Frances Donaldson - A Twentieth-Century Life

FRANCES DONALDSON

Evelyn Waugh thought the motive for reading autobiographical books was to get an understanding of the immediate past. I was born in the first decade of the twentieth century and I have survived into the last; thus my life coincides with a period of change which, in England at least, was in some ways greater than in a thousand years of history. I speak not of the technical advances, but of the social pattern - of the decline in an aristocratic order which had lasted since the beginning of recorded history, the changed attitudes to war, to poverty, to religion, to the rights of man, to colour, race and creed; above all to the alteration in the opportunities for women. We talk today of Thatcherism, but even Thatcherism cannot undo the social revolution which took place as a result of two world wars and the Labour government of 1945-51.

My intention is not to write a social history but an account of my own life in the consciousness that it reflects the history of the times. I shall not attempt a full-scale autobiography, which, when not about public events but concerned with the ordinary life of the writer, is nearer to the art of the novelist than of the biographer. To the latter the material is given and should be of interest in itself, but autobiography comes from within and can be devilishly difficult.

In fact, I jumped the gun. My first two books, published in 1941 and 1945, were about farming in the Second World War and were necessarily an account of my own experiences; Freddy Lonsdale was a biography of my father, and Child of the Twenties an account of my childhood and youth, both published in the fifties. I cannot escape some repetition here, partly because these books have been so long out of print, but chiefly because my father, a playwright, was both a dominant influence in my own life and an important representative of the twenties. But I have dealt fairly briskly with my early years and avoided altogether the history of my first marriage, when my life was given up to horses and dogs. I have written of that before and have nothing new to say.

I do not, as some authors do, find pleasure in reading my own work and when I read my early books recently it was for the first time in thirty years. The first two were bestsellers and the others have often been praised, but I was disappointed in them all. The second of the farming books is a great improvement on the first, but both are rather sententious. I think this must have been only partly due to my youth and inexperience as a writer, because so many people bought and enjoyed them. Possibly the high-flown tone was acceptable then, because, however clumsy, it was inspired by emotions which other people shared. Only now, when the mood has changed, is it obvious that the skill of the writer is no match for the heroic sentiments.

I hope I can do better now. Towards the end of his life I asked Frederick Ashton whether he thought his best work was done when he was young or at the time we spoke. He replied that when he was young he was more spontaneous but that he went deeper now. I was reminded of telling Evelyn Waugh that I thought my father, when he was young, had been content merely to amuse, but had now begun to wonder whether one should not have some higher aim; a mood, I said, which did not suit him.

Perhaps, Evelyn had replied lugubriously, perhaps he doesnt feel amusing any more.

There will be a certain amount of name-dropping in this book, because, owing to the circumstances of my childhood and youth and also because I lived on a farm for nearly thirty years, I seem for much of my life to have known a few names and almost nobody else. This matter is much added to by my incorrigible desire to please. I was taught by my father that the one unforgivable sin is to be a bore but the author of memoirs is always in the difficulty that, while the critics will castigate name-dropping, the public prefer to read about people they recognize. I have never kept a diary, a thing which, although there are notable exceptions, seems to me death to the writer of memoirs, who, having kept this reminder of small doings, too often feels bound to use it.

Certainly my own work was more spontaneous when I was young. I wrote Approach to Farming in six weeks, working after supper at the end of a long days farming; and equally I go deeper now. Yet the compulsion today is not simply to try to do better something I have done before. On the contrary, except to the extent that it is necessary to the narrative form, or because I can now make use both of material not available to me earlier and of hindsight, I do not intend to go over ground I have covered before. Having written so much earlier, I may pick and choose.

In an interview given recently, V.S. Pritchett said, No one can I would add that most people live at least three lives, by which I mean that at different times their circumstances are so dissimilar that one of the three people is uppermost. For my own part I reckon I have had four distinct lives (this would be five if I counted the four years of my first marriage); they coincide with the mood of the periods they cover and necessarily reflect them.

The first followed very closely what one might term the popular or picturesque view of the period between the two wars in England. This was one of the most philistine periods in the history of a generally philistine country; and, although Bloomsbury and Cyril Connolly, and later Auden and Isherwood have historically assumed so much importance, the overall view even now is better represented by Nol Coward and Mr Cochranes Young Ladies.

In this, the image evoked by the words the twenties is entirely different from that of the thirties. The twenties are regarded with nostalgia for a raffish kind of glamour, although much of this is based on fantasy, while the thirties are remembered as a time of political incompetence, of intense poverty and fear, of the appeasement of Germany and the gradual slide into war; the era which produced Blunt, Burgess and Maclean. The distinction between the two decades is not as it happens entirely well-founded but it accords with the pattern of my youth.

I have written of both periods before, but the events of those years look very different in retrospect. However, I no longer remember my youth either very accurately or, more important, with any real feeling, and, for this reason, when the necessity arises, I quote without apology from myself. The books I wrote about my experiences in the Second World War have proved useful as source material, but for these years I have the far more explicit account of my life given in my letters to my husband, Jack. He was abroad for the whole of the war and my daily letters to him form something like a diary, the only one I ever kept. They were not written for publication, but they recall things I had half-forgotten and others I cannot remember even in face of the evidence, and they give an authentic picture of life at the time. The fact that I bought a farm at the beginning of the war had the secondary effect that it settled the course of our lives for more than thirty years.

The period when we farmed in Gloucestershire and then in Buckinghamshire, as well as the time in London after we retired from farming, are still uncharted, but I have been fortunate in my opportunities to view the immediate past. When we went to London we were already over sixty, yet in every worldly sense the last of my lives must be counted the most successful and the most interesting of the five.