In My Father's House Read online

  ‘Just like you,’ my mother says when I comment that this was rather hard on Lucy’s second husband. ‘Catch you changing your name.’

  ‘That’s different. I’m a writer. It’s my professional name.’

  ‘Lucy employed over thirty people,’ my mother observes. ‘What’s unprofessional about that? Anyway, she doted on Philip Douglas. I don’t suppose he minded.’

  Didn’t he? I remember the story my father loved to tell, of Lucy sitting bolt upright each Sunday morning in the front pew of the little village church she’d spent a fortune on making her own. (Her first step had been to order all evidence of the House’s previous owners to be removed from the walls and banished to the bell-tower.) A plump lapdog lay between the iron hoops that fanned out her long skirt; above the feathered crest of his wife’s black crepe hat, Mr Douglas, the rector, spoke mildly to the parishioners of God’s message. Lucy, who needed no advice from God, took out her gold repeater watch and stared at it. At midday precisely, even when her husband was still in mid-sentence, she thumped the tiled floor with her ebony cane. The congregation rose for the last hymn; the rector, putting away his notes, crept back down the pulpit steps.

  ‘Dreadful old woman!’ my father said, beaming approval.

  It was good of Lucy to build a block of alms buildings for the poor, and to allow the villagers the freedom of the estate for their Sunday afternoon strolls. I’ve also heard how a sick coachman was dismissed after twenty years of service for allowing Lady Byron to catch a cold from him. I’ve heard of children being ordered to curtsey and doff their caps whenever she passed by, and of a family being evicted from their cottage because they missed a week’s rent. But time has softened the sharp edges in village memories and these stories have to be coaxed into the light. The old ladies I interview want to bathe the past in gold. They’ll only tell me how grateful their parents were for Lady Byron’s garden fete and the Christmas party up at the House, with supper for all the children of the village, their presents stacked ready and beautifully wrapped under a candlelit tree. Lucy lived in a handsome home cared for by twenty-two house-servants, while her village workforce shivered in unheated cottages with outside privies: the contrast doesn’t appear to bother their descendants at all.

  ‘Of course it doesn’t,’ my mother says, sounding strangely like my father. ‘Village people didn’t like to travel in those days. They lived at home, they married locally, and they all worked for the big house. It was a good system. They weren’t just servants, you know. They were our friends.’ And she tells me about the laundrymaid everybody in the village knew as Aunt Alice. ‘She was still wearing Lucy Byron’s underwear when I came here,’ my mother says. ‘Beautiful, lace-edged. You’d never see it outside a museum today. Lucy left every stitch of it to Alice.’

  I don’t know what to make of this. Did owning Lucy’s lace bloomers and being addressed as a relation make up for years of scrubbing linen and for hands chafed raw with bleach and carbolic? Alice seems to have thought so, and so does my mother.

  ‘We were friends,’ she says again. ‘That’s what your generation never understand.’

  Lucy Byron had been dead for over a decade when my father arrived at Thrumpton for the first time on a damp autumn evening in 1924. Her presence still governed the House. Lucy’s last portrait looked down the Carolean carved staircase which, on her orders, had been coated with treacle-black varnish; her ugliest contribution to the House, a Victorian billiard room, squatted beside it like a crematorium; her laurels and yews filled the garden with clumps of darkness. The household remained buried in the nineteenth century, as it had been when Charlie Byron, Lucy’s nephew and heir, first visited it as a boy. This was how he was content for it to remain. This was the rigid form from which my father took his blueprint for the future.

  ‘Fancy if they take electric power through Thrumpton and you have it and the telephone!’ Vita wrote to her sister from La Paz in 1925. Anna, after four years of marriage, was still struggling to accustom herself to life in a house that had no gas, no telephone line, no electricity and no mains water supply. From the pulpit in Thrumpton Church, her old-fashioned husband warned the congregation against the dangers of progress; in Charlie Byron’s home, a jangling row of bells, each pealing an identifiable note, called servants to their duties around the House throughout the day. A single oil lamp was carried into the drawing room at dusk; George’s nurse, bringing her charge down to wish his aunt and uncle goodnight, was given a small tallow candle to light their way back to the top floor.

