CHAPTER THREE

BEFORE-THE-WAR

There would come a time when the bells of Oxford would fall silent, with the coming of war. This meant that the portmanteau term “before-the-war” would take on a magic meaning. We would look back on a time of multitudinous ice creams, sunny holidays (it never rained before-the-war), grown-ups driving us freely about the country in petrol-rich cars without thinking about it. In short, those pre-war days of the many bells were very happy ones.

Life at Singletree was punctuated by visits to Bernhurst in East Sussex, not far from Battle. This was the home of an ancient American lady known as Great Aunt Caroline; she had been married to my father’s great-uncle Sir Francis Pakenham, a diplomat who was born in 1832 and died in May 1905 just before my father was born. As a childless widow, Aunt Caroline looked round for an heir; when Mary Julia Longford gave birth to a second son (who would have no financial expectations) Aunt Caroline declared an interest: there would be a visit of inspection. She proceeded from Bernhurst to London, liked what she saw, and announced that she would make the baby her heir, provided that he was named after her late husband. (Sir Francis had been a seventh child out of eight, and as such had not received either of the traditional Pakenham names of Thomas, Edward or Michael.)

As it happened, it was not a name my father ever used: he was Frank in every situation and on every document. Perhaps he resented the exclusion from the mainstream of Pakenham names, since he called his eldest son Thomas (like his father) and another son Michael. Whatever inspired it, this determination to avoid Francis meant that when the present Queen announced his enrolment in the Order of the Garter, in St. George’s Chapel in 1971, referring to “our well beloved Francis,” I thought she had got the wrong person.

At all events, little Frank, christened Francis, was destined to inherit a pretty Queen Anne house with some useful later additions, as well as seventy-five acres of farmland. From my point of view Aunt Caroline, already not far off a hundred, was a very tiny, very old lady, possibly left over from some fairy story, not exactly a witch but not quite a human being either, with her wizened appearance. To me, the most fascinating thing about her was what would now be called her lifestyle. Aunt Caroline had a full-time companion, also American, known as Cousin Edie (this blessed woman would later send us care parcels from America during the height of rationing). She also had a butler, forever dressed so far as we were concerned in butler gear of white tie and tails, whatever the weather. And of course, before-the-war as in most childhood memories of the time, the weather was always hot.

This meant that Tea-on-the-Lawn was an important moment in the butler’s life and indeed in ours. There was a large wooden summer house at the edge of the wide, neatly mown lawn which could overlook the rolling dips and hills of East Sussex down to the River Rother. It could also gaze backwards at the house, since a vital feature of the summer house was its huge rollers which enabled it to revolve, in theory following the sun. This was something Thomas and I found fascinating. Once the house was ours, we would have it spun round and round to our hearts’ content. Probably Aunt Caroline’s butler would turn it for us: we could not envisage the house without him.

No such lèse-majesté occurred in the reign of Aunt Caroline herself. At teatime an enormously long black power cord was laid across the lawn to the summer house and a large electric kettle installed. The butler was quite portly as he bent at his task but nothing deflected him from it. The teapot was silver. There were minute sandwiches served on the most delicate china. After that, the scene became less gracious. Aunt Caroline, now in her late nineties, was confused by my appearance. With my short curly hair, cut at the insistence of my mother, she decided that I was a boy, in fact the boy who would one day inherit Bernhurst in succession to his father Francis. And she did not like what she saw. She might have approved of the baby Francis, but this restless squirming “boy” was another matter.

“He fidgets, he fidgets,” she complained in a surprisingly strong voice, in which you could still trace an American accent. “Why does the boy fidget so much?”

“Keep still, Antonia,” hissed my mother. “She thinks you’re Thomas.” It did not occur to me at the time that in a modern reversal of a Frances Hodgson Burnett story, I might squirm away yet more energetically until I succeeded in blighting my brother’s potential inheritance. I just wished that my mother would let me have long hair to avoid misunderstanding: long thick plaits perhaps, interwoven with flowers.

