The basic reason was that we shared a taste for fantasy, historical fantasy, mixed in with the creative life of our dolls, who became historical figures. (Gilberta, my favourite doll with her halo of flaxen hair, was always up for it: Priscilla, a large innocent-looking baby doll, was more difficult to fit into a historical sequence.) The grown-ups, I can see now, might have found the spectacle of seven-year-old schoolgirls obsessed by their dolls slightly odd, except the whole lot of them were far too busy with more important matters to enquire further. They would not have understood an excited entry in my pocket diary in August 1944 when I was twelve and visiting the Carr-Saunders on their farm: it was full of plans for the dramas the dolls would shortly enact. Of course Gilberta would play Mary Queen of Scots while Priscilla would be a somewhat unconvincing Elizabeth I.
Where the fathers were concerned, Professor Alec Carr-Saunders, born in 1886, twenty years older than our parents, was a terrifying figure to us, and we tended to scuttle away into corners like rats when we encountered him. He was extremely tall and silver-haired, with the air of an ascetic monk perhaps, except that he was actually the Director of the London School of Economics and had written a famous book about population control. Teresa Carr-Saunders never seemed to our ignorant eyes to have any connection to him at all: she was much younger than her august husband and a romantic character in her own right. With a mass of beautiful thick dark hair perpetually escaping its inadequate bun, she ran about the house and farm, cooking perhaps, giving orders, actively farming (she had a degree in Agriculture at Oxford), helping other people, having imaginative ideas about farming, all done with wild but affectionate concern for one and all, animals equal with humans. I loved her.
With hindsight, however, it was more important to my future that Teresa Carr-Saunders was a passionate Catholic, and gave me what would later be described as an extremely positive image of Catholicism. (It was only recently that I discovered that her daughter, Flora, was at the same time receiving a positive image of Socialism from my mother, writing in her memoirs that after Elizabeth assured her the Labour Party was the party that wanted to make everyone happy, “my political allegiance was set for the rest of my life.”) Born Molyneux Seel, Teresa Carr-Saunders descended from two ancient Catholic families, as she often informed us. They were, what is more, “recusant” families, meaning literally those who refused to comply with the law by attending Protestant services. In order to have their own Catholic Masses, they needed Catholic priests who were similarly illegal and in grave danger if discovered. Not particularly interested in the theology of religion at this point—unaware of the tumult in my father’s breast—I fastened on the secrecy of it all. It was emphasized that these Catholic families were loyal English, not the German spies we were beginning to read about in the newspapers. The people who sought them out and persecuted them were the baddies.
Where did the Catholics, especially the unlawful—but loyal—priests, lurk? In hidey holes, otherwise less interestingly known as priest holes. And here at Water Eaton we had, so we fervently believed, our very own hidey hole. Belief, rather than historical fact, buoyed us up in this conviction. Floorboards which lifted and gave access to a huge, dark hole under the staircase were particularly menacing. What would happen if one of us fell into the hidey hole, was left alone and undiscovered…All of this was both thrilling and terrifying.
At the same time the seed was sown. Religion, loyalty, secrecy, violence, persecution, the claims of the state: in the Nineties I would explore all these issues when writing about the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and I even gave the book the subtitle “Terror and Faith.” In the course of my researches, I specialized in visiting all the hiding places, mainly in the Midlands, connected with my plotters and their priests. Some of these hiding places associated with the Catholics would later come in handy as refuges for King Charles II, escaping after the Battle of Worcester. So in a curious reversal of chronology, I had already embarked on a round of crouching visitations when writing his life, twenty years before I studied the Gunpowder Plot.
