Dominic loved any kind of outrageous exploit, especially if it involved the flouting of authority. So, in order to amuse me, as he said later, he gathered together a body of his friends and invaded the hat department of Fenwick’s. Under the pretence of buying hats for other people—“My mother,” said Dominic boldly, when challenged—they began to throw the hats about with increasing abandon. I was powerless to stop them, and I don’t think anyone in the department really blamed Miss Tony. But soon afterwards I was gently encouraged to slink away, and slink away I did.
In all fairness, I should balance the introduction of Dominic Elwes into my life by my parents against their other very different social introduction, which also involved a ball. My father’s interest in Germany had by no means waned with his appointment as Minister for Civil Aviation. The need for practical reconciliation in the post-war world had been, and remained, a passionately held belief. As a mark of respect for Frank’s position, I was among those chosen to be presented to Dr. Adenauer when he came to Oxford in 1951. I was honoured to meet the Chancellor of West Germany. After that, things did not go quite so well. Dr. Adenauer, evidently primed, asked me how many children my mother had:
“Achtzig,” I replied proudly.
“Achtzig!” repeated the great statesman in astonishment.
“Do you realize what you have just said?” whispered the man from the Foreign Office in attendance, gazing at me in disgust. At that moment, I just did: even my mother didn’t have eighty children. But while the diplomat sneered, the Chancellor continued to beam at me, repeating once or twice: “Achtzig, achtzig,” in good-natured amusement, before he was moved on.
Later, the foundation of some kind of Anglo-German Society was another progressive step on the part of my father and his fellow believers in reconciliation. It owed a great deal to the activity of my father’s friend Victor Gollancz—“Jolly Golly” as he sometimes referred to himself—who, being both Jewish and fearless, was in a strong position to see off any possible opposition. Other people joined in; then the exciting news came that T. S. Eliot wished to be part of the enterprise in some way. This was a huge honour. His mere name was an enormous asset. He was not expected to attend an event such as the Anglo-German Ball, a friendly small-scale affair held at the German Embassy.
The next exciting—but unexpected and slightly daunting—news was that Mr. Eliot had every intention of attending the Anglo-German Ball. Mr. Eliot’s manners being perfect, in due course he asked me to dance. It was in this way I considered that I entered literary history, able to point out to future partners that they were dancing with a girl who had danced with, not so much the Prince of Wales, but the greatest poet of our time. Apart from that, Mr. Eliot was an excellent, firm dancer and showed every sign of enjoying the activity while my father (not interested in the subject of dancing) was optimistically trying to adapt the talents of the rugby field to the dance floor.
My campaign to become a debutante did not take place at quite such a high level. At least the problem of getting home to NW11 after the dance had recently reached a delightful solution. Moved to pity by my social dilemma, my father’s younger sister Violet Powell offered a periodic refuge at the house she lived in with her husband Anthony Powell in Chester Gate, off Regent’s Park. This was NW1: and what a wonderful postal district that was since one could post anything there with pride. More to the point, any young man would be willing to drop a girl back to the Regent’s Park district. Inclusion at last in the London whirl! This was my first reaction to the imaginative generosity of my aunt. In fact, my friendship with the Powells—as it became with time, way beyond the family ties with which it originated—was far more important in my life than mere convenience for a taxi ride.
Violet Powell was an extremely tolerant person. As a result of her acute interest in social life in all its forms, she had no time for dismissing people as dull; no one was dull for Violet, there had to be some connection and she would find it. Of course the result was that no one was dull in Violet’s company; I found myself relating the details of my encounters at parties with new relish. She was not a substitute mother, although she performed some of the functions another kind of mother might have performed, such as listening to my tales of social derring-do with apparent interest (did they lose anything in the telling? With an audience like Violet, definitely not). Besides, I had a mother, a mother I loved and admired.
