My History

by Antonia Fraser

  As we grew older, we began to take a passionate interest in the course of the war. With Thomas, this took the form of identifying aeroplanes, alternatively building a hot-air balloon in a poky little room by the side door which was his own war effort. The ritual did not vary. At a given moment, we would all be summoned to assemble on the lawn for the release of the great balloon. The balloon would ascend, the balloon would catch fire, at which point Thomas would rush back into the shed to build another one. My own involvement was more sedentary: it consisted of reading the Daily Herald and trying to work out the progress of our men, especially our sailors and their ships. I followed, for example, the fortunes of the dreaded German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen, which never seemed to be out of the Daily Herald headlines. (The Daily Herald was taken in tribute to my parents’ Socialist principles, but I was generally able to have it to myself while they shared The Times.)

  Above all, I read the paper for news of Mr. Churchill, who was my hero—my first hero, I believe, who was courageous and far-sighted rather than saturnine and romantic. There would of course have been implicit parental support for this. As firm anti-appeasers, my parents had greeted Churchill’s accession to leadership (and the demotion of Elizabeth’s cousin Neville Chamberlain) with enthusiasm; just as my father had written to him early in 1939 on the subject of dons’ military service. For my part I also admired Mrs. Churchill, doing so much for the sailors on the icy convoys to Russia, and who, we firmly believed, had taken a vow never to remove the turban she always wore, just like the girls in factories, until Hitler was defeated. But Churchill himself was the real focus of my admiration. I wrote a poem for his birthday on 30 November and posted it well in advance to 10 Downing Street. On the morning after the actual birthday, my mother told me at breakfast: “By the way, you were thanked for your poem on the wireless last night.” I was not surprised. I came to realize that there had actually been some kind of general announcement of thanks for all the greetings sent by the public; nevertheless with the true faith of the hero-worshipper I was still convinced that my poem had been in some way special to Mr. Churchill.

  Later, when I came to study the actual life story of my hero, I learnt a valuable lesson about the great men of history (and for that matter the great women). This was not only the statesman who won the war for us with his courage, his oratory, and as we saw it his belief in us as a nation. He was also the politician whom my grandmother Mary Julia Longford held responsible for the disaster of Gallipoli (as a result of which her husband died): to the extent that one of her daughters told me she would not enter a drawing room in the Twenties if Mrs. Churchill, let alone Winston, might be there. As to subsequent decades, even reading Churchill’s views about India and the Indians made this faint-hearted liberal shudder. Yet amateur study of the Second World War has only confirmed me in my admiration for Churchill the war leader. The point I derived, which came in particularly handy when I was writing about the Duke of Wellington and his fierce denunciations of Parliamentary Reform, was that a great man was not necessarily a perfect man.

  I suppose our first real practical contact with the war—given that our father was living at home—was with the evacuees. I will omit the trains taking us to our holidays in B&Bs in Cornwall, so packed with troops on the move that there were even soldiers sitting on the floors of the lavatories, rather awkwardly for us children. This we simply took for granted: that’s what all trains were like: very slow, eternity to get to Cornwall, with mysterious stoppages for the sake of other troop movements, and absolutely crammed with people. The evacuees were different. The evacuees were not part of the normal routine of things. They were being saved, so we were told, from the Blitz which was tearing London apart.

  It is therefore odd to reflect now that it was during this period that I was sent off alone to visit a doctor in Harley Street for something to do with my back, which he manipulated. This is confirmed by my mother’s entry in my Progress Book—she was evidently proud of me rather than particularly protective: “Antonia used train, tube, bus, bicycle and feet! Did family shopping with the Points [as some ration coupons were known] at Selfridges.” In fact I travelled by bike to the station, by train to Paddington, by tube to Baker Street once a week, catching a train back which was calculated to miss the start of the bombing; all the same it was peculiar and not altogether pleasant reading the details of it the next morning in the Daily Herald. But my mother was confident: “The Blitz only starts at night.” I believed her and fortunately, where I was concerned, she was right.

