a screaming
match broke out. The screaming was mostly done by my father
and myself. Neither of us knew the meaning of a controlled
temper.
I still loved the House, as did we all, with an intensity of feeling
that could make me catch my breath when I stood outside it,
relishing the gentleness of its lines, the serenity which never failed
to bring me peace. It was only when I walked through its doors that
the atmosphere changed. The saddest part of my father's love for
the House was that his longing for it always to be perfect, always
at its best, had created instead a sense of tormented strain. It was
as if the House had become the mirror to his own unquiet spirit.

My father would claim that it was I, not he, who broke up the little
family unit when I chose, at the time of my marriage, to invest my
savings in a romantic ruin on a hilltop in Corfu. This house, when
it was eventually made habitable, became my home of preference,
an excuse to escape the relentless insistence by my father that every
weekend should be spent under his roof, and structured to his
rules. I, after all, being female, was never going to be the heir. My
brother bore that unenviable burden of obligation. I didn't have to
dance attendance.
The news that my husband and I would be spending all of spring
1975 at the Greek villa, where my mother would briefly join us (she
enjoyed flying as much as my father feared it), was broken to my
father at Christmas. This was one of the few remaining occasions for
which the family still convened at the House, where the stone
entrance hall was decked for the season with more boughs of holly
than a Victorian chapel.
I had been worrying that there would be a row about our Greek
plans. The news, although grudgingly received ('But Easter at
Thrumpton is so beautiful! How can you bear to be away!') was
rapidly overshadowed.
Nick had also been invited for Christmas. My father's
explanation was that he needed a mechanic to accompany him for
long night rides on icy roads; secretly, we all wondered what Nick's
own family must think about this defection. But Nick himself
seemed eager to accommodate my father's needs. He didn't even
object when, on Christmas Eve, he was languidly invited to don
fancy-dress - we had a collection of elaborate, and very fetching,
military uniforms laid away -- and wait on the family. Fitted out in
a waisted and splendidly-braided jacket, with a peaked cap perched
sideways on his dark curls, he looked shyly pleased by the
compliments my father lavished on him.
The reason for Nick's obliging behaviour became clear when,
shortly after handing round the soup and with a nervous glance at
his host, he announced that he had a piece of news to give us: he'd
got himself engaged. The marriage was set for early summer.
'Well! This is a surprise, Nick dear,' my father said, through lips
that had become thin as filleted anchovies; I watched white fingers
tap, and then begin to drum, the edge of the table behind his glass.
My husband, raising his eyebrows, glanced at me across the table.
I shook my head. I had no idea what we were in for, but the look
on my father's face didn't suggest that we'd be celebrating this
engagement with much joy.
The storm broke an hour later, after Nick had taken off his
uniform and retired to watch football on television. The details, for
me, remain obscure. All I remember is my father's low groan of
self-pity as the door closed behind his friend. The familiar
catalogue of complaints began. If only we could all stop being so
selfish, realise how hard he laboured to keep the House going, how
unappreciated he felt, how neglected, how despised by all these
members of the family (furious looks at myself, my brother, and
my husband) who regarded themselves as so much more intelligent
than himself. Of course, Nick had the right to get married. But if
we could only understand how much the bike trips meant to him,
how terrible it was for a man who had known so little friendship
in his life, to have such a boon companion so mercilessly snatched
away . . .
In fact, as was abundantly clear, my father was jealous. Nick
belonged to him. The idea that he might have led another life, in
which he had been stolen away by some wretched girl who -- Nick
had cheerfully admitted as much - cared nothing for bikes and
wanted him to give them up, was torture. We were invited to agree
that Nick should be urged to reconsider and, perhaps, postpone
such a hasty match; when we murmured disagreement, my father
burst into tears.
I was already seething. I'd hated seeing the way my father praised
Nick's good looks in his military attire and stroked his arm with a
covert hand while being served his soup; I was infuriated by his
response to the engagement, and his eagerness to undermine it.
But it was the tears that undid me. I'd seen my father shed them
too often. I knew how easily they flowed. Seizing a handful of
boiled potatoes, I flung them, hard, at his bent and weeping head.
When this failed to shut him up, I dropped on my knees and,
while my husband's jaw dropped in dismay, sank my teeth into -- what would some enlightened Freudian make of this delicious
detail? -- a leg of our family dining table.
'Stop it at once!' my mother whispered.
I heard her as if through a mist and didn't care. I was high as a
kite on rage that evening, intoxicated by the joy of letting emotion
finally flood out and take whatever form it found. Easily my father's
match when it came to putting on a display of histrionics, I hadn't
the gift for precise timing that allowed him now to rise to his feet,
deliver one long sorrowful glare, and then dramatically sweep from
the room. Still crouched upon the floor by the table-leg, I smelled
defeat. That I hadn't quite shown to advantage was confirmed by
the horrified stares of my mother, my brother and my husband.
'You and George!' my mother sighs. 'I don't know what it was
about the two of you. You couldn't let each other alone for a
moment. Dreadful. He was never so bad when you weren't there,
you know. So long as he had his own way; that was all it was about.'
This mild attitude infuriates me so much that I have to walk
away from her and stare out of a window while I steady my voice.
Hadn't letting him have his way been just the problem, in later
years? Had letting him have his way, as she so submissively did,
been a form of compliance and endorsement? Wouldn't it have
been better, when things got worse than this -- and they did -- if she
had stood up to her husband and spoken out against the way he
imposed his new life on us, obliging his family to conform to
patterns of existence we could never have anticipated?
But this is unfair of me. I know that, while I relish storms and
confrontations, my mother dreads them. There was a scene, just
before my father's death, in which she did at last speak to him
frankly, but I have never caught more than a shadowed glimpse of
what occurred that night. I know only that words were said in the
small London house, their second home, where much of my
father's other life had been played out in his later years. I know that
the scene traumatised her to the degree that she refused ever to
enter that house again. (We sold it immediately after my father's
death, at her request.) This was, I believe, the only occasion on

which she nerved herself to speak to him, not as his subject, but
as his wife and equal. To do so, she had needed to be pushed
beyond the terror for her own future that conditioned all her
earlier behaviour towards him.

Nick was not a lively character, but he possessed a kind heart,
coupled with a warm affection for the man who had taken the
trouble to teach him how to drive a car (and who had funded the
purchase of his own first bike). He may even have felt some guilt
about the distress his approaching marriage had caused.
Shortly after Christmas, my father mailed me a joyful letter (our
quarrels were always as quickly extinguished as ignited), to explain
that his youthful friend had devised a happy plan. My mother was
scheduled to visit the Corfu house in May; Nick, never having left
England before, had expressed the wish to ride out there in April,
with my father and 'The Duke'. The fact that my unpopular
husband was to be away in America for the summer offered an
added incentive and excuse. A young mother must, surely, be in
need of company?
The expedition was, from my father's point of view, a triumph.
But I, from the moment that a villager shouted up at my window
that two foreigners in black leather were awaiting me at the taverna,
was stiff with self-consciousness and embarrassment. Instead of admiring
their achievement -- 550 miles in a day, my father boasted,
beaming, in pouring rain, over the Alps and down through Italy
to Calabria -- I spiked their cheerfulness with snide remarks.
I mentioned my mother's name incessantly; my conversation
was angled to slant just above Nick's head, or to wound him
with allusions to episodes of which he could have no possible
knowledge. If I proved clever enough, subtle enough, even my
father couldn't catch me out in any overt discourtesy.
Looking back, across the years, at Nick's hunched back, as he sat
out on the terrace, staring at the hills and wishing, I'm sure, that he
had never crossed the Channel, I'm ashamed of my viciousness. He
had done all the riding, acted as the mechanic, humoured my father's
wishes, sacrificed the company of that fiancee whom he, presumably,
missed; his reward was to be tarred with condescension until his
cheeks must have burned. I could see that he didn't like Greek
food, that he felt lost and that he would have preferred to be
anywhere other than where he presently found himself.
Nevertheless, he was still my enemy.
The trouble, this time, stemmed from my father's disconcerting
announcement that Nick and he would like to share a bedroom.
The room I had selected for his friend, as he pointed out with
accuracy, was less agreeable than his own at the front of the house,
with a view across the valley. And for Nick, far from home, it
would be a comfort not to be alone. In fact, my father added with
a smile, he couldn't imagine for a minute that I would object.
He gave me no option to do so. Lying alone that first night in
my own bed, after checking on the room in which my small son
slept, I listened to the sounds of laughter and shifting bodies on the
other side of the wall, and writhed. All those years, I'd followed the
rules of his House; now, in mine, I was being forced to do so again,
and to endorse a way of life that reeked of betrayal: to myself, to
my mother, to our family.
Later, after his return to England, my father wrote me a long
and warmly affectionate letter. He reported what fun it had been
to take Nick for drinks at the Ritz in Paris; and, later again, of the
misery of going into the cold empty bedroom of the little London
house, after Nick had gone off to spend their first night back with
his fiancee and her parents. My father had begged Nick not to
leave him on his own, but of course, it couldn't be done. 'Did I feel
flat and alone and downcast to think all that super time was over?
It was horrid! Still, the journey to Greece and back had been an
experience that would never be forgotten. 'It did,' he added, 'seem
to bring us much closer together, didn't it?'

Had it? I wasn't so sure. It had touched me to see how care fell
away from my father's face when he was on holiday and out of
reach of the House, with its relentless need to be cared for and paid
for and kept up; it had filled me with confusing and distressing
thoughts to know that he and Nick, when we went upstairs at
night, walked into a shared room. I had hated the sounds of their
laughter, their whispers, their stirring bodies.
Readers will think it odd that I did not immediately draw the
obvious conclusion, that my father and Nick were lovers. I had no
means of knowing whether this was true or not; oddly, I didn't
care. What troubled me was the sense that I myself had been
supplanted, that somebody -- Nick -- had taken a place that was
rightfully my own. Not my mother's? Did that mean that I wanted
to be sharing a room with my father? The idea shocked me so
much that I promptly shut it out.
In truth, I didn't know what I thought. All I understood was
that I felt disturbed and uneasy, and that it was the sense of
exclusion that caused me the most pain.


