CHAPTER FIVE

SHE DRAGON

The school next door to which my mother had so casually referred, that summer in which we left Water Eaton, was called the Dragon. I spent the following four years of my life there, September 1940 to July 1944.

“Next door” was not an exaggeration. Our house was actually bang next door to the headmaster’s house, something that became awkward as I could be easily spotted mooning about in the garden making up romantic stories about myself, when I should have been doing my prep. Luckily the headmaster, “Hum” as A. E. Lynam was known—the Dragon specialized in nicknames which boys used quite openly—had a head of thick yellow-white hair which was virtually luminous. I would spy him in his window and recite gobbledegook Latin verse loudly to put him off the scent. Next to the headmaster’s house came the lane down to the River Cherwell and the boats; then the playing fields stretching down to the river and the school barge; lastly the school itself.

At the end of my first year at the Dragon, Hum gave the following verdict in my report: “Just the start for a She Dragon.” Apart from leaving open the question of whether he had been fooled by my gobbledegook or heard it correctly for what it was, Hum did point to something which was generally felt but not defined. There was a species called the She Dragon. Later I heard that girls at the school were known as hags, but the term was not then in use; although it would have been curiously appropriate for me. A late developer toothwise, I was known in my family as the gap-tooth hag, with photos of me in my new uniform, beaming happily under my circular school hat, to explain why. So far as I was concerned, it was all super, if not outright wizard (the two favoured words at the Dragon) as I belted out the words “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, You make me happy when skies are grey” (the favoured song) on my way to school.

Altogether, with my curly hair, still kept very short by my pitiless mother, at the age of eight I looked as much like a boy as a girl. This once led to an embarrassing incident at Parson’s Pleasure bathing place, where I was ushered into the wrong changing room, and had to lurk fully dressed in a corner (as a She Dragon, my chief reaction was not embarrassment but annoyance that I had missed my swim). Nevertheless, whatever I looked like, I did not feel like a boy, and nor, I believe, did any of the other so-called She Dragons.

Now officially described as co-educational, with about one third of the pupils girls, the Dragon was certainly not what is meant by co-educational in the Forties. What I did come to feel, therefore, was that I was in some way special, and this was undoubtedly based on the experience of being the member of a tiny clique. Did we girls in addition feel privileged? I don’t believe so: that came afterwards, when we discovered in our different ways what an exciting and unusual education, compared to our contemporaries, we had received.

The Dragon School had been founded by a group of dons in 1877 and was originally known as the Oxford Little Boys School; eventually it became Lynam’s for short, the name of the family who provided three headmasters, reigning in turn for an extraordinary span of eighty-nine years, ending in 1965. These were Skipper (C. C. Lynam), his brother Hum, and Hum’s son Joc ( J. H. R. Lynam) who took over from Hum halfway through my school career. It was Skipper, incidentally, who declared in a Prize Day speech that he much preferred his nickname to be used—“I hate to be called ‘Sir’ every half minute”—a tradition which stuck. And the first She Dragon was his daughter Kit, who arrived in 1896, to be followed by a second five years later, sister of three male Dragons; making the numbers two girls to eighty-eight boys. In my time, both these figures had substantially increased, but the gap remained proportionately enormous. In 1943, for example, there were officially forty girls and three hundred and fifty-one boys.

In the Forties, there were still older people who bafflingly referred to the school as Lynam’s; but according to the record, it was the first pupils who were inspired to call themselves Dragons by the fact that one of the don-founders had the surname George. We children certainly knew what we were. “I am a Dragon,” one would say in response to enquiries—with just a hint of polite surprise that any other answer could be expected.

