My History

by Antonia Fraser

  “Yes,” replied Elizabeth curtly.

  It was however our visit to the Skelligs, two wild rocky islands off the coast of Kerry, which clinched the matter. These islands were famous for their seabirds: gannets and puffins abounded; in the waters around them were to be found seals, dolphins, whales and even basking sharks. Sitting looking out to sea on the Great Skellig (known as Skellig Michael)—next land mass America, we were told—I felt more Irish than I would ever feel again, with the solitary opportunistic exception of my visit to Paris to promote Marie Antoinette: The Journey. There I was enduring a certain amount of haughty criticism of a xenophobic nature: what is an English lady doing, writing a biography of our queen? Even though we greatly dislike her and regularly describe her as la reine méchante. Then I had an inspiration. What was all this about an English lady? Enough!

  “Moi, je suis Irlandaise,” I pronounced firmly, in that accent my daughter Natasha described as just like the Queen’s but not so good. “Les Wild Geese,” I added helpfully, referring to the Catholic Jacobite Irishmen who had been exiled and fought for France in the seventeenth century and later. The word Irlandaise, if not the somewhat extravagant comparison, did its work; henceforward I was a respected Irish lady, benefiting from France’s warm feelings for historic Ireland. The duality had come to my rescue.

  George Bernard Shaw visited Skellig Michael in 1910 and described the adventure afterwards to a friend: “I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world…I hardly feel real again yet!” This, I found, was an impression shared by Robert Macfarlane in a book about wildness written a hundred years later: “It was a place for deep dreaming.” Certainly in 1947 I was happy at the Skelligs, including in my own dreams a handsome young lighthouse keeper. I did not have the courage to speak to him: there was a theory that the people of the Skelligs still spoke the original Irish and I was frightened of not understanding his reply, whether favourable or dismissive. Nevertheless he could not dismiss himself from the daydreaming I shared with Shaw and Robert Macfarlane, sitting there on the rocks and looking out towards the New World, from my own Old Irish World. Or was it really not my world at all but “their country” as my father was to describe it to me later?

  It was not a question to which I ever found the final answer. It is quite certain that writing a biography of Oliver Cromwell didn’t help to solve the problem; perhaps it could hardly have been expected to do so. On the one hand, there was Cromwell’s admirable admission of the Jews on his Protectoral nod, which King Charles II made legal. On the other hand there was Cromwell’s notorious military campaign in Ireland in 1650…Following his footsteps during the latter expedition, I went at the beginning of the Seventies with Hugh to Drogheda, site of the siege after which some of the worst of the legendary atrocities took place. To have the real experience, I wanted to find the reputed Cromwell’s Mound. Despite diligent searching, we got more and more lost until I spotted a priest standing with two nuns beside a small black car. These were surely my friends. They would help me.

  “Excuse me, Father,” I began, “I am looking for Oliver Cromwell’s Mound…” Before I could get any further, the priest crossed himself and pushed the nuns into the back of the car. Hugh came to my rescue.

  “You really are an idiot,” he said. “This is Ireland.” It is true that I had come hotfoot from Huntingdon where Cromwell had been born and East Anglia where he was the local hero. “I know what to do.” And he took command of the situation.

  “Good afternoon, Father,” he said unctuously. “This is my wife, the daughter of the holy Lord Longford. You know Lord Longford: wonderful Catholic, Lord Longford. And my wife—another good Catholic—for reasons I can’t quite explain, is going to write a biography of the wicked, tyrannous usurper, scourge of the Irish, Oliver Cromwell. So the direction of his Mound…?”

  “Thataway,” said the priest, pointing happily. So Frank Longford, the descendant of Major Henry Pakenham, but a “good Catholic,” by his conversion validated another descendant who chose to research Oliver Cromwell.

  I will end all this ambivalence suitably enough on the only anecdote about Cromwell I could discover in the Irish Folklore Society, which I had imagined wrongly would be a rich source of tales. Here it is. Question: Which is worse, Cromwell or the Drink? Answer: the Drink is worse than Cromwell, because everyone that Cromwell killed went to Heaven, and you can’t say the same for those killed by the Drink. This I would describe admiringly as a thoroughly logical Irish story, a story from the country to which I hope at least half of me belongs.

