In My Father's House Read online

  THE BOY

  Travelling home from La Paz, Vita agonised about the possibility that she had forfeited her son’s love.

  There is no doubt that her desertion of him had been deeply felt. Abandoned once, George never allowed her to forget how much she was adored. (How did Dick feel on the day in 1944 when he was invited to admire a handsome oil painting of Vita for which his twenty-one-year-old son, not he, had paid a hundred guineas? ‘Daddy didn’t say much,’ gives the answer in George’s diary.) Aged four, George spent a month’s pocket money on buying a pair of finches after Vita’s pet budgie died; a year later, fiercely resentful of the father who had returned from Bolivia to usurp his place, he wrote imperious letters from his bedroom in Evelyn Gardens, headed ‘extreamly urgent’ and summoning his mother to come upstairs ‘at once’ to share his bed, ‘because I am so fritened’. Such demands invariably won her consent.

  ‘Honestly!’ my mother exclaims. ‘Imagine what would have happened if I’d asked my mother that!’

  ‘I can see, though, after she left him at Thrumpton – he must have felt so insecure about her love.’

  ‘He had Anna running after him as well,’ my mother says. ‘And silly old Dar.’ (She’s talking in the language of family diminutives: by Dar, she means Ismay, Vita’s mother.) ‘They all spoiled him. The things he got away with! Do you remember the story about his putting tin-tacks on the nanny’s chair? Vita thought it was frightfully amusing.’

  ‘So did he. That’s why he was always telling us about it.’

  We’ve been chatting about my father this morning while wrapping and putting away – for good, I hope – six or seven delicate sets of breakfast china. I never understood why we had to keep so many of these ready for use; it is only this morning that I have learned my father wanted his weekend house-guests to be offered morning tea and biscuits with a wake-up call. Their bedroom curtains would be drawn, the fire switched on, a bath drawn: delightful, if you happen to be visiting a hotel that specialises in Edwardian weekends. I ask my mother whom he had expected to provide this elegant service. She grimaces.

  ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Oh, quite!’

  What age did he dream that he was living in? (This was during the 1990s.) And who, by that time, when he had almost cut himself free from aristocratic society, were the guests for whom a woman in her seventies was expected to play parlourmaid?

  ‘It’s how it was,’ she says, laying a flower-sprigged saucer in its nest of paper, ready for storage.

  A photograph taken in 1931, when my father was eight, offers a pointer to the way things were to go. Taking part in a charity matinee to raise money for The Women’s League Services for Motherhood (the celebrated ballerina Lydia Lopokova was the main draw of the day), George Seymour strutted on to the stage of the Cambridge Theatre as Lord Charles FitzRoy, a royal page in a tableau of Queen Victoria’s drawing-room assembly. His mother, priding herself on the family connections, had chosen George’s role with care. She did not stint him on the cost of a costume: a splendidly frogged silk coat, a feathered hat and silver-buckled shoes guaranteed that her son would be noticed and admired. Intoxicated by his transformation into a Lord, George began to take a keen interest in his ancestry. Vita, who kept small prints of Charles II and the Duchess of Cleveland, his mistress, on her dressing table, was happy to indulge him. From the age of eight on, my father proclaimed his Roy-al connection on all possible occasions. There were Fitzroys – and there was George FitzRoy Seymour, an altogether superior being in the opinion of himself and his doting mamma.

  This photograph of Lord Charles FitzRoy (his grandfather) was the model for my father’s appearance on stage in 1931.

  Vita seems to have shed few tears over the older two children she had left at boarding-schools when she travelled to La Paz; she was grief-stricken by the departure of George, aged six, to a prep school in Kent. ‘The loss must fall heavily on you,’ a sympathetic headmaster wrote in a letter that can’t have lightened her heart with the news that her puny son showed little confidence in himself, was useless in all forms of team sports, and had made no friends.

  I’m ready to sympathise. ‘Cream’ and ‘Dregs’ were the two categories into which newcomers to my own boarding school were divided by their superiors; a list of those to be envied (Cream) or despised (Dregs) was displayed each week on the notice board, and studied by all. Being cast among the dregs was a lesson in humiliation that nobody forgot. I don’t suppose my father’s school was any kinder to its misfits.

