My History

by Antonia Fraser

  Dutifully I trotted upstairs to the large drawing room, where an angry Father Christmas of a man—I think he must have been wearing some kind of red velvet evening jacket—greeted me, puffing out his red cheeks beneath his white curls in disgust at the way he had been treated. This was Harold Nicolson, now in his late sixties, whose writings I loved; I was particularly fond of Some People, a series of whimsical semi-autobiographical essays where fact and fiction were entwined in an elegant embrace. I had not yet read his authorized life of King George V, which had been published the year before and for which Nicolson had recently been knighted, but was quite sure I could bluff my way through with sufficient starry-eyed praise. Disraeli famously said: “Everyone likes flattery and when you come to Royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.” I felt that one could usefully adapt that to include royal biographers.

  Admiration of any sort was however not the emotion which characterized our exchange. The experienced and highly distinguished diplomat, as he had been for many years before his political career, vanished. Instead Sir Harold Nicolson was extraordinarily cross, first of all with his host, his absent-downstairs host, and then by inference with the messenger, who was me. At least I realized that he was in the grip of some strong emotion which probably did not include me in any way. That, of course, was the truth. He was, in his own opinion, taking a gracious step forward in the direction of welcoming his son’s partner, only to be snubbed in this unexpected manner. I should conclude this episode by reporting that he sent me the most charming abject apology, handwritten, the next day: “Dear Miss Pakenham, I behaved unconscionably badly last night…” And I never told George Weidenfeld about it since the door had already banged shut behind the departing Sir Harold when he escorted his dinner guests upstairs.

  Nevertheless it is interesting to reflect that in the early Fifties there could be surprising social reactions to George. That is, they were surprising to me, just as the invidious Catholic prayer on Good Friday removed by Pope John XXIII had surprised me; this was partly because my parents were clearly philo-semitic, but more significantly, because as I have recorded earlier, reading about the opening of the camps in the newspapers to which I was addicted had been one of the defining experiences of my later childhood. So any form of anti-semitism, however covert, left me first baffled and then angry, something I made clear when I had the courage to do so, which wasn’t always.

  “Isn’t it sometimes, well…difficult, working for George Weidenfeld?” was one question intended to be delicate, which began by baffling me. Difficult was the very last thing that George was. In three years working for him, I never encountered a cross word; even when a lesser spirit might legitimately have complained, George merely showed temporary pain before passing on to higher things. When I demonstrated genuine lack of comprehension at the question, the next words would be something like: “You being a Catholic and all that.” The word “Catholic” gave me the clue. My diary explodes: “The next time I’m asked that stupid question I intend to reply as follows: ‘Oh, George Weidenfeld is wonderful; he never minds when I flop to my knees at noon and publicly say the rosary.’ ”

  Only one thing was accurate about this fantasy picture: George would not have minded in the least, in the unlikely event of finding me saying the rosary kneeling on the floor of the office. I doubt he would have noticed. He would either have been rushing out to some exciting lunch full of plans for books to be outlined to a new author, or rushing back many hours later, full of plans for quite different books which the author had outlined to him. The point was that he lived in a perpetual state of excitement about his publishing plans. As a result, so did we all, his small staff in the cramped office next door to a gallery in Cork Street. On the day he returned from a reconnaissance trip to the United States, the atmosphere was electric. George did not so much rush in on this occasion as fly in over our heads, aloft on clouds of expectation.

  It was incidentally this tireless round which made me understand quite soon that my “spinning-straw-into-gold” fears for my lack of languages to be uncovered (those languages so rashly promised by Elizabeth) were unfounded. George spoke all the languages himself. My role was obviously something different. But while I was finding out what I was supposed to be doing for him, George was doing a great deal for me. Here at last was my university, if that term entails entry into a new and hitherto unknown world. It was a question of European culture, to which, by his mere presence and conversation, George did more to introduce me than he could ever know (or I ever wanted him to find out).

