A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  The season kicked off as usual with Queen Charlotte’s Ball at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, an occasion that originated in 1780 as George III’s celebration of his wife’s birthday, attended by the Queen’s virginal ladies-in-waiting, wearing white to demonstrate their virtue. The hundred or so snowy-gowned, sporadically virginal debs of 1972 had been coached by Madame Vacani, ballet teacher to royalty, on how to make a long, slow simultaneous curtsy to the battered old symbolic cardboard birthday cake, the same one that was familiar to my mother. It was brought into the Grosvenor House ballroom on a trolley draped in a faintly grubby white petticoat and pulled by the six prettiest debs. I was not chosen as one of those involved in the cake transportation. The Debutante Dress Show was the next social engagement, held in the bubble-gum-pink ballroom of the Berkeley Hotel. I was not chosen as a model.

  For tutorials I wore denim pinafore dresses and jeans from the Etam shop nearest to Artillery Row, or a favourite pair of yellow bell-bottoms from Top Shop that were covered in Beatrix Potter figures. After afternoons at home immersed in writing A-level essays, I spent the evenings at the deb dances choked in imitation pearls and rotating the six lacy, flouncy, flowery long dresses that Philippa had chosen for me. I was a disappointment to her, my physical appearance not up to scratch, the huge, intrusive Sackville nose that had troubled Victoria in Vita’s wedding photographs re-emerging to ruin yet another daughter’s profile. My front teeth were too large. They looked like tombstones. If I could have seen myself from behind I would have stopped wearing trousers. The habit for criticism that Victoria had directed against her daughter’s appearance was inherited by Nigel and adopted by Philippa. She tried to improve the situation. In order to give me the best start in life, she announced that either she could throw me a big party at a grand London hotel with all the eligible young men she could muster, or, in order to make myself more desirable, she could pay for me to have a discreet Harley Street nose reduction followed by a small dinner at which to show off the new nose. I chose the party.

  Secretly I began to feel that life was working out well. I had fallen in love. And I was prepared to take the next step towards liberation. What girl can feel that she has truly gained her independence before she has discovered sex? I went to the family GP to ask for the Pill. From behind his mahogany desk and looking at me over the half-moon of his bifocals, he regretted that as I was still too young to vote, he would have to inform my mother of my request. Somehow I persuaded him to keep the transaction between us, as my emancipatory birthday was only a few months away. Not long after my visit to the doctor, we went for a day trip to the races in France with my stepfather, travelling in his private plane. While our bags were checked on a random search at the airport, my contraceptives, cunningly packaged as a powder compact in order to preserve discretion, were placed on the customs desk for examination next to a Tampax. I grabbed both objects, feeling as embarrassed by the tampons as I was incriminated by the contraceptives. I had not moved quickly enough to prevent my short-sighted stepfather from enquiring whether I had started smoking cigars. I swiftly though truthfully replied that I had. But Philippa had sharper eyesight. She knew I was slipping beyond her control.

  She cheered up when she heard I was going to a ball at Blenheim (nose intact) before she realised my attendance would be contingent on being the unpaid assistant to London’s most in-demand travelling disc jockey. I would be eating in the downstairs kitchen with the resident chef rather than upstairs in the ducal ballroom, and lugging electric cables past the family portraits instead of waltzing beneath them in the arms of the heir. But she was even more taken aback to discover that the DJ had become my first proper boyfriend. I had met him at the discotheque company’s promotional party at the beginning of the deb season. He was wearing a pair of Mr Freedom cream velvet dungarees covered in black stars over a scarlet T-shirt. He was irresistible. His parents were unknown to Philippa. He did not have a title, a stately home or a job in the City. With the looks of a young Byron, the dark romantic eyes of Heathcliff, the glamour of Charles II, the enigmatic charm of Jay Gatsby and an ambitious and clever mind, James Macmillan-Scott was the coolest man in London. When he was not DJing, he was a part-time house painter and moonlighting in an upmarket grocer in Knightsbridge. He was so handsome that people used to make excuses to go stare at him, pressing their faces against the shop window. I could not understand what he was doing with me and my big nose. He wore ruffly lace shirts, a creamy silk scarf with a fringe and a long leather thong round his neck from which he hung a jangling bunch of keys. He shared a pair of red setter twins called Elvis and Jethro with his flatmate Ian, a photographer. He drove a Fiat Cinquecento, in which he raced round Hyde Park Corner on two wheels, and I was mad about him.

