My History

by Antonia Fraser

  The Harman grandparents who had produced this intelligent and attractive eldest child—Elizabeth was both these things in the opinion of her contemporaries, who elected her an Isis Idol in the undergraduate newspaper when she was at Oxford—were formidable people. Or so I found them in the course of our frequent visits to their house, Larksfield, on the top of Crockham Hill near Edenbridge in Kent.

  Grandfather was tall and terrifying as his blue eyes flashed above his white moustache. He had begun life as a Baptist, and even worked as a Baptist missionary at the Regent’s Park College before turning to medicine. Reluctantly he became a Unitarian to marry Miss Chamberlain, her family being prominent Unitarians; when I listened to him in his role of lay preacher at the local Unitarian chapel, I believe something of the old Baptist must have still been lurking. His style was lofty, almost manic, inspiring: as a preacher he carried the absolute conviction and excitement that comes from knowing you are in the right, with Someone Very Powerful not to say Almighty behind you (or rather above you) in case of any trouble. Many years later, trying to recreate the speeches of Oliver Cromwell in my imagination in order to attempt his biography, I drew on my memories of Grandfather preaching—that certainty that you were on the right side.

  Nathaniel Harman was born in 1869 and did not marry till he was thirty-six. I have always supposed that this feeling of God-given patriarchal authority was something he carried over with him from the Victorian era: since it was nothing that I would encounter with my own father, with time I was grateful for the experience, and not only as a clue to the oratorical style of Oliver Cromwell. All the same I could understand why even my bold, fearless mother was frightened of him.

  Grannie in contrast was small, but she was also frightening if in a more intimate way. Perhaps it was the fact that the pair were addressed as Mother and Father—such coldly descriptive words—which worried me, whose own parents were more sentimentally known as Mummy and Dada (the latter being Irish and what my father had called his own father). But if Grannie was small, she was also robust, with sturdy legs in brown stockings; a black straw was perched on top of her dark hair, as it seemed to me at all seasons. Here undoubtedly was a strong character, as we quickly recognized. When Thomas forgot to write her a thank-you letter for his Christmas present, she sent him nothing the next year except a note explaining the reason for its absence. It ended: “You are in my thoughts nonetheless”: this was more disquieting than comforting.

  Grannie also brooked no opposition when it came to domestic rituals like washing up. On one occasion I adopted, apparently, a slapdash approach to cleaning the breakfast china. This was the famous blue-and-white willow ware which commemorated a Chinese legend in which a rich mandarin’s daughter elopes with his secretary; when he pursues the couple on to a bridge, they are turned into lovebirds, fluttering forever beyond his reach. In vain I tried to explain that I had been busy working out the story (which was true). I was sentenced to do the whole thing again “until it is clean.” “Perhaps it will never be clean,” I replied cheekily. “Just like the Augean stables.” I had just learnt about the Labours of Hercules and saw an opportunity to show off. Grannie did not answer. Her manner indicated that this particular labour would in fact be completed and pretty soon if she had anything to do with it.

  Many years later, I acquired a copy of Grandfather’s poems from the Nonconformist Dr. Williams’s Library which was downsizing its stock. I found a romantic love poem, “True Heart,” written by Nat to Katie when their own children were “a brood of rising youth.” He explained their courtship—that of an established doctor to a young woman who was an aspiring doctor herself (and then abandoned her career for a husband and family):

  I called, you came—

  Leaving your wandering thoughts

  Of men and measures great

  Installed from infancy to strength

  Of womanhood…

  There were other references to her long dark hair and bright eyes. For the first time I pictured my awesome grandparents as they had once been, lovebirds of a sort, fluttering above a bridge.

