CHAPTER two

‘Family connexions were always worth preserving,
good company always worth seeking.’

Persuasion – Chapter 16

My parents, Paul and I lived in the north wing. We were a typical family in many respects. My parents were in their twenties when I was born, and they worked hard to raise their two children in a comfortable, joyous and secure environment. My father worked as a leather craftsman for an artificial limb company in Alton. My mother also worked in Alton, as an administrator and physiotherapy aide at the Lord Mayor Treloar Hospital, which specialised in orthopaedic surgery. My mother worked school hours, from nine o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon.

My father was clever and resourceful, a hands-on problem-solver rather than an academic and always had one project or other on the go; he cleared overgrown gardens, made improvements to our quarters and carried out many patchwork repairs to other parts of the house. He enjoyed the company of friends at dinner parties and liked to engage in lively conversation about the issues of the day. My mother was more reserved and down to earth, with a strong work ethic and high moral standards. She grew up in Australia and did well at school, but she chose to marry and have a family rather than continue with her studies—otherwise she could have easily gone to university.

Most of the manor has three floors, some with cellars underneath, except for the north wing which has four floors, including the basement quarters down an internal flight of steps close to the original house kitchen—‘below stairs’. The basement quarters included a corridor and four rooms once used for storage, including a knife room, a linen store for the housekeeper and a china room, which housed dinner services and tea sets. The rooms were half underground; the base of the high windows in each room was at ground level. Bapops had a kitchen and a bathroom installed in the 1950s to provide accommodation for Mr Munn and his wife, the only staff retained in my father’s youth other than nannies for the children. Mr Munn had worked in and around the house as a handyman, while Mrs Munn worked as a cook and undertook domestic work.

With the Munns long since departed, my parents and Paul moved into the basement before I was born. With only one bedroom, the basement was not big enough, and my father hatched a plan to extend it. A disused boiler room on the other side of the kitchen wall offered the solution. My parents undertook the job together, using sledgehammers to knock a door-sized hole through the 36-inch-thick wall of the kitchen to the double-depth room beyond, where the old boiler was still in place on the floor deep underground. Joists were installed above the boiler and floorboards laid and, because the newly created room did not extend the full width of the boiler room, walls were constructed. After a door was fitted to allow entry to and from the kit­chen, my mother made curtains for the windows. Carpet was laid, the room was decorated, and it was finally ready for Paul to use as a bedroom.

I was born late afternoon on 28 August 1970, a few weeks before Paul turned five. With older cousins named Jane and Cassandra, I was named Caroline Jane—Caroline after Caroline Austen, a niece of Jane’s who had later written and published her memories of her aunt, and Jane after Jane herself. I was christened in Chawton Church, and the occasion was followed by tea and cakes in the Great Hall.

Paul and I shared his bedroom until, when I was a toddler, my father knocked through the wall of the boiler room to the gunroom beyond to add yet another bedroom to the basement flat. A door was fitted, the room was plastered and decorated, and carpet was laid on the stone floors. Because of limited funds, my parents once again completed the renovations, with help from a neighbour when more hands were needed.

The bedrooms were not big in comparison to others in the house, but the living accommodation was spacious with a large kitchen, bathroom and sitting room, the latter complete with open fireplace and plenty of room for a dining table and chairs to seat eight. My parents loved having the company of friends for dinner, and they had the perfect surroundings for entertaining. They grew vegetables in an extensive vegetable plot they had created in the walled garden and liked to use as much home-grown produce as possible so they could give their guests a delicious meal and an enjoyable evening.

The walled garden was at the top of the south-west lawns that swept up behind the house and past the large copper beech tree, which took pride of place at the edge of the woods. The beech’s huge crown of red in the autumn was spectacular against the green backdrop of lawns and woodlands, and its immense convoluted trunk provided hours of make-believe and enjoyment. Beyond the beech tree sat a large weeping willow in front of the top terrace walk.

The neat path along the edge of the lawns between the house and the terrace had long ago been claimed by grass and overgrown bushes, but it could still be made out underfoot. At the top, there was a marvellous view, and being far from the road, it was a quiet place to enjoy the unspoiled sounds of the birds. Pheasants, rooks, jackdaws, pigeons, blackbirds, thrushes, jays and sparrows were in abundance, and in the winter, robins with their red breasts could easily be seen against the bleak winter background.

