In 1950, when she was 17, Antonia Fraser agreed to go to Oxford to help her mother, Elizabeth Longford, in her campaign to be elected a Labour MP in the city. She was delighted to do this, not because she was particularly political, but because she then lived in a “romantic haze”. Somehow, she had convinced herself that the Marquis of Vidal, the saturnine hero of Georgette Heyer’s novel, Devil’s Cub – or at least someone very like him – would spot her sitting demurely on the platform and promptly whisk her away to do goodness knows what.
Labour party meetings being what they are, however, this did not happen. Her mother spoke, a little red hat “chic” on her black hair, and then she took questions. “Lady Pakenham!” yelled one man from the floor, placing sneering emphasis on the word “lady” (Fraser’s father, Frank Pakenham, later the Earl of Longford, had recently been ennobled). “How can you put yourself forward for parliament and neglect your eight children?” Elizabeth did not miss a beat. “Stand up, Antonia,” she said, addressing her eldest and seemingly most dreamy child. Fraser, whose cheeks were then as round and as pink as a baby’s, struggled out of her seat. “Does she look neglected?” asked Elizabeth, at which point the crowd, whether hostile or not, collapsed into laughter.
This is a good story, but it’s also apt. Fraser was, and is, many things, but neglected is not one of them, and thanks to this, she seems never to have wanted either for confidence or purpose. Her parents were high-born, successful and well connected, and their clever child – an adjective Fraser uses about herself with some alacrity – in turn proceeded very smoothly through her early life. She loved two of the three schools she attended, after which she went up to her adored Oxford to read PPE (as she blithely admits, it was “unlikely” that her mother’s old Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall, “would not give her daughter a chance” to read for a degree there – and so it proved).
Once she had graduated, moreover, Elizabeth fixed her up with a nice little job working for the publisher George Weidenfeld. Her parents’ circle included Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman; as a teenager, her dancing partners included TS Eliot and Hugh Gaitskell. Anthony Powell was her uncle by marriage – Powell, incidentally, once informed her that she would never appear, thinly disguised, in one of his novels for the highly accurate reason that she was too “resolved” a character – while her holidays were spent with her Anglo-Irish relations in Dunsany Castle, County Meath (from here, regular outings were taken to Pakenham Hall, the house that would one day be inherited by her brother, Thomas).
To cap it all, her first serious book, Mary Queen of Scots, published in 1969, became a bestseller – and in spite of the best efforts of the novelist Elizabeth Jenkins, who noted waspishly in her review that the tyro historian had turned her subject from leopard to pussycat. (Fraser had been obsessed with Mary Stuart since she was a girl – she remembers being particularly intrigued by the passages describing the Earl of Bothwell’s rough wooing of the Scottish queen in Margaret Irwin’s The Gay Galliard – and wore a peaked headdress just like Mary’s at her first wedding).
My History is a prequel to Must You Go?, Fraser’s eccentric and (possibly unintentionally) hilarious memoir of 2010, whose focus was the second half of her life, and her happy marriage to the playwright Harold Pinter. Unfortunately, it’s not half so much fun to read, dishing up as it does such boring delights as a list of her favourite childhood books (a prodigiously able reader, she devoured Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story at the astonishing age of four, after which she pretty swiftly moved on to Walter Scott), a full tally of her various tutors at Oxford, and a long account of her desire to “come out” as a deb in spite of her famously socialist background.
By way of revelations it offers nothing whatsoever – unless, of course, you count the news that Elizabeth and Frank Longford’s idea of a seriously good night in involved debating “the proper role of the papacy with regard to a Protestant country” (both were Catholic converts), and that the pair did not, as Fraser’s first husband, the Conservative MP Hugh Fraser, once excitedly claimed, conceive their first child in the waiting room at Stoke station (this was merely the scene of their engagement). It will tell you something if I say that my favourite moment in the entire book comes when Fraser describes a brief stint she spent working in the hat department at Fenwick’s of Bond Street shortly before she went up to Oxford. “Here,” she writes solemnly, “I was known as Miss Tony, the only time I have ever permitted this soubriquet.” Henceforth, I’m afraid, Fraser will always be Miss Tony to me.
The book is a bizarre combination of what is known in the 21st century as humble-bragging – not-so-humble-bragging, sometimes – and peculiar, snobbish detachment. A good example of the former comes when she tells us that, though she realised on meeting Julie Christie that the two of them looked not at all alike, she was regularly mistaken for the famously beautiful actor (also, that time in the back of a taxi when Saul Bellow, a fellow Booker judge, told her she was a handsome woman, and then fell almost immediately into a deep sleep). A good example of the latter comes when… Oh, but I’m spoilt for choice here. Fraser seems to have no sense at all of her privilege – or even of her great luck in life. For all that her fondness for her parents is undoubtedly touching, it comes on the page with no grasp of their sillinesses, their (sometimes) laughable hypocrisy.
She makes no comment when she informs us that, after her mother was adopted as the Labour candidate for King’s Norton in Birmingham, she and her brother Thomas were installed in a state school in the city for a single week “to demonstrate, by practical example, her egalitarian views on education” (the Pakenham children were otherwise privately educated, in Fraser’s case at the Dragon in Oxford, and various boarding schools). Nor does she flinch from revealing that, during a period when the family was in Sussex, her socialist ma was not at all keen for her to talk to the children of visiting hop-pickers. “They eat different food,” Elizabeth told her daughter, before murmuring something about whelks and eels. When she arrives at Oxford, and hears one of her undergraduate contemporaries, Marigold Hunt, future wife of the historian Paul Johnson, demanding to know whether scouts (the college cleaners) will do “some ironing” for students, Fraser is filled, not with embarrassment at such entitlement, but with “admiration for her boldness”.
And so it goes on: I lurched from tittering dismay to full-blown outrage in the matter of the Pakenham/Fraser politics. The rest of the time my overwhelming feeling was one of disappointment. As memoirs go, this one is distant where it should be intimate, cool where it should be confiding. Even when interesting characters do appear on the horizon – Sonia Orwell is here, and so, too, is Barbara Skelton, the gorgeous, complicated wife both of Cyril Connolly and of George Weidenfeld – Fraser tells us next to nothing about them. Did TS Eliot gently perspire as he whizzed her across the floor at a ball at the German embassy? Did he whisper staccato lines of high modernism in her ear? It seems we shall never know.
My History is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson (£20). Click here to buy it for £16