  Anna Byron, my father’s childless aunt, sitting out on a garden wall at Thrumpton in 1928. George FitzRoy Seymour, already adopted as the child of the house, was five years old.

  And yet this was the House that won my father’s heart. I have trouble in understanding how this happened. Some of the details of his first years there are farcical: I can’t imagine the feelings of a small boy who is woken each morning by Miss Sarah Death (a housemaid) and who has his small shoes polished by Mr Percy Crush (a footman). Others make me shudder. I know that Anna Byron was under her husband’s thumb, but how could she have allowed a frightened child to be left alone, night after night (Nurse Ethel preferred to spend her evenings chatting in the Servants’ Hall with Mr Crush, Miss Death and Mr Shotbolt, the butler), in a chilly, carpetless room at the top of the House? The Byrons themselves slept in cosier quarters on the floor below; up at the top, so my father always told me, when the wind rattled the windows, he could hear the sound of a girl crying. Sixty years earlier, in Lucy Byron’s day, a housemaid, ordered to leave when she got pregnant, had hanged herself from the skylight outside his bedroom door.

  ‘Rubbish!’ my mother exclaims. ‘Absolute rubbish!’

  My mother has no time for ghosts. I think those desolate and unattended nights may help explain a fear of solitude so acute that my father could not, in later years, even walk to the end of the village without company.

  This doesn’t help. I’m not looking for an explanation of his terror, but a reason for the passionate attachment he formed to the House. From the time he first spoke of it as home at the age of three, his love of Thrumpton dominated my father’s existence. He wedded himself to the place with a passion that knew no reserve.

  How did it come about? Letters that he wrote later use ‘an oppressively Victorian upbringing’ to justify his taste for a less orthodox life. Oddly, it was one of the most Victorian aspects of his life there that had most entranced him.

  ‘Shotbolt was my ally,’ he wrote. ‘Shotbolt was my friend.’

  Mr Shotbolt, the Byrons’ butler, was an asthmatic ex-serviceman who had been gassed in the trenches. (He died in 1938, aged less than fifty, of a lung-related condition.) It was the butler who, having discovered that music was the best way to check a small boy’s tears, took out his tin whistle. Shotbolt taught my father to sing, whistle, and dance a jig: “Pop Goes the Weasel” and “I Ain’t Nobody’s Darling” were their star turns in the Servants’ Hall. (‘It is so nice to hear of my little angel being fond of music and dancing to the rhythm,’ Vita wrote wistfully when Anna reported on George’s improved spirits.)

  On his off-duty afternoons, Shotbolt obtained permission to take Master George out in the park. From Shotbolt, my father learned that a badger will share its sett with a fox’s earth, and that the hills at Thrumpton hide shards of bright pottery left over from Roman times. On long Sunday afternoons, when Shotbolt went fishing down by the ferry, my father sat beside him on the bank, watching the play of light on water and listening to stories of the butler’s own country childhood, out on the Romney Marsh.

  ‘Very poetic,’ my mother says suspiciously. ‘He didn’t tell me all that.’ I suspect that she’s forgotten, for my father wrote it all out and typed it up, as a loving tribute to the man who first made him look on Thrumpton as his home.

  Shotbolt introduced him to the land; a young electrician took him deep into the bowels of the House and, perhaps, gave him the sense that it could b
e mastered.

  Anna used all the persuasive power of which she was capable to make her old-fashioned husband see that life could not be lived by oil-lamps and candles for ever. In 1927, worn down by her insistence, Charlie Byron gave his consent: the House would be wired. (The image of 230 volts of power coursing below wooden floorboards was too dreadful to be supported; sternly, he insisted on the installation of a transformer to cut all power to half-strength. The House might have become electrified; thanks to its owner’s decision, it grew no brighter than in the old, oil-lit days.)

  Charlie Byron, looking quite dapper at the time of his marriage to Anna FitzRoy.