  As it was, where Harold was evacuated from Hackney with his whole school to a Cornish castle, other East End boys had to put up with North Oxford, which may have been safe but was far less exciting. Jimmy Perkins, our evacuee at 8 Chad, wore a Churchillian boiler suit, as the Dragon boys were now wearing, and had short upstanding flaxen hair; he was a good-looking, good-natured little boy with, unsurprisingly, a strong Cockney accent. I have a feeling that he must have been bewildered by 8 Chad if only because the food in his allegedly dangerous home would have been a great deal better (and the house a great deal warmer). He did not last very long with us; perhaps, like Harold who insisted on returning to war-torn Hackney from the safety of Cornwall, he was homesick and preferred to face the bombs.

  In quite a different category were the boys at the Dragon School who had themselves been evacuated to Canada or the United States at the beginning of the war by anxious parents, and began to return from 1943 onwards. They struck us as an arrogant bunch. Immensely tall, altogether much bigger than us, immensely strong, with flashing white teeth, they nevertheless appeared to us to have fallen way behind in their work. Or perhaps this was the spirit of the Dragon speaking: for how could anyone possibly be better educated than at the Dragon itself ?

  Our dealings with the real American servicemen who, later in the war, came to flood Oxford from nearby air bases were on the other hand entirely delightful. This generous race of men, in their odd uniforms with the jackets sawn off at the waist, made me Americanophile from the outset. There were a number of reasons for this. First, they presented us with sweets, and nylons for those who wanted them. I was too young to be interested in the stockings but sixteen-year-old Eileen, who helped our nanny, had one ambition which was to go out with a Yank and acquire a pair of proper American nylons. Secondly, the kindly Yanks escorted us blithely into cinemas, past the box office (also paying for us) where the Adult rating meant that you needed a grown-up to get in. Frankly, Thomas and I didn’t have many ambitions as all-consuming as the need to go to A-rated films at, let us say, the Super or the Ritz.

  “Please could you tell them that I’m your little girl,” went the dialogue. “And I’m your little boy,” Thomas would add. Thanks to the good nature of the Americans, this approach was surprisingly successful, although I can’t help feeling that we owed something also to the wartime spirit of the women in the box offices concerned. Some of the so-called family parties must have looked astonishingly disparate.

  All in all, it is easy to understand why the awful warning that Elizabeth gave me on the subject of American soldiers fell on stony ground. She had heard that I had been seen wandering alone about the paths of Marston, just outside the town itself. Actually I was composing my new novel in my head about Lucy and Rollo in the English Civil War (owing a great deal to Children of the New Forest). Elizabeth told me solemnly that in future I must beware of Marston: “You might meet an American soldier.” It was with difficulty that I restrained myself from asking eagerly: “Oh, whereabouts exactly?”

  At the same time, of course, in terms of practical contact with the realities of war, Oxford was full of Jewish exiles who had been arriving from universities and elsewhere since the Thirties. There were academics, musicians—masses of musicians—and many others. Gina, for example, was a sweet, rather silent Czech girl who helped my mother in our house in some way. I realize now that she must have been Jewish, but the point was never made to us exactly why she wa
s in Oxford in the first place; we just knew that Gina and people like her needed help and kindness, and that was extremely important in our parents’ eyes and thus in ours. The true horrific details of the Holocaust were first broken to me by reading the Daily Herald at the time of the opening-up of the concentration camps in 1944. I shall never forget that moment. But I also still recall the childish disbelief in which I first took refuge—this is too awful to be true. It was easier, far easier, to fling down the paper, do the washing-up (my turn) as hastily as possible, and bike off into the paradise of friendly roads and crescents in which we were lucky enough to live.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  GIRLHOOD ENCOUNTERED

  “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk”…actually it’s my head that aches and I only wish a beastly drowsy numbness would steal me altogether until the end of term. Is hemlock on Points?? Quoting from my beloved Keats in a letter home was not enough to solace me for my deep visceral unhappiness at my first boarding school.

