In My Father's House Page 14

  It’s rare to look into the face of a woman in her eighties and see the girl she once was smiling back at you. This, as I know, was the first great test of their marriage; I expected an admission that she felt coerced, trapped by my father’s obsessive love for the House. But what I see across the ironing-board is what I glimpsed when she was describing her first visit. Today, the same eagerness brightens her eyes and spreads a flush of pink across her cheeks. She loved the House as much as he did; she was with him all the way.

  As an addict to the House’s charms myself, I can understand a commitment of passion. Feebler justifications follow, about how people in the village would have felt betrayed if Charlie Byron’s nephew had turned his back on them. I’m not convinced; another family might have done just as well by the House, employed the same people, grown to feel the same protective love for the estate. But my mother is persistent; she reminds me of the fate that overtook Clifton Hall, the nearest large house to Thrumpton. Clifton’s land, conveniently close to the boundaries of Nottingham, had been requisitioned by the state during the war, and then retained for residential development; Clifton’s owners, by 1949, were already planning to sell up and leave. They were not alone: fine old family houses were being abandoned at an unprecedented rate during the late 1940s; some of the most glorious had been uninhabited since the war. Nobody, in 1949, would want to take on a derelict mansion, or so argued my father, seeing himself as a knight riding to the rescue. Nobody would care to save the House he loved. Except himself.

  This was not, of course, entirely true; the National Trust, formed in 1894 to save areas of outstanding beauty, had enlarged its scope during the 1930s, in order to acquire and protect significant houses at a time when many of them were being demolished. Since 1942, when the Trust consisted of four dedicated amateurs, a typist and her fifteen-year-old assistant, James Lees-Milne had been visiting embattled owners in the Trust’s old Austin car, or on his motorbike. In cases where the house seemed worth it, and where there was an endowment in land, money or chattels to be offered for its future maintenance, he and his colleagues would negotiate an arrangement.

  The Trust’s achievements were impressive. Nevertheless, an overseeing body with a duty to justify its work by making these houses more accessible to visitors, was at odds with my father’s mission; in this case, I’m on his side. The Trust, increasingly, has come to view its properties with the eyes of a Victorian schoolmaster. All furniture and paintings must be in keeping with the date of the House; all works of art must be fiercely preserved, even if it means keeping them bathed in perpetual gloom; all owners, once they have ceased to contribute to the maintenance, must accept that the Trust knows best. If the Trust decides that Kedleston in Derbyshire is better off without the fountain that Lord Curzon put there himself, Lord Curzon’s descendant has no option but to agree with them.

  Lord Curzon’s descendant was not pleased when the fountain was taken away because it was not chronologically appropriate to the building; my father, in later years, used this example to explain his own dislike of the Trust. Had he known it, Lees-Milne was on his side. He, like my father, saw the old squirearchy as the ideal system of management: benevolent, eccentric and enlivening. But what Lees-Milne recognised, as my father did not, was that the days of feudal patronage were numbered.

  My parents, having decided to see their venture through, were fortunate. They found a relative of my mother’s who was prepared to help raise the required sum from a group of bankers. The sting in the tail came in the terms: ten per cent interest and full repayment in less than a year. Ruthless steps had to be taken to meet such conditions: two-thirds of the land belonging to the Thrumpton estate was sold, together with the main farms and all but a handful of the tenanted properties. A shrewd investor, eyeing the line of Nottingham’s expansion, would have kept the flat farmland that offered the greatest potential for future development; my father, predictably, relinquished this outlying and least pretty part of the property in order to preserve the small heartland of cottages and houses that clustered nearest to the House, safeguarding its beauty, but adding little to its income.

  Cutting costs now became the central issue. The Daimler was exchanged for a more modest Humber; there were no more impulsive trips to London, no evenings at the Mirabelle and no lunches at Prunier, unless by invitation. When it came to the business of shifting a houseful of possessions into his new home, my father decided to save money and do the work himself. This, as he noted dolefully at the end of the year, was a miscalculation: after a month of heaving furniture on to trailers and pushing wheelbarrows of books along half a mile of pitted driveway, his back had been permanently weakened, while his wife was sporting sprained wrists and a twisted ankle.