CHERRY ORCHARD BLUES

It's rare for a son or daughter to possess sufficient understanding of
a parent to be able to proffer a fair assessment of that parent's
behaviour.
'It doesn't seem to have stopped you,' says my mother. 'I never
knew anybody so keen on judging everybody else's behaviour as
you are.'
'What I mean , I say, 'is, what I'm trying to say is . . .'
Italics, here, admit to unease. I'm writing about my father with
the benefit of hindsight, and with unlimited access to his diaries,
letters and notebooks, writings that neither my mother nor I was
privy to during his lifetime. The connections that these personal
records are enabling me to draw, between my father's early life and
his later behaviour, now appear obvious; I'm being granted an
overview that was from nowhere visible back then, at the time.
What we saw then, as my father entered his mid-fifties, was the
emergence of what appeared a radically altered personality. The
documentary evidence of his life, up until the time of his marriage,
suggests to me today that this final phase, though a long time
coming, may have been inevitable.
Sickly and spoiled, my father grew up as the cherished darling
of an over-indulgent mother, encouraged to develop into a preening
young snob by doting grandmothers. At Thrumpton, as a child, he'd
assimilated the habits and attitudes of a reactionary octogenarian, so
thoroughly, in fact, as to guarantee that he'd be seen as an outsider by
his peers, and given a wretched time at school. Later, he'd failed to pass
his military training, and his diary reveals that he felt both lonely and
unpopular in his banking job at Barclays. Here was a man who
had a lot of living to make up for in life. Is it surprising he fell so
hard for the sensation of freedom and rebellion afforded by biking?
Is it any wonder, as he saw his children slip away, eluding the
patriarchal grasp, that he looked for compensatory companions
who would prove, if perhaps less challenging, then more dependable?
'And what about the clothes?' I ask my mother. 'All that business
of the biking uniform? All that leather, the black} What did it all
mean? Do you think wearing clothes like that was a redress of some
kind, for his not having served in the Army . . .?'
My mother's look conveys such utter lack of enthusiasm for the
subject that I break off. For a moment, I feel the sense of obscure
depths that she may still adamantly be concealing. Am I imagining
it, or is she battling a secret urge to speak out -- fully, finally -- after
all these years?
My mother says: 'I wouldn't know.'

My father, while he did not approve of psychoanalysis, never
minded indulging in discussion of family failings, so long as the topic
didn't involve criticism of the head of the House. (It was acceptable
to reproach him for being 'sensitive', or 'vulnerable', or 'trusting': these
backhanded virtues were his authorised weaknesses.) But a quality
such as my mother's resilience -- in the face of such acts of cruelty as
the public humiliation by her husband over her sequinned dress, or
his belittling of her in personality games, or his snide and constant
comments upon her shape (neither his wife nor his daughter could
ever match up to his willowy and near androgynous ideal of the
female form): this was drawn from a profound inner security that was
unfathomably alien to my father.
'My religion, I suppose you mean?'
My mother's faith is simple and unquestioning. There is an
Afterlife. The good are rewarded. Evil, in the end, reaps its
punishment. God may drag His feet, but, though dilatory, proves
ultimately benevolent.
My father's beliefs were less secure, and consequently more
rigidly held, more sternly enforced. His response, when I dared as
a child to question the existence of the Holy Spirit, was to order
the local vicar to walk me up and down in our park, in full view
from my father's writing-desk behind the library window. This
purgatory was to be perpetual, or until my belief was restored, after
which we could return to the House for lunch. (The vicar, after
an hour of our pacing on a hot morning, admitted that he himself
wasn't certain about the precise dogma of the Holy Spirit. We were
both in need of refreshment; a collegial accord was reached. We
did not forfeit lunch.)
'It's more to do with an inner confidence,' I tell my mother
today. 'I can detect it already in that painting of you as a little girl
at Chirk. You always knew just who you were. Maybe you had an
understanding governesss; maybe it was a result of growing up as
an accepted part of a large family? I don't know. But that's the
quality he never achieved. And he couldn't shake it in you,
however unhappy you became. Do you think I'm right?'
'Mmm -- perhaps.' (Unlike her husband, my mother has always
disliked discussing other people's traits of character.) "I hope we
aren't going to stand here talking about this all day?'
It's hard, listening to her brisk tone, to credit how completely
my mother hid all evidence of an independent mind during the

twenty years leading up to my father's death in 1994. It was as if
she'd drained all colour from herself, leaving behind only the
faintest of sepia tints. At meals, she sat in silence; when asked a
question, she simply referred it to her husband for an answer. This
was a form of loyalty that maddened my father. Enraged by her
refusal to offer a point of view on any subject, however
provocative, he flung at her the accusation that she acted like an
ostrich. It seemed as if he wanted her to lift her head and hold it
there high, while he took the opportunity to launch at it whatever
he found at hand to hurl.
My mother kept her head down. Safe from sight, she could
survive.
Bearing in mind the fact that she was now as much a slave of the
House as he had ever been, that the worst thing she could imagine
was not that her husband should humiliate her but that she should
be separated from her familiar surroundings and her small, safe
routines, I don't see, now, what else she could have done. At the
time, I longed for her to speak out, or even to let us, her children,
speak out on her behalf. She wouldn't allow it. Whatever George
did was right was the attitude she decided to take, as a form of self
protection: a silence that spoke poignantly of grim endurance did
nothing to diminish the sense of nervous unease that made visits
to the House increasingly disagreeable.
It seemed, after Nick's departure in 1975 into married life,
fatherhood and a regular job that put an end to the joint biking
expeditions, that our family sat as if watching a clock, all of us,
anxiously, simply watching. And waiting.

In company (given a proper guest list, meticulously chosen), my
father remained entertaining, malicious, witty, and always hospitable,
allowing his darker side to emerge only as the final moment of
departure threatened, and once again there gaped before him the
dire prospect of solitude.
'Where has civilisation vanished?' I remember him wailing as
the guests filtered away from a mid-week lunch party, one chosen
to suit his calendar, not theirs, at my home in London. Informed
that these people had jobs to go to, he was incredulous. He was
free; why weren't they?
Abandoned by his self-absorbed and heartless children, feeling
inadequately attended to by a wife who appeared always to be in
the kitchen or planting bulbs in the garden, my father would lapse
into gloom, an ennui so profound that only his writing table could
provide conceivable remedy. My brother, patient, good
humoured and deeply attached to the House, tried to make our
father plan for the future: how did he hope to transfer his property
without exposing his heir to the crippling maximum penalty
imposed on unprepared estates? You would think, having
experienced the effects of this at firsthand when Charlie Byron
failed to make proper arrangements, that our father would have
been eager to do better by his own son. Far from it; my brother
was accused of a cold and calculating spirit for even daring to raise
such questions. Better, my father droned in one of his favourite
phrases, to let the tapestry unroll, by which he meant that he had
no intention of doing anything to ease my brother's mind, or lessen
the financial burden he would have to bear. Retrospectively, it
seems that he intended his heir to endure all the tests of devotion
that the House could impose.
Not being the heir, I was freer to speak my mind, and frequently
did.
'Thank you, darling, for a shrewd appraisal of my faults,
something which it can never be but salutary to hear,' my father
wrote in 1976; my reward was a counter-lecture upon my taste
for heavy late-Renaissance-style chairs ('the ghastliness of such
furniture makes me want to cover my eyes') and another on my
style of dress ('those awful monolithic rings and see-through
skirts').

I was more deeply affronted by his next swipe, a pointed
reminder of the fact that my husband, after four years of marriage,
was spending little time in my company. 'My poor darling, you
really are a grass widow now,' my father wrote, oozing fake
sympathy; 'don't you ever wonder what people must be thinking?'
Licking the wounds of the defeated, I withdrew from this round
in our lifelong epistolary fray.
I hated him. I loved him.
Let's look first at hate. Like most of us, my father was enthralled
by the glamour of the stage. Few things gave him more pleasure, in
the days when Nottingham's new and daringly modern Playhouse
Theatre was making a name for itself in the Midlands (this was during
the late Sixties), than to ask the cast over to Thrumpton for a meal
and a tour. This was fun, with the exception of an excruciating
occasion on which he lured over a well-known actor who was
playing Lord Byron by promising to lend him a household treasure,
the poet's very own signet ring, for future performances. The actor,
delighted, visited, took the tour, and held out his finger for the
precious loan. A sudden silence fell. The ring had belonged to Byron
when he was a schoolboy; the actor, as we all now saw, had large
hands. He struggled; twisted; sighed: patently, it wasn't going to fit.
'But look, it's perfectly easy!' my father shouted. Infuriated by the
failure of his project, he seized the ring back and demonstrated,
triumphantly, how elegantly it fitted his own narrow finger. 'You see!'
We did. Flushing crimson, the actor apologised for having such
workmanlike digits and regretted the trouble he had caused. My
father, oblivious to the embarrassment he had caused, remarked on
the contrast all over again, inviting his unhappy guest to admire the
blue tracery of veins in the hands of a true aristocrat.
On this occasion, I would gladly have stabbed him through
the heart.
And then, let's look at love. In London, he made friends with
the girl lead singer from a well-known pop group. Asking me to
come and lunch at the ladies' annexe to his club one day, he
explained that Grace was to join us (she had expressed an eager
wish to see such a place) and that my duty was to help steer her
through the subtleties of club behaviour.
The club was old-fashioned and pompous, creaking with elderly
men in pinstriped suits and chirping, neatly suited ladies from the
shires. Grace, when she entered shyly down the stairs, made quite
a stir. For this special occasion, she had chosen her clothes with
care: high white heels, a fake leopard coat, a tiny skirt and an even
tinier top. Descending the stairs, she began to remove her fur.
Eyeing her bronzed thighs and popping breasts with a combination
of admiration and alarm, my father hissed at me to give her a hint
by putting my own coat back on, quick. I did as asked. Grace kept
hers off.
Having reached us and smiled warmly around her, Grace
showed that she was perfectly at ease. Sitting down, she adjusted a
slipped shoestring shoulder strap, tucked one foot up under a
bottom tightly draped in scarlet silk, and took out her camera for
a snap. The ladies from the shires forgot their manners and gaped;
this wasn't what they were used to: even to produce a pencil and
paper was a social crime in this hallowed spot. The head waiter
hurried over and whispered furiously in my father's ear, while
grimacing at Grace's upheld camera as if its mere presence had the
power to blast the club to bits. My father, in turn, rose to his feet.
With a sweet smile for us and a glare for the head waiter, he
announced that the place was far too dull for such a glamorous
creature as his guest. Swept up the stairs on the tide of his indignation,
Grace and I were carried off to feast, at twice the price, at
a restaurant in which grandly discreet cubicles protected us from
comment, and honoured Grace's reputation as a celebrity. Grace
was overjoyed: 'He's a lovely chap, your dad,' she said when he
went off to hail her a cab home. 'Such a gentleman.' Later, my
father told me that the waiter at his club had insisted 'Madam' must
put away her camera and wear her coat throughout her stay, so as
not to distress the other diners. 'Pompous ass,' he said furiously. 'A
sweet girl like that.'
I loved him that day, because he was so transparently concerned
only that his guest should have a happy time. He could, when he
chose, be kind.
I hated him. I loved him. I longed for the affection he bestowed
so generously on Nick and Grace. He could make me laugh until
my breath choked in gasps. He's the man whose autocratic ways and
vicious sense of humour, as surely as his unappeasable craving for
love, have most formed my nature. The note of self-pity that lurks
about my conditional clauses, and the inflections that escape from
the corners of my whispered asides -- 'if you cared' ... 'as though it
mattered' - are part of my father's heritage. Like him, I hunger for
praise of the House; like him, I quicken with rage in its defence.
'I never knew a man make such a fuss about such an ordinary
little English manor house,' an old acquaintance of his remarked to
me only the other day, in a conversation about my father.
Ordinary? Our House? At moments like that, my father's spirit
approaches as close as the hand that used to brush my shoulder
whenever, playing the piano, I picked out some sentimental tune
('I'm just a lamb that's lost in the wood,' he'd croon with mocking
awareness of the self-pitying aspect of his nature, parodying his own
besetting weakness).
I love and I hate; and his is the familiar voice, whenever I
discover myself alone, that whispers to me from the dark.