  I was well aware that it was all my own fault. When Mary Queen of Scots decided to escape from rebellious Scotland and seek refuge in neighbouring Protestant England instead of Catholic France, her advisers argued strongly against it. As she told a confidant during the long years of her captivity, “but my best friends permitted me to have my own way.” This was certainly true of my parents, who would have much preferred Oxford High School on grounds of finance alone (the family was growing all the time and, let’s face it, the three existing boys would need to be sent to boarding schools without the option that girls were considered to have). As I’ve described, the choice of Godolphin School, Salisbury was dictated by vanity or, to put it more charitably, competitiveness: I wanted to get a scholarship.

  Then I arrived at the school with my trunk, after two or three changes of train, and found myself in St. Margaret’s House, Fowlers Road, under the tutelage of the housemistress, Miss Darroch. The trouble is that I was not really a girl at this point. Having always felt strongly that I was a girl during the four happy years that I was at the Dragon, I now encountered Girlhood as such and discovered that I did not fit in at all. I was like Kipling’s Mowgli in The Jungle Book, the feral child who had been brought up by wolves and had difficulty adjusting to existence among human beings, despite awesome powers of hunting and tracking. I had been educated completely wrongly for the place in which I now found myself, my Latin and Greek, my hunting and tracking, being far in advance of girls who were my contemporaries, but in other ways I was far behind. As I would observe to a meeting of Old Dragon Women in 2008, ranging in age from early twenties to early eighties, the Dragon School equips you for life, but not for a girls’ school in the mid Forties. Afterwards I found that there was a high proportion of agreement from the older members of my audience.

  At the time, at just twelve years old, I was still comparatively small (I grew nearly three inches between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, according to my Progress Book). More importantly, I was emotionally quite unable to fit in with these girls in my house who were well on their way to being women. Godolphin compounded the problem by attempting to treat me as my real age within the house, while classing me in a form at school with much older people. The result, not surprisingly, was that I had no friends.

  The humiliation of the weekly journey down the hill from St. Margaret’s to Salisbury Cathedral for a church service remains with me. We walked in a crocodile, two by two, and invitations to form part of a pair were subject to intricate social negotiation; except that I never got any. I walked solemnly week after week with Matron, a sweet woman who was clearly embarrassed by this state of affairs. At least the Cathedral itself constituted a haven where I would pray for a partner the week following, in between eyeing the tombs and more fruitfully conjecturing about the history of the inhabitants. I suppose I was suffering from a form of depression which muttering poetry did something to alleviate: not only Keats and his hemlock, but those lines of Marvell haunted me:

  But at my back I always hear

  Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

  And yonder all before us lie

  Deserts of vast eternity.

  (Although, given that Marvell was actually addressing his “Coy Mistress” and urging on an immediate passionate coupling, they were singularly inappropriate.)

  Of course there were other elements here, which it is much easier to appreciate with the perspective of distance than it was at the time. Part of the unhappiness was due to the inevitable break between junior and senior schools: I had been a queen bee at the Dragon, at least in my own estimation, and here I was a lowly worker bee. Part of it also sprang from my parents’ inability to visit me. It is true that parental visiting (let alone children going home during term time) was on a completely different scale to modern practice; the difficulties of wartime travel, lack of petrol, absence of parents abroad, or in my case the domestic cares of a rapidly growing family, all contributed to this. Most parents probably lived closer to Salisbury than we did and found visiting a great deal more practical. The fact was that the wistful entries for future dates in my pocket diary—“Mummy may come”—never seemed to be cancelled out with: “Mummy did come.”

