In My Father's House Read online

  Further praise for In My Father’s House:

  ‘Utterly riveting, ruthlessly honest and strangely touching, this portrait of the author’s extraordinary father both appalled and moved me – and made me laugh out loud’ DEBORAH MOGGACH

  ‘Miranda Seymour’s wonderful memoir is a kind of posthumous conversation with her father. The ending is particularly powerul. What a gripping, poignant, dramatic, emotionally searing book she has written!’ JOYCE CAROL OATES

  ‘Few books capture the pain and laughter of upper-class English life as vividly as this one. It is a gem of a memoir and I wish there were others like it’ ALEXANDER WAUGH

  ‘A brilliantly crafted true story, In My Father’s House gains depth and complexity from its willingness to explore the ethical dilemma of revealing painful family secrets. There is more to learn about human nature in this short memoir than in many novels two or three times its length’ PAT BARKER

  ‘A gem of a book – Miranda Seymour’s riveting memoir tells a moving story of family love and hate that manages to be subtle and funny, as well as profoundly surprising in its emotional twists’ RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN

  ‘Fascinating . . . Charming and candid’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘Thrillingly odd, yet oh-so-elegant and tasteful, I devoured it in one swift sitting, and have been urging it on my friends, aspirational and otherwise, ever since . . . The tale Seymour tells is so strange and sad, so sordid and yet touching, that you find yourself caught between wonder that she waited for more than a decade to write it – and wonder that she was able to put pen to paper at all’ RACHEL COOKE, Evening Standard

  ‘Never anything other than compelling . . . Extremely well crafted and holds the reader’s attention throughout’ LIZA CAMPBELL, Literary Review

  ‘A rich and entertaining account of the upper classes in the early to mid-twentieth century. There are endless family tragedies, trysts and twists. Those who loved her last book, The Bugatti Queen, will applaud the return to her clever, light style . . . The detail is thrilling . . . Needless to say, perfect for anyone who’s ever obsessed about a beautiful house in the country’ SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE, Tatler

  ‘This outstanding book is a very funny and very sad portrait . . . A story of heartfelt love and loathing, told with wit, delicacy and a considerable amount of understated indelicacy as well; it is also a delightful period piece, an evocation of a very recent time that is long gone . . . This is a book of “weary, ugly follies”, certainly, but it is far more than that; it is a heavy-hearted but light-handed reflection on love, memory and truth’ MINETTE MARRIN, Sunday Times

  ‘Seymour uses a variety of sources to blend a tale of family grief and tension with a wider look at human weakness . . . Writing this deeply personal account of her family must have been a cathartic experience for Seymour. For the reader, it is a treat to catch an author at the height of her descriptive powers, exposing the agony of parental disappointment with honesty, sensitivity, and touches of brilliance’ CHARLES SPENCER, Guardian

  ‘This is an extraordinary book. Miranda Seymour has written a family memoir whose honesty appals even as it compels, but its secondary achievement is to draw, almost from the corner of its eye, a portrait of Englishness in the last century that encompasses class, ownership, landscape, money, manners and clothes. It is consistently fascinating and occasionally horrifying and will make a good deal of modern autobiography look feeble and colourless in comparison’ ANTHONY QUINN, Observer

  ‘Memoirs about bad or dotty fathers exert a special fascination . . . Miranda Seymour’s is the latest gem . . . The only flaw in this bizarre and fascinating tale is that it speeds by too quickly. In My Father’s House is disarming in its honesty, endlessly surprising and oddly touching . . . “You’re determined to show him in a bad light,” [Seymour’s mother] tells her daughter. Indeed she is. That is precisely what makes this memoir so sparkling’ CRESSIDA CONNOLLY, Spectator

  ‘[A] remarkably candid, perceptive and haunting family memoir. By turns shocking, funny, tragic and moving, it deserves to take its place among the country-house classics . . . The moving account of the middle-aged George discovering his lost childhood on the back of a bike [is] almost unbearably poignant. So much so that it would be a shame to give away the pathetic, terrible ending – I can only urge you to go and buy the book’ HUGH MASSINGBERD, Country Life

  ‘This is an intimate journey through the life of a family that suffered as a consequence of George’s passion, fears and capricious behaviour; the cost of his passion was paid by many. Often dark, like its main subject, this is a fascinating and beautifully written study of love and obsession’ Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

  ‘Seymour writes captivatingly about growing up in a grand country house and her surprise when, late in life, her father starts riding around on big motorbikes with leather-clad young men. Shocking and touching’ Gay Times

  ‘In spare, limpid prose she commemorates her father George FitzRoy Seymour and his passion for his home. Her tone is by turns angry, unreasonable and uncomprehending, and then poignant, passionate and brave’ RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES, Times Literary Supplement

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2007

  This ebook edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015

  A CBS company

  Copyright © Miranda Seymour 2007

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Miranda Seymour to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia,

  Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India,

  New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4156-0272-2

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-47114-969-6

  Typeset in Bembo by M Rules

  The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

  To my beloved husband, Ted Lynch

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s note

  Family tree

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  THE HOUSE: OBSESSION

  1 Dick and Vita

  2 Exile

  3 The House

  4 The Boy

  5 A Public-School Boy

  6 A Good War

  7 Literary Connections: 2006

  8 Shadows under the Cedars

  9 False Trails

  10 Welsh Connections

  11 Reading Romance

  12 Nearer, My House, to Thee

  13 The Fulfilment of a Dream

  PART TWO

  THE HOUSE: POSSESSION

  1 I Hate and I Love (The Lists My Father Never Made)

  2 Family Snaps

  3 A Question of Appearance

  4 Betrayal

  5 On the Road

  6 Cherry Orchard Blues

  7 Ganymede

  8 The House Divided

  Epilogue

  List of Illustrations

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like, for his perseverance and faith in this book, to express warm gratitude to Anthony Goff, my agent and friend. I could not have wished for a wiser editor than Andrew Gordon, whose judgement proved i
nvaluable. This book owes much to them both.

  My gratitude also goes to Alan Hollinghurst for his unfailing support and wise counsel. Thanks also to Edwina Barstow, Hannah Corbett and to my excellent copy-editor, Robyn Karney. My warm appreciation also goes to Reginald Piggott for sorting out two complicated family trees.

  I owe a debt of a different kind to my mother, whose support has meant everything to me during the course of preparing and writing what proved to be a difficult book for us both.

  I thank my brother for having allowed me to feel that I could write as I wished, and as I felt. This was generous, and made a great difference to my approach.

  I have been continuously grateful for the friendship and excellent company of my son and daughter-in-law, and for the restorative and understanding love of my husband – and first reader.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The subject of this book is often referred to as ‘my father’. He was, in fact, ‘our father’. As the son of the house, my brother knew him from a different perspective.

  This is the story of my father in relation to myself. It is, in that sense, only a partial truth. It does not attempt to reflect my brother’s views, although I believe that he shares some of mine.

  Some names have been changed.

  ‘It seems, perhaps, a strange and unnecessary thing to go prowling back into the recesses of the past and to lift the decent curtain which has covered the weary ugly follies . . .’

  – Lord Howard de Walden, my mother’s father, in a letter to his five-year-old son; Gallipoli, 1915

  ‘What do you know about your own family anyway? They’re such secretive organisms, I can’t be doing with them.’

  – James Brooke to William Beckwith: Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  PROLOGUE

  ‘Three obituaries!’ a fierce old relation wrote after my father died. ‘What on earth for! What did he ever do?’

  The point was fair. Her own late husband, a handsomely moustached man with an outstanding war record, was of the type who earn such tributes. But George FitzRoy Seymour – he was concerned that the FitzRoy, recording some royal bed-hopping in the seventeenth century, should never be overlooked – had done no such service to his country. He had no war record. Long and dutiful service as a magistrate had earned him commendations and praise, but no official honour. The fat red handbooks in which he listed his London clubs – Pratt’s and Brooks’ in the issue of 1982 – offered no history of worthy activities, while revealing (father ‘great great great grandson of Marquess of Hertford’; mother ‘sister of 10th Duke of Grafton’; wife ‘daughter of 8th Baron Howard de Walden’) that here was a man who took exceptional pride in his connections. It saddened him that he had no title. His links to those who did were a solace.

  Eccentricity has not always been encouraged by the prim editors of Debrett. Invited to list his recreations, my father omitted motorbikes and wrote instead: shooting, deerstalking and tennis. Identifying himself as Lord of the Manor of Thrumpton provided a greater source of satisfaction.

  His address provides the clue to George FitzRoy Seymour’s most substantial achievement. Deposited with its childless owners as a baby, he fell in love with the House that always seemed to be his natural home. His vocation was announced in one of the first roundhanded essays he wrote as a schoolboy. When he grew up, he wrote, he wished to become the squ’arson of Thrumpton Hall, combining the role of landowner and parson as his uncle, Lord Byron, the poet’s descendant, had done before him. He would look after the tenants. He would be kind to his servants, especially when they grew old. He would cherish and protect the home he loved. The master who marked the essay, repelled by such priggishness, scribbled a terse comment in red crayon, advising young Seymour to find a style and topic more suited to his years. The following week, my father handed in eight pages on the importance of preserving the family monuments in Thrumpton’s village church. He was eleven years old. No suggestion had been made that he would ever inherit the House to which he had vowed his love. Uncertainty was not one of his failings.

  My father died in May 1994. A gust of wind blew in through a newly opened window, rippling the yellow hangings of the bed on which he lay. My brother went along the landing to find our mother and consult her about hymns for the funeral. I walked out into the garden. Reaching up into the swaying branches of the lilacs, I snapped them off until I stood knee-deep in the heavy swags of blossom I had never, until that moment, been licensed to cut. Returning to the House, I pushed at the wooden shutters of the rooms on the ground floor, parting them to let in a flood of lime-green light. Standing, hands on hips, at the far end of the garden, I hurled shouts at the red-brick walls and arching gables until they echoed back their reassurance: Free! Free!