With the latter book, it was an expedition to Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire, about a hundred miles from London. This secluded Tudor mansion, set among woods, protected by a moat, sent my mind immediately back to Water Eaton when I visited it. At the same time the house introduced me to the work of the priest Nicholas Owen, known as Little John, who was so expert in the art of concealment that in his lifetime he devised enough hiding places to conceal twelve or more priests. Nicholas Owen was also tortured by the Elizabethan authorities until his tiny frame (so useful in his work for fitting into holes, unlike poor Charles II at six foot) was permanently twisted. One special trick of Little John was to construct one hole inside another, so that the searchers—those devilish people—would find the first hole empty and ride angrily away, leaving their prey cowering but safe in the inner hole.
The problem of the hidey holes was the necessarily sudden nature of the priests’ hiding there. The cry would go up when men on horses were seen at the park gates: “The searchers! The searchers are coming!” The owner of the house—let us say a hospitable Catholic lady like Teresa Carr-Saunders, with a large family to protect—would start bundling the incriminating priests away. There was no provision for food supplies in the hidey holes: how could there be? Nothing would have served better to enlighten the triumphant searchers that priests had been here or were coming soon. So food and drink supplies had to be hurried and improvised. On one occasion Father Garnett and a fellow priest existed for ten days on a pot of quince marmalade which his agitated hostess happened to have in her hands when the warning cries went up.
Inserting myself with some difficulty into one such hiding place, I thought: I’ve just had a large breakfast. And I’m about to have a good lunch. And I’m certainly not in danger of death if discovered, since I was ushered in here by a courteous host. (Huddington Court in Worcestershire, secluded and tranquil like Baddesley Clinton, is still in private hands.) How can I possibly identify myself with the real feelings of these beleaguered men? And yet by crouching in this hole, if I cannot identify myself, I can at least empathize. I can try to think myself into the situation of a middle-aged man with bad circulation, cramped into a small hole, on the run for reasons of Faith.
At Water Eaton, some of the scaring—but also some of the excitement—undoubtedly arose out of my fear of the dark. My mother first noted this in my Progress Book in February 1939; that is to say, it antedated our arrival at Water Eaton. Apparently, Elizabeth consulted our family doctor who told her censoriously that I was reading books which were much too old for me, giving as an example Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes. (For a while this had been my favourite book: Jason, the Argonauts—who would not want to go roistering through the ancient world with such companions?) To her credit, Elizabeth kept the doctor’s verdict to herself and made no attempt to restore me to the Tales of Little Grey Rabbit; although even there I managed to find a picture of a small, dark, menacing weasel’s snout peeking over a windowsill, the thought of which terrified me in the night hours.
This fear of mine was strictly limited to the hours of darkness, with just a little anxiety saved for dusk as the dreaded harbinger. I myself date it from a children’s picture book about a village ringed with large mountains: as darkness fell, these dark rocky peaks turned into monstrous trolls and started to descend on the houses; only the dawn signalled by the crowing of the cock stopped them in their march and sent them back to being mountains again. Until the next evening came…These tormenting images meant that I always privately thought my fear was perfectly reasonable, despite the grown-ups constantly telling me that it wasn’t. Frankly, if darkness brings the trolls, isn’t it only sensible to dread it?
Oddly enough, I never really got over this childhood fear of darkness, of which I was supposed to be ashamed, until I openly admitted it. A conversation with Harold helped. I took a deep breath and explained to him when we first lived together that I was frightened of the dark
.
“You mean, like I can’t bear flies?” he said helpfully. (Harold was a strong and often dramatically public moscophobe.)
“No, not at all like that!” I cried, outraged. I couldn’t bear the idea of my heroic torment being reduced to the trivial level of insects. But after that exchange, candour on the subject somehow came more easily to me. And my new honesty, my escape from the childhood feeling of shame, disconcerted the trolls and did much to keep them in their proper environment as mountains in the future.
Sir Walter Scott, thanks to my mother, was a rather more productive, less baleful influence. For one thing, Elizabeth, a conscientious believer in reading aloud to her children, also exercised her first-class brain in cutting the books to make them palatable. In this way Lord Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, for example, positively zipped along, a rapidly moving thriller with a tumultuous ending. This is not the experience of anyone reading this noble but long-drawn-out novel from beginning to end.
