Fraser - My history: a memoir of growing up

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Copyright 2015 by FPinter Ltd.

All Rights Reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, London, in 2015.

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Pictures from the Dragon School, Oxford, are used with kind permission of the headmaster.

Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

Cover photograph of Antonia Fraser Yevonde Portrait Archive

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Fraser, Antonia, 1932

My history : a memoir of growing up / Antonia Fraser. First American edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-385-54010-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-54011-7 (eBook)

1. Fraser, Antonia, 1932Childhood and youth. 2. Fraser, Antonia, 1932Family. 3. Fraser, Antonia, 1932Homes and haunts. 4. HistoriansGreat BritainBiography. 5. Women historiansGreat BritainBiography. 6. Authors, English20th centuryBiography. 7. Oxford (England)Biography. I. Title.

DA3.F65A3 2015

941.0072 ' 02dc23

[B]

2014044611

eBook ISBN9780385540117

v4.1

ep

For Thomas, who shared my History

and for Mother Mercedes, IBVM, who spurred me on

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.

G. M. Trevelyan, Autobiography of an Historian

T he title of this early memoir has a double meaning. It is partly an attempt to recapture the experiences of my childhood and youthto call back yesterday, bid time return. But I have also sought to chronicle the progress of my love of History since my first discovery of it as a private pleasure when I was a childmy History as I believed it to be. For me, as will become apparent, the study of History has always been an essential part of the enjoyment of life. As a narrative, I hope it may evoke memories in other readers regarding their personal discovery of History.

My main source has been my own memory, aided by pocket diaries; these however were not kept continuously and mainly record whom and what I saw rather than my feelings. There are occasional fuller diaries too. I also find that I have kept all my mothers beautifully legible letters to me during the four years I was at boarding school and my fathers diametrically opposed illegible ones, by the simple conservationist method of never, ever throwing anything awayIn turn my mother preserved my own weekly letters home. For further sidelights on the past, I benefited in different ways from the reminiscences of my fathers sisters: Mary Clive, who took a keen, wry interest in family history, and Violet Powell, with whom I spent time in adolescence and who became a close friend once I was grown up.

Then, both my parents wrote autobiographies: my fathers first memoir, Born to Believe, written under his original name of Frank Pakenham, was published in 1953 when he was forty-seven; my mother Elizabeth Longford followed suit thirty years later with The Pebbled Shore when she was eighty. My father is also the subject of a well-researched biography by Peter Stanford, an early version being published in his lifetime and The Outcasts Outcast, a revised edition, after his death, in 2003.

Furthermore, my motherin what I once described as her earliest efforts at biographykept so-called Progress Books for all her eight children, from birth until their theoretical adulthood at twenty-one. Long before her death, Elizabeth Longford presented the individual Progress Books to her children in a move which was not perhaps entirely wise, given her instinct for candour. My own Progress Book is, from my point of view, embarrassingly frank as maternal pride struggles with irritation, and definitely loses out once I am an adolescent.

Lastly, my brother Thomas Pakenham, being eleven months younger than methus we are Irish twinsshould remember all this too, just as I have written it down. It is for this reason, and in full confidence that he will corroborate my every word, that My History is dedicated to him as well as to the first teacher who seemed to understand my passion for the living past. If however there are any discrepancies in our memories, I take my stand on the great lines in Harolds play Old Times: There are things I remember that may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.

NOTE ON DATES

My father was born Frank Pakenham and was created Lord Pakenham of Cowley in 1945. He inherited the Earldom of Longford on his brothers death in 1961. I then received the courtesy title of Lady, as in Lady Antonia Fraser, in March 1961 when I was thirty.

My seven siblings, all younger than me, were as follows:

Thomas b. 1933; Patrick (Paddy) b. 1937 d. 2009; Judith b. 1940; Rachel b. 1942; Michael b. 1943; Catherine Rose b. 1946 d. 1969; Kevin b. 1947.