In My Father’s House

‘No!’ My mother’s hands grip and twist the plastic handles of her floral shopping bag as we turn into the melancholy retail park where, two hundred years ago, George Gordon Byron and his cronies came sauntering down into scrubby meadowland to watch a display of cockfighting. Above us, the square bulk of Nottingham Castle looms from the rain clouds; around us, dark figures scatter across the glistening tarmac, fleeing towards the large lit doorways of the stores. I turn off the engine. We sit in silence, waiting for the rain to stop.

‘We mustn’t forget to buy coffee,’ I say. I’m feeling wretched at the distress my questions about her marriage have caused her. ‘And camomile tea. Oh Ma, I am sorry.’

‘If you were sorry, you’d stop writing,’ she says. Unexpectedly, she reaches out to touch my arm. ‘You’re so tense!’

‘I know.’ She stares ahead at a row of shopping trolleys, snugly huddled under a plastic canopy. ‘Can’t you understand how strange it feels for me? Your father and I worked so hard to get the House back to rights. And we did love each other, you know. In spite of everything.’ She sighs. ‘I keep trying to remember the good times and then I start seeing him. He always looks so cross.’

‘He certainly was bossy. Just like you. You’d have thought I was brought up in a pigsty to hear him lecturing me on how to behave.’

‘And to look. Do you remember how you had to have your hair set every week, in that style like a Greek helmet?’

As I say it, I remember being taken into a hot many-mirrored room with my mother and watching active but unfriendly fingers force a miniature version of the helmet to sprout in lacquered curls around my glowering face. Worse even than the strain of meeting the hairdresser’s interrogative stare with a satisfied smile, was the lack of speech. All around me, well-tended ladies twittered bright floods of repartee; thirteen and wordless, I sat shuttered in self-consciousness.

She flushes. ‘I liked it done that way. And some of the clothes he chose for me were lovely. What about the apricot silk dress from Worth? You must have liked that?’

I can’t remember it. All I see, thinking back, are the tweed suits of sensible cut, adding twenty years to her age. ‘Was he always like that, so controlling?’

‘There you go again, always against him.’ But she says it without rancour. ‘Not when we first met. Everything I did and said was perfect. I must say,’ she adds wistfully, ‘I did enjoy it. Being adored.’

Packing our laden shopping bags into the back of the car twenty minutes later, I return to the subject. First, I press a bar of chocolate into her willing hand. ‘I can’t write the book without saying anything about your marriage, you know. It wouldn’t work.’

Peeling off the wrapping, she breaks the bar into squares and pops one in her mouth. ‘Nice nice,’ she says, with a child’s pleased smile. ‘Not like those awful violet creams your father was always eating after we went to bed. He kept them in a locked drawer, greedy old thing. He thought I didn’t know.’

I ask if he ever told her about reading the cherry stones at Thrumpton. ‘It was just before he met you. And the stones told him he was going to make a marriage and grow rich within the year.’

‘Just like him to be so superstitious. Remember when we went to the circus at Olympia and he wouldn’t come out of the fortune teller’s tent?’

I remember it as a night scene by Edward Hopper, lights fading from the carousels and slides, music grinding to an end, my mother, brother and I clustered glumly in a doorway staring at the drawn blind behind which my father, then in his mid-forties, sat transfixed by an old woman’s warnings of grasping hands and indifferent hearts. She was, he had no doubt, speaking of the future of his home, warning him to keep fast hold of it.

‘As for being rich,’ my mother says. ‘I suppose money might have helped. But he wasn’t so badly off, you know.’ Always vague about finance, it’s possible that she never understood how little his four hundred pounds a year amounted to in 1945. ‘He did keep wanting to know how much income I had,’ she adds. ‘Too boring.’

I watch the familiar gesture of a piece of silver foil being smoothed and refolded, occupying her hands while she considers. ‘We used to laugh about all sorts of silly things,’ she says after a long pause. ‘I hope you’re going to say something about that. We did have fun.’ An unexpected giggle spurts out of her, so girlish that I turn in my seat to catch a glimpse of her face. She’s pink, her eyes screwed up with merriment. ‘I was remembering the time when we were in Hyde Park late one night after dancing at the Orchid Room,’ she explains. ‘We were kissing in your father’s car and a policeman stuck his face up against the window. He told us he’d been standing there and shouting at us for half an hour. We never even noticed!’

‘Did he tell you about Thrumpton straightaway?’ I ask as we drive slowly home. ‘He must have been in such a state about it being sold.’ And that, I think to myself, is why he would have been so pleased to meet a pretty and rich young woman who, even if she didn’t return his love at once, seemed glad to be courted. I’ve checked out the dates. They fit.

