My History: A Memoir of Growing Up

by Antonia Fraser

This insertion of the self into the story is something I have come to disapprove of intensely in modern biographers, for example that authorised biographer of an American president, much younger than his subject, who chose to insert himself (fictitiously) into the narrative. Researching Marie Antoinette as I was at the time, I proclaimed my disapproval: I would not dream of inserting myself into the palace of Versailles, let alone the Petit Trianon, I observed sternly in a lecture on biography to the Historical Association. It is honesty which compels me to admit that this instinct, evidently deeply rooted in human nature, animated all my first encounters with History.

  Two children’s books I much admired carried forward this tradition. He Went With Marco Polo by Louise Andrews Kent was published in 1936 and He Went With Vasco da Gama two years later; when I was not busy attending on my little Scottish royal mistress, I spared time to join the boy hero on his dangerous, fascinating journeys with the great adventurers. Then there was Boys and Girls of History by Eileen and Rhoda Power, published in the Twenties; the boy actor Salathiel Pavey was an especial favourite, despite his sad fate: I could see myself acting at the Elizabethan Chapel Royal. Obviously this kind of primitive identification gives way—or should give way—to the orthodox enquiries of the biographer. Yet what starts as a child’s self-centred fantasy may be a natural route leading towards the key adult question: just what did it feel like to be Mary Queen of Scots?

  In my teens I was more preoccupied with Mary Queen of Scots the romantic heroine, inspired by Margaret Irwin’s The Gay Galliard. Some of the passages describing Bothwell’s rough—very rough—wooing I found excitingly erotic because they were discreetly done but you got the drift. After that, I moved on to an interest in her religion and finally to a sympathy for her sufferings as a woman in a man’s world. The fact is that very early on I had been seized by an ambition: I would write the story of Mary Queen of Scots. I kept my hand in by insisting on enacting the story when staying with my cousins Henrietta and Felicia at Coombe Bissett, the house on a stream near Salisbury where their father Henry Lamb painted. Here I moved on from the childhood larks of the Four Maries to the scene of the execution. My dramatic skill frequently brought tears to my eyes:

  “Pray for me, good gentlewomen…” I have a suspicion that the sympathetic tears of Henrietta and Felicia soon began to dissolve into giggles. I was not put off. She was my Mary Queen of Scots. It was my History. That was all that mattered.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BEFORE-THE-WAR

  There would come a time when the bells of Oxford would fall silent, with the coming of war. This meant that the portmanteau term “before-the-war” would take on a magic meaning. We would look back on a time of multitudinous ice creams, sunny holidays (it never rained before-the-war), grown-ups driving us freely about the country in petrol-rich cars without thinking about it. In short, those pre-war days of the many bells were very happy ones.

  Life at Singletree was punctuated by visits to Bernhurst in East Sussex, not far from Battle. This was the home of an ancient American lady known as Great Aunt Caroline; she had been married to my father’s great-uncle Sir Francis Pakenham, a diplomat who was born in 1832 and died in May 1905 just before my father was born. As a childless widow, Aunt Caroline looked round for an heir; when Mary Julia Longford gave birth to a second son (who would have no financial expectations) Aunt Caroline declared an interest: there would be a visit of inspection. She proceeded from Bernhurst to London, liked what she saw, and announced that she would make the baby her heir, provided that he was named after her late husband. (Sir Francis had been a seventh child out of eight, and as such had not received either of the traditional Pakenham names of Thomas, Edward or Michael.)

  As it happened, it was not a name my father ever used: he was Frank in every situation and on every document. Perhaps he resented the exclusion from the mainstream of Pakenham names, since he called his eldest son Thomas (like his father) and another son Michael. Whatever inspired it, this determination to avoid Francis meant that when the present Queen announced his enrolment in the Order of the Garter, in St. George’s Chapel in 1971, referring to “our well beloved Francis,” I thought she had got the wrong person.

