My History

by Antonia Fraser

  When it came to the question of Marie Antoinette, I understood further that grace of deportment and dancing was something that was vital to the image of an eighteenth-century French queen; but I could hardly experience it first-hand. This was where a report by Horace Walpole, paying a visit to the French Court, was a wonderful discovery for me. He wrote that he would never forget seeing her follow Louis XV into the Royal Chapel, how she “shot through the room like an aerial Being, all brightness and grace and without seeming to touch the earth.” After that, I found that Marie Antoinette was several times compared by eyewitnesses to Venus, in that passage in the Aeneid where she appears incognito to Aeneas. But as Venus turns away, “by her gait she revealed that she was in truth a goddess” (vera incessu patuit dea). All this was worth far more in evoking her aura than discussions of the “Habsburg” lower lip she had inherited, which contemporary observers took for granted.

  The failure of the modern eye, unless it is guided properly, was quaintly illustrated for me when I visited Hever Castle in Kent. This was where Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife, held sway following the collapse of her marriage to Henry VIII due, as every schoolchild knows, to his instant physical distaste for her person, dubbing her “the Flanders Mare.” A party of schoolchildren who did of course know this were going round at the same time as myself. In this way I was privy to the following piece of dialogue:

  Schoolchild A—“There she is. The ugly one.”

  Schoolchild B—“Yes, there she is. Plug-ugly.”

  But they were actually gazing at a portrait of Anne Boleyn! The captions had confused them. Anne Boleyn: she of the fascinating black eyes which she knew how to “use with effect,” sending a silent message that carried “the secret testimony of the heart,” in the words of a contemporary. Anne Boleyn: the siren of a second wife, who with her sensual appearance gathered Henry VIII into her toils. I looked again at the second wife: if I had not studied the evidence of eyewitnesses, would I really have understood her magnetism? In the same way, the portrait of Anne of Cleves, along the line, looked perfectly attractive to the outward eye, unless you knew what happened—or rather didn’t happen—on her wedding night.

  In the summer of 1950, there were lunches given by debutantes’ mothers at which important social matters were ironed out; it was of course out of the question for Elizabeth to attend such things. Dances were arranged but also cocktail parties for those who could not afford a dance: some of these were shared conveniently between two families. The problem I faced was how to get myself onto the invitation list. There was only one answer. Since my mother was no help, I would bring myself out.

  I did not realize at first that, as a future student at a university, with an assured place, I was a rarity among the debutantes. I was to discover this when I began to acquire some dancing partners who would politely ask me about my autumn plans: “Are you going to the shoot at Stately Home X on November twenty-fifth…?” “No,” I would answer brightly: “I’ll be shooting down undergraduates. I’m going to Oxford.” After a few uncomprehending stares, I abandoned that line of chat and let it be understood that I was going to take a secretarial course, like the others. All the same I began dimly to understand the inestimable advantage I had in 1950 in having an ambitious mother—ambitious for her daughter academically, that is, and not like Mrs. Bennet seeking an advantageous matrimonial bargain.

  In truth, this instinct was the first small indication that a highly prized and successful relationship with my mother might lie ahead. My late teens were definitely the time when we were least in accord: to sum up, she only thought about Politics and Small Children, and I only thought about History and Romance. At the time, Elizabeth did give way to my wishes in one respect. She consented to host a modest cocktail party at the Allies Club in Park Lane, which had been fashionable during the war, I believe, but certainly wasn’t now. I achieved this by making it clear that agreement would be less trouble than prolonged argument. The rest was up to me.

  So it was a challenge that was all about winning and losing; although I did not attempt to scale the heights of the fabled Queen Charlotte’s Ball, where debutantes were said to curtsey to a cake in the absence of the monarch. It was as though Marie Antoinette had withdrawn from the courtly fray and issued the directive: “Let them curtsey to the cake.” That, I felt, would be a step too far for my mother and even, to be honest, for me. Sometimes I won when I managed to get to a dance because I had been at school with the girl concerned and discovered a spurious past intimacy between us. Sometimes I lost through trying to scale the heights, as when I failed to get to the ball at Holkham for Lady Anne Coke, a modern Gainsborough beauty. I won when I was invited to a shooting weekend in Hampshire by one John Baring, a quizzical fellow with a good sense of the ridiculous. He would have appreciated the entry in my diary noting the future event, with its order of priorities: “I am terrified of doing the wrong thing,” I wrote. “Also of getting shot.”

