CHAPTER TWELVE

OXFORD MISS

There we were, we first-year students, assembled in the Junior Common Room of Lady Margaret Hall to be wised up about all that was hopefully to come. We were told we could ask any questions we liked about the way things worked in our new life. There was briefly silence. Then a very small, very pretty girl, sitting in the front row more or less enveloped by her huge scholar’s gown, said in a loud, confident voice:

“I have a question. What can we ask the scouts to do for us in our rooms? Will they do some ironing?” These were the college maids, known as scouts in imitation of the servants in the men’s colleges. I remember a gasp. Someone nudged me.

“That’s Marigold Hunt. The Headgirl of Benenden.” It was in fact my first sight of the future Marigold Johnson, who filled me with admiration for her boldness: it was to inaugurate a lifetime’s friendship. At the time, being both domestically inadequate and terrified of my scout, I badly wanted to know the answer.

My neighbour in the back row quizzed me: “What are you reading?”

“History,” I replied without thinking, my History. Then I had to correct myself. “Actually I got in on History, but now I’m reading Politics, Economics and…” My voice tailed away.

“Philosophy,” concluded my new friend helpfully. “PPE. You forgot Philosophy.” Everybody at LMH was clearly very kind. Apart from this general atmosphere of kindness, the college, given its punitive rules, conveyed the impression of being an enormous ladies’ boarding school, more Godolphin than St. Mary’s Ascot. Girls, or I should of course say women, were not allowed to…the list was endless, many of them positively encouraging defiance. No man in your room before 2 p.m. or after 7 p.m.; no student to come back into the college later than 10 p.m. The latter rule certainly led to some strange solutions, of which spending the night out was the simplest; I developed a habit of returning for breakfast, carrying a black veil and a Missal, with the smug expression of one who has recently attended early Mass.

Climbing in was another more exciting option, needing the hefty arm of a man, from Christ Church perhaps, one who was used to beagling, with oneself as the hound. That still did not overcome the problem of the movable crinoline petticoat, alluded to in the previous chapter; after a dance, sporting girls tended to throw the petticoat over first in a merry gamble that the petticoat would not be stuck one side and the owner the other. Another rule that visits to London were not permitted in term time probably affected me more than most, given that my social life, including my unrequited love, was still focused there. I shall always bless the memory of the LMH tutor (not my own) who happened to coincide with me on the platform of Oxford station.

“Good afternoon, Miss Pakenham, an emergency dentist’s appointment, no doubt.”

“Yes, definitely an emergency,” I gulped. It certainly was now, if it had not been one originally. As equivocation, it was rather clumsy: this was the art of not telling a positive lie while not conveying the truth either, which I came to study later over the Gunpowder Plot. But it satisfied both our consciences, the charitable don and the wayward student. I heard no more about it.

The original fine red-brick buildings of Lady Margaret Hall, named for Margaret Beaufort, scholarly mother of Henry VII, had been constructed before the First World War, and Deneke, rather less agreeable because the rooms were so small, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in the year I was born. They were utterly different from the ancient and august stone structures which constituted my childhood memories of Oxford: that freezing room in Tom Quad where Frank taught had little in common, including the temperature, with the cosy sitting rooms in which the LMH dons resided. All this increased the impression of a boarding school, whereas Christ Church was what was meant by a college. Of course in yearning for icy-cold stone and tramps in the rain, instead of warm red-brick and bathrooms, I was being perverse. I was deeply impressed when my daughter Flora got a place at Wadham College to read Greats not long after girls were first admitted—three hundred and sixty-four years after its foundation in 1610. (Shades of the august Maurice Bowra of my youth!) I soon found out the discomfort which went with a greater sense of historical presence.

The gardens of LMH on the other hand were a joy. They were beautifully laid out and tranquil, rolling down towards the Cherwell—that river in which I had already immersed myself so often while living at 8 Chad and at the Dragon School. In fact, geographically LMH was virtually part of that North Oxford suburb in which I had grown up. I did not see it like that at the time, and it never occurred to me to wander in the direction of 8 Chad, down the footpath which skirted the Dragon School. The sound of bells which was the music of my childhood still came at evening from the chapels in the colleges; now the bells drew me towards the centre. My footsteps (and my bicycle) were firmly pointed in that direction.

