The discreet charm of a learned Lady

In this new memoir, Lady Antonia Fraser revisits the more distant realm of childhood
A fashionable life: Lady Antonia Fraser in 1964 at home with her basset hound Bertram (Picture: Frank Hudson/Associated Newspapers /Rex)
Rex Features
Jane Shilling8 January 2015

My History: A Memoir of Growing Up by Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld, £20)

Historian, debutante, useful rugger player — Lady Antonia Fraser has led a life of vivid contrasts. Her memoir of her relationship with the playwright Harold Pinter, Must You Go (2010), gave a glimpse of a partnership of successful writers. In this second excursion into personal history she revisits the more distant realm of childhood.

She was born plain (well, plain-ish) Miss Pakenham in August 1932, 10 months after the marriage of her parents, Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) and Elizabeth Harman, the daughter of a Harley Street doctor. Her mother prided herself on her middle-class origins and “left me with an early impression of the extravagance, fecklessness, unpunctuality and impracticality of the upper class — as epitomised by our father”.

Frank Pakenham was the second son of the Earl of Longford, who was killed at Gallipoli when Frank was nine years old. The future Lord Longford grew up to be heroically impractical. On moving into his first, servantless, marital home, he enquired of his new wife: “Won’t they bring us a cup of tea?” and got the grim reply, “We are they.”

After a brief career as a journalist (his duties included writing fashion copy: “Woman this year is to be very demure, very modest and very plain Jane,” he predicted), Frank Pakenham took up a lectureship in politics at Christ Church, Oxford, where he and Elizabeth were active Labour Party candidates.

For Antonia, the intellectual climate of Oxford was thrilling. Next door to the Pakenham’s North Oxford house at 8 Chadlington Road was the (mainly boys’) Dragon School, where she thrived on a competitive diet of Greek, Latin and rugby. The atmosphere at home was equally stimulating. A world away from the benighted suburbs of St Ebbe’s and Jericho where, as Elizabeth Longford remarked, the inhabitants were “so poor that they vote Tory” — the habitues of “8 Chad” included Frank Longford’s fellow dons Lord David Cecil, Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin.

Antonia’s passion for “History” (to which she invariably affords a reverent initial capital) was ignited by H E Marshall’s trenchant sweep through British history, Our Island Story. Captivated by the narratives of Queen Matilda and Mary Queen of Scots, she acquired a lifelong habit of identification with the tragic heroines who were later to inspire her own writing.

After a season as a debutante she returned to Oxford to read history at Lady Margaret Hall. Her time as an undergraduate “was more of a miss than a hit” and she failed to get a First. “I’m so glad,” said her father. “Because if you had, you would never have got married.”

Adroitly manoeuvred by her mother into a job at publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson, she embarked on a racy London life, stepping out with a succession of dashing chaps whose enthusiasm was fired by her fashionable resemblance to the actress Julie Christie.

She was married in 1956 to the Conservative MP Hugh Fraser (“I’m sure that with time Antonia will come to enjoy the life of a Tory MP’s wife,” her mother wrote). Her wedding photographs, in a dress inspired by Mary Queen of Scots, were taken by Cecil Beaton and after a brief skirmish with her mother over ownership of the subject, her biography of Mary was published in 1969. Her childhood ambition, to be “the beggar girl (intensely beautiful) who, armed with a first-class degree, wrote bestselling books”, was fulfilled.

A swanlike bella figura informs these memoirs, whose elegant tone firmly eschews the modern taste for sordid confessional. When occasional disagreeables occur — a tricky encounter with a furiously anti-Semitic Harold Nicolson, a disastrous prison lecture by Lord David Cecil — they are briskly dismissed, occasionally to frustrating effect (what did the prisoners of Wandsworth do to Lord David? We long to know). But if the anecdotes sometimes have the fine patina of stories polished by frequent telling, they are unfailingly entertaining: their good manners and discretion unexpectedly beguiling.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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