My History: A Memoir of Growing Up

by Antonia Fraser

  “But it’s a school for boys,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHE DRAGON

  The school next door to which my mother had so casually referred, that summer in which we left Water Eaton, was called the Dragon. I spent the following four years of my life there, September 1940 to July 1944.

  “Next door” was not an exaggeration. Our house was actually bang next door to the headmaster’s house, something that became awkward as I could be easily spotted mooning about in the garden making up romantic stories about myself, when I should have been doing my prep. Luckily the headmaster, “Hum” as A. E. Lynam was known—the Dragon specialized in nicknames which boys used quite openly—had a head of thick yellow-white hair which was virtually luminous. I would spy him in his window and recite gobbledegook Latin verse loudly to put him off the scent. Next to the headmaster’s house came the lane down to the River Cherwell and the boats; then the playing fields stretching down to the river and the school barge; lastly the school itself.

  At the end of my first year at the Dragon, Hum gave the following verdict in my report: “Just the start for a She Dragon.” Apart from leaving open the question of whether he had been fooled by my gobbledegook or heard it correctly for what it was, Hum did point to something which was generally felt but not defined. There was a species called the She Dragon. Later I heard that girls at the school were known as hags, but the term was not then in use; although it would have been curiously appropriate for me. A late developer toothwise, I was known in my family as the gap-tooth hag, with photos of me in my new uniform, beaming happily under my circular school hat, to explain why. So far as I was concerned, it was all super, if not outright wizard (the two favoured words at the Dragon) as I belted out the words “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, You make me happy when skies are grey” (the favoured song) on my way to school.

  Altogether, with my curly hair, still kept very short by my pitiless mother, at the age of eight I looked as much like a boy as a girl. This once led to an embarrassing incident at Parson’s Pleasure bathing place, where I was ushered into the wrong changing room, and had to lurk fully dressed in a corner (as a She Dragon, my chief reaction was not embarrassment but annoyance that I had missed my swim). Nevertheless, whatever I looked like, I did not feel like a boy, and nor, I believe, did any of the other so-called She Dragons.

  Now officially described as co-educational, with about one third of the pupils girls, the Dragon was certainly not what is meant by co-educational in the Forties. What I did come to feel, therefore, was that I was in some way special, and this was undoubtedly based on the experience of being the member of a tiny clique. Did we girls in addition feel privileged? I don’t believe so: that came afterwards, when we discovered in our different ways what an exciting and unusual education, compared to our contemporaries, we had received.

  The Dragon School had been founded by a group of dons in 1877 and was originally known as the Oxford Little Boys School; eventually it became Lynam’s for short, the name of the family who provided three headmasters, reigning in turn for an extraordinary span of eighty-nine years, ending in 1965. These were Skipper (C. C. Lynam), his brother Hum, and Hum’s son Joc ( J. H. R. Lynam) who took over from Hum halfway through my school career. It was Skipper, incidentally, who declared in a Prize Day speech that he much preferred his nickname to be used—“I hate to be called ‘Sir’ every half minute”—a tradition which stuck. And the first She Dragon was his daughter Kit, who arrived in 1896, to be followed by a second five years later, sister of three male Dragons; making the numbers two girls to eighty-eight boys. In my time, both these figures had substantially increased, but the gap remained proportionately enormous. In 1943, for example, there were officially forty girls and three hundred and fifty-one boys.

  In the Forties, there were still older people who bafflingly referred to the school as Lynam’s; but according to the record, it was the first pupils who were inspired to call themselves Dragons by the fact that one of the don-founders had the surname George. We children certainly knew what we were. “I am a Dragon,” one would say in response to enquiries—with just a hint of polite surprise that any other answer could be expected.

