In My Father's House Read online

  A less passive father would have reined in such precocity and told George to act his thirteen years. Dick, predictably, did nothing. Dick’s mother, meanwhile, expressed delight at her grandson’s enthusiasm for titles and connections. It was only two years since May Falle herself had become, at a price, Lady Portsea, a baroness. May was enchanted to hear about George’s interest in the future of Thrumpton, and the FitzRoy lineage. ‘We share an interest in the rock from which we are hewn,’ she told him approvingly.

  George had observed that his grandmother generally got what she wanted. In the summer of 1936, he told her how upset he was at not being allowed to go to Eton that autumn with his cousin, Oliver. May was outraged. How could her son be so foolish! Of course, George and Oliver must attend the same school. Had it not occurred to Dick what damage might be done to a young boy by such insensitive behaviour? To Eton George must go: in fact, she herself would underwrite all the costs of the dear boy’s education. Reminded that she had done nothing of the kind for George’s older brother, Lady Portsea stood her ground. All the more reason, she argued, that she should help this time.

  This is the only occasion I have been able to find on which Dick Seymour took a stand against his formidable mother. Contributions would be welcomed, he told her, but a decision had already been made. He himself had been extremely happy at Eton (he did not quite say that he had been far happier there than at home). He did not, however, feel it right to send George to a school to which (thanks to May’s refusal to help) he had been unable to afford to send his elder boy. George had done well enough in the exams to enter Winchester in the autumn of 1936. He was an intelligent boy; Winchester was a fine school.

  The decision was made.

  May, on whose support her grandson had depended for a reprieve, was silenced.

  5

  A PUBLIC-SCHOOL BOY

  I’m visiting Winchester on a sultry summer afternoon, hoping to find why my father hated his public school. So far, I’m charmed.

  Nestling behind the grey bulk of the Cathedral, the College hides its beauties as cunningly as Oxford and Cambridge conceal their lovely quads and cloisters. I’d forgotten that Jane Austen died here, in a modest house staring out at a high, hard, pebbled wall. Hawkins (Chawkers to the Wykehamists) is the house in which my father began life at the College in September 1936. The housemaster’s tall, fresh-faced son opens the door. When I explain my quest, he leads me upstairs to peep into the airy dormitories, and down to the Study in which forty boys still carry out their evening work in wooden booths known as Toys. Hawkins House, on a sleepy day in early August, feels unthreatening. The ceilings are clean and high; light pours through large windows. There’s no shade of the prisonhouse here, nothing sinister.

  ‘Anything else you’d like to see?’ asks the friendly boy. I shake my head, feeling foolish. I’m baffled.

  Back to the book of essays, then, to see what can be deduced from a schoolboy’s first year of compositions, complete with the Master’s comments.

  The Master had to struggle not to lose his temper with his new pupil. He asked for an essay on comic writing and was rebuked for liking Wodehouse (‘Personally,’ George informed him, ‘I do not particularly admire his style.’) The Master also liked Scott; George expressed scorn. Scott, in his own opinion, was greatly inferior to Harrison Ainsworth: ‘I challenge you to find another book written in such beautiful English . . . There is no other but Windsor Castle.’ This time, the Master showed his annoyance: ‘Nonsense!’ he wrote. The subject of ‘Relations’ gave rise to one of my father’s most florid pieces, inspired by memories of Charlie Byron’s sermons. ‘So does death part us all,’ he wrote. ‘Our relations who love us die and we stay on, and we in our turn have to leave those whom we have helped. So time goes on, and I think a befitting ending for this humble effort at entertaining the reader is the following verse of a favourite hymn of mine: “Time like an ever-rolling stream . . .”’

  The Master had begun to lose his temper; angrily, he reminded George Seymour that he was thirteen, not seventy, and ordered him to alter his style. My father didn’t change his style one scrap. The next set topic was ‘Friends’, a tricky one for a boy who had made none. Tellingly, George expressed a preference for artefacts. Pictures, in his opinion, were more faithful than friends. ‘They will still give you all the pleasure within their power. They do their best.’ For him, there was only one prevailing certainty, one friendship that could never falter, never betray: the House. This is true friendship, he wrote: ‘a place of happy memories and a place which seems in itself to welcome one on one’s homecoming.’

