In My Father's House Read online

  PART TWO

  The House: Possession

  1

  I HATE AND I LOVE

  (THE LISTS MY FATHER NEVER MADE)

  Depressing Things

  A time-consuming letter, replete with carefully composed items of news, is mailed to a former friend who (unaccountably) does not answer, thus gradually prompting the revelation (after three further epistles have been written and despatched) that the friend in question has been dead now for some number of years.

  Oh, how depressing!

  Discovering that the only place at which one’s favourite variety of chocolates (violet creams!) could reliably be purchased will in future no longer be stocking them (‘insufficient demand’).

  Oh, how depressing!

  After encouraging guests to enjoy a hot bath before dinner, finding that one’s own bath runs cold (this misfortune compounded by the impossibility of disclosing the fact).

  Oh, how depressing!

  Discovering, during a perfect summer’s afternoon, that clouds of smoke from the newly constructed neighbouring power station have obscured the sun and cast the garden into deep and enduring shade.

  Oh, how depressing!

  Rare Things

  A person of impeccable taste.

  A well-fashioned pair of shoes that fits uncommonly narrow – aristocratic! – feet.

  A woman of wit.

  A young person who is not bored by the company of an older man who has come to possess youthful tastes. (Alas!)

  Annoying Things

  A postal clerk – the last collection having been made just before one reaches the post-office – adamantly refuses to have further letters added to the outgoing sack. (Bureaucracy!)

  Guests who produce sheaves of holiday snapshots, and yet fail to admire the house in which they are fortunate enough to be staying.

  At church services, the use of texts other than those derived from King James’s Bible.

  Women who refuse to allow men to sit together in the dining room after dinner. (Barbaric!)

  Any detailed response to one’s simple and courteous inquiry as to how a guest has slept.

  Splendid Things

  The lace collar of a young Prince, painted by Van Dyck.

  A magnolia grandiflora that has just unfurled its petals.

  A full-length coat of sable.

  A loved, and impeccably maintained, old family house.

  A Ducati, unthrottled. (The Duke!)

  Disagreeable Things

  A certain gentleman – who (in modesty) shall here remain nameless! – having gone to enormous trouble to restore his family monuments to positions of appropriate prominence within his local church, subsequently discovers that the congregation, instead of showing their gratitude, complain that their generous benefactor had not first secured their permission.

  The faint odour, from beneath a woman’s clothing, of unclean linen.

  Nylon sheets . . . Morris dancers . . . Medieval music.

  Conversations about Proust (or any other French writers).

  Unpolished wine glasses upon a dining table.

  Things Worth Seeing

  Fred Astaire movies.

  ‘Race of the Aces’ at Snetterton!

  Valmouth (the musical), with Fenella Fielding as Lady Parvula. (Heaven!)

  Other people’s carved staircases (for purposes of comparison to one’s own superior version!)

  Pleasing Things

  A guest who appreciates the amount of work that must go into the maintaining of proper standards in hospitality.

  A newspaper article (about oneself) or television appearance (by oneself) when remarked on and admired by persons of discerning judgment.

  A trim woman, fully conscious that she looks well in her clothes, walking briskly along a Mayfair street to keep – one can only suppose! – an appointment most agreeable in nature.

  A friend who, spending time in one’s company, deigns never to consult his watch.

  The least sign (from one’s children) of any recognition (however slight!) of all that one does (and continues to do) entirely without complaint.

  Embarrassing Things

  A conscientious host, discovered while thoughtfully drawing the curtains in the bedroom of guests, who appears to them (quite without justice) to have been spying.

  One’s adolescent daughter, having put on weight, so that her clothes, once appealing, now appear unpleasantly tight.

  One’s wife, oblivious, on a public occasion, that her slip is showing, or that she possesses traces of lipstick stains upon her teeth.

  Surprising and distressing things

  A conversation with one’s daughter which leads her on to criticisms of oneself, the precision of her analysis suggesting that she has been pondering these (supposed!) flaws for some time.