  There was that moment, for example, when he complimented me on my appearance at a Weidenfeld party, referring to me as a “Jeune fille en fleur.” I regret to say that the Proustian reference to the girls at the seaside at Balbec in the second volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu was completely lost on me. “Jeune fille on what?” more or less sums up my reaction. I believe it was Peter Quennell, a cynical but not unkindly man, who noticed my puzzled expression and was slyly amused by it. He enlightened me. I hastened to read Proust, sort of in French, but with the Scott Moncrieff translation remarkably close at hand. Should this compliment ever come my way again, I would be ready with the right smile—deprecating yet knowing; one might mutter something about Balbec if one was in a daring mood…

  Part of this lack of European culture was due to wartime conditions and post-war restrictions on travel. As we have seen, my one venture into France had not resulted in much cultural enlightenment, although it gave me a valuable insight into the effects of the recent war. Similarly, my memorable Christmas spent with the De Gasperis enhanced my sense of Italian history, not Italian culture. My parents’ primary energies were concentrated on politics. There were occasional shafts of light when I was at Oxford, as when my friend Laurence Kelly, son of an ambassador and himself half Belgian, insisted that all of us read someone called Robert Musil; he also instructed us to talk a lot about angst. But it was George Weidenfeld, naturally at home everywhere in Europe where there was literature or music, who was the real influence. I did not move away from my passion for History, but I was enchanted by the other possibilities now presented to me.

  Perhaps my greatest single debt to George was in the realm of music. George introduced me to his beloved Wagner, in the shape of the Ring Cycle, beginning with a memorable night at Covent Garden. From the first moment I was intoxicated. Being introduced to Wagner by George meant that I was lucky enough to be spared any crisis of conscience about anti-semitism or otherwise; I could simply get on with adoring it all, music, text, the whole world of love and lightning, death and thunder. It was, as it turned out, a memorable night for George also, although I did not learn that until quite a while later. He had previously taken me out to a dinner with John Sutro which ended at the most fashionable nightclub of the time called the Milroy. On our way to dinner, George mentioned that to his annoyance John Sutro was bringing along Barbara Skelton, a famous siren then married to Cyril Connolly: among her many conquests, generally men of physical bulk and worldly power, was rumoured to be the Egyptian King Farouk. Sirens on their rocks do not on the whole regard young female fish in the sea below them with any particular favour, and Barbara was no exception to this rule. I commiserated with George quite sincerely.

  What I completely missed in the ensuing long-drawn-out evening, including dancing, was that Barbara had taken one of her sudden capricious fancies to George. How could George resist her? How could anyone resist her? Barbara was sinuous and sensual, with a curving figure like a Modigliani sculpture. Beneath her long hair peeped out a small, almost childish face: a bewitching naughty child. Although he loyally took me home to Chelsea, George was already afire with passion. Early the next morning, Barbara telephoned him and immediately initiated their raging affair. In the evening, quite unknowing, I was George’s prearranged guest at Rheingold. It is obviously a tribute to George’s impregnable good manners that no inkling of his tumultuous day reached me as I prattled on ecstatically. Although it was
perhaps just as well that Rheingold, unlike the rest of the Ring, is not much more than two hours long.

  So began an extraordinary sequence of events, by which Barbara Skelton was married to two men—Cyril Connolly and George Weidenfeld—three times, ending up back with Cyril. It was all made even more complicated by the fact that Cyril Connolly had been a kind of literary deity in George’s early publishing days. Shortly before I joined the firm, the publication of the anthology The Golden Horizon, taken from the famous magazine Horizon which Connolly edited, gave George tremendous éclat. Together with Rose Macaulay’s The Pleasure of Ruins, it was the book people referred to casually at parties when I mentioned where I worked.