My father recalls having seen, as a young boy, murmurations of starlings twisting and changing direction at a moment’s notice as if interconnected, but there were few starlings remaining in my childhood. I also recall my father saying Jane mentioned starlings in Mansfield Park, and it was easy to imagine Jane and Cassandra, after lunch at the Great House, taking a walk to the top of the lawns to be treated to a mesmerising display of starlings swooping and diving.

The path continued to the rose garden on the left or straight ahead to the open parklands stretching towards Farringdon, a neighbouring village. Jane would have known these fields and paddocks to be part of her brother’s estate. The edge of the woodlands marked our south-western boundary. The estate parklands had been sold decades earlier to be farmed with crops and livestock. The walled garden had once been at the front of the house, but Edward Austen Knight had it moved—Jane included garden improvements in Mansfield Park as well.

On the far side of the rose garden, two large ornate wrought-iron gates led to a fully enclosed flint-walled garden. It had once been an orchard, with dozens of fruit trees when my father was a boy, but it had long since been abandoned and become overgrown.

When I was too young to remember, by parents devised a plan to turn the walled garden into a vegetable garden. A farmer friend helped to clear the ground with a tractor and rotavator. The vegetable garden provided far more growing space than my parents could manage alone, so they shared the garden beds, work and crops with two local couples. My mother had become close friends with two of the physiotherapists she worked with at the hospital, Trish and Daryl. Daryl and her husband moved to South Africa when I was about nine, but Trish and her husband, Dennis, continued to share the garden with my parents year after year and became great family friends. They lived only ten minutes away and visited most days from spring through to harvest at the end of each summer to tend the vegetable garden.

I loved to spend time with my father in this garden, helping with the weeding, picking runner beans and collecting potatoes. While turning the soil with a fork, he would explain why some crops had grown better than others, and he would share his next plan for the garden—he always had a plan. I helped sprinkle seeds as he made furrows in the soil with a tool he fashioned from an old fork handle.

About a dozen apple trees, a couple of pear trees and some plum trees remained from the days of the orchard and provided fruit for cooking and for eating fresh, along with newly planted strawberries and rhubarb. The garden was divided into plots for different crops and rotated yearly. One plot was used for root vegetables: potatoes, parsnips, carrots, onions and leeks. An­other was used for cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli and Brussels sprouts. Lettuces and other salad greens were planted under rows of glass cloches to protect them from the occasional frost. Rows of tepees made from bamboo, cut from the cluster in the woods, allowed French beans and runner beans to climb. Courgettes and marrows grew to gargantuan sizes, but as with beans and carrots, they were usually picked smaller when at their sweetest and most tender.

I wanted to talk to my father more than I wanted to garden and usually left him to it after an hour or so when the chatter died down and the hard work began. I would often return at lunchtime to walk with him to the house for a sandwich or later in the afternoon with cold refreshments on a warm day.

Beans, peas and other suitable vegetables were blanched before being frozen for use in the winter months. This job seemed to take my parents days—huge boiling pots were used, and the vegetables were drained in the largest colanders I have ever seen. Every vegetable had to be chopped, boiled, cooled, bagged and labelled, and my parents heaved a sigh of relief as the last bag was sealed. Our family’s winter supplies were stored in large chest freezers in the old house kitchen. Other crops were also prepared for long-term storage. My father carefully laid apples on sacks in the old apple store at the back of the house so as not to touch each other, before being covered and kept fresh for up to five months, while my mother froze or preserved in jars the berries, plums and other soft fruits.

I always had good intentions to help my parents, but I quickly tired of this repetitive work and left them to it. I was expected to keep my room tidy and to help clear up after dinner, but my parents never insisted I join them in the hours of work they put into the estate or the garden.

At least a couple of times a year there was a power cut, sometimes lasting a few days. My parents, worried that their home-grown produce would spoil, would cover all the freezers with blankets, but I thought power cuts were exciting and fun. On such occasions, we cooked and ate our meals by candle­light, huddling around the open fire for warmth and light. ‘What game would you like to play first?’ my mother would ask, to which I would always reply, ‘giant dominos’ and reach for the box of large tiles, each bigger than a playing card and with brightly coloured spots. I liked board games and cards. My father and I played cribbage together regularly, but we played giant dominos as a family only when the power was off.