  At all events, little Frank, christened Francis, was destined to inherit a pretty Queen Anne house with some useful later additions, as well as seventy-five acres of farmland. From my point of view Aunt Caroline, already not far off a hundred, was a very tiny, very old lady, possibly left over from some fairy story, not exactly a witch but not quite a human being either, with her wizened appearance. To me, the most fascinating thing about her was what would now be called her lifestyle. Aunt Caroline had a full-time companion, also American, known as Cousin Edie (this blessed woman would later send us care parcels from America during the height of rationing). She also had a butler, forever dressed so far as we were concerned in butler gear of white tie and tails, whatever the weather. And of course, before-the-war as in most childhood memories of the time, the weather was always hot.

  This meant that Tea-on-the-Lawn was an important moment in the butler’s life and indeed in ours. There was a large wooden summer house at the edge of the wide, neatly mown lawn which could overlook the rolling dips and hills of East Sussex down to the River Rother. It could also gaze backwards at the house, since a vital feature of the summer house was its huge rollers which enabled it to revolve, in theory following the sun. This was something Thomas and I found fascinating. Once the house was ours, we would have it spun round and round to our hearts’ content. Probably Aunt Caroline’s butler would turn it for us: we could not envisage the house without him.

  No such lèse-majesté occurred in the reign of Aunt Caroline herself. At teatime an enormously long black power cord was laid across the lawn to the summer house and a large electric kettle installed. The butler was quite portly as he bent at his task but nothing deflected him from it. The teapot was silver. There were minute sandwiches served on the most delicate china. After that, the scene became less gracious. Aunt Caroline, now in her late nineties, was confused by my appearance. With my short curly hair, cut at the insistence of my mother, she decided that I was a boy, in fact the boy who would one day inherit Bernhurst in succession to his father Francis. And she did not like what she saw. She might have approved of the baby Francis, but this restless squirming “boy” was another matter.

  “He fidgets, he fidgets,” she complained in a surprisingly strong voice, in which you could still trace an American accent. “Why does the boy fidget so much?”

  “Keep still, Antonia,” hissed my mother. “She thinks you’re Thomas.” It did not occur to me at the time that in a modern reversal of a Frances Hodgson Burnett story, I might squirm away yet more energetically until I succeeded in blighting my brother’s potential inheritance. I just wished that my mother would let me have long hair to avoid misunderstanding: long thick plaits perhaps, interwoven with flowers.

  Once Aunt Caroline died, memories of her were kept alive in the house by the existence of her old-fashioned clothes stowed away in a cupboard. They joined the breastplate of our dead Life Guard grandfather and his excruciatingly uncomfortable helmet, but were rather more practical. There was a tiny little cloak, for example, intricately embroidered, with lace laid over taffeta, adorned with bows. A bonnet was another favourite, and a mauve satin skirt. Her clothes fitted us children and we used them for dressing up. There was also no need to control the fidgeting, in so far as I had ever done so. Thus Thomas and I enjoyed two halcyon seasons at Bernhurst before the war. We would have instinctively understood the words of Henry James to Edith Wharton (also on a visit to Sussex): “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me these have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

  Cricket played by adults was an important part in these summer afternoons. Once again, the sun shines and the white-clad “run-stealers flicker to and fro,” in the immortal lines of Francis Thompson:

  For the field is full of shades as I near th
e shadowy coast

  And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost…

  O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

  Our field was the Hurst Green cricket pitch, which lay behind the George, directly across the busy, dangerous main road to Hastings and the sea. Once you reached the pitch itself, roads and pub were forgotten: here was a magic enclave that might have been in a clearing in the forest.

  Our father was passionately interested in cricket; as a boy, he told us, he knew Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack by heart (a faint implication here of inadequacy on the part of his children, which was rare coming from him). His own play was enthusiastic, sometimes over-enthusiastic it seemed. Our mother was heard exclaiming: “It’s too bad! Frank was caught dancing outside his crease again and they stumped him.” Elizabeth herself was never known to take any physical exercise: she happily surrendered her unused tennis gear and even dress to me when I was eight, since that left her free for energetic gardening. She also gave the impression of disapproving of Frank’s ardent addiction to sport, which he nevertheless retained throughout his life. On the other hand, her loyalty was total: if he must play cricket, he should be allowed to do so without criticism, and certainly not be confined to something called a crease, whatever that might be, and stumped—horrid word—for going outside it.

