My History: A Memoir of Growing Up

by Antonia Fraser

  Here was a strongly religious man who was at the same time a convinced and ardent politician, standing for social security reform; as well as being demonstrably anti-Fascist he stood out against Communism in the context of the Cold War. I was deeply impressed by him on this level, but also by his gentleness towards ignorant people like myself. He was not without a sly sense of humour, cracking the odd joke about England’s Labour government which, once we had found some shared language, was quite sharp and to the point. In writing about politicians later, especially in my book on the Great Reform Bill, I used to reflect on that mixture of idealism and ambition common to the breed to which I had already been alerted by my parents. My mind sometimes went back to that Christmas in Italy and the supreme example set by Alcide De Gasperi.

  Signora De Gasperi ran everything in the house and seemed to do all the cooking as well. This was not entirely good news. She had her own ideas on how things should be, which included the fact that English girls needed to eat large lumps of meat daily otherwise they would become restive (like sporting dogs, I suppose). So I was condemned to these large and I have to say tasteless lumps while the rest of the family gorged on heavenly spaghetti…Signora De Gasperi’s moment of supreme control came at New Year. We travelled down to the south in a special train, with the people standing by to cheer their Prime Minister as we passed. We disembarked with Vesuvius in sight. The welcome was tumultuous. We were shown everything, including the great exhibition of the remains of Pompeii; well, not quite everything. At the behest of Signora De Gasperi, the famously rude sections (unsuitable for modest teenagers) were shrouded off from us. Privilege obviously had its disadvantages, at least in a Catholic country; it was not until a twenty-first-century exhibition of Pompeian remains in the British Museum that I was able to see at last those sights which Signora De Gasperi had denied a nice Catholic Socialist girl.

  On my return from France in September 1948, the problem of what I was going to do next became more acute. (It was felt that I was as yet too young to embark on job-seeking.) Luckily my best friend Lucy had also left Ascot. We attempted a session at the French Lycée in South Kensington. This had the advantage—for me—of being near her parents’ stately calm house in Onslow Square, where Arthur Pollen also had his studio. It was my aim to get inside this house and stay there as long as possible. When I managed to be present at the daily family lunch, my favourite moment was the emergence of “sculptor Pollen” from the studio, with both hands extended, politely rubbing them to indicate that he was not in a fit state to shake hands. It symbolized for me the working artist who also enjoyed a warm family life. Holidays in the Pollens’ house on Lambay Island off the coast of Dublin were even more agreeable, with a cowrie shell gathered from the beach serving as a souvenir of the same hospitable combination.

  Where the Pollens were concerned, I was developing that habit found in certain adolescents, probably members of large families, which I now call “cuckooing.” That is to say, I preferred another nest to my own. I don’t think this is altogether a bad thing: I have observed it since in members of my own family. It is after all only a rite of passage on the way to independent grown-up life, as the teenager discovers other preoccupations from those of her upbringing. In my case, it was the musical and artistic interests of the Pollens (I don’t remember a single word being spoken about politics) which impressed me. In this way I discovered the paintings and poetry of David Jones; his magic and mystic art was first encountered in the shape of a watercolour of an elephant in Lucy’s bedroom. Daphne’s uncle was the writer Maurice Baring, another Catholic convert; through the Pollens I discovered such novels as Cat’s Cradle, which I found satisfyingly full of Catholic sophistication.

  The French Lycée failed to enchant—a feeling that was mutual—due in our opinion to the monotonous attention to grammar. Already Lucy and I had embarked on a far more interesting endeavour. We were receiving private coaching from a tutor named Louis Bussell and learning about Gothic Architecture as well as History. Mr. Bussell’s Catholic ardour was an important element in all of this and enabled me to make a connection between the medieval Church and the Gothic, which was deeply exciting to one who had only recently become a Catholic. It also turned me in the direction of the early Middle Ages, after a brief but satisfying fling with Charlemagne, which would have consequences for my future academic career. “All is worthless after the thirteenth century!” Mr. Bussell was wont to exclaim with a mixture of pride and melancholy. In my Progress Book, my mother recorded that I was depressed by this, but she had not read my mood correctly. With my enthusiastic Catholicism, I found it exhilarating to consider, whereas, possibly by temperament as much as anything else, I didn’t agree.