  Upon the birth of one’s first grandchild, discovering that it is impossible to feel pleasure at this sudden intimation of one’s mortality.

  Learning that one’s children dislike one’s most intimate friend.

  Things That Have Relinquished Their Power to Charm

  An enchanting house, from which its rightful occupant has been compelled to depart.

  2

  FAMILY SNAPS

  ‘Miranda is so completely happy up there,’ my grandmother wrote to my father in 1952, the year my brother was born. Vita, while staying at the House, had visited the nursery – the same that had once served as my father’s – on the top floor.

  I don’t remember this occasion. I do remember crying when I was taken away from a more comforting room, my home for the first year that we spent there, in the lower part of the House.

  To a small child, the House was not welcoming. When I described my father’s early days there, I was drawing on my own fear-laden memories. The Byrons, with no children of their own, had made no provisions for reassurance or comfort. The top floor of the House, when I arrived, was as it had been in the 1920s, a chilly, desolate region, shut off behind doors.

  Later, after the birth of my brother, our parents tried to brighten the garret-like rooms and narrow passages. My bedroom walls were papered with garlands of roses; the nursery acquired a tall bookcase, an electric fire, a rocking chair and a big, old-fashioned doll’s house with rooms large enough for a small child to hide in. To a visitor, climbing the stairs from below, the children’s wing must have seemed cheerful enough.

  A birthday note delivered from the top floor.

  ‘We’d have kept you nearer if we could,’ my mother says. ‘But there wasn’t any room, not with a nanny and nursemaid. And you were happy. Don’t go pretending you weren’t. You never stopped reading! Whenever I came upstairs, you were always sitting by the bookcase.’ I ask her if she remembers the time – I can still see her turn and go crying down the stairs – when she asked if she might take me into the garden at some hour that had not been previously arranged. The nanny, even though she did not particularly like me, grasped my hand and squeezed it. (‘Whose little girl are you?’ Squeeze. ‘I’m Nanny’s little girl. I want to stay with Nanny!’)

  ‘Nasty little thing,’ my mother says. And she does, for a moment, after fifty odd years, still look distressed. ‘Why would you ever say something like that?’

  I’ve no idea. I only remember the pleasure it gave me to see that I could cause pain to a parent, somebody who seemed, at that thwarted age, so beyond my reach. ‘I think’, I say, ‘I wanted to punish somebody. I was so scared.’

  ‘Scared!’ My mother puts on her sensible face, the face of a woman who has no truck with terrors. ‘What nonsense you talk! What did you think was going to happen?’

  ‘I didn’t know. That was what frightened me so much. I never knew.’

  Three terrors ruled life on the top floor: ghosts, fire and floods.

  The ghosts, as I now know, were imaginary. Then, however, I had complete faith in my father’s story of the pregnant housemaid who hanged herself from a skylight outside the little room in which he, a quarter of
a century later, would sleep. My father had been subjected to this story himself; the room in which he had shuddered was now mine. (No record, other than the testimony offered by my father, suggests that a hanging actually took place.) Like my parent before me, I felt the ethereal housemaid’s soft skirt brush the back of my neck each time I went down the four steps beneath the skylight; like him, I heard her weeping in the night, whenever the wind was up, and trembled.

  I had other companions as well, of my own making. I believed in a sharp-faced, skinny-tailed devil who pressed his face to my window each night after the curtains were drawn, hoping that I might have forgotten to shout, before I jumped into bed and pulled the sheet up over my head: ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ I believed in witches who hid in the garlands of roses strewn across my newly papered bedroom wall. (Poor sight helped to foster this delusion.) I believed in the power of the moon to strike me and lay me under a spell.

  If, during the long night, I wanted to visit the lavatory, I had first to pass through the hanged housemaid and then, after opening the door on to the high carved staircase, dodge past the long, treacherous moonspokes that barred the way to the top floor’s only watercloset. Bedwetting, although frowned on, often seemed preferable.

  But pictures present a different story; here, I look extremely cheerful in my new party dress.

  Fire, fear of it bred in him by his uncle, was my father’s greatest terror.