  I never knew my paternal grandparents, Thomas Pakenham, Earl of Longford and Lady Mary Julia Child Villiers, daughter of the Earl of Jersey. The latter died shortly after I was born, and my grandfather was killed leading his men at Gallipoli in 1915. This tragedy was certainly the central fact of my father’s youth—he was nine years old at the time—and continued to weigh with him in countless ways; his attitudes to war, militarism, military service and pacifism could all be traced, I believe, to this moment when the little boy had to understand that his beloved father, his protector, had vanished for ever. “On this dark battlefield of fog and flame Brigadier-General Lord Longford…and other paladins fell,” Winston Churchill would write in his history of the First World War. My father would intone the words to his children: the emphasis was on “paladins.”

  His grief was underlined by the fact that his mother did not like him. Frank was the second son in a family of six children, and the best defence of my grandmother’s behaviour—which several of his sisters confirmed to me when I questioned them—was the siblingesque comment from one of them: “Well, you see, Frank was a very irritating child.” The truth of it, I believe, was something different. It was not so much that my grandmother did not love annoying Frank Pakenham, as that she did love, and love passionately his elder brother Edward, who inherited the Longford title at the age of twelve on the death of his father. It was the kind of strong aristocratic-maternal predilection which could be felt atavistically for an eldest son.

  There were many stories of her indifference—for there was no cruelty here, just a lack of interest—to her clever second son. Rumbustious, irritating, uppish my father may well have been, his uninteresting destiny to be that of an impecunious relation, possibly working in a bank, at any rate unknown to history (a remarkably false prophecy). But clearly Frank had a mind of great concentration. For one thing, from an early age he was keenly interested in politics; he was the kind of child who delights in asking the grown-ups searching questions, and perhaps we can discern some of the seeds of the irritation in that fact.

  While he was still at prep school, Frank examined his mother keenly about the German Peace Proposals in a letter home: “as I only caught a hasty glimpse of them in Mr. Stubbs’ paper before he took it away. From what I see,” wrote young Frank, “it looked as if they won the war.” It was significant that Frank would cite his beloved father’s “patience and gentleness in response to my interminable questionings” as his chief personal memory of him. He recalled their countless walks—which ended of course abruptly when he was nine—and his eager enquiries: “Is Bonar Law a good man? Could a British battlecruiser beat a German battleship?,” with the odd bloodthirsty question thrown in: “Could you shoot a man on that hill from here?”

  Mary Julia exhibited a very different attitude. Frank recorded that his mother would not let him try for a scholarship at Eton, on the grounds that it would take the bread out of the mouths of the needy—although there was a tradition of Oppidan Scholars, honoured but unfunded, which would surely have been appropriate. This indifference to her younger son’s undoubted intelligence reached its most acute form in her reaction to Frank’s final degree at Oxford. Travelling in a train with her best friend Olive Baring, Lady Longford started to scour The Times for the Oxford results. After a while, she threw down the paper in disgust: “Oh really, it’s too bad, Frank hasn’t even got a degree.” She had read through the list of Seconds, Thirds and lastly Fourths. It was left to Olive Baring to take the newspaper from her hands and, after looking at it, observe gently: “But here is Frank’s name. He’s got a First.”

  The ancestral home, then known as Pakenham Hall, was in the South of Ireland, not far from Mullingar. Frank wrote later that Ireland was always home to him and London never was. In fact his widowed mother brought up her children mainly in a large country house in Oxfordshire, North Aston Hall. Here he played tennis for the co
unty, as he would proudly recall when defeating his children with cunning sliced shots low over the net. He hunted as his father had before him (my grandfather was a Master of Foxhounds, which meant that hunting was a sacred subject, not to be criticized). But it was the Ireland of the holidays that captured Frank’s imagination. Long before Socialism and Catholicism preoccupied him—to say nothing of his feelings for my mother—his heart went out to the Irish, the terrible desolate history of their country leading inexorably to fierce Irish nationalism. As a young don, his first book—his best book—was Peace by Ordeal concerning the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.

