CHAPTER NINE

NICE CATHOLIC FRIENDS

“You see, Antonia, we thought that you should have some nice Catholic friends.” It was with these words that my mother explained to me what she chose to describe as “the sad news.” I was to leave Godolphin School in July 1946, and go to St. Mary’s Convent, Ascot, in the autumn.

I burst into tears. Elizabeth tried to comfort me. Whereupon I broke it to her that they were tears of delight, whereupon she was extremely surprised. With hindsight, I suppose her mistake was symptomatic of the distance which could then arise between parent and child at boarding school, before frequent visiting on both sides became the norm. At the time I was simply amazed that she did not know that I had always wanted to be a Catholic.

Of course going to a Catholic school did not necessarily mean I would convert to Catholicism. My mother explained to me carefully that I was to be allowed a choice. After all, I would be fourteen in August. Thomas at thirteen would also be allowed a choice. The other five would simply be transformed into Catholics from the theoretical Anglicans they had become at their splendid Oxford christenings. The event which was to bring all this about had occurred in April: Elizabeth, six years after Frank’s conversion, was received into the Catholic Church.

It will always remain a matter of puzzlement to me that this, the famously—and genuinely—happy marriage included such a long period of what one might describe as spiritual estrangement. Elizabeth, the Unitarian girl, had described the priests she saw in Grenoble, where she was sent to learn French, as “black beetles” and joked that she had been terrified when a black beetle got on to a tram with her. Elizabeth, the Socialist woman who had abandoned Unitarianism and had no religion, was antagonized by the behaviour of the Catholic Church during the Spanish Civil War. Her idea of religion, she once told me, was singing “Jerusalem” “with linked hands and wearing rolled-up shirtsleeves.” (In my whole life I don’t think I ever saw my mother with rolled-up shirtsleeves.) On the other hand, from 1940 onwards Frank regularly attended early morning Mass while we were at 8 Chad. He would return into the family kitchen to hear on at least one occasion a jovial cry from Elizabeth: “Beat the Orange drum, children!” I was intrigued by the notion of this Orange drum, which I imagined to be singularly bright and beautiful like a huge fiery sun. It seemed a pity it was not actually provided for us to play on at the breakfast table.

At some point—my intermittent pocket diaries do not record the start of it all—I started to accompany my father from time to time to St. Aloysius. This cannot have been without my mother’s permission and was perhaps part of the thaw which reached its dramatic ending in 1946. At all events I loved it. I loved the Mass for all the obvious outward reasons which attract the impressionable to the Catholic Church: the incense, the bells, the sound of Latin, and above all the feeling of mystery. This was a mystery from which I was for the time being excluded. My diaries record: “Dada went to Communion. I did not. I am not a Catholic.” When my Catholic friend Flora Carr-Saunders visited, I recorded again that she went up to Communion with my father but I did not. I became increasingly aware of this exclusion, and upset by it, so that I foolishly boasted to David, a boy at the Dragon who was a Catholic, that I had actually taken Communion with my father at St. Aloysius. David told his mother: clearly the divided religion of the Pakenham family was of interest to fellow Catholics and this Communion was exciting news. In the small world of Oxford, the report of my behaviour came back to my mother. I assured her it wasn’t true, full of shame at being caught out in the lie. I am sure she understood that the childish lie was the product of wishful thinking.

As a family in these pre-Catholic days, we did sometimes go to a service for the young at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, in Linton Road. Here Thomas and I experienced what would now be called “Happy Clappy.” The hyper-energetic vicar stirred up us children to sing lustily in chorus: “I’m H-A-P-P-Y, I’m H-A-P-P-Y, I know I am, I’m sure I am, I’m H-A-P-P-Y.” What made us so jolly and so happy? Jesus of course. But this was more of a fun experience than a religious one. My first religious feelings were encouraged by Jean, the nanny. Except the word “nanny” does nothing to convey the charm of Jean Birch, with her sweet face, soft pale skin, and the brown hair which all too soon would be swept up into a WRNS cap when she left to join the Senior Service. Her charm was felt by others: there was a choice of boyfriends for such an attractive girl in wartime Oxford, including undergraduates.

One in particular, a polite fellow called Roden, aroused the disapproval of our cook for being a gentleman, that is a class above Jean; Mrs. Pope, beloved Popie of many years’ service, announced: “He should know better.”