  Perhaps, on this occasion, the Master felt a little sorry for a boy who had no friendships to celebrate. ‘Rather ponderous,’ he wrote.

  The more wretched my father grew at school, the more fiercely he clung to the House. Whatever the subject he was given to write about, he always managed to turn it into a eulogy to the place he thought of as home. (Evelyn Gardens was never mentioned; you would never guess, reading these schoolboy essays, that their author had a London connection.) Trying his hand at story-writing, he remembered Nuthall Temple’s fate and wrote of the destruction by fire of a beloved family home. The features of Thrumpton – tall red-brick chimneys, stone gables, a lake, a library overlooking a garden – are easily identifiable.

  At fifteen, my father at last began to acquire a few friends. All of them were younger; all were impressed by his tales of a princely mansion in Nottinghamshire. (Again, not a word had been breathed about Evelyn Gardens.) ‘You rotten worm, aren’t you ever going to ask me to that house of yours?’ wrote one.

  It might seem obvious why my father didn’t want to ask friends to stay. Thrumpton was not his home. He feared exposure and ridicule. Another reason helps to explain why his essays dwelt on the House with such intensity. He had, for no reason he could understand, been banished.

  It’s possible that Charlie Byron, a capricious old gentleman, was playing cruel games with a nephew who adored his home; it’s more likely, since some distant Byron cousins had revealed themselves just at the time George went to Winchester, that he was rethinking the future. Charlie’s first duty, as Thrumpton’s owner, was to his own family, not his wife’s; the Byron cousins had a greater right to his property than Anna’s nephew. This, it seems, is why Charlie decided to bring an abrupt end to George’s holidays at the House. Other members of Anna’s family paid regular visits during this period; only George was excluded. This unexplained act of ostracism, it seems fair to assume, contributed to my father’s memory of the Winchester years as a time of extreme unhappiness.

  Death provided a solution to Charlie Byron’s quandary. The cousinly claimants both died young; George, who may never have known how seriously his hopes of inheritance had been threatened, was restored to favour in the summer of 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war. A rambling and affectionate invitation was issued; he was welcome again. He could visit Thrumpton for as long as he wished.

  When war was declared, my father was sixteen years old, with a year of schooling left to run and no expectation that his secure world was about to be overturned. Oliver FitzRoy was preparing to follow his older brother to Cambridge; my father – his academic record at Winchester was poor – had no such plans. He had only one clear objective: occupation of the House he loved and to which he had been welcomed back. Lulled by the tranquillity of a golden autumn, he made a leisurely round of favourite haunts, cycling around the sleepy little villages, fishing by the lake, wandering through the high grass of ungrazed fields where, for hours on end, he lay gazing up at an empty, unthreatening sky.

  Writing a letter of reassurance to his mother (he had taken to addressing Vita as ‘Boo’ because, he told her, it made her seem nearer to his age), he took care to relate which of the Thrumpton roses were in bloom, and to tell her that the House – his House – had never looked so lovely.

  War? What war? By the time he left Winchester in 1940, he was convinced that all would be resolve
d. (This certainty, although George did not say so, was based on Charlie Byron’s politically naïve reading of international events.) All that mattered, here and now, on the summer evening of his letter, was the scent of tobacco plants, the deepening blue of the sky, the rich rosy glow of sunlit brick. He felt so safe here, so at peace. Dearest Boo: she must not worry. All was well.

  6

  A GOOD WAR

  As a child, I used to pray, deep into my pillow, that my father would die. I never had such violent feelings about my mother. The only part she played in my fantasies of paternal obliteration was that I wanted her to marry a more glamorous man.