Indeed, that gold Dragon, seen in profile with his long curly tail, ferocious tongue and outstretched wings, was everywhere. He was the crest on our navy blue blazers, such a familiar sight round Oxford, stamped on the memory with the motto Arduus ad Solem. (Striving for the Sun, which during the Battle of Britain became linked in my mind with the celebrated motto of the RAF: Per ardua ad astra—Through Adversity to the Stars.) The school magazine was known as the Draconian. The anthology of poetry, first published in 1935, which dominated our learning and our recitation aloud was called The Dragon Book of Verse. The metal weathervane that swung to and fro above the building which contained the boys’ changing room was of course a dragon, with the school motto beneath—allowing these lines to be bellowed out meaningfully in the school song:

And the words on that tin

Mean go in and win…

Winning was extremely important at the Dragon. The lively spirit of competition extended to the parents, perhaps because so many of them (including my own) were connected to the ever-competitive academic world. Particularly, it seemed to me that the mothers were competitive; I remember them being quite as clever as their husbands and of course in many cases in wartime it was the mother who was the resident head of the household. All these mothers appeared to take an acute interest in the weekly form orders—distributed in written reports—with the corollary that certain among them were rumoured to be extraordinarily helpful with the homework. A popular master known as “Jacko” (C. H. Jacques) used to perform light-hearted revue sketches at the end of term. When he awarded the form prize to Mrs. Arrowsmith instead of her clever son, this was felt to be an appropriate, even admiring joke: when we applauded, we were applauding Mrs. Arrowsmith as well as Jacko.

My own mother was certainly right up with the rest of them in her ambitions for me. “Who came first?” was her only comment when I proudly announced that I had come second in Maths, a position which was frankly miraculous, given my lack of natural ability in that direction. On the other hand, constant child-bearing during the war meant that there was not much homework help to be expected. The perpetually attendant maternity nurse Elsie Violet Samways, known as Sammy, actually gave me more help listening to me practising my recitations. (“How old are you, Sammy?” This kindly woman, who seemed incredibly ancient to us, would answer any question but that: “As old as my eyes and a little bit older than my teeth,” she would invariably reply.) It was only after I grew up that I realized how fortunate I had been, as the eldest, to have Elizabeth’s keen attention at the start, teaching me that ever-swift reading, and later Latin. By the time I was eight, the spirit of the Dragon could probably be trusted to do the rest.

The dominant lessons at the Dragon School were Latin and Greek; the dominant sport rugger, as it was always called. This suited me down to the ground, often literally so in the case of rugger. All the girls at the Dragon in those days played rugger as a matter of course, there was nothing special about it—and how intoxicating the experience was! The girl described by my mother only a few years before as being absorbed “in a dream world of tinsel and glittering beauty” was experiencing different sensations. In short, the feeling of racing up the wing, and handing off my pursuers as enthusiastically as possible, is one that remains with me as sheer pleasure. As I have come to tell the story, I was in the second XV, and prevented from playing away against the local prep school Summerfields because there was no girls’ changing room. To me, this was extremely odd since I regarded playing rugger as the norm. But there is no doubt that this insouciance on the subject has merited some odd reactions over the years.

It began early. Our favourite among our parents’ friends was undoubtedly John Betjeman, whom they had known since their own Oxford days. Betjeman, as they called him, would appear out of nowhere and recite mock Shakespearean verse on his knee to my mother, poetically addressed (like Queen Elizabeth I) as Eliza. I loved and envied this. So when Betjeman, as an Old Dragon, took an interest in my rugger career, I was first flattered then upset when he would not accept that I played fleet-footedly on the wing, but kept insisting that I was to be found in the hurly-burly of the scrum. It was not until I read his poem “A Subaltern’s Love Song” featuring the immortal Miss Joan Hunter Dunn that I realized that this tribute to my strength was in fact the greater compliment. In my very minor way, I was of the breed led by Betjeman’s “shock-headed victor,” with her “strongly adorable tennis-girl’s hand.”

I will pass over briefly the incident while my first husband was Under-Secretary for War, when a benevolent general attempted to tell me the rules of rugger at the Army and Navy match at Twickenham. I tried to hand him off, as it were, with assurances about my expertise, which he in turn found hard to believe. But perhaps the all-round incredulity is summed up by an incident at another prep school, Colet Court, in the Seventies. I was walking down the touchline with my youngest son Orlando, watching a game of rugger, accompanied by Geoffrey Owen whose own son Tom was playing.

“Ah, Antonia,” said Geoff, “I so well remember you haring up the wing at the Dragon” (he was two years my junior). I was smiling fondly at the memory when I suddenly noticed Orlando, aged nine, looking utterly gobsmacked.