  Anna, significantly, sent no assistance from the House. The move took place in May. The hedges were foaming with blossom; the river was alive with ducks and coots; the neglected garden was a jungle of colour. Thrumpton had been her home for almost thirty years. At the point of departure, she looked back on all she had done: the laying-out of flower borders, the copying of ancient documents, the endless sorting of letters, maps, diaries, indentures and contracts, reaching back in time to the House’s earliest beginnings. This was how she had occupied her time; this, her husband had always told her, was a wife’s work.

  Perhaps she felt anger against him for having contrived that she should only be allowed a home on his Essex estate if she remained a widow. Perhaps she felt resentment at the newcomers, usurpers of her territory. Perhaps she had entertained hopes of staying on at the House, as my parents’ cherished guest. Perhaps . . . Who knows? For whatever reason, Anna Byron made a bonfire and burnt, on a sunny afternoon, as many historic documents as she could find. It took about three hours for her to destroy almost every trace of the House’s former owners and their work; it took her rather longer to dig up every shrub, bush and herb that she had planted, ready for transportation to her new home in Essex. My parents arrived to take tea with her that day and found the flowerbeds stripped, the archives reduced to ash and cinders. Anna didn’t, my mother remembers, look in the least ashamed; her expression was one of nervous defiance.

  (This is the accepted version; I’ve also heard that Anna tipped all the papers, disordered, into the cellars of the House; that my parents, unable to cope with a sea of uncatalogued documents, gave up in despair and threw them out themselves. There’s no way of knowing which way the House lost its history; all that can be said is that it’s gone.)

  One of the few documents to have survived from this period is a bound catalogue of the four-day auction ordered by the trustees and held in November 1950. I read it as another testimonial to my father’s passionate wish to keep the House as he had always known it. In the margin, with a red pencil, he marked the lots most closely connected to its history. The presence of a number of dealers pushed up the prices; he retrieved only a third of what he had hoped to save. The hardest task, my mother says, was trying to rescue the splendid library assembled by Lucy Byron’s uncle especially for the House. Porters had swept the leatherbound books from the shelves and bundled them on to trestle tables under a canvas awning, poor protection on a day of driving rain; jumbled together, they were sold in casually arranged lots. The result is that the House now boasts enough one-volume gothic novels (from sets of three) to fill a couple of sentry-boxes.

  ‘What about help? Did you have any when you moved in?’

  ‘Not enough.’ My mother sighs. ‘Life before the washing machine! I never seemed to stop washing or dusting. Let’s see: your father found a rather frightening woman who came with a rabid Alsatian. She told your father and I that we could do the work ourselves. So she didn’t last. And then there was a most peculiar cook who tried to stab me with a carving knife.’

  But when, perplexed, I ask the reason (my mother is good-natured and singularly undemanding), she can’t remember. Neither does she appear to hold a grudge for the assault. ‘They were a funny lot, the people who came and went in t
hose years,’ she says dreamily. ‘I wonder you don’t write about them instead.’

  My father planned to do so; his comments tell me more about him than about the person he describes. ‘Mrs Easom’s cat shot. Departure of Easoms.’ Omitted is the fact that my father, annoyed by the cat’s prowling ways, shot it himself, claiming to have mistaken it for a rabbit. ‘Mrs Zauner, temporary cook, stuck in tub.’ This is shorthand for a farcical incident that ended with a visit from the fire brigade to extricate Mrs Zauner, a large woman whose love of Hitler earned her a rapid dismissal, from one of the House’s narrow, old-fashioned bathtubs. The list, a long one, is confined to employees who flitted across his path, and fled, or were despatched; the bedrock, slowly assembled, was a small and loyal workforce who never told tales out of school and never questioned my father’s capricious ways. They receive no mention. Were they less eccentric, and thus less easily characterised, or was it the case that long connection turned them into extensions of himself, no longer identifiable as individuals?

