My History

by Antonia Fraser

  Miss Hurnard’s obituary in the LMH Brown Book would refer to “the wintry warmth of her conversation”: I experienced the winter but not the warmth. “I was one of Sir Maurice Powicke’s young ladies,” she sighed on one occasion, still looking firmly in the direction of the fire. The dog stirred, perhaps at the mention of the hallowed name, which was that of the immensely distinguished medievalist who had recently retired after twenty-odd years as Regius Professor of History. The impression given was that I would certainly never have fitted into this category.

  I had several other tutors, both at LMH and elsewhere, with whom I got on better. Anne Whiteman, she who prided herself on being the model for Anthony Powell’s Dr. Emily Brightman, was a jolly woman, squarely built, not very tall, with short frizzy hair who generally wore square-cut tweeds. At all times she seemed determined to enjoy the teaching of History: naturally the student opposite also enjoyed the experience. Then there was the delightful Karl Leyser at Magdalen who subsequently became Chichele Professor of Medieval History. With his brooding dark looks and heavy brows he was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who, after a period of internment at the beginning of the war, was rightly proud of going on to serve in the Black Watch. Although Karl’s lessons could be incomprehensible to those not listening keenly, he felt an excitement about his subject which was inspiring if one was sensible enough to pay attention.

  “Matilda of Tuscany!” he once exclaimed at the beginning of a tutorial and then paused for a long time as though in ecstasy at the mere thought.

  Hugh Leech, a young don at Balliol, was a man of great sweetness who once took the trouble to visit my mother in London and warn her against my wild ways. He believed that I could get a First but feared I would do something outrageous and be sent down. (In theory, I suppose anyone who received an award on getting into the University must be in line for a First.) Touchingly, Mr. Leech had developed a theory that I was rebelling against Catholicism. This was far from being the case: I was a keen Mass-goer, quite apart from those spurious visits which were supposed to explain my breakfast return to LMH.

  The truth was that I was not very wild, even those forbidden overnight stays being more the product of LMH rules and a wish to prolong the party than any more exciting developments. But I rather wished I were. Or at least, I wished to be seen as such, without the more testing task of following through. As we of the early Fifties inched slowly towards social freedom, we were in many respects essentially respectable tortoises who wanted to be seen as madcap hares; except, in this case, it would be the madcap hares of the Sixties who won the race. The shadow of the Bright Young Things of the Twenties—we’d all read Evelyn Waugh—fell athwart us, but in a time of clinging austerity there was nothing particularly bright about us (hardly any undergraduates had cars and they tended to be both male and older; I never met a girl student who owned a car).

  One episode sums up my own rather inept attitude to all this. Tom Stacey was one contemporary who was notably more enterprising than the rest of us, as his subsequent career as explorer, politician, publisher, writer and penal reformer, just for starters, would go on to demonstrate. In the Festival of Britain year he conceived the idea of Undergrad Tours: put simply, we, the impoverished undergraduates, were to make a great deal of money out of the wealthy tourists by showing them round the sights of Oxford. I was all for it, the money side of it, that is. I was more uneasy about Tom’s ebullient way with publicity, but unable to resist it since I was assured publicity was essential to our success. In the event, my diary records only one tour by three allegedly wealthy tourists, and then I paid for our lunch myself.

  You could say that the publicity side of it all was more successful, especially if you believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity. To promote us, in a group which included Tim Renton, a future Tory Chief Whip, I agreed to smoke a cigar despite the fact that I had never smoked cigarettes, not out of any principle (which would have been rare at that time) but insecurity mixed with vanity: I thought I looked ridiculous with the minute white object stuck in my mouth, especially when it dropped on to the Bernhurst sofa by mistake. None of this prevented me freely posing with the cigar in the interests of fortune if not fame. As for the rest of my appearance, I wore a blue velvet pixie hat, with a grey suit and pearls, a sophisticated fashion statement as I saw it, which made for difficult bicycling. In the end, it was my lack of any true sophistication which found me out. Anthony Powell summed it up in the card he sent me when he saw the photograph in the press: “Take the band off the cigar next time when you smoke one,” he wrote.

