My History: A Memoir of Growing Up

by Antonia Fraser

  Mother Mercedes was Irish and her sister, Mother Perpetua, was also a nun at Ascot. The official history of the school referred to her as having “blown in from Ireland”; in fact, although born in a little village in Co. Wicklow, she had attended Royal Holloway College to study Latin, Maths and History. But the real point about “the Merc” was nothing that training alone could give her: she was a teacher of genius and furthermore a teacher with a love of History that matched my own—except that she knew far more about it and in a far more disciplined fashion. She had her favourites—what sympathetic person doesn’t?—in the sense of historical favourites: the Empress Maria Theresa was one of them. The Austrian co-monarch had only previously registered with me as the mother of my beloved Marie Antoinette; now I thrilled to the details of her reign, a woman with an enormous family of sixteen children who ruled over vast areas of Europe (we treated the Emperor Francis as a token figure) and was a devout Catholic. It was a tribute to Mother Mercedes that I took the names of Antonia Maria Teresa—I preferred the Latin spelling—at my Catholic Confirmation, finding Maria Teresa infinitely preferable to the dull old Margaret Caroline of my Protestant Baptism. Many years later I discovered that Maria Theresa had been a formidably bossy and disapproving mother to poor Marie Antoinette, blaming the ignorant fourteen-year-old girl, dispatched alone to the French Court, for her fifteen-year-old husband’s prolonged failure to consummate the marriage. But as I delineated the relationship as accurately as I could, I sensed the ghost of the Merc standing at my shoulder, emanating reproach from beyond the grave: “But, Antonia, you know perfectly well that Her Imperial Majesty the Empress Maria Theresa…” In life, there was always a special relish with which she pronounced those words.

  It would be wrong to suggest that Mother Mercedes, for all her enthusiasm for certain subjects, did not pay attention to historical method. By a piece of good fortune, I happened to read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians in the holidays, attracted, to be honest, by the fact that it was on the special shelf at the bottom of the bookcase in the chilly spare room which was never used. I think my mother thought this was a safe place to store books such as Marie Stopes’s Married Love, not realizing that I would immediately home in on any book with such a promising title. Strachey had been placed there in the first flush of my mother’s cultural Catholicism, given his criticisms of the Church; although this severe attitude did not last, for a time she even hid—thought she hid—the book proof of a new novel by the Pakenhams’ old Oxford friend Evelyn Waugh called Brideshead Revisited in what she believed to be the same safe place. Elizabeth told me later rather touchingly: “I was frightened that it would put you off Catholicism.” Now I seized the Strachey book, hoping for further revelations: my goodness, what had those naughty Victorians been up to?

  I did receive a revelation, although it was not the one I expected. Thanks to Strachey, I entered the world of Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, General Gordon and above all Cardinal Manning. More than that, I realized that writing History was an art in itself as opposed to the bald relation of facts as in my childhood efforts about my various heroines. In short, it could be entertainment as well as enlightenment. There is an irony here: when I read Michael Holroyd’s biography of Strachey twenty years later, I learnt that on occasion Strachey had what may be termed an artistic attitude to historical truth. Many of the most vivid touches were in fact the product of his vivid imagination rather than actual research. It was a historian of a different ilk, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who pointed out that General Gordon retired into his tent not with a Bible and a bottle but a Bible and a prayer book. “Unfortunately,” wrote Trevor-Roper, “ ‘brandy-bottle’ is funnier than ‘prayer-book.’ ”

  At the time, I returned to Ascot on fire to talk to Mother Mercedes about the essay on Cardinal Manning (in which the saintly Cardinal Newman was my favourite character). Immediately she directed me to the library where Edmund Purcell’s nineteenth-century biography of the rather less saintly Manning languished. It was in fact exactly the kind of book which Strachey, writing in 1918, avowedly wrote to replace: “Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric…” But I was not to know that. Instead, encouraged by the Merc, I set about comparing the two accounts of the same life, and while at this enjoyable task had some glimmering of what the historical method might be.

