In My Father's House Read online

  Alex’s daughter still lives in this area. A conscientious guide, she can drive me through the narrow lanes along which Alex used to guide their tall ‘governess’ cart on weekly visits to the Lane House at Lamas. Recalling these trips, my cousin describes the fright it always gave her as a small girl when Dick, having waited patiently to play his trick, sprang out with a shout and wave of his stick from behind a roadside oak tree. He didn’t, by this stage of his life, have much else to occupy him. Tucked away in the snug little study at the side of Lane House, he retyped his recollections of the years, long gone, when life for a young diplomat had been full of promise.

  ‘Here we are.’ A narrow, roughly surfaced lane jolts to a stop at the side of a red house. Peering through the branches of a gigantic copper beech tree, my cousin and I can see the cliff over which the two of us, as little girls, used to plunge in a wooden boat towards an emerald ocean. We’ve grown; the land has shrunk: the cliff bordering the Lane House garden is a shallow slope, the ocean is a small square of rough turf. Beyond, a dark hedge shuts out the old view across wheat and cornfields; behind us, as we turn to press our noses to the dusty windows of the house, there’s no such evidence of change. The Lane House staircase is narrow and dark; the kitchen has gaunt, ramshackle cupboards and a cracked floor of red concrete, laid down for economy in the war. The study, without a fire, looks musty and damp. My father spent hours arranging flowers in these dim rooms; bright branches and blossoms helped to keep despair at bay.

  In 1944, the year my father turned twenty-one, he noted the date, twelve years earlier, on which his uncle became the tenth Duke of Grafton and owner of Euston Hall. Nineteen forty-four was the year in which the Duke, having lost two wives, married a jolly divorcee who welcomed younger company. Lamas was no great distance from Euston; my father, to his delight, was encouraged to pay regular visits. Invited by the new Duchess to offer suggestions as to whether diamonds could be worn with a country suit and which size of paper to order for stationery, his heart swelled. He had always prided himself on knowing how things should be done. In the absence of the Duke’s eldest sons (Hugh was in India; Oliver was keeping out of the way while he adjusted to the idea of a new stepmother), George felt that he had been given a role. In his mind, to judge from the tone of his proud, excited letters home, he was almost a son of the house himself. At a time when Charlie Byron was once again dithering about the future and keeping his nephew at a distance, this was a solace.

  Euston was not in good shape in the Forties, the time my father knew it best. One of the rebuilt wings was housing 150 boys from Barnardo homes; the gardens, laid out by the diarist John Evelyn, were neglected. Flaking paint, chipped plaster and threadbare curtains contributed to the air of gloom.

  George noticed none of this. Advising the new Duchess on how to behave, talking to old employees who remembered the days when his mother had been a young girl about the place, gathering peaches in the hothouse, ready to be packed in tissue and despatched to Vita’s ailing mother, he felt in his element. All that irked him was the contrast between Euston and Lamas. Why should his mother, so aristocratic in appearance and title, be obliged to live so humbly? Why should he himself be condemned, from time to time, to kneel like a parlourmaid on cold stone, lighting fires and blackening grates? They were FitzRoys, too, and bred for better things. Life was not just.

  In fact, as my mother remembers, George’s parents loved their little Norfolk home. The Lane House was not distinguished. It had no grand history. But it was their own. My father’s disdain was more wounding than he knew: his mother gratefully recorded in her journal that it had been ‘so nice’ when a visitor remarked that she thought their house delightful.

  George’s new alertness to the ducal connection was reflected in his reading habits. This was the time when he started to show an interest in the history of the Stuarts. Immersing himself in a biography of Charles II, he took proud note of the fact that the king’s long liaison with the Duchess of Cleveland made him into a direct ancestor. The connection was remote; nevertheless, this was the time at which George came to see himself as (almost) royal.

  I can’t resist reading my mother an extract from her husband’s wartime diary.

  ‘Listen! He’s talking about the Duchess.’

  ‘Bloody woman,’ my mother says. She takes a bite out of her Lincolnshire sausage as fiercely as if she had the Duchess of Cleveland’s white neck clenched between her teeth, not a plump column of pork. ‘Go on then.’

