In My Father's House Read online

  The same hunger to conform that made me yearn for a small suburban home fuelled my longing for a father with a military record of which I could boast. It mattered, in the Fifties. Memories of war were close; the recent past was as rich with action as a storybook. Heroes had fought at Dunkirk, endured starvation and torture in prison camps, come home with medals and rank that paid tribute to their courage. But if it depressed a myth-fed child to learn that her father had spent his war years working in a provincial bank, how much more humiliation must it have caused to him?

  This was the error I made. It was true that my father was not physically courageous. However, since he never was put to the test, why should I assume that he lacked the moral fibre to act with honour? Faith to do your duty was his family motto: given the chance, mightn’t he have acted on it?

  My mother has unearthed an old photograph that she thinks will interest me. It shows two young men in army uniform. These are my father’s first cousins, Lord Euston and his brother, Oliver FitzRoy, and the picture was taken late in 1943. The wistful look in their eyes may have something to do with the fact that they lost their mother when they were children, or with the more recent loss of a much-loved stepmother. Only a month has passed since then, and their lonely father has already chosen her successor. Their future feels threatened.

  Hugh, the older of the two brothers, is about to set off for India with the Grenadiers. As the son of a duke, he’s due to be given an interesting time, on the staff of the viceroy. Oliver, the boy my father thought of as his soulmate, looks too young to be tested in the skills of leadership. His is a sweet face, soft, but guarded. He, too, has just joined the Grenadiers. In a year’s time, he’ll be sent out to fight in France.

  Hugh Euston (later eleventh Duke of Grafton) and his younger brother, (my father’s idol) Oliver FitzRoy, in 1943.

  I like these studio photographs. There’s another in this folder of Leo, my father’s older brother, also serving as a Grenadier. Alex, his sister, is giggling at the camera on the day after her engagement in 1939. She’s twenty-five, and glad to be settling down in Norfolk with a tall, agreeable young officer whose poor sight has spared him from being sent abroad on active service.

  Caring for Alex through her first pregnancy gave my grandmother a reason to stay out of bomb-blasted London in the first months of the war. Dick Seymour, staying on alone at the tall red house in Evelyn Gardens, took new life from the sense of constant danger. Telling his wife about his daily walk to ‘the club’ in Carlton House Terrace, he joked about the plane fights overhead, the falling bombs, the roar of defending guns firing up from the backs of lorries along the borders of Hyde Park and Piccadilly. ‘You know how I hate agitations before breakfast,’ he wrote, with an almost visible twirl of his umbrella at the impertinent Italian pilots he longed to see brought down.

  ‘Blasted Ice-Creamers!’

  For the first time in his life, Dick Seymour and his mother were enjoying a state of mutual admiration. Lady Portsea was impressed by her son’s jaunty indifference to danger, and grateful for the regularity of his visits to her home in Eaton Square. He, in his turn, took pride in the old lady who, during some of the worst months of bombing raids, still climbed into her black Victoria carriage for a daily afternoon outing. The renaming of her two coach-horses was her only concession to an altered life: Fred and Ginger had become Churchill and Sarah.

  On the subject of my father, however, they were at loggerheads.

  Lady Portsea had always doted on her grandson. His announcement, in the autumn of 1940, that he intended to take on one of the Thrumpton farms, won instant support. ‘I love to think of you at work on the land – Mother Nature rewards those who cultivate and care for her,’ she wrote on paper newly topped with a coronet. (I think I know whom to blame for my father’s inordinate love of crests and coats-of-arms.)

  Dick Seymour was less sanguine. ‘I can’t understand how George can be so foolish,’ he wrote to his wife. He was disappointed already that their son had shown no wish to follow his FitzRoy cousins to Cambridge and take a degree; couldn’t the boy at least be persuaded to take a course in land agency and learn how to make a living at a richer man’s expense? Perhaps a job could be found for him at Ragley Hall, home to the head of the Seymour clan, or even at Euston, if Vita was willing to raise the idea with her brother, the Duke?