I was however actually there to study. It was clear that academically things were already off to a bad start: there was something Freudian about my forgetting—yet again—what PPE stood for. Within the next few days they got worse when I attended my first lecture in…Philosophy, I suppose. At any rate, it was given by the future Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, Peter Strawson; the site was University College in the High Street. The first sight which greeted me was a blackboard. And the lecturer almost immediately began scribbling figures on it in chalk.

I felt the kind of desperate impulse which must animate a bride who bolts at the altar, regardless of all the actions that have got her there in the first place—because it’s her last chance to escape. What had happened to my History? This was not why I had come to Oxford, to gaze at a blackboard covered in chalk figures. There and then I fled from Univ, into the High, dived towards the back streets of Christ Church, found my bicycle, and peddled frantically back to LMH. An awkward period of negotiation followed.

At some point, one of the dons involved murmured in a reasonable voice: “If we had known you wanted to read History, not PPE, we would not have awarded you an Exhibition…” The implication was that there had been other more worthy candidates in a fair fight over a History award. So my mother had been right about that, I remember thinking. That didn’t help me in my present fix.

“So are you going to take it away?” I burst out, thinking that would be the second piece of bad news, apart from my change of subject, I would have to confess in a letter to Elizabeth (I had no intention of risking a call from the single available telephone, a pay box in the porter’s lodge). There must have been some kind of conference. The dons were essentially fair-minded women. I had been given an Exhibition without a condition publicly attached. I was allowed to keep it.

I should like to relate that this crisis and its generous resolution turned me into a model student. My love of History was genuine enough; the trouble was that in other ways I lacked seriousness. Or at any rate the kind of seriousness demanded of a girl student in 1950, who incidentally would be writing two essays a week to the one essay that the men wrote. Any girl who looked as if she might have pretensions to a social life was deliberately given a 9 a.m. tutorial to keep her alert to her real mission—or so we believed. Certainly my sessions on medieval History with Miss Naomi D. Hurnard, my so-called Moral Tutor, always seemed to take place at this antisocial hour. It was not the hour itself to which I objected, by nature being a lark rather than an owl (like my father). It was the fearful temptation it presented of doing nothing about my essay during the days before, and then getting up with that famous lark and writing, fast, very fast…This was no way for an aspiring historian to come to terms with her subject.

The trouble was compounded by an unhappy juxtaposition of teacher and pupil. Admiration for Mr. Bussell, the man who believed nothing good had happened after the thirteenth century, convinced me that I wanted to study medieval History in particular (apart from the whole of English History, which we had to do as a matter of course). It was this which brought me into the orbit of Miss Hurnard, who would certainly have agreed that this match thrown up in Oxford was not one made in heaven.

Then in her forties, very pale, with black hair screwed into a bun, Miss Hurnard had long white hands which she extended together in the general direction of the fire. She looked remote; one has to bear in mind however that she was the author of violently learned articles about legal History which would culminate in the publication of The King’s Pardon for Homicide Before AD 1307. Sometimes the hands appeared as if they might pick up the metal toast rack lying by the hearth; and what would they do with this sharp instrument? In the meantime Miss Hurnard never looked in my direction, only talked in elegantly composed sentences as she gazed into the flames. On the hearth lay her dog, a large, equally pale lump of Staffordshire bull terrier. When the dog, unlike the don, did look in my direction, I got an uneasy impression of transferred hostility.

Miss Hurnard’s obituary in the LMH Brown Book would refer to “the wintry warmth of her conversation”: I experienced the winter but not the warmth. “I was one of Sir Maurice Powicke’s young ladies,” she sighed on one occasion, still looking firmly in the direction of the fire. The dog stirred, perhaps at the mention of the hallowed name, which was that of the immensely distinguished medievalist who had recently retired after twenty-odd years as Regius Professor of History. The impression given was that I would certainly never have fitted into this category.