  CHAPTER NINE

  NICE CATHOLIC FRIENDS

  “You see, Antonia, we thought that you should have some nice Catholic friends.” It was with these words that my mother explained to me what she chose to describe as “the sad news.” I was to leave Godolphin School in July 1946, and go to St. Mary’s Convent, Ascot, in the autumn.

  I burst into tears. Elizabeth tried to comfort me. Whereupon I broke it to her that they were tears of delight, whereupon she was extremely surprised. With hindsight, I suppose her mistake was symptomatic of the distance which could then arise between parent and child at boarding school, before frequent visiting on both sides became the norm. At the time I was simply amazed that she did not know that I had always wanted to be a Catholic.

  Of course going to a Catholic school did not necessarily mean I would convert to Catholicism. My mother explained to me carefully that I was to be allowed a choice. After all, I would be fourteen in August. Thomas at thirteen would also be allowed a choice. The other five would simply be transformed into Catholics from the theoretical Anglicans they had become at their splendid Oxford christenings. The event which was to bring all this about had occurred in April: Elizabeth, six years after Frank’s conversion, was received into the Catholic Church.

  It will always remain a matter of puzzlement to me that this, the famously—and genuinely—happy marriage included such a long period of what one might describe as spiritual estrangement. Elizabeth, the Unitarian girl, had described the priests she saw in Grenoble, where she was sent to learn French, as “black beetles” and joked that she had been terrified when a black beetle got on to a tram with her. Elizabeth, the Socialist woman who had abandoned Unitarianism and had no religion, was antagonized by the behaviour of the Catholic Church during the Spanish Civil War. Her idea of religion, she once told me, was singing “Jerusalem” “with linked hands and wearing rolled-up shirtsleeves.” (In my whole life I don’t think I ever saw my mother with rolled-up shirtsleeves.) On the other hand, from 1940 onwards Frank regularly attended early morning Mass while we were at 8 Chad. He would return into the family kitchen to hear on at least one occasion a jovial cry from Elizabeth: “Beat the Orange drum, children!” I was intrigued by the notion of this Orange drum, which I imagined to be singularly bright and beautiful like a huge fiery sun. It seemed a pity it was not actually provided for us to play on at the breakfast table.

  At some point—my intermittent pocket diaries do not record the start of it all—I started to accompany my father from time to time to St. Aloysius. This cannot have been without my mother’s permission and was perhaps part of the thaw which reached its dramatic ending in 1946. At all events I loved it. I loved the Mass for all the obvious outward reasons which attract the impressionable to the Catholic Church: the incense, the bells, the sound of Latin, and above all the feeling of mystery. This was a mystery from which I was for the time being excluded. My diaries record: “Dada went to Communion. I did not. I am not a Catholic.” When my Catholic friend Flora Carr-Saunders visited, I recorded again that she went up to Communion with my father but I did not. I became increasingly aware of this exclusion, and upset by it, so that I foolishly boasted to David, a boy at the Dragon who was a Catholic, that I had actually taken Communion with my father at St. Aloysius. David told his mother: clearly the divided religion of the Pakenham family was of interest to fellow Catholics and
this Communion was exciting news. In the small world of Oxford, the report of my behaviour came back to my mother. I assured her it wasn’t true, full of shame at being caught out in the lie. I am sure she understood that the childish lie was the product of wishful thinking.

  As a family in these pre-Catholic days, we did sometimes go to a service for the young at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, in Linton Road. Here Thomas and I experienced what would now be called “Happy Clappy.” The hyper-energetic vicar stirred up us children to sing lustily in chorus: “I’m H-A-P-P-Y, I’m H-A-P-P-Y, I know I am, I’m sure I am, I’m H-A-P-P-Y.” What made us so jolly and so happy? Jesus of course. But this was more of a fun experience than a religious one. My first religious feelings were encouraged by Jean, the nanny. Except the word “nanny” does nothing to convey the charm of Jean Birch, with her sweet face, soft pale skin, and the brown hair which all too soon would be swept up into a WRNS cap when she left to join the Senior Service. Her charm was felt by others: there was a choice of boyfriends for such an attractive girl in wartime Oxford, including undergraduates.