  In the little village church later that week, the vicar spoke of my father as ‘a man with a wound in his heart’. The description, which startled nobody, could have been a reference to the anguish he had recently experienced. It seemed more likely that the vicar, a man who had known my father for thirty years, was thinking of his aching need for a love greater than any one person had been able to provide.

  We buried his ashes privately, in the garden of the House to which he gave his heart. The wording on the tablet that marked the spot was borrowed from Christopher Wren’s epitaph. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. The pride of it, loosely translated here, felt right: If you wish to know me, look around you. Here I am.

  We chose the words and here, still, he is. On troubled nights, he comes to me in dreams, stalking back through the front door to survey his home and take charge of it once more. He complains that unknown people are sleeping in his room; that his cupboards are filled with the sordid clothes of strangers. Speaking in a flat voice, thinned by resentment, he explains that he intends to put the House, his home, not ours, to rights. We buried a phantom, a creature of our own wishes. We wanted him dead. Our mistake. He never died. He just went travelling.

  A white hand reaches out to pull down a parchment-coloured blind at one of the library windows. Wearily, he reminds me of the need to protect precious leather-bound books and rosewood tables from the glare of daylight. Helpless, I watch him take his familiar place at the head of the long dining table. Awaiting instructions, I find myself dismissed to a side seat, far away. He observes, looking pained, that the silver is tarnished, that the wine has been insufficiently aired, and that the soup plates are cold. Standards have slipped, but all will be well again. Everything, once again, is under his control.

  I watch his body harden into the familiar lines of authority. I long for him to leave. I know he never will.

  It takes days for the sense of dread to wear off, not only of his reproachful spirit, but of having failed the House, of having been unworthy of his expectations.

  His taste was not always for objects of beauty. This morning, I came across a battered white plastic chair in the courtyard at the back of the House, turned east to face the morning sun. The seat is soiled, the shape is ugly. I want to throw it away. Sam Walker disagrees. Sam and I read our first books together at the village dame school where Sam’s aunt kept order with a ruler and a whistle. Sam has grown up to be a true Nottinghamshire man, plain-spoken and reserved. He’s worked at the House for forty years.

  ‘You can’t get rid of that,’ he says. ‘It’s your father’s chair.’

  ‘The seat’s broken. I’m sure he didn’t mean us to keep it.’

  Sam Walker’s belief in preservation is legendary. Old lamp fittings, massive radiograms, towel racks, broken deckchairs; they never disappear. They go to rest in one of the stables to which only Sam holds the key. Their return may be a matter of years, not months, but their time will come.

  Resolute, I fold my arms. ‘There’s no reason to keep it now.’

  Sam looks at the wall behind me. ‘Your father always sat on that chair when . . . he carried it down to the lakeside every afternoon he was here after . . .’ Hesitating, he stares harder at the wall. ‘Yo
u know. After it happened.’

  Long-jawed and high-cheeked, Sam’s eloquent face could have been carved by a medieval mason. At this moment, it conveys no expression. The message is clear. The chair may look empty, but it still has an occupant.

  The chair stays.

  I can never hope to banish my father’s presence from the House that possessed his heart. I can make my peace by trying to understand what made him the man he was. Sifting through the drawers of diaries and ancient letters – like Sam Walker, George FitzRoy Seymour was a man who threw nothing away – I can assemble the fragments and see plainly what I always knew: that a single passion governed his life, a love so great and so certain that he was willing to sacrifice everything and everybody for it. ‘Dear Thrumpton, how I miss you tonight,’ he wrote in 1944, when he was twenty-one and had just paid a summer visit to his uncle’s home. ‘As I grow older the House exerts an ever greater hold on me – I love every tree and stone on the place, and every hold and corner of the place. God send I never have to leave for ever.’

  The House, constructed from rosy bricks and crowned with curved stone gables, stands among the meadows flanking the River Trent, in the middle of England, a hundred miles to the north of London. Starting life as a modest Nottinghamshire manor house built in the time of Shakespeare, it was enlarged twice. An ambitious owner redesigned it in the seventeenth century, to incorporate a large carved staircase and a grand reception room on an upper floor. In the 1820s, the House gained a courtyard, a library and a lake. The estate, easily encompassed by an hour’s brisk walk, is surprisingly varied in its landscape, incorporating traces of an Iron Age fort and a Roman trading post. An eighteenth-century stone weir breaks the level of the river that runs alongside the park’s expansive fields; pretty copses and airy beechwoods climb a long line of hillside that blocks out all evidence of the twenty-first century. (Until, that is, you walk the ridge along the hilltop and look the other way, out to where a distant line of motorway traffic snakes across a green plain and cooling towers puff steam clouds at the wingtips of low-flying aircraft. This landscape has a different kind of beauty, a kind my father did not acknowledge.)