“But, Popie, what about Jean? Shouldn’t she know better?”

“Jean is trying to do well for herself. That’s different.” Actually, even I could see that Jean, and no doubt Roden too, were simply trying to have a nice time in the fraught atmosphere of war.

No one for me could be above Jean. The day she left for the WRNS to do her duty for her country (as she explained) was the saddest day of my young life; we went immediately to Cornwall on holiday to bridge the gap. I was ten. All I did was gaze out to sea, muttering: “Jean is gone,” and write melancholy poems. Nevertheless Jean had already given me the inestimable gift of treating religious conviction as something joyous: not in the happy-clappy mode, but in the true mystical sense. The St. Aloysius experience built upon this foundation and convinced me that I wanted, needed to be a Catholic.

Jean herself was more of an Anglo-Catholic, that is, a High Church Anglican, sharing many of the Catholic rituals and practices, but not a Roman Catholic who acknowledged the authority of the Pope. By coincidence, several years later my mother, Thomas and I had an Anglo-Catholic period; I believe this step was suggested to Elizabeth by the sympathetic Anglican Bishop Kenneth Kirk of Oxford, as a kind of testing-ground for future developments. What the Bishop, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, correctly understood about Elizabeth was that her marriage to Frank was the centre of her existence. She had to find a way to reconcile herself to his deeply held Faith.

In 1969, after the tragic death of my youngest sister Catherine in a motor accident at the age of twenty-three, I spent some of the first period of mourning alone with my mother; she talked intimately about the circumstances which led to her conversion, her unbearable feeling of separation from Frank, and how until this moment her Faith had all been in terms of her relationship to my father. But now: “I’m glad I’m a Catholic.” I felt a tremendous sense of relief: that in circumstances that were so terrible, so utterly senseless to the outward eye, she could find any comfort.

Clearly Anglo-Catholicism aided Elizabeth to take the final step in 1946. Her actual instruction was performed by the Dominican priest Father Gervase Mathew at Blackfriars in St. Giles, playing the role that the Jesuit Father Martin d’Arcy had played with my father. Gervase became a great family friend, together with his more worldly brother, Archbishop David Mathew. When he agreed to talk to me informally about the Catholic Church, out of kindness, I was both daunted and enchanted by his style: he would hiss out some abstract word connected to the Faith—as it were, “Immaculate Conception.” Then Gervase would fall into complete silence for several minutes. I would venture to break the silence with an inane social remark, feeling the occasion demanded it—“Elizabeth sends her love”—just as Gervase launched into a long, fast, sibilant disquisition on the Immaculate Conception and how it should never, ever be confused with the Virgin Birth…It became a test of my nerve. How long would he remain silent? How long would I manage to remain silent myself ? For all this, I was devoted to Gervase, and curiously enough once we moved on to Byzantine History, his speciality, he was all instruction and no silence.

Priests, fascinating intellectual priests, played their part in my parents’ lives. There remained the problem of the Catholic friends. No wonder my parents felt grateful for getting to know Harry and Catherine Walston; the latter was a Catholic and Harry became a minister in the first Wilson government, which in their circle was a comparatively rare combination. The mesmerizing Catherine Walston had wild brown curly hair, milky skin and blue eyes, together with a figure which was at the same time boyish, feminine and seductive. Like Frank and Elizabeth, the Walstons had a large family, but unlike my parents, a large country house. Here Catherine dazzled the eye (as she was already known to have dazzled the eye of Graham Greene), especially wearing jeans at the Mass celebrated in the drawing room. This was Catherine’s speciality: to charm and outrage—just a little. For what was wrong with wearing jeans? One would not think twice about it now; it was simply that none of us had ever seen a pair before, except on some kind of American lumberjack (Catherine was actually American), and here was Catherine with her extremely shapely figure…What did the priest think, for example?