I had several other tutors, both at LMH and elsewhere, with whom I got on better. Anne Whiteman, she who prided herself on being the model for Anthony Powell’s Dr. Emily Brightman, was a jolly woman, squarely built, not very tall, with short frizzy hair who generally wore square-cut tweeds. At all times she seemed determined to enjoy the teaching of History: naturally the student opposite also enjoyed the experience. Then there was the delightful Karl Leyser at Magdalen who subsequently became Chichele Professor of Medieval History. With his brooding dark looks and heavy brows he was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who, after a period of internment at the beginning of the war, was rightly proud of going on to serve in the Black Watch. Although Karl’s lessons could be incomprehensible to those not listening keenly, he felt an excitement about his subject which was inspiring if one was sensible enough to pay attention.

“Matilda of Tuscany!” he once exclaimed at the beginning of a tutorial and then paused for a long time as though in ecstasy at the mere thought.

Hugh Leech, a young don at Balliol, was a man of great sweetness who once took the trouble to visit my mother in London and warn her against my wild ways. He believed that I could get a First but feared I would do something outrageous and be sent down. (In theory, I suppose anyone who received an award on getting into the University must be in line for a First.) Touchingly, Mr. Leech had developed a theory that I was rebelling against Catholicism. This was far from being the case: I was a keen Mass-goer, quite apart from those spurious visits which were supposed to explain my breakfast return to LMH.

The truth was that I was not very wild, even those forbidden overnight stays being more the product of LMH rules and a wish to prolong the party than any more exciting developments. But I rather wished I were. Or at least, I wished to be seen as such, without the more testing task of following through. As we of the early Fifties inched slowly towards social freedom, we were in many respects essentially respectable tortoises who wanted to be seen as madcap hares; except, in this case, it would be the madcap hares of the Sixties who won the race. The shadow of the Bright Young Things of the Twenties—we’d all read Evelyn Waugh—fell athwart us, but in a time of clinging austerity there was nothing particularly bright about us (hardly any undergraduates had cars and they tended to be both male and older; I never met a girl student who owned a car).

One episode sums up my own rather inept attitude to all this. Tom Stacey was one contemporary who was notably more enterprising than the rest of us, as his subsequent career as explorer, politician, publisher, writer and penal reformer, just for starters, would go on to demonstrate. In the Festival of Britain year he conceived the idea of Undergrad Tours: put simply, we, the impoverished undergraduates, were to make a great deal of money out of the wealthy tourists by showing them round the sights of Oxford. I was all for it, the money side of it, that is. I was more uneasy about Tom’s ebullient way with publicity, but unable to resist it since I was assured publicity was essential to our success. In the event, my diary records only one tour by three allegedly wealthy tourists, and then I paid for our lunch myself.

You could say that the publicity side of it all was more successful, especially if you believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity. To promote us, in a group which included Tim Renton, a future Tory Chief Whip, I agreed to smoke a cigar despite the fact that I had never smoked cigarettes, not out of any principle (which would have been rare at that time) but insecurity mixed with vanity: I thought I looked ridiculous with the minute white object stuck in my mouth, especially when it dropped on to the Bernhurst sofa by mistake. None of this prevented me freely posing with the cigar in the interests of fortune if not fame. As for the rest of my appearance, I wore a blue velvet pixie hat, with a grey suit and pearls, a sophisticated fashion statement as I saw it, which made for difficult bicycling. In the end, it was my lack of any true sophistication which found me out. Anthony Powell summed it up in the card he sent me when he saw the photograph in the press: “Take the band off the cigar next time when you smoke one,” he wrote.

The fact was that I had not yet discovered that truth so perfectly expressed in a line of verse by Hugh’s old friend, the poet-diplomat Sir Charles Johnston: “Having fun is such hard work.” In time I would discover the truth of the exact opposite, that working hard on what you really wanted to do could be the greatest fun in the world; but that was in the future. It is essentially a grown-up truth and I had not yet got there. Meanwhile, I had occasional intimations of what intellectual pleasure might be, as opposed to the elusive other sort. These intimations did not however occur during my infrequent attendances at lectures. When it came to living historians, I much preferred reading their books in a library to listening to the spoken word; so I only attended grumpily when I was assured that the research concerned had not yet been published. (Oh, why wouldn’t Bruce McFarlane get on with it?) I tended to concentrate on my parents’ friends, like Isaiah Berlin and David Cecil, who were of course the famous lecturers of the time.