The rest of the house was rather unnerving when the lights were out: the dark oak-panelled walls, the creaky floors, the stories of resident ghosts, and the many portraits of our ancestors with eyes that followed me as I walked past. I was easily spooked in my grandparents’ quarters at night and felt relieved that we lived tucked away in the corner of the house, half underground. Our living quarters in the basement had white walls, carpeted floors and no portraits, and I was sure the ghosts that roamed ‘above stairs’ would not venture into the servants’ quarters. I had never seen any trace of the Grey Lady, who was said to walk through my father’s old bedroom in my grandparents’ quarters, or the poltergeist that was said to inhabit the Blue Room, but I was wary none the less.

As a very young child, I did not give our home, the grounds or our family heritage much thought. But this changed when we moved to the first-floor quarters of the north wing when I was twelve. Our new quarters were ‘above stairs’—rooms built for the squire and his family to occupy—and were opulent in comparison to the converted storerooms below.

My mother told me about the move at the beginning of the summer in 1983, a few months before my thirteenth birthday. Paul had already moved to the Blue Room, a vacant bedroom on the second floor of the north wing. I was keen to have a larger bedroom, so I was excited by the news. I had rarely been into the rooms on the first floor of the north wing because they had been occupied by tenants since I was born.

When my father returned from work, just after five, my parents and I walked up the stairs to the first-floor corridor to have a look at our new quarters. Portraits in oil were set into the oak-panelled walls. I was most struck by the portrait of a woman in a sumptuous blue taffeta gown, with white ruffles at the sleeves and around the plunging neckline—to preserve her modesty, I assumed. The other portraits were of men.

The woman in the blue taffeta gown was called Elizabeth, my father said. With a double chin, pink cheeks and dark hair pinned away from her round face, she looked well fed. I decided she had been an important woman, the mistress of the house dressed in her luxurious robes, her elbow resting on a velvet cushion. She wasn’t terribly pretty, and like the Mona Lisa, her expression was difficult to read and open to interpretation. Her eyes were slightly squinted as if she could see something or someone behind the artist that displeased her, or perhaps she was frustrated at having to spend her time sitting for a portrait. Elizabeth looked like a woman not to be trifled with—much like Granny, I thought; she could be very forthright.

Opposite the portrait of Elizabeth was a door to the original dining room of the house, which would become the sitting room of our new quarters. At one time, the squire’s quarters would have encompassed these rooms, but my grandfather had separated off the north wing decades before. Equally as splendid as the Great Hall next door, our new sitting room was complete with a large stone-mantel fireplace, floor-to-ceiling oak panelling and leaded-light windows to two aspects with beautiful views across the front of the estate—our basement windows had not offered any views to speak of.

From a window seat, I could see across the front of the house to the south-east lawns. Overgrown woodlands on the other side of the lawns partially blocked what would otherwise have been an uninterrupted view across the estate parklands. With clear sight of the front entrance of the house, the window seat offered a perfect spot to view who came and went. This, coupled with the above-stairs decor, gave the quarters a different atmosphere to the basement, where it had been easy to forget the main house. Only one flight of stairs separated our old and new quarters, but the difference was pronounced. We were now in the squire’s quarters, and the grandeur was plain to see.

The dining room had hosted dinners for generations; only a short distance from the house kitchen via a passage, it was convenient for service. The bell to summon the servants had been disconnected long ago, but the button was still in place in the dining room, and the brass bell still hung in the servants’ passage.

How wonderful it would have been to go back in time—just for a minute—to see the silver service in full flow. ‘We four sweet Brothers & Sisters dine today at the Gt House. Is not that quite natural?’ Jane wrote to Caroline Austen in March 1815. It was easy to imagine the room filled with lively conversation and finely dressed guests seated around Edward Austen Knight’s grand dining table. Did Jane and Cassandra always sit in the same seats, or did their position at the dinner table depend on other company present? The table had long since been removed from the dining room; my father had found it in pieces in the old house kitchen, where Granny had been using it for sorting her washing! My father had rescued the table and reassembled it in the Great Hall, where it was used for family lunches with Granny and Bapops.