  As my childish enthusiasm for History developed into something more substantial, I began to feel possessive about it: my History once again as I had first felt reading Our Island Story. In this way, I devoted intense energy to the project of winning the School History Prize. Some of this energy was spent in the chapel praying, in the course of which I mentioned more than once that, if I won, I would devote my life to History. My subject was of course: “The Empress Maria Theresa.” Came the great day of the announcement I was trembling with excitement, fear, apprehension, all those things, as Mother Ig mounted the platform in the concert hall in her black garb with her clicking rosary at her side. Beneath the wimple, her thin down-turned lips were set. She smiled: her smile was sweet. Then she addressed us:

  “I have to tell you with much pleasure that the History Prize has been won by Antonia Pakenham.” I thought I was going to faint with joy. Then she added: “I also have to tell you that no one else went in for the History Prize.”

  It was a sharp lesson in undue self-esteem as I have no doubt it was intended to be. Now that I was safely a Catholic, Mother Ig had plenty of criticisms of me. One effort to improve my humility could be said to have backfired because it actually resulted in my acquiring what was probably the most useful accomplishment of my entire education. It happened like this. At one point we had to declare our hopes for the future; in other circumstances it might have been called a career meeting. There were modest indications in the direction of marriage and motherhood; even one or two suggestions of a religious vocation (one of my closest friends subsequently became a nun). In spite of my addiction to Hopkins’s poem on the nun taking the veil, I personally had no such ambitions. Instead, I saw my chance to create a sensation.

  “I want to be a journalist.” Pause for effect. “On the Daily Express.” I should add that the Beaverbrook press was actually banned at Ascot, for reasons I never discovered, so that my public declaration was a deliberate challenge. Mother Ig smiled that sweet smile. She bided her time. A few days later she made an announcement.

  “Saturday morning is as you all know a free period. Except for Antonia. She is going to be a journalist on the Daily Express. So she will spend Saturday morning learning how to type in the gym, with the benefit of postal lessons supervised by Mother Hilary.” So there I sat, with a kind of iron band masking the keys of the typewriter, beneath which my sightless fingers had to plot their own course. So I learnt to touch-type, touch-type very fast. Mutinous I may have been at the time; I should have felt intensely grateful.

  Mother Ig made one other prominent intervention in my life. Senior girls—as I undoubtedly was by right of academic achievement, the early Dragon School boost still working in my favour—were generally made Children of Mary. This meant a broad, pretty pale blue ribbon across the chest with a medal dangling from it. The qualities required were not quite clear but presumed to include piety and general good behaviour. One day Ig sent for me and broke it to me that I had been disbarred from election to the society, not by the nuns, but by my contemporaries: “They say you are a law unto yourself.”

  For a moment I was flushed with pride: a law unto myself ! Just what I had always wanted to be. Then the humiliation flooded me. To sit in the front row of the school, the only one without that broad pretty pale blue ribbon…But Mother Ig had not finished.

  She became brisk. “Reverend Mother and I have decided that it is unseemly for the head of the school in work”—she emphasized the words—“not to be a Child of Mary. So you will in due course beco
me one.” That smile again as she added: “But do remember how it came about. A lesson there perhaps for such a clever girl as you?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  GAP YEAR OR TWO

  Elizabeth stood, looking rather warily at my school trunk which had recently been trundled back from St. Mary’s.

  “Won’t you need your eiderdown and your sheets at school next term?” she asked after a pause.

  “No. Because I’ve left,” I replied.

  “So what will you do?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll think of something.” It was late July 1948: I would be sixteen at the end of August. I felt full of confidence that a glorious future awaited me: I would be a secretary (with my great Ascot-induced typing skills), earn some money and go to parties in the evening. University was very far from my thoughts although intuitively I must have realized that my mother, an undergraduate herself in the Twenties and a strong advocate of female education, would sooner or later point me in that direction. In short I was taking a gap year—or as it turned out, given my youthful age, two.

