in the villages of Temple Cloud and Clutton, and that he will be bringing his daughter with him who will be left to play with me in the nursery at Cholwell.
At the age of three, I believed that all peers wore a uniform which I envisaged as being a blue velvet suit with gilt buttons. I am waiting at the front door and am disappointed when Lord Weymouth appears wearing an elegantly cut grey lounge suit with rather flared trousers, what were then called ‘Oxford bags’. He has, however, brought his daughter with him. She is of much the same age as I am. We enjoy our afternoon together, and I vaguely hope that I shall see her again. It is the first time that I am conscious of feeling the attraction of the opposite sex.
The next time I meet her it is the early 1970s and she is Lady Caroline Somerset, and we are having dinner with Arnold and Netta Weinstock in Wiltshire. At another later meeting James Lees-Milne, who thinks I am rather a prig, notes in his diary how exceptionally at ease we are together. The last time I see her she has become the Duchess of Beaufort. Like me, she has memories of having tea at Fortt’s in Bath; that is where she told her younger brother, now himself Lord Bath, that fairies do not really exist. He claims that this moment of disillusionment ruined his life.
My next political memory came in July 1934. Mabel Sage, our much-loved cook, is giving me breakfast in the dining room at Cholwell, which looks out across the terrace towards Mendip. I have eaten my boiled egg with soldiers of toast. The BBC is broadcasting a news bulletin. Hitler has just carried out his Night of the Long Knives, in which Ernst Röhm and many others are murdered. I take in this information and comment to Mabel, ‘Does this mean there will be another war?’ She replies: ‘Oh no, Hitler’s not a wicked man like the Kaiser.’
I remember the German reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, but only as a headline in the Daily Mail. Our family view was that it was unavoidable, that Germany was only taking back what was German territory. We did not see it as a cause for war. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the Spanish Civil War had more personal impact.
I do remember the shock of Mussolini’s invasion, and our sympathy with the Abyssinians. After the defeat, the Emperor of Abyssinia, Haile Selassie, went into exile in Bath, bringing members of his family with him. I was being taught to swim at the old Royal Baths in Bath by Captain Olsen, who also instructed us in climbing horizontal bars and other aspects of Swedish Drill, as physical training was then called. As I splashed around in my inflated water wings, with two princesses, Haile Selassie’s granddaughters, in the water beside me, the small but benign figure of the Lion of Judah would look down on us from the edge of the pool. He is now regarded as God by the Rastafarians. There have been many worse gods.
Spain was a matter of more passionate debate, though not inside our family. As Roman Catholics, we regarded the communists, and therefore the Spanish Republican Government, as hostile to religion; they murdered priests and raped nuns. As democrats, we disliked the Fascist Franco, but also distrusted Stalinist influence on the Republicans. We did not support either side, though I think my parents may have felt that Franco would prove to be the lesser of the two evils. From the British point of view that turned out to be correct. Franco kept Spain out of the Second World War, which a communist government might not have been able to do.
However, the young men who came to our tennis parties at Cholwell saw things differently. They correctly expected the war in Spain to be merely a prelude to the war that was coming against Hitler. I heard their arguments from afar, as an eight- or nine-year-old child listening to twenty-year-old men. I do not remember if any of our friends actually fought in Spain; some of them may have felt guilty for failing to volunteer.
In the summer of 1937, our eyes were opened to what the enemy would be like. My elder sister, Elizabeth, has a gift for languages, which she may have inherited from my father, or indeed from his mother who for some of her early years kept her diary in German, and as a young woman taught in Paris. As Elizabeth was studying German, it was proposed that she make an exchange with a German girl whose aunt had made an exchange with one of our neighbours in 1900. Jutta Lorey was to come to us; the following year, in May 1938, Elizabeth was to go to the Loreys.
We did not foresee that this would be a political question. We did not realize that the political attitudes of the Lorey family were somewhat complicated. Frau Lorey was married to a Nazi judge, who disappeared at the end of the war, thought to have been killed by the Russians. Frau Lorey’s sister Hildegarde, who, a generation earlier, had been the girl of the original exchange, was an anti-Nazi, but Frau Lorey herself kept quiet. Jutta was a member of the Bund Deutschen Madel, a fanatical sixteen-year-old Nazi child, for which she can hardly be blamed. When she made the return visit, Elizabeth spent most of her time alone or with the family’s maid, Grete. Jutta was either at college or BDM meetings, Frau Lorey was out a lot and Judge Lorey had been seconded to the east. She was aware of tensions in the family, particularly during the one weekend when the judge returned home, but these seemed more personal than political. Grete was engaged to a soldier and used to take Elizabeth to the town barracks where the soldiers were very impressed by her being English. She learned excellent German which she used later when she worked as a translator at the prisoner-of-war camp in Latimer House during the war.
Jutta’s visit to Cholwell was another matter. She brought with her all her adolescent fanaticism. She showed us her BDM dagger with its flamboyant inscription of ‘Blood and Iron’ and its swastika. She lay on her bed in the sewing room, listening on short-wave radio to Hitler’s speeches. When the door was open, I remember standing outside for a minute or two and listening to one of them. He sounded hysterical to me, a shrieking lunatic raving in a foreign tongue, but to storms of applause. I associate the crises of the 1930s with the rooms in Cholwell in which I heard different broadcasts – the dining room with the Night of the Long Knives, the sewing room with Adolf Hitler, the nursery itself with King Edward VIII’s announcement of his abdication and with Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Germany.
We did not treat Jutta well. We suspected her of spying, probably rightly. The Hitler Youth who visited Britain were instructed to take photographs of local landmarks; German information packs, prepared for the 1940 invasion which never happened, included some of these snapshots. Jutta was a great photographer of landmarks. We could not stop her photographing Cholwell, which is indeed a prominent landmark, but we tried to prevent her photographing the tower of Downside Abbey. Whether we succeeded or not, I do not know.
We did not like Jutta, and she did not like us. The most spiteful thing I remember doing was cheating at Monopoly to make sure that she did not win. I have heard occasional distant accounts of her since the war, that she had been widowed, that she had become a hippy, that she was living in the Mediterranean. Among the evil things the Nazis did, the perversion of her adolescent enthusiasm is only a tiny mark. We knew, through her, that the Hitler regime was hysterical, evil and dangerous. It helped prepare us for what was to happen next.
When the war came Elizabeth joined the WAAF and worked as a translator. At the end of the war she worked on the repatriation of German prisoners of war and married a young German officer, Peter Bruegger, who had been classified as ‘White’, because he was anti-Nazi. He farmed our home farm. Though the marriage did not last, he became a popular local figure and was much loved by our children.
* * *
Until I was nine, I was educated at home. My father taught me which didn’t work terribly well when I was little because he was tall and impressive and could have a short fuse. It worked extremely well when I was a bit older. I also had lessons with Miss Farr, a young woman from Bristol, who was my sister Anne (Andy)’s excellent governess. Anne was educated at home until she was sixteen because she suffered from acute migraines. Miss Farr eventually left to marry a Mr Farr and become a Mrs Farr. If I did my lesson correctly, she would stick a coloured paper star in the exercise book; if I got five stars, she would stick in a paper duck. I was easily motivated by such rewards. Between lessons I would play with Anne in the garden. My sisters, with their long legs, climbed trees which were too difficult for me. Besides I was something of a coward and they were both bold and debonair.
In 1937, the summer of my ninth birthday, I went to board at the preparatory school of Clifton College. On the night of the Munich agreement we were supposed to be asleep in the dormitory of Matthew’s