In My Father's House Read online

  Lack of furniture aside, Dick and Vita were overjoyed to be settled at last in a home of their own. Hill House, a low, creeper-clad house near Godalming in Surrey, was where my father George was born in 1923, when Vita was thirty-seven. The celebrations at his birth were overshadowed by a sudden deterioration in Dick Seymour’s health. He felt pains in his side; his appetite waned; he experienced difficulty in breathing. Lady Falle wrote to suggest that her son should try eating less; Vita, remembering her father’s slow death, insisted that Dick must see a specialist. The verdict was alarming; Dick had weak lungs, asthma and a bad heart condition. A change of climate was prescribed.

  May, my father’s paternal grandmother, seen here shortly before her death in 1942.

  He got it. Dick’s career had been on hold since his return from Bangkok. In 1924, he received a new posting. The London specialist, when he heard that his patient was being sent to La Paz, expressed concern. No middle-aged invalid suffering fom breathlessness and a weak heart should be expected to take up a new life fourteen thousand feet above sea level, where gasping babies turned blue and strong men fainted if they walked uphill at normal speed. La Paz was a deathtrap for the weak. The appointment was surely a mistake?

  There had been none. Dick, conscious that his old enemy had become a force to reckon with in the Foreign Office, was convinced that William Tyrrell had chosen him for the post.

  The appointment was for an indefinite period. Hill House would have to be sold. The two older children, Leo and Alexanda, aged twelve and eleven, would remain at their English schools and spend holidays with relations. But what, Vita wondered, was to be the fate of her precious baby, the child she had lovingly named in memory of her friend George Vyse, a cripple who had died at the age of thirty?

  It’s possible that her memory of George Vyse’s fragility and early death heightened Vita’s sense of her baby’s need for special care. Her first impulse was to take George with her to Bolivia; advised of the potential risks to his health, she racked her brains for a solution. George was such a delicate little creature: who would be worthy of such a precious charge?

  Dick’s mother – bright, hard and engrossed in the social round – was out of the question. Violet Wilson, Vita’s younger sister, had gone to India with her husband; Anna, married at long last, but possessing no children of her own, seemed an unlikely candidate for baby care. This left only Vita’s mother.

  Ismay FitzRoy had been living alone for almost ten years when, in 1920, she fixed a widow’s eye on the dapper little baron who was courting Anna, her eldest daughter. It was noticed that Ismay had started to wear unsuitably girlish hats. A sharp-tongued cousin commented that rouge must be responsible for such uncommonly flushed cheeks in a woman past her prime.

  Her children were outraged, and not just by the rouge. As a mother, Ismay had never shown much affection for her eldest daughter; surely, now that plain, awkward Anna was thirty-five, she could be allowed some happiness? Charlie Byron, a shy bachelor who had recently inherited a handsome country home from his aunt, was an ideal match. True, he was capricious, old-fashioned and nearing sixty; nevertheless, he owned a house in London and two estates, in Essex and Nottinghamshire. Unlike his grandfather’s cousin, the poet, of whom he stoutly disapproved, this Lord Byron possessed a character of flawless respectability.

  Charlie Byron had never been much troubled by women during his placid residence as the rector of Langford, on his family’s Essex estate. Forced now to decide whether flirtatious Ismay or bashful Anna would make the better chatelaine for his new home, he dithered, and declined to commit himself to either. Ismay became imperious; Anna, seeing her last chance of marriage slipping away, grew tearful. Urgent family consultations were held; Anna’s oldest brother decided to take the initiative. Escorting his nervous sister to Nottinghamshire, Charles FitzRoy rang the bell at Thrumpton Hall, greeted his host, ordered him to take Anna into the billiard room – and bolted the door. It was winter. The billiard room was chilly. Lord Byron, growing a little shrill, demanded that he should be released. Charlie FitzRoy sat still, and waited. An hour later, Anna emerged, an engaged woman. Six months later, she became Lady Byron.

  George FitzRoy Seymour’s maternal grandmother, Ismay FitzRoy, in 1918, shortly before she set her cap at Charlie Byron, the bashful rector of Thrumpton.