  It could perhaps be described as a quixotic interest in that, as an aristocratic family, the Pakenhams were Protestant Anglo-Irish Ascendancy…Somewhere in the past—it would be years before I learnt exactly when—a house and estate previously called Tullynally had been transformed into Pakenham Hall. It was a subsequent transformation at the end of the eighteenth century which turned Pakenham into the Regency Gothic castle that entranced my father—and would in turn entrance me. Frank wrote lyrically about the view from the top of the tower—“all mauve and deep green”—in a rare literary reaction to landscape. It was indeed the castle’s elevated position in the middle of Ireland which made it special for the young then and later: high above the bog, and near to the Lough Derravaragh, setting for the legend of the Children of Lir, who were turned into wild swans by their stepmother.

  If 108 Harley Street needed five, then Pakenham Hall needed fourteen indoor servants, it seems, and twenty gardeners. My grandmother was herself brought up in aristocratic splendour as the daughter of a famous Tory hostess, Margaret Countess of Jersey, a founder of the Primrose League. The proverbial energy of her mother meant the emergence of a shy young woman in Mary Julia Villiers. As her sister Beatrice once told me: “Our mother [Lady Jersey] had seen every play, read every book, knew every important person, we never felt any urgent need to do those things since she had done them for us.”

  Nor did this splendid woman leave the scene early. Great-Grandmamma, as she was known, lived until 1945 (having been held in the arms of the famous Duke of Wellington as a baby). This enabled Frank to visit her in the course of the Second World War. She told him how surprising she found the presence of the Russians on our side: “You see, the first war I remember was the Crimean War and we had them against us then.” I came to treasure this link with history, when such links became a private obsession of mine; she died when I was thirteen and there were frequent visits to her at Middleton Stoney near Oxford. Thus, by exaggerating only a little for dramatic effect, I could claim to know someone well who knew the Duke of Wellington.

  Returning to Mary Julia, this shyness, or perhaps reserve was a fairer word, was only enhanced by the tragedy of her widowhood. And then there were the tortures of rheumatoid arthritis of the years before her death at the age of fifty-six. (Brigadier Tom must have carried some gene of longevity since, of their six children, one died at the age of one hundred and two, two reached their mid nineties, and one was eighty-nine.)

  Mary Julia became remote, so remote that her visits to the nursery were rare events indeed. Later she explained this to one of her daughters: “You see, whenever I entered the nursery, the nanny and nursery maids all stood up. And remained standing up until I left. It seemed so tiring for them to do this, so I kept away from the nursery.” No other course of action—asking the nurses to sit down, for example—had remotely crossed her mind. This was certainly not an upbringing from which a self-reliant male, in the modern practical sense of the word, could expect to emerge. Nor did Frank confound this expectation. As he himself admitted in his autobiography, he had never made a bed nor cleaned when he joined the army at the beginning of the war.

  In short, my father not only could not boil the proverbial egg—perhaps that was not so unusual for someone of his generation and background—but he could not reliably boil a kettle. When my mother had a major operation in her eighties, considerable care was taken to instruct Frank in routine maintenance, while he lurked alone in their small Chelsea flat. There was talk of a cup of tea being successfully made and some pride on the part of the instructor. “Yes, I have had a cup of tea. More than one,” confirmed my father with careful attention to the truth. It turned out that he had in fact paid a twice-daily visit to the workman’s café up the road.

  Clothes were frequently a disaster area. A handsome young man with rumpled thick brown curly hair—I can still remember the curls which gave way early to the magnificent, unmistakable, naturally tonsured head so beloved of caricaturists—he matched the rumpled curls with his rumpled clothes. Buttons escaped joyfully from buttonholes, just supposing there was a full complement of buttons there in the first place. Certainly there was always the danger of an undone button when Frank was making speeches from the platform during the General Election of 1945; we children took with sangfroid the fact that it might be necessary to admonish him: “Flies, Dada.”

