My History: A Memoir of Growing Up

by Antonia Fraser

  This was all good stuff to one who was too young to take in the implications of the Abdication. I had spent the war conventionally admiring the exhausted-looking King George VI—no wonder, when he was never out of his naval uniform. Then there was the sweetly smiling, rather more flourishing Queen Elizabeth. What splendid people to refuse to evacuate the Little Princesses away from danger! In addition we were told that the Royal Family observed the rules of rationing with the greatest strictness. And who could resist the charm of the Queen, boasting of bomb damage to Buckingham Palace with the words: “Now we can look the East End in the face.” Photographs of her daintily picking her way through the ruins left by the Blitz, her pastel dresses forever pristine amid the encompassing rubble, completed the picture.

  By the end of the war attachment to the monarchy seemed wound round the concept of patriotism like ivy round an arch; pull it away and the stones might come loose. In August 1945 Thomas and I spent the night in London before catching the boat train to Holyhead. In this way we found ourselves in the crowds outside Buckingham Palace on VJ Night, whooping and cheering among soldiers and sailors of all nationalities, and that seemed a very good place to be.

  A few years later the Royal Wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten provoked a similar reaction. (The Little Princess had grown up, and had in fact impressed us all by passing through a phase driving an army lorry in uniform.) My parents, due to Frank’s government post, were actually given seats in the Abbey; they had already gone to St. James’s Palace to view the wedding presents. Here, among other gifts, tea cosies crocheted by members of the Women’s Institute jostling with precious jewels, Elizabeth admired what she described as “the costly present we sent: a fifty-shilling volume of seventeenth-century poetry, selected by Peter Quennell, with a preface by Edith Sitwell.” She added: “we feel it will help to fill up one of the middle-brow guest rooms—until the new royal home is burnt down by Communists.” Elizabeth’s original republicanism was definitely on the wane: “I must say I begin to feel quite sloppy about Philip, with his film star face and fair hair,” she confided to me in her letter.

  Meanwhile, on the wedding day itself, I positioned myself once again as on VJ Night among the crowds outside the palace and got myself ready for action. The moment came. The fairy-story carriage containing the bridal couple, on its way back from the Abbey, swept inside the great gates. We cheered—no, we roared. And then, instead of remaining passively in our places, we all rushed the gates themselves, so that they opened and some of the crowd—including me—got inside. It was a short-lived triumph; we were soon ejected. But we had been inside the sacred territory. When I told my mother about it later, I could see that she did not altogether believe me; indeed, I would not altogether believe myself, if I had not subsequently tracked down a report of the 1947 incident in the press at the time of another Royal Wedding in 2012. The thrilling, slightly dangerous emotion of being part of a crowd remains with me. That shout: “Show us the dress! We want to see the dress!” Was that me, or my companion Lucy, in our dowdy navy blue mackintoshes, or the powerful woman beside us with a strong Yorkshire accent in what looked like a decommissioned army greatcoat?

  To such inchoate feelings, Gibbon gave an intellectual backing, even if it was rooted in the prejudices of the eighteenth century: his remarks about army rule remind us that when he was born in 1737, the Cromwellian era had ended less than eighty years previously. It was not that I hankered after a more absolutist monarchy; as the daughter of a Labour minister I was hardly likely to do that. But for the first time I found the whole concept of monarchy extremely interesting, quite apart from my addiction to reading about the lives of the more romantic members of the caste.

  My parents, I noted, always attended with alacrity those events at Buckingham Palace that came the way of a government minister. This seemed to be true for the Labour government as a whole, anxious to declare their patriotism, including respect for the monarch, and rebut any possible connection to that rabid Communist Party further to the left. The mid 1940s were a time of acute austerity in England. The lack of pleasant food was not really made any better for us ungrateful children by the frequent admonition to eat up what was actually on our plates and “Remember the starving children of Europe.” (Rebels were heard muttering: “the starving children are welcome to this,” and that didn’t make it any better either.)