  Ismay FitzRoy was displeased, but undefeated. If she was not to have a husband, she intended to have fun. Sammy, her youngest son, a raffish lad of twenty-three with a weakness for drink, was ready to help.

  From a distance, I can warm to the old lady’s spirit when I read her accounts of vagabonding around England with young Sammy in a splendid touring car, known as ‘the hooter’. As a mother, however, Ismay did not strike Vita as a suitable guardian for her beloved George. Time was drawing on, and her options were limited. It was true that Anna had no children and no experience of caring for them. Thrumpton was, nevertheless, equipped with servants, a large garden and, should George fall ill, a trustworthy doctor in the next village. Anna sent word that her husband was willing to give little George house room, so long as he caused no disruption.

  By the end of September 1924, Vita had made the decision that would prove so momentous in shaping my father’s life. As his parents set off for the Liverpool docks in preparation for their journey to South America, George, by then a toddler of almost two, smartly dressed in a white wool knee-length coat, and clinging tightly to the hand of his nursemaid, climbed the staircase to his new quarters, a dimly lit range of rooms on an upper floor known as the Barracks. Thrumpton Hall, a large and isolated house in south Nottinghamshire, was to be his home for the undetermined future. He was, as Charlie Byron impressively informed him, the only child to have lived there for three hundred years.

  2

  EXILE

  Travelling slowly towards La Paz, Vita was torn between longing and dread for the voluminous, close-written letters from her mother that now formed her chief contact with the family. Reports on their destination were discouraging. La Paz was said by everybody to be quite frightful, Ismay FitzRoy wrote. Angry not to have been put in charge of her grandson, she added a grim report of his situation. Poor little George! She had seen him at Thrumpton and noticed how hard he clung to his nurse’s hand when he was brought downstairs. The house was enormous and fearfully gloomy; scarcely a lamp in the place and oozing with damp, not at all suitable for a child so prone to coughs and colds. Still, George looked sweeter than ever. Such a pity that Charlie Byron and Anna insisted on keeping him hidden away in those dreary rooms on the top floor. What fun he might have had, living with his grandmother!

  Ismay’s calculated words had the desired effect. ‘Beloved little George,’ Vita wrote in anguish. ‘I can’t bear to feel I’ll never see him in frocks and rompers again.’ Twisting her knife harder in the next letter, Ismay wrote that she had not at first wanted to mention how eagerly George had run out of the Byrons’ house to greet her, or how he burst into tears when he saw no sign of ‘mummy’. Shedding tears herself, Vita was tempted to wonder if she could abandon Dick on their arrival, and take the next steamer back to Liverpool.

  I have kept a photograph of Dick and Vita Seymour in their old age. Snapped in their daughter’s garden on a summer afternoon, they sit beside each other on an iron bench. Dick looks wistfully at the camera; Vita keeps her hands clamped together on her lap. You could cut the photograph in half and never guess that these two had once been a couple.

  ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to be on that boat to La Paz with her,’ my mother says. ‘She could be quite cruel, you know, when she was angry.’

  My father’s parents as I remember them, an old couple, seated side by side but not companiably.

  I answer that I think either of us would have been equally irate. Vita, after all, had married a man who seemed likely to offer her a pleasant future in Paris or Berlin, not indefinite exile on the other side of the world. My mother, who has been reading a book about diplomatic wives, takes the vi
ew that Vita should have accepted her fate with a better grace.

  ‘But it must have been so frustrating for her, feeling they deserved a better posting and not being able to do anything about it.’

  ‘Why did you say that was?’ my mother asks. ‘Something to do with Dick’s temper?’

  ‘His temper?’

  ‘Dreadful!’

  I’m astonished. I was ten when my grandfather died. I can remember his wheezing chuckle, the slow blink of pale blue eyes, enlarged by the thick lenses of old-fashioned glasses. Nothing more. There’s no image of violence in my childhood memories of him; there’s no evidence of it in the wistful memoir he began to write while he was in La Paz, or in the mild letters written earlier, when he was at The Hague during the War and longing to be reunited with his family. He wrote to Vita of his bewilderment at the way he was being cold-shouldered by the Foreign Office, and of his love. ‘I miss you and the children dreadfully,’ he told her; ‘I wish the time until we meet could go a little faster.’ Dick Seymour sounds kind and a little sad, just as he always seemed to me.

