My History: A Memoir of Growing Up

by Antonia Fraser

  Later I boasted to my parents what I had done: apart from anything, I needed a letter of excuse for the Lycée. In my mother I saw a certain admiration for my boldness struggle with parental disapproval for skipping school. In the end, parental disapproval won.

  Elizabeth said: “You know I can’t possibly write a note for you which isn’t true.” I made no comment. Like any girl of spirit, I had perfected my mother’s clear, flowing signature years ago and my little portable typewriter, my sixteenth-birthday present, would do the rest.

  Frank looked up from his reading and merely said in his mild way: “John Belcher is an unfortunate man. He deserves our pity.”

  The spectacle of corruption in politics, the law-givers negligently tossing the laws out of the window, however petty, is always upsetting. This was my glimpse of it at an early stage of my personal interest in politics, as opposed to the political background endowed by both my parents; it was all a long way from the intellectual arguments of the Hampstead (Garden Suburb) Set. In my case, I must admit that I felt more fascinated by the characters involved, especially Sidney Stanley, and their motivation, than the tricky delineation of political corruption. It would be possible to deduce from this that I was a lawyer manquée: certainly I have retained a fondness for attending trials out of curiosity and reading law reports, also deriving enormous vicarious pleasure from the flourishing careers of family members who have gone to the Bar. But I believe the truth is slightly different: a biographer has something in common with a barrister making a case, and it was the biographical impulse which finally was driving me.

  One possibility never remotely crossed my mind (either then or since) and that was becoming an active politician myself. I suppose having both a mother and a father who aspired to enter Parliament, and a first husband who was an active MP, might have inclined me either way. In fact there was no question of me being persuaded by outside factors like these. I had always known exactly what I wanted to do, which was to write History, although very far indeed from knowing how to do it.

  This did not preclude me from feeling fascinated by the political process. I particularly enjoyed attending debates in the House of Lords when my father first joined, although it should be remarked that members were still strictly men only in the late Forties and most of the Fifties. One was used to serried ranks of male faces in dark suits when not in red robes and white wigs. This was in contrast to the House of Commons where Joan Vickers, the elegant middle-aged Tory MP elected in 1955, who displayed an immaculately coiffed head of silver-blue hair, could never have been mistaken for a man. Then there was the unmistakable voice of the Bevanite Labour MP Barbara Castle. It was a high voice and rather screechy to the critical ear, but then what else could she do to be heard above the deep baying of the male hounds at her heels? Women peers were not actually allowed into the Lords until after the Life Peerages Act of 1958, that act provoked into being by Tony Benn, whereas they had been admitted to the Commons for the first time forty years earlier. But then women were not yet admitted as members of the Oxford Union in the Fifties: even charismatic future leaders like Shirley Catlin, later Williams.

  In the Lords at that date, as a peer’s eldest unmarried daughter, I was allowed to sit in the gallery among the peers’ wives. I celebrated my status by sending my roving eye across the serried ranks of noble faces. I had in mind a diary entry around this time about my future husband: “Mine must be Catholic or convertible, a peer if possible, clever, intellectual and literary, interested in his surroundings. Either Labour or amenable, having a house in town and ancient family seat, fond of children and wanting them.” Somehow I doubt the sincerity of the next sentence, given the people who were my current heroes: “He need not be good looking, must be a nice person of moral worth.” I added: “Also wealthy and tall.” There spoke my beating sixteen-year-old heart.

  There was little positive sign of this paragon in the House of Lords of the Forties although I did rather fancy the look of my father’s friend Victor Rothschild, who had apparently chosen to sit as a Labour peer. I also understood him to be a war hero for his work with unexploded bombs. (I had forgotten to add “courage in war” to my diary requirements.)