  Restaurants were forbidden to serve more than a certain number of courses, bread on a side plate counting as one course. This restriction led to embarrassing incidents, as when Frank, who never noticed what he ate, innocently devoured a piece of bread on top of his meal. The waiter at the George, when taxed about this law-breaking, made things worse by saying airily: “Oh, I thought Lord Pakenham would like preferential treatment.”

  Buckingham Palace was perhaps the only place in the country where traditional grandeur was still maintained in the broad principles of the entertainment, even if the details were not yet fully restored. Where else would you need a long dress for a reception? Certainly not in North Oxford. Thus I accompanied my mother to that great Oxford emporium Elliston & Cavell to acquire a suitably sober yet elegant dress for the six months’ pregnant wife of a government minister. A black crêpe number, with a glittering miasma of jet beads around it to distract attention from the lack of waist, was thought to strike the right note.

  On her return, Elizabeth remarked crossly: “Everyone else was wearing long white gloves.” But she cheered up with stories of how Edwina Mountbatten, wife of Lord Louis, had been among the Royals, and how Gerry, Duke of Wellington, had snorted: “Curtseying to Edwina! Curtseying to Edwina!” The best story of course concerned Frank. Keen to demonstrate his loyalty, he became unconsciously affected by all the women curtseying to the Royal party as it entered. Instead of bowing respectfully like the men, this convert-Catholic enthusiast went much further. He genuflected very low and crossed himself. It is to be hoped that the Duke of Wellington didn’t notice.

  My mother, telling me the story, talked with that mixture of affection and exasperation with which she often used to describe Frank’s exploits. Then there was not only her true love for him but also her basic powerful respect for his character, including his religious convictions. The time had come when she had to confront all this in terms of their marriage, the most important thing in her life. The decision she would reach led to a profound change in my own life. Already Frank’s conversion to Catholicism in 1940 had reconciled certain aspects of his Anglo-Irish family history with his Faith. I was now experiencing, with Thomas, the complexities—and the pleasures—of Anglo-Irish life for myself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ARE WE REALLY IRISH?

  “Are we really Irish?” I asked the question of both my parents, determined to sort out the subject of British, Irish and English once and for all. Frank said “Yes.” Elizabeth said “No.” And there the subject rested in a nest of nebulous patriotic feelings, held towards both countries. Edmund Spenser once described Ireland at the end of the sixteenth century as being like an egg, aloof in the ocean, an image which haunted me when I worked on the life of Oliver Cromwell. The Ireland we knew however was in no way aloof. But just how was the egg joined to England? A further complication was to ensue after my marriage to Hugh, a Scotsman: we taught our children to describe themselves innocently as “half English, half Scottish and half Irish” which, whatever the laws of mathematics, seemed to cover the situation perfectly.

  In my childhood, the correct description was probably “Anglo-Irish,” a term which captured a particular society then. Certainly Ireland, the idea of it, permeated our Oxford lives long before I remember visiting it. We would for example receive shabby little boxes containing shamrocks sent from Dublin in time for St. Patrick’s Day; the plants, of which I was told I must be proud, drooped on my school blazer and I have a feeling they may have fallen off somewhere between 8 Chad and the Dragon. At the same time my father was aiming firmly at the British Parliament.


  The duality continued: Frank supported Ireland at International Rugby the whole of his life including the period when he was a (British) government minister. It existed in a variety of different ways. As a child, I had always imagined that the Pakenham family, who originated in Suffolk, somehow wafted over the sea into Ireland—by popular request might be going a bit far, but along those lines. Later there was talk of an Elizabethan Pakenham who had gone over to Ireland with the Lord Deputy. It was not until I came to research my Cromwell biography seriously in 1970 that I encountered the truth. Prendergast’s The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland is invaluable because the actual documents concerned were destroyed during the Troubles. Major Henry Pakenham of Colonel Daniel Abbott’s Dragoons acquired his property, then known as Tullynally, as a soldier in Cromwell’s army. It was an uncomfortable moment.