  Indeed, that gold Dragon, seen in profile with his long curly tail, ferocious tongue and outstretched wings, was everywhere. He was the crest on our navy blue blazers, such a familiar sight round Oxford, stamped on the memory with the motto Arduus ad Solem. (Striving for the Sun, which during the Battle of Britain became linked in my mind with the celebrated motto of the RAF: Per ardua ad astra—Through Adversity to the Stars.) The school magazine was known as the Draconian. The anthology of poetry, first published in 1935, which dominated our learning and our recitation aloud was called The Dragon Book of Verse. The metal weathervane that swung to and fro above the building which contained the boys’ changing room was of course a dragon, with the school motto beneath—allowing these lines to be bellowed out meaningfully in the school song:

  And the words on that tin

  Mean go in and win…

  Winning was extremely important at the Dragon. The lively spirit of competition extended to the parents, perhaps because so many of them (including my own) were connected to the ever-competitive academic world. Particularly, it seemed to me that the mothers were competitive; I remember them being quite as clever as their husbands and of course in many cases in wartime it was the mother who was the resident head of the household. All these mothers appeared to take an acute interest in the weekly form orders—distributed in written reports—with the corollary that certain among them were rumoured to be extraordinarily helpful with the homework. A popular master known as “Jacko” (C. H. Jacques) used to perform light-hearted revue sketches at the end of term. When he awarded the form prize to Mrs. Arrowsmith instead of her clever son, this was felt to be an appropriate, even admiring joke: when we applauded, we were applauding Mrs. Arrowsmith as well as Jacko.

  My own mother was certainly right up with the rest of them in her ambitions for me. “Who came first?” was her only comment when I proudly announced that I had come second in Maths, a position which was frankly miraculous, given my lack of natural ability in that direction. On the other hand, constant child-bearing during the war meant that there was not much homework help to be expected. The perpetually attendant maternity nurse Elsie Violet Samways, known as Sammy, actually gave me more help listening to me practising my recitations. (“How old are you, Sammy?” This kindly woman, who seemed incredibly ancient to us, would answer any question but that: “As old as my eyes and a little bit older than my teeth,” she would invariably reply.) It was only after I grew up that I realized how fortunate I had been, as the eldest, to have Elizabeth’s keen attention at the start, teaching me that ever-swift reading, and later Latin. By the time I was eight, the spirit of the Dragon could probably be trusted to do the rest.

  The dominant lessons at the Dragon School were Latin and Greek; the dominant sport rugger, as it was always called. This suited me down to the ground, often literally so in the case of rugger. All the girls at the Dragon in those days played rugger as a matter of course, there was nothing special about it—and how intoxicating the experience was! The girl described by my mother only a few years before as being absorbed “in a dream world of tinsel and glittering beauty” was experiencing different sensations. In short, the feeling of racing up the wing, and handing off my pursuers as enthusiastically as possible, is one that remains with me as sheer pleasure. As I have come to tell the story, I was in the second XV, and prevented from playing away against the local prep school Summerfields because there was no girls’ changing room. To me, this was extremely odd since I regarded playing rugger as the norm. But there is no doubt that this insouciance on the subject has merited some odd reactions over the years.

  It began early. Our favourite among our parents’ friends was undoubtedly John Betjeman, whom they had known since their own Oxford days. Betjeman, as they
called him, would appear out of nowhere and recite mock Shakespearean verse on his knee to my mother, poetically addressed (like Queen Elizabeth I) as Eliza. I loved and envied this. So when Betjeman, as an Old Dragon, took an interest in my rugger career, I was first flattered then upset when he would not accept that I played fleet-footedly on the wing, but kept insisting that I was to be found in the hurly-burly of the scrum. It was not until I read his poem “A Subaltern’s Love Song” featuring the immortal Miss Joan Hunter Dunn that I realized that this tribute to my strength was in fact the greater compliment. In my very minor way, I was of the breed led by Betjeman’s “shock-headed victor,” with her “strongly adorable tennis-girl’s hand.”

  I will pass over briefly the incident while my first husband was Under-Secretary for War, when a benevolent general attempted to tell me the rules of rugger at the Army and Navy match at Twickenham. I tried to hand him off, as it were, with assurances about my expertise, which he in turn found hard to believe. But perhaps the all-round incredulity is summed up by an incident at another prep school, Colet Court, in the Seventies. I was walking down the touchline with my youngest son Orlando, watching a game of rugger, accompanied by Geoffrey Owen whose own son Tom was playing.