“Orlando, what on earth is the matter?”

“But, Mummy,” he began, “we always thought you made all that up, just to make us laugh.”

For all the competitive merriment of sport, Latin and Greek were the true dominants of the school. The chief classics master, L. A. Wilding, known of course as “Law,” who taught Upper One for twenty years, had written a major textbook on the subject. The ability to write Latin verse was something that was expected to be instinctive and, hammered home, did indeed become so. It remains with one for a lifetime, learnt early enough.

In 1961, I received a new courtesy title when Frank became Earl of Longford on the death of his elder brother. No longer Mrs. Fraser, I was henceforth to be known as Lady Antonia.

“Did you realize that your new name is the ending of a Latin hexameter?” enquired the distinguished lawyer Sir John Foster, a lofty man both physically and mentally.

“Down in a deep, dark dell sat Lady Antonia Fraser,” I replied, swiftly, adapting the old Dragon lines we learnt to guide us about the rhythm of Latin verse which began: “Down in a deep dark dell sat an old cow chewing a beanstalk.”

“Weak ending, of course,” said Foster, attempting to claw back victory; he referred to the fact that the word Fraser consists of two syllables, the first of which gets heavier emphasis than the second, making it a trochee. A line could end strongly with the equal emphasis of a spondee: “heartbreak” for example instead of “happy.” I only wish I had had the guts to observe quite correctly: “So is Foster.”

With the study of Latin and Greek went a great deal of concentration on the ancient world, as well as reading the classics. As a result, the Dragon spirit saw to it that the boys regularly took the top scholarships at Winchester and Eton. A Dragon Century, the school history by Jacko, reveals that Winchester was the original objective, with Eton catching up fast from the Twenties on. This history also records 1951 as The Year of the Double Top, when the first places on the Winchester Roll and the Eton Roll were both won. It seems splendidly characteristic of Dragon competitiveness that while the boys were immediately awarded a “no-prep,” the staff celebrated with a party to which they triumphantly invited their rival masters from neighbouring schools.

It was certainly in the spirit of the Dragon School that when the time came for me to leave, I personally researched girls’ schools which awarded scholarships. These seemed to be few and far between, and focused on boarding schools; although my mother had simply assumed I would be going to Oxford High School. However I had a secret ambition which was to see the name Antonia Pakenham inscribed on the Honours Board among the names of all the cleverest boys at the Dragon, the Bullards and the Wildings. It seemed to me later a warning against hubris that by the time this aim was achieved—not too difficult at that period for a girl given a boy’s education—my name had to be installed at the very end of the existing Board running along the wall, an area almost invisible because it lay at the back of the stage.

Undoubtedly this competitiveness at work was acknowledged by the production of those weekly reports, giving the form order. Hum, as headmaster, read them all, commenting in red ink. There were also a prodigious number of prizes awarded. Was all this a mistake? I think my own attitude to the system was the obvious one: I liked it very much when I won, and was temporarily miffed when I didn’t. And yet it is a curious fact that I have absolutely no memory of learning History, my passion in life, when I was at the Dragon. I continued to read any historical works, principally biographies, I could lay my hands on. Since my parents’ books consisted of the classics and books by their friends, I took to pestering Oxford Public Library. There were no regulations against children using the adult section in those days, so I would sidle in, grab a book, get it stamped, slip out and walk home. Then I read the book. Back I would go…The librarian, incidentally, did not show herself in any way enchanted by my frequent appearances: she regarded them in some way as suspicious and tended to frown when she saw me arrive. It was an early instance of that rule which I had already begun to discover: speedy reading will make you happy but it will not make you popular. So for the time being all this was still part of my secret life, my History in fact.

When I first cast my mind back to those days, I came to the conclusion that, thanks to this possessive feeling about History, my memory must have blanked out the actual lessons. It was therefore interesting to discover from the printed forms of the school reports, faithfully preserved in my Progress Book by my mother, that there was in fact no official slot for History. In the body of the report, Classics is followed by English with a sub-section for Geography, then Mathematics, lastly French. Below that, there are five tiny sections for Music and Singing, Art, Handicraft, Divinity and Science. Yet clearly we must have been taught History, and indeed my contemporary Dragons remember the lessons.

