My History: A Memoir of Growing Up
Antonia Fraser
ALSO BY ANTONIA FRASER
NONFICTION
Mary Queen of Scots
Cromwell, the Lord Protector
King James VI of Scotland, I of England
The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England (editor)
Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration
The Weaker Vessel
The Warrior Queens
The Wives of Henry VIII
Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King
Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter
Perilous Question: Reform or Revolution? Britain on the Brink, 1832
FICTION
Quiet as a Nun
The Wild Island
A Splash of Red
Cool Repentance
Oxford Blood
Your Royal Hostage
The Cavalier Case
Political Death
Jemima Shore’s First Case and Other Stories
Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave and Other Stories
ANTHOLOGIES
Scottish Love Poems
Love Letters
Copyright © 2015 by FPinter Ltd.
All Rights Reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, London, in 2015.
www.nanatalese.com
Doubleday is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Pictures from the Dragon School, Oxford, are used with kind permission of the headmaster.
Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Cover photograph of Antonia Fraser © Yevonde Portrait Archive
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fraser, Antonia, 1932–
My history : a memoir of growing up / Antonia Fraser. — First American edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-54010-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-54011-7 (eBook)
1. Fraser, Antonia, 1932—Childhood and youth. 2. Fraser, Antonia, 1932—Family. 3. Fraser, Antonia, 1932—Homes and haunts. 4. Historians—Great Britain—Biography. 5. Women historians—Great Britain—Biography. 6. Authors, English—20th century—Biography. 7. Oxford (England)—Biography. I. Title.
DA3.F65A3 2015
941.0072'02—dc23
[B]
2014044611
eBook ISBN 9780385540117
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by Antonia Fraser
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Things I Remember
Note on Dates
Chapter One: The Sound of Bells
Chapter Two: My Island Story
Chapter Three: Before-the-War
Chapter Four: Hidey Holes
Chapter Five: She Dragon
Chapter Six: On Our Bikes
Chapter Seven: Girlhood Encountered
Chapter Eight: Are We Really Irish?
Chapter Nine: Nice Catholic Friends
Chapter Ten: Gap Year or Two
Chapter Eleven: Bringing Myself Out
Chapter Twelve: Oxford Miss
Chapter Thirteen: Jeune Fille in Publishing
Chapter Fourteen: I Am Going to Marry You!
Epilogue: Reader, I Wrote It
Acknowledgements
A Note About the Author
Illustrations
For Thomas, who shared my History
and for Mother Mercedes, IBVM, who spurred me on
“The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.”
—G. M. Trevelyan, Autobiography of an Historian
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.”
NOTE ON DATES
My father was born Frank Pakenham and was created Lord Pakenham of Cowley in 1945. He inherited the Earldom of Longford on his brother’s death in 1961. I then received the courtesy title of “Lady,” as in “Lady Antonia Fraser,” in March 1961 when I was thirty.
My seven siblings, all younger than me, were as follows:
Thomas b. 1933; Patrick (Paddy) b. 1937 d. 2009; Judith b. 1940; Rachel b. 1942; Michael b. 1943; Catherine Rose b. 1946 d. 1969; Kevin b. 1947.
I was married to Hugh Fraser MP, later Sir Hugh Fraser, from 1956 to 1975; Harold Pinter and I were together from 1975
until his death in 2008; we married in 1980.
CHAPTER ONE
THE SOUND OF BELLS
Any time, any place, the sound of bells reminds me of Oxford. Venice at evening: I’m transported back to childhood. The water dissolves into the River Cherwell, St. Mark’s fades into Christ Church doorway, the romantic gondolas become everyday bicycles. Much later, when I discovered for myself the poetry of Edward Thomas, his most famous poem became transposed in my mind: all the bells of Oxfordshire, not the birds, sang for him at Adlestrop. And for me ever since.