  He could have taken a hint from Oliver FitzRoy, his cousin and schoolmate. Oliver was a good-looking child, the beau ideal of boyhood, generous, sporting, open-hearted. My father worshipped him. He glued himself to Oliver like a shadow, hoping for a share of the sunlight through which his fair-haired, sleepy-eyed cousin strolled with an air of untouchable ease. Oliver glows out of my father’s prep school letters like a burnished prince, the victor on the cricket field, the hero of his set.

  Why was my father so disliked? Was it for his selfishness? (Other boys cheerfully shared out the spoils sent to them from home; my father squirrelled away his stores of sweets and cakes, to be consumed in solitude.) Was it because he was sickly and skinny? (He loved the school san; it was, he told his mother, the only place at school where the food was good, the bed comfortable, and the rules relaxed.)

  Or was it, perhaps, because he struck his schoolmates as a prig?

  Dick, since his return from La Paz, had begun writing light verses which, from time to time, he circulated around the family. Vita let it be known that she found Dick’s hobby irritating, an excuse to close the door on his wife and claim that he was busy. She took more pleasure in her son’s talent for poetry. George’s verses were also relayed around the family, after being copied out, for clarity’s sake, by a loving mother’s hand. Dick’s poems were playful; George’s were pious. One, composed when he was seven, told of his wish to become a horse and pace along God’s holy path; in another, he hoped that no naughty deed would deprive him of a coveted seat near the Saviour’s throne. His schoolmates, in less of a hurry to meet their Maker, kept George at a distance; the English master, reluctant to discourage such ardent feelings, praised a promising literary style.

  Vita, my father’s adored and indulgent mother, as he first remembered her.

  Abandoned once again by his family and bullied by his peers, my father used his pen to salvage some form of control over trying circumstances. Correspondence, assiduously maintained and elderly in tone, became his weapon. Making notes for a letter he planned to send to his aunt at Thrumpton, George reminded himself to sympathise with Anna about the coldness of the village church, and to ‘enlighten’ her about the unsatisfactory nature of heating provided at his school. ‘Ask her for butter,’ he added to his memo.

  Obsessively prompt himself, George expected payment in equal coin. By the time he was ten, he knew just how to make his displeasure felt when a correspondent slackened. Writing to his parents, he observed that Leo, his older brother, must be very busy indeed with dances and his new car (a snappy little MG) since he found no time to write; every morning, he told Vita, he looked at the school letter shelf in the vain (the word was fiercely underlined) hope of receiving a note from his sister, Alex. Running short of new victims in the family, he addressed himself to God, ‘as no one ever seems to write to you’. But even God was not to be trusted; George ordered him to write his answer clearly (underlined) and promptly (underlined): ‘Please have it there by tomorrow.’

  God failed to respond, although Vita lovingly preserved the letter: George’s earthly family found it wise to respond at length, and with speed, if they were not to be rebuked.

  A form of power had been discovered. A habit had been formed.

  Fifty years later, my father was still hard at work. Crouched at his desk in a corner of the hospitable Thrumpton library on a Saturday afternoon, he peppered the desultory conversation of his guests with the a
ngry rattle of a tiny Olivetti typewriter. They could talk and lounge; he, their host, had vital work to do; a pile of letters – to the rural dean, to his stockbroker, to his lawyer, to an unsatisfactory fishing tenant – was underway. By four in the afternoon, determined to catch the last post-collection of the day, he was in top gear, cramming stiff little sheets of double-spaced print into envelopes emblazoned with a phoenix perched upon a crown. (‘I was so intrigued by the crest,’ one of the grander cousins wrote to him. ‘I’ve been puzzling over its origins.’ A message that can be translated into blunt English as: You bloody little fraud.)

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ reproves my mother. ‘Edward the Sixth was the phoenix arising from the ashes of his mother Jane, who died in childbirth. Henry VIII gave it to the Seymours for their family crest.’ Listening, I can hear my father tutoring her in the sacred connection, another of those comforting bloodlines by which he linked himself to the throne. He sits on the right hand of God the Father. And then, remembering an attention-seeking child who used to boast to visitors to the House of her own descent from kings, I cringe. Oh mon semblable, mon père, I’m every bit as bad as you.

