CHAPTER TEN

GAP YEAR OR TWO

Elizabeth stood, looking rather warily at my school trunk which had recently been trundled back from St. Mary’s.

“Won’t you need your eiderdown and your sheets at school next term?” she asked after a pause.

“No. Because I’ve left,” I replied.

“So what will you do?”

“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.” It was late July 1948: I would be sixteen at the end of August. I felt full of confidence that a glorious future awaited me: I would be a secretary (with my great Ascot-induced typing skills), earn some money and go to parties in the evening. University was very far from my thoughts although intuitively I must have realized that my mother, an undergraduate herself in the Twenties and a strong advocate of female education, would sooner or later point me in that direction. In short I was taking a gap year—or as it turned out, given my youthful age, two.

As for my mother, she had been given some warning of my intention to leave after taking Higher Certificate (the rough equivalent of A level) on the grounds that work-wise, there was nowhere else for me to go since I had reached the top of the school. But with two children under three (to say nothing of the other five) and her own continuing political ambitions, she had other preoccupations. This was after my mother organized that flight from Oxford to Hampstead Garden Suburb, which was animated by resentment at my father leading the life of a Labour minister in London all week, while she languished in 8 Chad. “Alas, my good friend Oxford, farewell for ever!” I wrote sententiously (and as it happens inaccurately) in my diary.

Now came the first setback. From the start I hated 10 Linnell Drive. It was large—my new room was a decent size—there was a pleasant garden with a view of the Heath Extension and a back door which led out on to it; there was even a tennis court. So what was there to hate? Hampstead Garden Suburb had been planned by Raymond Unwin, with the collaboration of Sir Edwin Lutyens: the gracious low-built houses celebrated the style known as Neo-Georgian. There were to be no pubs, no fences only hedges, ample squares, churches by Lutyens but no church bells disrupting the peace. I did not, could not, hate any of this and had in any case no interest in pubs.

The answer to my dislike lay in the fact that there was no public transport: the Golders Green underground lay twenty minutes’ walk away. Furthermore London taxis were allowed to refuse to take a fare there, because it was outside the six-mile limit. Arriving in London with huge excitement, I discovered that I was already a social failure, someone who probably would not be taken home by even the most chivalrous of escorts—and he would have to be remarkably rich to contemplate it in the first place. In short, I felt an outsider. I lived in NW11 (now, incidentally, one of the most expensive residential areas in London). When I learnt that Evelyn Waugh, living as a young man in North End Road, NW11, had walked into Hampstead proper to post his letters to secure the more elegant postcode of NW3, I thought it a perfectly sensible decision.

The problem of my occupation was the next one I faced. There was no such concept as a gap year at the time, although it has now become a familiar term and generally includes exotic foreign adventure for those privileged to have it. That was certainly not an option then. Foreign travel as such, rambling round Europe, Asia or South America with a friend, simply did not exist. Money allowed to be taken abroad was limited to fifty pounds, which in any case was beyond the means of many families. But there was a possibility of a foreign exchange, which did not imply a currency deal, rather the exchange of two young people, roughly the same age, different nationalities, who would live alternately in each other’s homes. The experience was often preceded by a lengthy correspondence, postal of course, between the pair in question. The intention was to promote international love and friendship. This enterprise was not always totally successful.

As a matter of fact, I got off quite lightly during the month I spent with a French family in the south-west of France near Bordeaux. There were horror stories: mine was not one of them. It is true that the young people, led by my supposed “friend” Jacqueline, despised me, despised everything about me, beginning with my clothes. They were right. My clothes were, with one exception, despicable. The exception was an enormous pale turquoise coat, magnificent collar on a Napoleonic scale, which extended almost to the ground. The so-called New Look of Christian Dior had swept France the previous year: in England the yards of material needed to make these swirling skirts were, in an age of continuing clothes-rationing, regularly denounced in the press. But of course everyone desired the New Look. Lucy and I had managed to save enough coupons to acquire one coat each, hers being lichen-green to my turquoise. If these coats looked rather odd contrasted with our plain short skirts and workaday jumpers, it did not bother us. We were confident that we were in the height of fashion.

