Our own house was far from being a Victorian Gothic palace, although there were some splendid examples of that venerable style nearby in Northmoor Road and the Banbury Road. Number 8 Chadlington Road was in fact built in 1911. But there was a sturdy charm to these later North Oxford houses, which were comfortable—give or take the discomforts of wartime—without being grand. For one thing all the houses were endowed with what would have been seen as large gardens and, in true villa-style, were not attached to their neighbours.
There was even a tiny circular drive outside the front door with its dolphin knocker (still in place at the time of writing) but it was on the same small scale as Vicky—for Vixen—our beloved corgi, whose delight was to race round and round it, yapping angrily and tearing at any vulnerable trousered legs that presented themselves. The arrival of Vicky was, incidentally, an early example of royalism on my mother’s part. Then officially a republican, she informed us that corgis were the choice of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. We wondered, without ever getting an answer, whether the Palace corgis also attacked the Palace postmen, and if so, whether the Little Princesses had to sacrifice their clothing coupons to replace those ruined trousers.
This deprivation was something we took for granted, along with the deep cold of all the houses in North Oxford—any complaints were liable to be met by the unfriendly but frequently repeated enquiry: “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Then again, perhaps our house was especially cold, due first of all to Elizabeth’s natural puritanism—some women were said to greet food-rationing with joy, and if true, she was one of them. Fish was a staple: we were always being told that we lived in an island surrounded by fish. Consequently it was unrationed. Unfortunately after that all the fish in our house (which would now be served at vast prices in elegant restaurants) had to be draped in a thick white tasteless sauce, making it almost indistinguishable from the perpetual semolina and rice puddings which followed. With a tiny weekly meat ration and hardly any butter, floury potatoes accounted for the rest of our diet in another phrase I came to hate, “for the duration”: the Latin durus for hard or harsh seemed about right. Of course, we were never hungry, unlike most people in the world; on the other hand the modern attitude to food, the thrill of cooking, the zest of it all, never remotely touched our house during my mother’s long life.
After Elizabeth’s puritanism came Frank’s total indifference to all matters of material comfort. I have two wartime domestic images of him: one, indoors, is of a man sitting in the corner of the freezing, deserted dining room—officially abandoned in favour of the kitchen since the beginning of the war—reading a book, marking it with his vigorous pencil, as he always did (no matter whether he actually owned the book). Evidently Frank preferred peace to warmth. The outdoor picture, where the temperature might well be warmer, is exactly the same: Frank sits in a deckchair and marks his book with his strong pencil as he reads it. So characteristic and ingrained was this trait of his that, after his death, I was able to identify a copy of the New Testament left behind in the House of Lords library, without an owner’s name, but full of those ritual stabbings.
To us, in his deckchair or perhaps doing his vigorous exercises on which he prided himself, our father was an essentially benign presence. In fact, when I was very young I had a shrewd suspicion that he might be Gentle Jesus, as in the hymn, because he was so Meek and Mild. Like Jesus, he did not seem particularly concerned with earthly things, that is to say, his children. The great zoologist Solly Zuckerman, another Oxford friend, liked to tell a story by which an undergraduate rang the bell at our front door, only to have my father shout: “Come in quickly. Otherwise they’ll all fall out.” This was amusing to relate but inherently unlikely: I could not imagine my father being in the slightest bit concerned about the possibility.
All the inevitable corrections of childhood were carried out with a certain zest by our mother. She was occasionally known to pursue flagrant wrongdoers with a hairbrush, although there is no record of her actually catching them—or using it. Oddly enough, the sharp, competitive mother of my childhood transposed into an exceptionally charming, mild old lady, if not exactly meek. In contrast, our benign father could be a vigorous, not to say short-tempered debater in the family circle in later years, no more pleased than anyone else at having his will crossed. In seventy years of marriage, I suppose that they had leant into each other like two trees entwining over an arch and even their temperaments had begun to intermingle. (Like Ovid’s story of Baucis and Philemon, the couple who ended their lives turned into two neighbouring trees, as a reward for helping some gods in disguise.)