  It was my father’s good luck that the electricians who undertook the job brought with them a fourteen-year-old apprentice. Billeted in the village with the family of the girl he later married, Jack Carter was a gamekeeper’s son, a square-chinned, thickset boy with untidy reddish hair, wide lively eyes and, when amused, a grin that sliced into his cheeks. Jack Carter enjoyed exploring the estate as much as Shotbolt had done, and was as willing to share his knowledge of lairs, holes, birds’ nests and ferrets.

  The occasion for which my father still remembered Jack Carter fondly, after forty years, had nothing to do with woodland wanderings. It was the day when the young electrician offered to show him the House’s hidden world, on the other side of a small door at the back of a bolted cupboard on the top floor.

  This, given later developments, might seem to lay the ground for suggesting that my father was given a stealthy introduction to sex as a furtive pleasure by his new friend. Having known Jack Carter for much of my early life, I’d take a bet of any size against that possibility. This was an innocent escapade, a treat to cheer a lonely child.

  The space between the floors is the best-kept secret of old houses, a secret trail that can be followed, on hands and knees, from the rafters down to the cellar. I’ve crawled through that door myself as a child, hunting for lost treasure. Lying flat and wriggling forward through long low galleries laid with rushes and propped with blackened timbers, you become part of the fabric, dusty with its history. Odd objects lie here, dropped through the floorboards a hundred years earlier: a pencil stub, a necklace’s lost clasp, a scrap of carved wood. Listening, you catch from above the muffled sounds of life – heels clacking across a floor, a bucket being set down, a smothered laugh, a door being shut. Hidden away from the light, you smell wood, straw and mystery. I don’t think my father ever read The Borrowers. Climbing down into darkness and crawling behind Jack Carter’s sturdy boots into the heart of the House, he became part of their between-the-floors world.

  I’d like to think that it was here, lying alert and quiet while the coils of wire were carefully unreeled towards the next electric point, that my father made a pact with the sinews of the House that possessed him so entirely.

  Or was it made two years later, in 1929, the year in which a Thrumpton neighbour’s home, one of the loveliest in England, went down in flames?

  ‘Nuthall Temple!’ My mother shakes her head. ‘Now, you really are romancing. What on earth does Nuthall have to do with your father?’

  These events took place almost twenty years before her marriage. But when I remind her that her husband was at Thrumpton when Nuthall burnt down, and of the horror of fire which he picked up from his uncle’s own terror, she hesitantly admits that there may be a connection. She might only be humouring an obsessed daughter’s whim: I can never tell.

  Nuthall Temple was a ravishing house, built in the eighteenth century by the same team who had made Chiswick House an exquisite homage to Palladio. Beautifully situated, overlooking the lake from which the stone for its columned portico had been quarried, the Temple’s chief glory was a vast octagonal room, soaring to the full height of the house and decorated with some of the finest rococo plasterwork in the country, a playful riot of swags and garlands.

  Visits were exchanged on a weekly basis between the two houses during my father’s first years at his uncle’s home. Charlie Byron of Thrumpton and Robert Holden of Nuthall were both latecomers to the task of running large estates; Holden’s advantage was that he had a son and heir who loved the Temple and longed to live there.

  Death duties made this impossible. Set at fifty per cent in 1918, this tax on inheritance had just been raised once more when Robert Holden died in 1926. Advised that he could not afford to pay and stay, Holden’s son agreed to an auction. He had hoped to save his home from destruction by selling it as a country club; nobody, unfortunately, wanted to make the commitment. In 1927, less than a year after Robert Holden’s death, the Temple’s contents were sold piecemeal.

  The auctioneers stripped the house of all its glory; at the end of the day, nothing remained but a magnificent shell and the empty octagonal hall, its breathtaking plasterwork still intact. A few enthusiasts urged that a rescue mission should be undertaken before further damage was done; their pleas were ignored. Nuthall Temple, from that moment, was a disaster waiting to happen.