  As for Thomas and me, we were left reverently puzzling: Dada dancing? What sort of dance was that? Nothing quite so interesting took place on our watch, although we kept a keen lookout for those twinkling toes, but I was imbued with a lifelong feeling of pleasure at the idea of watching the game. Neither rainy windswept Sunday matches nor the occasional failure of family members to shine have ever quite destroyed it.

  The run-stealers flickering to and fro, our Hornbys and our Barlows, were on the whole our father’s friends, not famous cricketers. One match before-the-war included the writer and journalist Philip Toynbee, who as a youthful Communist had been involved with Frank in the famous Mosley incident at the town hall. His beguiling wife Anne, with her mild face and soft fair hair, enchanted us with the attention she paid to us; but for the most part the grown-ups ignored us, we were like cats watching silently in the background.

  There was however one star. Aidan Crawley was then, and remained, one of Frank’s favourite people. Here was a man of action with his handsome film star’s looks—Rex Harrison, perhaps—and his courage: he would be shot down in the war and held as a prisoner. He returned full of idealism to be elected a Labour MP for six years, before turning Conservative and finally chairing a new television company. No wonder one obituary compared him to a John Buchan character. Above all, Aidan was a fabulous cricketer in my father’s eyes.

  “Aidan was Twelfth Man for England,” said Frank proudly. It took us a long time to realize that this was not necessarily the top billing. Our keen enquiry to someone else we were assured was a top-rank cricketer—“Are you the Twelfth Man?”—must have met with some surprise.

  Most exciting of all about before-the-war holiday life at Bernhurst was the possibility of a visit to Bodiam. This was a castle rising up in the green lily-strewn bed of its own moat. It had a drawbridge, towers, crenellated turrets and a well. Windows from the turrets looked directly over the water. I thought that I should like to live there, with those coveted long plaits I was not allowed to grow but which were granted to me in my fantasy life, hanging down towards the moat. Like Rapunzel in the fairy story, I would let down my hair, although I wasn’t quite sure at this point whom I wanted to come clambering up it.

  Bodiam Castle was about three miles away from Bernhurst, but like the cricket pitch, if more exotic, it took you into your own world: into the world of my History, in short. Built late on in the fourteenth century, it was intended to keep out the French during the Hundred Years War. Sir Edward Dallingridge was granted a licence to erect a castle “for the defence of the adjacent country and the resistance to our enemies.” The French were just over the Channel, and the French, as I knew from my beloved Our Island Story, were out to get us. (They were of course no relation to the French, the other French, whom we would get to know and admire after the outbreak of the war, because they were Free, the Free French and thus completely different.)

  Bodiam was especially important because we learnt that the sea in those distant days did not stop peacefully at Hastings and Bexhill, where we would visit it to bathe. It came rushing across in the direction of Bodiam. I imagined as I looked out of the turrets that there were waves, possibly stormy, and boats, probably hostile, where now there was the River Rother. However, Bodiam’s satisfying life as a martial focus in the surrounding low-lying country came to an end with the Civil War in the seventeenth century. John Tufton, Earl of Thanet, on the King’s side, led an attack on Lewes, before being defeated at Haywards Heath (these were all familiar local Sussex names to us). The worsted Tufton had to sell Bodiam to a parliamentarian in order to pay the enormous fine imposed upon him. Somehow poor Bodiam ended up being “slighted”—not some petty social insult, but strong measures which put it out of action as a defensive castle. The ruins, artistically covered in ivy, became an eighteenth-century tourist attraction as the fashion for the medieval and the Gothic spread.

