My History: A Memoir of Growing Up

by Antonia Fraser

  It is Bruno who epitomizes for me the best of the Dragon: his energy, his enthusiasm for drama meant that the essential Shakespeare experience we received was the real contribution to the study of History which I got from the Dragon School. To know three Shakespeare plays virtually by heart, to love them, before the age of twelve, to realize there was a whole Shakespearean world and it was part of History—these were inestimable gifts.

  Gilbert and Sullivan, also produced by Bruno, had no educational value so far as I was concerned, but was sheer pleasure. My first experience was with Patience when I watched Richard Wilding, future top civil servant, mincing about the stage as Bunthorne (“If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily”) while his ravishing unbroken voice soared above it all. My memories of Gilbert and Sullivan are in fact all of divine boy singers: evidently we few girls didn’t have an advantage there, no doubt due to the tradition that preferred young boys in choirs to girls (or women).

  Personally, I did not sing even though I took part as the third girl in The Pirates of Penzance. This silence was at Bruno’s direct request. He had a habit of bending down and placing his ear close to one’s mouth as one was rehearsing. To me he simply said: “Don’t.” Nevertheless, because he approved my acting in Shakespeare, I was allowed to go on stage and smile beguilingly in my bonnet with the others in the school photo, a happy if slightly fraudulent presence. The relief from the painful need to sing—Bruno got it absolutely right—meant that I thought of Gilbert and Sullivan then, and still do, as one of England’s unequivocal national delights. Bruno’s dismissal of my singing was after all only a more economical version of the art mistress’s celebrated report, much quoted by my family thereafter: “Ideas good, execution faulty.”

  Seated in the front row of the Macbeth photo is one of my two best friends at the Dragon, both of course girls, Lalage Mais as Lady Macduff. (Felicity Wilding, whose father was Law, was the other.) Lalage was the daughter of one of our most eccentric masters: the writer S. P. B. Mais who taught us English. An expansive, loudly benevolent man of many thick waistcoats, mainly checked, he was renowned for them and even the hottest day would lead to no more than a partial unbuttoning. His teaching also flowed in a great seam of recitation, reminiscence and whatever else came into his mind at the moment. S. P. B. was then in his sixties, a veteran author and, more unusually at the time, frequent broadcaster on radio. The fact that he actually managed to be distinguished for eccentricity was a considerable achievement, because to be honest, many of our masters were in retrospect quite odd.

  This was an effect of wartime, of course: adult men and women below a certain age needed to be away serving the war effort, not acting as teachers to children. As a result, many of our masters were old enough to have served in the First World War; one, Frank Cary, had lost a leg and another, “Fuzz” Francis, had lost an eye. “Tubby” Haines, who taught Maths, was known to be suffering from shell-shock. We girls took the effects of this shell-shock philosophically: it meant remembering to sit at the back of the class, otherwise Tubby might be moved to use your hair to scrub the blackboard in a fit of rage. This actually happened to a girl, aptly known for her pretty curly hair as “Fuzzy” Stradling, who was seized and used as a cleaning implement. The rest of us simply thought that Fuzzy had been an idiot to sit in the front row. It was all part of the atmosphere in which the consequences of the First World War were in a strange way present with us along with the actuality of the Second; we at the Dragon still marked our First World War casualties, just as a new list was beginning.

  I remember that there was one master who was a conscientious objector—my mother tried to explain to me what that was although I still didn’t get it. On the one hand, his behaviour seemed to flout the known rules of the super-patriotic world in which we lived. On the other hand Mattie himself was a particularly sympathetic person, writing generous reports about my naïve would-be-Shelley attempts at composing verse. Much later, as I began to study the intricate subject of conscientious objection—Harold for example was an objector to post-war National Service in the very different atmosphere of 1948—to say nothing of the history of First World War objectors, memories of Mattie came back and I wished vainly that I had been of an age to talk to him, instead of merely accepting his encouragement.