  And yet. I’d forgotten something that may be relevant. Not long before my grandfather’s death, my father dropped me off to have tea with the old couple at their London flat. The live-in companion opened the door and told me that Mr Seymour had gone to bed for the day. He was too ill to be seen. I was to go into the front room and take care not to talk too loudly.

  Sitting by the window that looked out across a flint-grey Thames, I played a game of snap with my grandmother and sipped the diluted orange squash which always tasted different in London from the country, brinily chemical. I asked if I might go to the bathroom. As I walked towards it, something darkened the end of the passage and rushed at me with a roar.

  Confusion and rage reddened the air; my fear could not have been greater if a mountain bear had sprung out of a cupboard and shown its claws. Turning, I fled back into the safety of the front room. My grandmother stood with her back against the window, looking down at me with an anxious stare that warned against making a fuss. I picked up a book and opened it, pretending to read while the words ran together in a jumble of black markings. Behind me, I could hear my grandmother and the companion, whispering urgently. They glanced at me and left the room. Listening at the door, I heard two deep, harsh shouts, heavy movements of something being dragged, and a moan. I sat down quickly and began turning the pages again. It seemed as if my grandfather’s place in the flat had been usurped by a frightening stranger, who had to be controlled.

  The memory is a striking one and my mother insists that Dick Seymour could be terrifying when enraged. Still, his writings offer no confirming evidence. Even Ismay, who clearly despised her son-in-law, never mentioned his temper in her troublemaking letters to Vita. Call it family loyalty if you like, but I think my grandfather was shabbily treated.

  I think, too, that Vita’s attitude may have hindered his advancement. My grandmother was not the sort of woman who had stiffened the Empire’s backbone. Prepared to loathe La Paz before even setting foot in Bolivia, she kept a record of life there that made Job’s trials sound lightweight. The rain never stopped. The house was hideous. The housekeeper had no knowledge of English or French (surely Vita could have tried to learn a few phrases of Spanish?); the high altitude kept them both in a state of constant exhaustion.

  Marooned in a country she detested, among people with whom she found no common bond – she despised the Bolivians and made no attempt to hide her boredom from the ladies of La Paz’s diplomatic colony – Vita lived for the postbag and for news of her children. Leo and Alex were said to be flourishing, but how could she bear to think of George, so young still that he might – this was her greatest fear – forget her and begin to look on Anna as his mother?

  She had lost him; she was convinced of it. She had left him behind because she feared the risk to a delicate child’s health of such a journey. Now, regretting her decision, she fumed at the unhappiness her husband’s stalled career had inflicted. Everything, she confided to her mother and to Anna, was so unjust. The one treat she had keenly anticipated, a train journey to Lake Titicaca, Cuzco and Machu Picchu, ended disastrously when Dick turned blue from lack of breath and had to be transported back to La Paz and confined to his bed for a month. All requests for proper medical treatment had, as usual, been ignored. Dick’s new deputy, meanwhile, put in a plea of ill-health and was granted permission to leave on the spot. Embassy servants carried him to the train on a stretcher; when Vita peered though the window of his compartment, she saw the lively young deputy sitting upright and laughing at her as he waved goodbye.

  Surely, Ismay FitzRoy wrote, dear Lady Falle could use her political connections? Was Dick entirely without – she might as well have said ‘guts’ – influence over his own mother? Timidly, Dick wrote to beg for help and to admit, with characteristic understatement, that life in Bolivia was becoming a little bleak. A word to Lady Falle’s friend, Mrs Austen Chamberlain, could do so much for them (Chamberlain was the new Foreign Secretary to Baldwin’s government). Any assistance that his mother could offer them to cover the older children’s school bills would be gladly received.

