MY PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER was from a Cornish family called Lyle, who appear to have made and then squandered a small fortune in tin mining. They must have been fairly disreputable, as one Victorian ancestor was involved in the first breach of promise case in the British Isles. He was, needless to say, the defendant. Over the years familial appetites had been transfigured into more sedentary passions, such as gluttony. Father’s Great-Aunt Molly ate rare beefsteak for breakfast until well into her eighties, ignoring doctors’ warnings of the dangers of chronic dyspepsia, which would have been in any case indistinguishable from her usual turn of mood.
The family lived near Helston, in a granite manor house called Bonython. Bonython was a place where dreams were made. The usual vista of bricks and mortar had been transformed by the architect’s hand into a construction with lines as clean and pure as a Clichy crystal. What charms the memory treasures: picture windows that not only lent a magical translucence but set off to perfection the treasures that lay within, chief of which was a spiral staircase leading from the hall to the floor above.
Great-Aunt Molly relied on architectural rather than horticultural features for her effects. Though the gardens around the house were copious, flowers were allowed in it only if they were dull enough not to attract attention to themselves. In short, she hated strong colours; which led one of her younger and braver house guests to devise an ingenious practical joke. For weeks he beavered away in his room constructing fake flowers out of wire, papier-mâché and cardboard which were then painted in garish reds, yellows and vermilions. In the middle of the night he crept out of the door bearing these monstrous creations and planted them at highly visible points around the garden.
Doubtless due to a recalcitrant piece of beefsteak, Great-Aunt Molly delayed her morning perambulation until midday. But when she finally stepped out of the front door, her shrieks could be heard all the way to Helston. To make matters worse, the Lord Lieutenant was expected for lunch, and when he arrived, he was treated to the curious spectacle of Aunt Molly, whose girth was by no means inconsiderable, doing a sort of tribal dance by a bonfire heaped with coloured petals of cardboard.
Father spent the first ten years of his life breathing in the sea spray and the Cornish air – particular in its crispness and sweet odour. He would have liked to have owned Bonython himself, but being the younger son – my uncle Robert was older by three years – this was a vain aspiration. Indeed Father’s inheritance shrank from being negligible to being nothing after he became a Labour MP. My grandmother viewed socialists as almost below murderers on the human chain. ‘There is no such thing as an “ism”,’ she said to Father indignantly. ‘Especially socialism.’ When he riposted, ‘What about Conservat-ism?’, it caused him to be written out of her will altogether.
One of the things, as a child, I liked best about Bonython was that it seemed immemorial. In a little glade three miles from where the drive turned right towards the sea a ghostly Cavalier and Roundhead fought an endless duel to the death. The Lyle family had, like most Cornishmen, been Royalists, and the Duchy resounded with souvenirs from this most pernicious of struggles. The land around the Lizard bred eccentrics. Down the coast lived an old man whose household companions were different species of monkey. The larger ones were dressed as miniature Edwardian boys and the smaller as ingénues from Colette. They ate at table with the old man and I believe he even tried to teach them Cornish, though his death in a fire along with his monkeys precluded any serious study of this linguistic experiment.
The jewel of that part of Cornwall remains St Michael’s Mount, the family seat of the St Levans. What a piece of work that was! It rose from its pinnacle of earth like something organic, part of and melded to the Cornish sea. Its every stone spoke of romance. In the halls, gas jets blossomed like evening primroses in their thick bell-glasses, while windows looked out onto a tiny private chapel. The regal scale of the place was leavened by the wild beauty of its setting.
At low tide one could walk across from the mainland. Otherwise Lord St Levan’s guests arrived like Henrician courtiers, by boat. A great excitement was raised when builders restoring a pew in the chapel discovered beneath it a wooden trap-door. There below was a small chamber containing the hunched skeleton of a man whose height was six foot four. This giant had used the chamber as a hiding place, only to be forgotten – or betrayed – and left to the first instalment of Hell on earth.
The present Lord Levan, John Francis Arthur St Aubyn, had the noble mien of Lord Marchmain and the soul of Puck. His cheekbones were so high you could have hung washing from them. If any Englishman could be descended from the senators of Old Rome it was he; so much the very prototype that foreigners pointed to him as an example of what the British race was still capable of. A scholar, a gentleman, an amateur historian, a kind and generous soul, a popular landlord and Deputy Lieutenant of Cornwall, he was well spoken of by everybody.