  When I came to study the early-nineteenth-century Parliament, I became aware how privileged I had been in my youth to sit right there inside the House of Lords and House of Commons: the Whig ladies who were keen on politics had to lean forward and peer down a sort of ventilator and in any case the old Houses of Parliament, before the fire of 1834, were intolerably stuffy, crammed and uncomfortable. The parliamentary debates—in both houses—were crucial in the cause of Reform and researching; I read and reread the Hansard accounts, trying to picture them and recreate them in my mind. The spur to my imagination was the memory of those early sessions.

  Life at the Bendixen crammer was not quite so glamorous, and in fact consisted of a lot of concentrated hard work, but it was not entirely without its pleasures. This was because Bendixen was next door to the Classic cinema in Baker Street. In those days, no questions were asked, and no new ticket requested, if you elected to spend all day in the cinema, attending three or four performances of the same film. It was vital that the prices were so much cheaper than in the West End, where we could only afford the noxious front row. (As a result, the memory of the unhappy looming face of Richard Attenborough in close-up as a tobacconist’s son sent to an exclusive public school in The Guinea Pig disturbs me to this day.) At the Classic, Lucy and I were able to make a thorough study of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) as part of our larger project of investigation into the career of Gary Cooper.

  This was so important that Lucy actually telephoned Linnell Drive—a rare occurrence, our single telephone being in a tiny lobby under the stairs—to give me some news from a magazine centred on movie gossip. Gary Cooper had been asked why he had been at the top of his profession so long. “People with big feet is hard to move,” he replied. This, as Lucy pointed out, effectively contradicted the dreadful rumour that Gary Cooper was dumb. It had been derived from some other gossip magazine, which we would now never buy again.

  The Oxford exam came, proved very difficult according to my diary, and then there was the prospect of the interview. In theory, not everyone got an interview, but it was obviously unlikely that Lady Margaret Hall, my mother’s old college to which she remained much attached, would not give her daughter a chance. Besides, Elizabeth herself had taken a keen interest in my campaign, as she saw it, but which was frankly quite as much her own.

  First of all, she instructed me to read Arnold Toynbee, and not the abridged version, by the way. “Read the whole thing, Antonia, and at the interview when they ask you what you have been reading, be careful to make references to passages which are not in the abridged version. That means you had better read the abridged version as well and make notes. You can do it.”

  Yes, the quick reader she had involuntarily created (she always said she was not a particularly quick reader herself) could do it. But I didn’t much want to do it. I preferred Lytton Strachey to Toynbee, although I had enough sense to keep that judgement to myself. As it was, I plastered my interview with interpolations from Toynbee. Afterwards I realized my behaviour had been like that of Bertie Wooster who, when told in advance that a certain attractive young lady admired Tennyson, managed only to read The Princess. His conversation with her at dinner led at all points inexorably to quotations from that poem, while the young lady tried in vain to invoke other works: “You do seem to be fond of The Princess,” was her final comment.

  Elizabeth’s second instruction was along different lines.

  “Antonia, you will read PPE,” she said.

  “Not History?”

  “No. All girls nowadays want to read History. That is, if they don’t read English. I want you to get a scholarship. Hardly any girls read PPE. If you take the History exams, but say you hope to read PPE at university, you will probably get an award.”

  Dutifully, I did as she sugge
sted. And sure enough, the great day came when an orange paper telegram, prepaid reply possible by telephone, arrived at 10 Linnell Drive. “Lady Margaret Hall offers Exhibition…” I dashed into the tiny dark lobby, seized the instrument and dictated my reply at high speed which went something like this: “Yes, yes, dear Lady Margaret Hall, I would love to accept your kind offer, in fact I would love to come to Oxford altogether…” At this point the sour voice of the telephone operator to whom I was dictating these rapturous words broke in: “You have used up all the prepaid message. Do you want to pay for more?”