The explanation came to me from the school archivist: History was at this point included with English. After a formal inspection of the school in 1930, it was declared as follows: “ ‘English’ in the timetable is a general term, including Scripture, History and Geography as well as Literature and Composition.” Although one notes that Geography and Divinity but not History had escaped into categories of their own in the intervening ten years. Perhaps the Dragon emphasis on the Classics (on the evidence of the school report as well as my memory) was a reflection of the fact that a degree in Classics was for a long time considered the supreme degree at Oxford. My mother, for example, who had chosen to read Greats—as it was significantly known—did for a while simply assume that I would follow her, based on the advantage of being at the Dragon School. It seems relevant that I have vivid memories of learning the Classics with Law, and French with Monsieur Dodd, both listed as major subjects, but not History.

Above all my memories are of “English.” This was not because it included History: it was due to two quite separate things. First of all, English meant reciting poems learnt by heart from The Dragon Book of Verse in the school hall: mainly Tennyson, according to my recollection. When I came to check the contents, Tennyson was indeed ahead of all other poets except Shakespeare, followed by Robert Browning and William Blake. I was amused to note that the last poem in this book was P. G. Wodehouse’s “Good Gnus” with its jolly, wonderfully incorrect beginning:

When cares attack and life seems black

How sweet it is to pot a yak…

But in my Animals “Who’s Who”

No name stands higher than the Gnu…

Ending:

And one more gnu, so fair and frail

Has handed in its dinner-pail…

Tennyson not Wodehouse was my man. Certainly my “Break, break, break/On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!” was in my unprejudiced opinion particularly fine, with its tragic conclusion to which at the age of ten I gave full vent: “But the tender grace of a day that is dead/Will never come back to me.” Thomas, a year younger, was quite good too as he rendered William Blake in a suitably high flute-like voice: “Piping down the valleys wild/Piping songs of pleasant glee.” Behind the reciters in the Hall was the vast mural centred round the half-naked figure of Education, surrounded by pals called Piety, Lofty Aims and Loyalty, but already one was inclined to ignore this slightly embarrassing backcloth.

The real point of “English” for me, however, was Shakespeare and acting in the annual school play in the summer term. As it turned out, I was extremely lucky. Any girl with a good memory could hope to play a leading role under the direction of “Bruno” (J. B. Brown); acting ability did not matter, since Bruno would do the rest. In this way I played Viola, followed by Celia in As You Like It. Bruno by this time had found a new favourite in the shape of Priscilla Hett, but tactfully explained to me that Celia was a better part than Rosalind. I was foolish enough to believe this during rehearsals, and still took an unconscionable time—right until the tumultuous applause for the adorable quicksilver Scilla at the end of the play, in fact—to grasp the truth.

My finest hour came in my last term when I played Lady Macbeth to the Macbeth of David “Piggy” Pyemont: a charming flaxen-haired boy, a brilliant classicist, killed during National Service in Malaya, one of those casualties of that time after the war when peace in Europe did not necessarily mean peace in the world. In the official school photo he sports a Viking headdress with two enormous horns sprouting from it. I sit complacently at his side, with two equally enormous thick red plaits framing my youthful face. And of the various incidents during that finest hour, undoubtedly the moment when I stepped forward in front of the whole Dragon School and declaimed passionately the words of Lady M, “Unsex me here…” was the highlight.

It is Bruno who epitomizes for me the best of the Dragon: his energy, his enthusiasm for drama meant that the essential Shakespeare experience we received was the real contribution to the study of History which I got from the Dragon School. To know three Shakespeare plays virtually by heart, to love them, before the age of twelve, to realize there was a whole Shakespearean world and it was part of History—these were inestimable gifts.

Gilbert and Sullivan, also produced by Bruno, had no educational value so far as I was concerned, but was sheer pleasure. My first experience was with Patience when I watched Richard Wilding, future top civil servant, mincing about the stage as Bunthorne (“If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily”) while his ravishing unbroken voice soared above it all. My memories of Gilbert and Sullivan are in fact all of divine boy singers: evidently we few girls didn’t have an advantage there, no doubt due to the tradition that preferred young boys in choirs to girls (or women).