Once Aunt Caroline died, memories of her were kept alive in the house by the existence of her old-fashioned clothes stowed away in a cupboard. They joined the breastplate of our dead Life Guard grandfather and his excruciatingly uncomfortable helmet, but were rather more practical. There was a tiny little cloak, for example, intricately embroidered, with lace laid over taffeta, adorned with bows. A bonnet was another favourite, and a mauve satin skirt. Her clothes fitted us children and we used them for dressing up. There was also no need to control the fidgeting, in so far as I had ever done so. Thus Thomas and I enjoyed two halcyon seasons at Bernhurst before the war. We would have instinctively understood the words of Henry James to Edith Wharton (also on a visit to Sussex): “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me these have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

Cricket played by adults was an important part in these summer afternoons. Once again, the sun shines and the white-clad “run-stealers flicker to and fro,” in the immortal lines of Francis Thompson:

For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast

And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost…

O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

Our field was the Hurst Green cricket pitch, which lay behind the George, directly across the busy, dangerous main road to Hastings and the sea. Once you reached the pitch itself, roads and pub were forgotten: here was a magic enclave that might have been in a clearing in the forest.

Our father was passionately interested in cricket; as a boy, he told us, he knew Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack by heart (a faint implication here of inadequacy on the part of his children, which was rare coming from him). His own play was enthusiastic, sometimes over-enthusiastic it seemed. Our mother was heard exclaiming: “It’s too bad! Frank was caught dancing outside his crease again and they stumped him.” Elizabeth herself was never known to take any physical exercise: she happily surrendered her unused tennis gear and even dress to me when I was eight, since that left her free for energetic gardening. She also gave the impression of disapproving of Frank’s ardent addiction to sport, which he nevertheless retained throughout his life. On the other hand, her loyalty was total: if he must play cricket, he should be allowed to do so without criticism, and certainly not be confined to something called a crease, whatever that might be, and stumped—horrid word—for going outside it.

As for Thomas and me, we were left reverently puzzling: Dada dancing? What sort of dance was that? Nothing quite so interesting took place on our watch, although we kept a keen lookout for those twinkling toes, but I was imbued with a lifelong feeling of pleasure at the idea of watching the game. Neither rainy windswept Sunday matches nor the occasional failure of family members to shine have ever quite destroyed it.

The run-stealers flickering to and fro, our Hornbys and our Barlows, were on the whole our father’s friends, not famous cricketers. One match before-the-war included the writer and journalist Philip Toynbee, who as a youthful Communist had been involved with Frank in the famous Mosley incident at the town hall. His beguiling wife Anne, with her mild face and soft fair hair, enchanted us with the attention she paid to us; but for the most part the grown-ups ignored us, we were like cats watching silently in the background.

There was however one star. Aidan Crawley was then, and remained, one of Frank’s favourite people. Here was a man of action with his handsome film star’s looks—Rex Harrison, perhaps—and his courage: he would be shot down in the war and held as a prisoner. He returned full of idealism to be elected a Labour MP for six years, before turning Conservative and finally chairing a new television company. No wonder one obituary compared him to a John Buchan character. Above all, Aidan was a fabulous cricketer in my father’s eyes.

“Aidan was Twelfth Man for England,” said Frank proudly. It took us a long time to realize that this was not necessarily the top billing. Our keen enquiry to someone else we were assured was a top-rank cricketer—“Are you the Twelfth Man?”—must have met with some surprise.

Most exciting of all about before-the-war holiday life at Bernhurst was the possibility of a visit to Bodiam. This was a castle rising up in the green lily-strewn bed of its own moat. It had a drawbridge, towers, crenellated turrets and a well. Windows from the turrets looked directly over the water. I thought that I should like to live there, with those coveted long plaits I was not allowed to grow but which were granted to me in my fantasy life, hanging down towards the moat. Like Rapunzel in the fairy story, I would let down my hair, although I wasn’t quite sure at this point whom I wanted to come clambering up it.

Bodiam Castle was about three miles away from Bernhurst, but like the cricket pitch, if more exotic, it took you into your own world: into the world of my History, in short. Built late on in the fourteenth century, it was intended to keep out the French during the Hundred Years War. Sir Edward Dallingridge was granted a licence to erect a castle “for the defence of the adjacent country and the resistance to our enemies.” The French were just over the Channel, and the French, as I knew from my beloved Our Island Story, were out to get us. (They were of course no relation to the French, the other French, whom we would get to know and admire after the outbreak of the war, because they were Free, the Free French and thus completely different.)