The French teenagers did not agree. While they did pluck at the turquoise material with Gallic grunts of approval (although such a coat must have been a ludicrous sight in the south in August), they made it quite clear that the rest of my wardrobe was beyond the pale sartorially. They did not seem to care about anything else; or if they did, excluded from their whispered conclaves in French, I had no idea what it was. When I pasted a photograph of myself at the château into my album, about to devour a bunch of grapes which I had suspended above my mouth, the caption beneath read: “The grapes were the only nice thing about the visit.” There were however two people I found in different ways sympathetic. One was Mathieu, a handsome young man who was supposed to be picking these grapes for the harvest; except that whenever possible he lay down on his back amid the rows of vines, gazed at the sky and appeared to go into a dream until interrupted. The family went into an understandable state of rage at his idleness, but I enjoyed our halting conversations; I was just beginning to watch French films and in my imagination Mathieu amid the vines made a good romantic character.

It was the other sympathetic person who made the whole experience memorable long after I had returned thankfully to England. There was an aged grandfather-figure, generally dressed in the clothes I expected senior Frenchmen to wear from films, including a black beret. Always addressing me as “mademoiselle,” he paid elaborate heed to me, launching into political monologues about England, France, De Gaulle, Churchill and above all the course of the recent war. Gradually I became aware that he must have been a member of the Resistance, and perhaps was not so very old after all. All this reached its climax at my sixteenth birthday celebration on 27 August, which was towards the end of my stay.

There were speeches. Even Mathieu was allowed to rise up from among the vines, although on this occasion he did not speak. Grandpère made up for it. He made an extremely long speech, flowery, rhetorical, grandiloquently polite not only about myself but also about the wartime relationship between our two countries. Then the Resistance seemed to come into it; with my limited French I had the impression that I was forgotten as old issues were being raised, old scores settled…There were discontented mutterings from the other older men present, and undoubtedly some of them were disputing what he said, with frequent and furious flourishes of their hands. It was all made worthwhile for me, however, by Grandpère’s magnificent conclusion.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, he saluted me as one who had brought peace to the château by my mere presence. “Just as our English allies did for us during the war,” he added meaningfully, throwing in something in which I could distinguish the word Vichy. There were increasingly angry looks from the unwilling audience of this paean of praise which concluded: “You, mademoiselle, are coming among us like the goddess Irène, the goddess of peace.” As the sixteen-year-old goddess cast her eyes down, modestly yet peacefully, Grandpère burst into tears and had to be escorted sobbing out of the room. After that, I wish I could report that we gave Jacqueline a really agreeable time when she in turn came to England. Alas, the weather was morbidly wet and cold. Jacqueline retired to her bed and stayed there.

The sense that my Bordeaux visit gave me of an internal French war not yet finished was a useful historical experience. Up to this point I had imagined that peace in Europe simply meant peace. Everyone loved the Resistance and of course everyone loved the English who came to the rescue of France, won the war for them actually (with a little help from the lovable Resistance). I had no previous conception of the strains that occupation might leave behind. My next experience of foreign travel was very different and infinitely happier; but in one sense it was also a historical experience. I owed it to my father’s position in the government and it should therefore be firmly added to the credit account of his political career so far as I was concerned, given that at this age I was liable to grumble tiresomely about the disadvantages of being a Labour minister’s daughter, in contrast to the more conventionally social families of my friends.

Alcide De Gasperi, the Prime Minister of Italy, and his wife, Signora Francesca, decided that the family would invite from England the daughter of a Catholic Labour minister to spend Christmas 1950 with them. The important element in this was the Catholicism: both De Gasperis were devout Catholics, and in fact lived in a modest flat in Rome very close to St. Peter’s. Signora De Gasperi certainly went to daily Mass, and probably the Prime Minister as well. Alcide De Gasperi was at this point nearly eighty, and had been the Christian Democrat Prime Minister of Italy since December 1945. With his dignified spare Nordic appearance, Signor De Gasperi was very different from the conventional British picture of a loquacious dark roly-poly Italian (he had been born in the Tyrol when it was part of Austria-Hungary). He certainly did not look his age. Nor did he appear in any way diminished by some of the ordeals he had endured during a long life, including time in prison at the hands of the Fascists, before he became the wartime founder of the (then illegal) Christian Democratic Party. Subsequently he was its first Prime Minister.