  As a snob, I can sometimes match him; as a correspondent, George Seymour had no equal. Pouring letters out fast as water flowing from a tipped bucket, he expressed disgust at those slackers who failed to answer by return of post. What did these people do with their time? Had they no manners at all? Only the blessed select, possessing either titles or fast motorbikes, escaped his censure; they, lucky creatures, could answer as slowly as they pleased. The rest of us were less leniently treated: if we hadn’t replied within the day, it proved that we were heartless, careless, ungrateful or even, when his spirits were especially low, all three.

  You couldn’t win. He wrote like a survivor from Edwardian times, when five daily posts allowed letters to fly to and fro as fast, almost, as email. A prompt answer engendered an immediate response; with it came a strong hint of trouble in store if you failed to answer – again – within the day.

  And so it went on.

  A present from the Byrons almost compensated for the miseries of a dormitory bed, bullying schoolmates, and absence from the country house George loved. Their present was a reward to a nephew so affectionate that he had asked if he might spend the Christmas of 1933 with them, rather than at Evelyn Gardens with his parents. Charlie and Anna were eager to show their appreciation. Vita had tipped them off that George wanted to invite his cousin Oliver to stay at Thrumpton, but that he was embarrassed because Oliver had a bicycle. The Byrons consulted with each other and reached agreement: George must not be outshone. When their nephew came down to breakfast on Christmas Day, Shotbolt wheeled his gift up to the table: a Kildare bicycle, bright blue, with a bell. Oliver also had a Kildare, but this one was finer and larger, the new hot model for 1934. Forbidden to bring it to school, where he had looked forward to showing off his treasure, George made the Kildare the subject of a protest poem (‘You aren’t aloud (sic) a bicycle, for fear that you might crash’). Privately, he comforted himself with the prospect of showing his treasure off to Oliver during the summer vacation, when he had been promised he might spend five glorious weeks at Thrumpton.

  George FitzRoy Seymour in 1933, a slightly priggish prep-school boy.

  The Byrons’ gift offered their nephew a rare opportunity to boast about something other than his blood. Aged ten, George was growing embarrassed by his parents’ modest means. He minded that his mother wore dowdy clothes, not couture; an outing with a schoolmate’s mother in – he swaggered to his parents – ‘the biggest and newest Chrysler you have ever seen’, sharpened his embarrassment about their own, inferior motor. Writing to his mother before sports day, he begged her to buy a new hat and to park their battered Hillman out of sight. (‘For goodness sake don’t bring that sky-blue car into the drive because the oldest car that anyone else has seems to be about three years, and if you brought in our old bus I should think we would be the laugh of the place.’)

  George’s parents, as he was forced to realise, lacked the means to buy a Chrysler; a brand-new bicycle almost made up for that disappointment. The day on which he was given the Kildare, he noted in his schoolboy diary, had been the most exciting of his entire life.

  Oliver FitzRoy’s summer visit to Thrumpton provides another marker in the stages of my father’s attachment to the place. Vita had given her son the 1934 edition of The Cyclists’ Diary, complete with useful tips about repairing punctures (ignored) and on places to visit (carefully studied). The July pages of the diary are dense with reports of journeys undertaken, and places seen. He already loved the House and its park; cycling proudly alongside his cousin’s inferior Kildare, he became familiar with the row of fishermen who crouched on the riverside tow path; with the road leading away from the village to a plump wooded cone where the last of the English witches had allegedly been burned at the stake; with the smoke-grimed churches of Clifton, Ratcliffe, Kingston and Strelley, in which alabaster knights and their ladies lay stiffly asleep, a veil of reddish marble hooding their eyes.

  Oliver left behind an addicted cyclist. Week by week, George notched up the miles: seventy-six in one, eighty-two in another. The marriage of his parents was going through a stressful period; glad to escape, Vita became her son’s travelling companion. Reading his records of their trips, I’m amazed by the distances they covered: in a single month, mother and son cycled across the Fens, up to the Lake District, down to the Norfolk coast, and west to Cornwall.