‘Sold?’ My mother gives me a disgusted look. ‘The things you ask. Whoever said it was being sold?’

I’m so flustered that I almost overshoot the turning into the courtyard at the back of the House. ‘It’s in the diary. Uncle Charles had decided to go back to Essex, to Langford, you know, after the troops moved out of the big house there. Thrumpton was put on the market for sixty thousand. George was frantic. It happened just before you met. He must have told you?’

‘Not a word.’ Halfway out of the car, she stops and gives me a glance that expresses more amusement than annoyance. ‘So that’s what you’ve been thinking all this time, that he married me for my money! A nice thing.’

I don’t want to offend her, but I can’t dismiss the idea of a connection. The Byrons agreed to take Thrumpton off the market for a year in September, 1945. My father had a year in which to come up with a solution. ‘I’d do anything to save Thrumpton,’ he wrote that month. ‘I realise now that it means more to me than anything else in the world.’

Did anything include persuading the daughter of one of England’s wealthiest men to marry him and provide the funds he lacked?

I’m looking at a picture, painted in 1930. In the foreground, two skinny teenage girls kneel on the floor, playing chess. These are my mother’s sisters, Gaenor and Pip. Behind them, near to the fireplace, my grandmother sits at the piano, chin held high: Bronwen, her eldest daughter, known always as The Beauty, plays a viola; Elizabeth, the musical prodigy of the family, draws her bow across a cello’s waisted heart. Across the room, their brother turns his back; a tennis racket swings from his hand like a hunting crop, hinting at the impatience he surely felt at having to pose for a family portrait. Facing him, perched on a long window-seat, my grandfather is identifiable by the baldness of his head and the plumpness of his crossed thighs. ‘I suppose Pa’s fond of us, in his way,’ my mother wrote to my father at the time of their engagement, ‘but he’s a queer person.’

The Irish artist John Lavery has painted this domestic scene in deep, glowing colours that pull the eye towards the centre where, in a short lemon-yellow frock, a child stands. Her feet are neatly pointed like a dancer’s. She’s watching the game of chess, but the artist has placed her apart, separate. She could have been curled up by one of the two dogs or sprawled beside her sisters in the foreground, but Lavery has made a focus point of her solitude.

This is my mother. Eight years old, she stands firm as a young warrior in the drawing-room of Chirk Castle, a fourteenth-century fortress in the Marches, the borderlands that divide England from Wales. This, until the year she marries my father, will be her home. She will be the last to leave, helping Margot, her mother, to fold curtains, store books, check the inventories, say farewell to the house that always seemed to be their own. Her parents were only a couple in the most formal of senses by 1945, but Margot took care to return to Chirk that year. She knew her husband; left to himself, Lord Howard de Walden would have cared only for the preservation of his library, his writings, and his hawks.

Writing her memoirs years later, my grandmother claimed that Tommy chose her as a bride because of her hands, which were large and capable. They needed to be.

Erudite, absent-minded and notoriously dishevelled in person, Lord Howard de Walden made up for an unglamorous appearance by living like a Renaissance prince. Invited to join the Olympic Fencing team in 1906, he transported his colleagues to Athens on the Branwen, his private yacht; the Royal Welch Fusiliers’ regiment under his command in the First World War was equipped to fight with medieval daggers from his own collection. Lacking a country home of his own and learning of a family link to the property, he rented and repaired a beautiful, haunted house in Essex until the ghosts – a mighty hound that raced around the dining table and vanished into the wall; an old man who sat on visitors’ beds; an army of spectral knights who came clattering up the drive on moonlit nights – grew too obstreperous for the tenant of Audley End. In 1911, he undertook another romantic project: the restoration of a Welsh castle that the resident family could no longer afford to maintain. This was where my mother was born in 1922; by that time, the Howard de Walden family looked on Chirk as their home.

Lord and Lady Howard de Walden enjoyed dressing up for pageants at their Welsh home.

My mother has taught me to venerate my grandfather and the home he brought to life. I like her youthful memories of being led around the hilltop gardens by the hand of Rudyard Kipling, of being talked at (‘never with; you couldn’t!’) by Shaw. I love to think of her galloping bareback over the Welsh hills on her father’s Arab mares. (‘There you go again! Bareback! You know perfectly well that we always used saddles.’) And of my grandmother calling her tribe of daughters home by hooting Brünnhilde’s cry across the Ceiriog valley. (‘Well, that’s true.’) I relish the story of an intrepid aunt setting off to nurse in the Spanish Civil War (wrong side, unfortunately) before marrying a philandering aristocrat whose baby-smooth cheeks and confident smirk won him a few film appearances (famous titles, undemanding roles, always playing himself, the charismatic cad).