Here was a strongly religious man who was at the same time a convinced and ardent politician, standing for social security reform; as well as being demonstrably anti-Fascist he stood out against Communism in the context of the Cold War. I was deeply impressed by him on this level, but also by his gentleness towards ignorant people like myself. He was not without a sly sense of humour, cracking the odd joke about England’s Labour government which, once we had found some shared language, was quite sharp and to the point. In writing about politicians later, especially in my book on the Great Reform Bill, I used to reflect on that mixture of idealism and ambition common to the breed to which I had already been alerted by my parents. My mind sometimes went back to that Christmas in Italy and the supreme example set by Alcide De Gasperi.

Signora De Gasperi ran everything in the house and seemed to do all the cooking as well. This was not entirely good news. She had her own ideas on how things should be, which included the fact that English girls needed to eat large lumps of meat daily otherwise they would become restive (like sporting dogs, I suppose). So I was condemned to these large and I have to say tasteless lumps while the rest of the family gorged on heavenly spaghetti…Signora De Gasperi’s moment of supreme control came at New Year. We travelled down to the south in a special train, with the people standing by to cheer their Prime Minister as we passed. We disembarked with Vesuvius in sight. The welcome was tumultuous. We were shown everything, including the great exhibition of the remains of Pompeii; well, not quite everything. At the behest of Signora De Gasperi, the famously rude sections (unsuitable for modest teenagers) were shrouded off from us. Privilege obviously had its disadvantages, at least in a Catholic country; it was not until a twenty-first-century exhibition of Pompeian remains in the British Museum that I was able to see at last those sights which Signora De Gasperi had denied a nice Catholic Socialist girl.

On my return from France in September 1948, the problem of what I was going to do next became more acute. (It was felt that I was as yet too young to embark on job-seeking.) Luckily my best friend Lucy had also left Ascot. We attempted a session at the French Lycée in South Kensington. This had the advantage—for me—of being near her parents’ stately calm house in Onslow Square, where Arthur Pollen also had his studio. It was my aim to get inside this house and stay there as long as possible. When I managed to be present at the daily family lunch, my favourite moment was the emergence of “sculptor Pollen” from the studio, with both hands extended, politely rubbing them to indicate that he was not in a fit state to shake hands. It symbolized for me the working artist who also enjoyed a warm family life. Holidays in the Pollens’ house on Lambay Island off the coast of Dublin were even more agreeable, with a cowrie shell gathered from the beach serving as a souvenir of the same hospitable combination.

Where the Pollens were concerned, I was developing that habit found in certain adolescents, probably members of large families, which I now call “cuckooing.” That is to say, I preferred another nest to my own. I don’t think this is altogether a bad thing: I have observed it since in members of my own family. It is after all only a rite of passage on the way to independent grown-up life, as the teenager discovers other preoccupations from those of her upbringing. In my case, it was the musical and artistic interests of the Pollens (I don’t remember a single word being spoken about politics) which impressed me. In this way I discovered the paintings and poetry of David Jones; his magic and mystic art was first encountered in the shape of a watercolour of an elephant in Lucy’s bedroom. Daphne’s uncle was the writer Maurice Baring, another Catholic convert; through the Pollens I discovered such novels as Cat’s Cradle, which I found satisfyingly full of Catholic sophistication.