  Years later, laughing, he told me about Sammy FitzRoy’s visit to the House in 1928, when he himself was five years old. Sammy, Anna’s wild younger brother, was in unusually subdued spirits: never lucky, he had just burned down a house – his own mother’s – by dropping a lighted cigarette. Charlie Byron, frantic with alarm, imposed a smoking ban during his stay at Thrumpton; Sammy, for the first six hours of his visit, was the model of abstinence.

  A pre-dinner glass of sherry brought on the crucial return of the urge. Sammy felt for a cigarette, remembered orders, shook his head, looked firmly around the room and announced that he was in need of a rest. An hour later, climbing the stairs to bed, my father encountered his uncle Charlie kneeling outside Sammy’s bedroom door, nose to the keyhole, hands clasped, as if engaged in prayer. (Which, as a devout clergyman, he may well have been.) This performance was repeated, every evening, for a week before Sammy, bored with frightening an old man out of his wits, called for his car and left.

  I’m not sure whether my father realised how close his own behaviour came to that of his uncle. I witnessed him undertaking precisely this ceremony whenever my brother or I invited any smokers to stay. If caught hovering outside one of their bedrooms, he was unembarrassed and unrepentant. The House, and its safety, came first.

  The burning of Nuthall Temple was the first fire I heard about. Described by my father with horror – what could be more wicked than the wanton destruction of a family home! – it took on the proportions of a mythic devastation. A gaudy oil painting by Frank Brangwyn (or someone who admired his style) hung on the flight of stairs leading to the top of the House. It showed flames belching out of a black fortress, with figures streaking across the canvas in front of them, orange-tipped by the firelight. This, I supposed, was the Temple.

  I had never visited the site of the Temple. All I knew was that it had burned to the ground in the course of an afternoon. If a stone temple could be destroyed in a couple of hours, little imagination was needed to guess how quickly a house like our own, comprised largely of wood, plaster and brick, could be reduced to ashes.

  Fire threatened our lives. Fire kept our household warm. The windows of the House looked out upon country fields, but this was also coal country, ten miles from the notorious pits of D. H. Lawrence’s Eastwood. Sometimes, sitting beside my father for the half-hour before bedtime when he would read aloud from The Pickwick Papers, I might see a glowing lump of coal jump the low brass fender and land upon the library carpet. My father always noted it in time, but what, I wondered, if nobody had been watching? What if the fireguard were one time forgotten, or if it should fail to prevent the leap of a smouldering fragment?

  Mrs Bardell shrilled with fright at Mr Pickwick’s innocent invasion of her bedroom; I couldn’t pay attention. Fiery tongues were already licking their way across the carpet to the bookshelves and out towards the closed door. The encyclopedia in the nursery bookcase had informed me that fire burns through a seasoned plank of timber in just four minutes. In four minutes, the flames would be past the library door and enfolding the fruit-crowned wooden pillars at the foot of the staircase that climbed all the way up to the last oak door that shut off the nursery wing and the sleepers who lay trapped inside it.

  We, my brother and I, would burn in our beds.

  Not true, my mother says. We children were never in danger. We had The Chute.

  The Chute, hacked out of a thick interior wall on the recommendation of the local fire department, led directly from my bedroom into our nanny’s bedroom cupboard. Here, it was imagined that Nanny, neatly dressed and ready for action in any emergency, would receive her little charges with open arms and carry them down a blazing staircase to safety.

  I had no faith in this scenario. Nanny, a gaunt, anxious, passionate woman with the improbable name of Ruby Rose, often expressed the wish that she might have a little boy of her own. She didn’t feel the same way about girls. My brother was clear-eyed and pink-skinned. He had a mischievous smile and a mop of flax-yellow hair. I knew which of us Nanny Rose would save.