Hearing how five-course banquets were borne across a courtyard from an underground kitchen, I’m amazed again by the ease with which my mother has adapted to a different life. Doesn’t she mind wearing velour tracksuits and secondhand shoes when she looks back on those years in a many-towered castle, set high on a wooded hill, with maids to unpack for her, to press her clothes and draw her bath?

I should know better than to wonder; the key to my mother’s survival and good humour is that she never occupies her mind with what’s gone. It may be that the last memories of Chirk are so bleak that they blot out earlier pleasure. I can’t imagine how it felt, aged twenty, to escape a court martial (her misplaced chart pins had sent an American convoy, quite harmlessly, to Scotland instead of Devon). Broken and lost, she came back to Chirk, to recuperate from a nervous collapse in an abandoned house. This isn’t a time she talks about, but I’ve heard enough to know my mother suffered. I’ve heard her describe sitting alone at meals with her father, staring at the bald dome of his head as he bent forward, oblivious, diligently tracking a line of text in some obscure manuscript. Once, unable to bear the silence, she shouted at him. He flinched, as if a stranger had broken in on his dreams, but he didn’t speak. She says it was a mercy when Margot returned from Canada, a warfree zone to which she had agreed to take those grandchildren who could least be cared for by their busy parents.

My mother as a small girl, posing in her tutu; and as a teenager (on the far left) at a fete in Chirk village, 1936.

Back in Britain, Margot looked at her youngest daughter’s trembling hands and listened to her frightened laugh; furiously, she lambasted Tommy for selfish indifference before taking control of the situation. My poor mother: hustled off to a local agricultural college to learn the rudiments of farming, she found her métier just in time to be deprived of it. A girl must have a season; Margot insisted on it, even when the girl in question was in her twenties. Measured and fitted into a fluid sheath of flame-coloured silk, another of emerald green, my mother was launched, bright-eyed and apprehensive, to find a mate and make a life of the kind for which she had been bred.

In later years, my mother developed a comfortable shape. By the time she had turned twenty-two in the summer of 1945, worry and a poor diet had stripped her of flesh. Large-eyed, and thin as a weasel, she was pale-skinned, her head crowned with a mass of copper-gold hair. (Think Moira Shearer; you’re not far off.) She read with voracious indiscrimination, spoke a little French and German, spelt atrociously and was financially innocent. (‘Unless I can see money or know it’s there, I feel insecure,’ she admitted in an early letter to my father.) Her nervousness was hidden by an insouciant manner. She didn’t, beyond a couple of tender flirtations, of which one had been with an unseen military pen-pal, have any sexual experience. This was a dove, I’m ready to conclude, who was ripe for being caught and plucked.

My mother shakes her head. ‘You make me sound such a ninny. I wasn’t looking for a husband. My father may have rented Chirk, but he owned lots of farms in Wales. I’d talked to him. He was going to let me have one of them at half rent. I had everything planned out.’ She looks past me, her eyes bright with affection for the picture of something I have never seen. ‘I’d have kept a few goats. Hens. A donkey. Pigs. It was going to be just outside Wrexham, near Chirk.’

Life on the land she’d loved. I remember reading the letters that Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon wrote to each other in the closing months of the Great War, two poets planning out a farming future. Unchanged landscape comes to symbolise a lost idyll in wartime. Old-fashioned paintings of pastoral scenes sold well throughout the 1940s; fields of corn helped mask the stench of war: of sulphur, and of death. Of course my mother wanted to farm: what could life offer that was more tranquil, more reassuring?

Remembering the wartime diary’s notes of visits to the manicurist, and of a certain flower-scented hand-lotion reserved there for George Seymour’s personal use, I can’t help smiling. ‘Just read his letters,’ she says, indignant. ‘He was just as keen as me. The letters will tell you how it was.’

I tell her that I have been unable to find them. ‘But he kept yours in his desk, every single one. All tied up in ribbons and put safely away.’

‘Oh?’ I’m sceptical. I’ve searched through every cupboard and drawer in the House, but they’re gone, those voluminous screeds of adoration which demanded instant response, out on the ash heap or in the fire. She can’t remember a word from them now, or even from her own.

‘Listen!’ I quote one of my favourite lines, when she informed her husband-to-be that her mother thought him ‘“oh! A perfect pet! (Although she doesn’t say what sort.)”.’

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