The Sound of Bells

CHAPTER ONE THE SOUND OF BELLS i NY TIME, ANY PLACE, the sound of bells reminds Ame of Oxford. Venice at evening: I’m transported back to childhood. The water dissolves into the River Cherwell, St Mark’s fades into Christ Church doorway, the romantic gon- dolas become everyday bicycles. Much later, when I discovered for myself the poetry of Edward Thomas, his most famous poem became transposed in my mind: all the bells of Oxfordshire, not the birds, sang for him at Adlestrop. And for me ever since. I was not in fact born in Oxford – although I sometimes feel I was – but this tremendous in uence began to exert itself before I was three years old. In May I remember being lifted from my bed at my parents’ home on Rose Hill, South Oxford, in the middle of the night and taken on an adventure. The next thing I knew I was gazing at a lofty stone tower, all covered in lights, like a heavenly apparition. When I asked in a mysti ed voice what was going to happen now, I was told rather crossly to admire the tower. ‘It’s the King and Queen,’ I was informed. Which was the King, which was the Queen? There were all kinds of possibilities in the illuminated darkness of the summer night. For that matter 5 ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¡ ¨ £ © MY HISTORY what was the King . Nobody enlightened me further. Soon I was taken back to bed, unaware not only that it was the Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary, but also I had been gazing at the tower of Magdalen College, the foundation stone laid in !", and at !! feet the tallest building in Oxford. Nevertheless I knew that I had been allowed to glimpse something extraordinary; I had gazed through the window into another magic world of an- cient towers and stones which surely only appeared under cover of darkness. My feeling of privilege deepened the next morning when my younger brother Thomas somehow realized that he had been excluded from a grown-up treat, and screamed with rage. This increased my feeling of possessiveness about what I had seen. Wonderland was clearly not for everyone. That memory of wonderland persisted. Asking for an unspeci ed recording of Oxford bells among my Desert Island Discs in "##$ – the rst time such a choice had been made, I believe – I was enchanted to discover that the bells in question were those of Magdalen College. As I listened, wonderland once more returned. I was born on "% August ". The headline of The Times for that day was: GERMAN CRISIS; it went on to comment rather wearily: ‘with the start of a new week, the stage is set for another of the periodic German crises.’ (The Nazis were already the largest party in the Reichstag: six months later Hitler was made Chancellor.) An unspoken commentary on what happened when such crises bubbled over was provided by the In Memoriam column. It was led by the names of those who had died ‘On Active Service’ in the war which had ended fourteen years earlier: rather more than half the entries. Of more obvious concern to those in London, there was a heatwave. A few days earlier, standing at the window, Virginia Woolf said to herself: ‘Look at the present moment because it’s 6 ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¡ ¨ £ © THE SOUND OF BELLS not been so hot for " years.’ As for my mother, throughout the long humid days of waiting, she spent all her time in the water happily if impatiently, often accompanied by her young sister-in- law Violet. This might incidentally explain my lifelong addiction to swimming: since my earliest memory I have always understood what John Cheever expressed so eloquently: ‘To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition.’ The event took place in a house in Sussex Gardens loaned by Margaret, Countess of Birkenhead, widow of my father’s patron, F. E. Smith. Thus it was both a home birth, as was cus- tomary with women of my mother’s class in those days, and an away-from-home birth, upped from a cottage to a grand London residence. Today I sometimes gaze at what is now Riyadh House, and contemplate the small patch of railed-in garden outside in the middle of the road round which taxis swirl on their way to Paddington. My rst outing to this patch, on the fth day, was duly noted in my mother’s magisterial Progress Book (with its daunting preface by the publisher: ‘If the suggested records are carefully made, they will prove of invaluable assistance to the doctor in later years’). Impossible to contemplate leaving a baby in a hugely ostentatious Thirties pram alone there now, but with the sublime con dence of the time, my mother simply noted: ‘a strong wind, glimpses of sun, roar of tra& c’. She also noted that I was born at ".! a.m. BST, which placed me with the sun in the sign of Virgo and the sign of Cancer rising. The latter delightful information, which made me brilliantly hard-working yet oh, so sensitive and caring (no one ever seems to have a dull horoscope), I only discovered many years later when I was working with George Weidenfeld and Sonia Orwell: both of them boasted of being brilliant hard-working Virgos. It certainly meant nothing to my mother. On the other hand I was 7 ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¡ ¨ £ © MY HISTORY delivered by a female doctor, which obviously meant a great deal to her, with views on women which would have made her into a su* ragette if the battle had not been won already by her valiant predecessors. In fact her twenty- rst birthday fell in August "%, so that she was able to vote in ", the rst British General Elec- tion in which all women over twenty-one were able to do so. When I was born, my parents, Frank and Elizabeth Pak- enham, had been married less than ten months. My mother con ded to me later that I was a honeymoon baby, conceived at Lismore Castle, in Southern Ireland, where the newly wed pair were staying with Lord Charles Cavendish and his wife Adele Astaire. When I was young, I managed to derive from this an exotic feeling of destiny – a castellated start to my life! It was in fact far more to the point that my parents’ marriage was one which would last for nearly seventy years, where the deep af- fection never failed and nor did the lively conversation which developed from the a* ection, to back it up. It must have been sometime in the $#s that my mother re- ported to me with shining eyes: ‘You know, Dada and I had such a wonderful time last night.’ I began to speculate: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle (my mother was a devout monarchist in her later years) before she interrupted me: ‘No, no, just us: we had a fascinating argument about the proper role of the Papacy with regard to a Protestant country. Frank thought . But I to- tally disagreed . .’ Not everyone’s idea of romantic chat, perhaps, nevertheless it was clearly just as exciting for them to be argu- ing with each other some fty years into their marriage as it had been at the outset. One notes, too, that in any argument they were equal partners in disagreement. This outstandingly happy union did not in fact have a particu- larly auspicious beginning. Within the narrow con nes of the British class system of the time, much narrower than it is today, 8 ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¡ ¨ £ © THE SOUND OF BELLS with fewer rami cations, my parents came from completely dif- ferent backgrounds. My mother, born Elizabeth Harman in #/, was the daughter of a Harley Street doctor, Nathaniel Bishop Harman: she was in fact born and brought up at #$ Harley Street, where he had his consulting rooms as an ophthalmic sur- geon. Her mother was Katherine Chamberlain, one of the seven daughters of Joseph Chamberlain’s brother Arthur; this incidentally meant that my mother was a cousin of Neville Chamberlain, the future Prime Minister, although their politics would be very di* erent. It was an extremely a0 uent setting in terms of comfort and style. A tall eighteenth-century house, #$ Harley Street contained both a residence and consulting rooms. My mother revealed to me that there had been ve servants and, when I expressed ingenuous surprise, said carelessly: ‘Well, we needed a man to carry up the coal to the nursery on the top oor.’ But of course the lavishness of domestic help, taken for granted by the middle class at that time – the Harman arrangements were nothing un- usual – was a phenomenon which vanished altogether with the Second World War. As a young woman Katie Chamberlain had herself trained as a doctor: a comparatively early example of a female in the profession. She quali ed at the Royal Free Hospital; although it was said that Katie had only ever earned one fee of 1 for extract- ing a wisdom tooth, before marrying Nat Harman in #. My grandmother was then thirty-three and immediately gave up her profession to bear ve children, while running the house- hold at Harley Street. You could say that my mother was o* ered two possible role models if she contemplated her own mother’s career. On the one hand Katherine Harman was a woman who had actually trained for a profession – out of choice, since the Chamberlain family was by most standards wealthy.

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