  The fact was that I had not yet discovered that truth so perfectly expressed in a line of verse by Hugh’s old friend, the poet-diplomat Sir Charles Johnston: “Having fun is such hard work.” In time I would discover the truth of the exact opposite, that working hard on what you really wanted to do could be the greatest fun in the world; but that was in the future. It is essentially a grown-up truth and I had not yet got there. Meanwhile, I had occasional intimations of what intellectual pleasure might be, as opposed to the elusive other sort. These intimations did not however occur during my infrequent attendances at lectures. When it came to living historians, I much preferred reading their books in a library to listening to the spoken word; so I only attended grumpily when I was assured that the research concerned had not yet been published. (Oh, why wouldn’t Bruce McFarlane get on with it?) I tended to concentrate on my parents’ friends, like Isaiah Berlin and David Cecil, who were of course the famous lecturers of the time.

  “You’re just a tourist looking for sensations.” When Isaiah Berlin spoke these teasing words to me in his rapid glottal voice, he got it absolutely right. Lord David Cecil’s lectures were a particular delight: he would rush in rather late, in a flurry, and proceed to read aloud from, shall we say, Jane Austen. That occupied about twenty minutes, by which the prescribed hour’s lecture was nearly gone, and the rest of the time would be occupied by David, in his equally characteristic voice, the voice of an aristocrat in love with literature, giving us pleasant insights. The most celebrated lectures all the time I was at Oxford were given by the art historian E. H. Gombrich. And they took place at the Ashmolean Museum.

  “Tea after Gombrich?” was the kind of smart invitation you hoped to get, especially from someone at nearby St. John’s in St. Giles or Worcester College, down the road. I wish I could remember one word of what I heard before these wished-for teas took place. Compared to the thrill of reading a book by Gombrich, the mind ungratefully blanks out.

  So the first real intimation of the pleasure of historical research—in the proper academic sense—came with a special small class held at Merton College: there were three of us, and the two men, Alan Brownjohn and Jon Stallworthy, went on to become well-known poets. I on the other hand went on to become someone who adored digging into historical documents with my mental spade. I had a double task. First I was to investigate one volume of the manuscripts held at Hatfield House, seat of the Marquess of Salisbury, whose ancestors were advisers to Queen Elizabeth I, printed by the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Secondly I was to write a paper about what I found. For once, this was no hasty how-fast-can-I-do-it job. I revelled in the task.

  In the Sixties I was able to read some of the originals when I was writing about Mary Queen of Scots, and the Marquess of Salisbury allowed me into his library at Hatfield. This was an honour for an as-yet-unpublished historian and even the formidable Lady Salisbury’s greeting did not diminish it.

  “Why are you writing about that silly woman Mary Queen of Scots?” she demanded. “Why not write about Queen Elizabeth instead?” (Many years later I did attempt it, but, finding that I personally had nothing new to say about this fascinating woman, gave it up.) At the time the excitement of fingering respectfully the letter which Mary Queen of Scots had once touched—this was an age before gloves were requested—equalled but did not exceed that original dramatic discovery at Merton: this was something I wanted to do, was determi
ned to do, and hoped to do for the rest of my life.

  I could not see into the future. I did not know that I would one day be sitting in the Archives Nationales in Paris, this time fully equipped with white gloves, gazing at the only copy of the Wardrobe Book of Marie Antoinette which had survived the French Revolution, watched by two armed French gendarmes, feeling almost as terrified as I felt excited. What would happen to me if I left a blotch? Was the Bastille still in use? At the time in Oxford, it was enough that this was another Keatsian moment, as when I first learnt to read: once again magic casements opened. By chance, I subsequently came across that exact volume of the Historical Manuscripts Commission looking unloved on a dusty back shelf of a second-hand bookshop. It cost three pounds. Naturally I bought it.