A striking wooden carving graced the wall above the fireplace mantel, tower­ing up to the high ceiling. Carved in relief from oak to match the panelled walls and fireside columns, a wide central panel showed a shield with four quarters on the left and two halves on the right. Two of the four quarters on the left, with diagonal lozenges, were instantly recognisable as Knight arms. In traditional style, the arms sat above the family motto and below a knight’s helmet with an effigy of the Greyfriar topmost, all surrounded by foliage, just like the arms above the front entrance to the house. In bold relief below the motto was a date—‘1895’.

To the left, a narrower panel featured flowers and leaves, and the initials ‘MGK’. A matching panel to the right carried the initials ‘FK’. My father explained that 1895 was the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of Montagu, the thirteenth squire, and his wife, Florence. The left of the arms in the middle panel were Montagu’s four quarters: Knight, Austen, Leigh (Jane Austen’s mother was a Leigh) and Knight again—the same as those of his grandfather, Edward Austen Knight. Florence’s arms were on the right. Did Montagu design and install the carving secretly and, once it was in place, surprise Florence? Or had they planned it together? Did Florence influence Montagu’s flamboyant design choices? Either way, it was the most romantic gesture of love I had ever seen.

The rest of our new quarters lay down the hallway in the extension, which had originally added a billiard room with an open fire and windows to two aspects. The billiard table and lights had long since been removed and the room split into two to provide another spacious sitting room and a kitchen beyond. My father was planning to fit a new kitchen into a corner of the sitting room and convert the kitchen into a bedroom for me.

The Tapestry Gallery upstairs provided access to not only Paul’s new bedroom and our new bathroom but also the back of my grandparents’ quarters, the tenants’ quarters above the billiard room, the backstairs that led to the house kitchen on the ground floor, and the staircase up to my cousins’ quarters on the top floor.

A door at the corner of the Tapestry Gallery opened to the top of the backstairs, a convenient route from our basement quarters to Fiona on the top floor, without the need to walk through my grandparents’ or any of the tenants’ living quarters. Despite having used these stairs many times, I had never before noticed in the dim light of the stairway a dark oak door on the right at the top of the stairs. The door wasn’t easy to open, but when my father gave it a firm shove to move whatever was blocking access, I was surprised to see that the door opened to the north-west end of Suicide Alley. It was actually the picture gallery, but we called it Suicide Alley because the passage was so cluttered that one risked injury simply by entering it.

The wide unused corridor, originally built for servants to move around the first floor without the need to go through the family’s bedroom chambers, was crammed with unused and broken furniture, dusty boxes, picture frames, books, riding boots, coats and ornaments—decades of family possessions stored with good intentions for later use or disposal. I had seen only the south-east end of Suicide Alley on the first-floor landing of my grandparents’ quarters. I hadn’t realised that the door visible at the far end, behind all the boxes, opened at the top of the backstairs.

My father pulled back a curtain behind some discarded furniture to reveal a large leaded-light window I had never seen before. It overlooked the inner courtyard and depicted six shields in stained glass that traced the coats of arms of each successive owner of Chawton House. There was a second set of six behind another curtain around the corner on my grandparents’ landing, which also overlooked the courtyard. The windows had been installed by Montagu, and they were beautiful—just like the carving above the fireplace. Under each vibrantly coloured shield were the names of the squires with their arms and the date of their inheritance of the house. The stained-glass windows became my favourite record of the names and dates of my ancestors.

Multiple squires were listed underneath a few of the shields in the stained-glass windows, but most shields listed only one squire. Although each shield was a different combination of arms—evidence of families joining through marriage, inheritance and adoption—every shield included the gold lozenges set diagonally on a green background. Some of the squires were of particular note and familiar to me, but other names I knew little about. From the first squire to the last, each was named Knight.

Long before I first saw the stained-glass windows, I had seen in my grandparents’ quarters an iron fireback marked ‘JK 1588’—the name and date under the first glass shield was ‘John 1583’. John Knight was the principal builder of the house. I was about seven when I first calculated that my family had owned Chawton for nearly four centuries—it was such a long time, it might as well have been forever. I later discovered that the Knights had been in Chawton for over six and a half centuries and had held land in the parish since at least 1307.