In retrospect, I applaud Elizabeth’s determination to involve her children in nineteenth-century classics, however long-winded. And as to reading aloud, one need only point to the modern success of audiobooks to see the wonderful power of the art. But I did get frustrated by what seemed the somewhat slow daily pace. I had to find a solution and I did. For this sly but voracious reader, it was the work of a moment to establish that my mother was absent, and then down I would creep in my nightie and read on happily, gluttonously devouring the future chapters.
Of course I was not nearly smart enough to conceal my nocturnal rovings for ever. I began to be visibly surprised at omissions, make comments on bits of the plot which hadn’t yet happened. I was finally caught out when a descriptive passage I had loved while clandestinely reading the night before was omitted. “Oh, but I thought that she wore…” I began. To her credit once again, my mother never reproached me with my deceit, but merely handed me the book and said firmly, even with a certain respect: “Antonia will now read on for herself.” Which was probably the right solution.
In this way, both in public and in private, the taste for Sir Walter Scott was inculcated. Ivanhoe was a particular favourite, with its rapid action, give or take the florid descriptive passages. Set in late-twelfth-century England, Nottingham and York, here was romance, lawful and unlawful, abduction, tournaments, mysterious strangers behind visors, torture, witchcraft and more, much more. The characters were as rich as the descriptions. Here were Rebecca, the beautiful Jewess who is a healer (I called my eldest daughter after her, pretending it was a tribute to Daphne du Maurier), Lady Rowena, the unexotically beautiful Saxon (I much preferred Rebecca), Isaac the Jewish money-lender, who is Rebecca’s father, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a noble Saxon, dull but good, Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert, leader of the Knights Templar, a saturnine character for whom I had a weakness, who redeems himself by his death, as well as the Black Knight who of course turns out to be Richard I in disguise, returning from the Crusades.
All of this gave me a taste for early Saxon and Norman English History which I never quite lost, despite the plodding manner in which it was taught at school. And then there was that curious sidelight on the history of the Jews, exotic, glamorous, alien, persecuted through no fault of their own: the hideous treatment of Isaac of York for money-lending chilled the blood. (Unless money-lending is a crime—but who were the money-borrowers? Christians.) Wartime would bring an influx of distinguished Jewish refugees into Oxford, together with explanations as to their presence: but that lay ahead. Scott’s Ivanhoe was my first impression of the Jews, as Water Eaton and Teresa Carr-Saunders constituted my first impression of Catholics.
Kenilworth was another extremely vivid experience: here we were once again in an Elizabethan manor house, although this time it was to feature lethally, not as a refuge for priests. Amy Robsart, secret wife of the Queen’s favourite the Earl of Leicester, is an awkward factor in Court calculations. If Leicester were not married, let us say his wife died and Leicester was a free man, would perhaps the Virgin Queen in her ruff, with her pointy shoes, step off her globe and make him a happy (as well as a powerful) man?
The subsequent murder of Amy Robsart at Cumnor Place, near Oxford, is one of the great crime scenes because it is so understated. As a child I had to read it several times to be sure of what it meant; then it entered my nightmares. Leicester’s servant Richard Varney decides to destroy Amy Robsart, believing this to be in the best interests of his master—and himself. A narrow wooden bridge which leads to her bedroom high up in a tower is fitted with a trap door. Now the familiar low whistle with which the Earl used to summon his bride from outside is heard, and the sound of a horse in the courtyard. Amy rushes out…
“Is the bird caught?—Is the deed done?” says Varney to his accomplice. “Look down into the vault—what seest thou?”
“I see only a heap of white clothes, like a snow-drift,” he replies. This was the image which stayed with me. And here I was in an Elizabethan house not so very far from Cumnor. I could intone the old rhyme with ghoulish satisfaction:
Full many a traveller oft hath sighed,
And pensive wept the Countess’ fall
As wandering onwards they’ve espied
The haunted towers of Cumnor Hall.