  Given this revelation, and the pleasing welcome accorded to me by my parents’ Oxford friends, it seems strange that at the time I felt that Oxford was more of a miss than a hit. Of the friends, Hugh Trevor-Roper was particularly hospitable to Frank’s daughter, although I saw him more in the light of a bachelor don in a dark blue velvet evening jacket who went hunting in the day and entertained at night, than as the celebrated historian he already was. (The Last Days of Hitler came out in 1947.) David and Rachel Cecil, still in Linton Road, frequently asked me to dinner; the spare man who was chosen to balance the numbers was, more often than not, John Bayley. Looking like a substantial owl, he was not my idea of Prince Charming and, given that he would go on, famously, to marry Iris Murdoch, he would no doubt have said the same about me. But I much enjoyed his company: somehow he managed to be both cheerful and lugubrious at the same time.

  It is possible that in this privileged access, due to my parentage and my North Oxford upbringing rather than my own efforts, lay one reason for my slightly disconsolate reaction to university. I experienced none of the wonder that my mother described to me on her first day at Oxford University: how whirling up to LMH alone without her dominating parents was the most liberating experience of her life. How could I? I had whirled nowhere; or if I had, I had certainly not left my parents’ world behind.

  It is perfectly true that there is one advantage of a university education, whatever one’s background, for which I will always be grateful. That is the unforced encounter with people of different nationalities, especially important perhaps for wartime children. Friendships could and did exist which illumined the vast world outside. There were two cases in point at LMH, two intriguing girls who were roughly my contemporaries.

  Alia El-Solh, like Masha in The Seagull, always wore black (except for her dressing gown which was red, but that was in private). She explained to me the reason with simplicity: “They killed my father.” I learnt that this was the former Prime Minister of the Lebanon, assassinated in July 1951 shortly after his second term of office. Up to this point, I had never paused to think about the Middle East (except in biblical times) and occasional forays into reading newspapers about the military campaigns of the war. Now I made a few nervous attempts to find out something in order to get to know Alia El-Solh better and not make a fool of myself.

  With Sabel Desta, granddaughter of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, time was to bring about a closer connection. In the LMH first-year photo Sabel stands on the sideline (I am at the back, Marigold at the front, an excellent guide to our standing in the college). Sabel’s aristocratic features, her high cheekbones and large black almond eyes give an impression of hauteur; this was very far from being the case. Cheerful and hard-working, she hardly deserved to be imprisoned after the fall of her grandfather’s regime, along with her five young children. By then a visit to Ethiopia while Haile Selassie was still in power, and a long rugged trip up mountains where no mule foot had ever trod (or so it seemed) under Thomas’s auspices had made me feel close to the country and Sabel’s family. I ended by protesting outside the Ethiopian Embassy against Sabel’s and others’ long incarceration (fourteen years altogether): Sabel, the cheerful young woman first encountered at LMH.

  Another obvious reason for my ungratefully tepid reaction to Oxford lay in my love life at the time. Things had come right between Patrick Lindsay and myself—as I saw it—and unrequited love had turned into grand passion—once again in my version. But Patrick, destined for a job in the art world, had first of all studied with Bernard Berenson in Italy, and then, giving vent to his other more extrovert side, decided to sail the Atlantic in a yacht. Of course, the love object being at a distance, even on a yacht in mid-Atlantic—oh the perils! oh the privations!—has never yet dimmed a first-rate passion. The situation seemed to me vaguely operatic, that new pleasure to which Patrick had so successfully introduced me.

  Before and after these sorties, typically adventurous in different ways, Patrick took me to his home in Scotland, Balcarres in Fife. It was an introduction to another side of Scottish History, not so much the character of her romantic Queen, more about the nobility who had been prominent in her reign. Patrick had an immense pride in the family history of the Lindsays, who, he assured me, had once been known as the Lightsome Lindsays, although at what period was not clear. His father Lord Crawford was certainly not lightsome: his record of public service to the arts included the trusteeship of every museum you could name from the National Gallery and the Tate, to the British Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland. His huge head of silver hair held high and his fine Roman nose also aloft, he might have given an impression of pomposity; his courtesy to all and sundry quickly corrected that.

