Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle (2 page)

What I gathered was that David was the mild-mannered one with the brains, and James the mischievously disruptive one with the looks. I came to understand this as soon as words and conversation took on meaning and reports from school rounded out the picture. People called David “Sid” at Stowe, his public school, because he was gentle and nice and amusing like the famous working-class English comedian at the time, Sid James. That he also happened to come from the other end of the social spectrum from Sid James made the nickname doubly amusing. After one term at Aiglon College in Switzerland, boys were calling James “Lord Jim,” I was told (often by him!), out of admiration for his good looks, manliness, and cool.

First at Hill House, and then at St Aubyn’s, the prep school we all attended, near Brighton on the Sussex coast, David distinguished himself in the classroom, comported himself as an upright citizen, and wound up head boy, despite having never given more than passing consideration to shining at sports. James selected a different path, opting to give Prince Charles a severe working over in the corridors of Hill House, thereby establishing his reputation as a rebel, but finding little to inspire him in any classroom through which he passed. He did, however, take a strong liking to soccer, rugby, and cricket, and soon played all three well. This stood him in good stead when, due to his inability to pass exams in England, he was sent off to be educated first in Ireland and then in Switzerland, and discovered that good looks and sporting prowess (especially skiing) were noted, appreciated, and envied.

When we were together, my older brothers were generally solicitous towards me. In contrast, they were at battle stations with each other a great deal of the time, for reasons that escaped me beyond the obvious differing personalities. Regrettably they appeared to work overtime to find the other’s weak spots—which, of course, they did.

Having Nanny and the children occupying the top two floors of what felt like an enormous London house was clearly ideal for a family like ours, where the modus operandi remained always, “Quiet please—grown-ups disinclined to be disturbed.” A ghostlike hush hovered about my father’s presence on those rare occasions when he actually came into my line of vision.

On one particular morning, with David already packed off to St Aubyns boarding school, a rumpus broke out in the London nursery, at the conclusion of which I was left with a highly disagreeable first impression of my father. I was sitting perched in my high chair, enjoying being three, attempting to go quietly and methodically about my business, but all around me pandemonium had erupted. I could no longer concentrate on spooning porridge into my mouth from my rabbit-festooned cereal bowl because James had taken it upon himself to start dancing around the breakfast table like a madman, laughing, pointing, and loudly exclaiming how funny the nursery maid Anne’s varicose veins looked. Quite what brought on this sudden outburst I did not know. I was also totally unaware as to what varicose veins might be, but judging by my brother’s extravagant behaviour there must be something about them that first provoked great mirth and, second, if the look on Anne’s face was anything to go by, considerable anguish.

With the situation quickly deteriorating I started to succumb to a powerful sense of anguish myself. I was accustomed to a very deliberate, peaceful, and uncomplicated world. Outside interferences were rare, and until now, disturbing personal dramas (asthma aside) had been nonexistent. But now Anne, a tall, thin Canadian girl, about twenty years old with big eyes and long curly brown hair, was crying and getting very upset, standing in front of the cuckoo clock, which suddenly cuckooed to announce the time, further adding to the din.

Nanny was imploring James to stop, but the ineffectiveness of her words showed that she had little experience of situations such as this. I watched her kind, wrinkly face becoming taut with frustration. All thoughts of breakfast vanished as I stared at my brother, who wandered from the round table in the middle of the nursery back to his room to prepare for school, and then returned, never letting up, with Anne continuing to cry and looking lost and helpless. Finally Nanny started to leave the nursery, telling James, “I’m simply going to have to fetch your father.” This sounded ominous. I had never seen my father on our floor. In fact, I had no distinct recollection of seeing him in any precise location.