What Violet was, I realized afterwards, was my first “grown-up” friend; that is to say, she was the staging post between the friendships of early youth, of necessity always with contemporaries, and the wide-ranging friendships we enjoy later on. It helped that there was something infectious about Violet’s enthusiasms. I note from my pocket diaries that an evening spent at Chester Gate would quite often be followed by a visit to a picture gallery, not out of duty, but for the sheer possibility of pleasure it offered. Her elder son, Tristram, then eight or nine, sometimes accompanied us, showing remarkable equanimity and even enjoyment.
Anthony Powell exerted a different kind of influence. To me in those days he was simply the benevolent man who sat down every morning after breakfast and wrote. He had a handsome head, with fine Roman features that could be well portrayed in busts (as happened later). This god-like but friendly figure obviously enjoyed what he was doing: that was my strongest impression; and then there was the regular discipline with which he appeared to write. Somehow I began equating writing, discipline and a good life. I had no idea at this point what he was writing: in fact this must have been the early stages of A Dance to the Music of Time, the first volume being published after the Powells moved to The Chantry in Somerset in 1950. At other times of day, Tony was definitely up for gossip based on the coloured-up details of my social life.
Anthony Powell had a great interest in genealogy, which of course I shared in a humbler fashion. It was however far from being centred on famous dukes and the like: it was family history that fascinated him. He took for example my decision to write about Cromwell as a personal challenge to involve me in the details of the Cromwellian Welsh ancestry that Tony had thoughtfully traced for me. Whereas Cromwell’s eighteenth-century biographer the Revd. Mark Noble had dismissed these ancestors with English condescension—“their history could afford no pleasure, and but little knowledge”—Tony took the opposite view. To sum up a long and intricate tale, Cromwell’s true family name was Williams. His father, Richard Williams, was the nephew of Thomas Cromwell through his mother. Opportunistically, Richard proceeded to change his name to Cromwell while the influence of his famous uncle was paramount, and the change survived Thomas Cromwell’s fall from power.
“Why not refer to him as Williams throughout?” suggested Tony at the end of his helpful and detailed letter. The trouble was that, apart from anything else, I had already decided to call my book Cromwell, Our Chief of Men, inspired by Milton’s sonnet which begins with this acclamation. I replied diplomatically to Tony that I did not think that Williams, Our Chief of Men had quite the same ring.
With time, I became a prodigious fan of Anthony Powell’s great sequence of novels. Just as my favourite pieces of instrumental music, string quartets, can be heard for ever, I find that his “music of time” bears endless rereading. While he was creating the novels, I had the added pleasure which all fans share of trying to distinguish reality from fiction. Perhaps it is an ultimately pointless exercise. I certainly came to think so when married to Harold, sometimes wanting to mutter: “What’s wrong with the writer’s imagination?” when claimants to be the original of this that and the other character stepped eagerly forward. Nevertheless, the exercise is undoubtedly an irresistible one. My favourite tutor at Oxford, Anne Whiteman, was proud to consider herself the origin of the claret-loving scholar Dr. Emily Brightman in the later books. Was Pamela Widmerpool or was she not Barbara Skelton? And where did Georgina Ward, actress in the dramatic version of Afternoon Men, fit in all this…At one point I was encouraged to enquire of Tony whether I myself might not
one day feature…
Tony gave his genial laugh which very often preceded a polite contradiction of what one had just said. “Oh no, Antonia,” he said. “You are a resolved character. I don’t write about resolved characters.” At the time I was innocent enough to be flattered: a resolved character! Like the bourgeois gentilhomme speaking prose all his life without knowing it, I had never even noticed my “resolving.” Later I realized that it was Tony’s elegant way of avoiding a discussion with which he must have become all too wearily familiar over the years.