  One in particular, a polite fellow called Roden, aroused the disapproval of our cook for being a gentleman, that is a class above Jean; Mrs. Pope, beloved Popie of many years’ service, announced: “He should know better.”

  “But, Popie, what about Jean? Shouldn’t she know better?”

  “Jean is trying to do well for herself. That’s different.” Actually, even I could see that Jean, and no doubt Roden too, were simply trying to have a nice time in the fraught atmosphere of war.

  No one for me could be above Jean. The day she left for the WRNS to do her duty for her country (as she explained) was the saddest day of my young life; we went immediately to Cornwall on holiday to bridge the gap. I was ten. All I did was gaze out to sea, muttering: “Jean is gone,” and write melancholy poems. Nevertheless Jean had already given me the inestimable gift of treating religious conviction as something joyous: not in the happy-clappy mode, but in the true mystical sense. The St. Aloysius experience built upon this foundation and convinced me that I wanted, needed to be a Catholic.

  Jean herself was more of an Anglo-Catholic, that is, a High Church Anglican, sharing many of the Catholic rituals and practices, but not a Roman Catholic who acknowledged the authority of the Pope. By coincidence, several years later my mother, Thomas and I had an Anglo-Catholic period; I believe this step was suggested to Elizabeth by the sympathetic Anglican Bishop Kenneth Kirk of Oxford, as a kind of testing-ground for future developments. What the Bishop, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, correctly understood about Elizabeth was that her marriage to Frank was the centre of her existence. She had to find a way to reconcile herself to his deeply held Faith.

  In 1969, after the tragic death of my youngest sister Catherine in a motor accident at the age of twenty-three, I spent some of the first period of mourning alone with my mother; she talked intimately about the circumstances which led to her conversion, her unbearable feeling of separation from Frank, and how until this moment her Faith had all been in terms of her relationship to my father. But now: “I’m glad I’m a Catholic.” I felt a tremendous sense of relief: that in circumstances that were so terrible, so utterly senseless to the outward eye, she could find any comfort.

  Clearly Anglo-Catholicism aided Elizabeth to take the final step in 1946. Her actual instruction was performed by the Dominican priest Father Gervase Mathew at Blackfriars in St. Giles, playing the role that the Jesuit Father Martin d’Arcy had played with my father. Gervase became a great family friend, together with his more worldly brother, Archbishop David Mathew. When he agreed to talk to me informally about the Catholic Church, out of kindness, I was both daunted and enchanted by his style: he would hiss out some abstract word connected to the Faith—as it were, “Immaculate Conception.” Then Gervase would fall into complete silence for several minutes. I would venture to break the silence with an inane social remark, feeling the occasion demanded it—“Elizabeth sends her love”—just as Gervase launched into a long, fast, sibilant disquisition on the Immaculate Conception and how it should never, ever be confused with the Virgin Birth…It became a test of my nerve. How long would he remain silent? How long would I manage to remain silent myself ? For all this, I was devoted to Gervase, and curiously enough once we moved on to Byzantine History, his speciality, he was all instruction and no silence.

  Priests, fascinating intellectual priests, played their part in my parents’ lives. There remained the problem of the Catholic friends. No wonder my parents felt grateful for getting to know Harry and Catherine Walston; the latter was a Catholic and Harry became a minister in the first Wilson government, which in their circle was a comparatively rare combination. The mesmerizing Catherine Walston had wild brown curly hair, milky skin and blue eyes, together with a figure which was at the same time boyish, feminine and seductive. Like Frank and Elizabeth, the Walstons had a large family, but unlike my parents, a large country house. Here Catherine dazzled the eye (as she was already known to have dazzled the eye of Graham Greene), especially wearing jeans at the Mass celebrated in the drawing room. This was Catherine’s speciality: to charm and outrage—just a little. For what was wrong with wearing jeans? One would not think twice about it now; it was simply that none of us had ever seen a pair before, except on some kind of American lumberjack (Catherine was actually American), and here was Catherine with her extremely shapely figure…What did the priest think, for example?