The public image of my parents at this time was somewhat different, as I learnt when I came across an old copy of the Tatler and Bystander carefully preserved by my mother, along with election addresses and other political memorabilia. Rather incongruously for the Society magazine in question, the headline, dated December 1941, featured Frank and Elizabeth as “Both Socialists” and “Both Labour Candidates”—for Oxford City and Kings Norton. Mr. Pakenham, it informed us, formerly worked in the Conservative Research Department, then Christ Church, and now was personal assistant to Sir William Beveridge. This reminded me that throughout this period my mother in theory retained her pre-war political ambitions while my father, acknowledged as candidate for Oxford whenever (and if ever) there was another election, was working hard on what became known as the Beveridge Report. Subsequently he would give two hundred and fifty lectures on the subject of Social Insurance.
“Very exciting!” I wrote in my pocket diary. “Dada is going to abolish Want.” Rather less exciting were the formal teas we had to have with Sir William Beveridge and his stern future wife, Mrs. Janet Mair, at University College. All sides were uneasy; one got the strong impression that Sir William would have been far happier entertaining Want itself than facing the fairly graceless children of his assistant.
As for Frank’s other activities, the philanthropy—particularly towards prisoners, for which Frank became famous in later years, or even infamous in some circles of the press—was already in evidence. One of my earliest encounters with the puzzling behaviour of grown-ups was the result of a visit by a former student of my father’s at Christ Church. He came to tea. We were told we must be especially nice to him since he was now an inmate of the Littlemore Lunatic Asylum. This wasn’t so far from Singletree where we then lived, and in fact our afternoon walk often took us past Littlemore where we tried to catch glimpses of the “loonies” as being an interesting feature of the landscape. After the young man—gentle and polite throughout—departed, I asked my nanny why he was living in Littlemore. I was told that he had committed “arson.” And what might “arson” be? When Nanny explained, I was more baffled than ever, because surely the grown-ups would never ask someone who had done this to have tea with me. This was an advance warning of what would be a lifetime of Frank intermingling his existence—and occasionally his family’s—with the unfortunate. He recorded that his first visit to a prison was in January 1936 and I would imagine his last one would have been very shortly before his death nearly seventy years later.
Number 8 Chad, as it was always known, was the first place in my life where the word “home” began to have a solid, stable meaning. This was certainly not unconnected with the fact that I now had my own attic room, a cell in dimensions, but my own cell. (Thomas had the equivalent cell opposite; quite recently we were given a tour of our old house by the owners and, somewhat to their surprise, Thomas pointed out with freshly minted indignation that I had had—infinitesimally—the better cell.) For me, the passion I felt for this small space was mostly to do with the animal instinct for secrecy natural to members of large families. I believe this was where I first came unconsciously to define happiness as being alone in a room with a house full of people. There was in addition the slight stirring of the need for privacy by would-be creative people: what Auden called “The Cave of Making” where “domestic/noises and odour, the vast background of natural
/life are shut off.” It was a need which would become acute once I was of those who combined the life of a professional writer with that of a mother—and all at home. I sometimes wished I could attach the tiny private cell from 8 Chad on to the sides of my Notting Hill house.
The result of St. John’s enterprise was described in architectural books as a suburb—but how could North Oxford be a suburb? It was the centre of the world, so far as we were concerned. There were other areas within Oxford, with exotic names such as St. Ebbe’s and Jericho, but their remoteness was summed up by a careless remark of my mother’s about the inhabitants—“so poor that they vote Tory”—which she later explained as something called the lumpenproletariat. In 1940, I had the impression that all the grown-up inhabitants of North Oxford—that is to say, all my parents’ friends—were dons. Prominent among them were Lord David Cecil in Linton Road, Roy Harrod, like my father at Christ Church, with his nearby house in St. Aldate’s, Maurice Bowra at Wadham and Isaiah Berlin at All Souls. Similarly my mother’s friends were dons’ wives such as Rachel Cecil and Billa Harrod: Maurice Bowra was not married, nor at that point was Isaiah Berlin. But I was fascinated by Billa Harrod long before she became my friend when I was at Oxford. I had been her bridesmaid before the war, and at some point was told a story in which Billa had convincingly posed as a Turkish princess; given her exotic dark-eyed looks, magnolia skin and thick black hair, I found it easy to believe.