  In the summer of 1972 I passed my English literature A level with a good grade, and to both my parents’ and my own surprise, Westminster Tutors recommended that I sit the Oxbridge entrance exam that autumn. If I was offered a place, I would join the university the following year. We all knew that my chances were slim. The competition was intense, especially for a place to read English. My mother did all she could to discourage such ill-advised folly. Maybe she truly believed that I would be hurt by the probable rejection. More likely I think she was jealous, and also a little fearful, emphasising to me that the route to adult success did not lie in a musty library rather than admitting her dread that academic opportunity might widen further the gulf between us.

  She wrote to Nigel suggesting an alternative plan. ‘Juliet is not exactly university material,’ she said, and wondered if a nice establishment in Switzerland or France or maybe a course in the history of art in Florence might fit my nonacademic inclinations better. In some ways she was a generational casualty of the incremental progress of female emancipation, a woman confused, no longer able to apply the rules and restrictions of her own upbringing to her daughter. Resentful, perhaps, that she had been offered so little encouragement by her own parents to follow any sort of intellectual or professional career, she did all she could to put a stop to mine. I knew that if she had her way, I would be on track to follow her into an educational vacuum, the prospect of finishing schools threatening to finish me off. But I was lucky. My father had more confidence in me. With his encouragement I returned to Westminster Tutors, filled in the forms and continued to balance my academic, social and love lives. At the end of that final term I sat the Oxbridge exam, and in early December I heard that I had passed the written round and had been invited by St Hugh’s College, Oxford, to come up for an interview.

  The night before the interview I had been to an ankle-twisting dance on a skating rink, and I limped onto the train to Oxford from Paddington still wearing my ice-skimming, red tartan pinafore dress. One hundred and twenty-four interviewees were competing for twelve places. Two weeks later and three days before Christmas, I arrived home blown dry and buffed up from my mother’s hairdresser on the day of my own debutante party, for which a special chocolate pudding, ‘Bombe Surprise pour Juliette’, had been created by the head pastry chef at the Dorchester Hotel. A telegram addressed to me was sitting on the coconut doormat.

  Vacancy offered you Michaelmas Term 1973 Please Reply by Return. English Literature faculty St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

  I put the telegram in my pocket and went to the party.

  I did not mention the St Hugh’s telegram to anyone. I knew what my mother would want me to do. But my father’s opinion would be difficult to argue against. James had been offered a job running the discotheque at the Tehran Hilton. He had asked me to go with him and I had agreed. I wanted to be with him all the time. Three days after the party I telephoned my father from my stepfather’s house in Hampshire (where the first edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King with Gustave Doré illustrations sat between the latest editions of Country Life and The Field on a table in a room where the walls were lined with the spines of cut-off books, a library in illusion in an otherwise book-free house). ‘Happy Christmas,’
I said, asking about his own lunch with the neighbours, wanting the details, all the trimmings. ‘Oh, and by the way, I got into Oxford,’ I said ‘But I’m not going.’

  I heard the smash as my father dropped the remaining unbroken coffee cup from a favourite pair given to my parents as a wedding present. I explained that I would be turning down the place to read English at Oxford in favour of working at the Tehran nightclub with the man I loved. My father said he would write to me, and the following day a costly hand-delivered letter arrived, cleverly outlining the advantages and then the disadvantages of both options. In conclusion he pointed out that as fascinating as the interior of a Persian nightclub might sound, it would probably not differ much from the interior of any similar establishments in Berkeley Square. Whereas Oxford … the legacy would be lifelong, he said. The sight of the word on a jar of marmalade had never failed to thrill my grandfather. My father continued to dream about punting and of a Brideshead world. James could visit. I would make new friends. I would be living in one of the most beautiful cities on earth. I would never regret it. And he was right. For me, those three years at Oxford, concluding with finals week spent in my hero T. S. Eliot’s rooms at Merton College, have backlit the rest of my life in a way that the dark basement of the Tehran Hilton never could have done, even for a moment.