  My relations who lived nearer were kind and supportive. There was a particularly happy episode when Julia and Robin Mount, my father’s youngest sister and her handsome, raffish husband who had been an amateur jockey, came to take me out. Aunt Julia was lavish in her beauty, with a figure that Renoir would have painted; she had long, unconfined blonde hair, a miraculous pink-and-white complexion, and huge blue eyes, one with a slight cast in it which only added to the fascination. Both were very intelligent, but that appeared to be a source of pleasure to them, not a spur to ambition, as in North Oxford. It was, I realized later, typical of their exciting bohemian-Wiltshire lifestyle that the Mounts bought me a copy of Middlemarch at Beech’s Bookshop in Salisbury (I’d never even heard of it) and they also pressed sherry upon me at lunch. Although North Oxford dons were legendarily supposed to offer twenty-four-hour sherry, this certainly did not apply to us at 8 Chad. I had never tasted the delicious sweet liquid. (I loved it.)

  As the first of my parents’ children to go to boarding school—in 1944 there were six of us—I now began to think of 8 Chad as some kind of Eden from which I had been expelled; and like Adam and Eve, I had contributed to my expulsion. It was ironic because I had never properly appreciated the hustle and bustle of family life when I was actually in the middle of it, tending to regard my younger brothers and sisters (other than Thomas who was A Fact of Life) as rumbustious nuisances who might interfere with the meaningful kitchen colloquies of me and my Dragon friends. One day, as I have said, I would define happiness as being alone in a room in a house full of people. I had already tasted the pleasure of being alone in my 8 Chad “cell”; now I began to understand that the real paradise was being able to combine that personal solitude with lively surrounding activities (non-intrusive ones, perhaps).

  So my letters pulsated with affectionate references to “the Monstrous Regiment”—once I had come across John Knox’s denunciatory phrase concerning female monarchs and was able to apply it to four-year-old Judith and three-year-old Rachel. I worried that Thomas, eleven months my junior and similarly with that awkward August birthday, would suffer the same problems of age vs. learning as myself when he transferred school: “I hope for Thomas’ sake that he hasn’t got a scholarship, it would be terrible for him to get one before he was thirteen.” And I asked tenderly after the latest exploit of Patrick, whose bright brown eyes were often alert with some kind of defiance of authority.

  Boisterous—with a merry gleam in those brown eyes which went with the defiance—Paddy always represented a separate force. He was three and a half years younger than Thomas, and exactly the same distance from Judith, born in 1940. Our father adored him, a protective love as we understood later (but not then, as children don’t) which may have sprung from a fe
llow feeling for a less-favoured second son—except that Paddy was actually as a result more favoured than Thomas, the eldest. Paddy was extremely handsome, the best-looking in the family, and a good athlete, which appealed to his father. I realize now that Frank had an honourable wish to protect this brilliant, ever popular young man from his own demons—Paddy was what would now be called bipolar, which in the end cut short a successful career at the Bar—but once again we did not understand, just as the traumas of Frank’s own childhood were quite unknown to us.

  Catherine Rose, my youngest sister, was born in February 1946: my pocket diary is ecstatic on the subject: “BABY BORN—Girl. Thank you dear darling God. I am one of seven!” This was a far cry from my previous naughty private jokes with Thomas after we read Jude the Obscure. We particularly liked the episode in which a strange child called Little Father Time decides that his family’s woes are due to its size, eliminates two of his siblings and hangs himself, leaving behind the message: “Done because we are too menny.” We enjoyed wailing those words to each other—in private. Now it was all anticipation of ecstasy: “HOME! Breakfast at half past 8! No row if you are late (we HOPE) NO frowns from women in gowns (Poof !) No slimy girls with corkscrew curls (Oof ) But HOME.” And so on and so on.

  The fact was that life back home was beginning to be exciting in a new way, a political way. My mother had taken the heroic decision not to stand for Parliament in the next election, given that she would probably win Kings Norton, whereas the fate of Oxford, my father’s putative constituency, was much more open to question. The consequence was that 8 Chad became a hotbed of political talk, while walking anywhere with Frank meant, in our opinion, that he greeted every single person he met with a friendly “Good morning” and then the explanatory phrase we grew to dread: “I’m Frank Pakenham, your Labour candidate…”