  Gleeful, I read the entry out to her. ‘It is refreshing to feel that at some period of history one’s family – that’s the Duchess – have milked vast quantities of wealth from the country. And it gets better! This bit’s about why it matters to buy your shoes in Jermyn Street, and to have your hair cut at the Savoy. I am always convinced, more and more as time goes on, that it pays to get the best, and nothing but the best. Was that what he was like when—?’

  But my mother has gone, her breakfast abandoned, shuffling rapidly away and out of reach. Malice has made me forget the need to be courteous. I’m talking, after all, about the young man she chose to marry.

  Well-made shoes and a smart haircut were my father’s protective devices during a period of insecurity. He hadn’t made friends during his time at training camp or in hospital; he was not making more headway at the local branch of Barclays Bank where he was now employed. But how, when he referred to his superiors as ‘dreary little men’ and regaled the clerks and secretaries with the interesting history of his bloodline, can he have expected to be treated as one of themselves? ‘I, who am so lonely,’ he wailed, when his fellow employees set off for whisky-steeped nights of jitterbugging at the local aerodrome. ‘I, who so long for companionship.’

  Life in London was more congenial. Just as the diary is leading me to pity him, I turn a page and find George speeding away from Norfolk in his little Morris car, fashionably yellow string-gloved fingers clasping the wheel and gear shift, lips pursed in a whistle, all ready for a weekend of socialising. He writes about his special table at the Savoy and going to dances at the Dorchester; he describes the joy of lying stretched in a hot, lily-scented bath, before he set off from the Chelsea home of one of the well-housed cousinly tribe to see a ‘simply killing’ new Rattigan play. The army discharge papers present him as suffering from exhaustion and neurosis; how am I to reconcile them with these accounts of dinners and theatres and dances that went on until dawn?

  The diary for 1943-4 ends with a ten-page index of people he has mentioned. He seems to have acquired a vast circle of friends: I’m puzzled that so few of them kept up the connection. I’ve tracked one of them down, however, and persuaded him to meet me. He’s a man in his early eighties, burdened by a title as magnificent as his girth. We’re lunching together in a large, old-fashioned restaurant near Piccadilly; I’m having difficulty in distracting his attention from a pert-bottomed waitress who’s been assigned to take care of our table.

  ‘You were saying? I was never close to your father, I’m afraid. You’re going to find this is a bit disappointing.’

  ‘I’m sure not.’

  I’m impressed by the elegance of his suit, and puzzled by his air of courtly blankness. The diary led me to suppose that this might have been one of my father’s closest friendships. It’s plain that this man doesn’t know what he’s doing here. His eyes stray again: I cough.

  ‘I think you used to go to the same dances? The Leek-Melvilles? At the Dorchester?’

  ‘I’m sure we did. Still – your father wasn’t really one of us, you know.’ He smiles kindly, softening a possible blow to my pride.

  ‘You mean, because he didn’t have a military record? Did that make him the odd one out?’

  He dissects a crimson slice of beef with care, pops a potato in his mouth, and nods approval. ‘We didn’t think about things like that, my dear.’ (He’s already told me twice about his year of service in France.) ‘It’s possible that he might have felt it.’ He leans forward, bri
ghtening as he finds something to tell me. ‘I know! He had a camera hanging round his neck. That’s what I remember. He was always taking photographs of us. It was rather odd, you know. One didn’t take snaps of friends in those days, not in public. But I can’t remember a word he said. Letters? No, he wasn’t a letter-writer, was he? I wish I could be more help but – two o’clock? Is it really? No, I won’t have cheese. Or coffee.’

  Talking about my father hasn’t given him any visible pleasure; my impression is that he is relieved to bring the meeting to a close. But he has helped, more than he knows. I’d wondered what my father’s role had been when he rejoined this smartly social world, so remote from his daily life at the Norfolk bank. I’d guessed that he felt like an outsider, painfully aware of his lack of an officer’s rank. A camera gave him a form of control; even if he didn’t know these people intimately, he could shape the groups, command the smiles. When conversation turned to military matters, he switched off, to become the recording eye. Cameras keep life at a safe distance.