  This general lack of Catholic friends reached its climax with the birth of Kevin in November 1947. We were accustomed to having numerous godparents, such was the custom, and poor Kevin, as the eighth child, could hardly be denied the same potential source of material gain. In the end my fifteen-year-old self had to be drafted in. My mother wrote to me frankly on the subject: “I feel that in about five years time Dada and I will have hundreds of charming Catholic friends, all suitable to be godparents, but at present the numbers of the elect are limited.” It would just have to be me. The Catholic Herald actually featured me on the front page, wearing the obligatory hat loaned by Elizabeth and holding the protesting baby; underneath the photograph it read: LITTLE GODMOTHER. In my tweed suit I did not look particularly little. In spite of that, I was immensely proud.

  Elizabeth’s efforts at being a good Catholic mother had all her characteristic energy and resource. She encountered, for example, a particular problem with Guy Fawkes Day on the fifth of November. How could we, a nice Catholic family, burn the effigy of a Catholic conspirator with his pipe, in his black slouch hat and his ancient fit-for-the-bonfire trousers? Yet we must not be deprived of the national celebration. The solution: we burnt the effigy of the Communist Foreign Minister of Romania, one Ana Pauker, a Cold War hate figure…who oddly enough wore a black slouch hat and ancient trousers and smoked a pipe. Perhaps this episode is responsible for the fact that in later years I began a crusade to call November Fifth “Bonfire Night”; we should celebrate Samhain, the Celtic feast when the autumn leaves were burnt and the dark of the year began, which stretches back into our history, instead of the original 1605 Anti-Catholic concept of Guy Fawkes Day.

  The choice of St. Mary’s, Ascot was inspired by a friend from Frank’s youth, Daphne Baring. A painter herself, she was now married to the sculptor Arthur Pollen with six children; as a couple they were delightful new friends for both my parents, Catholic, artistic and extremely cultured. Perhaps Antonia and Lucy Pollen, who were the same age, would bond together if Antonia went to St. Mary’s? Oddly enough, this did actually happen, unlike most such parental plans for their young; Lucy became my closest friend. But before that, before I could have this really nice (and clever and humorous) Catholic friend who looked like an angel in a Flemish picture, someone with whom one could discuss the finer points of Gary Cooper as well as Shakespeare, I had to encounter the whole mysterious world of Catholicism itself at close quarters.

  As a matter of fact, I was secretly prepared for it. Thi
s was because Miss Lemarchand, a mistress at Godolphin, on hearing of my future fate, had pressed a novel into my hands, Frost in May by Antonia White, which had been published in the early Thirties, in order, as she put it, to warn me. As a warning it had exactly the opposite effect. I was tremendously excited. The plot concerned a Protestant girl, Fernanda, known as Nanda, who like me was sent to a Catholic school. (In her case, it was her intelligent, dominating father who was a recent convert.) The ending of the book is extremely painful, as Nanda is ejected from this mysterious, wonderful Paradise, and above all from her new friends, headed by the careless aristocrat Leonie, for reasons she barely understands.

  In 1946 I put the ending from me—I still find it painful today on revisiting the book—but devoured the descriptions of the Catholic world of which I was hopefully to be a part; above all I would meet latter-day Leonies. What would they be like, these girls with their ancient names? What had their ancestors been up to? How had the ancient families managed to remain Catholic during the years of persecution? Many hadn’t, as I learnt later, but had returned to the Faith in more settled times. Nevertheless there was a kind of delightful arrogance about these so-called old Catholics, epitomized for me by an incident in the House of Lords. My father, walking along a corridor with the Duke of Norfolk, the premier Catholic peer, fell to his knees and attempted to kiss the ring of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster who happened to be passing. Miles Norfolk made no such move.