by Barbara Vine
But questions first. There’s one about Railtrack and one about nuclear weapons and then comes mine. The Clerk of the Parliaments gets up and says, ‘The Lord Nanther,’ and I say, ‘My Lords, I beg leave to ask the question standing in my name on the order paper,’ but I don’t ask it because it’s printed for all to read on the Orders of the Day.
The minister says there’s no question but that the Jubilee Line will be completed. I’m obliged to ask a supplementary question and this is something that makes a lot of peers sweat, lest the minister pre-empts them and they’re left with an enquiry that’s already been answered. Also you may write down your possible supplementaries as a mnemonic but not read them aloud. When I first came in, I got into a muddle over this and Conservatives began chanting, ‘Reading, reading!’ I resolved never to ask another starred question but of course I did, and then another, and now it doesn’t worry me much. Very soon it won’t worry me at all but by then I shall have been banished.
I get up and ask if the minister is aware that almost the only access to the Millennium Dome will be by tube and bus, and if the opening of the Jubilee Line is delayed attempts will be made to reach the Dome by car, an awkward situation since there is virtually no car parking provided. But I abstain from savagery because, although I don’t take their whip, I’m sympathetic to the Government and almost always vote with them. The minister (an urbane man, shaken by nothing) repeats his earlier reply and adds that the tube will be finished and serving Greenwich North station not just by 31 December but by October. Now it’s open to the rest of the House to ask questions and peers do so, diverging wildly of course from the subject and belabouring the minister with queries as to why the Northern Line is so bad and getting worse, whether the Dome is to be a permanent or temporary structure and when is the Government going to do something about restricting the number of cars in the capital? Every starred question and its supplementaries gets seven and a half minutes to ensure we’re done in half an hour, so we soon pass on to the last one which is about e-mail.
The public gallery is full today, so are the press seats and the places below the bar where peers’ guests sit on the temporal side and their spouses sit on the spiritual side, so-called because the bishops sit there as well as the Government. Reforming the House of Lords is a hot potato, as the Sunday Times said yesterday. I drift off into thoughts about Henry. He was in this House as a Conservative, but it seems he put in few appearances. He made a maiden speech on the subject, appropriately enough, of the contribution of good drainage to health, and seldom spoke in here again. Too busy with his blood quest, no doubt. The armorial bearings, produced for him by the College of Arms, show (I’m not getting the heraldic terms right) castellated turrets in two quarterings, red hearts in two, the motto Deus et Ego or God and I, which Jude says is very bad Latin.
Questions are over and the Government chief whip is on his feet telling the House that while the debate today and tomorrow is not time-limited it would be best for everyone if back benchers restricted the time they spoke to seven minutes in view of the long list of speakers. Reasonable and fair man as he is, he repeats that he can only offer guidance, but he points out that it would be in everyone’s interests if speeches were not unduly extended into the small hours.
‘The time at which the House adjourns tonight and tomorrow night,’ he says, ‘is entirely in your Lordships’ hands.’
Earl Ferrers, who looks everyone’s idea of a general commanding an army, gets up and asks why the chief whip is always asking for restraint. Some noble lords are going to be restrained for the rest of their lives so why should they be restrained on the Bill that is perforce to restrain them?
And so it has begun. Lady Jay, the Lord Privy Seal, opens it with the words, ‘My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time,’ and one after another, from all benches, they put their cases. Peers come and go, leaving quickly and entering slowly, always pausing to give a court bow to the Cloth of Estate. I go out for tea when the debate adjourns, and when I come back again it is a quarter past five and Baroness Young is saying from the Conservative benches that this is one of the saddest days of her political life. The Bill, she says, means the end of the House of Lords and the end of hundreds of years of history. It won’t lead to a chamber with democratic legitimacy, for life peers are just as undemocratic as hereditary peers.
She goes on for a long time in this gloomy way and when she’s finished I’d like to get up and say that if there’s no democracy in this House, and there can’t be in her view since it’s composed exclusively of lifers and hereditaries, the best solution would be to abolish it altogether and we’ll all go home. But I can’t speak since I haven’t put my name down on the list. When I look round again I see that Jude has come into the Chamber and taken her place below the bar. She’s had her hair done and is wearing a very elegant black trouser suit. It’s only a couple of years since women started wearing trousers in here and an even shorter time since the wives of peers did. Trousers are not a good idea on overweight women but, come to that, they’re not a good idea on overweight men, only they don’t have a choice about it. I smile at Jude and she raises her eyebrows and smiles at me and I mouth, ‘Dinner?’ and she mouths, ‘Yes.’
Lord Trefgarne is speaking now, pointing out, very much to the dismay of those who haven’t counted, that nearly two hundred lords have their names down to speak in the two days’ debate. He says that he has no intention of confining his speech to seven minutes and goes on to ask if the Government realize what a tough battle they have to face. It is six o’clock. I get up and leave, pausing to let Jude precede me out of the Chamber and into the Peers’ Lobby. We head for the Peers’ Guest Room and a drink.