“You’re just a tourist looking for sensations.” When Isaiah Berlin spoke these teasing words to me in his rapid glottal voice, he got it absolutely right. Lord David Cecil’s lectures were a particular delight: he would rush in rather late, in a flurry, and proceed to read aloud from, shall we say, Jane Austen. That occupied about twenty minutes, by which the prescribed hour’s lecture was nearly gone, and the rest of the time would be occupied by David, in his equally characteristic voice, the voice of an aristocrat in love with literature, giving us pleasant insights. The most celebrated lectures all the time I was at Oxford were given by the art historian E. H. Gombrich. And they took place at the Ashmolean Museum.

“Tea after Gombrich?” was the kind of smart invitation you hoped to get, especially from someone at nearby St. John’s in St. Giles or Worcester College, down the road. I wish I could remember one word of what I heard before these wished-for teas took place. Compared to the thrill of reading a book by Gombrich, the mind ungratefully blanks out.

So the first real intimation of the pleasure of historical research—in the proper academic sense—came with a special small class held at Merton College: there were three of us, and the two men, Alan Brownjohn and Jon Stallworthy, went on to become well-known poets. I on the other hand went on to become someone who adored digging into historical documents with my mental spade. I had a double task. First I was to investigate one volume of the manuscripts held at Hatfield House, seat of the Marquess of Salisbury, whose ancestors were advisers to Queen Elizabeth I, printed by the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Secondly I was to write a paper about what I found. For once, this was no hasty how-fast-can-I-do-it job. I revelled in the task.

In the Sixties I was able to read some of the originals when I was writing about Mary Queen of Scots, and the Marquess of Salisbury allowed me into his library at Hatfield. This was an honour for an as-yet-unpublished historian and even the formidable Lady Salisbury’s greeting did not diminish it.

“Why are you writing about that silly woman Mary Queen of Scots?” she demanded. “Why not write about Queen Elizabeth instead?” (Many years later I did attempt it, but, finding that I personally had nothing new to say about this fascinating woman, gave it up.) At the time the excitement of fingering respectfully the letter which Mary Queen of Scots had once touched—this was an age before gloves were requested—equalled but did not exceed that original dramatic discovery at Merton: this was something I wanted to do, was determined to do, and hoped to do for the rest of my life.

I could not see into the future. I did not know that I would one day be sitting in the Archives Nationales in Paris, this time fully equipped with white gloves, gazing at the only copy of the Wardrobe Book of Marie Antoinette which had survived the French Revolution, watched by two armed French gendarmes, feeling almost as terrified as I felt excited. What would happen to me if I left a blotch? Was the Bastille still in use? At the time in Oxford, it was enough that this was another Keatsian moment, as when I first learnt to read: once again magic casements opened. By chance, I subsequently came across that exact volume of the Historical Manuscripts Commission looking unloved on a dusty back shelf of a second-hand bookshop. It cost three pounds. Naturally I bought it.

Given this revelation, and the pleasing welcome accorded to me by my parents’ Oxford friends, it seems strange that at the time I felt that Oxford was more of a miss than a hit. Of the friends, Hugh Trevor-Roper was particularly hospitable to Frank’s daughter, although I saw him more in the light of a bachelor don in a dark blue velvet evening jacket who went hunting in the day and entertained at night, than as the celebrated historian he already was. (The Last Days of Hitler came out in 1947.) David and Rachel Cecil, still in Linton Road, frequently asked me to dinner; the spare man who was chosen to balance the numbers was, more often than not, John Bayley. Looking like a substantial owl, he was not my idea of Prince Charming and, given that he would go on, famously, to marry Iris Murdoch, he would no doubt have said the same about me. But I much enjoyed his company: somehow he managed to be both cheerful and lugubrious at the same time.