The French Lycée failed to enchant—a feeling that was mutual—due in our opinion to the monotonous attention to grammar. Already Lucy and I had embarked on a far more interesting endeavour. We were receiving private coaching from a tutor named Louis Bussell and learning about Gothic Architecture as well as History. Mr. Bussell’s Catholic ardour was an important element in all of this and enabled me to make a connection between the medieval Church and the Gothic, which was deeply exciting to one who had only recently become a Catholic. It also turned me in the direction of the early Middle Ages, after a brief but satisfying fling with Charlemagne, which would have consequences for my future academic career. “All is worthless after the thirteenth century!” Mr. Bussell was wont to exclaim with a mixture of pride and melancholy. In my Progress Book, my mother recorded that I was depressed by this, but she had not read my mood correctly. With my enthusiastic Catholicism, I found it exhilarating to consider, whereas, possibly by temperament as much as anything else, I didn’t agree.

The study of History co-existed with my literary efforts, duly recorded in my pocket diaries. There are many starts and no finishes. A typical week would read: “Monday: Wrote. Tuesday: Wrote. Wednesday: Bought brown pillbox cocktail bag with mirror in lid, same size as gas mask case. Thursday: Wrote. Friday: Wrote. Saturday: Tried to make petticoat out of parachute silk from Butterick pattern on Popie’s sewing machine. Disaster.” (Parachute silk was unrationed.) My literary efforts were no more successful than the petticoat. I decided for example that the characters in a children’s adventure story written “to save the family finances” were unreal and abandoned it. Eighty pages of a book called The Lost Medal about a group of Catholics (heavily influenced by R. H. Benson, writer of such riveting historical novels as Come Rack! Come Rope! ) stopped there. In any case, my chief pleasure was not completion but listing book and chapter titles of infinite enticing variety: my literary pleasure, that is. Now that it was agreed that I would attend a crammer called Bendixen in Baker Street for some months before the Oxford Entrance Exam in October, perhaps I could study parties in the gap.

The Bendixen plan came about when my mother noticed at last that I was hanging about the house rather a lot without visible employment, and concentrated her formidable intellect upon her eldest daughter. Now she openly questioned whether I had ever shown any capacity for serious hard work—such as was needed for any girl to get into Oxford in those days, since places in the few women’s colleges were so limited. The Dragon School had given me an advantage, she implied, and I had never been tested. She was of course quite right. What sensible schoolchild would do “serious hard work” if it was made unnecessary by a freak of early education? What Elizabeth hadn’t noticed was that I could and did do an infinite amount of hard work where my passions were involved, and my primary passion was History. That pleasant surprise lay ahead. All of this was in considerable contrast to the Labour politics which continued to dominate my parents’ lives.

Just as NW11 was not quite NW3 on the social register, so Hampstead Garden Suburb was theoretically not quite Hampstead in the political sense. There was much talk about the “Hampstead Set” in the Labour government, prominent in it my mother’s old Oxford admirer, Hugh Gaitskell and his wife Dora. Hugh Gaitskell had a slightly pawky appearance, as though a chat with him might not include many laughs. In fact his set mouth and beady eyes, the natural air of a civil servant, belied his amiable and even dashing character: he had a lot of charm. Hugh Gaitskell also loved to dance, as would emerge much later in reports of his friendship with Ann Rothermere (subsequently married to Ian Fleming). All I knew was that he was my favourite of my parents’ politician friends. Thanks to him, a great moment in my life followed. I was sitting out, a seventeen-year-old wallflower at a Buckingham Palace dance where, invited as a Labour minister’s daughter, I knew no one. Suddenly Hugh Gaitskell swooped by in white tie and tails and whirled me away to the dance floor. We danced and danced. Like Cinderella, I felt myself transformed into the belle of the ball, even if the then rank of my royal prince was actually Minister of Economic Affairs.

NW11 was in fact well represented in the Hampstead Set, which included the Gordon Walkers, also old Oxford friends (Patrick Gordon Walker was Under-Secretary at the Commonwealth Relations Office, later Secretary of State), and in 1948 a younger couple called Wilson. Harold, ten years my parents’ junior at thirty-one, had just been made President of the Board of Trade. His wife Mary—“as I suppose we must now learn to call her,” wrote Elizabeth—had recently given a children’s party to which my younger siblings were invited. My mother’s faintly scornful comment on the hostess’s name in a school letter was due to the fact that Mrs. Wilson had apparently once been known by her first name of Gladys, but was now firmly Mary. It also expressed a certain private attitude of condescension to the Wilsons at the time.