Bodiam was especially important because we learnt that the sea in those distant days did not stop peacefully at Hastings and Bexhill, where we would visit it to bathe. It came rushing across in the direction of Bodiam. I imagined as I looked out of the turrets that there were waves, possibly stormy, and boats, probably hostile, where now there was the River Rother. However, Bodiam’s satisfying life as a martial focus in the surrounding low-lying country came to an end with the Civil War in the seventeenth century. John Tufton, Earl of Thanet, on the King’s side, led an attack on Lewes, before being defeated at Haywards Heath (these were all familiar local Sussex names to us). The worsted Tufton had to sell Bodiam to a parliamentarian in order to pay the enormous fine imposed upon him. Somehow poor Bodiam ended up being “slighted”—not some petty social insult, but strong measures which put it out of action as a defensive castle. The ruins, artistically covered in ivy, became an eighteenth-century tourist attraction as the fashion for the medieval and the Gothic spread.

The castle I encountered however was far from being a ruin, otherwise I would hardly have planned to take up residence there, plaits and all. In its next incarnation, Bodiam was carefully adapted and rebuilt at the orders of Lord Curzon, after the First World War; this lofty grandee politician, Viceroy of India at one point, clearly had a taste for the majestic. What we saw therefore was the product of many visions down the six hundred odd years of the castle’s existence. I like to think that in its turn Bodiam has gone on to inspire further visions of History in the imagination of its visitors, including my own. For example, I was gratified to learn when I got interested in the whole subject of historical biography that the great Macaulay—an early hero—had been, according to G. M. Trevelyan, interested in “castle building”: he once declared that “the past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance,” something with which I could easily identify. Certainly from Bodiam onwards, a castle, however dilapidated, aroused in me a thrill that a Georgian masterpiece of a house could never do: the feeling of danger perhaps…the possibilities of dungeons and oubliettes where there were also turrets.

Where I was concerned, an obsession with Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill made it particularly easy to insert myself into the landscape around Bodiam, much as the two children who were the centre of the story, Dan and Una, had done. The first exciting thing that I got from the book was a feeling of secrecy about Sussex. Here was not grandeur of landscape as I would later thrill to in Scotland and in a smoother more dulcet way in Dorset: instead, a series of grassy enclaves, hills which delicately revealed themselves then retreated, valleys one came upon by surprise.

As a result I began to discern secrecy in the holiday world around me. Even the hop-pickers who came annually for the summer from the East End of London to perform their task had something secret and exciting, almost clandestine about them. For one thing, we were instructed on no account to talk to these mysterious strangers, some of them children like ourselves. But apparently threatening children.

“Why shouldn’t I talk to a hop-picker?” I asked, keen to make new friends, followed by “Where is the East End?” from Thomas, who from birth wanted to know facts.

“They eat different food,” my mother said vaguely. That made the incomers even more mysterious. When pressed, she murmured something about whelks and eels, which was positively exciting. My nanny was more succinct. “Little thieves,” she muttered. “And big thieves too.”

All this moulded into my picture of Sussex derived from Kipling, where the magic elf named Puck instructed Dan and Una in the ways of the past. The actual book was published in 1906, at roughly the same time as Our Island Story, arguing for a prelapsarian period in children’s literature in the decade before the First World War. Kipling wrote it for his own son and daughter, basing the opening on a real-life performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which his daughter Elsie (ten in 1906) played Titania—and he himself played Bottom. But there was something literally timeless about the story. To me in the Thirties, it was all happening then. And years later, incidentally, I received pleasing confirmation of the enduring spell of Kipling when I learnt that the historian Simon Schama, thirteen years younger than me and living not in Sussex but in Southend-on-Sea, had found inspiration in Puck of Pook’s Hill: “For a small boy with his head in the past, Kipling and fantasy was potent magic,” he wrote, “with Puck’s help you could time travel by standing still.”