  As for my mother, she had been given some warning of my intention to leave after taking Higher Certificate (the rough equivalent of A level) on the grounds that work-wise, there was nowhere else for me to go since I had reached the top of the school. But with two children under three (to say nothing of the other five) and her own continuing political ambitions, she had other preoccupations. This was after my mother organized that flight from Oxford to Hampstead Garden Suburb, which was animated by resentment at my father leading the life of a Labour minister in London all week, while she languished in 8 Chad. “Alas, my good friend Oxford, farewell for ever!” I wrote sententiously (and as it happens inaccurately) in my diary.

  Now came the first setback. From the start I hated 10 Linnell Drive. It was large—my new room was a decent size—there was a pleasant garden with a view of the Heath Extension and a back door which led out on to it; there was even a tennis court. So what was there to hate? Hampstead Garden Suburb had been planned by Raymond Unwin, with the collaboration of Sir Edwin Lutyens: the gracious low-built houses celebrated the style known as Neo-Georgian. There were to be no pubs, no fences only hedges, ample squares, churches by Lutyens but no church bells disrupting the peace. I did not, could not, hate any of this and had in any case no interest in pubs.

  The answer to my dislike lay in the fact that there was no public transport: the Golders Green underground lay twenty minutes’ walk away. Furthermore London taxis were allowed to refuse to take a fare there, because it was outside the six-mile limit. Arriving in London with huge excitement, I discovered that I was already a social failure, someone who probably would not be taken home by even the most chivalrous of escorts—and he would have to be remarkably rich to contemplate it in the first place. In short, I felt an outsider. I lived in NW11 (now, incidentally, one of the most expensive residential areas in London). When I learnt that Evelyn Waugh, living as a young man in North End Road, NW11, had walked into Hampstead proper to post his letters to secure the more elegant postcode of NW3, I thought it a perfectly sensible decision.

  The problem of my occupation was the next one I faced. There was no such concept as a gap year at the time, although it has now become a familiar term and generally includes exotic foreign adventure for those privileged to have it. That was certainly not an option then. Foreign travel as such, rambling round Europe, Asia or South America with a friend, simply did not exist. Money allowed to be taken abroad was limited to fifty pounds, which in any case was beyond the means of many families. But there was a possibility of a foreign exchange, which did not imply a currency deal, rather the exchange of two young people, roughly the same age, different nationalities, who would live alternately in each other’s homes. The experience was often preceded by a lengthy correspondence, postal of course, between the pair in question. The intention was to promote international love and friendship. This enterprise was not always totally successful.

  As a matter of fact, I got off quite lightly during the month I spent with a French family in the south-west of France near Bordeaux. There were horror stories: mine was not one of them. It is true that the young people, led by my supposed “friend” Jacqueline, despised me, despised everything about me, beginning with my clothes. They were right. My clothes were, with one exception, despicable. The exception was an enormous pale turquoise coat, magnificent collar on a Napoleonic scale, which extended almost to the ground. The so-called New Look of Christian Dior had swept France the previous year: in England the yards of material needed to make these swirling skirts were, in an age of continuing clothes-rationing, regularly denounced in the press. But of course everyone desired the New Look. Lucy and I had managed to save enough coupons to acquire one coat each, hers being lichen-green to my turquoise. If these coats looked rather odd contrasted with our plain short skirts and workaday jumpers, it did not bother us. We were confident that we were in the height of fashion.

  The French teenagers did not agree. While they did pluck at the turquoise material with Gallic grunts of approval (although such a coat must have been a ludicrous sight in the south in August), they made it quite clear that the rest of my wardrobe was beyond the pale sartorially. They did not seem to care about anything else; or if they did, excluded from their whispered conclaves in French, I had no idea what it was. When I pasted a photograph of myself at the château into my album, about to devour a bunch of grapes which I had suspended above my mouth, the caption beneath read: “The grapes were the only nice thing about the visit.” There were however two people I found in different ways sympathetic. One was Mathieu, a handsome young man who was supposed to be picking these grapes for the harvest; except that whenever possible he lay down on his back amid the rows of vines, gazed at the sky and appeared to go into a dream until interrupted. The family went into an understandable state of rage at his idleness, but I enjoyed our halting conversations; I was just beginning to watch French films and in my imagination Mathieu amid the vines made a good romantic character.