The Wilsons were not among my parents’ close friends, as I see from my diary record of dinners at 10 Linnell Drive. These were not frequent, although there was one never-to-be-forgotten occasion when the Prime Minister and his wife Violet indicated that they would accept a dinner invitation. Like everything to do with the Attlees—with one notable exception—the occasion was to be formal in the pre-war fashion which they seemed to prefer, which combined so strikingly with Clement Attlee’s strong feeling for social welfare and made him at the time an underrated leader. There were even dinner jackets. Both Elizabeth and Violet Attlee wore what looked like discreet velvet tea gowns.

In the same way a little dance given for the Attlee daughter Alison, at No. 10 Downing Street, might have been hosted by any of the previous incumbents. The pleasant fair-haired very young man with blue eyes and regular features who danced with me would have fitted into any Conservative ballroom; I thought we got on well as he chose to tell me the history of No. 10 at some length as we danced. In fact he turned out to be called Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and was soon claimed, rather to my surprise, by an equally sweet-looking young American wife. (The future Tony Benn would have been in his mid twenties.)

The exception in the public persona of Mr. Attlee was our memorable family visit to Chequers for a Boxing Day party. A vast Chinese screen was prominent in the great hall; behind it lurked an enormous fireplace. Lo and behold! From behind the screen stepped out the figure of Father Christmas! He looked immensely confident, even commanding, after his presumed Arctic journey: but…for a moment I thought the new spirit of internationalism had gone too far and he was actually a former enemy, a Japanese. Of course it was our host, Mr. Attlee, who in Father Christmas gear, with his dark slanting eyes under his scarlet hood, did have a certain Asiatic look. After that, I rejected all the fashionably snide Society stories about Mr. Attlee: “an empty taxi drew up at No. 10 Downing Street and Mr. Attlee got out” was typical. Anyone who could convincingly come down the chimney at Chequers and retain his dignity was a great man. That was quite apart from his unfailing kindness towards the children of his colleagues such as myself: there was none of that legendary taciturnity for which he became famous as a leader.

When my parents’ dinners did occur, as for example on my father’s birthday in December 1948, they would typically feature the Gaitskells, Aidan Crawley with his celebrated war reporter wife Virginia Cowles, Douglas and Peggy Jay. Douglas Jay was a brilliant man who had in addition demonic good looks; despite this combination, or perhaps because of it, my pretty girl friends who stayed at Bernhurst were careful not to play Sardines with him during the after-dinner games, as one or two of them explained to me. I did not experience this; in any case I much preferred Peggy Jay, a high-minded woman with a strong conscience on which she acted. My real reservation about Douglas Jay, which applied to various of my parents’ political friends, was his arrogance.

There was a famous utterance of my parents’ friend Sir Hartley Shawcross, then a Labour MP, in the House of Commons in 1946 during a debate on anti-Union laws: “we are the masters now.” As a matter of fact, like many famous utterances, it was misreported in the first place. Shawcross actually said: “We are the masters at the moment,” which has a very different connotation. Unaware of the truth, I did find the phrase summed up a certain Labour attitude that made me uneasy. My loyalty to Labour was as yet undiminished. But I was brought up on Frank’s belief in the Christian doctrine that “we are all of equal importance in the sight of God,” which, as he put it himself in his autobiography, animated his Socialism. So I was similarly disquieted by the notorious outburst of Jay himself. Once again I was misled by the press. There was no outburst. Jay, now Economic Secretary to the Treasury, had written in a pre-war book: “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.” It was now quoted in a much cruder form: “the man in Whitehall knows best.” With my ignorant but enquiring mind, I asked myself: was this really an expression of the philosophy of the beloved Labour Party?

