My History: A Memoir of Growing Up

  But really it would be right to take Great-Uncle Eddie first. He was the flamboyant one who caught the eye. For one thing, his towering height made him the natural centre of attention. He seemed to us to be seven foot tall, and was actually about six foot five. Now in his sixties, he was still handsome, with a finely shaped silver beard and regular features. Then he exuded energy, and with the energy came surprise—whatever would Dunsany do next? A plethora of stories were told about him within the family circle: one might call them tales of the unexpected. Walking round a lake with Eddie when they were a courting couple, did Beatrice really ask: “I wonder how deep that lake is?” And did he really reply: “Go in and see,” suiting the push to the words? I found this one difficult to believe because his public behaviour to his wife was always so chivalrous; although it is true that her nickname for him of “Pony” might have been profitably altered to “Wild Horse.”

  It was easier to credit the story of his behaviour during a game of Dumb Crambo, because it focused on surprise. Dunsany was asked by one side to enact the word “shirt” for the other side to guess. This was his response. Going behind a screen, Dunsany proceeded to throw not only his shirt, but all his clothes over the top into the drawing room, one by one. Aunt Beatrice became visibly agitated. Finally, the last garment, one imagines of the most intimate sort, having been deposited publicly, Dunsany said in a sepulchral voice: “And now I’m coming out.” There was general consternation followed by genteel panic.

  “Pony, Pony, there are ladies present!” Beatrice began to squeak in real distress. “No, Pony, no…” Before her husband stepped from behind the screen—fully dressed in a completely different set of clothes.

  At the time when Thomas and I knew Great-Uncle Eddie, he was in his late sixties. His physical stamina seemed undiminished: he would be up at dawn to go duck-shooting and liked to tell the story of comparing notes with his gamekeeper Toomey. The latter, according to Dunsany, was an ardent Sinn Feiner. They would meet later in the morning and—once more according to Dunsany—the dialogue would go like this:

  “I got two duck this morning, Toomey.”

  “And I, my lord, got two trains.”

  It is pleasant to record that in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Toomey worked for Great-Uncle Eddie for forty years. Shooting was certainly a passion, sometimes a disconcerting one, as when a shot would ring out. Dunsany had seized a gun kept handy and potted a rabbit on the lawn from the first-floor window.

  Not all Dunsany’s pursuits were sporting in the outdoor sense. He was also celebrated as a chess player. The Cuban José Raúl Capablanca, world champion for six years in the Twenties, once played him. We were brought up on the fabled sentence which occurred at the end of the game: “Capablanca resigns” (I believe it was actually a draw). The trouble was that, where chess was concerned, I just about knew the rules, although Thomas had a certain skill which I definitely didn’t. It might have been better in both cases if we had been able to say that we were totally ignorant. For Dunsany, his mighty energies ever seeking diversion, would prowl about the enormous drawing room, looking for what would undoubtedly turn out to be a victim.

  “Have a game?” These were the words we dreaded, not so much a question as a command. Then Dunsany would continue his prowling, while one of us sat down obediently at the board. After the first few moves, with his enormous hands dominating the board, he played blind, looking out of the window, possibly for vagabond rabbits (although I do not remember him actually shooting at them during a chess game: he always took chess seriously, even with us). We told him about our moves, at which point he would dictate his own, his fine head held aloft and distant. Of course he always won. All this meant that Thomas and I crept about the drawing room during the day for fear of “Have a game?,” as though it was a dragon’s lair, with a chess-playing dragon inside it.

  Great-Uncle Eddie had his other passions—and his phobias. Some of them were curiously modern. He felt strongly for example on the subject of white flour, and salt, which should be rock salt and not commercially processed. He did not hesitate to say so wherever he was. This made entertaining him at Bernhurst something of a trial for Elizabeth who, being uninterested in the topic, never remembered the passion from one visit to the next. Advertisements altogether aroused his ire. For that matter so did T. S. Eliot. Then there were dogs’ tails, which should never be docked: Great-Uncle Eddie’s dogs had magnificent feathery tails.