In 1977, two years after Nick's defection, my father deserves our
sympathy. No substitute biking companion has yet appeared. His
daughter, meanwhile, has gone off to spend six months with her
errant husband and small son at a beach house in Malibu, writing
a book about Greek island life, recollecting it in utter tranquillity,
while watching the dawn roll in upon lilac waves.

'Your life,' her father writes with justifiable irritation, 'is so
beautifully glamorous . . .'
His son, goaded by him into riding about town on a
motorbike, is hospitalised after an accident in a city street. The
accident was life-threatening; now, there's daily pain and grim
talk of a possible amputation. But it's not at all my father's
fault; not in the least. He'd never asked his son to get knocked
down by a lorry (although he had forcefully pressed upon
him a machine quite alien to the young man's nature). What
matters most to my father is the resulting emptiness that has
descended upon the House; and that its appetite for care remains
inexhaustible.

Taken at their London house, this photograph shows the real affection
that continued to exist between my parents, and, in the placing of her
hand, an indication of my mother's wish to protect her husband.

Living in California, I scarcely gave my parents a thought. Now,
looking through the old diaries and letters, I see that a little more
concern might have been welcome. Money, by 1977, is in short
supply. Often as not, now, when my parents have visitors, it's my
mother who does the cooking, lays the table, and washes up
afterwards, while my father scurries off round the bedrooms,
twitching curtains shut, running baths, refilling water-flasks, vainly
attempting to replicate the leisured life of a perished century.
Reading stories of ageing and decline by William Trevor and
Molly Keane, my parents smile at one another and sigh in
recognition. Sometimes, when all the guests have finally gone, their
hosts are so exhausted that they fall asleep in their chairs, waking
with a start only when their shoulders sense the chill of encroaching
night. They worry about their son's slow recovery; they
comfort themselves by buying tickets to see The Roly Polys, a
troupe of unusually plump dancers, or Hinge and Bracket, a
transvestite revue that mocks gentility (my father's favourite target
for mockery). There's a companionship here, and a good humour,
that it will fortify my mother to remember in the difficult years
ahead.
Times had been growing harder for the privileged owners of
stately homes. In 1974, a dramatic exhibition was mounted in
London to warn of the speed with which this unique portion of
its heritage was being lost to Britain. Visitors to the show, put on
by Roy Strong at the Victoria & Albert Museum, stared in
disbelief: were there really so many fallen monuments and roofless
halls, such a number of tree-flanked avenues leading up to unkempt
fields and ravaged ruins?
Articles were written, appeals launched. Some of the larger and
more famous buildings attracted public interest and elicited grants,
but life for those who owned the smaller and less celebrated houses
posed problems that lacked simple solutions. These once stately
mansions were not, after all, crucial repositories of the Crown
Jewels. What right had these smart-voiced couples to squander
precious land, and then proceed to speak of themselves as noble
custodians? Why shouldn't their oversized homes be sold and
put to more productive use, as training colleges, for example, or
nursing homes?
My father resisted the temptation to apply for a grant, since he
feared, far more than the lack of money, being placed under any form of supervision. (Much of his delight in the House stemmed
from the sense that he could do as he pleased with it, and be
beholden to none.) Instead, he and his wife did what they could
to limit the costs of a way of life they could no longer properly
afford, but which continued to seem demanded of them by the
House. The family cars grew smaller, and secondhand; the heating
was turned down, until damp patches upon the walls portended
worse problems than high fuel bills. Plans were made to economise
by hibernation, during winter months, at the rear of the House.
During this period of slow deterioration, my father's diaries my
mother had no time to keep one -- became increasingly laconic.
Each week carried a brief notation of the days upon which smoke
clouds from the power station had been worst, and of the number
of trees upon the estate that had had to be cut down, victims of a
virulent plague of Dutch Elm disease.
Elms, and the sound of the wind sighing through their lush
boughs, were one of the glories of Thrumpton's park. Over a
hundred of them had been affected by the virus, and now stood,
drab-branched and skeletal, waiting to be felled. My mother, in a
rare confessional moment, admitted in one of the letters she sent
to California that she could no longer bear to walk out into the
fields. All day long, the chainsaw whined; trunks sprawled on the
land like the severed limbs of fallen giants.
Nineteen seventy-seven was a bad year. After losing in rapid
succession two adored black labradors, loyal animals who seemed
bred for love, not hunting, my parents managed to locate and
The House: Possession

purchase a third. They'd owned the dog just six months when
burglars, casing the House for some future felony, abducted it.
Drugged, and stabbed with a knife up the rectum, the poor,
friendly hound was left on a local roadside, to bleed to death. The
prospective theft, efficiently executed in the absence of any guard
dog, was carried out the following month.
This was a major burglary, on a scale that felt, to my parents, as
if their home had been raped. For me, the devastation did not, at
that time, carry great impact. Living far away, off on another
continent, I had fallen out of love with my parents, with their way
of life, and with the House. If asked for a view, I might have
quipped that the House had always been too cluttered and that a
few old clocks and antique miniatures weren't worth crying over.
Even I, however, regretted the loss of objects that reminded me of
the now rapidly vanishing past: I was six when I first watched two
tiny blacksmiths tap their anvils against a bell in my greatgrandfather's
gold repeater watch; I was not much older when I
was shown a silver fish that concealed in its innards a secret cargo
of toothpicks, a pretty trinket designed to adorn a Georgian lady's
dressing table.
The repeater watch was gone for ever; the fish turned up ten
years later in a Nottingham silversmith's shop. My father, driving
at dawn to a deserted car-park on the edge of Doncaster,
discovered, as his informant had promised, that the prettiest of the
clocks had been left ready for him, deposited in a brown paper bag
between the front wheels of an abandoned Ford Sierra. I never
heard what exorbitant bribe had been paid for its recovery, or how
the extortion had been effected. All that mattered, to my father,
was that the clock had come home.
The burglary brought out both the best and the worst in his
nature. The best was represented by the tenacity that had come to
the fore back in 1950, when he borrowed beyond his means to
rescue the House he loved. Now, when the police made it clear
that their obligations did not extend beyond reasonable endeavour,
my father undertook to tackle the job himself. He transformed
himself into an amateur sleuth. Loitering in the narrow lanes of
Brighton, where stolen goods often appeared prior to their journey
across the Channel, he was at virtually no risk of being mugged;
when he started going alone to the Mile End Road, and asking
questions in places where, despite his flat cap and shabby jacket, he
could never have passed unnoticed, he was pushing his luck.
My father's determination paid off: goods were recovered;
confessions, improbably, obtained. My impression was that,
distressing though the burglary had been -- my parents were in the
House at the time, and were fortunate to have survived the pillage
unhurt -- the ordeal had soon after devolved, on the part of my
father, into a titillatingly farcical treasure hunt.
The burglary also brought out the worst in my father, as I
discovered on my return to England and, inevitably, to the House.
My father's insistence that all weekends were his pre-requisite,
driving me into elaborate lies to cover each time I failed to show
up, with or without my husband, had not weakened. He talked
about the burglary all the time. The precise details were replayed
until, as with the power station, guests and visitors had to be
entreated, for all our sakes, to keep away from the topic. There was
no power station. There had been no burglary.
We could forestall conversations. We could not inhibit the
feverishly elaborate workings of my father's mind.
A detailed inventory of the House and its contents had been
drawn up shortly before the burglary. The suggestion for this had
come from a homosexual couple with whom, a decade or so
before, my parents had become close friends. (The couple's
sexuality had, in those years of necessary discretion, been well
hidden - so much so that I, as a schoolgirl, placed the more
handsome partner's name under my pillow, hoping that this might
induce from him a proposal of marriage. My parents' early


endeavours to find suitable wives for this agreeable couple suggest
that they lived in a state of similar ignorance.)
Two facts had aroused my father's suspicion. One was that the
older of their two friends, a sweet and softly-spoken man, worked
for a well-known antique shop, from which insider information
might conceivably be bartered. The second was that the couple,
emerging at last from camouflage during the late and less inhibited
Seventies, began to lead an overtly stylish life, in a house that was
reported to be filled with splendid things.
To my father, all now became clear. Accounts of a fine house
filled with antiques clinched his suspicions. Their two old friends
had been the masterminds behind the burglary. This breakthrough
in the case was announced to the family over lunch at the House,
on a tranquil summer's day when I was just daring to hope that the
subject of the burglary was closed. Beaming, my father announced
a plan of action; dumbstruck with dismay, we asked him first to
produce any shred of evidence.
But it was so obvious, so excruciatingly obvious! (He thumped
his fist on the table so hard that the knives and forks danced from
their set positions.) What fools we were! How blind! The couple
had never once, since the burglary, asked my father to their house,
to stay! What could be clearer? Patently, they had everything to
hide!
Hopelessly, we pointed out the flaws in his reasoning. How
could the couple possibly expect to hide well-known pieces of
furniture in a house visited by mutual friends? Why, when they had
successful careers, would they stoop to burgling? Why would they
still be issuing invitations to my parents to dine with them in
London? Why? Only, surely, because they were innocent - and, at this stage, unaware that they had fallen into the camp of suspects.

We were wasting our time. No protests could dissuade my father
from his chosen course of action. He took a hotel room in the
town nearest to the house in which his friends lived. From there,
he went, ineffectually disguised beneath a flat cap and dark glasses,
to case the joint in which, he knew, his stolen goods were being
concealed (if not flaunted!), all that missing booty plundered from
his beloved home.
The denouement proved both melancholy and ludicrous. The
gay couple, having gone out for the afternoon to visit some friends,
returned to find a familiar figure, strangely disguised, with his nose
pressed hard to the locked window of their library, a room which
overlooked the private, garden side of their house. Trapped, my
father muttered some improbable tale of how, having found himself
in the vicinity and happening to pass by, he had idly wondered,
seeing how lovely their roses looked ...
The episode was one of complete discomfiture and farce. It did
not stop my father from believing, for a single second, that his
friends remained guilty. If the stolen goods were not on show, then
it was because they had been secreted away, or spirited off to be
fenced. The possibility that his conjectures might prove wrong was
never entertained. His old friends, baffled by his visit and puzzled
by his altered manner, were not afforded the chance to defend
themselves or the opportunity to clear their names.
'Of course they'd claim they were innocent,' my father stormed.
'Anybody who isn't an idiot can see they're just covering up. I
don't mean they did the burglary themselves, but they were behind
it. Who else would it be?'
(Years later, I'm tempted to wonder whether this blameless
couple, brave enough as middle-aged men to proclaim their love
to a social group notorious for its narrow views, had not evoked
within my father an anxious mirror to his own secret compunctions?
At the time, his eagerness to condemn them as felons seemed both
bizarre and inexplicable.)
The discovery, ultimately, that the burglars comprised a group
of well-known criminals who specialised in country house
robberies, came too late for the salvation of a congenial relationship.