I suppose there has to be some serpent in an Eden: in this case a whole nest of snakes. My parents decided to take a holiday together in Czechoslovakia in 1938: an interesting year to choose in view of subsequent events, and surely a significant element in the very strong opposition towards appeasement on both their parts. Thomas and I were to be parked in a seaside holiday home for children called Kittiwake. A certain amount of preparation must have gone on for this event, since I have memories of Elizabeth showing me an illustration of the gull called a kittiwake in a bird book. I gazed at it dubiously: I thought the bird had a sinister twist to its beak. However we listened dutifully to tales of what a wonderful time we were going to have: “No Mummy and Dada! Just fun with other children!” Older children, she might have added. For at Kittiwake I encountered a new phenomenon: the gang of which I was nothing like the eldest member, no longer the superior, envied person.

Nevertheless all went well, or so I thought. There were games, round games, square games, a bit of acting perhaps, swimming, digging in the sand…And now we children were all going to have a meeting. There was an announcement, not exactly from the staff like most announcements, but a message rapidly passed from childish lip to lip. Whispered not shouted. In this way we all convened in some outdoor space where it was possible to sit in a circle. If not explicitly secret, this meeting would certainly not include the grown-ups.

I was distinctly excited, as I remember to this day: this memory of innocent anticipation haunts me almost as much as what was to follow. A keen reader of school stories—those of Angela Brazil, favourite of my father’s generation, in particular—I rejoiced that I was about to take part in some kind of clandestine activity, which would undoubtedly turn out to be jolly good fun. The circle was large for there were quite a few of us staying at Kittiwake, and then an older girl whom I will call Elspeth stepped into the middle of the ring.

She made a brief, rather thrilling speech. The message was clear. There was a traitor in our midst, a truly bad person, someone who was at one and the same time both deeply unpopular and insufferably pleased with him or herself. What could be done about this person, this uppish yet odious person who was making our lives a misery? We all agreed that nothing was too bad for such a person. We hissed, we spluttered. No one was more eloquent in her enthusiastic denunciations than I was. When I first read Orwell, the Two Minutes Hate in 1984, this daily routine of loyal party members expressing their contempt for the current enemy superstate aroused painful memories. For of course this pariah, this hate object, was in fact myself.

The sheer horror of the occasion lay not so much in my expulsion from the gang as my total ignorance of my impending fate. And so I had betrayed…Exactly what had I betrayed by hissing with the rest of them? Everything, I suppose. As well as ending up a pariah, I had turned viciously on an innocent person, a victim, who just happened to be me.

On her return from Czechoslovakia, my mother lovingly painted a picture of a kittiwake for my precious autograph book. To her amazement, I burst into tears and ran from the room. Naturally I never told her why the sight of the glinting eye and cruel curving beak of the bird aroused such an extreme reaction: that was not the mode in parental relations in the Thirties—or anyway not our mode.

Besides which, she would inevitably ask: “What did you do to deserve this?” And I had no idea. As a matter of fact, I still don’t, although it could be argued that the whole experience did me a power of good, teaching me early in life that unpopularity—and thus logically popularity as well—is a mysterious quality which sometimes appears from nowhere, with nothing done to deserve it. For all that, I have never felt quite the same about gulls: untrustworthy predatory creatures that they are. And I tore the picture of the hateful kittiwake out of my autograph book the moment my mother’s back was turned.

It is curious that in all these memories, mainly good, one mysteriously bad, no images of my brother Thomas’s serious illness occur. It is as though all that existed in some separate sphere. And yet photographs provide clear documentary evidence: here is Thomas, my companion, my Irish twin, my other self, in a large leather collar propping up his head and chin, and with his arm similarly held up by a stiff steel and leather “aeroplane” sling.

Thomas somehow contracted polio at the end of 1936. Reading my mother’s autobiography, published in the 1980s, I understood for the first time the frightful parental agonies she had endured: and at a time incidentally when she was pregnant with her third child. Thomas developed a temperature over Christmas and, a few days later, could not move his left arm or turn his head. Eventually he was moved to the Wingfield Hospital, not far from where we lived at Singletree, and diagnosed with polio, in those days called infantile paralysis.

This menacing disease was not unknown to us by repute. According to nursery lore, it might be lurking in certain brands of ice cream with exotic names: you went there adventurously at your own risk, whereas Wall’s was dull but safe. The prospect of dangerous ice cream was in fact rather exciting, like the sort of potion a witch might devise to trap unwary children. We also knew about tuberculosis since there were several children who had had it and recovered: in this case, according to our nanny, it was evil cows who were responsible, as opposed to good cows who gave pasteurized milk—what magic pasture was that?