  Dunsany violently disapproved of the Duchess of Windsor, going back to the days when she was married to her second husband, Ernest Simpson. This disapproval extended to the former Edward VIII. Of the Duke of Windsor he was fond of saying with a kind of grim pleasure: “He used to be the Admiral of the King’s Navy, and he gave it all up to be the third mate of an American destroyer.” Was there some anti-American feeling here? Or was it merely generational: Great-Uncle Eddie and Great-Aunt Beatrice being affected by the influx of American heiresses into English Society in general and the English peerage in particular. Beatrice, a most charitable woman, was in her turn fond of a story about an American, keen to emphasize her newly won place in the ranks of the aristocracy, who caught the tail-end of a conversation about The Prince by Machiavelli.

  “Gee, that dear Prince!” the newcomer was supposed to have cried. (Beatrice’s American accent was lamentable even to my ears.) “Didn’t I see him just yesterday at the races?”

  Great-Uncle Eddie, apart from being a sportsman, had been a soldier, fighting in the South African War as a young man. No one could fault his courage: the comparatively elderly couple had only recently escaped from Greece, where they were caught, with Dunsany lecturing, at the beginning of the war. But his profession, if that is the right word, was actually that of a writer: he was a poet, a novelist and a playwright. He wrote in fact all the time, with a magnificent quill pen, and the sight of his huge splendid scrolling writing still moves me. There was for example a jeu d’esprit, “Lines to Antonia,” written to invite me to Dunsany:

  Come when the hay has grown

  And visit us, Antonia

  When all the lilac’s flown

  But there is still begonia

  Come when the midgets drone

  (Better bring some ammonia)

  And our new gramophone

  Will play you a sinfonia.

  This was actually printed in Punch, to my immense pride. As a tangible record of his affection, Great-Uncle Eddie gave me a paperweight of ruby-red glass; it still stands on my writing desk. “See, how the sun makes it light up when you roll it down the bank of a river,” he said, suiting the action to the word so that I had to scramble to save the pyramid-shaped object from disappearing. (Perhaps that story about Aunt Beatrice and the lake was true after all.)

  More seriously, a back staircase was plastered with the framed playbills of his many performed plays. Then there were the Jorkens stories; Jorkens, a retired big-game hunter, spends his time in the Billiards Club (billiards are not played) where he trades stories for whisky. My favourite, with its mad mixture of logic and fantasy, was when Jorkens saved the Gulf Stream for Britain by buying it from a man in a pub who happened to have it for sale. Dunsany’s love of his spaniels was commemorated by My Talks with Dean Spanley, a marvellous novel in which an alcoholic clergyman is convinced he is the reincarnation of a dog called Wag. The Dean goes into reminiscent mood when he is supplied with sufficient Tokay at the Club: how his name was really Moon-chaser not the pathetic Wag, and how he carried out his elected task of keeping the earth safe from the moon by vigorous nightly barking. “Ah, the moon,” says the Dean. “Yes, he never came any nearer. But there’s no saying what he’d have done if I hadn’t been there.”

  For me, however, Dunsany’s greatest work was his novel about the political troubles of the fight for Irish independence, The Curse of the Wise Woman. The old woman concerned uses her magic powers to save the bog, the sacred bog which epitomizes Ireland, which is about to be ruined by outsiders with machinery fo
r the sake of industrial production. But the action takes place within the carapace of another story which is not magic at all. It begins with a boy in a big Irish house, who is mysteriously instructed to keep his eyes fixed on a Dutch picture in the corner of the room if his father ever gives the order. The order comes. His father somehow vanishes through the bookcases of the library, while the boy gazes fixedly at the Dutch picture. And then four men arrive with the sinister greeting: “There is no one we have a greater respect for than your father but it is a pity he mixed himself up with politics the way he did.” The boy gets the point immediately: “Then I knew they had come to shoot my father.” The boy has seen the face of the leader of the assassins—but he chooses not to identify him and one day the potential killer will be leader of the country. He will also be grateful to the boy who stayed silent as he knew his father would have wished.