With Nanny gone, my discomfort increased, but instead of contributing to the ruckus by bursting into tears myself or banging my cereal bowl with a spoon, I tried to block it out as if it had nothing to do with my world. But upon hearing the familiar floorboard squeak from just outside the bathroom on the half landing, I turned to see my father coming up the stairs, an aura of profound irritation emanating from his three-piece, navy blue pinstripe suit, and a stern, frighteningly stern, expression on his face. James was suddenly quiet as if struck dumb, and the only sound in the nursery was an intermittent gentle sob from Anne. Climbing the last few stairs, his left hand on the banister, my father entered the nursery and without so much as a by-your-leave (or a sympathetic offer of a hankie to Anne), he quietly instructed James to bend over the armchair adjacent to the storage cupboard by the left window, and started whacking away at my brother’s bottom with his right hand, very hard.

I watched this whole affair in a state of extreme shock. I do not know how many whacks James received, but when it was all over he, too, was crying. When my father departed, he did so abruptly, without a word to anyone, leaving the four of us to try and recover as best we could from the unpleasantness of it all.

James went off to school in a sorry state, Anne cleared away breakfast and tidied up, and Nanny and I returned to our morning schedule of bathroom matters, a little music on the radio, and preparations to go out. She did not discuss with me the previous half hour, so I assumed she preferred not to. I, therefore, was obliged to file the matter away in a new and unfamiliar category, one that for quite some time I referenced merely as “Bad.”

This was the first occasion from which I could start to form an opinion about my father, and what an occasion it was! From a selfish standpoint I was peeved that he had failed even to acknowledge my presence. Undoubtedly he was concentrating on the task at hand, not a task he would have wished for and one he clearly would have wanted over and done with quickly. But all the same, I would have appreciated something from him, had needed something from him, right there and then, after sitting through such a nasty and really quite disturbing business. Sadly, frustratingly, I got nothing, not even a pat on the head; so I was left, feeling isolated, to ponder what I had just seen. I sought comfort by retreating into my shell during the whole affair, unaware as to what it all meant for the future and me. I never saw my father in the nursery again.

2.

T
HE
C
ASTLE
W
AY

It was a bothersome affliction being a shy child because you always appeared to be taking two steps backward before the first, hesitant step forward. So whatever it was people might have been expecting of you, they tended to give up and move on (often with a quizzical expression and a raised eyebrow) long before you had worked up enough steam to say or do what you had originally intended. With people other than Nanny and my mother and brothers, it was frequently a struggle to present myself in a pleasing light, and on the occasions when I did succeed it was usually because I forced myself to.

I could be surrounded by a large number of people and still feel completely alone. Birthday parties were generally excruciating, including my own. I’d be sitting at the tea table or on my parents’ drawing-room floor watching Popeye cartoons on a noisy home projector, mini revellers all around me howling like banshees, feeling as if I were on a desert island—in fact, wishing I were.

If I’d had my wits about me (which I tended not to because, after 1956, my wits became inexhaustibly tied up learning Lonnie Donegan, Cliff Richard, and later, Roy Orbison tunes on the nursery radio and David’s record player) and had actually given some thought to my lacklustre social calendar, it might have dawned on me that the London/Leeds Castle bubble, inside which Nanny and I lived, acted as a powerful barrier against outsiders. Furthermore, it helped promote feelings of isolation that came and went during my childhood and that have never entirely gone away, despite my now being as happy as any man could legitimately wish to be.

At Leeds Castle the nursery was much larger than the one in London, but we conducted our lives there (or had them conducted) in much the same fashion, as an adjunct to those of the grown-ups. We were independent inasmuch as we were left to our own devices (with Nanny acting as supervisor in chief), but controlled by a framework of rules that included a flexible timetable as well as being seen no more than necessary, and heard somewhat less. There was a degree of stealth in how we comported ourselves, especially before noon; and a general understanding that our needs and wishes must always be governed—and duly accorded priority—by what I now call “the castle way.”

The castle way was the all-encompassing, all-powerful, semi-feudal-system-meets-benevolent-dictatorship by which Granny B ran the lives of all those who fell within her sphere of influence and control. That sphere included a select group of friends and advisers, my parents, my brothers, Nanny, me, assorted aunts and uncles, and, in some ways, the very air we breathed.