  Then there was “the Colonel” as J. C. Purnell was known, in charge of physical exercise and swimming (he had joined the school with his former rank of sergeant, but Curnell Purnell was the obvious Dragon nickname). Much later, Thomas, writing a history of the Boer War, discovered that the Colonel had actually fought in it, and regretted not having asked for his reminiscences. As the Colonel barked at us, intoned rhymes at us, during the daily grind on the treacherous gravel of the school playground (my knees still bear the scars of falls during play) he provided the most extreme example of the way the teachers in their experience spanned English History.

  The Carpentry master, Ted Mack (“E.G.H.M.” on school notices and reports), became a family friend. About the same age as my parents, he seemed similarly old, but a great deal more benevolent when it came to treats. These ranged from a beautifully crafted wooden chest with A on it and a cradle for my doll (I have them still) to helpful little bookcases, ideal for a child so intent on creating her own space in an increasing family. Then there were the sweets: impossible to overstress the delight of sweets which were not part of one’s meagre sweet ration. Ted Mack was also a keen birdwatcher, and with my mother, we all went on a holiday to Wales; Lalage Mais and her family came along for company. But of all the kindnesses Ted Mack did me, introducing me to the theatre, in the shape of Oxford’s New Theatre, with regular visits, was surely the greatest.

  I was fortunate in that wartime Oxford was a centre for the theatre: not only the New Theatre where famous productions from the blitzed West End could take refuge, but also the Playhouse, which was a repertory theatre of tremendous variety as well as distinction. One family outing to the latter to see a play centring on a betrayed country girl sticks in the memory, since there was no one to care for my young brother Paddy and we had to take him. “She’s going to have a what?” he shouted at one point, in the loud, commanding voice which would one day be a great asset to him as a barrister.

  Other outings were at a higher level. Elizabeth conscientiously organized visits to Shakespeare at Stratford, not too far away, while petrol was available. Ted Mack on the other hand took me to absolutely everything; the essence of our theatre-going was to watch the good as well as the bad, and discuss which was which afterwards. Ted then indulged my new hobby of autograph-seeking by escorting me round to the stage door. “Glamourflags was not a very good play,” I wrote grandly in my pocket diary, about a revue with many different sketches; that did not prevent me from noting: “afterwards we got their autographs.” Ivy Benson and her All Ladies Band fared better, and once again we got the autographs. I blush to think that these stars were obliged to inscribe my book: “To the Ant of Chadlington”—the signature I always used at the time.

  I have no idea what my parents thought of our theatre-going; the truth was probably that they were too frantically busy to care, and one child being occupied was one child less to tend. My mother certainly never tried to take me to the opera again after a disastrous expedition to The Tales of Hoffmann when I was five: as the character of the singer named Antonia duly sang herself to death, I punctuated the action with wild screams of dismay, thus bringing about a pause in my opera-going which lasted for twelve years. When it came to my friendship with Ted Mack, only the housemistress at my next school raised an eyebrow, as Ted continued to visit me, as well as performing vital offices such as sending me sweets (still) and the magazine Punch weekly. My mother indicated later in a roundabout way that she had received a letter on the subject. I was protected by ignorance of what the housemistress might be implying—the relationship was certainly completely innocent of anything that would now be considered “inappropriate.”

  In any case, poor Ted m
ust have fallen ill with cancer just about this time; he died at the age of forty-one in May 1945. Before that, Thomas and I, hearing that he was in hospital in London, and not of course being told about cancer, joyfully planned an expedition to visit him. We described ourselves as Ted’s nephew and niece and after an argument gained the ward where he lay. We found a wan figure, sadly shrunken from the big and burly man we remembered; but he still managed to smile at our audacity.