  I’m trying to imagine those first years of occupation: the carved staircase draped in dustsheets, stone passages inadequately carpeted by cracked brown linoleum, plaster swelling and peeling from the pale pea-green walls, the biting cold of winter winds stabbing through cracked panes of glass so frail – a few remain to cause a shuddering chill – that they shiver at a touch. I look at the book in which, always meticulous, my father noted the lists of tourists to whom they opened the House, week after week, from 1952. I can easily see him, thin shoulders hunched against the cold, sitting in the doorway with a roll of tickets that still, fifty years later, looks almost untouched; I see my mother, wrapped in a heavy coat, conducting tours around rooms which, although efforts had been made to brighten them, can’t have seemed to justify the twenty-four old pence that was asked for entry. The rewards were small; after the euphoria of receiving three hundred visitors on their first open day (the incoming revenue repaired three wooden shutters and gave the dining room a one-bar electric fire), numbers dwindled rapidly to twenty, ten and often, in bad weather, to none at all.

  My parents ranked low among an heroic band of older survivors. James Lees-Milne, touring the countryside on behalf of the National Trust, was welcomed into houses that had lost their roofs, or had their windows blown out by bombs. Some of the ancient owners were surviving with only a supply of water that had to be fetched, by themselves, from an outside well. Several large houses had no electricity whatsoever. Had Lees-Milne visited Thrumpton at the time my parents took it on, he would have told them they were lucky. This house had not suffered from wartime occupation; although neglected and in poor repair, the foundations and roof were secure.

  Above all, the new owners were young. Many of the house-owners visited by Lees-Milne were in their seventies and had lost their heirs in the War. My parents were in their late twenties, filled with energy, determination and hope. My father, although he lost the knack in later years, proved clever enough at investing to build up enough money by the mid-Fifties to pay for a nanny, a nurserymaid, a cook, a chauffeur and a gardener. I admire what my parents did; nevertheless, these, in the dour Fifties, were not straitened circumstances.

  The House was the grail my father had pursued throughout his life. It came as a shock to find he held an empty cup. The glorious aristocracy, about whom he knew so much, did not perceive the new owner of Thrumpton Hall as one of themselves. He achieved, with persistence, occasional triumphs, but a letter to the Duchess of Devonshire, complimenting her on the excellent conversion of Chatsworth’s kitchen into a restaurant and inviting her to luncheon, brought back only a well-phrased note of regret at the fullness of her diary which, alas . . .

  Such rebuffs were felt as wounds. The Duchess got off lightly; other displays of indifference to his treasure and himself were stored away for vengeance. One grand connection, having neglected either to visit or to issue invitations, was punished when my father bid against him at an auction, deliberately driving up the price of a cherished family portrait that he had no intention of buying for himself. Asked by the irritated purchaser what the devil he’d thought he was playing at, my father giggled, twirled his umbrella and replied: ‘Fun!’

  My father’s impish sense of humour (he was a good raconteur) earned him some reputation as a wit; the problem was that he had no sense of where the boundary lay between sport and malice. Jokes of the kind he practised on his relation in the auction room lost him more friends than he won by telling the stories.

  From the point of view of social achievement, the capture of the grail was disappointing. In another respect, it brought liberation, although not of the kind that could have been easily predicted from George Seymour’s earlier life.