The castle way—or Granny B’s way, generous to a fault but inclined towards imperiousness—permeated every aspect of our lives. Up to a point it governed what we should all be doing and when we should all be doing it, at any given time throughout the year. There may have been other upper-class matriarchal figures in postwar Britain lording it over their subjects in just such a fashion, but I was not aware of them and certainly never came remotely within their jurisdiction.

The structure of my existence revolved around the activities of my parents, and theirs, in turn, revolved around the weekly calendar of Granny B and “the court.” The court was made up of close friends and immediate family who found it amusing to refer to themselves as though they were royal courtiers, most of them drawn from the higher ranks of society. If Granny B was amused by the unsubtle, gently mocking comparison of her domestic arrangements to the households of Queen Elizabeth and other monarchs, she hid it well. And I never saw anyone speak of “the court” to her face. Even my mother would only use the term with a wry smile attached.

Granny B and the court began each New Year with a three-month sojourn in the Bahamas; spent April, May, June, and part of July commuting between London and weekends at Leeds; shifted to the South of France for the summer and returned to the London/Leeds format for the autumn months and Christmas. Nothing about this programme—or, at least, the bits that affected me—struck me as anything other than normal at the time. It was what I knew. I spent my life with Nanny. I saw my mother and brothers every now and then, and periodically I had lively encounters with estate workers and Harrods doormen when out and about in the pram or going for a walk. By the time I was five I had still not been exposed to any useful indications—from inside or outside the London/Leeds Castle bubble—that my childhood was unusual. When I started making friends at Hill House, it came as a surprise to find that not everybody lived like me. In this instance the castle way never became my friend, let alone an ideal travelling companion, thanks to its preoccupation with keeping the real world at a pronounced arm’s length from my own.

*   *   *

The castle way’s feudal system—structured, top-down authority—was straightforward, and castle life was big, regulated, and formal. Granny B, as chatelaine and keeper of the purse strings, was the undisputed leader and ruler of the roost. She was ideally suited to this position thanks to her wealth and her personality, which bypassed gregariousness in favour of quiet authority and seductive style. Her manner was rigorously polite, her gaze unfaltering, her smile infrequent, her charm carefully rationed.

As in feudal times, she rested atop a layered hierarchy that included members of the court, her friends outside the court who came to the castle less frequently, and the family, which of course were the unpaid groups. Financial advisers, antique furniture and decorating consultants, personal staff, and estate workers comprised the paid groups. In the eleventh century the Normans, having bloodily subjugated Saxon England from top to bottom, established their layered hierarchy, which started with the king who ruled over the barons who ruled over the knights who ruled over the
villeins
who, despite being lowly workers with no landholding rights, were at least able to look down their noses at the serfs who dwelled at the bottom of the ladder of power with little chance of escaping their allotment in life. With a few perfunctory nods to the twentieth century, Granny B ran affairs at Leeds Castle along remarkably similar lines.

David Margesson was the court’s undeclared ringmaster and Granny B’s closest friend, adviser, and confidant. He rested in solitary splendour just beneath her in the Leeds Castle hierarchy—an unchallenged, viceregal position—and he helped her run the Leeds Castle estate with an astonishing lightness and deftness of touch. In feudal terms he was the most powerful baron.

David, or “Morg,” as our family liked to call him, was a man of unparalleled wit, charm, erudition, and all-around impressiveness. Tall and always immaculately dressed, he had a face that seemed sculptured for posterity, and a speaking voice to match. As a teenager I did suspect, although it was never confirmed to me, that in his capacity as my grandmother’s longest-standing male friend, his role, both in London and at Leeds, could well have extended to one of an intimate, nocturnal nature. Granted their remarkable closeness, it would have been surprising had this not been the case.

Morg had won a Military Cross in World War I. He was elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative member of Parliament in 1922 and was government chief whip from 1931 until 1940. From 1940 to 1942 he was secretary of state for war under Winston Churchill. Created Viscount (Lord) Margesson of Rugby in 1942, he served in the House of Lords for twenty more years. As did the rest of the court, he went about his business in London during the week and came down to Leeds every weekend.