  The study of History co-existed with my literary efforts, duly recorded in my pocket diaries. There are many starts and no finishes. A typical week would read: “Monday: Wrote. Tuesday: Wrote. Wednesday: Bought brown pillbox cocktail bag with mirror in lid, same size as gas mask case. Thursday: Wrote. Friday: Wrote. Saturday: Tried to make petticoat out of parachute silk from Butterick pattern on Popie’s sewing machine. Disaster.” (Parachute silk was unrationed.) My literary efforts were no more successful than the petticoat. I decided for example that the characters in a children’s adventure story written “to save the family finances” were unreal and abandoned it. Eighty pages of a book called The Lost Medal about a group of Catholics (heavily influenced by R. H. Benson, writer of such riveting historical novels as Come Rack! Come Rope! ) stopped there. In any case, my chief pleasure was not completion but listing book and chapter titles of infinite enticing variety: my literary pleasure, that is. Now that it was agreed that I would attend a crammer called Bendixen in Baker Street for some months before the Oxford Entrance Exam in October, perhaps I could study parties in the gap.

  The Bendixen plan came about when my mother noticed at last that I was hanging about the house rather a lot without visible employment, and concentrated her formidable intellect upon her eldest daughter. Now she openly questioned whether I had ever shown any capacity for serious hard work—such as was needed for any girl to get into Oxford in those days, since places in the few women’s colleges were so limited. The Dragon School had given me an advantage, she implied, and I had never been tested. She was of course quite right. What sensible schoolchild would do “serious hard work” if it was made unnecessary by a freak of early education? What Elizabeth hadn’t noticed was that I could and did do an infinite amount of hard work where my passions were involved, and my primary passion was History. That pleasant surprise lay ahead. All of this was in considerable contrast to the Labour politics which continued to dominate my parents’ lives.

  Just as NW11 was not quite NW3 on the social register, so Hampstead Garden Suburb was theoretically not quite Hampstead in the political sense. There was much talk about the “Hampstead Set” in the Labour government, prominent in it my mother’s old Oxford admirer, Hugh Gaitskell and his wife Dora. Hugh Gaitskell had a slightly pawky appearance, as though a chat with him might not include many laughs. In fact his set mouth and beady eyes, the natural air of a civil servant, belied his amiable and even dashing character: he had a lot of charm. Hugh Gaitskell also loved to dance, as would emerge much later in reports of his friendship with Ann Rothermere (subsequently married to Ian Fleming). All I knew was that he was my favourite of my parents’ politician friends. Thanks to him, a great moment in my life followed. I was sitting out, a seventeen-year-old wallflower at a Buckingham Palace dance where, invited as a Labour minister’s daughter, I knew no one. Suddenly Hugh Gaitskell swooped by in white tie and tails and whirled me away to the dance floor. We danced and danced. Like Cinderella, I felt myself transformed into the belle of the ball, even if the then rank of my royal prince was actually Minister of Economic Affairs.

  NW11 was in fact well represented in the Hampstead Set, which included the Gordon Walkers, also old Oxford friends (Patrick Gordon Walker was Under-Secretary at the Commonwealth Relations Office, lat
er Secretary of State), and in 1948 a younger couple called Wilson. Harold, ten years my parents’ junior at thirty-one, had just been made President of the Board of Trade. His wife Mary—“as I suppose we must now learn to call her,” wrote Elizabeth—had recently given a children’s party to which my younger siblings were invited. My mother’s faintly scornful comment on the hostess’s name in a school letter was due to the fact that Mrs. Wilson had apparently once been known by her first name of Gladys, but was now firmly Mary. It also expressed a certain private attitude of condescension to the Wilsons at the time.