  At this distance of time, I remain intensely grateful to all the hosts and hostesses who received me and—more or less—philosophical about those who didn’t. Fortunately at least one event followed conventional lines of mother and daughter bonded together in attendance and that was my presentation at Buckingham Palace. Debutantes had to be presented by someone who had been presented herself, which category included of course Elizabeth, despite her lecturing at Stoke. I was even able to boast later of exchanging a few words with the Queen herself. This honour could hardly have been accorded to every single debutante at the packed occasion, although I’m sure the perpetually smiling Queen Elizabeth did her best. I was evidently the beneficiary of my father’s official position as a Labour minister. Once again, this was something to set against his basic disinclination to attend any social occasion designed for my self-promotion.

  “What would be the point, darling?” said Elizabeth sensibly. “Dada would only go to sleep.” This was so obviously true that I had to hold my peace. It was an exchange I bore in mind much later when Harold entrusted me with the delicate mission of stopping Frank coming to his first nights: not only did my father fall asleep almost at once, but his prominent, highly recognizable slumbering figure gave, Harold felt, the wrong impression to the critics.

  “So you are going to Oxford,” said the well-primed Queen Elizabeth in a friendly manner, after I had made my curtsey. “Well, you must have a fling first.” Actually a fling was the last thing I wanted: on the contrary I wanted True Love, the sort I read about in books, not all of the high standard of Pride and Prejudice. It is a fact that, being a quick reader, apart from enabling a person to study good books such as Macaulay and Gibbon, enables a person to read a lot of bad books as well. It would however be ungrateful to pick out the titles that gave me such pleasure and stigmatize them as bad books; besides, I would maintain that such books can teach you narrative skill, which certainly never comes amiss in writing History. I made this point in the very first interview I gave to the press after writing Mary Queen of Scots, acknowledging my debt to Barbara Cartland for whom I had had a teenage addiction. The next day the doorbell rang and a chauffeur stood there with a huge parcel of books.

  “With the compliments of Miss Barbara Cartland, my lady,” he said. “The mixture as before,” read the engaging note which accompanied the books, signed by the author herself.

  At the age of seventeen I had not yet found True Love (that would in fact turn out to be many, many years ahead). But I had got to the first stage: I had met my First Love. Patrick Lindsay was the dashing younger son of the Scottish Earl of Crawford and Balcarres. Extraordinarily handsome, with his thick black hair, eyebrows which met in the middle—“a sign of jealousy,” he told me complacently—and his large compelling green eyes, Patrick Lindsay was every maiden’s dream. Besides, with Patrick, the word dashing meant exactly what it said: he dashed in every possible sense of the word, dashing very fast down mountains, dashing about very fast in cars, and finally taking to aeroplanes where no doubt he dashed abo
ut the air as a pilot. Patrick’s interests were not limited to fast sports, however. He would take me later to my first opera since that disastrous Tales of Hoffmann at which I had howled the house down on witnessing the death of Antonia. This was The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden with Geraint Evans as Figaro. The combination of Mozart, First Love and opera was irresistible: it seared me for ever. I still cannot hear the overture without feeling some welcome residue of romantic excitement.

  I first encountered Patrick at a very different occasion, a hunt ball—how right I had been to fantasize about them when at Fenwick’s!—and my behaviour was in no way elevated to Mozartian standards. Somehow I planted a sticky kiss on the shirtfront of his evening dress. Patrick was not best pleased by this: in fact I learnt later that he had quite a puritan attitude to make-up and smoking. At all events the lurid pink lipstick I favoured appeared to make more impression than I did. Besides this maiden’s dream was said to be in love with a girl who was both a skiing champion and the niece of a duke. I could compete in neither category.