  The castle I encountered however was far from being a ruin, otherwise I would hardly have planned to take up residence there, plaits and all. In its next incarnation, Bodiam was carefully adapted and rebuilt at the orders of Lord Curzon, after the First World War; this lofty grandee politician, Viceroy of India at one point, clearly had a taste for the majestic. What we saw therefore was the product of many visions down the six hundred odd years of the castle’s existence. I like to think that in its turn Bodiam has gone on to inspire further visions of History in the imagination of its visitors, including my own. For example, I was gratified to learn when I got interested in the whole subject of historical biography that the great Macaulay—an early hero—had been, according to G. M. Trevelyan, interested in “castle building”: he once declared that “the past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance,” something with which I could easily identify. Certainly from Bodiam onwards, a castle, however dilapidated, aroused in me a thrill that a Georgian masterpiece of a house could never do: the feeling of danger perhaps…the possibilities of dungeons and oubliettes where there were also turrets.

  Where I was concerned, an obsession with Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill made it particularly easy to insert myself into the landscape around Bodiam, much as the two children who were the centre of the story, Dan and Una, had done. The first exciting thing that I got from the book was a feeling of secrecy about Sussex. Here was not grandeur of landscape as I would later thrill to in Scotland and in a smoother more dulcet way in Dorset: instead, a series of grassy enclaves, hills which delicately revealed themselves then retreated, valleys one came upon by surprise.

  As a result I began to discern secrecy in the holiday world around me. Even the hop-pickers who came annually for the summer from the East End of London to perform their task had something secret and exciting, almost clandestine about them. For one thing, we were instructed on no account to talk to these mysterious strangers, some of them children like ourselves. But apparently threatening children.

  “Why shouldn’t I talk to a hop-picker?” I asked, keen to make new friends, followed by “Where is the East End?” from Thomas, who from birth wanted to know facts.

  “They eat different food,” my mother said vaguely. That made the incomers even more mysterious. When pressed, she murmured something about whelks and eels, which was positively exciting. My nanny was more succinct. “Little thieves,” she muttered. “And big thieves too.”

  All this moulded into my picture of Sussex derived from Kipling, where the magic elf named Puck instructed Dan and Una in the ways of the past. The actual book was published in 1906, at roughly the same time as Our Island Story, arguing for a prelapsarian period in children’s literature in the decade before the First World War. Kipling wrote it for his
own son and daughter, basing the opening on a real-life performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which his daughter Elsie (ten in 1906) played Titania—and he himself played Bottom. But there was something literally timeless about the story. To me in the Thirties, it was all happening then. And years later, incidentally, I received pleasing confirmation of the enduring spell of Kipling when I learnt that the historian Simon Schama, thirteen years younger than me and living not in Sussex but in Southend-on-Sea, had found inspiration in Puck of Pook’s Hill: “For a small boy with his head in the past, Kipling and fantasy was potent magic,” he wrote, “with Puck’s help you could time travel by standing still.”

  I suppose there has to be some serpent in an Eden: in this case a whole nest of snakes. My parents decided to take a holiday together in Czechoslovakia in 1938: an interesting year to choose in view of subsequent events, and surely a significant element in the very strong opposition towards appeasement on both their parts. Thomas and I were to be parked in a seaside holiday home for children called Kittiwake. A certain amount of preparation must have gone on for this event, since I have memories of Elizabeth showing me an illustration of the gull called a kittiwake in a bird book. I gazed at it dubiously: I thought the bird had a sinister twist to its beak. However we listened dutifully to tales of what a wonderful time we were going to have: “No Mummy and Dada! Just fun with other children!” Older children, she might have added. For at Kittiwake I encountered a new phenomenon: the gang of which I was nothing like the eldest member, no longer the superior, envied person.

  Nevertheless all went well, or so I thought. There were games, round games, square games, a bit of acting perhaps, swimming, digging in the sand…And now we children were all going to have a meeting. There was an announcement, not exactly from the staff like most announcements, but a message rapidly passed from childish lip to lip. Whispered not shouted. In this way we all convened in some outdoor space where it was possible to sit in a circle. If not explicitly secret, this meeting would certainly not include the grown-ups.