  “Ah, Antonia,” said Geoff, “I so well remember you haring up the wing at the Dragon” (he was two years my junior). I was smiling fondly at the memory when I suddenly noticed Orlando, aged nine, looking utterly gobsmacked.

  “Orlando, what on earth is the matter?”

  “But, Mummy,” he began, “we always thought you made all that up, just to make us laugh.”

  For all the competitive merriment of sport, Latin and Greek were the true dominants of the school. The chief classics master, L. A. Wilding, known of course as “Law,” who taught Upper One for twenty years, had written a major textbook on the subject. The ability to write Latin verse was something that was expected to be instinctive and, hammered home, did indeed become so. It remains with one for a lifetime, learnt early enough.

  In 1961, I received a new courtesy title when Frank became Earl of Longford on the death of his elder brother. No longer Mrs. Fraser, I was henceforth to be known as Lady Antonia.

  “Did you realize that your new name is the ending of a Latin hexameter?” enquired the distinguished lawyer Sir John Foster, a lofty man both physically and mentally.

  “Down in a deep, dark dell sat Lady Antonia Fraser,” I replied, swiftly, adapting the old Dragon lines we learnt to guide us about the rhythm of Latin verse which began: “Down in a deep dark dell sat an old cow chewing a beanstalk.”

  “Weak ending, of course,” said Foster, attempting to claw back victory; he referred to the fact that the word Fraser consists of two syllables, the first of which gets heavier emphasis than the second, making it a trochee. A line could end strongly with the equal emphasis of a spondee: “heartbreak” for example instead of “happy.” I only wish I had had the guts to observe quite correctly: “So is Foster.”

  With the study of Latin and Greek went a great deal of concentration on the ancient world, as well as reading the classics. As a result, the Dragon spirit saw to it that the boys regularly took the top scholarships at Winchester and Eton. A Dragon Century, the school history by Jacko, reveals that Winchester was the original objective, with Eton catching up fast from the Twenties on. This history also records 1951 as The Year of the Double Top, when the first places on the Winchester Roll and the Eton Roll were both won. It seems splendidly characteristic of Dragon competitiveness that while the boys were immediately awarded a “no-prep,” the staff celebrated with a party to which they triumphantly invited their rival masters from neighbouring schools.

  It was certainly in the spirit of the Dragon School that when the time came for me to leave, I personally researched girls’ schools which awarded scholarships. These seemed to be few and far between, and focused on boarding schools; although my mother had simply assumed I would be going to Oxford High School. However I had a secret ambition which was to see the name Antonia Pakenham inscribed on the Honours Board among the names of all the cleverest boys at the Dragon, the Bullards and the Wildings. It seemed to me later a warning against hubris that by the time this aim was achieved—not too difficult at that period for a girl given a boy’s education—my name had to be installed at the very end of the existing Board running along the wall, an area almost invisible because it lay at the back of the stage.

  Undoubtedly this competitiveness at work was acknowledged by the production of those weekly reports, giving the form order. Hum, as headmaster, read them all, commenting in red ink. There were also a prodigious number of prizes awarded. Was all this a mistake? I think my own attitude to the system was the obvious one: I liked it very much when I won, and was temporarily miffed when I didn’t. And yet it is a curious fact that I have absolutely no memory of learning History, my passion in life, when I was at the Dragon. I continued to read any historical works, principally biographies, I could lay my hands on. Since my parents’ books consisted of the classics and books by their friends, I took to pestering Oxford Public Library. There were no regulations against children using the adult section in those days, so I would sidle in, grab a book, get it stamped, slip out and walk home. Then I read the book. Back I would go…The librarian, incidentally, did not show herself in any way enchanted by my frequent appearances: she regarded them in some way as suspicious and tended to frown when she saw me arrive. It was an early instance of that rule which I had already begun to discover: speedy reading will make you happy but it will not make you popular. So for the time being all this was still part of my secret life, my History in fact.