I was not in fact born in Oxford—although I sometimes feel I was—but this tremendous influence began to exert itself before I was three years old. In May 1935 I remember being lifted from my bed at my parents’ home on Rose Hill, South Oxford, in the middle of the night and taken on an adventure. The next thing I knew I was gazing at a lofty stone tower, all covered in lights, like a heavenly apparition. When I asked in a mystified voice what was going to happen now, I was told rather crossly to admire the tower.
“It’s the King and Queen,” I was informed. Which was the King, which was the Queen? There were all kinds of possibilities in the illuminated darkness of the summer night. For that matter what was the King…Nobody enlightened me further. Soon I was taken back to bed, unaware not only that it was the Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary, but also I had been gazing at the tower of Magdalen College, the foundation stone laid in 1492, and at 144 feet the tallest building in Oxford. Nevertheless I knew that I had been allowed to glimpse something extraordinary; I had gazed through the window into another magic world of ancient towers and stones which surely only appeared under cover of darkness.
My feeling of privilege deepened the next morning when my younger brother Thomas somehow realized that he had been excluded from a grown-up treat, and screamed with rage. This increased my feeling of possessiveness about what I had seen. Wonderland was clearly not for everyone. That memory of wonderland persisted. Asking for an unspecified recording of Oxford bells among my Desert Island Discs in 2008—the first time such a choice had been made, I believe—I was enchanted to discover that the bells in question were those of Magdalen College. As I listened, wonderland once more returned.
I was born on 27 August 1932. The headline of The Times for that day was: GERMAN CRISIS; it went on to comment rather wearily: “with the start of a new week, the stage is set for another of the periodic German crises.” (The Nazis were already the largest party in the Reichstag: six months later Hitler was made Chancellor.) An unspoken commentary on what happened when such crises bubbled over was provided by the In Memoriam column. It was led by the names of those who had died “On Active Service” in the war which had ended fourteen years earlier: rather more than half the entries.
Of more obvious concern to those in London, there was a heatwave. A few days earlier, standing at the window, Virginia Woolf said to herself: “Look at the present moment because it’s not been so hot for 21 years.” As for my mother, throughout the long humid days of waiting, she spent all her time in the water happily if impatiently, often accompanied by her young sister-in-law Violet. This might incidentally explain my lifelong addiction to swimming: since my earliest memory I have always understood what John Cheever expressed so eloquently: “To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition.”
The event took place in a house in Sussex Gardens loaned by Margaret, Countess of Birkenhead, widow of my father’s patron, F. E. Smith. Thus it was both a home birth, as was customary with women of my mother’s class in those days, and an away-from-home birth, upped from a cottage to a grand London residence. Today I sometimes gaze at what is now Riyadh House, and contemplate the small patch of railed-in garden outside in the middle of the road round which taxis swirl on their way to Paddington. My first outing to this patch, on the fifth day, was duly noted in my mother’s magisterial Progress Book (with its daunting preface by the publisher: “If the suggested records are carefully made, they will prove of invaluable assistance to the doctor in later years”). Impossible to contemplate leaving a baby in a hugely ostentatious Thirties pram alone there now, but with the sublime confidence of the time, my mother simply noted: “a strong wind, glimpses of sun, roar of traffic.”
She also noted that I was born at 2:45 a.m. BST, which placed me with the sun in the sign of Virgo and the sign of Cancer rising. The latter delightful information, which made me brilliantly hard-working yet oh, so sensitive and caring (no one ever seems to have a dull horoscope), I only discovered many years later when I was working with George Weidenfeld and Sonia Orwell: both of them boasted of being brilliant hard-working Virgos. It certainly meant nothing to my mother. On the other hand I was delivered by a female doctor, which obviously meant a great deal to her, with views on women which would have made her into a suffragette if the battle had not been won already by her valiant predecessors. In fact her twenty-first birthday fell in August 1927, so that she was able to vote in 1929, the first British General Election in which all women over twenty-one were able to do so.
When I was born, my parents, Frank and Elizabeth Pakenham, had been married less than ten months. My mother confided to me later that I was a honeymoon baby, conceived at Lismore Castle, in Southern Ireland, where the newly wed pair were staying with Lord Charles Cavendish and his wife Adele Astaire. When I was young, I managed to derive from this an exotic feeling of destiny—a castellated start to my life! It was in fact far more to the point that my parents’ marriage was one which would last for nearly seventy years, where the deep affection never failed and nor did the lively conversation which developed from the affection, to back it up.