  There was one question that I had never thought to ask during all this time: what is PPE? Now I had about ten months to find out before I went up to Oxford in the following October. My airy plans for the next year did not however include making simple academic enquiries like that.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BRINGING MYSELF OUT

  “Miss Pakenham is taking her debut seriously,” wrote the Bangkok Post. “She has given up her job to devote more time to social affairs.” I was seventeen and a half. I still don’t know why the Bangkok Post elected to share this news with its readers. Did the fact that my father was Minister of Civil Aviation in the Labour government really make this a news item in faraway Bangkok? At all events the tattered cutting sent by some well-wisher overseas was preserved in my Progress Book.

  Unfortunately, although Miss Pakenham was undoubtedly taking her debut seriously, the rest of the world was not. In particular, Elizabeth was evidently irritated that as an active Socialist and a Socialist minister’s wife, she was being plagued by me to act the part of a debutante’s mother. One can see her point—or rather I can see her point now; at the time I merely thought being a debutante was an enchanting idea, something that admittedly needed a bit of work to achieve. I had hoped that my mother would do some of this work (as other people’s mothers did) but if for some strange reason of her own she was unwilling to do so, I would apply myself to the task.

  I should make it clear, with regard to my mother’s Socialism, that she was not irritated by the Court itself let alone the monarchy; she was a Socialist but not a revolutionary and enjoyed the royal outings to which Frank’s political offices entitled her. (This was incidentally long before she became famous as a royal biographer: Elizabeth’s ambitions were still political in the late Forties, and as mentioned earlier, she would stand for Parliament for the last time in 1950.) It sums up my parents’ attitudes, which were far from exceptional for Labour ministers at the time, that their children went to private schools of one sort or another at some stage; all the four boys, for example, went to Ampleforth. On the other hand we used the National Health Service from the start. When it came to so-called presentation at Court it was the frivolous work involved which appalled Elizabeth, when there were so many much more interesting things to do. She after all had allowed herself to be presented after her marriage, photographed in the full Thirties rig of long white dress, train and ostrich feathers (since the war, reduced to afternoon dress plus hat). Someone had sent her the news clipping, adding the jokey comment by hand: “All I learnt at Stoke,” referring to her high-minded WEA lecturing in the Midlands. To Elizabeth’s credit, she stuck the clipping in her photo album.

  Elizabeth did not understand that her frivolity was my serious glamour—the glamour of the aristocratic past brought to life. I expected to meet the new Whigs, the new Lady Georgiana Spencer, future Duchess of Devonshire (from reading The Grand Whiggery I might have remembered that the original Georgiana was married off on her seventeenth birthday). Then my favourite fiction figured as well. An intense study of Jane Austen and Trollope, whom I loved even better, had left me hungry for Society, as I imagined it to be. In Trollope, for example, it will be remembered that since Dragon School days onwards I had identified myself with Lady Glencora Palliser of Can You Forgive Her?—she who inadvertently introduced me to the real facts of life. At the age of seventeen, as a role model I still preferred her to Dorothea in Middlemarch.

  There had not been many Whigs about in the first job I managed to get after I had secured that place at Oxford in the autumn. But I was determined to earn money, and be my own mistress in that respect (hoping to spend most of it on clothes) since there didn’t seem to be any other money around at home. The job was as a typist in a pool in the accounts department of a leading advertising agency called Pritchard Woods, off Bond Street. The typists’ room was our world: I never had any contact with the suave gentlemen who were actually creating the advertisements for which we typed out the bills. They wore suits, had thick hair slicked back, and seemed much preoccupied if one passed them in the corridor. I like to think that the ability to type an intricate bill correctly with six carbons beneath is one which will stand me in good stead when some kind of retrograde anti-technical revolution arrives, and with it once again the need for such things. And I suppose I must have carried out my work more or less correctly, otherwise there would have been trouble. What I remember chiefly is the rich private life which was outlined by my fellow workers every morning, all married as I recall it, and one at least trying for the baby which would release her from the workplace.

  I was never asked about my private life, out of sensitivity I believe, because it must have seemed rather unlikely from my appearance that I actually had one—at any rate one that would interest them. These were smartly dressed, well-made-up women at all times, whatever their difficulties and whatever the journeys they had to take to reach the office. Compared to them I was a hobbledehoy.