I fared much better being swayed by oratory, as the ignorant but enquiring tend to do. There were two significant occasions. Once my parents took me to hear their friend Richard Crossman give a rousing talk in Headington; I think they intended to excite me about politics. As it was, I was indeed excited by Dick Crossman, rather more than they expected or even hoped. His ebullient style, his flashing eyes behind their enormous glasses, his thick wedge of hair above all made him an evangelical figure. I did not realize that my parents considered him in some way unreliable, although they were very fond of him personally. My ingenuous enthusiasm took them by surprise.

“Dick is a good speaker but he’s not Gladstone,” said Frank rather grumpily. Gladstone was one of his heroes. In private life, Dick was a man of enormous personal warmth as I discovered later when married to an MP, even if a Tory one; Hugh often remarked that he preferred the company of Dick Crossman to most of his fellow Tories.

The second speech was given in a hall in Hampstead Garden Suburb by Victor Kravchenko, who had escaped from Soviet Russia and written a bestselling book, published in 1946, called I Chose Freedom. Ukrainian-born, Kravchenko had been a Soviet official, before requesting political asylum in the United States when he was posted to Washington. The Soviet Union demanded his immediate extradition, which President Roosevelt declined to carry out. Here was an even more captivating speaker, in the literal sense of the word. Coincidentally this experience came at roughly the same period as I was reading about the ordeal of the Hungarian Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty, tried and imprisoned under the Communist regime, with a false confession forced out of him by torture (having already been imprisoned during the war by the pro-Nazi authorities). Together with my parents’ resolute opposition to Stalinism, and their equally resolute adherence to Socialism, I was never in any danger of confusing the two; my Catholic loyalty, exemplified by the fate of Mindszenty, was the third element.

I was certainly proof against the teasing of my uncle John Harman, my mother’s much-loved brother who conspicuously did not share her politics. For some reason, I had to have my tonsils out in a London nursing home when my parents were stuck in Oxford. Uncle John showed great kindness in visiting me (he was already a busy doctor and must have had a demanding schedule). One day he arrived and with a mischievous smile held out a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which had been published eighteen months previously.

“Read this,” he said. “This is what will happen to this country if your parents have their way.” I had never heard of either George Orwell or Animal Farm. Reluctantly, I put aside salacious Forever Amber, which I could never have read at home but was being serialized in the Sunday Dispatch and obtainable at the nursing home; I had hidden it under the bedclothes when Uncle John arrived. Immediately I was hooked and Animal Farm remains the most gripping horror story I have ever read, which I have always rated much higher than 1984. But never for one moment did I think it had any relevance to the idealistic Socialist Britain of my parents.

All this amounted to the fact that, at the age of sixteen, I was naturally interested in public affairs, while preferring action over issues to party politics. A few years later I would find with relief a straightforward cause about which it was possible to feel passionately and that was the abolition of capital punishment, acting as an usherette at Gerald Gardiner’s Fifties meetings arguing for the reform. But I was also inquisitive (and already of course an inveterate newspaper reader). In short, I liked to know what was going on. It was in this mood of high-minded research that I decided to bunk off from the Lycée in December 1948 in order to attend the proceedings of the Lynskey Tribunal. This concerned possible corruption in political life and it involved a member of the Labour government.

I had to queue for five hours to do so. To see the chief witness in the investigation, Sidney Stanley, a flamboyant adventurer if not outright conman, born in Poland as Solomon Wulkan, more than made up for the temporary inconvenience. In any case I was used to queuing and found my fellows outside Church Hall, Westminster much more interesting than those in my usual Golders Green queue for nylon stockings: they all had strong political views, I discovered, but no single person agreed with anyone else; there were quite a few Poles among them, but they were not necessarily on Stanley’s side. Most people disapproved of John Belcher, a junior minister at the Board of Trade who had been a railway clerk, for what seemed like shocking corruption in those austere days—a hotel in Margate! For his family as well! Horrors! With hindsight, Belcher’s well-meant efforts to involve business with Labour, never an easy task, seem more pathetic than corrupt. In the event there was no prosecution, but Belcher resigned from Parliament and went back to being a railway clerk. However, if you were not involved in the allegations of corruption, it was all good fun. Stanley proved to be what I can only describe as a Pinteresque character before his time, with something of the panache of Max in The Homecoming. You had to believe him with that wicked smile, those inviting gestures, that air of cheerful self-confidence. Perhaps he should have played the part of Max: at all events, a potentially fine actor was lost to the English stage when Stanley, transformed into Schlomo ben Chaim, spent the rest of his life in Israel.