  From the date, almost, at which he acquired the House and its estate, a rift began to appear in his personality. On the one side, the more predictable one, he easily adopted the trappings, traditions and obligations of squireship. One of his first acts was to restore the Hall’s Victorian habit of holding a Christmas party for the children of the village, complete with games, a handsome tea and carefully wrapped presents. He sat on committees, supported the county, and fought small wars on behalf of the village’s preservation, with tireless zeal. As a proud patron of the living, with rights over the church, he subjected each new vicar to a searching interview. A little too conscious of the need to set an example to his own small flock of tenants, he never failed to attend the Sunday service, impeccably dressed, or to read the first lesson in a voice of sonorous certainty, whether condemning the profligate or blessing the pure in heart. Disdainful in his reception of newcomers to the village, he was tirelessly thoughtful of the needs of the older inhabitants, whose nostalgia for the past tallied with his own views. If my father had not been such an autocrat, he could easily have become a beloved paragon, a model of old-fashioned patronage.

  Few can play Dr Jekyll’s role without chafing at the traces of being constantly good-mannered and conscientious. Hyde is always there, biding his time for the moment of release. An imaginative mind might guess that the moment of Hyde’s escape wasn’t too far ahead from the family portrait which my father commissioned in the mid-Sixties.

  In concept and setting, the picture is as conventional as the place in which it hangs, in the family library. (Tellingly, it faces the smiling portrait of Vita that my father had proudly commissioned when he was twenty-one.) This painting is set in the House’s most formal room, an ornate saloon on the first floor. I sit at the piano, off to one side, tidily dressed in a white shirt and dark skirt. (My father, who disliked short hair, had decided that his eighteen-year-old daughter looked best in a shoulder-length wig.) My mother, implausibly dressed for an afternoon scene in a smart blue cocktail frock, also wears a wig, a replica of her best Greek helmet style. She sits bolt upright on a sofa, ankles crossed, hands folded, looking on with apparent interest at the scene that occupies the centre of the painting.

  Here, two players confront each other across a backgammon board. (My mother’s enthralled gaze convinces nobody who knows her; backgammon registers itself with her only as an irritating sound of clattering dice.) My brother, a fair-haired schoolboy, faces both the artist, and his opponent. He leans forward a little, intent upon the game, meditating his next move as he poises his hand above the counters.

  In the family painting by John Lavery of my mother’s family at Chirk, she had occupied the central place, all lines converging upon her. Here, the lines meet on the image of my father, the second player at the games board. The picture had been his idea, and was paid for by him. But – was it by choice? – his back is turned toward the viewer. All that can be remarked is the fall of the jacket from his shoulders, the slight stoop of his head over the board. He is at the centre, but the face of the dominant figure in this family portrait is entirely hidden from view.

  Artists are often prescient. George Gissing, in his fictions, predicted the troubles that lay ahead in his own life; Millais, painting Lizzie Siddal as a drowned Op
helia, looked forward to the model’s early death; Shelley, mourning his fellow poet Keats in Adonais, foretold his own watery end. Did the young artist who lived with us while he worked on our family tableau catch a glimpse of another, secret self, yet to emerge, and choose to hint at it with that resolutely cloaked view? Did he intuit that, as time unrolled, the hidden face would become a cipher, that the act of concealment would become the most significant feature of what seemed, at the time, to be a conventional representation of a country family, at ease in the interior of their home?

  George FitzRoy Seymour enjoyed posing for this portrait of him as High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, on his favourite staircase.

  I don’t know. Neither can I do more than guess what the same handsome young artist was thinking when my father, glorying in his new role – all jokes about Robin Hood were banned for that year – posed for him again a little later, as High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, in full, magnificent regalia.

  My father liked the portrait of old Lucy Byron, standing on her grand carved staircase, looking down on the viewer. The artist was invited to paint him in the same position. The clothes – black silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes, velvet suit and foaming lace jabot – both mock and honour their wearer’s pose as the aristocratic owner of a stately home. My father had a redeeming sense of the absurdity of his pretentions. It’s likely that this portrait was intended, in part, as a joke. What interests me more now is the strained expression upon his face.

  These paintings were done in the late Sixties. By then, my father was struggling to unite two quite different forms of life: one as a conventional squire and family man; the other, as a fun-loving, risk-taking Jack the Lad. This second aspect of his complex nature was, at the time he became High Sheriff, still under wraps.