This was sad: that long-enduring friendship was one of the last true
ones of my father's to have survived.
Increasingly critical of others, and mortally sensitive to any
criticism of himself, my father, as the decade of the Seventies gave
way to that of the Eighties, was rapidly approaching what he had
always fled and always dreaded: a state of almost total personal
isolation.

GANYMEDE

The king of the gods once loved a Trojan boy
Named Ganymede . . . and carried off the youngster
Who now, though much against the will of Juno,
Tends to the cups of Jove and serves his nectar.

OVID, METAMORPHOSES, TRANSLATED BY ROLFE HUMPHRIES

It was in 1980, shortly after my father had given up hunting for his
lost treasures, that he found Robbie, the young man who became
what J. R. Ackerley called 'The Ideal Friend'.
Ackerley, having tried love and found it disappointing, settled
for a dog. My father, looking to fill the gap left by dead pets and
absent children, found a substitute for both in a sweet-natured boy
who was willing to offer the uncritical devotion he needed and had
never, as yet, found.
Robbie was not, at first sight, an obvious candidate for my
father's love. Heavily built, with bad posture and nicotine-stained
teeth and fingers, he appeared older than his age. Shaving and hair
care were low on his priorities; he looked rough as a straw mattress.
His eyes were small and flickered shyly when you tried to meet
them; his smile was unexpectedly sweet. He was quite muscular. He
was also, as my mother reminds me, proud. Nick hadn't objected to
dressing up as a footman to hand around our Christmas dinner;

Robbie would have served us with a better grace, but in his own
clothes. Probably, he would have wished to contribute something
to the feast; always short of money, he had a generous heart.
So far as I know, my father never read Ackerley s writings: if he
had, these candid discussions of homosexuality might have struck
some familiar chords. To the reader, who has already heard of his
sharing a bedroom with Nick, and who is now being introduced
to a relationship with another young man that lasted, in growing
stages of intensity, for fourteen years, the situation will seem
transparent. It will seem more so when I state that my father
eventually gave Robbie the bedroom in the House that lay closest
to his own private dressing room, that they took holidays together,
went biking through the nights and often only returned for
breakfast.
This points, does it not, to an obvious conclusion? Even my
mother, when we last discussed this delicate subject a few weeks
ago, reminded me that my father had allowed Robbie to share with
him my parents' twin-bedded room in their London house. She
added that she had never cared for the fact that Robbie slept in her
bed, and that it was often still unmade when she paid her own next
visit.
'So what do you think?' I asked her, and she shrugged. 'I don't
see what else could have been happening,' she said. 'Do you?'
The strange truth is, that I'm finding it difficult to set the words
down. As soon as I write them, doubts crowd eagerly in. Really,
I know that part of the trouble is that I just don't want to imagine
my father in bed with Robbie, any more than I wanted to imagine
my father in bed with Nick. I wonder, never having been to an
analyst, what I should make of this reluctance. Am I too prudish
to tolerate the thought that my father slept with boys? Can I
honestly believe that this attachment, so close in all other ways, was
sexless? Why can't I acknowledge it with the simplicity that my
mother seems at last to have achieved? I don't know. Is it the
biographer's mind at work, warning me to abhor speculation unless
proof can be given? I simply do not know. But I may be the last
person who clings, absurdly, to the faint possibility that my father
was, until the end, a heterosexual.
I'm clearer on the fact that it was, once more, the pain of
displacement that troubled me most. Being ousted, reduced to a
lesser place in my father's affections than his friend: this was what
hurt, like a bad headache, all the time.
Whatever my father's private life may have been, he wanted the
world to know him as a straight man. Robbie was introduced to
the small circle of people who encountered him as a friend, never
as a lover. We, as I knew even then, were valuable camouflage. If
my mother, my brother and I played our parts obligingly, Robbie
could be presented as a friend to all of us, an approved addition to
a close-knit family. My brother and I were not happy about this
plan. How could we be, when Robbie had usurped us?
And my mother? The other question that needs answering at
this point is that of my mother's extraordinary restraint. My father
kept company with Robbie for fourteen years: why did she put up
with it?
"I was weak,' she says now. I don't see it as weakness, but as
evidence of how well she understood her husband, a man whose
need for love was as profound as his insecurity. They write of people
who will walk through fire for the sake of a loved one: she's one of
those. This is why, when I see my mother watching her favourite
actress, Giulietta Masina, in her favourite film, La Strada, I understand
the look of enchanted recognition that transfigures her face.
La Strada tells the story of Gelsomina, who leaves home to travel
the road with a circus strong man, Anthony Quinn playing the
character of Zampano. A taciturn but handsome brute with a
terror of solitude, Zampano bullies Gelsomina and humiliates her
by his casual affairs; she, loving him and with no other place to go,
stands by her man and accepts humiliation as her fate. When,

finally, she leaves him, Zampano goes to pieces; in the last scene,
he is seen trying to bury himself in the shore where Gelsomina's
abandoned body lies.
Time and again I have watched my mother, her dinner
forgotten as she stares at the screen. I've seen her hands caress the
side of the chair as Gelsomina turns to show us, by her bright little
smile, her determination to endure. "I can't bear it!' my mother
cries. But she always wants to watch the film once more.
My mother, throughout this last epoch of her marriage, played
Gelsomina's role. Like Gelsomina, she understood that however
much my father hurt her, she would damage him far more if she
failed to play her part. He needed Robbie, but he also needed her.

They met, so my father explained to me later, in Leicester Square
in London, in a cinema queue. My father talked about his bike.
Robbie, just turned eighteen, was awed by his descriptions of the
Ducati: shyly, he admitted that he had never seen one of these
glamorous machines. The cinema tickets were sold out. With
nothing further to do that evening and a sulky young wife waiting
for him in a Vauxhall basement, Robbie was happy to be offered
supper and taken to a London house where, with a fond pat on its
ebony side, he was introduced to 'the Duke'. He felt honoured by
the friendly manner of a man who seemed both kind and lonely.
They agreed to meet again.
Confidences were soon exchanged. My father, anxious not to
frighten Robbie away, played down his own circumstances. The
House was never mentioned, only an unsympathetic family and a
need for freedom. Robbie revealed that his father, four years
earlier, had killed himself, and that he had since lost contact with
his mother. A girlfriend had pressured him into marriage, a step
that he now regretted. He didn't have a job and didn't relish the
idea of full-time employment. (His options were restricted by the
fact that he could only with difficulty write his name.)
It was my father who suggested that Robbie should train to be
a despatch rider. Self-interest played the predominant part. My
father liked to instruct; despatch riding wasn't a full-time job; the
boy, when once qualified, could replace Nick as his co-rider upon
the Duke.
It didn't take long for my father to realise that he was
underestimating to himself the role he desired Robbie to play in
his life, and that his feelings were reciprocated. Robbie, a
confused and gentle young man who had been deeply affected by
his father's death, was as lonely as he was himself. Grateful for my
father's solicitous friendship, Robbie came, in time, to worship
him, as a substitute for his own lost parent, as a tutor, and, at the
least, as a beloved companion.
For the first two years, the friendship flourished in secret. Their
mutual pleasures were simple. They walked along the towpaths
of the London canals, ate breakfasts at greasy spoon cafes
and went to bike shows. My father picked out a few films of a
popular kind, at which they both could laugh. Years had passed
since my father had felt so merry. Robbie was an easy laugher;
he chuckled at everything, even when no cause for mirth was
apparent.
Here was the kind of easy companionship that my father had
hankered after during his miserable years of employment at the
bank. Here, surely, was what his children should have continued to
provide? The closer he became to Robbie, the more resentful my
father grew of what he perceived as the cold indifference of his
son and daughter. We had never been so readily available, so
willing to fall in with his whims, so happy to place our lives at his
disposal.
My mother, during this early period of the relationship with
Robbie, was kept in the dark. While surprised by the amount of
time that her husband now apparently devoted to his voluntary
work in London as chairman of the Juvenile Magistrates' Court,


she was not much grieved by his absences; ill-health, hypochondria,
and low spirits had made of my father a querulous and demanding
companion. As the daughter of a near recluse, my mother was
equipped to make the best of solitude. Unlike her husband, she
enjoyed her own company.
My father had now reached his late fifties. He was overdue for
a mid-life crisis, ripe for the rebellion that had never taken place
in his early life. The timing of Robbie's appearance was perfect;
all of the older generation for whom my father retained a ghostly
vestige of awe were dead. Nobody was left to gainsay him, or to tell
him how best to treat his wife.
My mother, if she happened to hear about Robbie's existence,
could be relied upon to defend her husband, and fight off any
suggestion that there was anything odd about this unusual partnership.
Friends presented a trickier situation.

A photograph of George FitzRoy Seymour and Robbie.

My father had lost none of his snobbery. He cared, as much as
ever, about where he was invited and by whom, about annual
invitations to stalk in the Highlands, and the fact that he frequented
the same London barber as the Duke of Muttonchops. It amused
him to flaunt convention by inviting a young female pop star to
his club, just as it had once given him delight to shock his country
neighbours by showing off Slav in his loincloth, as part of the
household. Robbie was another matter. He did not wish it to be
thought that he was paying a young man for sexual services; he
was acutely conscious that rumours would spread if Robbie
and he appeared, outside my mother's company, in public. He
was, for this reason, unnerved when Robbie casually proposed
that the two of them should take a walk together, sometime,
around Piccadilly and St James's. When my father began to offer
alternatives - a visit to the Tower of London was held out as an
enticement -- Robbie displayed his most annoying characteristic:
extreme stubbornness. Nothing would satisfy him now but the
promise of a long and leisurely day during which my father would
show him a glimpse of his other, more old-fashioned world, and
share with him - Robbie loved picnics - a sandwich in Green
Park.
Green Park was the least of my father's worries. 'Avoid Boodle's'
he wrote despairingly in his diary. The reference was to the club
from the ladies' annexe of which he had defiantly stormed when
warned that his young companion must hide her skimpy clothes
under a coat and put away her camera. Like all the old-fashioned
gentleman's clubs, Boodle's invited its members to be treated
like schoolboys: to eat nursery food, to dress ever so nicely, and to
behave as Nanny would wish. Robbie had heard my father mention
the club as a place for which he felt a particular affection. As a
favoured friend, he was keen to pay a visit. Untruthfully told that
strangers were forbidden to enter, he requested to be allowed to
admire it from the doorway.