The Middle Ages were impossible for me to imagine, but I could picture England in the sixteenth century. I had seen repeats of the 1971 BBC series Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson playing Queen Elizabeth I. The interiors of the buildings in the series were very similar to those in Chawton House, and I could imagine how John Knight might have dressed and spoken; he contributed £50 to the funds raised by the Queen to defend the realm against the Spanish Armada, commemorated by the fireback, and I pictured him as a serious man with great presence. John died leaving no heir, and his brother Stephen became the second squire of the new manor house.

The stained-glass windows made it easy for me to establish just how many squires there had been. ‘John 1583’, ‘Stephen 1620’, ‘John 1627’, ‘Richard 1636’ and ‘Sir Richard 1641’ completed the names under the first three shields. Sir Richard inherited Chawton estate in 1641 when he was only two. In practice, his mother managed the property on her young son’s behalf. This is believed to have saved the house from being burnt to the ground during the English Civil War, as other manor houses in the area, such as Basing House, were destroyed by Oliver Cromwell’s army, the ‘Roundheads’. ‘Richard was so young, Cromwell couldn’t tell what shape his head was,’ My father once joked. I couldn’t believe how lucky we had been—Chawton House could so easily have been lost.

King Charles I, guarded by a strong body of troops, came through Chawton village on his last sad journey from Hurst Castle on the Hampshire south coast to Windsor on his way to the Palace of Whitehall where he was executed. It was hard to imagine such an important but sombre procession in our pretty village. Were the streets empty, or did people come out of their houses to watch?

Richard was the only ‘sir’ in the family. At the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when Richard had just come of age, his name appeared on a list for the proposed new order of the Knights of the Royal Oak. The idea was later abandoned by Charles II, but Richard did receive the honour of a knighthood on 10 January 1667, and I was super proud of him. I assumed Uncle Richard had been named after Sir Richard—Bapops keen to ensure his heir was given a traditional and respected family name as he had been. Sir Richard left no children and chose another Richard—Richard Martin, his aunt’s grandson, as his successor on the condition that he took the name of Knight. The name ‘Richard’ was obviously of some amusement to Jane. At the beginning of Northanger Abbey, Jane tells us that Catherine Morland’s father was ‘a very respectable man, though his name was Richard.’

‘Richard 1679’ and ‘Christopher 1687’ were under the next shield, which included a quarter of arms with three birds (at least that is what they looked like to me). Both Martin brothers were also childless, making three childless squires in succession. ‘Who decides who the next squire will be?’ I asked, and my father explained that it was the duty of each squire to name their heir, usually their eldest son. If the squire had no children, it was his responsibility to find the most suitable male relative to continue the family legacy and prepare him for the responsibilities he would inherit.

The fifth and sixth shields were startlingly different from the others. Under the fifth shield were the words ‘William Woodward Knight Elizabeth Knight 1702 1ST Husband’, while under the sixth were ‘Bulstrode Peachey Knight Elizabeth Knight 1702 2ND Husband’. I was surprised when my father said that neither William nor Bulstrode had inherited the house. It was Elizabeth Martin—Richard and Christopher’s sister—who had inherited the house from her brother the same year Queen Anne inherited the Crown. I was shocked to learn that a woman had run the estate; I had always thought only a man could inherit Chawton. Both of Elizabeth’s husbands took her new surname, such was the importance of the Knight name remaining in control of the estate. On each marriage, a new shield was created, with Elizabeth’s arms on the left and her husband’s on the right.

Elizabeth ran the estates for thirty-five years and occupied a central pos­ition in the history of Chawton. She was a woman of strong character, masterful but affectionate, with a keen sense of the duties and the dignity required of the resident landowner. I had assumed that the woman with the pink cheeks and blue taffeta gown in the portrait in our new quarters had been the wife of a squire. But in fact, she had been in charge; she was Elizabeth Martin Knight, a highly competent woman, who secured and expanded the estate as effectively as the most capable of male squires.

I had accepted without question the succession of men to the position of squire, assuming it the ancient laws of the land. But it wasn’t. Perhaps the family had adopted the tradition after Elizabeth, or perhaps an exception had been made for her. Whatever the circumstances, I believed Elizabeth served as proof that a woman could do equally as good a job as a man. I thought about it some more, unsure whether this was a sensible measure for the success of the estate or simply unfair. My Uncle Richard was Bapops’s firstborn, so the question of succession when a daughter is the eldest child had not arisen.