This general lack of Catholic friends reached its climax with the birth of Kevin in November 1947. We were accustomed to having numerous godparents, such was the custom, and poor Kevin, as the eighth child, could hardly be denied the same potential source of material gain. In the end my fifteen-year-old self had to be drafted in. My mother wrote to me frankly on the subject: “I feel that in about five years time Dada and I will have hundreds of charming Catholic friends, all suitable to be godparents, but at present the numbers of the elect are limited.” It would just have to be me. The Catholic Herald actually featured me on the front page, wearing the obligatory hat loaned by Elizabeth and holding the protesting baby; underneath the photograph it read: LITTLE GODMOTHER. In my tweed suit I did not look particularly little. In spite of that, I was immensely proud.

Elizabeth’s efforts at being a good Catholic mother had all her characteristic energy and resource. She encountered, for example, a particular problem with Guy Fawkes Day on the fifth of November. How could we, a nice Catholic family, burn the effigy of a Catholic conspirator with his pipe, in his black slouch hat and his ancient fit-for-the-bonfire trousers? Yet we must not be deprived of the national celebration. The solution: we burnt the effigy of the Communist Foreign Minister of Romania, one Ana Pauker, a Cold War hate figure…who oddly enough wore a black slouch hat and ancient trousers and smoked a pipe. Perhaps this episode is responsible for the fact that in later years I began a crusade to call November Fifth “Bonfire Night”; we should celebrate Samhain, the Celtic feast when the autumn leaves were burnt and the dark of the year began, which stretches back into our history, instead of the original 1605 Anti-Catholic concept of Guy Fawkes Day.

The choice of St. Mary’s, Ascot was inspired by a friend from Frank’s youth, Daphne Baring. A painter herself, she was now married to the sculptor Arthur Pollen with six children; as a couple they were delightful new friends for both my parents, Catholic, artistic and extremely cultured. Perhaps Antonia and Lucy Pollen, who were the same age, would bond together if Antonia went to St. Mary’s? Oddly enough, this did actually happen, unlike most such parental plans for their young; Lucy became my closest friend. But before that, before I could have this really nice (and clever and humorous) Catholic friend who looked like an angel in a Flemish picture, someone with whom one could discuss the finer points of Gary Cooper as well as Shakespeare, I had to encounter the whole mysterious world of Catholicism itself at close quarters.

As a matter of fact, I was secretly prepared for it. This was because Miss Lemarchand, a mistress at Godolphin, on hearing of my future fate, had pressed a novel into my hands, Frost in May by Antonia White, which had been published in the early Thirties, in order, as she put it, to warn me. As a warning it had exactly the opposite effect. I was tremendously excited. The plot concerned a Protestant girl, Fernanda, known as Nanda, who like me was sent to a Catholic school. (In her case, it was her intelligent, dominating father who was a recent convert.) The ending of the book is extremely painful, as Nanda is ejected from this mysterious, wonderful Paradise, and above all from her new friends, headed by the careless aristocrat Leonie, for reasons she barely understands.

In 1946 I put the ending from me—I still find it painful today on revisiting the book—but devoured the descriptions of the Catholic world of which I was hopefully to be a part; above all I would meet latter-day Leonies. What would they be like, these girls with their ancient names? What had their ancestors been up to? How had the ancient families managed to remain Catholic during the years of persecution? Many hadn’t, as I learnt later, but had returned to the Faith in more settled times. Nevertheless there was a kind of delightful arrogance about these so-called old Catholics, epitomized for me by an incident in the House of Lords. My father, walking along a corridor with the Duke of Norfolk, the premier Catholic peer, fell to his knees and attempted to kiss the ring of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster who happened to be passing. Miles Norfolk made no such move.

“Bloody convert!” he exclaimed with great geniality.

When I first started to write crime novels in the late Seventies, I tried to recreate the experience of that first autumn at Ascot. In Quiet as a Nun I proposed that the woman who would go on to be the heroine of my series, Jemima Shore Investigator (actually a TV journalist, not a real detective), had been sent as a little Protestant day-girl to the next-door Convent of Blessed Eleanor for reasons of wartime convenience. She is called back to the convent to solve the mystery of the death of one of her schoolfriends, once Rosabelle Powerstock, for many years a nun known as Sister Miriam, who has died alone in a ruined tower in the convent grounds. There were no ruined towers at Ascot amid the well-kept rhododendrons and no mysterious deaths. Still less did a ghoulish figure known as the Black Nun go prowling round the convent at night (my nuns would have made short work of him, running after him with the shiny wooden rosaries pinned at their sides jangling, as they did when supervising hockey).