Father first took me to St Michael’s Mount when I was fourteen. I remember the day well because he was suffering from a bad cold. When Father had a cold he never had it quietly. His groans were of the most darkly dramatic nature. He sneezed with such a roar that you could feel it halfway across a large room. Poor Mother was on this occasion enlisted as an itinerant nurse, following behind us with a huge and bulging box of handkerchiefs. When we set out it was low tide, which did nothing to assuage her fears of trudging on foot a mile out to sea on moist sand. Muttering imprecations against the English, Mother trailed behind our little party like an unwilling camel.
She had a point. Climbing the path up to the castle was like traversing a perpendicular cliff. Its sharp declivities, slanted back at an angle usually only to be found in Tuscany, seemed to bring a remote echo of Roman terraces below pagan temples. In sensible walking shoes it took half an hour, but in Mother’s, which might have been designed by an imaginative misogynist, it took almost double that. On the way her burden got the better of her and she jettisoned the box of handkerchiefs into the sea, where they floated like snowflakes.
If Lord St Levan minded our unintentional lapse of manners he did not show it, and we were greeted with a friendly if distracted air. It turned out that our host was in the throes of despair. Amongst the most treasured objects at the Mount were four pairs of cannon that magisterially pointed out over the bay. These cannon had been taken from a French frigate during the Napoleonic wars, and were not only worth £4,000 apiece but occupied a place in local legend similar to the Elgin marbles. A painting of this petit Trafalgar was on display on the castle walls as a warning to any who presumed on the St Aubyns.
With woeful countenance Lord St Levan related how, a few weeks before, a yacht flying the French colours had anchored in the bay below the Mount. The following morning one pair of cannon were missing from their cradles. ‘Those damn Frogs,’ said Lord St Levan. ‘They must have climbed up the hill and pinched them during the night.’ The loss wounded his family pride; it was as if Napoleon had come back to life and tweaked him on the nose. ‘Send the commandos after ’em,’ was Father’s suggestion. He added, ‘And while you’re at it, put a policeman at the foot of the Mount to deter a second attempt.’
Lord St Levan perked up at this: he did not positively glow but his features resumed their usual mellow cast. A tour of the castle was proposed, which I took up with alacrity. Father said he would stay and talk to Lady St Levan, so we left him there happily smoking a cigar.
Lord St Levan was an indefatigable tour guide. Some of the apartments were approached down break-neck stairs; one room contained only a series of gothic cupboards in cypress wood, with elaborately carved borders and with a fretwork cornice. The four-poster beds, rare examples of their kind, were of particularly narrow construction, with the mattress boards built at least three feet off the ground. Getting into them was like climbing into a horse’s saddle with the aid of a mounting block.
After the cannon, there was one other object dear to Lord St Levan’s romantic heart. When Oliver Cromwell had visited the Mount he left behind his napkin. An unusual souvenir of the Commonwealth, it was displayed in a case in one of the halls. St Levan chattered on about it in an ecstasy of anticipation. He became quite misty-eyed and his words ran into each other. ‘Cromwell . . . Commonwealth . . . beautiful cloth . . . white as snow still . . . never been used since of course . . . priceless’ mingled together like the rhythms of a chant.
As we walked towards the glass display case, my own sense of excitement nearly equalled his. It appeared that I was on the point of witnessing one of the great artefacts of history, such as the Rosetta Stone or the temples on the Acropolis. But when we reached the sacred table on which it had rested for centuries, my host let out a cry. It was gone. It had vanished. There was no napkin to be seen. Desperately we scrabbled on the floor, hoping it had fallen there, but it had definitely disappeared. As we wandered mournfully back to the drawing room Lord St Levan looked like an elephant whose bun had been stolen from him. We bade him a sad little farewell on the castle steps and made our somewhat perilous descent to the sea.
Father remained uncharacteristically silent throughout our homeward journey. Occasionally his face took on a shifty look, as if he were struggling with some secret burden of shame. Usually he took a mystical view of his misbehaviour, as if some particular and unexpected virtue resided in it like a djinn in a bottle; but in this case there was no pleasure there. It appeared as if he were going to burst into tears.
‘Oh, Woodrow, for ’eaven’s sake, what is the matter?’, asked Mother, dropping consonants in her agitation. Father clung mutinously to his silent anguish but began to pull a dirty piece of cloth from his coat pocket. In the mind’s eye there was something familiar about it. It looked like an ancient napkin.
It was an ancient napkin. It was Cromwell’s napkin. I looked at Father sharply. The napkin had accompanied Cromwell in perfect safety throughout his turbulent life, it had survived floods, storms, every vicissitude of history, everything nature could throw in its path. But it still had to pass the test of meeting Woodrow Wyatt, and that was too much for it.
Father sniffed. ‘It was all your mother’s fault,’ he said crossly. ‘I had to blow my nose on something.’