  Dick, it is clear, had failed to grasp what was obvious to the women of the family. George, after leaving Winchester in the summer of 1940, had sped like a homing pigeon to the House he loved and which Charlie Byron was encouraging him to look on as his heritage. University had never interested him – few men could use the words ‘clever’ and ‘intellectual’ with such complete disdain. He had no wish to be employed at Ragley, Euston, or anywhere else; his plans for the future did not extend beyond the boundaries of his uncle’s estate. When it was explained to him that a seventeen-year-old, with no experience of land management, could not be given a farm for free, he simply lowered his sights and proposed to work for one of the Thrumpton village tenants. Harvesting, and planting sugar-beet, the principal victory crop in the Midlands, required no special skills; a boy who was known to be Lord Byron’s nephew was unlikely to be overworked or ill-treated.

  Nobody who knew my father ever doubted that he had a will of steel. This was his first chance to use it. He got his way.

  ‘No need to sneer,’ says my mother. ‘The farms were fearfully shorthanded during the war. He was being useful. And, besides, what else could he have done?’

  ‘Taken the course to learn land agency?’

  ‘Your father! Leave Thrumpton to help run somebody else’s estate? Can you imagine?’

  Slight though the remaining evidence is of my father’s year of working on the land, the effect on him was profound. Bombs fell on Derby, Nottingham and neighbouring fields; another hit the local electricity station and blew out all the windows of Clifton Hall, the nearest big house. At Thrumpton, the only evidence of war was the placing of a searchlight on the hill and a request from the local shepherd to bring his flock down to lower pastureland. Every Friday, faces scrubbed, boots polished with spit, the farm tenants walked up to the Hall to pay their rent; every evening, when his work was done, my father walked through the park and back, with the sun dazzling his eyes, towards the House. He knew, by now, the name of every mound, copse and corner of the land on which it stood; the threat of devastation heightened its value as a precious commodity. Writing to his parents, his prose quickened with love whenever he turned to the subject of the House and the landscape:

  Dear Thrumpton. The moon was full last night. I went for a walk by the lake and spent an hour down by the willows looking at the House. I pray no harm will come to it.

  He could as well have been writing of a lover, or a child.

  Action could not be put off for ever. In May 1941, George put his name forward for a commission in the Motor Battalions. The Byrons, dismayed at the prospect of losing the company of such a willing and solicitous nephew, grew fretful. What would they do without George to run their errands, act as their chauffeur, keep them entertained? Old Lady Portsea, picking window-glass off the staircarpet after a bomb flattened the house next door to her own, sent blessings to her grandson and congratulated him on having chosen to join the 60th (the King’s Royal Rifle Corps). Did he know, she wondered, that two of his Seymour forebears had joined the 60th and fought in the Transvaal? Prudently, she omitted to add that they had both been killed.

  George had left Winchester, with a glad heart, in July 1940. In August 1941, he learned with dismay that he was to be drafted back there for his first spell of military training. Bushfield Camp lay west of Winchester, on the Hursley road. Tracking it down in the summer of 2003, I found the way to an empty hillside blocked by an iron farm gate. Beyond it, a derelict track climbed towards the square silhouette of a sentry box; on the gate, the warning sign was plain: Keep Out. Arrogance is one of the vices I have inherited from my father; such restrictions apply t
o other people, not to us. Like him, I expect a volley of cheap charm to rescue me if caught in the act. (‘It’s your land? I’m most dreadfully sorry! But what a wonderful place!’ Parroting the lines, I can hear his own suave drawl.) I climbed the gate and sauntered up the hill.

  Bushfield Camp, according to local information, is a site ready for development for housing, or a leisure centre, or a car park. At present, it’s abandoned. The neat grid of roads that once marked out the camp’s boundaries is just visible between steep banks that, in high summer, are smothered with wild flowers. Bees hum; a small plane drones in the distance; otherwise, there isn’t a sound. A rusty sink juts up from a clump of mallow and tansy. The bolted metal doors that block my entry to abandoned buildings are scrawled with messages. Nothing sinister: Ellie loves Paul; John wants a blowjob; Marie thinks John should fuck off.