I wonder what Jane thought of Elizabeth—Jane must have known how well she managed the estates in the eighteenth century. Did Fanny Knight, denied the opportunity due to her gender despite being Edward Austen Knight’s firstborn child, feel the injustice? Jane and Fanny were very close; was it discussed? Perhaps Fanny saw the burdens her father had endured with legal challenges to his ownership of Chawton (from Hinton and Baverstock, descendants of the Martins, who believed that under some conditions of inheritance for Chawton they had a right to the estate—I didn’t know the details) and the associated financial losses, and was happy the responsibility had passed her by.

However, I didn’t need to look as far back as Fanny to see this tradition in action. I was again taken by surprise when my father explained that Aunt Betty, my great-aunt who lived in Alton and who was the only regular visitor I knew Bapops to have, was Bapops’s older sister. I was curious to know how Aunt Betty, another Elizabeth, felt about visiting the childhood home that would have been hers to inherit if she were a man or if the tradition of male succession had not existed? Did she wish she had been squire or was it a relief not to have inherited the responsibility? But she never talked about it, and I never would have asked Aunt Betty such personal questions.

I was not sure who would have been known as ‘the squire’—Elizabeth or her successive husbands. I decided to count Elizabeth as the eighth squire—after all, she was the one who had inherited and run the estate from 1702 to 1737. Like her brothers, Elizabeth had no children and chose as her successor her second cousin Thomas from the Brodnax branch of her family. Thomas was also heir to Godmersham Park, and his succession brought the estates together under the same squire. Elizabeth seemed as significant to the family’s landholdings as Queen Anne had been to Britain. Under Queen Anne’s reign, The Acts of Union passed by the English and Scottish parliaments in 1707 led to the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, governed by a single monarch.

Thomas had already received his inheritance from the May family and, as a condition, had changed his name to Thomas May by an Act of Parliament, as was required. When he sought another Act of Parliament to change his name once more—to Knight, to inherit Chawton House—it was flippantly suggested in the House of Commons that a law be passed to allow Thomas to call himself whatever he liked. ‘Or whatever he May,’ my father quipped.

This was the Thomas Knight who was second cousin to George Austen and who appointed George the Rector of Steventon, a parish Thomas had also inherited from Elizabeth Martin Knight. Like all previous shields, Thomas’s shield included the Knight arms of gold lozenges set diagonally on a green background but with the addition of a small flower towards the bottom left. The arms were altered to signify the distance of the blood relationship between Elizabeth and Thomas. ‘Thomas 1737’ and ‘Thomas 1781’ were the names under the next two shields. Thomas left the estates to his son, Thomas II, who was childless and who, at the end of the eighteenth century, chose Jane’s older brother, Edward Austen, my fourth great-grandfather, as his heir. In 1791, Edward married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Brook Bridges, a British baronet and Whig politician—so my grandparents were not the first couple named Edward and Elizabeth Knight to have run the estate.

‘Edward 1794’ was under the next shield. I was a little confused because I had previously heard that Jane’s brother had been squire from 1798, so my father explained that Thomas had died in 1794 but his wife, Catherine, had run the estates for four years after his death before passing control to Edward. He was commonly referred to as Edward Austen Knight, despite never having carried both surnames, and Edward’s heraldry included both the Knight and Austen arms. The Austen arms, a red chevron with three black bear paws, came from John Austen Esq. of Broadford in Kent. In his book, Montagu Knight describes Broadford as ‘a picturesque Elizabethan residence’. Over the fireplace in the entrance hall are the Austen arms, with the date ’1587’—only a year earlier than the ‘JK 1588’ fireback in my grandparents’ quarters. The Austens had equally as long a history as the Knights.

When Edward Austen inherited the Chawton estate, the Knight arms of lozenges with a small flower were altered once more, with the addition of a red square in the top-left corner to signify the fourth-cousin blood relationship between Thomas II and Edward. In 1812, Edward changed his name—and thus my own—to Knight. ‘Papa changed his name about this time in compliance with the will of the late Mr. Knight and we are therefore all Knights instead of dear old Austens How I hate it!’ noted Fanny in her diary. Jane drily commented in a letter to Martha Lloyd, ‘I must learn to make a better K.’ But Jane did pay her respects to the Knight name, my family said, and appreciated the circumstances that had led to her life in Chawton village. The hero of her fourth novel, Emma, written in Chawton three years later, was a perfect English gentleman named Mr Knightley.