His prodigal daughter wasn't there to relish the spectacle of her
father's anguish; today, I find no difficulty in imagining it.
Sauntering down St James's Street with his friend 'Georgie' (he
disliked the name George, finding it far too formal), Robbie kept
his hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans. Hurriedly informed
that they were passing the sacred door, he climbed the step,
stared in, let his stomach take the air and gave it a prolonged and
cheerful scratch before announcing that he was ready to move on.
This would not have been a protest against the splendour of his
surroundings, or an indication of the fact that he had intuited my
father's anxious state of mind, but a modest declaration of his
lingering independence.
The diary reveals that the mission was successfully accomplished.
They had met nobody my father knew. Robbie remained
unconscious of having caused even a moment of anxiety - and
thoroughly enjoyed his day out.

The year 1982 saw two strands of my father's elaborate life become
entwined. It's possible that Robbie was starting to feel hurt at being
kept apart from his friend's family; it's as likely that my father could
no longer face daily life at Thrumpton without him. He invited
Robbie to stay, for a week of biking. He didn't tell him what to
expect, what sort of a House. He did, imperiously summoning me
to come and visit at the same time, try to ensure that his friend
received a warm welcome. I was told that I would be meeting a
somewhat illiterate young man with a sensitive nature that would
respond quickly to slights. I heard the tenderness with which my
father anxiously offered this brief description. Just as with Nick, I
felt my body shake with jealous rage. I knew what to expect now.
Another cuckoo: another usurper.
Robbie, as I later learned, had arrived a day earlier than myself,
riding the bike that my father had given him when he passed his
test. My mother's recollection is that she offered the unwelcome
visitor a friendly welcome, a good lunch and an invitation to carry
her basket of stems and cuttings while she pruned the garden roses.
It's possible that Robbie felt basket-carrying was a bit demeaning.
It's more likely that he was unnerved by the size of the House
and angry that my father had hidden all this splendour from
him. All I know is that I turned up the following day to find the
library blinds drawn, the bees humming merrily outside them
among the wallflowers, and my father stretched, prostrate, upon a
sofa. His eyes, when he removed his dark glasses to bestow a sorrowing
kiss on my cheek, were milky with tears.
'Where's your friend?' I asked. My father shook his head. He
could hardly speak for sobs.
'Gone,' he said at last. 'Gone back to London. And he never wants
to see me again. Oh, bloody, bloody house!'
'He didn't like it?'
'He's cockney' my father said, as though this explained everything.
'And I love him. Is that a terrible thing to say? I love him!'
I studied my fingernails and concentrated on wondering whether
they might be improved by a clear coat of varnish. By concentrating,
I could block out the unwelcome sound of a renewed burst of
weeping, followed by further diatribes against the House. This,
clearly, was love of a new kind.
'I suppose you think I'm horribly selfish,' he said petulantly,
when it became clear that I wasn't going to respond. 'But if you
knew how happy Robbie and I have been--'
'I don't want to know.'
Outraged, my father glared. 'My God, but you're cold-hearted!
You've never cared. It's all about you, isn't it? It never occurs to you
that anyone else might deserve a few pathetic little moments of joy,
when their entire life has been one long, wretched grind of duty
and sacrifice . . .'
More followed: long, quaveringly familiar lamentations about
the cruelty of a family who begrudged him any moment of
freedom, any morsel of common happiness. I was too furious to
speak. I couldn't believe that he was looking for my sympathy.
'Now, don't be so sharp,' reproves my mother. 'I'm sure he never
said all that. No need to get carried away'
'I'm not. Do you think I'd forget?'
'I think', my mother says nicely, 'you had less to complain about
than me. And I put up with it.'
'Only because you had to,' I say brutally. 'Only because you
weren't ever going to leave him.'
'I might have done,' she says, looking forlorn. 'You don't know
everything.'
Guilty at causing pain, I squeeze her hand. 'You'd never have
abandoned him. You were a good wife.'
But she still wears a sad look, and I've put it there. 'I'm not sure,'
she says. "I wasn't always kind.'

The row was quickly patched up, and Robbie was persuaded to
return to the House for a second visit. After a third, he began to
feel more at his ease. He was staying there in October 1982, when
my father, aware that mature women dislike to be reminded of
their age, adopted the charitable course of leaving my mother to
celebrate her sixtieth birthday alone, while he took young Robbie
off on an overnight bike trip to Scotland. Shortly after this jaunt,
with my father's benevolent encouragement, Robbie decided to
leave his wife. The separation and divorce were uncontested;
Robbie now had even more time to place at the disposal of his
mentor.
Either Robbie disliked the bachelor state or else he was an easy
prey; we were never quite sure. In 1983, less than a year later, he
announced that he planned once again to marry. His choice had
fallen upon Delia, a stolid, matronly young woman, a few years
older than himself. My father, although displeased, paid for the
cake and the hire of the registry office; he even offered to act, and
performed as, the best man. Three weeks later, he suggested to
Robbie that the Duke needed to get out for a run. They took a
two-day trip on the bike to Cornwall: this expedition, as my father
noted in his pocket diary had proved 'great fun!' Part of the fun, I'd
guess, was in knowing that he'd won Robbie away from a newlywed
wife.
The homosexual friends to whom I've told the story interpret
Robbie's married state as a plus for my father. He'd never shown
any interest in effeminate men; they see him as the type to enjoy
the challenge of a female rival. If this was the case, he must have
relished the scent of victory. Robbie was either exceptionally weak
or entirely under my father's spell; by the spring of 1984, less than
a year after he married Delia, he was travelling to Thrumpton
every week, while his wife remained in London.
This marked the point at which Robbie began his new role at
the House. A routine was quickly established. Each night, after a
homely supper cooked by my mother, the two men would repair
upstairs to my father's dressing room to change into their bikers'
uniforms. My mother remained below to wash up the dishes. By
nine, the House was entirely hers. She rarely saw the two of them
before breakfast the following morning.
My mother said nothing and did what was asked of her; Delia
was not so willing to comply. She wanted her husband back with
her, and earning money.
My father jotted down a terse reminder to himself, during the
late summer of 1984: 'Talk with Delia.' He could, when he
wanted, make himself hard to resist; I'm sure Delia was surprised,
when he left, to find that Robbie was going to be spending just as
much time at the House as before, and with her agreement. The
compromise she had been offered was that the invitation now
embraced them both. Robbie would continue to accompany my
father on his biking expeditions. Delia, meanwhile, would enjoy
the pleasure of providing my mother with a companion.

Separated from my first husband and keeping myself at a
distance from the House and its altered menage, I was baffled by
the insistently serene tone of my mother's letters. Having met Delia
once, I couldn't imagine that the two wives had anything to say to
each other; on paper, my mother praised her as a helpful young
woman who didn't mind helping to polish furniture and was
always easy company, no trouble at all. Today, however, my mother
has become less guarded. She remembers how Delia enjoyed
watching television game shows, with the volume turned up at full
blast. The furniture-polishing was, she says, undertaken only when
the television broke down, and at my mother's insistence.
'Well, she didn't do anything else!' she says. 'And all that
cooking! I had to give her lunch, and him dinner. I might as well
have been running a hotel.'
'Why did you pretend everything was fine in the letters?' I ask.
'You ought to have said you were having a rotten time; you know
we would have backed you.'
Stubbornly, she shakes her head. 'I didn't want you causing
trouble,' she says. 'It wouldn't have done any good.'
Even though I've seen her watch that film so many times, I still
can't bear to hear the note of resignation in her voice. Gelsomina
was a poor little waif, staying loyal to promiscuous Zampano, in
part, because she had nowhere else to go; my mother is a proud
woman, from a proud family. How could she allow herself to be
so beaten down?
'You said you could have left him. Why didn't you?'
She looks bewildered. 'And leave all this . . .?'
Of course. It isn't only the story of Gelsomina, standing by her
impossible man. Having lost that romantic family home of her
own, the castle on the hill she'd always supposed was their own
until her parents left it, my mother had allowed the house of her
marriage to fill the void. She would have put up with anything
rather than be separated from a home the contours of which had
grown as reassuringly familiar as a beloved body. Here it always
stands, at the heart of every family story, pulling us back, holding
us fast: The House.

At about this time, bruised by the end of a marriage and a long,
unhappy love affair, I turned again to the House myself, seeking
comfort in its safe harbour. I hadn't been seeing much of either
of my parents after that one emotional scene with my father, when
he thought that Robbie had left him. I knew of Robbie's existence,
and that he and Delia spent time at the House. It had not occurred
to me, until I began to feel the desire to spend more time there
myself, that I would find myself an outsider. Robbie was now
securely fixed in position. My brother and I had been displaced.
I hope that Robbie never understood how much I hated him
for supplanting me. He didn't glimpse me above him, standing on
the roof, looking down to where he lounged at my father's side
on the bank of the lake, where he lay listening, like a perfect child,
to a storybook read aloud to him by his ageing friend. He didn't
read the diary in which I wrote: 'Is he never not here?' He didn't
know how desperately I prayed for him to disappear.
Towards me, Robbie always acted cheerful and kind. He taught
my son how to fish in the Thrumpton lake; when my London flat
was burgled, he rode round on his new bike -- my father's birthday
gift to him - to offer me a brass candlestick he claimed to have picked
up at a car boot sale. (Or had my father given it to him to offer me
as a sop?) He was always keen to come up with a word to help
me out at Scrabble, a game that our father, dispensing urgent winks
and nods to signal his scheme, ensured that Robbie always won,
however bizarre his spelling.
'You do like Robbie, don't you?' my father would say, hungry
for appreciation of his friend.
'He's all right,' I'd say, the most that I could manage without
being accused of viciousness or snobbery. (And here was another