It is possible that in this privileged access, due to my parentage and my North Oxford upbringing rather than my own efforts, lay one reason for my slightly disconsolate reaction to university. I experienced none of the wonder that my mother described to me on her first day at Oxford University: how whirling up to LMH alone without her dominating parents was the most liberating experience of her life. How could I? I had whirled nowhere; or if I had, I had certainly not left my parents’ world behind.

It is perfectly true that there is one advantage of a university education, whatever one’s background, for which I will always be grateful. That is the unforced encounter with people of different nationalities, especially important perhaps for wartime children. Friendships could and did exist which illumined the vast world outside. There were two cases in point at LMH, two intriguing girls who were roughly my contemporaries.

Alia El-Solh, like Masha in The Seagull, always wore black (except for her dressing gown which was red, but that was in private). She explained to me the reason with simplicity: “They killed my father.” I learnt that this was the former Prime Minister of the Lebanon, assassinated in July 1951 shortly after his second term of office. Up to this point, I had never paused to think about the Middle East (except in biblical times) and occasional forays into reading newspapers about the military campaigns of the war. Now I made a few nervous attempts to find out something in order to get to know Alia El-Solh better and not make a fool of myself.

With Sabel Desta, granddaughter of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, time was to bring about a closer connection. In the LMH first-year photo Sabel stands on the sideline (I am at the back, Marigold at the front, an excellent guide to our standing in the college). Sabel’s aristocratic features, her high cheekbones and large black almond eyes give an impression of hauteur; this was very far from being the case. Cheerful and hard-working, she hardly deserved to be imprisoned after the fall of her grandfather’s regime, along with her five young children. By then a visit to Ethiopia while Haile Selassie was still in power, and a long rugged trip up mountains where no mule foot had ever trod (or so it seemed) under Thomas’s auspices had made me feel close to the country and Sabel’s family. I ended by protesting outside the Ethiopian Embassy against Sabel’s and others’ long incarceration (fourteen years altogether): Sabel, the cheerful young woman first encountered at LMH.

Another obvious reason for my ungratefully tepid reaction to Oxford lay in my love life at the time. Things had come right between Patrick Lindsay and myself—as I saw it—and unrequited love had turned into grand passion—once again in my version. But Patrick, destined for a job in the art world, had first of all studied with Bernard Berenson in Italy, and then, giving vent to his other more extrovert side, decided to sail the Atlantic in a yacht. Of course, the love object being at a distance, even on a yacht in mid-Atlantic—oh the perils! oh the privations!—has never yet dimmed a first-rate passion. The situation seemed to me vaguely operatic, that new pleasure to which Patrick had so successfully introduced me.

Before and after these sorties, typically adventurous in different ways, Patrick took me to his home in Scotland, Balcarres in Fife. It was an introduction to another side of Scottish History, not so much the character of her romantic Queen, more about the nobility who had been prominent in her reign. Patrick had an immense pride in the family history of the Lindsays, who, he assured me, had once been known as the Lightsome Lindsays, although at what period was not clear. His father Lord Crawford was certainly not lightsome: his record of public service to the arts included the trusteeship of every museum you could name from the National Gallery and the Tate, to the British Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland. His huge head of silver hair held high and his fine Roman nose also aloft, he might have given an impression of pomposity; his courtesy to all and sundry quickly corrected that.

“I’m so glad you’re able to see our Stanley Spencer, The May Tree,” he said to me. “As you know, it’s generally away on exhibition. You understand the problem one has in refusing these requests.” I was taken aback but flattered at being included among those who had this particular problem. Lady Crawford, small and private, was not lightsome either. She appeared to regard me, and indeed the rest of the world, with a certain suspicion. When I came to listen to her dry comments on her various relations including her husband, I realized that, quite as much as the great Lord Crawford, she lived life on her own terms.