  The Wilsons were not among my parents’ close friends, as I see from my diary record of dinners at 10 Linnell Drive. These were not frequent, although there was one never-to-be-forgotten occasion when the Prime Minister and his wife Violet indicated that they would accept a dinner invitation. Like everything to do with the Attlees—with one notable exception—the occasion was to be formal in the pre-war fashion which they seemed to prefer, which combined so strikingly with Clement Attlee’s strong feeling for social welfare and made him at the time an underrated leader. There were even dinner jackets. Both Elizabeth and Violet Attlee wore what looked like discreet velvet tea gowns.

  In the same way a little dance given for the Attlee daughter Alison, at No. 10 Downing Street, might have been hosted by any of the previous incumbents. The pleasant fair-haired very young man with blue eyes and regular features who danced with me would have fitted into any Conservative ballroom; I thought we got on well as he chose to tell me the history of No. 10 at some length as we danced. In fact he turned out to be called Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and was soon claimed, rather to my surprise, by an equally sweet-looking young American wife. (The future Tony Benn would have been in his mid twenties.)

  The exception in the public persona of Mr. Attlee was our memorable family visit to Chequers for a Boxing Day party. A vast Chinese screen was prominent in the great hall; behind it lurked an enormous fireplace. Lo and behold! From behind the screen stepped out the figure of Father Christmas! He looked immensely confident, even commanding, after his presumed Arctic journey: but…for a moment I thought the new spirit of internationalism had gone too far and he was actually a former enemy, a Japanese. Of course it was our host, Mr. Attlee, who in Father Christmas gear, with his dark slanting eyes under his scarlet hood, did have a certain Asiatic look. After that, I rejected all the fashionably snide Society stories about Mr. Attlee: “an empty taxi drew up at No. 10 Downing Street and Mr. Attlee got out” was typical. Anyone who could convincingly come down the chimney at Chequers and retain his dignity was a great man. That was quite apart from his unfailing kindness towards the children of his colleagues such as myself: there was none of that legendary taciturnity for which he became famous as a leader.

  When my parents’ dinners did occur, as for example on my father’s birthday in December 1948, they would typically feature the Gaitskells, Aidan Crawley with his celebrated war reporter wife Virginia Cowles, Douglas and Peggy Jay. Douglas Jay was a brilliant man who had in addition demonic good looks; despite this combination, or perhaps because of it, my pretty girl friends who stayed at Bernhurst were careful not to play Sardines with him during the after-dinner games, as one or two of them explained to me. I did not experience this; in any case I much preferred Peggy Jay, a high-minded woman with a strong conscience on which she acted. My real reservation about Douglas Jay, which applied to various of my parents’ political friends, was his arrogance.

  There was a famous utterance of my parents’ friend Sir Hartley Shawcross, then a Labour MP, in the House of Commons in 1946 during a debate on anti-Union laws: “we are the masters now.” As a matter of fact, like many famous utterances, it was misreported in the first place. Shawcross actually said: “We are the masters at the moment,” which has a very different connotation. Unaware of the truth, I did find the phrase summed up a certain Labour attitude that made me uneasy. My loyalty to Labour was as yet undiminished. But I was brought up on Frank’s belief in the Christian doctrine that “we are all of equal importance in the sight of God,” which, as he put it himself in his autobiography, animated his Socialism. So I was similarly disquieted by the notorious outburst of Jay himself. Once again I was misled by the press. There was no outburst. Jay, now Economic Secretary to the Treasury, had written in a pre-war book: “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.” It was now quoted in a much cruder form: “the man in Whitehall knows best.” With my ignorant but enquiring mind, I asked myself: was this really an expression of the philosophy of the beloved Labour Party?

  I fared much better being swayed by oratory, as the ignorant but enquiring tend to do. There were two significant occasions. Once my parents took me to hear their friend Richard Crossman give a rousing talk in Headington; I think they intended to excite me about politics. As it was, I was indeed excited by Dick Crossman, rather more than they expected or even hoped. His ebullient style, his flashing eyes behind their enormous glasses, his thick wedge of hair above all made him an evangelical figure. I did not realize that my parents considered him in some way unreliable, although they were very fond of him personally. My ingenuous enthusiasm took them by surprise.