difficulty: it was impossible to express hostility to Robbie without
sounding condescending. If Robbie had been rich, or well-read,
or from a grand family, I would have felt no such delicacy about
expressing my resentment.)
'He's very fond of you! A yearning pause, while I savour the
moment of power and contemplate the dangers of candour, the
risk to my mother, who has begged me, almost crying, to make no
more trouble than already exists in the House.
'He was saying how much he admires you for writing all those
books.'
I'd like to tell him that I'd value Robbie's admiration of my
works more if he had managed to do more than glance at their
jackets. Instead, I thank my father for passing the tribute on; seeing
Robbie himself loitering attentively in the background, awaiting
his excuse to join in, I find a reason to move away, to leave the two
of them alone. I hate to see them together. I hate the softness in my
father's eyes when he looks at Robbie. I hate the glances that plead
with me to be understanding, to be kind.
My rage, expressed as calculated reticence, was fuelled by a sense
of the injustice done to our family as a whole. Why was it acceptable
to my father for Robbie to boast fingernails that looked as though
he'd gone grave-digging without a shovel, while my mother's
honest gardening hands were criticised as unkempt? Why was my
young son rebuked if he failed to post my father a weekly letter
from school, while Robbie never wrote at all? Why must I drive
across London -- I was often working against tight deadlines - to
return to Robbie a cheap plastic cigarette lighter he had left behind
at the House? Why must I obtain the autograph of a singer I had
once met, requesting him to write 'With Love to Robbie'? Why
must Robbie always take precedence, always be without fault?
The answer, as I well knew, was love. My father was enraptured,
besotted, head over heels. He treasured my mother. He was, if only
behind our backs, proud of his son and daughter's achievements.
But Robbie was the passion of my father's later life. Robbie's only
rival was the House.
The presiding spirit of this stage of their increasingly exclusive
relationship was A. A. Milne. Teaching Robbie to read had not
been an easy business, since he was quickly bored and disliked being
corrected. These little foibles, as my father fondly observed, demonstrated
that he had much in common with a special character in one
of the few books that Robbie sincerely enjoyed: the bouncy and
uncrushable 'Tigger'.
Delighted by this identification, Robbie pointed out that Tigger
was referred to by Pooh as a great friend of Christopher Robin's:
not just any friend, but a. great one. If he was Tigger, then my father
must surely be Christopher Robin (rapidly shortened to 'CR').
Her affection for owls made the selection of name an easy pick
for my mother. Delia, although her visits had become infrequent,
was offered Piglet. Behind her broad back, however, my father
spoke of her to Robbie as Heffalump. They both enjoyed this little
joke at the expense of Delia's shape, although Robbie occasionally
remonstrated that it wasn't in the best of taste. (He remained quite
fond of Delia, and liked to point out that she had a good sense of
humour. She surely needed one.)
The names were chosen in 1984. From then on, these were the
characters and personalities that my parents and Robbie adopted
for use in their private life.
I've managed to find my father's tattered copy of The House at
Pooh Corner, the volume in which Tigger first appears. It's a third
impression from the 1928 edition, published when George Seymour
was five years old and just beginning to look upon Thrumpton as
his rightful home. Ernest Shepard's delicate drawing, spread across
the flyleaf, depicts a small boy, with his faithful band of followers
skipping at his heels, dancing through an idealised landscape. Easily
visible on the far side of the rolling fields is the outline of a tall, well
gabled house. The similarity to his own House and its pretty estate

is striking enough to have caught my father's fancy when, almost
sixty years later, he began reading the book aloud to Robbie.
To me, it's clear that my father was once again revisiting his
childhood, burying the bad memories of abandonment, loneliness
and fear in a re-enacted version over which he had gained control.
In his kindness to Robbie, he was also compensating himself for
the years when he had slept up on the dusty top floor, and cried,
unheard, for the mother who had left him when she travelled to
La Paz.
My mother argues that the connection is simpler still.
'He liked being Christopher Robin because it meant he didn't
have to be responsible,' she states. 'And Tigger: well, Robbie was
rather greedy, and clumsy, and always making out he knew much
more than he did.'
'And were you Owl, because you were so wise?'
- My mother glances again at the illustration by Shepard. 'The
owl isn't following Christopher Robin,' she observes.
And she's right: the owl is off on its own, floating overhead, hovering
above the frolicking troupe. Suddenly, I find myself thinking
about the grand house parties with which my grandmother liked to
fill her Welsh castle, and of my reclusive grandfather trotting quietly
away from them, absconding up the stone stairs, fleeing to his turret
and his books.
'Could you have got through it all without that ability to detach
yourself?' I ask her.
My mother thinks about it, then she shakes her head.
'I doubt it,' she says. 'No. Not that last ten years . . .'

THE HOUSE DIVIDED

Saturday, 24 April 1993
Received by George Seymour, very friendly, extremely
correct, snobbish ... In the library we were joined for
drinks by. . . nice rugged lady resembling Violet
Powell . . . and a strange yob-like bruiser who sat mute
and gazing into space. Myles [Myles Hildyard, a
neighbour] disclosed that he is the 'friend' with whom
G.S. rides pillion all over the country on an enormous
motorbike -- very strange.

JAMES LEES-MILNE, THE MILK OF PARADISE:
DIARIES, 1993-1997

Lacking any interest in motorbikes, I had no sense in 1985 of the
significance in my father's exchange of a Ducati for a Harley
Davidson. Today, I've become better informed.
The Ducati, affectionately known to its admirers (not just my
father) as the Duke, is the Bugatti of the bike world. A young
man's machine, it was designed for speed, for fast corners on the
Italian racetracks; later, it was adapted to suit the twists and turns
of European roads. The Ducati is swift, dangerous and elegant.
The Harley is a style of life, the icon of the seasoned biker, the
tough guy.
Image, here, is what counts. Nobody cares that Marlon Brando
actually rode a British Triumph in the film, The Wild Ones (or that

the author of On the Road, for a similar example, could not even
drive). In fact, and this explains my father's change of machines,
the Harley Davidson (rudely known to its critics as the Hardly
Ableson) is a bike ideally suited to an ageing man. Built for long
haul riding on the straight roads of America, it is more comfortable
than the Ducati, and more reliable. For a man of sixty-one who
was anticipating a long future of leisurely bike tours around Britain,
accompanied by Robbie, the Harley was the consummate choice.
This was not, at the time, how it seemed to us. To my brother
and me, our father appeared to have taken one more step into a
macho world of big machines, black leather, tough talk and loud
boasts, a world into which we were unable to follow him. I myself,
after my father once kidnapped my six-year-old son, sweeping him
off to 'do the ton' on a busy local road, had resolved to have
nothing further to do with bikes; my brother, having nearly lost his
life in a biking accident, had better reason still for staying away
from all such machines.
Love made my father protective of his friend: suspecting that his
grander cousins and acquaintances would take a dim view of
Robbie's role in the House, he took care to keep them at a
distance. The Visitors' Book at the House had once been thick
with names; by 1987, with rare exceptions, it displayed only one,
awkwardly traced, over and over, week in, week out. On the
infrequent occasions when country neighbours came to meals,
Robbie stayed at the back of the House. Occasionally, for a laugh,
and because he liked to have his friend close to him, my father
coaxed him to come through to the dining room where, while
pouring wine or gathering up the plates, Robbie took stock of the
visitors. Later, he'd comment on their appearance and entertain my
father with his candid views, fondly passed on in due course to my
brother and myself. (No opportunity was ever missed for showing
off Robbie's remarkable powers of perception.)
Robbie, while we kept our distance, was feeling increasingly at

home in the House. To him, as to us all, it offered an enchanted
haven. The villagers, taking their cue from my mother's smiling
face, kept any doubts to themselves and offered Robbie a warm
welcome when he and my parents joined in the local galas, fetes
and feast days. In the gardens, on hot summer days, the two men
hacked down laurels and scythed away undergrowth before settling
down to a beer and sandwich lunch on the grass. Riding the bike
around the county, they scoured antique markets and charity shops
for bargains; irreproachably elegant in London, my father now
competed with his friend for scruffiness in his country clothing,
boasting of the excellent cut and comfort of a tattered and ill
fitting pair of moleskin trousers that Robbie had spotted on a
secondhand stall. For supper, my mother remembers, the two
of them liked nothing better than beans on toast before they
went upstairs to my father's dressing room in the oldest and most
remote corner of the House, to prepare for a long night ahead,
on the road.
Enthusiasm for fast bikes, late night fry-ups at motorway diners,
and a bit of slang had not reduced my father's acute sense of his
place in the wrorld. Visiting London, he continued to dine at his
club, to visit his barber, to purchase hair lotion in Jermyn Street,
and to study, at leisure, the Daily Telegraph, for confirmation that
the civilised world was in decline. (At Thrumpton, he preferred to
read, with Robbie, the jaunty and more downmarket Sun.) It gave
him continuing joy that an earl's elderly daughter consented to chat
to him twice a week on the telephone. He flinched as if pierced
when a stranger failed to rhyme his surname with the capital of
Peru. He cringed when I mentioned that I had forgotten, while
posting off a letter, that a duchess's name should properly be
preceded on the envelope by the words: 'Her Grace'.
By 1988, however, Robbie's ascendancy was almost complete,
and the worlds that my father had striven to keep separate were
beginning to collide. To us, his children, it seemed as though Robbie's

transformation into Tigger, the stripy little tiger who thinks he can
do everything better than anybody else, had encouraged a new and
irritating confidence. The bike rides now often included visits to
castles, cathedrals and stately homes; seeing them in the company
of a man who sounded eminently authoritative, Robbie picked up
fragments and then produced them, garbled, as his own opinions.
'Tigger's got very good instincts,' my father wrote to me, after
proudly reporting Robbie's reaction to the gargoyles of Notre
Dame. All I could think was that my mother, rather than Robbie,
ought to be holidaying with her husband in Paris. Burning with
self-righteousness, I urged her to stand up for her rights. When had she last been taken on a holiday? Did she know -- I'd been shocked
by this information -- that there were plans afoot for a visit with
Robbie to Venice? Didn't she care?
For a moment, I seemed to detect a slight chink in the armour.
I didn't know, then, that my mother had been suggesting that she
and my father should take a holiday in Venice, their first European
jaunt, as a couple, in twenty years. Neither did she feel the need
to tell me. Instead, shaking her head, she told me to stop making
trouble. Everything was all right. She had no complaints, none at
all. In fact, the kindest thing her children could do, she said in a
voice taut with repressed emotion, was to keep their mouths shut
and their opinions to themselves. All she had ever asked of us was
our discretion.
'Be quiet,' she said fiercely, when I returned to the attack. 'Please.
Just -- be quiet.'
Silence was beyond me. I found it easier to stay away from
Thrumpton, and to put all the contending forces and inhabitants
of the House entirely out of my mind.