Personally, I did not sing even though I took part as the third girl in The Pirates of Penzance. This silence was at Bruno’s direct request. He had a habit of bending down and placing his ear close to one’s mouth as one was rehearsing. To me he simply said: “Don’t.” Nevertheless, because he approved my acting in Shakespeare, I was allowed to go on stage and smile beguilingly in my bonnet with the others in the school photo, a happy if slightly fraudulent presence. The relief from the painful need to sing—Bruno got it absolutely right—meant that I thought of Gilbert and Sullivan then, and still do, as one of England’s unequivocal national delights. Bruno’s dismissal of my singing was after all only a more economical version of the art mistress’s celebrated report, much quoted by my family thereafter: “Ideas good, execution faulty.”

Seated in the front row of the Macbeth photo is one of my two best friends at the Dragon, both of course girls, Lalage Mais as Lady Macduff. (Felicity Wilding, whose father was Law, was the other.) Lalage was the daughter of one of our most eccentric masters: the writer S. P. B. Mais who taught us English. An expansive, loudly benevolent man of many thick waistcoats, mainly checked, he was renowned for them and even the hottest day would lead to no more than a partial unbuttoning. His teaching also flowed in a great seam of recitation, reminiscence and whatever else came into his mind at the moment. S. P. B. was then in his sixties, a veteran author and, more unusually at the time, frequent broadcaster on radio. The fact that he actually managed to be distinguished for eccentricity was a considerable achievement, because to be honest, many of our masters were in retrospect quite odd.

This was an effect of wartime, of course: adult men and women below a certain age needed to be away serving the war effort, not acting as teachers to children. As a result, many of our masters were old enough to have served in the First World War; one, Frank Cary, had lost a leg and another, “Fuzz” Francis, had lost an eye. “Tubby” Haines, who taught Maths, was known to be suffering from shell-shock. We girls took the effects of this shell-shock philosophically: it meant remembering to sit at the back of the class, otherwise Tubby might be moved to use your hair to scrub the blackboard in a fit of rage. This actually happened to a girl, aptly known for her pretty curly hair as “Fuzzy” Stradling, who was seized and used as a cleaning implement. The rest of us simply thought that Fuzzy had been an idiot to sit in the front row. It was all part of the atmosphere in which the consequences of the First World War were in a strange way present with us along with the actuality of the Second; we at the Dragon still marked our First World War casualties, just as a new list was beginning.

I remember that there was one master who was a conscientious objector—my mother tried to explain to me what that was although I still didn’t get it. On the one hand, his behaviour seemed to flout the known rules of the super-patriotic world in which we lived. On the other hand Mattie himself was a particularly sympathetic person, writing generous reports about my naïve would-be-Shelley attempts at composing verse. Much later, as I began to study the intricate subject of conscientious objection—Harold for example was an objector to post-war National Service in the very different atmosphere of 1948—to say nothing of the history of First World War objectors, memories of Mattie came back and I wished vainly that I had been of an age to talk to him, instead of merely accepting his encouragement.

Then there was “the Colonel” as J. C. Purnell was known, in charge of physical exercise and swimming (he had joined the school with his former rank of sergeant, but Curnell Purnell was the obvious Dragon nickname). Much later, Thomas, writing a history of the Boer War, discovered that the Colonel had actually fought in it, and regretted not having asked for his reminiscences. As the Colonel barked at us, intoned rhymes at us, during the daily grind on the treacherous gravel of the school playground (my knees still bear the scars of falls during play) he provided the most extreme example of the way the teachers in their experience spanned English History.