I could be that traveller! At any rate in my imagination.
In the real world the fields were very often flooded in that long winter, so hated by the grown-ups with their wartime anxieties, while we got on with enjoying our watery paradise. We shared it with cows, hens and above all donkeys: Flora displayed her newly acquired knowledge of Latin by calling her donkey Amat. She got the word from the book Elizabeth was using to teach us the language called Latin with Laughter. The tone was set by the frontispiece, which showed a cheery-looking fellow and a highly disgruntled sailor. Underneath in Latin it read: “The poet sings; the sailor does not love (amat) the poet.” Emboldened by this, Flora refused to listen when it was pointed out to her that “amat” was a verb not a noun.
The level of our cares at this point is shown by the fact that the supreme crime was to get water over the top of your gumboots—supreme mistake too, since there was not much heat around in the stone-built house, and what existed was not dedicated to drying the soggy interior of a miscreant child’s boot. There was gang life and the kind of games which a body of children about the same age evolve when the grown-ups are not paying attention. For example we re-enacted Gollums and Bellums, wafting about the forecourt in the dark (Gollums from The Hobbit, given to us recently by our parents’ friend Tolkien, and Bellums, like Amat the donkey, came from our rather limited Latin vocabulary). The idea was to frighten each other, and we did.
Perhaps with our artificially induced terrors we were more like the children in The Enchanted Castle, by the adored E. Nesbit, whose every word was sacred to me. These children, feeling bored, provided an audience for their plays out of old overcoats, scarves, caps and walking sticks. They called these constructs the Ugly Wuglies: only to have the fearful creatures come alive in a scene which still makes me uneasy when I hear slow handclaps. “And then someone else was clapping, six or seven people, and their clapping made a dull, padded sound. Nine faces instead of two were turned towards the stage, and seven out of the nine were painted, pointed, paper faces.” The cry goes up: “Jerry, those things have come alive. Oh, whatever shall we do?” Naturally the Ugly Wuglies are as nasty, predatory and vicious as their appearance indicates: the resultant adventures test the reader’s nerves to the utmost.
One author was never allowed to pollute our imaginations and that was Enid Blyton. In an excess of Thirties moralistic disapproval—the only example of such that I can remember—my mother banned her works. Unusually for me, I took no steps to get hold of the books in question later from the library. Indeed, I followed my mother when dealing with my own family, more for reasons of intellectual snobbery, I suspect, rather than anything else. My daughters, however, showed more spirit: it was not long before a stockpile of the dr
eaded works came tumbling out of their wardrobe. “Jane”—a lively schoolfriend—“gave them to us” was the explanation. “She felt sorry for us not being able to read them. It was so exciting reading them in secret.” (A lesson, surely, in the dangers of censorship.)
We never really knew why we left Water Eaton: why not stay for ever with our sodden gumboots and our happy lives? There was of course the question of our educational future: we could not be taught by a governess all our school lives, delightful laid-back experience as that had been, including Elizabeth’s lessons from Latin with Laughter. It is also easy to understand now why my mother decided that, with the return of my father to civilian life, we must have a proper family existence together.
It was when I read Elizabeth’s entry about the fall of France in her autobiography that I finally appreciated why our happiest year had been a time of torment for her. While we frisked about carelessly, in and out of our hidey holes, real or imaginary, she had a double anguish to endure. It was not only the despair of Frank at his inability to fulfil what he perceived as his military duty and his subsequent collapse. There was the fate of many of the men who actually did go to war. Elizabeth wrote: “his unfortunate battalion of the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry had won glory in France at the cost of tragic casualties,” adding “Frank would almost certainly have died had he been with them.”
A house was bought in North Oxford. This was 8 Chadlington Road, running between Bardwell Road and Linton Road, very close to the River Cherwell. One day my mother announced casually: “And there’s a school next door. You’re going to go to it.”