It must have been sometime in the 1980s that my mother reported to me with shining eyes: “You know, Dada and I had such a wonderful time last night.” I began to speculate: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle (my mother was a devout monarchist in her later years) before she interrupted me: “No, no, just us: we had a fascinating argument about the proper role of the Papacy with regard to a Protestant country. Frank thought…But I totally disagreed…” Not everyone’s idea of romantic chat, perhaps, nevertheless it was clearly just as exciting for them to be arguing with each other some fifty years into their marriage as it had been at the outset. One notes, too, that in any argument they were equal partners in disagreement.
This outstandingly happy union did not in fact have a particularly auspicious beginning. Within the narrow confines of the British class system of the time, much narrower than it is today, with fewer ramifications, my parents came from completely different backgrounds. My mother, born Elizabeth Harman in 1906, was the daughter of a Harley Street doctor, Nathaniel Bishop Harman: she was in fact born and brought up at 108 Harley Street, where he had his consulting rooms as an ophthalmic surgeon. Her mother was Katherine Chamberlain, one of the seven daughters of Joseph Chamberlain’s brother Arthur; this incidentally meant that my mother was a cousin of Neville Chamberlain, the future Prime Minister, although their politics would be very different.
It was an extremely affluent setting in terms of comfort and style. A tall eighteenth-century house, 108 Harley Street contained both a residence and consulting rooms. My mother revealed to me that there had been five servants and, when I expressed ingenuous surprise, said carelessly: “Well, we needed a man to carry up the coal to the nursery on the top floor.” But of course the lavishness of domestic help, taken for granted by the middle class at that time—the Harman arrangements were nothing unusual—was a phenomenon which vanished altogether with the Second World War.
As a young woman Katie Chamberlain had herself trained as a doctor: a comparatively early example of a female in the profession. She qualified at the Royal Free Hospital; although it was said that Katie had only ever earned one fee of £3 for extracting a wisdom tooth, before marrying Nat Harman in 1905. My grandmother was then thirty-three and immediately gave up her profession to bear five children, while running th
e household at Harley Street. You could say that my mother was offered two possible role models if she contemplated her own mother’s career. On the one hand Katherine Harman was a woman who had actually trained for a profession—out of choice, since the Chamberlain family was by most standards wealthy. This state of affairs was still unusual. On the other hand, my grandmother was a woman who had instantly abandoned her profession on marriage and thrown in her lot with her husband and family. In later years, as I began to contemplate the trajectory of my mother’s life with detachment, I could discern both influences.
At the time of my parents’ courtship, it was more important that the Harmans were proudly middle-class. This was a time when refinements such as “upper middle-class” and “lower middle-class” were not in use or, if they were, they were not in use by my mother. On the contrary, she brought me up to believe that not only were we purely and simply middle-class, but that this was the most striking, splendid, admirable thing to be. This impression is confirmed by my father’s account in his autobiography Born to Believe: Elizabeth prided herself on being a member of the middle class, who were “the salt of the earth.” There were other classes of course; but the upper class were the “non-spinners” of the Bible as in “they toil not neither do they spin”—the lilies of the field; the poor on the other hand were there to be helped. I’m not sure in her heart of hearts my mother ever really deviated from this position.
Certainly she left me with an early impression of the extravagance, fecklessness, unpunctuality and impracticality of the upper class—as epitomized by our father, in contrast to her own neat, strong virtues. My mother for example carved a joint with skill and drove a car with determination; my father did neither of these things. She also wrote in a clear, immaculate handwriting without crossings out…my father conveyed his thoughts in a series of parallel unbending strokes of the pen in which occasional words like TOP SECRET stood out but which were otherwise totally illegible. Nothing captured the difference between them so vividly for a child as the contrast in these two modes of parental expression.