  A portrait of my mother, red-haired and slender in a wedding-dress of oyster satin, with the archaic smile favoured by Botticelli lending a curve to her cheeks, was painted a year after her marriage. It hangs in one of the rooms of the House that is always shown to visitors. Below the painting stands a framed photograph of the artist, Anthony Devas. Strangers, drawing the obvious conclusion, have often asked if the photograph is of my father. I told them, until I reached my teens and acquired a conscience, that it was. I liked to bask in their admiration of the artist’s handsome face and to hear them find some faint resemblance to my own. I liked to think it might be so, that my newly married mother had conducted a secret affair, of which I was the unacknowledged product.

  ‘Was he as gorgeous as he looks in the photo?’ I ask my mother.

  ‘Anthony? He was wonderful-looking. Just like the photograph. He painted that picture of me at his studio in Chelsea. He used to take me to lunch afterwards, somewhere in Sloane Street. Augustus sometimes came along. It was all such fun.’

  I stare at her, dazzled by this easy jump into the past. ‘Augustus John? You never told me that before. What did you talk about? Did he try anything?’

  She smooths the bright cover of her book with a gardener’s hands, square and strong. ‘Who, Augustus? I’m not sure he would have dared, not after he fell out with Mummy about the picture he did of her, the one she didn’t like. I did know him already, of course. He came and drew us all at Chirk, in the war.’

  My mother has grown lively. Her book forgotten, she’s ready for a chat about life in the Welsh castle where she grew up. ‘Are you writing about Chirk yet? I was thinking – there’s so much I ought to tell you. Are you going to say anything about when Kipling came to stay with us, and Shaw? And you mustn’t forget about Chesterton and Belloc!’

  I’ll have to remind her that this is not to be a book about her family, but her husband. ‘I haven’t reached Chirk. He’s only just left Winchester.’

  ‘Better hurry up, if you want my memories,’ she calls after my retreating back. ‘I won’t be here for ever.’

  I’m suddenly full of the wish that she might be just that. It’s taken all of the ten years since my father’s death for my mother to blossom back to brightness as she emerges from the emotional bolthole in which she buried herself in order to survive. I used to hope only that her death should be merciful, quick as a blink or a dropped stitch. Now, I can’t imagine life without her. I want her never to die.

  I chose Anthony Devas for my imaginary father because he looked so attractive. I also chose him because he looked, even with a paintbrush in his hand instead of a sword or a gun, as though he could play a military hero; my father did not. As a grown woman who has fallen in love with the House and its history, I’m ready to admire the tenacity with which George Seymour pursued his grand obsession; as a small girl, observing him with a hard judgmental eye, I saw unmanliness in my father’s caprices and fits of petulance. I noted and disliked his readiness to use emotion to score a victory.

  The fathers I admired never cried. Not in public. They were bluff, capable men who lived up to their military titles. One girlfriend acquired at boarding school was dear to me less for herself than for her father, a nobly moustached colonel with a crop of thick white hair and long cheeks striped pink by desert suns. I liked his tales of war. I winced when his wife shouted at him for boring the child stiff, my dear. She’s heard it already. We all have. So we had, but never often enough. I wanted to take this old warrior for myself, to be the privileged recorder of his valiant deeds. If he could only be my father! (Once, while he was teaching me how to tack a sailing-boat across a small river near their family home, I found the courage to whisper my secret wish; the colonel answered by giving me a complicated set of instructions to keep me busy until we moored and went ashore for lunch. At which point, kindly patting me on the shoulder, man to man, he said that he was going to forget anything I might wish I hadn’t said. ‘But I do—’ He strode ahead of me, letting the garden gate swing shut behind him.)