‘It’s not as if you won’t all keep your titles,’ says Jude, over her large glass of Chardonnay. ‘You’ll still be called “my Lord” or “your Grace” or whatever and your heirs will still inherit.’ I’m touched by Jude’s attempt to reassure, especially as this comes from the woman who is known as Lady Nanther and ‘my Lady’ only in here, and otherwise spurns her title and insists on being known as Judith Cleveland. ‘I can’t see what all the fuss is about. Half of them never come in here.’
I ask her what she thinks Henry would have said about it. She takes a keen interest in Henry and likes discussing him, even though Paxton Osborne, where she’s a senior editor, won’t be publishing the Life.
‘They’ve tried to reform the House of Lords before, haven’t they?’ she asks. ‘I mean, in the nineteenth century and again in 1911? He wouldn’t have been surprised at the idea.’
‘He died in nineteen-oh-nine,’ I say. ‘He came in here very little but he valued the peerage. Isn’t that why he was so desperate for an heir? All those girls born, one after another, four of them before the son finally came.’
The shadow I’ve sworn I’ll never provoke again passes across her face and I want to bite my tongue or cover up my mouth. But I’ve done it again and now it’s too late. She doesn’t say anything about it, she seldom does these days, she doesn’t need to because the pain is there in the tiny wince and the attempt at a smile. It’s only about five seconds before she’s talking again, telling me of a letter about Henry she’s come across in the biography of a musician they’ve just had come in. She’s even brought me a photocopy of it and as I take it from her I feel a thrill of excitement go through me. It’s just possible I’m going to begin discovering some of the thoughts that went through Henry’s head.
2
The letter from the musician’s mother has joined the others in Correspondence One on the table. ‘One’ because it was written when Henry was still fairly young and practising at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The mother had taken her son, who was to grow up a world-renowned violinist, to Henry expecting a diagnosis of haemophilia on the grounds of his frequent nosebleeds. Here she is writing jubilantly to her cousin of the result of the consultation:
Dr Nanther is a most charming, courteous and very handsome man. He had
little to say to Caleb, no doubt understanding that a child of seven, however talented, is without judgement or self-knowledge, but was very gracious to me. In the course of our conversation I told him, as I was bound to do, though with great fear in my heart, of my husband’s uncle who had the Bluterkrankheit or what we would call Haemophilia and died from a haemorrhage at the age of fifteen. Imagine my joy, dearest Christina, when Dr Nanther, explaining with great patience, told me that a boy could inherit that disease only through his mother, never through his father, that, in his judgement, what Caleb suffered was a mere Epistaxis or a chronic bent towards nosebleeds and that he would grow out of it…
Grow out of it, we know from this biography, he did and lived to be nearly eighty. More emerges from this letter about Henry than about the child. He apparently had a highly developed bedside manner. His photographs had already told me he was good looking but not, of course, that he was courteous and gracious. To the mother, very likely a young and pretty woman, he behaved charmingly, while he took no notice of the child.
Henry Nanther was born at Godby near Huddersfield on 19 February 1836, elder son of Henry Thomas Nanther, a woollen manufacturer and active Wesleyan. His mother was Amelia Sophia, daughter of William Pearson.
That is Dictionary of National Biography stuff. Plain unadorned facts. Though his entry states that Henry was the eldest son it naturally makes no comment on the fact that his parents had been married for fourteen years before he was born. These days you come across plenty of couples married for many years before having children but that is the result of careful planning, the woman wishing to succeed in her career, the establishment of a suitable home for a family, and so on. No family planning existed in Henry Thomas and Amelia Sophia’s day. So what happened? Did she have miscarriages – and this is something I know plenty about – or give birth to stillborn babies? Did conception for some reason never happen? Women who worry about their failure to conceive are less likely to conceive than those who are carefree. So Jude was told by her doctor, as if it was conception she had trouble with. It seems unlikely that Amelia didn’t worry, given the times she lived in and the fact that the woman was inevitably blamed in cases of failure to produce children.
At last a child came along. By that time Amelia would have been over her anxiety, for she was past her mid thirties and may have given up the idea of becoming a mother. The baby, to be baptized Henry Alexander, was born at the family home, Godby Hall, a handsome healthy child. Within two years of his birth another son came along, but this one was different. With very little evidence to go on, it’s hard to know precisely what was wrong with William Thomas Nanther, but, given that his mother was in her late thirties at the time of his birth, it sounds as if he was a Down’s Syndrome child. This would be a likely explanation for his being described in Amelia’s letters to her sister Mary as ‘strange’, ‘backward’ and ‘different-looking’. In one letter she writes, ‘Billy looks not at all like either Mr Nanther or me. The village people call him a changeling, which hurts my feelings when I hear it, though I try not to attend to the opinions of ignorant folk.’