The next two shields depicted the two marriages of Edward II, the eldest son of Edward Austen Knight. A portrait of Edward II hung opposite the stained-glass windows directly outside Granny’s bedroom door. I had seen the portrait many times. He was a tall, proud man with a huge unruly moustache, a top hat and a cane. He had a serious face and eyes that followed me as I walked past. With portraits throughout my grandparents’ quarters, I was always under the watchful eye of one ancestor or another—it could be most disconcerting.

The portrait portrayed none of the scandal or mystery that surrounded Edward II. He eloped with his first wife, Mary Knatchbull, and they subsequently had seven children. Mary died in 1838 at the young age of thirty-one, leaving Edward with her six surviving children, including four sons. Edward had nine children with his second wife, Adela Portal; the eldest died in infancy, only five weeks after his younger brother Montagu was born. Montagu George Knight, the second-born son of Edward II and Adela, became heir and inherited the estate upon his father’s death in 1879. I wondered why Edward II’s surviving sons from his first marriage were overlooked in favour of their younger half-brother. Were none of them suitable for the job, or did Adela assert her influence upon her husband? I couldn’t help but think of Adela when I later read Sense and Sensibility—Mrs John Dashwood showed exactly how persuasive a wife could be.

After six years of marriage, Montagu and Florence had not had children, and for the eighth time in our history, the squire did not have an heir. Montagu chose his brother’s firstborn son, Lionel, Bapops’s father, to succeed him. From my observations, Montagu had been a proud squire. The history of the house had been enhanced by the installation, under his stewardship, of both the carving above the fireplace and the stained-glass windows. In 1911, he co-wrote a book, Chawton Manor and Its Owners: A Family History, with his cousin William Austen Leigh (who went on to write Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, A Family Record, published in 1913). Even his grave was the most elaborate in the family section of the church graveyard. Clearly, Montagu cele­brated his custodianship of Chawton and wanted to leave his mark. Perhaps, because his brother’s descendants were to continue the family legacy, he wanted to ensure he was not forgotten. Or perhaps he had something to prove.

My mind burst with all the twists and turns of the inheritance of the house over the centuries—for me, the convolutions of the family tree were as confusing as the layout of the house. Chawton estate passing from father to eldest son was said to be tradition, but our history showed this not to be the case for the majority of the squires. Since John Knight—the first squire in the stained-glass windows—the house had been passed from father to eldest son on only five occasions, the last being from Lionel to Bapops, the fifteenth squire, in 1932.

The final stained-glass window depicted Montagu. Some of the portraits in the house were labelled, and I had heard most of our ancestors’ names or read them on the church wall plaques, but I had not previously understood how they were all connected. The stained-glass windows explained the line of succession. There were other windows on the landing ready for more stained glass to be installed, but neither Lionel nor Bapops had added their own names. Neither used their heraldry or a coat of arms or installed grand gestures of their position; it was as if they didn’t care to be remembered. The eyes that had watched me all these years were leaders who generation after generation had succeeded in retaining the estate, despite the challenges they faced. These were our forefathers, and I understood the weight of responsibility on Bapops’s shoulders to continue their legacy.

The precise connections between the different branches of the family were difficult to understand, complicated by the intricate web of marriages and succession choices. I tried to fathom the relationship between my father and Thomas Knight II, who had adopted Edward Austen. Edward was my father’s third great-grandfather, and Thomas was Edward’s fourth cousin. I was unable to solve it and gave up. Besides, it didn’t matter—we were all Knights from Chawton.

My father’s family had lived in the same location for generations, living off wealth and fortune built over centuries. In sharp contrast, my mother’s family were on the other side of the world. My mother was the eldest of five children born to Alfred and Florence, a builder and his wife, who had migrated from the East End of London to Australia in 1950 when my mother was three and her brother was an infant. The young family eventually settled in Caltowie, located on the road between Jamestown and Laura in the Mid North region of South Australia. In the mid nineteenth century, during the early years of European settlement, Caltowie was used as a camping ground for teamsters hauling timber, the creek providing a good place for the animals to water. Travellers going north to the forests or south to the copper mines would stop to revive. By the 1950s, Caltowie had grown into a small but bustling town.