  All the same, I had met my First Love and I knew that somewhere, somehow, as in books, we would meet again. In the meantime I was going to Oxford to study History. No, wait, I was going to study—what was the name of that subject? I would shortly find out.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  OXFORD MISS

  There we were, we first-year students, assembled in the Junior Common Room of Lady Margaret Hall to be wised up about all that was hopefully to come. We were told we could ask any questions we liked about the way things worked in our new life. There was briefly silence. Then a very small, very pretty girl, sitting in the front row more or less enveloped by her huge scholar’s gown, said in a loud, confident voice:

  “I have a question. What can we ask the scouts to do for us in our rooms? Will they do some ironing?” These were the college maids, known as scouts in imitation of the servants in the men’s colleges. I remember a gasp. Someone nudged me.

  “That’s Marigold Hunt. The Headgirl of Benenden.” It was in fact my first sight of the future Marigold Johnson, who filled me with admiration for her boldness: it was to inaugurate a lifetime’s friendship. At the time, being both domestically inadequate and terrified of my scout, I badly wanted to know the answer.

  My neighbour in the back row quizzed me: “What are you reading?”

  “History,” I replied without thinking, my History. Then I had to correct myself. “Actually I got in on History, but now I’m reading Politics, Economics and…” My voice tailed away.

  “Philosophy,” concluded my new friend helpfully. “PPE. You forgot Philosophy.” Everybody at LMH was clearly very kind. Apart from this general atmosphere of kindness, the college, given its punitive rules, conveyed the impression of being an enormous ladies’ boarding school, more Godolphin than St. Mary’s Ascot. Girls, or I should of course say women, were not allowed to…the list was endless, many of them positively encouraging defiance. No man in your room before 2 p.m. or after 7 p.m.; no student to come back into the college later than 10 p.m. The latter rule certainly led to some strange solutions, of which spending the night out was the simplest; I developed a habit of returning for breakfast, carrying a black veil and a Missal, with the smug expression of one who has recently attended early Mass.

  Climbing in was another more exciting option, needing the hefty arm of a man, from Christ Church perhaps, one who was used to beagling, with oneself as the hound. That still did not overcome the problem of the movable crinoline petticoat, alluded to in the previous chapter; after a dance, sporting girls tended to throw the petticoat over first in a merry gamble that the petticoat would not be stuck one side and the owner the other. Another rule that visits to London were not permitted in term time probably affected me more than most, given that my social life, including my unrequited love, was still focused there. I shall always bless the memory of the LMH tutor (not my own) who happened to coincide with me on the platform of Oxford station.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Pakenham, an emergency dentist’s appointment, no doubt.”

  “Yes, definitely an emergency,” I gulped. It certainly was now, if it had not been one originally. As equivocation, it was rather clumsy: this was the art of not telling a positive lie while not conveying the truth either, which I came to study later over the Gunpowder Plot. But it satisfied both our consciences, the charitable don and the wayward student. I heard no more about it.

  The original fine red-brick buildings of Lady Margaret Hall, named for Margaret Beaufort, scholarly mother of Henry VII, had been constructed before the First World War, and Deneke, rather less agreeable because the rooms were so small, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in the year I was born. They were utterly different from the ancient and august stone structures which constituted my childhood memories of Oxford: that freezing room in Tom Quad where Frank taught had little in common, including the temperature, with the cosy sitting rooms in which the LMH dons resided. All this increased the impression of a boarding school, whereas Christ Church was what was meant by a college. Of course in yearning for icy-cold stone and tramps in the rain, instead of warm red-brick and bathrooms, I was being perverse. I was deeply impressed when my daughter Flora got a place at Wadham College to read Greats not long after girls were first admitted—three hundred and sixty-four years after its foundation in 1610. (Shades of the august Maurice Bowra of my youth!) I soon found out the discomfort which went with a greater sense of historical presence.