  My love for the colonel was heightened by the fact that he and his family lived in a cheerily modern house on a town street. The house was in no way conspicuous. It was neither pretty nor ugly. It represented all that I wished for, at an age when nothing about a journey to London appealed to me so much as a drive through the cosily interchangeable streets of Mill Hill and Hendon and Finchley. There was such comfort in conformity when I was a child, in the Fifties, such danger in being perceived as different. I didn’t, dear parents, mean to annoy you when I prayed to live in a house just like the one near the local garage, where a dressmaker worked at a sewing machine in the front window, seated in a theatre set of white lace curtains pulled back with red silk cords. Her pocket-sized lawn was bordered by pink and white flowers; her front door was picked out in contrasting tones of cerise and powder pink. I loved her home. I wanted nothing to do with a monster house filled with creaks and ghosts and pictures with censorious eyes. I longed to shrink our singularity to the colours of an entrance door or to the choice of which tree, flowering cherry or weeping ash, should throw a shadow-cloak over the pavement.

  I know why I craved a soldierly father, and why I wanted to be part of that world of reassuring sameness. I don’t know why or precisely when I began to wish my father dead. The urgency with which I muttered my secret prayer, night after night, still causes me to feel guilt. My mother doesn’t find it strange.

  ‘Children do find it easy to wish their parents dead; it’s not just you. I often thought like that about my mother, you know. It’s not a crime.’

  I do know when I lost my respect for him.

  The incident was sparked by some private grief of his in which I, a little girl with fine, mouse-brown hair held back by an ‘Alice’ band, had no share; my memory is only of the shocking spectacle of a grown man crying. He wanted, he said, to kill himself; all reason for wishing to live had gone. Sitting beside him, I looked sideways at his bent head and the tears falling on to his knees. Sobs blocked my throat when he told me that we would all be happy when he was dead. How could he think such a terrible thing? Weeping, I flung my arms around his neck and hugged him, rubbing my cheek against his. Too young to understand that the atmosphere of drama thickening the air was meat and drink to a nature such as his, I agreed to the pact on which, still sobbing, he insisted. If he promised to do himself no injury, I, too, must swear never to make an attempt on my life.

  That set me off. I only had to picture my body, stiff and cold as a starched shirt, to feel emotion swelling to hysteria.

  Tenderly, he stroked my hair. ‘You and I are too alike, my darling. We feel these things so much.’

  ‘I won’t. I’ll never – I swear it! But don’t – please don’t.’ I couldn’t speak the words. Carefully, he mopped my blotched cheeks with a freshly pressed handkerchief smelling of limes; gravely, we shook hands on our agreement. I went to bed tearful but exalted. It’s not often a girl of nine gets to save her father’s life.

  Readers will spot the flaw: if I wished him dead, I should have welcomed this unexpected answer to my prayer. But suicide comes under another heading; the word, even to a child, is heavy with horror. Suicides, in the myths and folktales on which I feasted during raids upon the tall nursery bookcase, were among the damned, buried at crossroads, forbidden to lie in churchyards. I could wis
h my father dead by accident. I could not wish that he should take his life.

  My father was in the best of spirits the following day. When I asked, a little reproachfully, how he was feeling, he looked surprised. The moment at which I lost respect for him was the one in which I saw that he had no idea what I was talking about. It was all words.

  In fact, as I came to understand, my father placed a high value on his life. To approach him with a cold or cough was an act of unforgivable selfishness; to feed him with a dish which threatened to play havoc with his capricious stomach was tantamount to threatening him with murder. Far from killing himself, my father would have been happy to provide the reasons why he, of us all, should be spared. How could we get on without him? Who but he was indispensable to the survival of the House?

  An old-fashioned phrase slides into my head. You wouldn’t want to be in a trench with—

  ‘You’re being unfair,’ my mother says. ‘He never had the chance to fight. We don’t know how he would have behaved.’

  ‘We don’t know. But—’

  She shakes her head. I’m not going to win her assent to this. But I wouldn’t have cared to be with my father in a situation where one life had to be sacrificed. It wouldn’t be his.

  Even as a child, I knew that the war was a bad subject. He was happy to play us a crackling record of Churchill’s speeches to the nation, but direct questions were never welcome. The closest I came to knowing what part he had played in his country’s defence was the clipped information that he had been ill. I heard my mother describe how a bad-tempered sergeant made her scrub canteen floors with a sanitary towel; from my father, I heard not a word. No word of the bombs, of the Blitz, or the dead: nothing.