  The early days of my first marriage coincided with the early days of the new Weidenfeld ménage and Barbara, George, Hugh and I had several evenings à quatre. I am afraid that her new settled status did not inspire Barbara to greater friendliness towards me. Instead, she practised her skills on Hugh, like a pianist who cannot resist an opportunity to try out an instrument in a neighbour’s house. Hugh, although swearing that she was not his type (which was probably true), admitted that he could not help feeling the attraction; there was something about the moment when Barbara suddenly switched from being sullen and rather silent to her siren mood, which was evidently irresistible.

  A further element in the complicated Connolly–Weidenfeld connection was the presence of Sonia Orwell in the publishing offices, as a literary consultant; Sonia having been one of the young ladies in the Horizon office, jealously trying to guard their editor, as immortalized by Nancy Mitford in her novel The Blessing where she nicknamed Connolly the Captain. The widow of George Orwell, who had married her on his deathbed, Sonia always gave me the impression that Cyril Connolly was her real idol: certainly the invocation of the name Cyril generally meant that no opposition to whatever the name wanted or approved would normally be entertained. Sonia was now thirty-six or -seven; one could still see the exceptional looks which had earlier held the artists of the Euston Road set in her thrall: that beguiling milkmaid appearance of untidy, tumbling fair hair and healthy complexion. Even if the once-curvaceous figure was verging on the plump, her energy in the cause of real writers (and artists) made her an attractive person. She would arrive in the office in the morning invariably quite late, often very late, and then outline a fabulous party which had taken place the night before, possibly in the Gargoyle and probably including Lucian Freud. As she talked, Sonia’s voice would be croaking as a result of the cigarettes and the drink she had enjoyed; you knew she could not wait for the next bohemian outing—and the next hangover.

  All the same, although Sonia evidently liked telling her tales of what-happened-last-night, and I certainly liked hearing them, she made it clear that I was only within the literary world, the real one that she understood, on sufferance. Her attitude to me was that of a Victorian parent to a child: I should be seen (and might listen) but should not be heard. When I ventured to allude to meeting her friend Lucian the night before, and how I had complimented him on the cover he had done for Nigel Dennis’s novel Cards of Identity, an intriguing drawing of a man with a long nose and the eyes of a rat—Lucian’s own features—she gave me a sharp ticking-off. I should not have done that, she said; Lucian would have been very annoyed even if he had not seemed so in the slightest. She understood artists—“when you have been around these difficult people as long as I have”—and I did not.

  Home life while I was working for George was in general rather less exotic than all this. Clarissa Churchill, the belle of Oxford in my childhood, had once worked for George at Contact magazine; she had since married Anthony Eden. This inspired Evelyn Waugh, who adored her and disliked Eden, to address me as follows: “The last girl who had your job ended up marrying the Prime Minister. See that you do better.” It was however extremely unlikely that I would make any such glorious—or inglorious according to Waugh—match.

  My cousin Henrietta Lamb worked for Peter Quennell doing picture research for History Today, a similar world to my own. Friends since birth, it seemed an obvious move for us to share a flat together. She earned eight pounds a week and I earned six.

  Once we were installed in the flat beneath my parents’ house in Cheyne Gardens, we busied ourselves enjoying a London of a very different sort. These were Basement Days. The flat was dark and rambling, with a bathroom at the back that it took some time to discover; the lights there often did not work, which was no bad thing. At the front a tiny kitchen, more of a galley than a room, seemed already part of the dustbin area. To our relief, a man found lurking there in the early morning turned out to be a policeman in quest of unpaid library fines (mine) rather than an official from the Council complaining about the unsightly jumble. The sitting room also had a good view of the dustbins out of its murky windows. In short, this seemed to us to be an ideal place to give dinner parties, especially as the great Elizabeth David had recently published A Book of Mediterranean Food.