  Was it the easy freedom of those days that my father rediscovered in his rejuvenated middle age, roaring through the empty blackness of the Fenland night and out to the shores, the headlights of his latest ebony-flanked machine glaring into the dark? Was it?

  Growing up in the rooms at the top of the House where my father spent his first years, I formed my reading habits at a nursery bookshelf. Five foot across and climbing up to the low ceiling, the shelves seemed as appetising as a box of well-wrapped sweets, stuffed with fairy tales, myths, poetry, encyclopedias and – I’m not sure where these came from – some sinister little German stories with gothic print and inky woodcuts, of which the most vivid showed two bad children being roasted alive, trussed up on a garden spit. (A warning, I supposed, to my brother and myself of what would become of us if we misbehaved.)

  These were my father’s books. None of them captured his imagination so completely as Antony, a memoir presented to him by Vita in 1936, when he was thirteen years old.

  My mother detests Antony, despite the fact that my father chose to give her a copy shortly after they met. ‘Ghastly drivel,’ she says, ‘and so snobbish! I can’t think what your father saw in it.’

  Antony was a tribute, written by Lord Lytton shortly after his eldest son and heir, Antony Knebworth, was killed in a freak flying accident. Spoiled by doting parents, Lord Knebworth appears to have excelled at sports, disliked hard work, and treated women badly. My father thought him perfect. As soon as he finished reading Antony for the first time – he returned to the book each year, with undiminished pleasure – he persuaded Vita to accompany him on a twenty-mile cycling trip from Evelyn Gardens out to Knebworth House, where his hero had spent his boyhood. Lord Lytton, the bereaved father, was away; a gardener allowed the visitors a brisk walk around the icebound garden before their long journey home.

  My mother wonders if George’s obsession with a good-looking sportsman offers us a first glimpse of what he was to become. She may be right; we agree that it’s strange for a boy of thirteen to have shown no similar interest in girls. I’m more intrigued by the fact that Vita chose to give her son Antony, a book about a glamorous aristocrat, the heir to a title and a splendid house, in 1936. This was a year of seismic changes in the ranking of the FitzRoy clan; was Vita encouraging George to glory in his own connections? Was she so foolish, and so irresponsible?

  It’s possible. Vita, too, was a snob. One of my relatives still remembers how angrily she refused to yield her seat to Princ
ess Margaret at some charity performance of a play. Vita would not do it, she said, because she was better born and had more right to the seat than that common woman. (I don’t think you need to wonder, my relative added in an acid postscript to her letter, why Dick Seymour’s diplomatic career failed to prosper!)

  In 1936, a cousin’s premature death resulted in Vita’s brother, Charles FitzRoy, becoming the tenth Duke of Grafton and owner of Euston Hall; his sisters were given appropriate upgrades. My father, reading Antony, felt newly at home in this lordly throng; in his school address book, he wrote out a list of all the noble ranks and placed an asterisk beside those to which he had the closest links. Schoolfriends were proudly informed that his uncle had become a duke; tongue in cheek, surely, one wrote to congratulate him for such a thrilling piece of information.

  All George now lacked was a title of his own. This would cause him pain until the end of his days. His yearning for one is apparent in the Debrett’s entries where, year after year, he linked himself to the nobility (‘father himself great great grandson of; mother the sister of; wife the daughter of . . .’) Links, however tenuous, were better than nothing at all.

  ‘I love your Euston.’ My father was nineteen when he wrote that to his mother, after a visit to the Duke of Grafton’s new Norfolk home. At thirteen, shortly after Vita gained her title, George launched a mission to see that she looked the part. Evelyn Gardens was not smart enough for a duke’s sister; helpfully, George bombarded his parents with ideas for improving their London home. He spent his holidays researching suitable carpenters and decorators to refit and paint it. Instead of a birthday present, he wanted Vita and Dick to do up their shabby bathroom. (George had already picked out a pink-and-white wallpaper which would, he assured them, prove ideal.) Alex, his older sister, was persuaded to split the expense of buying Vita a fur coat, secondhand, in which, he proudly noted: ‘Mummy looked très grande dame’. Sending home dutiful accounts of the school sports day, he digressed to mention an elegant set of velvet curtains he had seen for sale, quite cheap, just the thing to give their drab dining room a lift.