Maurice Bowra to us was a remote person, whose fabled connection to our mother—he was supposed to have proposed to her when she was at Oxford—we found difficult to equate with this short, rotund figure, so very unlike our father; his gaze, like his conversation, was way above our heads. Roy Harrod gave an impression of enormous kindness, and equally enormous vagueness; even when I came to live next door to him in London, I suspect he had no idea who I was. David Cecil, on the other hand, with his lanky figure, clever narrowly domed head and fussy aristocratic voice, was a personal favourite. He always seemed positively delighted to see me in whatever circumstances we met. It was an attitude summed up by my first dinner party on arriving in Oxford in 1950. Hugh Trevor-Roper invited me courteously, as my father’s daughter; I was one of twelve people and the youngest by perhaps twenty years. There was considerable jockeying for position. David Cecil was the last to sit down and was perforce placed next to me. “I had hoped for this,” he said with an air of satisfaction which was utterly convincing.
Then there were the friendships where the dons concerned shared something like my parents’ political views: two historians were to be friendly to me in later years as “Frank’s daughter.” A. J. P. Taylor was a case in point: his vitality and charming egocentricity might have prepared one for the post-war fame he was to achieve as a broadcaster. A. L. Rowse was another whom my parents evidently regarded indulgently, with anecdotes about Leslie this and Leslie that. Years later, I was to learn that he too considered that he had exercised a certain indulgence where my father was concerned. I went to visit him in his last years in retreat near St. Austell in Cornwall. He was seated in a chair at the end of his library, and owing to deafness pulled my own chair very close. We began to discuss Oxford days. “The trouble with Frank,” he roared into my ear, “is that he was never a Homo.” I repeated this charge to my father, thinking he would be amused. “No, perfectly true,” he commented, scarcely looking up from the large-print New Testament that, as so often, he was reading at the time.
Obviously this is a timeless child’s-eye view of my parents’ circle, since Berlin for one was certainly away during the war, so that admiring anecdotes of “Shire,” as he seemed to be termed ( just as David was always “Sissil”), must belong to another era. It simply reflects the close sense of the academic community with which we were imbued. The Goodharts were there, Arthur with his awesome American wife; Herbert Hart, whose wife Jenifer, like the Ayers and Stuart Hampshire, featured in the kind of parental gossip that I picked up and somehow stored away without understanding it until much later.
The extent of these friendships can be charted in the photographs of the christenings of my siblings. At Paddy’s pre-war christening, where he was baptized Patrick Maurice, Bowra as godfather is prominent. I am pictured sitting on the lap of Sandie Lindsay, who in 1938 would feature in a famous anti-appeasement by-election at Oxford, the Vice-Chancellor of the University and Master of Balliol. Despite these distinctions, from my expression I am clearly hoping for a better lap, the choice being Betjeman, Philip Toynbee or Naomi Mitchison. When my sister Rachel was christened in 1942, David and Rachel Cecil (for whom she was named) featured, as did Maurice Bowra once more. Sometimes a golden young beauty who bewitched everybody in the academic world was present: this was Clarissa Churchill, niece of one Prime Minister who went on to marry another in the shape of Anthony Eden.
There was another aspect to it all. I now realize that despite this social life something of the old feeling of the exclusion of women in the academic world—the myth in fact—lingered at any rate into the chit-chat of my mother and her friends. “Nothing has changed,” Elizabeth sometimes exclaimed, when conferring with Billa. Both evidently excoriated the treatment of wives in wartime Oxford, believing that all the fun (and a lot of the available food) was to be had at High Table, to which wives were apparently not invited, despite the existence of women-only colleges.