  “Dick is a good speaker but he’s not Gladstone,” said Frank rather grumpily. Gladstone was one of his heroes. In private life, Dick was a man of enormous personal warmth as I discovered later when married to an MP, even if a Tory one; Hugh often remarked that he preferred the company of Dick Crossman to most of his fellow Tories.

  The second speech was given in a hall in Hampstead Garden Suburb by Victor Kravchenko, who had escaped from Soviet Russia and written a bestselling book, published in 1946, called I Chose Freedom. Ukrainian-born, Kravchenko had been a Soviet official, before requesting political asylum in the United States when he was posted to Washington. The Soviet Union demanded his immediate extradition, which President Roosevelt declined to carry out. Here was an even more captivating speaker, in the literal sense of the word. Coincidentally this experience came at roughly the same period as I was reading about the ordeal of the Hungarian Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty, tried and imprisoned under the Communist regime, with a false confession forced out of him by torture (having already been imprisoned during the war by the pro-Nazi authorities). Together with my parents’ resolute opposition to Stalinism, and their equally resolute adherence to Socialism, I was never in any danger of confusing the two; my Catholic loyalty, exemplified by the fate of Mindszenty, was the third element.

  I was certainly proof against the teasing of my uncle John Harman, my mother’s much-loved brother who conspicuously did not share her politics. For some reason, I had to have my tonsils out in a London nursing home when my parents were stuck in Oxford. Uncle John showed great kindness in visiting me (he was already a busy doctor and must have had a demanding schedule). One day he arrived and with a mischievous smile held out a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which had been published eighteen months previously.

  “Read this,” he said. “This is what will happen to this country if your parents have their way.” I had never heard of either George Orwell or Animal Farm. Reluctantly, I put aside salacious Forever Amber, which I could never have read at home but was being serialized in the Sunday Dispatch and obtainable at the nursing home; I had hidden it under the bedclothes when Uncle John arrived. Immediately I was hooked and Animal Farm remains the most gripping horror story I have ever read, which I have always rated much higher than 1984. But never for one moment did I think it had any relevance to the idealistic Socialist Britain of my parents.

  All this amounted to the fact that, at the age of sixteen, I was naturally interested in public affairs, while preferring action over issues to party politics. A few years later I would find with relief a straightforward cause about which it was possible to feel passionately and that was the abolition of capital punishment, acting
as an usherette at Gerald Gardiner’s Fifties meetings arguing for the reform. But I was also inquisitive (and already of course an inveterate newspaper reader). In short, I liked to know what was going on. It was in this mood of high-minded research that I decided to bunk off from the Lycée in December 1948 in order to attend the proceedings of the Lynskey Tribunal. This concerned possible corruption in political life and it involved a member of the Labour government.

  I had to queue for five hours to do so. To see the chief witness in the investigation, Sidney Stanley, a flamboyant adventurer if not outright conman, born in Poland as Solomon Wulkan, more than made up for the temporary inconvenience. In any case I was used to queuing and found my fellows outside Church Hall, Westminster much more interesting than those in my usual Golders Green queue for nylon stockings: they all had strong political views, I discovered, but no single person agreed with anyone else; there were quite a few Poles among them, but they were not necessarily on Stanley’s side. Most people disapproved of John Belcher, a junior minister at the Board of Trade who had been a railway clerk, for what seemed like shocking corruption in those austere days—a hotel in Margate! For his family as well! Horrors! With hindsight, Belcher’s well-meant efforts to involve business with Labour, never an easy task, seem more pathetic than corrupt. In the event there was no prosecution, but Belcher resigned from Parliament and went back to being a railway clerk. However, if you were not involved in the allegations of corruption, it was all good fun. Stanley proved to be what I can only describe as a Pinteresque character before his time, with something of the panache of Max in The Homecoming. You had to believe him with that wicked smile, those inviting gestures, that air of cheerful self-confidence. Perhaps he should have played the part of Max: at all events, a potentially fine actor was lost to the English stage when Stanley, transformed into Schlomo ben Chaim, spent the rest of his life in Israel.