  We grappled with its revolutionary concepts and argued about the details as explorers in the South Pacific must have discussed hitherto unknown flora and fauna. For example, what was one to make of this enormous stone at the centre of a so-called avocado pear? Was the stone to be left in place as a sort of noble centrepiece or thrown away? Going for the centrepiece was only one of the many decisions we were to get wrong. Then, stuffing an aubergine seemed an awful effort for very little result; secretly I did not fancy the taste of either aubergines or the new favourites, peppers, but was far too anxious to keep up with the times to admit it.

  Courgettes were delicious but presented a different problem: if these were the miniature versions of something called a courge, might it not be simpler and more economical—we were always on the lookout for that—to buy one big courge? Whatever it was. When it turned out to be a form of vegetable marrow, there was disappointment, since wartime cookery had contained all too many insipid marrow dishes. As for real mayonnaise, the memory of my struggles to whip it up still embarrasses me, as well as the unacknowledged fact that all the time I longed for that reliable old bottle of Heinz Salad Cream we were supposed to be replacing. The Goncourt Brothers once wrote that the time of which one does not have a dinner menu is “a time dead to us, an irrecoverable time.” All I can say is that for me Basement Days will never be irrecoverable so long as the last aubergine remains to be stuffed.

  Economy became of the utmost importance when it came to the drink we provided. Cheap—really cheap—wine was one thing: the plonk one brought along to something officially designated a bottle party (as many parties were) hardly deserved the name of wine. Spirits on the other hand were prohibitive. Yet all too many potential escorts who came to the Basement demanded a quick swig of gin or whisky on arrival, before setting off for the designated expedition. A whole bottle of whisky was quite outside our range; in the end I think it was Henrietta who hit on the brilliant expedient of recovering a single empty bottle and replenishing it when necessary with miniatures, so long as it retained its vital Haig label. At all events we became jeunes filles in search of a whisky bottle in a dustbin—not a very Proustian concept. Under the circumstances, it was tempting to rate escorts according to a secret equation: consumption of whisky versus desirability. Not every otherwise agreeable man passed this secret test.

  One of those who did pass the test was Michael Alexander. He was tall and extremely good-looking with a slightly dissolute air; he would have made a good James Bond, although in those days the Ian Fleming creation had not yet captured the imagination of the world. At the time, I fancied there was just a hint of my teenage hero Gary Cooper. As a young man in the war—Michael was now in his mid thirties—he had been a Commando, joined the Special Boat Service and was captured in North Africa. The boast of a family connection to General Alexander, which was false but probably saved his life, led to him being imprisoned in Colditz. Here he joined the Prominente, men who might have hostage value such as Lord Harewood, son of the Princess Royal, and
Giles Romilly, Mrs. Churchill’s nephew. I first got to know about Michael when I read The Privileged Nightmare, his account of Colditz written with Romilly, including the eponymous nightmare situation at the end of the war when Hitler at his last stand ordered the death of the hostages; it had been published the year before I joined Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  Michael’s next adventure was to rescue a friend called West de Wend Fenton from the Foreign Legion (he became known as “Beau” West, another Gary Cooper echo) and this too became a book, The Reluctant Legionnaire, which came out in 1956.

  Michael dedicated this latest book to me. The printed version read: “To Antonia, with love.” Underneath in the copy he gave me, he corrected it by hand to “with much love,” adding “What an honour to have provided you with your first dédicace.” I wish I could say that this romantic message was echoed by his single-minded devotion to me in private life. Alas, the sound of footsteps on the staircase of his Harrington Road flat was heard every day, morning as well as night (Michael showed no signs of having a job) and only a few of them were mine. I was extremely jealous of these other footsteps, especially the daytime ones who were evidently free for fun while I was toiling away in Cork Street. Michael Alexander was a founder member of the so-called Chelsea Set, associated with the new espresso bars in the King’s Road. Michael himself innocently described it later: there was no such Chelsea Set, they were merely workers who were “non-nine-to-fivers” and thus able to meet for coffee. To an outsider, actually a “ten-to-sixer,” the men and the girls seemed enviably devoid of routine cares.