  It was the other sympathetic person who made the whole experience memorable long after I had returned thankfully to England. There was an aged grandfather-figure, generally dressed in the clothes I expected senior Frenchmen to wear from films, including a black beret. Always addressing me as “mademoiselle,” he paid elaborate heed to me, launching into political monologues about England, France, De Gaulle, Churchill and above all the course of the recent war. Gradually I became aware that he must have been a member of the Resistance, and perhaps was not so very old after all. All this reached its climax at my sixteenth birthday celebration on 27 August, which was towards the end of my stay.

  There were speeches. Even Mathieu was allowed to rise up from among the vines, although on this occasion he did not speak. Grandpère made up for it. He made an extremely long speech, flowery, rhetorical, grandiloquently polite not only about myself but also about the wartime relationship between our two countries. Then the Resistance seemed to come into it; with my limited French I had the impression that I was forgotten as old issues were being raised, old scores settled…There were discontented mutterings from the other older men present, and undoubtedly some of them were disputing what he said, with frequent and furious flourishes of their hands. It was all made worthwhile for me, however, by Grandpère’s magnificent conclusion.

  Despite all evidence to the contrary, he saluted me as one who had brought peace to the château by my mere presence. “Just as our English allies did for us during the war,” he added meaningfully, throwing in something in which I could distinguish the word Vichy. There were increasingly angry looks from the unwilling audience of this paean of praise which concluded: “You, mademoiselle, are coming among us like the goddess Irène, the goddess of peace.” As the sixteen-year-old goddess cast her eyes down, modestly yet peacefully, Grandpère burst into tears and had to be escorted sobbing out of the room. After that, I wish I could report that we gave Jacqueline a really agreeable time when
she in turn came to England. Alas, the weather was morbidly wet and cold. Jacqueline retired to her bed and stayed there.

  The sense that my Bordeaux visit gave me of an internal French war not yet finished was a useful historical experience. Up to this point I had imagined that peace in Europe simply meant peace. Everyone loved the Resistance and of course everyone loved the English who came to the rescue of France, won the war for them actually (with a little help from the lovable Resistance). I had no previous conception of the strains that occupation might leave behind. My next experience of foreign travel was very different and infinitely happier; but in one sense it was also a historical experience. I owed it to my father’s position in the government and it should therefore be firmly added to the credit account of his political career so far as I was concerned, given that at this age I was liable to grumble tiresomely about the disadvantages of being a Labour minister’s daughter, in contrast to the more conventionally social families of my friends.

  Alcide De Gasperi, the Prime Minister of Italy, and his wife, Signora Francesca, decided that the family would invite from England the daughter of a Catholic Labour minister to spend Christmas 1950 with them. The important element in this was the Catholicism: both De Gasperis were devout Catholics, and in fact lived in a modest flat in Rome very close to St. Peter’s. Signora De Gasperi certainly went to daily Mass, and probably the Prime Minister as well. Alcide De Gasperi was at this point nearly eighty, and had been the Christian Democrat Prime Minister of Italy since December 1945. With his dignified spare Nordic appearance, Signor De Gasperi was very different from the conventional British picture of a loquacious dark roly-poly Italian (he had been born in the Tyrol when it was part of Austria-Hungary). He certainly did not look his age. Nor did he appear in any way diminished by some of the ordeals he had endured during a long life, including time in prison at the hands of the Fascists, before he became the wartime founder of the (then illegal) Christian Democratic Party. Subsequently he was its first Prime Minister.