  When I first cast my mind back to those days, I came to the conclusion that, thanks to this possessive feeling about History, my memory must have blanked out the actual lessons. It was therefore interesting to discover from the printed forms of the school reports, faithfully preserved in my Progress Book by my mother, that there was in fact no official slot for History. In the body of the report, Classics is followed by English with a sub-section for Geography, then Mathematics, lastly French. Below that, there are five tiny sections for Music and Singing, Art, Handicraft, Divinity and Science. Yet clearly we must have been taught History, and indeed my contemporary Dragons remember the lessons.

  The explanation came to me from the school archivist: History was at this point included with English. After a formal inspection of the school in 1930, it was declared as follows: “ ‘English’ in the timetable is a general term, including Scripture, History and Geography as well as Literature and Composition.” Although one notes that Geography and Divinity but not History had escaped into categories of their own in the intervening ten years. Perhaps the Dragon emphasis on the Classics (on the evidence of the school report as well as my memory) was a reflection of the fact that a degree in Classics was for a long time considered the supreme degree at Oxford. My mother, for example, who had chosen to read Greats—as it was significantly known—did for a while simply assume that I would follow her, based on the advantage of being at the Dragon School. It seems relevant that I have vivid memories of learning the Classics with Law, and French with Monsieur Dodd, both listed as major subjects, but not History.

  Above all my memories are of “English.” This was not because it included History: it was due to two quite separate things. First of all, English meant reciting poems learnt by heart from The Dragon Book of Verse in the school hall: mainly Tennyson, according to my recollection. When I came to check the contents, Tennyson was indeed ahead of all other poets except Shakespeare, followed by Robert Browning and William Blake. I was amused to note that the last poem in this book was P. G. Wodehouse’s “Good Gnus” with its jolly, wonderfully incorrect beginning:

  When cares attack and life seems black

  How sweet it is to pot a yak…

  But in my Animals “Who’s Who”

  No name stands higher than the Gnu…

  Ending:

  And one more gnu, so
fair and frail

  Has handed in its dinner-pail…

  Tennyson not Wodehouse was my man. Certainly my “Break, break, break/On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!” was in my unprejudiced opinion particularly fine, with its tragic conclusion to which at the age of ten I gave full vent: “But the tender grace of a day that is dead/Will never come back to me.” Thomas, a year younger, was quite good too as he rendered William Blake in a suitably high flute-like voice: “Piping down the valleys wild/Piping songs of pleasant glee.” Behind the reciters in the Hall was the vast mural centred round the half-naked figure of Education, surrounded by pals called Piety, Lofty Aims and Loyalty, but already one was inclined to ignore this slightly embarrassing backcloth.

  The real point of “English” for me, however, was Shakespeare and acting in the annual school play in the summer term. As it turned out, I was extremely lucky. Any girl with a good memory could hope to play a leading role under the direction of “Bruno” (J. B. Brown); acting ability did not matter, since Bruno would do the rest. In this way I played Viola, followed by Celia in As You Like It. Bruno by this time had found a new favourite in the shape of Priscilla Hett, but tactfully explained to me that Celia was a better part than Rosalind. I was foolish enough to believe this during rehearsals, and still took an unconscionable time—right until the tumultuous applause for the adorable quicksilver Scilla at the end of the play, in fact—to grasp the truth.

  My finest hour came in my last term when I played Lady Macbeth to the Macbeth of David “Piggy” Pyemont: a charming flaxen-haired boy, a brilliant classicist, killed during National Service in Malaya, one of those casualties of that time after the war when peace in Europe did not necessarily mean peace in the world. In the official school photo he sports a Viking headdress with two enormous horns sprouting from it. I sit complacently at his side, with two equally enormous thick red plaits framing my youthful face. And of the various incidents during that finest hour, undoubtedly the moment when I stepped forward in front of the whole Dragon School and declaimed passionately the words of Lady M, “Unsex me here…” was the highlight.