  My mother had little choice other than to accept my decision, and although I do not remember any expression of her pride, or even approval, I do remember my stepfather’s sceptical comments about ‘joining a bunch of hairy lefties’. Philippa had one last attempt up her sleeve to hold on to me, to ‘finish’ me. She put the Channel between me and James and sent me on a smart cooking course in Paris, where I lodged with an impoverished count and countess who let out rooms to nice British girls. I spent weekdays heaving with nausea as I failed to skin a rabbit or dice a pair of lamb’s kidneys, evenings in Maxim’s wine cellar learning to taste the difference between a Lafitte and a Latour, and weekends attempting to arrange flowers in a vase suitable for a ducal ballroom. Every third Friday, unknown to my mother, I would take the coach from outside the central bus station at Les Invalides to Calais, a ferry to Dover and a coach to Victoria, where James would meet me. I would return to Paris on Sunday.

  In October Nigel drove me to St Hugh’s College in St Margaret’s Road in north Oxford. As a surprise, he had brought with him in the boot of the Vanden Plas two framed prints of his own favourite paintings, Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews and Turner’s Fighting Temeraire. Together we hung them above my bed as the autumn sun glinted on the leaves that fell from the sycamore trees outside my window.

  Oxford was not very Brideshead at first sight. The long, brightly lit corridors were school-reminiscent. Watery footprints darkened the cork floor that linked the shared bathroom down the corridor to the rooms. No male visitors were allowed in the college after 10 p.m. Dinner was little better than the meal that Virginia Woolf had described at Girton almost half a century earlier when the pattern on the bowl beneath the watery soup was clearly visible. Glasses did not ‘flush’ yellow and red as she had observed them do at men’s colleges. But despite the water we drank and the institutional smell of the college corridors, I was at Oxford. I had a room of my own and a reader’s pass to the Bodleian, after declaring to the librarian that I would not ‘bring into the library or kindle therein any fire or flame’. James was my most constant visitor, followed by my delighted father. Not only was his daughter at Oxford, the first woman of the family to follow in the Nicolson male tradition, but Nigel was able to indulge himself in a three-year-long nostalgia for his youth. He took me to tea in the Randolph Hotel, round the corner from his old lodgings in Beaumont Street, and opened an account in my name at Blackwell’s, where he set up a generous termly credit for new books. I went to lectures given by Dame Helen Gardner, who was rumoured to have been in love with T. S. Eliot, and by Richard Ellmann on James Joyce. Ann Wordsworth gave her tutorials in a shed off the Crick Road. We sat on stools. Rings from the bottom of leaky bottles stained the carpet, and a half-empty bottle of Burgundy was propped against a bookcase, the wine as dark as Mrs Wordsworth’s red velvet jacket. We rolled our own. Sometimes we could not see her face through the gloom. We talked of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Keats and everything else that mattered, the soft encompassing darkness causing us to blink hard when we emerged into the harsh light of day.

  * * *

  I had made a new friend who had not been scrutinised for approval by either parent. Belinda Harley was my tutorial partner. With her shiny, fashionable Purdey haircut, she was Oxford’s Zuleika of the 1970s, a standout undergraduate in a college with a strong rowing community and a dining room that served chewy stews, strength-building spinach and quite a lot of beer. Belinda had vodka in her room and pâté. I had sherry. I floated about wearing frocks. Belinda strode down the High wearing black trousers and a skintight denim jacket with little beneath. The jacket had a zip sewn on a bias from shoulder to hip and she would move the zip up or down depending on her mood. I had never met anyone like her. We were inseparable. Belinda knew Francis Warner, the poet and English don at St Peter’s College. Francis knew Samuel Beckett and Richard Burton, and Francis helped us launch a literary society, encouraging us to invite our writing heroes to come and speak. They came. My father kicked us off with ‘How much should a biographer tell?’ and then the playwright Peter Nichols came, followed by the aristocratic biographer and historian Lord David Cecil, the American theatre director Charles Marowitz, and the artist and son of Bloomsbury Quentin Bell. The exquisite Irish novelist Edna O’Brien came and insisted the audience sit at her feet instead of in rows of chairs as she read aloud to us from her latest novel in the sexiest voice on earth. When the controversial critic F. R. Leavis agreed to be prised from Cambridge for the first time in thirty years, every member of the university’s English faculty joined the undergraduates to hear him, and even though we had moved the meeting into the biggest theatre we could find, it was standing room only as he began to speak. No one in the room could understand a word of what he said, but, delighting in the knowledge that they had actually been there, no one cared a jot.