  Our parents were not unloving; they certainly had no wish for their children to burn. Further precautions were eventually taken. An iron bar was attached to the nursery windowsill. Inside the window, a hemp rope lay coiled, neat as a cobra within its wooden box, long enough to stretch three storeys down to the flagstones at the foot of the House. Today, I wonder whether either that box or that rope could have survived a fire; at the time, all we objected to was the sensation of coarse hempstrands rubbing our tender thighs and clenched palms raw as we practised the descent, drilling against our father’s stopwatch. (Later, despatched to a school that rated pupils by their ability to saddle up a horse or hurl a ball through a ring, I shone at the gym exercise that required skill in rope climbing.)

  My father’s terror of fire conflicted with his aesthetic views. He was terrified of a fire; still, he could not bring himself to get rid of the old flexes, plugs and fittings that had been part of the House for over seventy years. They reminded him, he said, of its golden age. At the time of his death, most of the electric fittings spat blue flame when they were connected to plugs. Edwardian flexes, long stripped down to naked wire, trailed potential firelines across the wooden floors. One bulb, still burning dimly at the dark end of a passage, had 1926 printed on the underswell of its globe.

  Water held even more terror than fire. In books of mythology, I read about Neptune, who struck the earth with his trident to raise the floods. Rivers raced across the plains, and waves lapped the mountain peaks, until all was a shoreless sea and fish swam in the branches of the trees in the woods.

  Water rose from the dreams of my childhood like a smiling thief, stifling each room in turn with clammy outstretched fingers, filling the cupboards and drawers with the stench of river mud, burying the House as deeply as the trunks of tall willows that are sealed from sight by a sudden tide of winter floodwater, the whole reflecting, at its loveliest hour, the salmon blush of early evening, of twilight at Thrumpton.

  Our parents were not unloving: here, I help my mother to steady the old-fashioned perambulator which holds my younger brother.

  Fire, like ghosts, lived in the dark world of nightmare. Water was real. Each winter, as the river spilled over its banks and joined the lake, water seeped up from the earth and into the warren of cellars beneath the House, spreading a net of slime below the polished floors of orderly rooms. This was the season in which the smell of death taunted the ceremonious life of the House with the impolite stink of rotting fish.

  This, in earlier times, wa
s when the House’s owners took long, quiet holidays on the Riviera, for the protection of their lungs.

  The life of our ritual afternoon walks was changed by floodtime. To the west of the House, the flat fields lay under a surface of grey silk, a shroud for the puffed corpses of rabbits that had been either drowned or poisoned by hostile farmers. Walking carefully on the hillside above this seasonal lake, my brother and I avoided looking at the bobbing bodies. Instead, we admired the high clumps of yellow bubbles that danced across the surface of the floodwater. We thought of these billowy products of pollution as pretty playthings. Watching the waters spread, we imagined the House as an ark, ourselves as its crew.

  Once, escaping from the House, the two of us strayed off the village road, down to the river, and into flooded pastureland. Trying to turn back, we found we could not stir. Greedy river currents sucked and swirled around us, pouring grey water into the funnels of our small rubber boots, holding us fast, as if under some spell. Wailing, we reached towards the high bare hands of the willow branches at the edge of the field, begging them to bend and to save us.

  Eventually, the pasture-owner waded in and scooped us up, a howling child pressed each to a broad hip, as he strode back to land and up the drive to the House.

  Afterwards, we talked about our escape. Would our father have ventured into a flooded field to rescue us? We were unsure.

  In the event, we found we had never been missed.

  Water was at its most bewitching in the landlocked Midlands during the deceivingly brief season of high summer and parched fields, when a stroll beside the river brought cooling thoughts. This was when my brother and I wandered down to the far end of the park. Here, at the foot of a cliff of red clay, lay a secret world: a small marina, complete with lock, bridge and a sweetshop selling aniseed balls and fizzy lemonade. Here, hours slipped past as easily as the trickle of licked ice cream while we watched the lock gates swing closed and the watery pit begin to surge, bringing a bargeload of cheerful river-travellers up to the level of the path. Red-checked curtains twitched forward to mask the cabin rooms from sight; saucepans rattled; glasses clinked. Hungrily, we watched the bargees chug away, adventurous and free.