The lightsome one was of course Patrick: it was in fact the combination of his dashing ways and his true fascination with art history—he ended up as Head of the Old Masters Department of Christie’s—which held me in his spell all the time I was at Oxford. My diary resonates with good days when I saw or heard from him, and bad days when the brief entry “Miz” probably meant that neither had taken place. There were plenty of visits to the opera. Our relationship reached its height in a trip to Italy, Patrick driving his ancient car with two other passengers. These were my brother Thomas and the beautiful Vanessa Jebb, admired generally by all at Oxford and the particular object of my brother’s affections. Thomas had arrived in Oxford to read Greats at Magdalen the year following me. As has been mentioned, he had failed the test for National Service because of his childhood attack of polio and was thus in the small category of undergraduates (male: women did not do National Service) who were about eighteen when they came up.

Comparative youth did not faze Thomas, any more than the spirit of the boy once famous for asking “Hujamean” and “Wajamean” at every conceivable opportunity had been dimmed. One of his early actions was to buy a very cheap decommissioned taxi, which he baptized Pythia, after the Delphic oracle. Pythia certainly manifested much of the unhelpfully enigmatic spirit of the original for whom she had been named. On one famous occasion, Pythia gave a few grunts.

“You hear that rattle?” said Thomas carelessly over his shoulder through the glass window to Henrietta and myself, deposited in the back seat. We were in full finery, scanty shawls over our off-the-shoulder dresses. My home-made black tulle was still going strong even if I had to cut off the ragged pieces at the bottom of the skirt where energetic dancers had trodden on them, so that the dress was now somewhat shorter. We were all three attending (without permission) the coming-out ball of Caroline Child-Villiers in London, determined not to miss such an august occasion hosted by her father, our cousin Grandie Jersey. “It sounds like the big end going,” said Thomas. “Of course it isn’t.” But it was. The rattle had been a message from the oracle, once again misinterpreted.

I cannot remember how long we lurked in the black depths of the Pythia on the edge of the dark road before rescue came. I do know that we proceeded to London by hitchhiking, despite our unsuitable clothes, and that finally we tagged in wearily to the ball. “How did you come from Oxford?” “By taxi”—well, it was partly true. Thomas was the only one who was in no way put off by all this, occasionally commenting with surprise on the extraordinary coincidence of the big end actually going at the same time as it sounded like it.

On our Italian trip, the fact that the knowledgeable Patrick was our guide and driver did not put Thomas off either. He had his own sturdy independent views, in this case mainly from the back seat. Patrick owned the car, a Triumph which seemed very grand to us, and had a little money to pay for petrol, but the rest of us could contribute practically nothing. As a result, all four of us camped out every night in sleeping bags, for economy’s sake, except when we could winkle our way into the grand Italian house to which Patrick had an introduction. We were on the cadge throughout our journey, including the moment in a small Italian town when Patrick spotted a friend of his father’s sitting alone at a table across the square.

“At least he’ll give us all some coffee. He’s always coming to Balcarres.” But the haughty individual sitting in solitude at the café showed absolutely no signs of entertaining us; in fact, by his body language alone, he displayed a strong preference for the rapid departure of this little ragged party. It was Sir Anthony Blunt. Afterwards, when his career as a spy was exposed, I worked it out from the dates that he must have been waiting for some kind of illicit contact and I felt a vicarious thrill. At the time we were disconsolate, except for Patrick, who was indignant when he thought about all the Balcarres hospitality. We sloped back across the square like unwanted dogs.

So that was a failure. The success was our visit to Bernard Berenson, for whom Patrick had worked at Villa I Tatti before his yacht trip to America. It was a success, that is, for Vanessa and myself; I’m not sure that Patrick and Thomas in their different ways shared this view. The great man was now in his late eighties, a small but very dignified figure, with a well-trimmed silver beard; he was wearing a lot of clothes for such hot weather, as well as a hat, but that only added to his impressive aura. “B.B.,” as he was known, was presented to us as the pre-eminent authority on Renaissance Art, and Patrick’s hero; I knew nothing of his more controversial history with the art dealer Joseph Duveen. Vanessa and I found him to be extremely benevolent in a delightfully paternal manner, as though it was an especial pleasure to encounter young ladies like ourselves. We were placed on either side of him at lunch; he smiled warmly at us. B.B., however, showed no similar desire to be paternal towards my brother Thomas, who was put at the bottom of the long table under the arches; either that or Patrick, scenting trouble, had influenced the placement.