  Not only the bog is there, the geese—the cry goes up “the grey lags are coming”—and the flash of the snipe, but in a brilliant manner the intricate politics of the country: what F. E. Smith, my father’s hero, called “this island of incomparable beauty…so individual in its genius, so tenacious in love and hate, so captivating in its nobler moods.”

  Every now and then, Thomas and I would be piled into a taxi to make the cross-country journey to Pakenham Hall in Westmeath. Here we found a very different couple as well as a very different castle. Taking the castle first, Pakenham gave no impression at all of armed defence, unlike Dunsany. It had been transformed in the age of Regency Gothic and now sprawled graciously across the head of a green valley, with views of mighty trees and peaceful cows in the distance. In the foreground just below the castle lay a kind of grassy platform, useful for what I came to think of as Irish tennis (interrupted only by real rain storms, not softly falling drizzle). The most remarkable room in the house was the library, an eighteenth-century gentleman’s library, plus the Irish books that interested Edward and Christine. Then there was the Great Hall, high and dark with a threatening family tree somewhere at the top of it that one could barely read, unlike that friendly herald’s tree at home.

  Edward Longford, when we first were aware of him, must have been in his early forties. But his extraordinary physical appearance made it difficult to attach any particular age to him. To my eyes, he always looked the same age during the fifteen-odd years I visited him: that is to say, immensely large, weighing something like thirty stone. At the same time, he was made of the most wonderful material, with rosy cheeks and a glowing air of wellbeing which made nonsense of the modern rules of health.

  Nor did his enormous bulk appear to incapacitate him from anything he really wanted to do: Uncle Edward always had his own way. The footman once put the mountainous plate intended for the lord in front of me by mistake. As I sat, somewhat stunned, I saw Uncle Edward banging his empty mat in furious agitation like a huge child in a high chair deprived of his lawful bottle. For undoubtedly one answer to the question, why was Edward Longford so fat, was that he ate a vast amount of food lavishly provided by his loving wife. The adult bottle (of wine) was not actually of any importance, although one glorious episode demonstrated that he could drink with the best of them, if he was so minded.

  In the Fifties, the known lack of drink at Pakenham once prompted my brother Thomas to take action on behalf of us Frasers who were planning to visit. Aware that Hugh liked his due ration of whisky and his wine at dinner, he helpfully prepared the way by saying (inaccurately): “My brother-in-law is an alcoholic.” What no one at Pakenham knew was that our generous host in the South of Ireland, Andrew Devonshire, with equal consideration, had dispatched us on the train with a case of bottles for secret consumption in our bedroom. Drink flowed downstairs in a way I had never seen before. Drink also flowed upstairs. My main memory of the ensuing stay is of the zest Uncle Edward himself brought to consuming alcohol, draining whole bottles—“It doesn’t last, you know,” he said with authority—but unlike us, without any apparent ill effects.

  Another example of Uncle Edward’s surprising ability was his skill at billiards. Playing with us, he would deftly carry out a particular shot, with the billiard cue held behind his back in his plump, pink hands, and his enormous round stomach extending over the green baize of the table in a way that seemed to defy physical reality. Another passion was driving his car very fast, like Mr. Toad, down the middle of the Irish roads: mercifully there were very few other cars on the road at the time. Edward was, like his siblings, a clever man who had learnt the Irish language, part of his support for the new independent Irish state, and translated poems from the language. (Eamon Longphort was his adopted Irish name.) He once took us to Fore Abbey, originally a Benedictine monastery near Lough Lene, and from a commanding position in the ruins, like some great abbot from the past, harangued his congregation of two in both Irish and Latin.

  Christine Longford was a couple of years older than her husband; they had met as undergraduates at Oxford. Christine’s mother Mrs. Trew still lived in Oxford (occasionally tended to by my father in her later years), but Christine, like Edward, had made her life entirely Irish. Her appearance was in itself fascinating, apart from being in complete contrast to that of Edward. Her thick dark hair was cut rigidly across, straight without hint of a curl; she wore no make-up. All this was quite austere. But her smile, over the cigarette perpetually held in her hand, was somehow complicit in any pleasure. She once hissed at me, seeing that I had picked up Memoirs of Hecate County, a collection of novellas by Edmund Wilson, which happened to be lying in the drawing room: “the sex one is on page…” I was embarrassed at the time, but not too embarrassed to remember the page number and race to it as soon as I was alone. (And yes, she was absolutely right, “The Princess with the Golden Hair” was sex indeed: it was subsequently banned in the U.S.)