Jemima was glamorous, much admired, single by choice, no children, herself an only child, red-haired and willowy enough to wear a white trouser suit as her preferred costume. There were no parallels there. But I drew happily on my intense feelings encountering Catholicism, Catholic nuns and Catholic girls—the ones who were to be my nice new friends. I also drew on the fact that both Jemima and I experienced all this in the autumn with the trees beginning to shed their leaves in the school drive with the onset of winter. But of course no leaf was allowed to sully the drive. “The nuns must catch the leaves before they fall,” says Jemima’s mother, as she delivers her nervous daughter for her first term; it was true enough of Ascot in the Forties, the immaculate condition of everything there presenting a striking contrast to the hurly-burly of post-war living conditions in North Oxford.

The feast of All Saints on 1 November was my first experience of full-throated female celebration with its robust hymn:

For all the saints who from their labours rest

Who thee by faith before the world confessed

Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blessed…

It was in direct contrast to my other favourite musical moment: the singing of Panis Angelicus at Benediction when the women’s voices were tender and exquisite.

I was enchanted by the two moments every day at twelve noon and six p.m. when the bell tolled for the Angelus: we all stopped whatever we were doing and prayed. I got used to the sight of a nun who had been busily strafing the corridor with a broom suddenly coming to a dead halt and bowing her head. I even liked the ritual of being called by a nun at 7:15 (for Mass) with the words Benedicamus Domino and having to reply Deo Gratias. It seemed a very civilized way of being woken up, if one had to be woken up. After that it was black veils with our uniforms for Low Mass, and white for Benediction and Feast Days. In fact I loved all the rituals, most of all perhaps the developing ritual of the year itself in the daily Mass, the Saints’ Days and the great feasts (I am still inclined to date my letters that way—Feast of St. Catherine for 25 November, St. Lucy for 13 December, John Baptist for 24 June).

I gave a lyrical description in my letter home of the Feast of Corpus Christi in the summer term, marked by an elaborate procession of priests, crucifixes and banners. The school carried smaller “bannerets”: red for the Sacred Heart, blue for Our Lady, lilac for St. Joseph and yellow for the Pope. They came in two shapes, known irreverently as “nighties” or “pyjamas” according to whether they were square or forked at the end; I noted that I carried a lilac nightie. This was an English summer. When the rain came pelting down, we girls were not deterred but simply continued “with measured step and (mostly) solemn face” in the direction of the chapel. The priest, however, took a short cut out of the rain.

Unlike Jemima Shore, who remained an agnostic Protestant, I received instruction towards my conversion from the awe-inspiring headmistress “Ig,” actually Mother Ignatius IBVM (Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary). For a time these letters got confused in my mind with other ever-present initials: AMDG for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, to the Greater Glory of God, which we were supposed to write at the top of our essays. The confusion was dealt with in teasing fashion by Mother Bridget, who received the essay in question—“So you’re actually already a nun?” But she also gave me the impression, however kindly, that this sort of thing was only to be expected from a Protestant.

Actually I was fast moving away from being a Protestant, in so far as I had ever been one, in practice as well as principle. I retained—and retain—a deep affection for the Church of England which finds expression in my love of Anglican (and Nonconformist) hymns, although many of those have since sneaked into the Catholic services. From my point of view, the instruction with Mother Ig went well and I enjoyed being presented with the intellectual arguments as a backing for my emotional determination to become a Catholic. Already doctrine interested me: I wrote back from Godolphin in my last term to report to my mother that the Infallibility of the Pope had been raised in the Divinity class; it was discussed “in a rather supercilious Protestant tone—rather as if a person safely behind bars was wondering how a lion masticated his food. I kept my own mouth shut.” Now I was encouraged by Mother Ig to open my mouth and argue, even if Mother Ig, with great zest, always had the last word. She was particularly fond of the prophet Jeremiah, who seemed to her not the hectoring killjoy of popular imagination, but a lovable man in need of understanding (hers).

I also enjoyed the special attention, marking me out from anyone else in the school; this was responsible for my decision to be received in full grown-up fashion in front of all the girls in the chapel and furthermore to vanish before their eyes into the sacristy to make my first (Catholic) confession to the priest within. A less public alternative was offered for this confession but I rejected it. As it is, I cannot remember the sins I confessed; I do remember being determined that this would not be a speedy process; my sins in the eyes of the school must be long-drawn-out and worthy of the event.