  The response was worse than either he or Vita could have feared. Lady Falle was afraid that she did not have a penny to spare for school fees, but she had done as they wished. She had spoken to the Chamberlains. The news was excellent: Dick was offered an immediate transfer: to Bogotá. Such a chance would not come again; she urged him to accept.

  Dick was a dutiful son; even so, he flinched. ‘We never had a moment’s thought about refusing,’ Vita confided to her diary, ‘but the shock of such an offer after Bangkok and La Paz was really awful.’ Their colleagues agreed; better to stay in La Paz than sink to Bogotá.

  The final straw for Vita came in a letter from her mother. It brought the news that dear little George now addressed Anna Byron as ‘mummy’. She had suffered enough. Booking a passage home, she left her husband to solace himself with the memories of his schooldays. Arriving at Liverpool after a year’s absence, she was greeted by a letter from Anna. George had just returned from a weekend with Ismay. ‘And directly he got into the hall,’ Anna wrote with tactless pride, ‘he said: “I’ve come home now!”’

  How old do you have to be to form a passion that will endure for a lifetime? The answer in my father’s case seems clear. Abandoned at the age of two, he had given his heart to Thrumpton. No human love would ever displace it.

  3

  THE HOUSE

  My mother has found a newspaper cutting about Mrs Wescomb’s Winter Ball, held at Thrumpton Hall in 1840. The gushing prose (‘a scene of profuse hospitality and festivity . . . a most elegant supper . . . the graceful pleasures of the dance . . . a brilliant display of loveliness and beauty’) was churned out for every grand event of the time. What startles us is the news that over a hundred people were shepherded up the grand carved staircase to dance in what the newspaper describes as ‘the upper drawing room’.

  ‘A hundred people!’ My mother and I gaze at each other, open-mouthed. The frail wooden floor of this pretty rose-pink reception room has collapsed twice in the last seventy years. The idea of fitting a hundred dancers, not to mention Mr Quick’s quadrille band, into such a delicate structure, is beyond our imagining.

  The Wescombs had plenty to celebrate in 1840 and no serious concern for the cost of a collapsed floor. A bachelor uncle had just left Thrumpton Hall to Miss Lucy Wescomb, a girl of seventeen. At the age of twenty-one, she could claim her estate; until then, Lucy’s mother was formally in charge of: one large red-brick Jacobean house, a thousand acres of land, four farms, thirty employees, fifteen cottages, and three lively, strong-willed daughters in their teens. As if that were not enough, Mrs Wescomb was still supervising Langford, another estate of a thousand acres in Essex, east of London, where the girls had all grown up.

  Lucy and her favourite sister later married two brothers, descendants of the celebrated Lord Byron. Since Lucy had
no children, her nephew became her heir. Charlie Byron – my father’s uncle – was born on the Essex estate in 1861; fifty years later, he was still the bachelor rector of Langford, patiently waiting to inherit – but only for the duration of his own life – a house he scarcely knew.

  ‘So cruel, those life tenancies,’ my mother sighs. ‘When you think of having all the work and care of upkeep, and always knowing that your home isn’t your own.’

  I glance at her. Thrumpton now belongs to me; does she mind living as a guest in a house to which she gave the best part of her life? Is that what she’s thinking? Or is she remembering the Welsh castle in which she grew up, always supposing that her parents owned it, until the day the owners returned, and my mother’s family were forced to leave? I can’t tell. It’s not always easy to read my mother’s thoughts; she’s had too long to learn how best to hide them.

  My father was brought up on tales of Lucy Byron’s reign. To me, she sounds a monster; to him, and to the Thrumpton villagers who told him their memories, Lucy was a character. Why should they have minded when she refused to have a pub in the village, when beer was always available from the Hall’s own brewhouse? Hemming and repairing Lady Byron’s bedsheets didn’t strike them as inappropriate work for girl pupils at the village school. Neither could she be blamed for having an eye for a handsome lad (Lucy’s seven footmen were strikingly good-looking) or for keeping her title after her husband died and she married her cousin Mr Philip Douglas. Everybody knew her as Lady Byron; her tenants and servants shared her pride in the name. Mrs Douglas didn’t convey the same glamour.