Where polio was concerned, I was to meet quite a few people at Oxford, and later, who had suffered from this in the Thirties. It is a phase now history in the most thankful sense of the word, ever since the discovery by Jonas Salk of the vaccine (first tested in 1952) which has led to the virtual eradication of polio, at least in the West. At that time the odd child at a party might have a leg in a splint, a sling like Thomas, or sit in a wheelchair. These were of course middle-class children, yet by repute polio was considered to be a working-class disease. My mother told me much later that Frank’s political enemies, and even some of his Tory relations who deplored his Labour affiliation, had suggested that he risked contamination by living in South Oxford at Singletree, near the Cowley works, instead of safe donnish North Oxford. In short, our middle-class upbringing should have protected Thomas had it not been for his parents’ persistence in living in defiance of the social order.

In her autobiography my mother actually wrote rather more discreetly if less specifically: “It was suggested that he had picked it up on 19 December from a children’s Christmas party given by the Labour supporters of Cowley [the ward for which my father was Labour Councillor].” And she added firmly that it was just as likely to have been acquired at Margaret Countess of Jersey’s party for her numerous great-grandchildren about the same time.

It showed an admirable—and characteristic—loyalty to the Cowley Labour Party for Elizabeth to invoke those fabulous parties as a potential source of the disease. How many great-grandchildren did Lady Jersey have? Dozens and dozens it seemed. Most of them spoke in terrifying sophisticated voices about visits to the Park, and future London parties, which alarmed country cousins like myself and Henrietta.

“Was that your nanny you were with this morning, George?” asked a moppet called Sophy in a white frilly dress with red shoes. “She wasn’t wearing a uniform.” It was true that the nannies at Great-Grandmamma’s parties—crowds of them all together like hens—wore starched uniforms, a phenomenon which did not extend to North Oxford. Somehow it illustrated our status, as in a Jane Austen novel, as being less grand than our relations. I longed to have been seen in the Park that morning, with or without my nanny in her usual dull blouse fastened by a pin brooch at the throat, and a tweedy sort of skirt. It was also symbolic of status that the fairy on the vast Christmas tree was always given to Lady Caroline Child-Villiers, daughter of Grandie (for his previous courtesy title Lord Grandison, not a social judgement on his character), the current Earl of Jersey; although, as Henrietta pointed out, Caroline was younger than us.

Had the infection really lurked in the famous bran tub from which each great-grandchild was allowed to extract a present? My mother showed great bravado in raising the subject. All the same I can only imagine how the original allusions to Labour and Cowley, with their nasty imputation of parental neglect, must have added to her sorrows.

All this was of course quite unknown to me then. What I saw (through the mask I had to wear for visits) was an entire set of Little Grey Rabbit toys. And Thomas didn’t even like soft toys. Envy, always in attendance in family life, murmured in my ear. The next thing my unfortunate mother knew I was myself struck immobile. It was the family doctor who lured me into movement again by trailing a new doll in front of me. After a moment I could not resist; like a kitten, I pounced—and the game was up.

So Thomas eventually emerged, back into nursery life, in his steel-and-leather kit, with his neck and one side in some way withered. The true courage of his endurance, the infinitely touching speechless courage of sick children everywhere in hospital, was not apparent to me. I now see that those Nature does not manage to kill, she magnanimously makes stronger; or rather, even more importantly, she bestows the art of survival upon them. No one since has ever questioned Thomas’s powers of endurance: it is as though the steel and leather entered his soul at that point. To me at the time he simply appeared to be more obstinate than before. Thomas’s two favourite words, as a grown-up once wryly pointed out, were “Wajamean” and “Hujamean” and he was not easily satisfied by the answers he was given.

In any case, we were soon ready for the next stage in our adventure of living: evacuation. Shortly before war broke out, a taxi took us across Southern England, from Bernhurst in East Sussex to Water Eaton Manor near Oxford. Others were suffering the ordeal of being uprooted and separated from their parents. The nine-year-old Harold Pinter, for example, with the rest of his primary school in Hackney, was dispatched six hundred miles away to Cornwall, never having left home before. For me, however, the happiest year of my early life was about to begin.