This took place on a Saturday. The next day, Sunday 1 December, my longed-for First Communion took place. It was the Feast of the Forty English Martyrs, as I would discover later, foremost among them Blessed Edmund Campion (later canonized), the Elizabethan Jesuit who had been executed on this very day in 1581. This was a most appropriate date for one who would now become increasingly obsessed by English Catholic History.

The actual founder of the Order of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an English Catholic woman called Mary Ward, had been a fanatic for female education, which had sadly dipped with the disappearance of the convents at the Reformation. Born in Yorkshire in 1585, Mary Ward came of a prominent recusant family: two of her uncles were involved in the Gunpowder Plot. Mary Ward first went abroad to join the Poor Clares at St. Omer, where she later founded a boarding school for English girls. She also came back secretly to England with her female associates to support the recusants: together they became known as the Apostolicae Viragines or more light-heartedly the Galloping Girls. Mary Ward’s real contribution at this date was her conviction (which has a very modern sound) that women, just like men, could do “great things”: in this respect there was no difference between them. As for the Catholic religion: “It is not veritas hominis, verity of men, nor the verity of women, but veritas Domini”—the truth of God. She added, after citing the example of the female saints: “And I hope in God it will be seen that women in time will do much.”

Studying the life of this remarkable woman for my book on woman’s lot in seventeenth-century England, in the 1980s, I was gloomily unsurprised by the fact that Mary Ward and her new order ran into trouble with the Papacy. It was not until 1703, long after her own death, that the congregation received papal approval. Finally in 1951 Pope Pius XII described Mary Ward as the outstanding pioneer of the lay apostolate of women and beatified her. In any case, the tradition which she founded remained and I benefited from it: the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary put education first in a way that not all Catholic girls’ schools appeared to do at the time. At Ascot in the Forties, nuns believed that it was not only for the Greater Glory of God that we should go to Mass every morning, but also concentrate on our lessons, work hard for exams and see to it that our essays came in on time.

There was an explosion in my study of Catholic literature, or rather literature written by Catholics. G. K. Chesterton had been known to me in Oxford, more for the Father Brown detective stories than anything else. Now I explored it all, the paradoxes, the pleasures, with enthusiasm. Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses had formed part of our nursery lore but not his histories. The rhymes were always a delight. There was Lord Lundy for example:

“But as it is!…My language fails!

Go out and govern New South Wales!”

We learnt with some pleasure that our father’s generation had not been permitted to recite this one aloud, since their grandfather, Lord Jersey, actually had been sent out to govern New South Wales. Later the histories came to trouble me as a would-be historian when I studied Belloc’s James II as background to my biography of his brother Charles II; the Catholic partisanship was so blatant and yet so vigorous that I feared to be seduced even as I muttered with Whiggish disapproval. At the time I found Belloc’s historical work in the convent library and gorged on it.

I also discovered a new favourite poet to replace Keats: this was Gerard Manley Hopkins. Learning the onomatopoeic lines became a spare-time hobby, although my favourite, suitably enough under my new circumstances, was “Heaven-Haven: A nun takes the veil”:

I have desired to go

Where springs not fail,

To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be

Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

And out of the swing of the sea.

It still remains a refuge in times of stress. I even inserted a small picture of Gerard Manley Hopkins as a young man in my Missal, along with the other holy pictures. The collection of miniature holy pictures for this purpose was a practice which I much enjoyed; even if, as a Protestant convert, I was a late starter and it was a long time before I could emulate the Missals of my friends, stuffed with the memorial cards of their grandparents as well as pious portraits of the saints.

Not everything about Catholicism was quite so easily assimilated. My first Catholic Easter was spent at school. There was a retreat: three days of silence, four sermons and holy reading. I boasted to my parents in a letter of getting through eight lives of the Saints and Martyrs to one read by everyone else: St. Antony of Padua (my patron saint), St. Margaret of Scotland, St. Frances of Rome and so on. But for all this, it was a matter of more concern among us girls whether Franz Werfel’s The Song of Bernadette, which was such a great read, counted as being holy enough: I have an awful feeling that I put another book’s ostentatiously holy cover over the original one, just to make sure.

