PROLOGUE

THINGS I REMEMBER

The title of this early memoir has a double meaning. It is partly an attempt to recapture the experiences of my childhood and youth—to “call back yesterday, bid time return.” But I have also sought to chronicle the progress of my love of History since my first discovery of it as a private pleasure when I was a child—my History as I believed it to be. For me, as will become apparent, the study of History has always been an essential part of the enjoyment of life. As a narrative, I hope it may evoke memories in other readers regarding their personal discovery of History.

My main source has been my own memory, aided by pocket diaries; these however were not kept continuously and mainly record whom and what I saw rather than my feelings. There are occasional fuller diaries too. I also find that I have kept all my mother’s beautifully legible letters to me during the four years I was at boarding school and my father’s diametrically opposed illegible ones, by the simple conservationist method of never, ever throwing anything away…In turn my mother preserved my own weekly letters home. For further sidelights on the past, I benefited in different ways from the reminiscences of my father’s sisters: Mary Clive, who took a keen, wry interest in family history, and Violet Powell, with whom I spent time in adolescence and who became a close friend once I was grown up.

Then, both my parents wrote autobiographies: my father’s first memoir, Born to Believe, written under his original name of Frank Pakenham, was published in 1953 when he was forty-seven; my mother Elizabeth Longford followed suit thirty years later with The Pebbled Shore when she was eighty. My father is also the subject of a well-researched biography by Peter Stanford, an early version being published in his lifetime and The Outcasts’ Outcast, a revised edition, after his death, in 2003.

Furthermore, my mother—in what I once described as her earliest efforts at biography—kept so-called Progress Books for all her eight children, from birth until their theoretical adulthood at twenty-one. Long before her death, Elizabeth Longford presented the individual Progress Books to her children in a move which was not perhaps entirely wise, given her instinct for candour. My own Progress Book is, from my point of view, embarrassingly frank as maternal pride struggles with irritation, and definitely loses out once I am an adolescent.

Lastly, my brother Thomas Pakenham, being eleven months younger than me—thus we are Irish twins—should remember all this too, just as I have written it down. It is for this reason, and in full confidence that he will corroborate my every word, that My History is dedicated to him as well as to the first teacher who seemed to understand my passion for the living past. If however there are any discrepancies in our memories, I take my stand on the great lines in Harold’s play Old Times: “There are things I remember that may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.”