  Frank cast an interesting light on this tentative discomfort in conversations we held during the precious last year of his life. Although in his mid nineties, he was in full possession of all his faculties, except his sight, which had never been good since childhood; like many people with bad sight, he had an exceptionally acute memory. After writing a biography of Marie Antoinette, I had that sensation familiar to me from the moment when, against all advice, I followed the tragic heroine Mary Queen of Scots with Cromwell himself: now for something completely different. In this case, I fixed on the Battle of the Boyne, which I thought would enable me to explore the subject of Ireland with more detachment than had been possible with Cromwell. The project languished after a year, basically due to my lack of sympathy with both leading characters, William III and James II. The Irish lessons on which I had optimistically embarked, hoping to have the promised conversations in that language with my friend Edna O’Brien, vanished without trace. What remained was the fascinating residue of my father’s reminiscences when I questioned him about growing up as a member of the Protestant Ascendancy in Catholic Ireland.

  “We always felt it was their country,” he told me. Frank then revealed with shame—or rather, after sixty years, with admirable humility—an incident from the period of his conversion to the Catholic Church. In London at the Jesuit Church in Farm Street, in Oxford at St. Aloysius, Greyfriars in the Cowley Road or St. Benet’s in St. Giles, the Mass was glorious. But the first time the practice of his religion necessitated going to the local Catholic church in Castlepollard on a Sunday, he felt a real pang of reluctance.

  “You see, we had been brought up to think of it as the dirty church…”

  At the same time, my father, whether as Frank Pakenham, a little boy, or Frank, Earl of Longford, a Labour minister, felt invincibly Irish. He was also absolutely clear on his views about the partition of Ireland into North and South. A passage in his autobiography published in 1953 sums it up: “Irish Partition remains to be tackled: it is contrary to nature and totally wrong.” He went on to suggest that Partition would not be ended overnight—correctly enough—but pronounced it “essentially one of the most soluble of the unsolved problems of the world.” Why then did Frank never show any sign of wishing to live in Ireland? It transpired later—I never knew about it at the time—that the childless Edward Longford did once raise the possibility of his younger brother, with his large family, taking over Pakenham Hall in Westmeath; nothing further happened and the project languished. Since Frank’s love of Ireland extended to brief, flurried visits—two nights maximum—before he rushed back to that British political world which he ardently enjoyed, it is difficult to believe he could have settled happily in a stately home on the edge of a lake in the middle of nowhere (by his standards).

  By default, it became understood that if anyone succeeded it would be Thomas, as the eldest son, although he was not of course the eldest child—which happened to be me. The laws of primogeniture (actually male primogeniture) by which Thomas the male succeeded before Antonia the female were never explained to me. I simply grew up knowing them. Thomas used to tell a wicked story in which the butler at Pakenham Hall took us to a pub in Castlepollard, and then commanded: “Step forward, the next Earl of Longford.” According to him, I then attempted to step forward, only to be elbowed aside in favour of the boy Thomas. Alas, no such pub visits ever took place. Because I grew up with the knowledge that I would not inherit, it was never a problem. (The winner-takes-all rule was probably more difficult to accept for the younger brothers of the heir who were in the line of succession, unlike us girls.)

  The study of History makes it easy to understand why male primogeniture was a practical solution: in feudal times and earlier it was a fighter who was needed to lead the tribe in action. Goddesses did go into battle, but that was in the world of myth; although by and by I was fascinated to discover the reverence with which real-life warrior queens were treated, when out of curiosity I came to write a book on the subject from Boadicea to Mrs. Thatcher. Nowadays the law is inevitably changing as the world changes; a man may be needed to wield a lance in battle but anyone can, as it were, wield a computer, regardless of sex. But it would be wrong not to observe, as a last word on the subject, that in the case of the Pakenham family, the antiquated law got it absolutely right. My brother Thomas, now known throughout the world as the Man of the Trees for his exciting celebrations of the leafy world, was well fitted—certainly much better fitted than I—for his role as a feudal lord, if his weapon was the camera, not the lance.