The Carpentry master, Ted Mack (“E.G.H.M.” on school notices and reports), became a family friend. About the same age as my parents, he seemed similarly old, but a great deal more benevolent when it came to treats. These ranged from a beautifully crafted wooden chest with A on it and a cradle for my doll (I have them still) to helpful little bookcases, ideal for a child so intent on creating her own space in an increasing family. Then there were the sweets: impossible to overstress the delight of sweets which were not part of one’s meagre sweet ration. Ted Mack was also a keen birdwatcher, and with my mother, we all went on a holiday to Wales; Lalage Mais and her family came along for company. But of all the kindnesses Ted Mack did me, introducing me to the theatre, in the shape of Oxford’s New Theatre, with regular visits, was surely the greatest.

I was fortunate in that wartime Oxford was a centre for the theatre: not only the New Theatre where famous productions from the blitzed West End could take refuge, but also the Playhouse, which was a repertory theatre of tremendous variety as well as distinction. One family outing to the latter to see a play centring on a betrayed country girl sticks in the memory, since there was no one to care for my young brother Paddy and we had to take him. “She’s going to have a what?” he shouted at one point, in the loud, commanding voice which would one day be a great asset to him as a barrister.

Other outings were at a higher level. Elizabeth conscientiously organized visits to Shakespeare at Stratford, not too far away, while petrol was available. Ted Mack on the other hand took me to absolutely everything; the essence of our theatre-going was to watch the good as well as the bad, and discuss which was which afterwards. Ted then indulged my new hobby of autograph-seeking by escorting me round to the stage door. “Glamourflags was not a very good play,” I wrote grandly in my pocket diary, about a revue with many different sketches; that did not prevent me from noting: “afterwards we got their autographs.” Ivy Benson and her All Ladies Band fared better, and once again we got the autographs. I blush to think that these stars were obliged to inscribe my book: “To the Ant of Chadlington”—the signature I always used at the time.

I have no idea what my parents thought of our theatre-going; the truth was probably that they were too frantically busy to care, and one child being occupied was one child less to tend. My mother certainly never tried to take me to the opera again after a disastrous expedition to The Tales of Hoffmann when I was five: as the character of the singer named Antonia duly sang herself to death, I punctuated the action with wild screams of dismay, thus bringing about a pause in my opera-going which lasted for twelve years. When it came to my friendship with Ted Mack, only the housemistress at my next school raised an eyebrow, as Ted continued to visit me, as well as performing vital offices such as sending me sweets (still) and the magazine Punch weekly. My mother indicated later in a roundabout way that she had received a letter on the subject. I was protected by ignorance of what the housemistress might be implying—the relationship was certainly completely innocent of anything that would now be considered “inappropriate.”

In any case, poor Ted must have fallen ill with cancer just about this time; he died at the age of forty-one in May 1945. Before that, Thomas and I, hearing that he was in hospital in London, and not of course being told about cancer, joyfully planned an expedition to visit him. We described ourselves as Ted’s nephew and niece and after an argument gained the ward where he lay. We found a wan figure, sadly shrunken from the big and burly man we remembered; but he still managed to smile at our audacity.

I note from my letters home that I tried to visit Ted again during the April holidays before he died, but wasn’t allowed to do so, since as my mother wrote to me at school in May 1946, breaking the news of his death, “poor Ted just wasted away.” I was thirteen. My anguished letter back asked why the world preferred to invent “the most atomically fiendish instruments of death” (a reference to the dropping of the bomb on Japan the previous August) instead of finding cures for illness. How could my mother answer this unanswerable question? Wisely, she did not attempt to do so. Her next letter was full of gentle reminiscence of our happy birdwatching holiday. To this day, I remember Ted with affection, as the man who inculcated in me a lifelong love of a theatrical expedition—any time, any theatrical expedition, so long as there is excitement in the anticipation.

“Oh why oh why doesn’t Dick Plummer write?” This sad expostulation comes from my pocket diary, but it is dated 1947, long after both Dick and I had left the Dragon School. We had sat opposite each other at an Old Dragon Dinner, although that night in the diary I was truthfully more interested in recording my pale blue dress and Pink Plum Beautiful lipstick than the charms of the boy opposite. The lament, days later, has an artificial sound to it as if my fourteen-year-old persona, self-reared on Georgette Heyer, thought she ought to be having those feelings. It was certainly the Marquis of Vidal, eponymous hero of Devil’s Cub, who remained my ideal. The romances of boys and girls at the Dragon School were, in my experience, mainly epistolary: the odd note or a jovial comment written by a sister across a brother’s notebook about the prettiest girl at the Dragon: “Thomas Pakenham loves Marion Hunter.” My intimate friendships remained, as I wanted them to be, with girls.

