all went horribly wrong when they were routed by Parliament’s New Model Army under Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Naseby, the turning point of the Civil War. Sir John galloped away unscathed but would later forfeit everything to Cromwell’s Republican parliament: titles, houses, estates and privileges – the lot. It was a sepulchral moment.
When by popular demand Charles II was restored to the throne in 166o, while the Republican signatories to his father’s execution were being summarily hanged, drawn and quartered, we somehow inveigled our way back into favour. Our titles were reinstated and we were allowed to buy all our lands back, both in Warwickshire and Yorkshire, for a painful payment of £50 to the newly formed Cavalier Parliament, a pecuniary affront we never forgave, far less forgot. We had learned a bitter lesson. From then on we kept our political heads down and got on with looking after our own interests.
By the eighteenth century we had stumbled across coal underlying our Yorkshire land just in time for the emerging colonial markets and the incipient Industrial Revolution. On the mining profits and only a few miles from Woodsome Hall, enthusiastically competing with the fashionable expansion of the times, we built Denby Grange, a second, much more stately mansion which would become our principal family home. Its grand Georgian façade was attached to the restored shell of a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey that had been sacked in the Reformation. It overlooked the lush Colne valley, and was where, when I was born in 1946, our close cousin, Sir Kenelm, still lived in arthritic bachelor grandeur. But my great-grandfather had been a second son, not in direct line of succession for the Yorkshire estates. Instead, in 1856 his father had awarded him the Warwickshire manor and its adjoining lands as a wedding present. My grandfather had been born just down the east passage from my bedroom, so had my father.
It was only after Clement Atlee’s 1948 socialist government nationalised our collieries, removing in one eviscerating Act the family business and capital holdings it had taken us 250 years to develop, that the deeply disillusioned Sir Kenelm debunked to Mullingar in Ireland to live out his days shooting snipe and raising racehorses, while the share-holding family elders took the tough but ultimately prudent decision to up sticks and abandon Yorkshire altogether. The titular heartland then shrank back to our medieval association with Warwickshire, where, on his share of coal profits, my great-grandfather had founded a cement works, later the Rugby Portland Cement Company.
When, many years later, I was old enough to look back down the drama of the centuries I found that we had somehow managed to produce a colourful, if never illustrious, array of dramatis personae: a few prominent courtiers; a mistress to James I; several swashbuckling soldiers; various undistinguished MPs; an adventurer who travelled the south seas with Captain Cook; a celebrated Lord Mayor of York who built the Mansion House and whose coat of arms still hangs on the Micklegate Bar; a chaplain to George II who became an outrageously greedy pluralist clergyman and Dean of Lincoln Cathedral; an ivory, then slave trader; one of Britain’s first female industrialists; an opium dealer; a bevvy of sporting parsons; several masters of foxhounds; a Groom-in-Waiting to Edward VII; another king’s mistress; a couple of naval captains; a fraudster and card sharp; several Lords Lieutenant; a pioneer Canadian cattle rancher; a successful racehorse breeder of classic winners; an eminent cricketer and a cement manufacturer. There was also quite a procession of probably dull but thoroughly worthy citizens, but, alas, no writers, nor any hint of a naturalist.
At six years old I knew none of the above. Small children are blissfully unaware of who they are or where they come from. To me the Manor House was a paradise enhanced by the strange, unstoppable passage of time. All I knew was that it was the home where I always felt we belonged, my sister Mary and I, or perhaps I should say where it never occurred to us that we didn’t belong. It was never clear to me whether something we had done meant by us, the living family, last week, or last year or even by my grandfather, who seemed to me to be as old as Noah, or whether it had been done centuries before. One spring, jackdaws blocked a tall chimney with twigs and debris, which proved particularly tricky to clear. Staring up at men struggling with rods and brushes on the roof I heard my grandfather say, ‘We didn’t think about jackdaws when we built it so tall.’ Later I discovered that we probably built it in about 1620.
We had become a generic collective, embracing more generations, more individuals, more loves, fears, hopes, dreams, tragedies and joys than we could ever know or count. Not even the graveyard could list them, except the very recent ones, such as my grandmother, Emily, cut down at sixty-five by a sudden heart attack in 1944. Tirelessly she had marshalled the ladies of the village to produce fruit and vegetables for the war effort while filling every available cranny of the house with hungry evacuees from the Blitz hells of Birmingham, Coventry and London. She had overstretched herself, people said, and the firebombing of the old Coventry cathedral had broken her heart. Her stark five-foot limestone cross now stood beside the low graveyard wall in the shade of a vast beech whose huge branches clutched at the sky.
Traumatic experiences he would never discuss had made my uncle Aubrey a shy and private man, turning quickly away if anyone mentioned the war. They had changed him and his life forever. He had served with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and was taken prisoner on Dunkirk beach in May 1940. The Nazis marched them 500 miles to the notorious Stalag VIIIB Lamsdorf POW camp in Poland. When their boots wore out, they were forced to continue barefoot through a cruel winter. Feet bound in rags, black, frostbitten toes rotted and fell off as they hobbled along. They were starving. They had to beg raw potatoes and turnips from peasants along the way. Many died en route. Although my grandmother sent him food parcels every week for three years, Aubrey never received one. In dire health he was finally released in a prisoner exchange in 1943. He returned with suppurating malnutrition ulcers all over his legs, ulcers that would never heal, although he would survive as a virtual recluse for another thirty years. I once barged into the bathroom and surprised him changing the dressings. I have never forgotten the sight of raw flesh.
* * *
In common with many very old houses, the Manor House possessed a distinctive personality, an aura weighted far more heavily with the past than the present, with mythology as much as with reality, with the ghosts and shadows of those long-forgotten souls in the graveyard more than the living family and retainers, all of whom lived and moved in constant obeisance to the inescapable echoes of an unrecorded history. I loved it with a passion bone-deep and in all its unruly ramifications: its hidden cupboards and alcoves, its dingy corridors, its chill, feet-polished flagstone passages and its staircases leading upwards into shadow and mystery. Charged with an over-active imagination, exploring them became a never-ending adventure, the stuff of boys’ comic annuals. To me the house exuded a happiness that was alluring, confident and ever present, and I rested upon it like a cushion.
There were rooms where instinctively I sensed that small boys were not supposed to be. Rooms I tiptoed through, furtively glancing over my shoulder in case the ghosts of the past stepped out from behind the door. Long stone-flagged passages where steps had been hollowed by centuries of bustling feet. It was a house into which small children could vanish for hours on end, exploring a seemingly endless succession of rooms leading into more rooms and more passages, up flights of steps, across landings, down again, through creaking doors revealing yet more rooms and corridors, ever more and more enticing.
In the front of the house the formal reception rooms were big, although my grandfather had taken my grandmother’s death badly and had cut himself off from the world, refusing to entertain. He had retreated up the long west passage to the child-forbidden sanctuary of his study, known as the smoking room, only emerging for afternoon tea in the kitchen or dinner in the sombre Jacobean dining room, oak-panelling as dark as chocolate, dimly lit with half-shade sconces around the walls and candles flickering in silver candelabra on the long mahogany table.
The spacious drawing room with its finely carved cornice and chimney breast, where the iron fire basket stood four square like a bulldog in the empty grate, was temporarily closed down. Dark portraits of unsmiling ancestors glared loftily from the walls. Dustsheets covered the furniture and the