On the other hand Oxford itself, far from being a backwater, was an exciting place to be. How did we children know that it was intended to be Hitler’s headquarters when he won the war, with Frank’s college Christ Church as his personal dwelling? As a result of this decision, temporarily reassuring if ultimately chilling, we understood that Oxford would not be bombed. We must have picked this up from our parents’ talk, over our heads as it were. It was evidently a common subject of comment. Vera Brittain, visiting Somerville, her old college at Oxford, during this period, queried the lack of bombing in such a congested place. In a book published in 1941, she reported the Dean as saying: “Well, they say here that Hitler’s keeping Oxford for himself. He wants it to look as it always has when he comes to get his Honorary Degree!”
The fact was that Oxford, packed with refugees and evacuees of many different sorts, was not in our experience bombed. On the contrary, we heard the drone of the planes traversing the city in the night sky on their way to bomb Coventry, or perhaps Birmingham, flat. We grew accustomed to air-raid sirens and the music of the All Clear—I still can’t hear any similar siren-like noise without a Proustian moment of recollection—and we had air-raid shelters (our own was in our cellar, otherwise inhabited by eggs being preserved in spirit in buckets). On one famous occasion, a siren went off when I was temporarily the only person in the house, with my baby sister Judith in her pram in the garden. Feeling heroic and at the same time very, very nervous, I hoicked her out of the pram and went gingerly down into the cellar to sit among the eggs. By the time my mother returned—it can only have been a short while later—conscious heroism had taken over from nerves and I was sitting, in her own words in my Progress Book, “with the air of the boy who stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled.”
We had gas masks. These had been routinely issued to us all at the beginning of the war, with a special baby’s apparatus and children’s gas masks in jolly colours, as if this was all some kind of asphyxiating game. After all, there had been instances of gassing in the previous war, and survivors to remind one of the fact. There were however rumours that girls slightly older than us filled their gas mask cases, which were slung over the shoulder, with make-up and mirrors. Then there was the Blackout, a new concept to us. The Blackout had a physical manifestation, large and unwieldy, which had to be sedulously applied at dusk and removed the next morning. This consisted of shutters of a thick, presumably fireproof material with wooden edges which it was among my tasks to fit to the windows. A chink of light—and well, you would bring the air-raid warden round very quickly. After that the German planes would follow and the ensuing d
isaster would be your responsibility.
As it happened, the only really dangerous plane which came close—very close—was one of our own. I was alone at the bottom of the garden at 8 Chad one Sunday afternoon in May 1941 when I heard the extraordinary noise made by the low-flying flaming aeroplane, and then saw the thick dark smoke go up like a pillar. My first reaction was: “They’ve hit the Dragon!” On a sunny weekend, the playing fields were positively crowded with super-active Dragon boys. With the total shock and the hideous noise, I had lost my sense of direction. The plane—on some kind of training mission—had actually crashed in the next-door road (the present site of Wolfson College): three people were killed and the aeroplane was a write-off. Of course I assumed that this was a German plane: the concept of our own planes crashing, or nearly crashing on our school, was not one that I could handle. At the time I went inside the house in a state of paralysed fear, and sat down in the kitchen without mentioning what I had seen. It was only when the news was given to us the next morning that I described my experience, and then I’m not sure that I was believed.
This was not the sort of incident for which Thomas and I had prepared ourselves right at the beginning of our time in Oxford when the bells fell silent. Still very young, we understood that they would only peal out again under one of two conditions: first, if peace was declared (when we had won the war, of course); secondly, if parachutists landed. Obviously the sound of the bells would call for some split-second decisions, as the wrong call might have serious consequences, like waving flimsy Union Jacks in the face of advancing Nazis. So Thomas and I prepared early for the possible arrival of a parachutist. First of all, we would lull him into a sense of security: “Ich liebe dich,” we would say. Then, when he was thoroughly disarmed, we would shout: “Du Hund! ” and stab him to the heart. What with was still a matter of debate.
My History Page 10