My Australian grandparents went on to have three more children. Their fourth child tragically died in infancy. Alf, as we called my grandfather, built residential properties in the region, which often took him away from home for extended periods. Although he worked hard to support his family, they lived a modest life, struggling to make ends meet at times. But the children were well cared for, and the bills were always paid—eventually.

I loved the story of how my parents, from such different backgrounds, had met and fallen in love—I found it so romantic. As was customary, my father travelled after completing his education. He set off by ship from Southampton to Melbourne. Soon after my father arrived in Melbourne, he was introduced to Dud Sparks, who was looking to hire a farmhand in exchange for board and wages. For two years, my father worked on Dud’s farm in the Jamestown area and became proficient in managing both arable land and large herds of sheep.

One Saturday evening, my father went to a dance in Caltowie, a quarter-hour drive from Jamestown, and there he met my mother, Carol. My mother, who was in her last year at Jamestown High School and would soon start nursing at Jamestown Hospital, was instantly taken with the handsome young English gentleman. Their love blossomed, and they were married in Caltowie before taking a brief honeymoon near Port Pirie. In September 1965, my brother, Paul Edward Knight, was born in Naracoorte in the southern region of South Australia. My father had taken a position 340 miles south on a farm that offered better accommodation for a young family. My mother had no option but to abandon her nursing course.

Within a few weeks of Paul’s arrival, Granny flew from England to Australia to meet her new daughter-in-law and grandson and suggested they return to England with her to visit the family in Chawton. My father had mentioned that his family owned a large country house in England, and he carried a crumpled photograph of the manor in his wallet, which my mother had briefly viewed. But the photograph offered no sense of scale, and without any point of compari­son, she thought perhaps all houses in England were much like that!

Granny traded in her return airfare in exchange for four tickets to travel home by ship. On the four-week journey to England, Granny took it upon herself to educate my mother—an eighteen-year-old girl from country Australia—in preparation for life in England. Granny delivered a crash course in the etiquette she thought necessary, including dinner-table protocol, and encouraged my mother to sample many alcoholic drinks in search of one she might like—a soft drink over dinner would not do!

Granny was direct and to the point and could not hide her dismay when an instruction was not followed correctly. Having seen cruise ships on television and photographs of Granny when she was younger—a tall, handsome, well-dressed woman with a confident smile—I imagined the most glamorous of voyages. But my mother was not fooled by extravagance and glamour and valued people based on their behaviour and the pleasure of their company, not wealth or position. She believed in personal responsibility and the need to do what must be done. Granny was very fond of my mother.

One cold morning in December 1965, when Paul was only three months old, my mother saw Chawton House for the first time; she was a couple of years younger than Elizabeth Bennet was when she first saw Pemberley. I asked my mother what she had thought as they came up the drive, but she had no clear memory of the moment. After four weeks on a ship and being far away from her remote Australian home and family for the first time, everything was extraordinary, and she was obviously not able to absorb it all.

Although the visit to England had been intended as a holiday, my parents decided to stay and rented a cottage in a nearby village before moving into the basement quarters at Chawton House. In the summer of 1973, my mother took Paul and me to visit our Australian family, and I had my third birthday in South Australia. I couldn’t remember it, but I often looked at my mother’s few photographs of the trip and dreamed of travelling to Australia again. We were there for the whole of Paul’s six-week school holiday from Chawton Primary School, from mid July through to early September. We visited Dud Sparks’s farm in Canowie Belt where my father had worked. My mother said Paul and I loved our visit to the farm. We helped with the lambs, we saw where my father had slept, and we sat in the truck he had driven. When the time came to leave Australia, both Paul and I were upset and wanted to stay longer. But our lives were in England now. Paul would soon be returning to school for the commencement of the year, and I was due back at nursery school. We returned as planned.

During my mother’s early years in Chawton, the only regular contact she had with her family in Australia was by letter. She was homesick, of course, and missed them. But she fell in love with Chawton, and within a couple of years, my mother was settled. Despite the cultural differences, Granny and Bapops made my mother feel welcome and were sensitive to how far away she was from her family—Bapops even made sure my mother spoke to her parents in Australia on the telephone at least once a year. Telephone exchanges stopped work during the postal workers strike of 1971, but Bapops used his influence to ensure my mother didn’t miss the annual call—because family connections are important and always worth preserving.