  Standing on the windless hilltop, I try to imagine my father here in 1941, an underweight and – I’ll guess – sexually inexperienced eighteen-year-old with the mannerisms and attitudes of an elderly country squire. Was he conscious, as I am, of the irony of his topographical situation at Bushfield? I hadn’t, until my visit, realised that he was placed exactly between his two lives, the schoolboy, and the snob. On the left, lay Winchester; on the right, lay Hursley, one of the houses to which his grand connections had provided an introduction. In 1935, he boasted to his mother of his lunch out at Sir George Cooper’s home. He had been given a splendid meal, allowed to admire a set of Gobelin tapestries made for Madame de Pompadour, and taken into a magnificent ballroom designed by Sir Joseph Duveen. By 1941, however, Sir George was dead, his widow banished to a farmhouse after Vickers Aircraft took over the estate as their headquarters for Spitfire development. Did my father revisit Hursley from Bushfield Camp, I wonder? Did he see how they had daubed the Chinese silk wall hangings with a thick layer of grey paint, turned the linen store into a lab and the dancing room into a factory? (Dear Thrumpton . . . I pray no harm will come to it.) The fate of houses such as Hursley must have pierced his heart.

  The record of what my father actually did during his brief spell at camp is minimal. His diary shows that he underwent drill from six in the morning until four in the afternoon, with a break for lunch. He was then at liberty to do as he pleased, to visit relations, wander around Winchester, or spend the evening with John Persse, a former schoolchum who was also at the camp.

  Persse, a horse-loving, unbookish young man whose family lived nearby, thrived on his time at Bushfield; my father was wretched. It was, he lamented to his parents after five days at the camp, ‘a frightfully hard life’. Paying a visit to sympathetic elderly relatives who knew how strings could be pulled, he told tales of loneliness, bad food and a sadistic insistence on rigorous exercise. The relatives promised to do what they could: two weeks later, George was released, to spend a month of sick leave at Thrumpton. No record survives to tell me how he felt, after a spell of successful grouse-shooting in Scotland, about being tersely ordered to return to military duties at the end of September.

  ‘Pneumonia,’ my mother says briskly when I ask what ended my father’s brief army career a year later. She frowns, doing her best to remember what she was told. ‘Did they give him the wrong pills? Something like that.’

  ‘He never mentioned anything about a driving accident? Before the pneumonia?’

  ‘An accident?’ And she looks so blank that I know she’s telling the truth. ‘Oh no, darling, he never had an accident. You know what a good driver your father was.’

  My father was a fast driver but not, until the last months of his life, a reckless one. He prided himself on the speed of his reactions. He was pitiless in his contempt for any guest who failed to stay on his tail during a nerve-testing dash to some social occasion for which punctuality stood high above kindness. (‘Where on earth has he got to? We’re five minutes late! My God, that friend of yours is so slow!’)

  Given his attitude, it is unlikely that he would admit to having crashed an army vehicle shortly after his return to Bushfield Camp. His family, while sympathetic, were plainly uncertain of the details; George may not have been in a hurry to provide them. His first request was that he might be sent to Thrumpton for his convalescence; instead, he was despatched to the new military hospital at St Hugh’s in Oxford, to be treated for concussion and head wounds. On 12 December 1941, he was moved again, to spend two months at Middleton Park, a country house newly built by Edwin Lutyens and handed over by its owner, Lord Jersey, for wartime use by patients with head injuries.

  Middleton Park, its claustrophobic teak and marble interior contrasting strangely with the façade of an eighteenth-century chateau, cannot be viewed as one of Lutyens’ happiest achievements. My father loathed the house, taking comfort only in the survival of an unrestored family chapel in the park, and of a peaceful library in which to keep up his correspondence.