Later I boasted to my parents what I had done: apart from anything, I needed a letter of excuse for the Lycée. In my mother I saw a certain admiration for my boldness struggle with parental disapproval for skipping school. In the end, parental disapproval won.

Elizabeth said: “You know I can’t possibly write a note for you which isn’t true.” I made no comment. Like any girl of spirit, I had perfected my mother’s clear, flowing signature years ago and my little portable typewriter, my sixteenth-birthday present, would do the rest.

Frank looked up from his reading and merely said in his mild way: “John Belcher is an unfortunate man. He deserves our pity.”

The spectacle of corruption in politics, the law-givers negligently tossing the laws out of the window, however petty, is always upsetting. This was my glimpse of it at an early stage of my personal interest in politics, as opposed to the political background endowed by both my parents; it was all a long way from the intellectual arguments of the Hampstead (Garden Suburb) Set. In my case, I must admit that I felt more fascinated by the characters involved, especially Sidney Stanley, and their motivation, than the tricky delineation of political corruption. It would be possible to deduce from this that I was a lawyer manquée: certainly I have retained a fondness for attending trials out of curiosity and reading law reports, also deriving enormous vicarious pleasure from the flourishing careers of family members who have gone to the Bar. But I believe the truth is slightly different: a biographer has something in common with a barrister making a case, and it was the biographical impulse which finally was driving me.

One possibility never remotely crossed my mind (either then or since) and that was becoming an active politician myself. I suppose having both a mother and a father who aspired to enter Parliament, and a first husband who was an active MP, might have inclined me either way. In fact there was no question of me being persuaded by outside factors like these. I had always known exactly what I wanted to do, which was to write History, although very far indeed from knowing how to do it.

This did not preclude me from feeling fascinated by the political process. I particularly enjoyed attending debates in the House of Lords when my father first joined, although it should be remarked that members were still strictly men only in the late Forties and most of the Fifties. One was used to serried ranks of male faces in dark suits when not in red robes and white wigs. This was in contrast to the House of Commons where Joan Vickers, the elegant middle-aged Tory MP elected in 1955, who displayed an immaculately coiffed head of silver-blue hair, could never have been mistaken for a man. Then there was the unmistakable voice of the Bevanite Labour MP Barbara Castle. It was a high voice and rather screechy to the critical ear, but then what else could she do to be heard above the deep baying of the male hounds at her heels? Women peers were not actually allowed into the Lords until after the Life Peerages Act of 1958, that act provoked into being by Tony Benn, whereas they had been admitted to the Commons for the first time forty years earlier. But then women were not yet admitted as members of the Oxford Union in the Fifties: even charismatic future leaders like Shirley Catlin, later Williams.

In the Lords at that date, as a peer’s eldest unmarried daughter, I was allowed to sit in the gallery among the peers’ wives. I celebrated my status by sending my roving eye across the serried ranks of noble faces. I had in mind a diary entry around this time about my future husband: “Mine must be Catholic or convertible, a peer if possible, clever, intellectual and literary, interested in his surroundings. Either Labour or amenable, having a house in town and ancient family seat, fond of children and wanting them.” Somehow I doubt the sincerity of the next sentence, given the people who were my current heroes: “He need not be good looking, must be a nice person of moral worth.” I added: “Also wealthy and tall.” There spoke my beating sixteen-year-old heart.

There was little positive sign of this paragon in the House of Lords of the Forties although I did rather fancy the look of my father’s friend Victor Rothschild, who had apparently chosen to sit as a Labour peer. I also understood him to be a war hero for his work with unexploded bombs. (I had forgotten to add “courage in war” to my diary requirements.)