All of this was exciting as well as exacting. It was when we came to the Good Friday litany, a long list of people we prayed for, that I was temporarily disconcerted. We prayed, we knelt, we rose. Then came the moment when we were asked to pray for “the perfidious Jews.” We did pray, but we remained standing. I was deeply shocked, as much by the fact that we stayed on our feet as by the use of the word “perfidious.”

“But I thought we were the perfidious ones?” I said in bewilderment. In a confused manner, I was alluding to everything I had recently learnt about the war, the camps and the Holocaust. Technically, of course, the Latin word perfidus can also mean without faith—the Jews being obviously without Faith in the Catholic sense. But the first meaning to English ears is undoubtedly “treacherous”: a message underlined by the ostentatious refusal to kneel. It is also significant that Pope John XXIII, that valiant man now rightly a saint, removed the word from the litany in 1959, four years after the gratuitous omission of kneeling was ended.

At the time, coming from Oxford, where there were so many Jewish refugees, as has been noted, all treated with sympathy and respect for the sufferings which had caused them to flee their native country, I simply did not understand this extraordinary apparent gap in the thinking of the wonderful Catholic Church. Nowadays I am aware that my heart still lights up whenever I read about the Catholic priests and nuns who chose to hide away the Jews in the countries where they were being tormented.

The winter of 1947 was famously hard, as though the weather was determined to underline the perilous economic situation of the country. It also lasted an extremely long time. My mother’s letters in early March are full of accounts of taking two and a half hours to dig out the car from the snow one day, and then having to do it all over again the day following. There had been five hours of electricity switch-off, as she put it. Everything was frozen inside and out: not a drop of running water in 8 Chad. For a whole week heavy buckets had to be carried back and forth from next door. Then a slight thaw meant that an unwelcome torrent flowed down from the cloakroom ceiling and the cracked nursery radiator belched out a lake of stinking black liquid. The plumber only came two days later.

I prayed earnestly in the Ascot Chapel for St. Jude, patron of Lost Causes, to come to the aid of the beleaguered household. But I rather preferred my mother in this vigorous, disaster-coping mode to the mother who wrote me impatient letters about my failings, as in the following: “I found in your bedroom a perfectly good stocking without a single hole or darn in it but a ghastly rent right across the ankle behind the heel…not the first. Your dragging it on to your leg without the slightest care and simply tearing it in half must stop at once, otherwise…” She did not specify the reprisal but did sign herself “Mummy Ogress,” the nickname I had once given her. I continued to receive these letters and others like them without, so far as I can recollect, altering my conduct in any way.

Fortunately Elizabeth had the great distraction from both freeze and family of Frank’s burgeoning political career. He was made Minister in Charge of Germany, under Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary, and paid his first visit in this same icy spring of 1947; in the next two years he would make twenty-five more visits. Conditions for the civilians there were appalling. But conditions had been of course appalling for millions of others, innocent people, throughout the war, to say nothing of the atrocities committed. It was a war which had ended less than two years earlier. Nevertheless I was deeply shocked when my father was execrated in the Beaverbrook press for announcing: “I shall pray for the Germans night and morning.” (Didn’t Dada pray for everyone night and morning, including Vicky the corgi, if he remembered?) From Frank Pakenham, it was an utterly natural comment, just as it was natural for him to learn enough German to read the New Testament. And as a matter of fact, the other feature of his arrival in Germany—his rash jump from the aeroplane, unaware that steps were on their way, leading to a heavily bleeding forehead in all the photographs—was equally in character.

What followed, his attempt to do something to help the German civilian population, was probably the most important episode of his life, before he dedicated himself to penal reform. I was reminded of it fifty years later: after my father’s death I received out of the blue a letter from a German who had been a sixteen-year-old girl at the time; she wrote of her gratitude to the one man who had made her feel that Germans were not all, as she put it, lower than beasts.

Frank did not confine his interest in Germany to the interior of the country. He gave an order—one of the very few he personally gave concerning our education—that his elder children were to learn German. From my encounters with a German nun at Ascot, I now received something more than lessons on the importance of Heine and Goethe. For Mother Hilda, or Mutter Hilde as she had once been, burst into tears on my arrival in the tiny tucked-away room designated for our special lessons.