It was, as I realised later, easier for me to do this than it was for my
brother. I, although I loved the House, had accustomed myself to
the knowledge that it would never be mine. As my father's
daughter, I had escaped the weight of future obligation. I had no
need to fret about my father's determination to hold on to the
House until his death (as one of an unusually long-lived family, he
expected to survive into his nineties). I sympathised with my brother's
fears that his inheritance, when it came, would be swallowed up
by death duties; but these were not my concerns.
In 1989, I married a man whose relative youth -- he was several
years my junior -- and friendly manner won my father's heart.
Looking with hungry eyes for anybody in the family who would
treat Robbie with more than frozen courtesy, he saw two potential
allies, my husband and my affectionate, easygoing son, a boy of
sixteen. This consoled him a little, I imagine, for the fact that my
brother and I, while outwardly civil, remained hostile to Robbie,
an intruder for whom our mother appeared to be meekly
sacrificing her rights as a wife.
It was at about this time that, with money running low, my father,
while taking no risk himself, encouraged my mother and his son into
a plan to replenish the coffers at no expense. He was not alone in
thinking that Lloyd's Insurance would solve the problem; or in being
sucked under by the claims that almost immediately began to flood
in from companies whose employees had suffered from the use of
asbestos. Lloyd's, as my family were now painfully taught, had not
been joking when they asked, in return for a handsome annual
yield, to have the promise of unlimited security. This meant, in
plain language, that they would take everything, the House
included, to recoup the required amount.
My mother was wiped out; my brother became temporarily
vulnerable. It was at this point that my father decided to change his
will. I might not have much money, but I was not threatened by
Lloyd's. I, at the stroke of a pen, became his heir; my clever, hardworking,
conscientious brother, who had endured the brunt of my
father's demands and expectations for half his life, was casually
informed, as he was stepping on to a train, of the altered plan.
These were the facts; nevertheless, I couldn't help wondering if
my father's talent for mischief-making had also influenced this
transformation in his children's lives. My brother and I had always
been close; our shared resentment of Robbie strengthened the
bond. Was it possible, I wondered, that our father hoped by this
radical action to drive us apart? If so, he was to be disappointed.
My brother, conscious that I loved the House as passionately
as he, told me that it was only fair that each of us should have
our turn. Our affection for each other, although tested, remained
undiminished.
I had not suspected, until I became my father's heir, how much
this would increase my passionate aversion to Robbie. Neither had
I realised how meticulously my father was planning for his friend's
future. I, as a woman, was judged to be a softer touch than my
brother, and, in my imagined gratitude, more susceptible to the
request he now made.
My father still had no intention of yielding control of his estate;
having risked nothing of his own with Lloyd's, he had no reason
to do so. The full horrors imposed by inheritance and capital gains
tax would be avoided, he explained, by the fact that the House
would pass, for a restricted period, through my mother's hands.
And what if she died before him? His answer -- that this was most
unlikely - didn't do much to reassure me.
This discussion took place one summer afternoon in 1992 as he
left Robbie to fish in the lake while he tutored me in the daily
running of the estate. We strolled along the hilltop, backs tactfully
turned to the looming chimney of the station. Smiling, my father
pointed down to the lake where Robbie crouched in the rushes
beside his rod. Invited to comment on his evident state of
contentment, I prepared to speak my mind.
'Don't you think it's time that Robbie got on with his own life?'
'Away from here? When you can see how he loves it? I've always
thought', my father murmured, his hand resting like a pincer on
my arm, 'that it was one of the great privileges of owning a beautiful
House like this, that one can offer it to people less fortunate than
ourselves. Agreed?'
'Within limits,' I said. 'Not all the time.'
Sighing, my father released his grasp. 'To be honest, I don't
know what would happen to him now if he lost this.'
'He could be with Delia in London,' I said. 'She is his wife, isn't
she?' I glanced at him. 'I'm not going to promise to share the
House with Robbie, if that's what you mean. I won't.
'Darling, we're not talking about next year,' my father said. 'I'm
not gone yet, however eagerly you might wish it.' He paused again,
softened his voice. All he was asking, and surely it wasn't such a
burden to add to my inheritance, was that I should never attempt
to banish his friend from the House. Robbie, like some unloved
heirloom, was to be a permanent fixture.
I don't know whether it says more about my father's force of
personality or my own weakness of character that I had, by the
time we walked down the hillside, given up and given in.
Beaming, my father gave the good news to his friend; Robbie,
stretching his hand towards me and offering a cheery grin, said he
expected that we'd rub along pretty well as co-habitants, so long
as I learned to take my orders.

Christmas 1993 was approaching. Christmas was still one of the
few occasions that had remained sacrosanct to the family. This year,
however, my brother, lovingly married and with a young family of his own, sent apologies; my father promptly announced that he
would be asking Robbie to come and fill the gap. Delia, although
still formally married, was in the process of seeking a separation;
the poor chap couldn't be expected to spend the holiday season on
his own.
'He's been with you all this month,' I said. 'Hasn't he got any
other friends he might want to see? There must be someone.'

'You do sound desperate to be rid of him,' my father said. 'Poor
Robbie. And he's always so full of inquiries about you, and how
you're doing. It'd thrill him to think you actually wanted him here,
you know. It's so little to ask.'
Telephones are a useful medium for communicating silence as
displeasure. I waited.
'You do remember that Robbie's father killed himself at
Christmas,' my father said in a voice of hushed reproach for my
insensitivity 'It's a sad, sad time for him to be alone. But if that's
what you want, of course, I'll tell him. I'll say you couldn't bear to
spend even two of your precious days showing a little kindness that
wouldn't have cost you anything to offer . . .'
The technique was too familiar to be wholly effective, but a
compromise was negotiated. I would bring my family for
Christmas Eve and stay on for two days; Robbie, after spending
most of December at the House, would depart, returning there on
Boxing Day to remain through January. Our stays would overlap,
but only for only two meals. Honour, on both sides, had been
satisfied.
My father liked to map things out in advance; these plans were
hatched and resolved in October. At the end of that month, he
invited himself to supper at my home in London. This in itself was
unusual. So was the fact that the meal was consumed 'without
protest. No objection was made to a souffle that had sunk, or even
to the shocking absence of new potatoes to accompany the
poached salmon: my father took second helpings of everything,
praised my appearance and spoke kindly of the wine my husband
had bought for the occasion.
'Although a Gewurztraminer might have been even more
delicious,' he said, lounging elegantly back in his chair as he
mentioned the wine I most detested. 'You like German wines,
don't you, darling?'
I don't and was about to say so, when my father cut across me.
His smile, I noticed, had become tight-lipped, a sure sign that he
was feeling uneasy.
'Speaking of that,' he said rapidly, 'I've been laying down some
rather good Alsatian wines at the House.' My father examined the
well-buffed tips of his nails. 'For Robbie.'
'How thoughtful,' I said. 'I thought he preferred beer.'
'I can hear that note in your voice,' he said softly. 'Do try not
to be quite so unpleasant. He's so fond of you.'
I turned my back. 'I'll get the coffee.'
The subject had been delayed, but not dismissed.
'The thing is,' my father sighed as he set down his cup, 'that
Robbie's a bit short of money at present. He's frightfully proud.
No point in my trying to give him anything. But if you were to
buy some wine from him, at a good price . . .'
Then and now, the scheme seemed baffling in its convolutions.
I was to pay my father twelve pounds a bottle, for a case of wine
that I didn't want. This would apparently show Robbie that I
entertained friendly feelings towards him, while allowing his pride
to remain intact. Wearily, I offered to write a cheque to Robbie on
the spot; my father shook his head. Robbie and Delia shared a
bank account; better by far if I made out a cheque to George
Seymour and let him complete the transaction, in cash.
Too tired to argue, I did as he asked. Rosy with satisfaction, my
father pocketed the cheque, kissed my cheek, shook my husband's
hand, mounted his bike and shot away down the street.
I made no effort to collect the wine. Having listened to my father's
explanation, I assumed that he had immediately banked the cheque
and given the cash, so badly needed, to his friend. Robbie, I
supposed, had been told of my love of Gewurztraminer and my
eagerness to help him by purchasing it. As always, I was astonished at
the lengths to which my father was willing to go, for Robbie's sake.
On this occasion, however, he did not go far enough. He did
not hand the money over to poor, desperate Robbie; instead,
savouring the pleasure of his own solicitude, he put seven twenty
pound notes into an envelope, and laid it, inscribed to Tigger from
Christopher Robin, to one side. I gather that he planned to bestow
this handsome surprise just before I arrived for Christmas; Robbie
would, so he fondly fancied, thus be persuaded of my friendly
feelings and feel less mournful at being dismissed from the House
on Christmas Eve. He told me this afterwards, blaming himself for
his folly. But by then, it was too late.
At the beginning of December, just as my father and he had
planned, Robbie arrived at the House. As usual, the two of them
went out on the bike each night after dinner. Dire weather never
kept them from making these expeditions; the diaries show that
they rode, through heavy fog and rain, to Folkestone, to Cardiff,
and to Lyme Regis. Robbie was unusually subdued; my father's
references to the unstoppable cheeriness of Tiggers failed to elicit
the usual grin. Apparently, he complained on several occasions of
a headache, and, a further curious symptom that was giving him
trouble, of a dizzying blackness behind his eyes.
It's possible that he was anxious about his state of dependence
on my father. It's certain that he was worried about money.
Problems with Delia can't have helped; neither can the knowledge
that he was approaching the age at which his father had killed
himself. The mention of headaches and dizziness also suggest that
Robbie may have suffered from severe mental depression, and
that this condition was worsening. Later, all these possibilities were
subjected to intense and painful speculation.
My mother's memory, although clear on all the preceding stages
of the relationship, wavers at this point. The details that follow are
based on her recollections, combined with those provided by my
father to me, at three in the morning, on 12 December.
On the afternoon of the preceding day, Robbie went alone to
the cupboard where the shotguns were kept, at the back of the
House. He put one of the guns into the boot of the beaten-up old
car that had been bought for him sometime earlier; he then went
to find my father, and to let him know that he had decided to go
back to London early. He offered no reason, and made no apology.
My father hated his plans to be upset; he had been looking forward
to a further two weeks of biking, and of Robbie's company. There
was a scene.
Petulance, I imagine, prevented my father from going up to his
room to fetch the cash-filled envelope, inscribed to Tigger. He
may have wished to punish him; he may, in his distress, have let
the envelope go out of his mind. It isn't known. No third party
was present at the conversation that took place between them,
before Robbie climbed into his car and drove away. My mother
remembers that she heard them quarrelling; she was unaware until
the end of the day that Robbie had left the House.
Towards ten o'clock that evening, when my parents sat watching
the news, my father became intensely anxious. He telephoned
Robbie's flat; Delia answered. She confirmed that her husband had
arrived safely and added that he was in a funny mood. My father
asked her to bring him to the phone; Robbie, apparently, said he
wasn't talking. Delia, now sounding anxious, said she'd only meant
to drop in to pick up a coat, but that Robbie seemed so low that
she had decided to stay She'd seen him in bad spirits before, but
never like this.
At two in the morning, my father was woken by a ringing
phone. It was Delia once more, and she had bad news. Shortly after
midnight, while she was sleeping, Robbie had gone into the kitchen,
shut the door, and written a brief note to say that he couldn't
see any other way out. Then he had sat down at the table,
stuck the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth and blown his head
off. The police had just left. The mess was terrible.
An hour later, my own phone rang. At first, I couldn't recognise
my father's voice or understand the news that was delivered, between
gasps, in hoarse cries, like those of a tortured animal. I heard the

word: 'Dead'; after that, nothing but deep, protracted sobs. Robbie
was dead? Silenced by shock, I stared at the ghost of myself that
wavered in the mirror opposite the bed. This was, in a sense, all
I had wished for; I had never expected my wish to be granted in
such a fashion. 'I'm sorry; I'm so sorry' I heard a voice whisper out
of the receiver. I'm not sure whether it was from shock or pity that
I began to tremble as I realised that, for the first time - it was not
to be the last -- my father was apologising to me. My poor father:
he was apologising for his tears.