  In fact I never expected to inherit anything: this was not in my romantic personal view of how life was to be lived. While of course life at the Dragon School, coming together with my mother’s innately feminist feelings, meant that I never had any sense of female inferiority. I expected rather to be the beggar girl who caught the eye of the prince, rather than the princess; I had some sense that life that way would be more fun. Or perhaps the beggar girl (intensely beautiful) who, armed with a first-class degree, wrote bestselling books: there was never any limit to the ambitions of my imagination. As it was, nothing formal on the subject of Thomas’s future was, as far as I know, ever communicated to us. Thomas and I were merely told that we would be going on visits to Ireland. We would be staying with Lord and Lady Dunsany (our late grandmother’s sister) at Dunsany Castle in Meath, with sorties to Pakenham Hall to visit Edward and Christine Longford.

  Anglo-Ireland is celebrated in literature as a nostalgic, slightly decrepit society, with the decrepitude of the characters echoed in their beautiful falling-down houses and ruined estates. This was the world of Aidan Higgins’s wonderful novel, Langrishe, Go Down set in the Thirties (for which by coincidence Harold had written the screenplay before we met), or one of my favourite books, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles, which takes place ten years earlier. Such picturesque melancholy was not at all our experience. Thomas and I on the contrary found our Ireland to be a paradise, a land flowing literally with milk and honey—or rather beef, butter and chocolates.

  This was because we went regularly from severely rationed Oxford to a country where there was not only no rationing but a natural lush fertility specially created to nourish the young and greedy. On arriving in Dublin by boat, with hours to spend before we took the bus to Dunshaughlin in Co. Meath (where we would be met by a pony cart), our first move was to head for the sweet shops and do all we could to empty them. At Dunsany there were four large meals a day, the tea alone encompassing more food than breakfast and lunch together at 8 Chad. At Pakenham Hall, it is enough to say that our uncle Edward was known, not without reason, as the Fattest Man in Ireland.

  In another less materialistic way, Ireland in the Forties was also Paradise for us. Our hosts, the Dunsanys, embodied the two qualities most appreciated by the young. And they were complementary. Great-Uncle Eddie was deeply, gloriously, heroically eccentric. Great-Aunt Beatrice was the incarnation of kindness. Perhaps the young Beatrice Villiers had never been a beauty, but children are not interested in formal beauty. It was the charm of her soft face, still-black hair swept up into a small bun, and her high round cheekbones, like little apples, whi
ch beguiled us. She also had imaginative generosity of spirit—allowing me to investigate the contents of her large case of jewellery, for example, telling me the story of each item, why she had received this pearl necklace, that diamond brooch (although I do not remember her actually wearing any of them on her discreet printed summer dresses).

  Beatrice presided in an unostentatious way over Dunsany Castle. This was a stalwart building, dating from the twelfth century, with four towers which implied armed defence in past years. The walls were massive and, as I remember it, covered in voracious ivy. At the time of our first visits, there was no electricity: only paraffin lamps, with the occasional small torch-light for reading in the drawing room. (Electricity was not installed there until 1946.) Getting up to bed through the shadows of the vast staircase aroused considerable apprehension, as may be imagined, in one still anxious to conceal her shameful fear of the dark; but of course it was exciting at the same time. There were many maids, by our standards, as well as a butler. My favourite was the lady’s maid Bridget: in her sober uniform with a white cap, and her sad Irish beauty, black hair, white skin, she was like a character out of Upstairs, Downstairs before it was written. Gentle, quietly helpful Bridget—what did she make of my frightful wartime schoolgirl’s wardrobe?