One of the most agreeable aspects of conversations with Tony was his deep interest in the work of other writers; these talks were precious. There could however be traps here for the unwary—or the less well read. I once went on a Hellenic Cruise with the Powells. The company of fellow passengers was grist to Tony’s mill (in fact the Powells became inveterate cruise-goers). It was in this way that he suggested that we should assign them code names, using characters from Scott Fitzgerald, so that if necessary we could carry on our enjoyable discussions in public without offence. Somehow I allowed it to be understood that I was as expert on the work of Fitzgerald as the Powells were. The scene where I waxed eloquent on the subject of Jordan Baker, Daisy Buchanan’s girl friend with the “autumn-leaf” yellow hair, except I assumed from the name Jordan that he was a man, can still occasionally trouble the noon’s repose. The situation was saved by Violet, who gallantly continued to make gender-correcting references until I got the point and shut up; after that, by mutual agreement, we transferred our allusions to the works of Dickens.
There were no such perils during my happy visits to The Chantry, unless you counted walks round the lake with Tony swinging a billhook and occasionally pouncing on an errant shrub in our path. Even Tony cooking his famous curry did not make me nervous because I was confident Violet’s benign spirit would somehow ensure that everything would turn out all right.
The season of 1950 was the one into which I now launched myself, having bettered my social life from the landing-stage of Chester Gate. My parents survived in the NW11 suburb until the end of July when they returned to Bernhurst, a year or two later adding a sparsely furnished house in Chelsea to the equation to save my father commuting. It seemed peculiar to find something like the debutantes’ season still in place in 1950: wartime attitudes had not altogether vanished in the past five years. Petrol-rationing only ended in late May, clothes-rationing having ended a year previously; sweets and sugar remained rationed for a few years, and the final end of all rationing did not come until July 1954. In social life generally, at the start of the Fifties, there appeared to be a harking-back to the remembered rituals of the Thirties, and no impulse that one could discern towards breaking with the past. The ceremony of presentation at Court, for example, continued placidly for the next eight years. Change, when it came, was for the Sixties.
In this apparently retrograde world, I had developed expectations. Those wartime holidays staying with Aunt Mary Clive at her cottage at Whitfield had been enlivened by obsessional reading of old copies of the Tatler in the attics of the dust-sheeted big house nearby. I expected therefore race meetings, felt hats for gentlemen and suits with rather baggy trousers, dances with heavy lipstick and ropes of pearls for the ladies. Names would be mainly double-barrelled, with both names quite long and difficult to spell. (Any yearning I might have had for a double-barrelled name was, however, quickly removed by finding my own name difficult enough for anyone formally announcing it at my entrance to a ball. “Miss Alethea Buckingham has arrived,” was one memorable stab at it.) In fact, the season of 1950, in so far as I managed to infiltrate it, was a shabbier and thus cheaper version of the Thirties seasons.
I was certainly not the only one who made her own ball dresses, my masterpiece being made of layers of coarse cotton net, cheap and surprisingly easy to fashion into an off-the-shoulder number with a huge skirt. Daringly, the colour was black, but I softened the effect with an enormous pink velvet rose plonked in the middle of my décolletage. Queen Victoria was known to have suggested to one of her granddaughters, wearing a plunging evening dress at dinner, that she should poke a flower into her bosom, for the sake of the footman who was standing behind her chair in the direct line of vision. My pink velvet rose would hardly have saved the sensibilities of a footman since it tended to weigh down the whole edifice, with its inadequate structure beneath.
A different kind of danger was posed by petticoats: in the evening they gave a crinoline effect, being made of cheap material and held up by rings of whalebone. But petticoats were wayward things: if the fastening broke, or the emergency safety pin gave way, the gleaming white structure could sink without warning to the floor at one’s feet, say, during a Scottish reel. The so-called Merry Widow corset which held one in to an improbably small waist was on the other hand a loyal friend, but was not launched on a grateful market of young ladies until a few years later. This was the one period when I kept elaborate accounts at the back of my pocket diary of what I spent on clothes—probably because I was trying so hard to be something I wasn’t. In my tiny budget, there was inordinate expenditure on pairs of white gloves, which certainly proves the point.