Of course most of us knew the facts of life, or thought that we did. There would be occasional ruderies shouted out by a boy, generally from a safe distance. We girls also discussed such subjects from time to time, although in retrospect the level of accuracy was not very high and one hopes we all knew better by the time we were grown up. To give an example, when one of us brought hot news from a holiday spent near a riding stable that “you have to do it standing up if you want to have a baby. Like the horses,” nobody contradicted her. Girls, however, were not admitted to the ritual biological instruction which I believe occurred for school leavers, about which exaggerated tales were told (by boys who never failed to comment: “But of course I knew it all anyway”). The most useful piece of information I derived from a combination of reading Trollope and an enlightened friend.

Aged eleven, I had discovered Trollope in a huge green-and-gold edition in my parents’ house. (I learnt later that there was a lot of wartime Trollope reading among the grown-ups “to get away from the war.”) Thus I was temporarily obsessed by the character of Lady Glencora Palliser in Can You Forgive Her? The tiny, tousle-haired heiress and her fatal love for the wastrel Burgo Fitzgerald occupied most of my waking thoughts. I was however baffled by one significant development in the plot. We all knew that Lady Glencora must dutifully provide an heir for her husband Plantaganet Palliser, himself the heir to the Duke of Omnium, because that was what the Duke requested. I turned to Felicity Wilding, slightly older than me, for help.

“When Glencora says with a blush that she’s not quite sure, she thinks, maybe…I mean, how can she not know whether she’s having a baby? Either they did it, in which case she’s having a baby. Or they didn’t, in which case she isn’t.”

“Oh, no,” said Felicity in a world-weary voice. “You don’t understand. Grown-ups do it all the time.”

I was stunned and fell into incredulous silence. Nothing in the frequent appearance of babies in these years at 8 Chadlington Road had prepared me for such a—frankly—embarrassing revelation. I found it much more difficult to assimilate, for example, than the fate of the lovely Amabel in Harrison Ainsworth’s Old St. Paul’s at the hands of the wicked but sexy Lord Rochester, in the words of the author “seeking only in pursuit of the grocer’s daughter the gratification of his lawless desires.” Old St. Paul’s was another current favourite: in fact I found Harrison Ainsworth a wonderful source of shocking enlightenment—at the level I wanted—as well as History. It was only many years later that I learnt from Robert Gittings’s biography of Thomas Hardy that he himself had been obsessed by Old St. Paul’s in youth and had immersed himself so totally in the novel as a child “that he never quite threw off its influence on his style.” I felt a retrospective sense of pride to have shared a passion with the great writer.

At the time I turned away from Felicity and went back to the safety of the written word and Trollope’s political Pallisers. Instinctively I much preferred them to the then fashionable Anglican bishops, bishops’ wives and deans of Barchester. I was determined to ignore any possible connection with reality and stick with the lot of them, Phineas Finn, Lady Eustace, Lady Laura Standish, Madame Max Goesler and so forth, ignoring anything unpleasant that might disturb me in my rapt contemplation of their fascinating social fortunes.

It was probably a long way away from what Hum thought a She Dragon should be thinking about. What would that be? Something to do with the Classical World, no doubt. But at this point, in my imagination, Lady Glencora was a great deal more interesting than Helen of Troy because she was my private heroine, not the character extolled in class. For the time being, it was she who accompanied me as I walked moodily on the banks of the Cherwell, flowing past the playing fields and the school barge.

Meanwhile the river itself was and remained for me as much part of the Dragon as the weathervane which told us to go in and win. I was a She Dragon, which meant that I was versed in the Classics, a dashing rugger player in my own estimation, but also a marine species, perfectly at ease in the water of the Cherwell, swimming or punting, listening to Colonel Purnell’s rhythmic cries of instruction. It was a potent combination.

Then there was that other powerful element: the North Oxford world in which we lived.