  Two days after his arrival at Middleton Park, my father sent what he considered disturbing information to, of all inappropriate people, Charlie Byron’s underpaid deputy butler, a boy of twenty. Bursting with indignation, George revealed that he was being forced to share a bedroom at Middleton Park with communists (the deduction was drawn from the fact that two of his fellow patients had been complaining that workmen deserved better rates of pay). The next step would be revolution; Lord Byron had better prepare himself to be hanged from a lamp-post when he next left home. In the meantime, he, George, intended to do what he could to help these idiots to appreciate the selfishness of their attitude, and the importance, while the country was at war, of preserving tradition and loyalty!

  My father expected his correspondents to be prompt – he did not expect them to dispute his opinions. A round, laborious hand suggests that James Hopkins was not especially well-educated; the tone of his letter suggests that my father had chosen the wrong man with whom to share his alarm. Perhaps, Mr Hopkins wrote, my father was unaware of how hard life was for those less privileged than himself? Nobody wanted to assassinate the aristocracy or to be paid above their merits; it was simply the case that society needed to change. The war must be hard on men like my father, Hopkins added kindly, but perhaps this convalescence would prove a real blessing, a chance to listen to people who could open his mind and broaden his views. Hopkins ended this candid and surely unwelcome letter with the news that he was leaving Lord Byron’s service to sign up.

  My father, for once, did not reply. A few months later, James Hopkins was killed in action.

  The only other surviving evidence of my father’s stay at Middleton Park is a spectacularly hideous rug: lime green was, to his annoyance, the only available shade of wool. His diligence in creating this monstrosity was fuelled by zeal: by showing the so-called communists a representation of his beloved Thrumpton, he hoped to soften and humanise these misguided men. His scheme was disclosed in his diary. The results were not recorded.

  My father returned to duty at Bushfield in May 1942. Two weeks later, he caught pneumonia and was sent back to St Hugh’s, Oxford. His condition was serious; the fact that he failed to attend the funeral of Lady Portsea confirms it. She had been, with the exception of his mother, his favourite relative.

  Family affection always came second to his love of the House. When George was released from St Hugh’s, he accepted an invitation from Charlie Byron to complete his convalescence at Thrumpton. The proposal was not without self-interest; gardeners were hard to find in wartime and George, while never athletic, could be relied on to help keep the lawn smooth with an iron roller. Resourcefully, my father found a donkey to pull the roller while he lay stretched out in a cane chair, describing an idyllic summer in long, minutely detailed letters to his mother in Norfolk.

  Three months at Thrumpton were enough to make even my languid father impatient for a recall to duty; it came in September, when he was ordered to join a training camp near York. The discipline here was harsher than at Bushfield; four days after his arrival, my father fainted on parade. Despatched to the local mili
tary hospital for inspection, he was diagnosed as suffering from ‘effort syndrome’. The specialist was not impressed by either his physique or his attitude to being drilled (my father loathed all forms of team activity, and reacted accordingly). Writing his report, the specialist offered a personal opinion: this N.C.O. would never be passed as fit for action. He urged that the young man should be discharged immediately or transferred to an office post.

  Clerical work offered no appeal; George wrote to give his parents the news that he was leaving the army. He begged them not to intercede, or to pull strings; what was done was done. ‘I can’t help but feel pretty depressed,’ he admitted. He had no idea as to what he should do next.

  My father’s despair sounds authentic; nevertheless, I feel dissatisfied. The specialist’s report has survived. It states that he was incapable of strenuous exercise; in the diaries, however, he recorded his cycling trips. During the early part of September, while he was still at Thrumpton, he had been notching up as much as forty miles a day. More tellingly, a letter from one of his Winchester classmates, Philip Parr, congratulated him on the good fortune of his escape, ‘knowing you loathe the army as much as I do.’ (Philip wasn’t so lucky; he was killed on service in Greece the following summer.)

  ‘Effort syndrome’ sounds like a bad joke. When I investigate, it turns out to be a new name for the condition known as ‘soldier’s heart’. First observed in the American Civil War, this was brought on by stressful situations. Soldiers on the Western Front suffered from it; so, later, did those serving in Vietnam and the Gulf War. But there’s a difference. These men were on active service, living under the daily threat of death. My father’s effort syndrome was a response to the unpleasant, but far from dangerous, routine of daily drill.