  I note from my letters home that I tried to visit Ted again during the April holidays before he died, but wasn’t allowed to do so, since as my mother wrote to me at school in May 1946, breaking the news of his death, “poor Ted just wasted away.” I was thirteen. My anguished letter back asked why the world preferred to invent “the most atomically fiendish instruments of death” (a reference to the dropping of the bomb on Japan the previous August) instead of finding cures for illness. How could my mother answer this unanswerable question? Wisely, she did not attempt to do so. Her next letter was full of gentle reminiscence of our happy birdwatching holiday. To this day, I remember Ted with affection, as the man who inculcated in me a lifelong love of a theatrical expedition—any time, any theatrical expedition, so long as there is excitement in the anticipation.

  “Oh why oh why doesn’t Dick Plummer write?” This sad expostulation comes from my pocket diary, but it is dated 1947, long after both Dick and I had left the Dragon School. We had sat opposite each other at an Old Dragon Dinner, although that night in the diary I was truthfully more interested in recording my pale blue dress and Pink Plum Beautiful lipstick than the charms of the boy opposite. The lament, days later, has an artificial sound to it as if my fourteen-year-old persona, self-reared on Georgette Heyer, thought she ought to be having those feelings. It was certainly the Marquis of Vidal, eponymous hero of Devil’s Cub, who remained my ideal. The romances of boys and girls at the Dragon School were, in my experience, mainly epistolary: the odd note or a jovial comment written by a sister across a brother’s notebook about the prettiest girl at the Dragon: “Thomas Pakenham loves Marion Hunter.” My intimate friendships remained, as I wanted them to be, with girls.

  Of course most of us knew the facts of life, or thought that we did. There would be occasional ruderies shouted out by a boy, generally from a safe distance. We girls also discussed such subjects from time to time, although in retrospect the level of accuracy was not very high and one hopes we all knew better by the time we were grown up. To give an example, when one of us brought hot news from a holiday spent near a riding stable that “you have to do it standing up if you want to have a baby. Like the horses,” nobody contradicted her. Girls, however, were not admitted to the ritual biological instruction which I believe occurred for school leavers, about which exaggerated tales were told (by boys who never failed to comment: “But of course I knew it all anyway”). The most useful piece of information I derived from a combination of reading Trollope and an enlightened friend.

  Aged eleven, I had discovered Trollope in a huge green-and-gold edition in my parents’ house. (I learnt later that there was a lot of wartime Trollope reading among the grown-ups “to get away from the war.”) Thus I was temporarily obsessed by the character of Lady Glencora Palliser in Can You Forgive Her? The tiny, tousle-haired heiress and her fatal love for the wastrel Burgo Fitzgerald occupied most of my waking thoughts. I was however baffled by one significant development in the plot. We all knew that Lady Glencora must dutifully provide an heir for her husband Plantaganet Palliser, himself the heir to the Duke of Omnium, because that was what the Duke requested. I turned to Felicity Wilding, slightly older than me, for help.

  “When Glencora says with a blush that she’s not quite sure, she thinks, maybe…I mean, how can she not know whether she’s having a baby? Either they did it, in which case she’s having a baby. Or they didn’t, in which case she isn’t.”

  “Oh, no,” said Felicity in a world-weary voice. “You don’t understand. Grown-ups do it all the time.”

  I was stunned and fell into incredulous silence. Nothing in the frequent appearance of babies in these years at 8 Chadlington Road had prepared me for such a—frankly—embarrassing revelation. I found it much more difficult to assimilate, for example, than the fate of the lovely Amabel in Harrison Ainsworth’s Old St. Paul’s at the hands of the wicked but sexy Lord Rochester, in the words of the author “seeking only in pursuit of the grocer’s daughter the gratification of his lawless desires.” Old St. Paul’s was another current favourite: in fact I found Harrison Ainsworth a wonderful source of shocking enlightenment—at the level I wanted—as well as History. It was only many years later that I learnt from Robert Gittings’s biography of Thomas Hardy that he himself had been obsessed by Old St. Paul’s in youth and had immersed himself so totally in the novel as a child “that he never quite threw off its influence on his style.” I felt a retrospective sense of pride to have shared a passion with the great writer.