“I haf thought I vill nefer teach German again,” she sobbed. Mother Hilda was quite small and of a certain age (it was difficult to tell the age of the nuns with their black wimples covering their hair and bands across the tell-tale forehead). Although she had wisps of white hair showing delicately on her upper lip in an incipient moustache, there was no question of her looking anything but female, and a respectable female at that. Nevertheless instantly into my mind came the stories of parachutists masquerading as nuns, which of course the credulous (like me and Thomas) were delighted to believe, which coupled with Mother Hilda’s strong German accent might well have led to some unpleasant experiences. I began to have a dim understanding of what it must have been like to be an alien in our country in the past war, even one manifestly dedicated to the service of God. As my correspondent expressed it to me fifty years later, not all Germans were lower than beasts; or to put it another way, not all Germans were Nazis. I had to step back from my conventional total condemnation, based on newspapers and films.

I was extremely happy during my two years at St. Mary’s, a fact borne out by my letters home, and not unconnected to an announcement early on: “This school is COMPETITIVE I’ll have you know, you were wrong about that.” Clearly, for all the need for nice Catholic friends, my mother had felt worried—wrongly—about the level of education in a convent. But the major happiness was created by the discovery of a History teacher who felt as I did about the subject, if possible more passionately. This was Mother Mercedes, IBVM. It was at this point that History stopped being a private matter of enjoyment and became an academic subject—an enthralling academic subject.

Mother Mercedes was Irish and her sister, Mother Perpetua, was also a nun at Ascot. The official history of the school referred to her as having “blown in from Ireland”; in fact, although born in a little village in Co. Wicklow, she had attended Royal Holloway College to study Latin, Maths and History. But the real point about “the Merc” was nothing that training alone could give her: she was a teacher of genius and furthermore a teacher with a love of History that matched my own—except that she knew far more about it and in a far more disciplined fashion. She had her favourites—what sympathetic person doesn’t?—in the sense of historical favourites: the Empress Maria Theresa was one of them. The Austrian co-monarch had only previously registered with me as the mother of my beloved Marie Antoinette; now I thrilled to the details of her reign, a woman with an enormous family of sixteen children who ruled over vast areas of Europe (we treated the Emperor Francis as a token figure) and was a devout Catholic. It was a tribute to Mother Mercedes that I took the names of Antonia Maria Teresa—I preferred the Latin spelling—at my Catholic Confirmation, finding Maria Teresa infinitely preferable to the dull old Margaret Caroline of my Protestant Baptism. Many years later I discovered that Maria Theresa had been a formidably bossy and disapproving mother to poor Marie Antoinette, blaming the ignorant fourteen-year-old girl, dispatched alone to the French Court, for her fifteen-year-old husband’s prolonged failure to consummate the marriage. But as I delineated the relationship as accurately as I could, I sensed the ghost of the Merc standing at my shoulder, emanating reproach from beyond the grave: “But, Antonia, you know perfectly well that Her Imperial Majesty the Empress Maria Theresa…” In life, there was always a special relish with which she pronounced those words.

It would be wrong to suggest that Mother Mercedes, for all her enthusiasm for certain subjects, did not pay attention to historical method. By a piece of good fortune, I happened to read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians in the holidays, attracted, to be honest, by the fact that it was on the special shelf at the bottom of the bookcase in the chilly spare room which was never used. I think my mother thought this was a safe place to store books such as Marie Stopes’s Married Love, not realizing that I would immediately home in on any book with such a promising title. Strachey had been placed there in the first flush of my mother’s cultural Catholicism, given his criticisms of the Church; although this severe attitude did not last, for a time she even hid—thought she hid—the book proof of a new novel by the Pakenhams’ old Oxford friend Evelyn Waugh called Brideshead Revisited in what she believed to be the same safe place. Elizabeth told me later rather touchingly: “I was frightened that it would put you off Catholicism.” Now I seized the Strachey book, hoping for further revelations: my goodness, what had those naughty Victorians been up to?