I had two dresses made for me by a dressmaker. One was of startling lime-green silk with white stars on it, material bought at Jacqmar; this was for my garden party dress, the garden party at which I would be presented. With it went heavy white court shoes and a shiny white plastic handbag, modelled on one carried by Princess Margaret. A large white straw picture hat with a carefully matching lime-green ribbon completed the picture. The saleslady at Jacqmar, a large building just off Bond Street, said brightly: “What an interesting colour! I’m sure no other debutante will be wearing this colour green.” I did not tell her that my uncle Henry Lamb had recently drawn me and flatteringly discerned exotic green lights in my skin; he suggested green would be a good colour for me to wear, but bearing in mind the mysterious greens in his own pictures, probably did not have in mind lime-green-patterned Jacqmar. The other dress was of cream-coloured faille, once again adorned by a large pink rose, but a better-behaved rose that did not weigh anything down. I was photographed wearing this by Baron, the famous Society photographer, looking uncharacteristically soulful after he told me sharply not to smile.
In giving an account of my appearance at the time, I am tempted to imitate the example of the Marquise de la Tour du Pin in her eighteenth-century memoir of her life at the Court of Marie Antoinette: as an exercise in false modesty it is hard to beat. “I think the moment has come to describe myself,” she wrote. Despite her reputation for beauty, “on paper, the portrait will not be flattering…” After this preamble, Madame de la Tour goes on to list her features in the most favourable terms, including the beautiful fresh bloom of her mouth, and her very good teeth, before observing that she herself always considered herself—and any woman said to look like her—as “hideous.” She ends: “Perhaps it was my dazzling clear and transparent complexion which made me outstanding in any gathering…” Unfortunately a dazzling clear and transparent complexion would not have made a girl of my generation in England in any way outstanding since the cliché about the famous pink-and-white English skin was broadly speaking true. A compliment to the complexion always sounded suspiciously like the compliment of last resort, when there was nothing else to say.
My own looks, including what was seen as an over-large mouth (as Baron had pointed out when he told me to purse my lips), were not at all fashionable at the time. The contemporary ideal was the Deb of the Year, the Hon. Sally Ann Vivian, with her exquisite fragile appearance: cute blonde curl in the middle of her forehead, little beanie hat above (my head looked ridiculous in a beanie hat) and delicate rosebud mouth. She was indeed ravishingly pretty and I longed to look exactly like her. It was not until the Sixties, once again, that the wheel of beauty turned, as it does from decade to decade, and a new type emerged with film stars such as Julie Christie and Marianne Faithfull. I was able to benefit f
rom an imagined resemblance to Julie Christie, especially after her success as Lara in Dr. Zhivago.
It was a comparison I heavily encouraged. My hair had somehow grown longer and blonder in the interval, and may even have been reinforced by the strategic positioning of hairpieces (sometimes I still discover these relics of that time in an old cupboard and gaze at them with a mixture of nostalgia and amazement). I swept it up into Lara-like styles whenever possible. Of course when I got to know Julie Christie, associated with Harold on Human Rights issues, I realized that the comparison was absurd. We were not really at all alike. It was the illusion of the huge fur hat (naturally I had bought a huge fur hat to peer from under) and the make-up. Apart from anything else, like many film stars, she was not only intensely beautiful but tiny in real life, a Pocket Venus. I only hope that those people to whom I nodded in gracious acknowledgement at the opera in New York when they questioned me respectfully from the next box with the words: “Miss Julie Christie?” never found out the truth.
The contemporary values for good looks became of particular interest to me when I was writing historical biography. One was faced with the inevitable contrast between the reports of the day and the illustration on the page which seemed to be contradicting what I had written. Mary Queen of Scots for example was regularly described as the most beautiful princess in Europe; looking at the statutory pictures of her, long beaked nose, small pursed mouth, eyes which were certainly not large, one wondered what the other princesses must have looked like. Soon I came to realize that my role was not to pass any kind of judgement based on my own values but simply try, by quotation, to establish how she was seen at the time; readers could then interpret the pictures for themselves.