  Our talk leads me to wonder how deeply my father felt his lack of a military record at the time. I’d missed something: now, from this new angle, it jumps out. He wasn’t a letter-writer, was he? His schoolfriends, going off to squad training and active service, were good about staying in touch with the one they’d left behind. They wrote to him. But here’s the thing: my father, the master of correspondence, the man who couldn’t let a letter pass unanswered for a single day, my unstoppable father never wrote back.

  The most striking example of these one-way correspondences to have survived among my father’s papers was with John Persse. All I know of Persse suggests that he was an affectionate young man, lively and popular. His housemaster’s reports, while harsh about his academic limitations, praise his brilliance as a mimic. Persse was my father’s closest friend at Winchester. In 1941, they were stationed together nearby, in the training camp at Bushfield; in 1942, they met again. They clearly enjoyed each other’s company. And yet, after my father left the army, he shut Persse out. ‘Write, curse you, write!’ his friend entreated, but my father never did. Persse grew angry, then wistful. On the verge of being sent into action in 1944, he wrote to ask what he had done to cause offence. Two months later, Persse was dead, shot down as he went to help a wounded comrade. My father, expiating his guilt, showered reminiscences upon the dead man’s family until, with the politeness of desperation, they begged for silence.

  Discomfort about his army discharge could explain my father’s strange failure to maintain contact with such a good friend. His vaunted connection to Thrumpton offers another possibility. All Persse’s letters allude to Thrumpton; all describe his eagerness to visit this wonderful place. Clearly, he’d been led, ever since their days together at Winchester, to believe that Thrumpton Hall was George’s family home. The little house at Lamas had never been mentioned; neither, in earlier letters, had the Seymours’ home in West London. Living close to Winchester, the Persse family had been unfailingly hospitable to John’s school chum; by 1942, John was showing his hurt at not being offered a reciprocal courtesy.

  Was this the pitiful reason why those last, plaintive letters from Persse received no answer? Was my father so afraid of admitting the truth: that Thrumpton was home to him only in his dreams, that all he could offer Persse was a dark back bedroom overlooking a Norfolk lane?

  ‘I don’t like the way you keep running him down.’ My mother brushes out her hair, still a reddish-gold in her eighties, with fierce straight strokes. ‘It isn’t fair. He paid for that lovely portrait of his mother by Oswald Birley out of his own pocket, you know. And he was only twenty-one.’

  ‘Snobbery. He’d just seen the painting Birley did of the Duke, at Euston.’

  ‘Goodness, you can sound unpleasant,’ my mother says with feeling. ‘Well, then, what about all those landscapes of Thrumpton that he had done for Charlie Byron and Aunt Anna?’

  Triumphant, I fold my arms. ‘Well, actually, if you really want to know—’

  She covers her ears. That won’t stop me.

  My father came across Major Drummond-Fish on one of his visits to Euston, where the artist had just completed painting a series of views of the house and estate. Offered a new commission at a time when he was short both of money and a place to stay, the ageing major gladly agreed to do the same for Thrumpton. The Byrons were not consulted; my father, on this occasion, simply acted as though the House was his own. When the paintings were finished, he invited the Byrons, together with their tenants and employees, to admire the results at a private exhibition in their own library. A few of the more discerning farmers had, he noted with approval, shown real taste in preferring his own favourite view, across the lake. He then had the paintings packed up and taken to Lamas, where he hung them, close enough to touch frames, facing his bed. Here, in the privacy of his room, he possessed the House entirely, from every angle. Just so, perhaps, one of his revered ancestors might have hung up a painting of some shapely odalisque, for private delectation. No voluptuous naked female could give my father what the House had never failed to provide: an image of permanence, security and consolation.

  Not even the House could comfort him, in the summer of 1944, for the steady flow of reported deaths of the young men he had looked upon as his closest friends. In August, his parents sat him down in the front room of the Lane House and told him to prepare himself for a cruel shock: Oliver FitzRoy, the cousin my father had thought of as his twin brother, had been killed in action shortly after his twenty-first birthday.