Ten years earlier, my father had made the arrangements for
Robbie's wedding to Delia. She, gone all to pieces, showed no will
to fight him now, when he offered to organise and pay for the
funeral. Delia was not especially fond of my father -- he had, after
all, been her rival - but she had neither the heart nor the funds to
sort things out herself. She may even have understood how much
this last ceremony would mean to him.
It was a cold day, but fine. The service at the South London
crematorium was scantily attended; behind us, the long brown
ranks of pews stood empty. I hadn't, until now, understood how
isolated Robbie had been, how entirely dependent he had been
upon my father's friendship.
'All rise,' said the vicar. Heads bent, we stood, Delia in a tight
purple dress with a hatband that almost matched, my mother
in a dark green tweed suit that didn't quite acknowledge the
gravity of the occasion. I, my husband, and my son had, after
consultation, gone to the opposite extreme, showing up like a trio
of ravens; my father, eyes averted from the altar, stood a little apart from us, draped in a heavy black coat that weighed down
his shoulders.
'All kneel,' said the vicar. Dully I stared at the row of large
Victorian windows that overlooked the chapel's car-park, willing
myself to feel grief that Robbie was dead. The sense of relief was
stronger, to my shame. Delia was sobbing noisily; I couldn't
produce a single tear.
Beyond the windows, a group of teenage boys were shouting at
each other as they kicked a ball around the car park. Frowning at
the interruption, the vicar rose once more to offer words of
comfort to the bereaved. A small, exhausted-looking man who had
evidently given little attention to my father's descriptions of the
deceased, he spoke warmly of Ronnie's love of horses (my father
winced at this misconstruction of his account of Robbie's bike
riding); back on familiar territory, the vicar spoke with sonorous
authority of the enduring peace that Ronnie could now enjoy.
And now, he went on, by the special request of Ronnie's family, we
were to hear a piece of music that would remind us all of his love
of laughter, his innocent sense of fun. (My father, sobbing, buried
his head in his hands as the red curtains drew apart and the casket -- it looked disconcertingly small - began, with a dignified hiss of
moving steel, to be received.)
I should have guessed what was coming from the portable
gramophone I had seen my father carrying into the chapel;
unprepared for what we were about to hear, I shrank from the
sudden crackle of vinyl as if it had been a gunshot. The turntable
continued to spin, the record to emit a loud and tuneless crackle;
nobody budged. My father was on his knees, white knuckles
squeezed against his eyes as though he meant to gouge them out.
My son, who loved him, slid along the pew to wrap a warm arm
around his grandfather's hunched back. The coffin continued to
move gradually away from us. And then, into the gloom, there
burst the sound of a relentlessly jolly children's song:

The most wonderful thing about Tiggers
Is Tiggers are wonderful things! . . .
wonderful things!. . . wonderful things!. . .

The needle, clicking gently stayed trapped in the groove. Grim
faced, the vicar leaned forward to pull the lever up. Now, all that
could be heard were the stifled cries from behind my father's
clenched fists.

Afterwards, gathered together in the gloom of Robbie's basement
flat, we made polite conversation to Delia and a woman friend of
hers who had come along to help pour out cups of tea. My
mother's face was stony as she sipped the cup and declined Delia's
offer of a room in which to freshen up. I, shaken by the bleakness
of Robbie's London home, tried not to wonder which of the walls,
covered by a cream woodchip paper, had been spattered, and how
difficult blood might be to remove. I couldn't see any stains. I
watched my father as he circled the room, holding out a plate of
elegantly cut sandwiches - he had prepared them himself- that
nobody wanted to eat. Now that he had taken off his winter coat,
I saw his age revealed, in a body that appeared thin as paper, and
in the tremor of that tentative, gracefully extended hand. Even
death couldn't make me feel fond of Robbie, the usurper to whom
I had been expected to offer a home for life. But no daughter
could take pleasure in the sight of a parent who was so evidently
suffering from a broken heart. I saw that he was willing himself to
stay in control, struggling to mask the extremity of his grief. I felt,
like a stab of pain, something for him at that moment that was
close to love.

My father drew some comfort, I think, from designing the
handsome stone tablet on which, with no sense of parody, Tigger
was recorded as the beloved friend of Christopher Robin, and of
Owl. He knew the memorial could not be placed where it would
invite ridicule; he chose a secluded portion of the courtyard at the
back of the House, making of it a kind of shrine where, so I heard
later, he would sit for hours at a time, his face turned towards the
wall, his hands pressed to the side of his stomach in which, as it
came to seem, his grief lay stored. On other occasions, as I later
gathered, he would take a chair down to the bank of the lake,
placing it in the spot where Robbie had liked to fish and where,
on summer days, the two of them had spent long, languid hours
of perfect ease.
All roles at the House were now reversed. The paternal tyrant
had become a weeping and apologetic child. We sat in silence at
meals where my father, pushing his plate away, leaned forward,
rocking his head in his hands, attempting to shield from sight the
tears that never stopped falling. My brother and I, grim-faced, read
to each other the letters in which our father thanked us for the
affection we had shown to Robbie, and apologised for his own lack
of control. Even the sight of a despatch rider could make him cry,
he admitted; the knowledge of the money he had held back was
a source of relentless self-accusation.
'I wish I could overcome this misery' he wrote to me, but it
held him as if in a vice.
My father had always been superstitious. I found for him a
clairvoyant, who provided him some comfort when she told him
Robbie had spoken to her. It is an indication of the depth of his
love that he was willing to undertake, while suffering such
tormenting pain that it hurt him by then even to stand upright, a
daily round trip of a hundred miles in order to sit with this kindly
woman, and to receive her message of consolation. Robbie was
happy, she assured him, repeatedly; he was at peace.
My father would not go near a doctor until the physical pain,
indistinguishable by now from the trauma of his grief, had grown
too strong to be withstood without management. He asked for,
and got, morphine, enough to keep him biking, week after
haunted week, up and down the motorway. The purpose, I
imagine, was to receive further comforting messages about, or
from, his lost friend. Drugs helped, but couldn't sustain him. Too
weak to fight the family's pleas for a diagnosis and proper
investigation, he allowed himself to surrender. After two desolate
nights at the local city hospital, we were advised to take him home.
Cancer, five months after Robbie's death, had invaded and spread
to my father's pancreas. He hadn't, the doctor said, more than a few
days left.
We took him back to the House. He wouldn't let us help him
up the stairs until one last call had been put through to the
clairvoyant. The last words I heard him speak, to be conveyed
through her, were a message to Robbie. She wouldn't take a penny
in payment when I asked, later, what she was owed.
'He was such a gentleman,' she said. 'And so sad.'
'No,' my mother rebukes me gently. 'That's wrong. You've
forgotten the staircase.'
She's right. I've somehow blotted out the memory of my father's
last words. Stoked up on morphine, he had fought to throw us off,
as we led him to his bedroom. We saw before us a silent staircase,
cushioned with soft red carpet. His eyes saw flames, a blazing fire
rising above us to engulf what he had given his life to save: the
House. The old terror, the one put into his mind as a child by the
story of Nuthall Temple, became once more real enough to cause
him to shriek out, like a soul in torment.
I've never been able to uncover precisely what my mother had
endured in those five months after Robbie's death. She tells me
now that one of the hardest things to bear was her husband's
insistence that my brother and I had truly loved his friend, as she
had not. It was this last piece of wilful self-deception that
eventually proved intolerable. Once again, I started from sleep to
hear a telephone ringing in the darkness; once again, I heard my
father's broken tones.
'She's saying terrible things,' he said. 'Tell me they're not true.
She says you hated Robbie, you and your brother. It's not true, is
it? Tell me it's not true.'
'And you lied,' my mother says flatly and I look away.
'What else could I do?'
'You could have supported me,' she says. 'You could have told
the truth. As if he hadn't known it already'
There was no contact between them at the end. My mother,
during the last week of her husband's life, closeted herself away in
the small, undistinguished bedroom that had always been used -- while in their single state -- by the men of the House: my father,
her son, and mine. She didn't come to the room in which my
father lay dying. He didn't ask for her.
My brother and I sat by his bed throughout the slow, glittering
May days that bleached the walls with light. We read to him, as he
had read to us when we were children, the comic scenes from The
Pickwick Papers. He gave no sign of hearing our voices. His hands
lay open upon the sheets, palms upturned, as if waiting for
something to be placed within them.
We discerned at last what it was that his hands so wanted to
hold: a photograph of Robbie, at nineteen, standing beside the
Duke and smiling cheerily. My father's fingers closed around the
frame, clasping it tight. We thought we saw him smile.
'Somebody he was fond of?' enquired the nurse who'd come
out to help us. We nodded. Explanations, adequate ones, didn't
seem in order, not even possible.
Death came crawling. We could hear the tick of time slow
down, to the point when every movement on the bed became
frustrating. And then -- suddenly -- he'd gone, and all around us, the
air grew light and easy. Running across the wet lawn with bare
feet, scything down branches until I stood knee deep in blossom,
I hurled shouts at the red-brick walls and arching gables until they
echoed back at me: Free! Free!
I didn't, at the time, understand that we'd simply passed from
one phase of possession to another. My father had gone, but only
from the daylight. Never from the House.

EPILOGUE

Twelve years on, my father's spirit is present as ever, but the sense
of anguish has receded. Walking through the fields, reading on the
bank by the lake, playing the piano as he liked to hear me do, I'm
conscious of the passion with which he cherished all this beauty
and that, increasingly, I've taken on his cause as my own. I worry
as he did, over the death of one of the grand old trees in the park,
and the change its absence will create; I glow as he did, when friends,
making their first visit, sigh with pleasure to find such an oasis. Like
him, I'd sacrifice almost anything for the sake of keeping all this
in place, as it was; and as, however precariously, it has remained.
They're putting up a vast marquee on the terrace above the lake
this weekend; the bride is planning where to stand and greet her
guests; the caterers are laying name cards on the tables; the florist
has just put the final touches to a column of lilies and roses. Up in
my room, above the marquee roof, I can look across the white
canopy to where two swans are conducting their file of cygnets
across the lake, orderly as the wedding processions to which, looking
regal and faintly bored, they lend a conscious air of dignity.
Beyond them, I can see the drooping branches of the old willow tree under which Robbie and my father used to sit, reading stories
of Christopher Robin and watching the water for the slick of
light on a carp's back, out beyond their lines. I can see myself there,
sitting on Slav's shoulders as he waded out into the lake; I can see
my brother, the oars of his boat sending ripples out towards where
my mother stands on the bank, scattering bread for the ducks from
the basket balanced between the swell of her hip and the crook of
her arm.
It's an image of impossible serenity. Making it, I realise the clanger
of becoming too close a replica of my father, whose unappeasable
wish it was to control not only the House and its setting, but the
lives of those who lived there.
Following in my father's footsteps, I'll try to walk with a lighter
tread -- and no longer, now, to look back.

The End.