  The gardens of LMH on the other hand were a joy. They were beautifully laid out and tranquil, rolling down towards the Cherwell—that river in which I had already immersed myself so often while living at 8 Chad and at the Dragon School. In fact, geographically LMH was virtually part of that North Oxford suburb in which I had grown up. I did not see it like that at the time, and it never occurred to me to wander in the direction of 8 Chad, down the footpath which skirted the Dragon School. The sound of bells which was the music of my childhood still came at evening from the chapels in the colleges; now the bells drew me towards the centre. My footsteps (and my bicycle) were firmly pointed in that direction.

  I was however actually there to study. It was clear that academically things were already off to a bad start: there was something Freudian about my forgetting—yet again—what PPE stood for. Within the next few days they got worse when I attended my first lecture in…Philosophy, I suppose. At any rate, it was given by the future Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, Peter Strawson; the site was University College in the High Street. The first sight which greeted me was a blackboard. And the lecturer almost immediately began scribbling figures on it in chalk.

  I felt the kind of desperate impulse which must animate a bride who bolts at the altar, regardless of all the actions that have got her there in the first place—because it’s her last chance to escape. What had happened to my History? This was not why I had come to Oxford, to gaze at a blackboard covered in chalk figures. There and then I fled from Univ, into the High, dived towards the back streets of Christ Church, found my bicycle, and peddled frantically back to LMH. An awkward period of negotiation followed.

  At some point, one of the dons involved murmured in a reasonable voice: “If we had known you wanted to read History, not PPE, we would not have awarded you an Exhibition…” The implication was that there had been other more worthy candidates in a fair fight over a History award. So my mother had been right about that, I remember thinking. That didn’t help me in my present fix.

  “So are you going to take it away?” I burst out, thinking that would be the second piece of bad news, apart from my change of subject, I would have to confess in a letter to Elizabeth (I had no intention of risking a call from the single available telephone, a pay box in the porter’s lodge). There must have been some kind of conference. The dons were essentially fair-minded women. I had been given an Exhibition without a condition publicly attached. I was allowed to keep it.

  I should like to relate that this crisi
s and its generous resolution turned me into a model student. My love of History was genuine enough; the trouble was that in other ways I lacked seriousness. Or at any rate the kind of seriousness demanded of a girl student in 1950, who incidentally would be writing two essays a week to the one essay that the men wrote. Any girl who looked as if she might have pretensions to a social life was deliberately given a 9 a.m. tutorial to keep her alert to her real mission—or so we believed. Certainly my sessions on medieval History with Miss Naomi D. Hurnard, my so-called Moral Tutor, always seemed to take place at this antisocial hour. It was not the hour itself to which I objected, by nature being a lark rather than an owl (like my father). It was the fearful temptation it presented of doing nothing about my essay during the days before, and then getting up with that famous lark and writing, fast, very fast…This was no way for an aspiring historian to come to terms with her subject.

  The trouble was compounded by an unhappy juxtaposition of teacher and pupil. Admiration for Mr. Bussell, the man who believed nothing good had happened after the thirteenth century, convinced me that I wanted to study medieval History in particular (apart from the whole of English History, which we had to do as a matter of course). It was this which brought me into the orbit of Miss Hurnard, who would certainly have agreed that this match thrown up in Oxford was not one made in heaven.

  Then in her forties, very pale, with black hair screwed into a bun, Miss Hurnard had long white hands which she extended together in the general direction of the fire. She looked remote; one has to bear in mind however that she was the author of violently learned articles about legal History which would culminate in the publication of The King’s Pardon for Homicide Before AD 1307. Sometimes the hands appeared as if they might pick up the metal toast rack lying by the hearth; and what would they do with this sharp instrument? In the meantime Miss Hurnard never looked in my direction, only talked in elegantly composed sentences as she gazed into the flames. On the hearth lay her dog, a large, equally pale lump of Staffordshire bull terrier. When the dog, unlike the don, did look in my direction, I got an uneasy impression of transferred hostility.