  The news came when a shrinking workforce was leading to rapid shifts of location for employees of Barclays Bank. My father had just received orders to move from Norfolk to the branch near Liverpool Street in London. He went to no parties during this period and stayed away from company. For once, there is no mention of the ritual haircut. Dazed by grief, he walked the streets all night, hoping that a bomb would fall and put an end to him. ‘Half of me has died,’ he wrote in his August diary: the following month, after news of a further spate of deaths, he made a bitter little note on the worthlessness of his own survival. ‘They are all gone now,’ he wrote.

  It’s hard to withhold pity during this stage of my father’s life. Dick and Vita were not emotionally demonstrative; his married brother and sister were absorbed in their own young families. Abruptly ordered to move once more, to another Norfolk branch bank at Fakenham, he lodged at a nearby rectory and spent his evenings playing card games with the vicar’s small children. Every weekend, he took a bouquet of flowers to old Ismay FitzRoy and listened attentively to family gossip. Here, at least, he could feel that he was appreciated; conscientious George had always been her favourite grandchild.

  Family letters show that Vita, Anna and Ismay had been busily scheming for George’s future behind his back. The possibility that he might one day be allowed to live at Thrumpton had been raised once more; Anna Byron dropped excited hints to her nephew that he should prepare himself for news of great expectations. The news, when it came, was very different. Charlie Byron did not like plans to be made behind his back. The House was not a FitzRoy home; sharply, he reminded his wife and her sister that he had connections of his own to consider. A savage row broke out; harsh words were spoken, tears shed; hopes dashed. ‘Poor George!’ Vita noted sadly. ‘When we knew his grief [we thought] he’d really be entitled to anything.’ Recently, she had been fretting about her daughter Alex’s loss of a nursemaid; the new drama put the smaller mishap into perspective. ‘I feel quite livid with CB (Charles Byron),’ she wrote with indignation: ‘What a man!’

  This upset took place towards the end of 1944. By the spring, old Lord Byron was ready to eat a little humble pie. Their only gardener had just left; the footmen and the chauffeur had already gone; the cook’s threat of a forthcoming resignation was the final straw. Servants could no longer be found; might dear George be willing to consider helping out a fond old uncle who still hadn’t quite decided who his eventual heir should be?r />
  George felt, to judge from the ecstatic tone of his diaries, as though invited to walk back into Eden. Fatigue forgotten, despondency gone, he set to work scything nettles, mowing the lawns, hacking down undergrowth, losing himself in manual labour until, late in the afternoons, he slumped in a trance beneath the lakeside willows, watching the lines of the House he adored dissolve into the dusk. Sitting at his little desk in the Fakenham rectory, he had written of loneliness and a sense of isolation closing in on him like a vice; now, in a moment of epiphany, as he sat out beside the lake on a summer night, he understood all that Thrumpton meant to him and that without it, he was lost. ‘God send I never have to leave,’ he prayed.

  Everything, in that season of luminous beauty, seemed to take place in a dream. No guests were staying. In the drawing room, behind drawn blinds, his aunt played Liebestraum on the piano; sitting in the garden with Bingo, the old poodle, asleep at his side, his uncle Charlie dozed the days away in a deckchair. At dinner one night, laying a line of cherry pits across his plate of fruit, George played a private game of divination. The cherry stones promised marriage before the end of the year, and riches. ‘I wonder?’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I wonder.’

  Preparing to travel back to Fakenham and the bank, he snipped a branch of orange-scented philadelphus from the shrub beneath his bedroom window and wrapped it in wet cloths. For a week, the cloying fragrance filled his little Norfolk bedroom with memories.

  Three months later, he received two dismaying letters by the same post. One, from his aunt Anna, pleaded for his forgiveness; the other, from his uncle, sounded a more aggressive note. The fact of the matter, Charlie Byron wrote, was that the time had come for things to change. The House had become a burden, too heavy a one for two old people to bear. It was too late for argument: the advertisements had already been placed. The House was to be sold.