  My next job should have done something to solve that particular problem. This was selling hats in the ground-floor department of Fenwick’s in Bond Street. Here I was known as Miss Tony, the only time I have ever permitted this sobriquet: in this case I had no choice as it was simply announced that no one could work in Fenwick’s hat department with such a ridiculous long name as Antonia. I certainly had a very jolly time as Miss Tony. The trouble was that, as time passed, it got rather too jolly. I was by now beginning to have nice London friends, to add to my nice Catholic ones.

  First of all, I got to know Raymond Bonham Carter, then doing National Service but stationed in London at the Guards Barracks. This was arranged by my parents via his parents, the formidable Lady Violet Bonham Carter, and her husband Sir Maurice, always a kindly man in the short conversations one managed to have with him. Lady Violet had a long, horsey face which she had a habit of sticking close to yours, while she confided fascinating things in a low and thrilling voice that seemed to derive from some marvellous society before the First War; unfortunately I was generally too frightened to listen. She was the daughter of Prime Minister Asquith, a fact of which one was not kept in ignorance. Raymond too was suitably proud of this descent.

  I found him the most agreeable company; as a person he was a credit to the sort of super-intelligent conversation he had listened to all his life, without any of the loftiness of his mother. So it was natural that I should confide in him about the two problems I had with my life at Fenwick’s. One was the need to sit down from time to time due to my uncomfortable court shoes. The other was the need to get away for the weekend instead of working on Saturdays, in order, as I put it, to go to hunt balls. The latter need was pure fantasy on my part. What hunt balls? I had never been to a hunt ball. But somehow I believed that, if I were free, invitations would waft magically in my direction. Raymond was extremely sympathetic.

  “My grandfather, Mr. Asquith, passed a law saying that shopworkers had a right to sit down. Insist on your rights!” I didn’t quite do that. I did the next best thing, which was to confide in a beguiling man from the Evening Standard Diary who seemed interested in anything I had to say.

  The first result was an entry headed: SITS AND NO SATS SAYS MISS TONY. The second result was a ticking-off from the head of the department, who took the opportunity to suggest that where my unkempt long curly hair was concerned, I should have what she called a “Fork-me-all-off.” Then I would at least look the part of
a smart saleslady. It seemed wise to do as she suggested; so the third result was a head of soignée but unflattering short curly hair, visible in photographs of me aged seventeen, which if it was revenge on the part of the head vendeuse must have been a satisfying one.

  The next episode was not resolved, unfortunately, with a mere haircut. As part of my parents’ new Catholicism, which they were taking so seriously, they had purchased tickets for a Catholic charity event called the Rose Ball. This was a remarkable departure from their usual parsimony (as I saw it, although practical economics might have been a fairer description). At all events, here was a rare opportunity for them to behave as philanthropic Catholics and please me at the same time. Elizabeth even secured a partner for me, a suitable Catholic young man, the son of the painter Simon Elwes, grandson of the diplomat Lord Rennell. Dominic Elwes was eighteen. He had fair hair and brown eyes, and was startlingly good-looking. Besides that, he had extraordinary charm.

  In view of Dominic’s subsequent career, which included elopement with a beautiful girl, and an eventual sad suicide at the age of forty-four, it is easy to see now that a suitable Catholic young man was the last thing that he was. At the time, I had some warnings of his erratic but romantic nature since he took me to meals at the Hungaria restaurant, merrily signing the bill “Simon Elwes.” It was the kind of thing that many young people might secretly want to do, but wouldn’t have the courage. Dominic Elwes certainly had daring spirit enough to do anything that suited him. I was bewitched by him without being in love. Alas, my brief diary entries show that our meetings were generally “unsatisfactory,” which referred to unpunctuality and even outright forgetfulness. But then Dominic and his friends did rescue me from Fenwick’s, leaving me to concentrate, in the words of the Bangkok Post, on “social affairs.”