I did receive a revelation, although it was not the one I expected. Thanks to Strachey, I entered the world of Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, General Gordon and above all Cardinal Manning. More than that, I realized that writing History was an art in itself as opposed to the bald relation of facts as in my childhood efforts about my various heroines. In short, it could be entertainment as well as enlightenment. There is an irony here: when I read Michael Holroyd’s biography of Strachey twenty years later, I learnt that on occasion Strachey had what may be termed an artistic attitude to historical truth. Many of the most vivid touches were in fact the product of his vivid imagination rather than actual research. It was a historian of a different ilk, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who pointed out that General Gordon retired into his tent not with a Bible and a bottle but a Bible and a prayer book. “Unfortunately,” wrote Trevor-Roper, “ ‘brandy-bottle’ is funnier than ‘prayer-book.’ ”

At the time, I returned to Ascot on fire to talk to Mother Mercedes about the essay on Cardinal Manning (in which the saintly Cardinal Newman was my favourite character). Immediately she directed me to the library where Edmund Purcell’s nineteenth-century biography of the rather less saintly Manning languished. It was in fact exactly the kind of book which Strachey, writing in 1918, avowedly wrote to replace: “Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric…” But I was not to know that. Instead, encouraged by the Merc, I set about comparing the two accounts of the same life, and while at this enjoyable task had some glimmering of what the historical method might be.

As my childish enthusiasm for History developed into something more substantial, I began to feel possessive about it: my History once again as I had first felt reading Our Island Story. In this way, I devoted intense energy to the project of winning the School History Prize. Some of this energy was spent in the chapel praying, in the course of which I mentioned more than once that, if I won, I would devote my life to History. My subject was of course: “The Empress Maria Theresa.” Came the great day of the announcement I was trembling with excitement, fear, apprehension, all those things, as Mother Ig mounted the platform in the concert hall in her black garb with her clicking rosary at her side. Beneath the wimple, her thin down-turned lips were set. She smiled: her smile was sweet. Then she addressed us:

“I have to tell you with much pleasure that the History Prize has been won by Antonia Pakenham.” I thought I was going to faint with joy. Then she added: “I also have to tell you that no one else went in for the History Prize.”

It was a sharp lesson in undue self-esteem as I have no doubt it was intended to be. Now that I was safely a Catholic, Mother Ig had plenty of criticisms of me. One effort to improve my humility could be said to have backfired because it actually resulted in my acquiring what was probably the most useful accomplishment of my entire education. It happened like this. At one point we had to declare our hopes for the future; in other circumstances it might have been called a career meeting. There were modest indications in the direction of marriage and motherhood; even one or two suggestions of a religious vocation (one of my closest friends subsequently became a nun). In spite of my addiction to Hopkins’s poem on the nun taking the veil, I personally had no such ambitions. Instead, I saw my chance to create a sensation.

“I want to be a journalist.” Pause for effect. “On the Daily Express.” I should add that the Beaverbrook press was actually banned at Ascot, for reasons I never discovered, so that my public declaration was a deliberate challenge. Mother Ig smiled that sweet smile. She bided her time. A few days later she made an announcement.

“Saturday morning is as you all know a free period. Except for Antonia. She is going to be a journalist on the Daily Express. So she will spend Saturday morning learning how to type in the gym, with the benefit of postal lessons supervised by Mother Hilary.” So there I sat, with a kind of iron band masking the keys of the typewriter, beneath which my sightless fingers had to plot their own course. So I learnt to touch-type, touch-type very fast. Mutinous I may have been at the time; I should have felt intensely grateful.

Mother Ig made one other prominent intervention in my life. Senior girls—as I undoubtedly was by right of academic achievement, the early Dragon School boost still working in my favour—were generally made Children of Mary. This meant a broad, pretty pale blue ribbon across the chest with a medal dangling from it. The qualities required were not quite clear but presumed to include piety and general good behaviour. One day Ig sent for me and broke it to me that I had been disbarred from election to the society, not by the nuns, but by my contemporaries: “They say you are a law unto yourself.”

For a moment I was flushed with pride: a law unto myself ! Just what I had always wanted to be. Then the humiliation flooded me. To sit in the front row of the school, the only one without that broad pretty pale blue ribbon…But Mother Ig had not finished.

She became brisk. “Reverend Mother and I have decided that it is unseemly for the head of the school in work”—she emphasized the words—“not to be a Child of Mary. So you will in due course become one.” That smile again as she added: “But do remember how it came about. A lesson there perhaps for such a clever girl as you?”