  In total contrast to this charming, rumpled person was the exquisitely neat Elizabeth Harman who went up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1926 and subsequently read Greats like Frank (having changed from English). Much loved by her parents, for all their rigid style of parenting, much encouraged, she had the self-confidence of the beloved first child. Pictures of her at Oxford, in her Isis Idol days, show a graceful figure, taller than her mother but only by a little, certainly far below my father’s six foot one and a half (a height we learnt to reel off with respect, not forgetting the half).

  My first memories of her, not so many years afterwards, when she was in her late twenties, were of brightness, even sharpness. Her elegant short straight nose, for example, stuck out sharply into the world, indicating that she was on the watch—in my case for wrongdoing, mainly carelessness and slapdash untidiness. (In my Progress Book, this was regularly ascribed to my Pakenham inheritance.) Her hair was black, her eyes were brilliant blue and their gaze was certainly sharp enough. I’m not sure how classically beautiful she was, but Elizabeth Harman was immensely pretty, irresistibly attractive and above all she had energy and optimism. People enjoyed the company of “Harman,” as male undergraduates rather snobbishly called the few female ones that they condescended to know.

  The first meeting of this disparate pair, Frank and Elizabeth, became the stuff of legend. Or perhaps fairy story would be a better description. The story came in two episodes. In the first episode: On a summer’s night a beautiful Oxford undergraduate wandered down a corridor during a ball at Magdalen College and was amazed to find a large figure, dressed in the blue-and-yellow uniform of that (now notorious) club the Bullingdon, slumped across a chair fast asleep. The face, she remembered sixty years later, was “of monumental beauty, as if some Graeco-Roman statue—the Sleeping Student maybe—had been dressed up in modern clothes by some group of jokers.” She wondered idly what kind of girl would have left such a partner fast asleep.

  The second episode took place the next night. This time our popular heroine was at a ball in New College (her current beau was the future leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell). Shown into a room in the Garden Quad, who should be lying along the sofa “fastly and serenely asleep” but her vision of the night before. The spirited Elizabeth did not hesitate. Bending over the vision, she planted a kiss on his forehead. “Now kiss me,” she said as the vision opened his large brown eyes. “I daren’t,” he replied, before promptly falling asleep again.

  One might add as a footnote to this that if my mother had found my father on a sofa for any number of balls, any number of nights, he would probably have been asleep. Little did she know at that point that there would be a myriad of occasions in years to come when the happy couple would spend the evening with Frank sleeping sweetly on their own sofa, a book fallen down beside him—frequently the Bible in later years—while Elizabeth read some work of History. (The ability to fall asleep whatever the company was an endearing trait—or so I came to regard it when I found that I had inherited it mys
elf.)

  Yet after this fabled beginning, actual romance took some time to develop. The future parents did not share the same friends, nor for that matter politics at that date. My mother was starting to investigate the possibilities of Socialism, animated, I believe, by a general desire to continue the philanthropic tradition of her forebears: philanthropy was always a prominent characteristic of dissenters, such as the Chamberlains and the Kenricks (her maternal grandmother, the wife of Arthur Chamberlain, was a Kenrick). My father came of traditional Tory stock, both the Pakenhams and the Villiers being conventional Conservatives. The marriage of Julia, daughter of Sir Robert Peel, to the future Earl of Jersey in 1841 meant that Frank was actually descended from a Tory Prime Minister. As a bright young man fascinated by politics, he set his sights on working in the Conservative Central Office.

  The girls my father knew were certainly not at Oxford, or if they were, it was not as undergraduates. They were in fact the young women who came from the rather narrow social class in which he grew up. They were definitely not intellectuals in the way that my mother was naturally educated to be. Typical of them was the high-spirited and eccentric Maureen Guinness with her blonde hair and huge hypnotic blue eyes (and her Guinness fortune). Frank was extremely fond of Maureen: later she would be appointed my godmother. But as a potential admirer, those timid words—“I daren’t”—summed up Frank’s attitude. Inhibition, not too difficult to trace back to his awkward relationship with his mother, meant that he remained a clumsy suitor, if he was a suitor at all.