  “I’m so glad you’re able to see our Stanley Spencer, The May Tree,” he said to me. “As you know, it’s generally away on exhibition. You understand the problem one has in refusing these requests.” I was taken aback but flattered at being included among those who had this particular problem. Lady Crawford, small and private, was not lightsome either. She appeared to regard me, and indeed the rest of the world, with a certain suspicion. When I came to listen to her dry comments on her various relations including her husband, I realized that, quite as much as the great Lord Crawford, she lived life on her own terms.

  The lightsome one was of course Patrick: it was in fact the combination of his dashing ways and his true fascination with art history—he ended up as Head of the Old Masters Department of Christie’s—which held me in his spell all the time I was at Oxford. My diary resonates with good days when I saw or heard from him, and bad days when the brief entry “Miz” probably meant that neither had taken place. There were plenty of visits to the opera. Our relationship reached its height in a trip to Italy, Patrick driving his ancient car with two other passengers. These were my brother Thomas and the beautiful Vanessa Jebb, admired generally by all at Oxford and the particular object of my brother’s affections. Thomas had arrived in Oxford to read Greats at Magdalen the year following me. As has been mentioned, he had failed the test for National Service because of his childhood attack of polio and was thus in the small category of undergraduates (male: women did not do National Service) who were about eighteen when they came up.

  Comparative youth did not faze Thomas, any more than the spirit of the boy once famous for asking “Hujamean” and “Wajamean” at every conceivable opportunity had been dimmed. One of his early actions was to buy a very cheap decommissioned taxi, which he baptized Pythia, after the Delphic oracle. Pythia certainly manifested much of the unhelpfully enigmatic spirit of the original for whom she had been named. On one famous occasion, Pythia gave a few grunts.

  “You hear that rattle?” said Thomas carelessly over his shoulder through the glass window to Henrietta and myself, deposited in the back seat. We were in full finery, scanty shawls over our off-the-shoulder dresses. My home-made black tulle was still going strong even if I had to cut off the ragged pieces at the bottom of the skirt where energetic dancers had trodden on them, so that the dress was now somewhat shorter. We were all three attending (without permission) the coming-out ball of Caroline Child-Villiers in London, determined not to miss such an august occasion hosted by her father, our
cousin Grandie Jersey. “It sounds like the big end going,” said Thomas. “Of course it isn’t.” But it was. The rattle had been a message from the oracle, once again misinterpreted.

  I cannot remember how long we lurked in the black depths of the Pythia on the edge of the dark road before rescue came. I do know that we proceeded to London by hitchhiking, despite our unsuitable clothes, and that finally we tagged in wearily to the ball. “How did you come from Oxford?” “By taxi”—well, it was partly true. Thomas was the only one who was in no way put off by all this, occasionally commenting with surprise on the extraordinary coincidence of the big end actually going at the same time as it sounded like it.

  On our Italian trip, the fact that the knowledgeable Patrick was our guide and driver did not put Thomas off either. He had his own sturdy independent views, in this case mainly from the back seat. Patrick owned the car, a Triumph which seemed very grand to us, and had a little money to pay for petrol, but the rest of us could contribute practically nothing. As a result, all four of us camped out every night in sleeping bags, for economy’s sake, except when we could winkle our way into the grand Italian house to which Patrick had an introduction. We were on the cadge throughout our journey, including the moment in a small Italian town when Patrick spotted a friend of his father’s sitting alone at a table across the square.

  “At least he’ll give us all some coffee. He’s always coming to Balcarres.” But the haughty individual sitting in solitude at the café showed absolutely no signs of entertaining us; in fact, by his body language alone, he displayed a strong preference for the rapid departure of this little ragged party. It was Sir Anthony Blunt. Afterwards, when his career as a spy was exposed, I worked it out from the dates that he must have been waiting for some kind of illicit contact and I felt a vicarious thrill. At the time we were disconsolate, except for Patrick, who was indignant when he thought about all the Balcarres hospitality. We sloped back across the square like unwanted dogs.