Patrick, if it was indeed his initiative, was right. Towards the end of lunch, Thomas leant forward—he had to lean a long way to make himself heard—and said in a loud voice: “Mr. Berenson, you have made a pretty good thing out of the Renaissance, haven’t you?” B.B. did not miss a beat. He continued to smile, a smile that included Vanessa and me, and might even have included Thomas. He gave no acknowledgement whatsoever of the importunate question. Twice more, the demanding voice from the bottom of the table was heard. Each time B.B. smiled on. Eventually Thomas gave up. Yes, a great man indeed.

My romance with Patrick did not last, not because of the importunities of my brother, for whom he retained a strong if exasperated affection. (In later years, in arguments over family pictures, Thomas probably felt the same.) For all my hopes and sighs and wishes, his ardent protestations and plans, Patrick and I were simply not meant to spend our lives together. The trouble was that we both found difficulty acknowledging the fact to each other, given the heady relationship we had enjoyed while I was at Oxford. It was understandable—I was still only twenty when I left and Patrick four years older.

There was undoubtedly a certain amount of deception on both sides, due to this shared reluctance to say goodbye. For my part, those summer nights in Oxford, my last summer term, could not really pass without romance of some sort; and as for summer days, what are punts for, if not for gazing upwards in rapture at the manly figure in charge? From Patrick’s point of view, he was now in London, and once more every maiden’s dream.

In any case, in a mysterious but timely fashion, my historical work had suddenly returned into my life with renewed significance. Having malingered over medieval History, on a sudden impulse I chose a completely different special subject. This was known as “The Making of the Ententes” and referred to the period in the first decade of the twentieth century, in which various diplomatic alliances were constructed in Europe; arguably these Ententes would lead up to the First World War, although the precise connection is still debated. I cannot now remember why I defiantly chose a special subject so far from my earlier declared medieval interests. And it was defiance: I was delicately warned that it might harm my academic prospects. The implication was that I would be regarded as a historical flibbertigibbet. I suspect that in the first place I got interested in the character of Edward VII, who played a major role in these events. (Did that define me as a flibbertigibbet?)

What I did not know at the time of my choice was the fact that this whole period was a special interest of my father’s. To me, Frank at this point was a dedicated politician, and I had not cared to investigate his academic career. The final job he held in the first post-war Labour government was that of First Lord of the Admiralty. By his own account, Frank hesitated before taking it: it was his past which still haunted him. “Was it really possible that I, with my own inglorious war record, could supply leadership and inspiration to the finest Navy in the world?” Mr. Attlee persuaded him to accept with the cheerful reflection: “The Navy survived Winston and Brendan—it will probably survive you.” Five happy months followed, in which we had the use of Admiralty House, remarkable for harbouring in winter the so-called Fish Furniture, the wondrous Regency suite in the shape of dolphins from the Brighton Pavilion. This coincided with the Oxford holidays. All too briefly, my entertainment of my friends in London took on a remarkable lustre.

In the General Election at the end of October 1951, Labour was defeated and Frank’s spell in the government came to an end. He returned in due course to Oxford, the place he really loved, and thanks to the influence of Robert Blake (so Frank always said) resumed teaching at Christ Church. It was in this way that father and daughter coincided at the University, and Frank became my unofficial tutor on “The Making of the Ententes.” It was an extraordinary timely discovery that my father was a thrilling tutor just as I was approaching my final year: more than that, just as I was working on a subject which really intrigued me.

It marked a new stage in our relationship and an exciting one: suddenly my beloved but abstracted parent reading a book who left all decisions to my mother, was transformed into a vigorous, argumentative historian who enjoyed debating the subject as much as I did. I might actually be reading his same book. The coincidence led to a kind of obsession with the whole pre-First World War period in general, Sir Edward Grey in particular. It never quite left me. When I was contemplating writing a work of History, shortly after my first marriage, I suggested the title Summer 1914 to my publisher. It was not a serious suggestion—with two children in eighteen months, I really just wanted a lawful excuse to read History books instead of The Adventures of Babar. I did accept a hundred-pound advance, but then honourably returned the money—as I recall it.