  At the time I turned away from Felicity and went back to the safety of the written word and Trollope’s political Pallisers. Instinctively I much preferred them to the then fashionable Anglican bishops, bishops’ wives and deans of Barchester. I was determined to ignore any possible connection with reality and stick with the lot of them, Phineas Finn, Lady Eustace, Lady Laura Standish, Madame Max Goesler and so forth, ignoring anything unpleasant that might disturb me in my rapt contemplation of their fascinating social fortunes.

  It was probably a long way away from what Hum thought a She Dragon should be thinking about. What would that be? Something to do with the Classical World, no doubt. But at this point, in my imagination, Lady Glencora was a great deal more interesting than Helen of Troy because she was my private heroine, not the character extolled in class. For the time being, it was she who accompanied me as I walked moodily on the banks of the Cherwell, flowing past the playing fields and the school barge.

  Meanwhile the river itself was and remained for me as much part of the Dragon as the weathervane which told us to go in and win. I was a She Dragon, which meant that I was versed in the Classics, a dashing rugger player in my own estimation, but also a marine species, perfectly at ease in the water of the Cherwell, swimming or punting, listening to Colonel Purnell’s rhythmic cries of instruction. It was a potent combination.

  Then there was that other powerful element: the North Oxford world in which we lived.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ON OUR BIKES

  We North Oxford children seemed to be born on our bikes, like Centaurs, with two wheels instead of horses’ legs. This was the powerful image evoked by John Betjeman, Old Dragon, in his poetic autobiography:

  Take me, my Centaur bike, down Linton Road

  Gliding by newly planted almond trees…

  As with so much else written by Betjeman on North Oxford—“Belbroughton Road is bonny, and pinkly bursts the spray…”—when I read these lines in 1960 they carried me back instantly to that time, that place.

  We biked everywhere: round about the network of roads that comprised North Oxford, where our friends lived, further sometimes to Marston or Headington or Shotover. Bikes were thrown down carelessly on reaching one’s destination, in front gardens, even on the pavement. With renewed energy, it would be off to visit our cousins the Hopes in Rawlinson Road, and Lizzie Cairns in her magnificent house in Charlbury Road—being careful at all times to give a wide berth to the nearby house where lurked the dangerous Taylor boys. No one quite knew why the Taylor boys were dangerous, but it gave a certain pleasing spice to the journey.

  There was no other traffic: seeing a rare bus nosing its way down the two main roads which kept the network together was like seeing the head of a large wild animal appearing out of the grass. Cars were virtually non-existent: my mother’s old grey car spent most of the war out of commission, hunched in the gardener’s shed like one of those ancient creatures in the Pitt Rivers Museum which used to scare us at dusk on a December afternoon. I can remember neither accidents nor thefts, altho
ugh both must have occurred: our bikes, handed down from brother to sister and down again, had a routinely battered appearance (under the circumstances there was no serious attempt to restrict bikes with crossbars to boys or vice versa) so that I still find the sight of a brand-new shiny bicycle slightly disconcerting.

  Betjeman went on to refer to “the young dons with wives in tussore clad/Were building in the morning of their lives/Houses for future Dragons.” There was indeed a myth that North Oxford itself had its origins in the time when dons were not allowed to marry, and had to keep their unofficial womenfolk and children out of sight. The area, extending down the Woodstock and Banbury Roads as far as Summertown, with all the tributary roads, was thus the location of nineteenth-century academic harems…Alas, for the myth. It was not until I read Tanis Hinchcliffe’s study of North Oxford published in 1992 that I realized that the origins of my childhood kingdom lay not in secret relationships but in the less exciting, more materialistic world of property development.

  St. John’s College, which owned the North Oxford estate, sought to diversify from agricultural rents, and so leases for houses began to be sold. It was not even true that the earliest inhabitants were dons, able at last to marry and retain their positions according to an Act of 1877; this was another version of the first myth. By the time the dons were empowered, North Oxford was already in existence with “tradesmen” and even “spinsters” installed. In short, the dons found the houses waiting for them.