  There was something of a brilliant monkey about Christine: a Chinese monkey perhaps, which a propensity for Chinese jackets, and Chinese artefacts to furnish Pakenham, encouraged one to perceive. The brilliance showed itself early when she wrote a novel, Making Conversation, while still at Oxford, and she continued to write plays and novels. She certainly encouraged the free, almost anarchic side of Edward, who appeared to prefer Chinese art to his ancestral belongings. In consequence, he disposed of various possessions, and in one legendary incident at least, Frank was the beneficiary. Uncle Bingo, bachelor younger brother of the late Lord Longford, was dining at his club. He gazed for a long time at a large piece of silver in the centre of the polished table. Then he said in a fond, reminiscent voice:“There used to be a piece just like that at Pakenham when I was a boy.”

  “That is the piece that was at Pakenham when you were a boy,” replied the Club Secretary briskly. “Your nephew Edward sold it to us.” Uncle Bingo was said to have been so put out that he proceeded to leave everything to the innocent Frank. (That part at least was true; it was a matter of regret that the bequest arrived in time for the collapse of the Stock Exchange and vanished almost as quickly as it had come.)

  Edward and Christine, despite the Chinese imports, never struck me as particularly interested in their Westmeath surroundings. What excited them both was the Gate Theatre in Dublin, into which they poured their energies and a great deal of Edward’s fortune; he became Chairman of the theatre in 1930. Years later, it always seemed to me wonderfully fitting that the Pinter Festivals which Harold appreciated most in his long career took place at that very same Gate Theatre, under the management of Michael Colgan. Older members of the audience would tell me: “Oh, I remember your uncle Lord Longford, holding out his begging bowl outside the steps of the theatre.” I loved the image: Uncle Edward shaking with laughter, all of him, which he did quite regularly, making some excellent jokes—and accosting playgoers to contribute in that accent which had become a sort of Irish all his own. At this point I was tempted to reply: “And now it’s my husband who’s holding out his begging bowl—metaphorically speaking.”

  Harold had toured Ireland as a young man with t
he celebrated actor-manager Anew McMaster, a formative experience described in his affectionate memoir Mac. Our earlier Irish experiences having taken place at roughly the same time but in very different circumstances, we united happily in enjoying the Gate Festivals. I even got to stay at the Shelbourne Hotel. In the Forties, had I not dreamt in vain of that entry in the social column of the Irish Times: “Miss Antonia Pakenham has arrived at the Shelbourne”? Now I was there.

  The whole family, not just the Irish twins, Thomas and myself, did have one holiday together in Ireland in the summer of 1947 around the time of my fifteenth birthday. Elizabeth was expecting her eighth child in November, which did not deter her from booking us into a hotel at Derrynane, near Waterville, in Co. Kerry on the coast in south-west Ireland. There the green grass went down to the sea, in a wide bay, with black-and-white cows munching right to the edge of the waves.

  This was an exciting glimpse of another Ireland from the lakes, bogs and lush pastures of Meath and Westmeath, and the stately jolly lives we had led there, wandering idly down the paths, swimming in the lakes, when not stuffing ourselves with unrationed food handed over by butlers. For in the corner of the bay lay the house of Daniel O’Connell, the Irish politician known as the Liberator. For me, there is no more attractive character in Irish History than O’Connell. I only came to study him properly at the time when I was working on the Great Reform Bill of 1832, in which, newly enabled to sit in the British Parliament by the Act of Catholic Emancipation, he exerted vital influence. Nevertheless, the sense I acquired in 1947 of his personality, against the background of the Irish landscape, remained with me. (O’Connell was born at Carhen, about nine miles from the house at Derrynane.)