Henry Thomas Nanther was the owner of a woollen mill and most of the able-bodied population of Godby worked in it. Rows of back-to-back cottages had been built climbing the hillsides to accommodate the families who had moved there for the sake of certain employment. The Nanthers lived in a big house, built in the Georgian style, a little outside the village; a white stucco building, not particularly suitable for the Yorkshire climate, to the front of which Henry Thomas had added a monstrous portico with a domed roof, supported by eight disproportionately fat columns with Corinthian capitals. It’s still there, or the exterior is, and the interior hasn’t been much altered.
To their credit, Henry Thomas and Amelia kept Billy at home rather than committing him to some kind of institution. No doubt they were aware of just how dreadful such a place would have been, comparable, I imagine, in awfulness to the children’s homes and homes for the mentally ill which still exist in Eastern Europe. Or worse. Henry Thomas was wealthy and, if he and his wife were never quite accepted by the local gentry, they were respected. He was a deeply religious man, assiduous in carrying out his duties as a Methodist lay preacher, and determined to practise what he preached. Perhaps he genuinely believed it would have been wrong to lay the burden of his second son on other shoulders. Of course there was a children’s nurse at Godby Hall and a nursery maid as well as the usual staff of servants. Billy, according to his mother, was good, sweet and affectionate. Down’s children often are. If it was Down’s. It’s equally possible his incapacity was due to a difficult birth during which his brain was damaged by being temporarily deprived of oxygen. We don’t know and now never shall.
In his elder brother’s second year at the day school he attended at Longfield, three miles away, Billy fell ill. As we know from the fate of several of the Bronte sisters whose home, in Haworth, wasn’t far away, tuberculosis was rife in the hills and valleys of Yorkshire in the 1830s and 40s. That it was contagious was not known at the time or, rather, it was assumed that infections came from ‘miasma’, a kind of noxious vapour that rose from standing water and sewage. Why Billy caught tuberculosis and not his brother or his parents is a mystery. Why, after all, did Emily, Anne and Maria succumb to it while Charlotte and their father remained free of infection?
By this time – Billy was five – his mother had become more attached to him than to his elder brother. And this in spite of what she had earlier written to her sister about his strangeness and retardation. His illness drove her to the edge of insanity. The letters she wrote to Mary are rambling or wild and full of threats to end her own life, ‘if the Lord takes my Billy’. Her husband, perhaps because of his business and commitments at the mill, seems to have been less involved. What was Henry’s attitude? We don’t know. He was at school in a village to which he was taken by pony and trap each morning and fetched home each afternoon. Amelia writes that she had been in the habit of driving him herself, at least for the morning trip, but that this ceased with Billy’s illness. Did Henry mind? He must have done. Those drives constituted perhaps the only times he was alone with his mother. Now he had been deprived of this pleasure by the illness of a brother he had always, according to a worried letter from Amelia to Mary, treated with some amount of contempt.
A progressive doctor who attended Billy told his parents that a dry climate at a high altitude would improve his health and recommended Switzerland or the Bavarian Alps. In 1843, in Yorkshire, that was like telling parents today that they ought to take their sick child to the Antarctic or the top of the Himalayas. But no, even that’s not a parallel. Today’s parents wouldn’t find going to Nepal or the far south nearly as preposterous as Henry Thomas and Amelia found the idea of the Continent. Neither had ever been out of England and neither had any intention of going. Instead, Amelia took Billy to the Lake District. If anything, he grew worse and they returned within a fortnight for Amelia to write to Mary that he had spat blood on three mornings in succession.
Appallingly risky as it seems to us today, the two little boys shared a bedroom. It was called the night nursery and Amelia often mentions it in her letters.
I went into the night nursery at first light this morning [she writes], and found both boys asleep, but for the third time this week there was blood on Billy’s pillow, quite an excessive amount. I felt so sick at the sight after I had hoped and prayed there would be none this time, that I thought I should faint. If only Billy would call me or nurse when he coughs and the dreadful blood comes! But he is so good and – oh, imagine it! – would not want to trouble us.
How much of this coughing did Henry hear and how much blood-spitting did he see? Most of it, surely. Remember that he disliked and despised his brother and felt it was he who occupied the prime place in their mother’s affections. Did he know what coughing up blood meant? Probably. There’s no reason to suppose Amelia was discreet about demonstrations of grief. No doubt Henry witnessed t
his nausea and these near-faintings. He was seven, the age of reason. His brother coughed up blood and his mother reacted as if the world was coming to an end; therefore the blood indicated Billy was very seriously ill and might die. Isn’t it likely that he too looked for blood on his brother’s pillow and when he saw it rejoiced in what it meant?
I’m wondering – and perhaps I shall always just wonder – if this equating of the evidence on Billy’s pillow with the removal of a rival and with a happier future was the beginning of Henry’s passion for blood.
Jude and I went home after dinner. The House sat till ten past three this morning, finally adjourning after Lord Vivian had given statistics about the number of peers who attend the House daily, and Lord Falconer had asserted that changes under the Act would make the place more independent. They’re going on with the debate today. Easter is coming, the House will rise tomorrow until 12 April, and soon after we shall be at committee stage. Jude has taken two days off and we are going up to Yorkshire to take a look at Henry’s birthplace by invitation of the owner.