  One day Francis invited Belinda and me to a tutorial at St Peter’s. Richard Burton, ‘the world’s Greatest Living Actor’, as I wrote later to my father, was waiting for us in Francis’s room wearing an academic gown. Burton’s love affair with Oxford had begun during the war, when he was briefly an undergraduate at Exeter College. Since then he had returned to the university as often as possible, had acted with the university’s dramatic society, OUDS, and had long wanted to establish with Francis an Oxford theatre devoted to putting on Shakespeare’s plays. Sitting beside him in an afghan coat, all hippy and ethnic, her thick black hair parted in the middle, was Elizabeth Taylor, whom Burton had just married for the second time. Her deep violet eyes danced with the audacity that comes after consuming most of a half bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I registered the convenience of the slim, flat sides of the bottle that slid neatly into a pocket. The awestruck male undergraduates sat on the floor. Belinda and I, as token girls, shifted self-consciously in the two spare chairs. As soon as Burton began the tutorial with Henry V’s magnificent entreaty to battle, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends’, his wife interrupted.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Richard. You can’t do the King properly with a fucking WELSH accent. Henry V was fucking ENGLISH for fuck’s sake. Hand it over. I’ll have to do it.’

  Reaching for the book with one hand, she took another glug with the other. But Burton would not hand the book over and there was a tussle and she walked out while he continued, apparently oblivious to her absence, that arousing, skin-tingling voice caressing us for the rest of the evening. My mother was thrilled by the story, which she considered almost as good as Princess Margaret paying me a personal visit. Burton was less starstruck by the experience. That night he wrote up an account of his day at Oxford in his diary.

  21 November 1975, Oxford. Cheap. Everything
very shabby. Clothes (my suit?) cars etc. Students unattractive. Beer warm. Depressing. Glad to get to bed.

  I was still officially living in my stepfather’s London house during the holidays, escaping across the park at night to James’s flat and returning early in the morning, letting myself in stealthily so that my absence should not be discovered. When I left Oxford, although James and I were in love and wanted to move into a place of our own, we did not have the guts to ‘live in sin’. Nigel intervened. One night at Sissinghurst after much whisky, James and I were turning over with Nigel the options about how I might afford to escape from living at my mother and stepfather’s when Nigel passed me a note in red biro. He had written, ‘Juliet and James get married.’ He was a man who liked neat endings, a parent following in the tradition of free dancing lessons negotiated by Catalina in exchange for her daughter’s hand, and the subtle housing contract his grandmother Victoria had made with Young Lionel that ensured her continuing occupation of Knole. Just as his great-grandfather Old Lionel had been satisfied with his daughter Victoria’s multi-purposed engagement to Young Lionel, Nigel was pleased about his own proposal to entrust my welfare to a good man who he knew I loved, solving a financial and accommodation problem and achieving a legal outcome all at the same time. But there was an element of selfishness about his matchmaking. By becoming instigator of the arrangement, he was keeping me under his wing. He was not prepared to entirely relinquish his daughter, confidante and hostess, and for a long time I thought that was a loving, even exemplary way to behave. If the arrangement suited Nigel, it also offered me everything I wanted at the time. In accepting the move designed by my father, I would have a husband I loved and an escape route from my mother, and I would make my father happy. Unlike the spirit of independence that motivated Pepita and Vita to loosen their parental ties after marriage, I was not only content but keen to maintain a post-nuptial closeness with my father. As he climbed the stairs to bed, I could hear his semi-silent whistle. I handed the note to James and we both burst into tears. The wedding took place the following year.