  Little help was on hand for the owners of country houses and their estates in the post-war years. Farming had helped to maintain them in the past; the ending of wheat subsidy in 1921 heralded twenty years of agricultural depression. Increased death duties didn’t help. The National Trust was concentrating its limited resources on the preservation of landscape, not houses; no system yet existed for the listing and protection of property that was still in private hands. A new Tory government championed the rights of a property-owning democracy; country houses, with their large empty parks, offered opportunities for development in a time of housing crisis. Nuthall Temple stood just beyond the fringes of Nottingham, a city ripe for expansion.

  The end came on a warm summer’s day in 1929. ‘Nuthall Temple Burned,’ ran the local paper’s headline: ‘A Wonderful Sight’.

  The newspaper’s own reporter helped to start the blaze. Contacted by a developer who had bought the Temple and wanted to build on its site, the journalist agreed to lend a hand in exchange for exclusive rights to the photographs. The two of them doused the Temple walls with paraffin; at midday, the villagers strolled up the drive to see what was going on. The developer threw in the first lighted brand; the reporter followed suit. In an hour, the Temple was on fire. Cameras snapped as the whole of the West Wing collapsed. The Music Room, gracefully decorated with Adam plaques, stood as a roofless wreck for a minute or two before dissolving into a shimmering wall of heat; the cupola of the great Octagon came down into the flames in a cascade of golden fragments. Swaggering among the smoking ruins, a group of boys from the village posed as conquerors.

  Charlie Byron was horrified. Robert Holden had been his closest friend in the neighbourhood. Miserably, Charlie blamed himself for Nuthall’s fate, for not having rallied up support; fearfully, he dwelt on the possibility that Thrumpton might meet a similar fate. This, in the late summer of 1929, when my father was six years old, was the main topic of conversation.

  Vita and Dick were both back in England by this time. Dick had accepted a part-time desk job in the Foreign Office; Lady Falle reluctantly contributed towards the purchase of a family house in Evelyn Gardens, west of her own grander home in Eaton Square. Formally, this was George’s home; informally, he was spending a large part of each year at Thrumpton.

  The Byrons had grown too attached to their small nephew to want to relinquish him when Vita returned to England in 1925; an understanding was reached which allowed George to continue paying long visits to Thrumpton. This was an arrangement that suited everybody. Vita, glad to see him growing rosy-cheeked in his spells away from the city, began to hope that Charlie Byron might be looking for a suitable heir; Anna, regretting the absence of a child of her own, liked having a little boy to spoil and hug; George relished the sense of being universally loved.

  Charlie Byron was already in the habit of talking aloud at meals to his dog Bingo, a large and shaggy poodle. As George grew old enough to hold conversations, he displayed a ready sympathy and understanding for his un
cle’s worries that Bingo, even at his best, failed to show. When Nuthall Temple burned down, Charlie lectured his nephew on the importance of protecting the home they loved from faceless villains: the local council; developers; a land-hungry government. George took it all in as earnestly as if he was his uncle’s colleague, rather than a child of six. His mannerisms were already copied from his uncle; in the larger family, George was spoken of as being ‘quaint’.

  George loved his parents; it was simply the case that a tall, featureless house in West London could not compete against the charms of life at Thrumpton, where, indulged and adored, he was now allowed to do as he pleased. Gradually, he was developing a sense of his own small and slightly pompous person as the son of the House, the heir apparent. ‘I want to live at Thrumpton and care for the village,’ he wrote in his diary for 1934. He was eleven years old. By then, the sense of commitment was absolute.

  Was it the shocking destruction of Nuthall Temple that first put the idea of himself as the saviour of Thrumpton into my father’s oddly unchildish mind? Was that the moment when he first understood that a House cannot survive the failure of an owner’s love?

  My mother claims that I’m being imaginative. I remember how haunted my father was by his fear of fire, how he patrolled his home on winter nights, ensuring the extinction of matches, candles and cigarette butts, pulling iron guards forward to protect wooden floors from a lively spark or smouldering log. I remember too, after his death, coming across a folder of cuttings about the Temple. One photograph had been circled with a heavy black pen. It showed a few broken chunks of wall that had escaped the fire. Sic transit gloria, my father had written underneath, doubtless congratulating himself that Thrumpton had, thanks to his single-minded endeavours, escaped such a fate.

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