When I came to study the early-nineteenth-century Parliament, I became aware how privileged I had been in my youth to sit right there inside the House of Lords and House of Commons: the Whig ladies who were keen on politics had to lean forward and peer down a sort of ventilator and in any case the old Houses of Parliament, before the fire of 1834, were intolerably stuffy, crammed and uncomfortable. The parliamentary debates—in both houses—were crucial in the cause of Reform and researching; I read and reread the Hansard accounts, trying to picture them and recreate them in my mind. The spur to my imagination was the memory of those early sessions.

Life at the Bendixen crammer was not quite so glamorous, and in fact consisted of a lot of concentrated hard work, but it was not entirely without its pleasures. This was because Bendixen was next door to the Classic cinema in Baker Street. In those days, no questions were asked, and no new ticket requested, if you elected to spend all day in the cinema, attending three or four performances of the same film. It was vital that the prices were so much cheaper than in the West End, where we could only afford the noxious front row. (As a result, the memory of the unhappy looming face of Richard Attenborough in close-up as a tobacconist’s son sent to an exclusive public school in The Guinea Pig disturbs me to this day.) At the Classic, Lucy and I were able to make a thorough study of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) as part of our larger project of investigation into the career of Gary Cooper.

This was so important that Lucy actually telephoned Linnell Drive—a rare occurrence, our single telephone being in a tiny lobby under the stairs—to give me some news from a magazine centred on movie gossip. Gary Cooper had been asked why he had been at the top of his profession so long. “People with big feet is hard to move,” he replied. This, as Lucy pointed out, effectively contradicted the dreadful rumour that Gary Cooper was dumb. It had been derived from some other gossip magazine, which we would now never buy again.

The Oxford exam came, proved very difficult according to my diary, and then there was the prospect of the interview. In theory, not everyone got an interview, but it was obviously unlikely that Lady Margaret Hall, my mother’s old college to which she remained much attached, would not give her daughter a chance. Besides, Elizabeth herself had taken a keen interest in my campaign, as she saw it, but which was frankly quite as much her own.

First of all, she instructed me to read Arnold Toynbee, and not the abridged version, by the way. “Read the whole thing, Antonia, and at the interview when they ask you what you have been reading, be careful to make references to passages which are not in the abridged version. That means you had better read the abridged version as well and make notes. You can do it.”

Yes, the quick reader she had involuntarily created (she always said she was not a particularly quick reader herself) could do it. But I didn’t much want to do it. I preferred Lytton Strachey to Toynbee, although I had enough sense to keep that judgement to myself. As it was, I plastered my interview with interpolations from Toynbee. Afterwards I realized my behaviour had been like that of Bertie Wooster who, when told in advance that a certain attractive young lady admired Tennyson, managed only to read The Princess. His conversation with her at dinner led at all points inexorably to quotations from that poem, while the young lady tried in vain to invoke other works: “You do seem to be fond of The Princess,” was her final comment.

Elizabeth’s second instruction was along different lines.

“Antonia, you will read PPE,” she said.

“Not History?”

“No. All girls nowadays want to read History. That is, if they don’t read English. I want you to get a scholarship. Hardly any girls read PPE. If you take the History exams, but say you hope to read PPE at university, you will probably get an award.”

Dutifully, I did as she suggested. And sure enough, the great day came when an orange paper telegram, prepaid reply possible by telephone, arrived at 10 Linnell Drive. “Lady Margaret Hall offers Exhibition…” I dashed into the tiny dark lobby, seized the instrument and dictated my reply at high speed which went something like this: “Yes, yes, dear Lady Margaret Hall, I would love to accept your kind offer, in fact I would love to come to Oxford altogether…” At this point the sour voice of the telephone operator to whom I was dictating these rapturous words broke in: “You have used up all the prepaid message. Do you want to pay for more?”

There was one question that I had never thought to ask during all this time: what is PPE? Now I had about ten months to find out before I went up to Oxford in the following October. My airy plans for the next year did not however include making simple academic enquiries like that.