A little while later the publisher rang me: “Someone has written your book,” he said. The author was Barbara W. Tuchman and the book was The Guns of August, alternatively known as August 1914. Immediately on first reading, this became one of my favourite History books and has remained so: the mixture of scholarship, readability and a quality which I will call humanity entranced me. I had a further reaction. In part, I felt, accurately enough, that I could never have written that particular book half so well; another part of me felt that one day I might at least try to write a similar kind of book almost as well. It was an inspirational experience, as when I read Garrett Mattingly’s The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, or Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic in 1971; the latter in particular showed me another way of writing History and profoundly influenced my study of women in seventeenth-century England, The Weaker Vessel.

There is a footnote to the Barbara Tuchman story. Invited to the American Embassy to meet the distinguished historian herself, I was overwhelmed with hero-worship for this pleasant, confident, middle-aged American lady with her elegant dress and well-arranged silver hair who had achieved so much. I could say nothing to her. When I explained this to Harold, he responded sympathetically: “I felt just the same way when I met Denis Compton.” From a cricket fanatic to a History freak, it seemed exactly the right comparison.

The time for Schools, as the examinations were known, arrived. To show seriousness, we had to wear sub fusc, that is black-and-white clothes, black ties for the men, black stockings for the girls (to show something else, I chose to wear black nylons with saucy seams down the back, the sort that kindly Americans had bestowed on girls in the war; invigilators looked at me with disapproval but could not find that it was actually forbidden).

The day before, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II had taken place. I received a ticket to a stand facing down the Embankment, from which I would see the girl Queen arriving as yet uncrowned for her destiny, but would then be able to depart for last-minute frantic study. There seemed a splendid allegorical meaning to all this: I too was a young woman seeking her destiny, although it happened to be in the rather less glamorous Examination Schools of Oxford, rather than Westminster Abbey. My ruminative mood was suddenly disturbed by raucous shouts of glee as I crossed the forecourt of Parliament to reach my stand: the successful climbing of Everest had just been announced. Luckily, the young Queen, looking so tiny, so fragile, in her coach more than satisfied expectations. And I was soon able to trail back to Chelsea where my parents now lived in the week.

I walked alone along the Embankment for half an hour without seeing a single human being, only birds along the river. I felt like someone in a science fiction movie, alone in a world struck by some out-of-space disaster. But these fresh meditations were interrupted when I realized that all the human beings were sitting indoors, with their heads towards the real portents of the future, their new television sets.

As to the examinations which followed, of course I did not get a First. How could I? I had not done nearly enough proper hard work over three years to fulfil any such expectations. But hope springs…because I was twenty and hope is mercifully impartial. Afterwards it was on balance gratifying to hear a rumour that I had done so well in my Ententes paper, and so badly in a medieval one, that there had been some doubt whether the same person could have written both papers. If true, it was a tribute to my father. As it was, he would perform one further good deed in the interests of bolstering me up.

Frank took an acute interest in my degree; this was not entirely due to the possibility of parental pride (or disappointment). As we shall see, he was a master handler of disappointment, no doubt because that searing experience of failure in the army stayed with him. In fact it wasn’t just my degree. As an academic in his early career, he took a keen interest in all degrees and remembered them long after in later life: When Alec Douglas-Home became Prime Minister, I recall Frank throwing in the fact that he had got a Fourth.

In July, I received only a short perfunctory Viva, the oral cross-examination following Schools, by which a student might raise her or his degree up a level in answer to questions. From this I knew immediately that I had not got a First. To receive an un-Viva-ed First was extremely rare, and certainly not in prospect for me.

I went back to LMH and into the coin box by the porter’s lodge. I rang my father.

“Dada, I’m awfully sorry but I haven’t got a First.” Frank did not even pause. Quick as a flash he said: “Oh, I’m so glad. Because if you had, you would never have got married.”

About ten years later, I remembered the exchange and out of curiosity asked Hugh whether he would have married me if I had got a First.

“Oh, but I always thought you did get a First,” he replied.