Chapter Two ‘Transported Back to Our Childhood…’
Chapter Two
‘Transported back to our childhood…’
Much of Park House’s exterior was composed of a rough, rusty sandstone that looked, up close, like the crust on scorched gingerbread.
The key areas – round its high windows and generous doorways – were marked out with crisp limestone masonry that cut an elegant swathe through the surrounding coarseness.
This gave the building a more patrician air.
When we lived there – it has changed significantly since, having been a care home, and now in a state of decay – Park House was laid out in a configuration that emphasized its original intended grandeur.
It contained five family and two guest bedrooms, as well as a room for our nanny, on the first floor, with two separate staff flats leading off its back yard.
The tall, handsome, ground-floor front door looked out onto a broad gravel drive with a grass turning circle at its centre. Thick rhododendron bushes lay beyond, rendering the road outside mute and invisible.
On entering the house, you encountered a generous hall, to the right of which stood my father’s study.
The main feature of this office was his surprisingly modern desk – he was, otherwise, very much a man of traditional tastes.
It also had a central table, piled with periodicals and books, at the top of which stood A Near Run Thing, a hardback account of the battle of Waterloo, where his old army regiment had excelled.
There was also a secondary desk for occasional secretarial or accountancy back-up, next to which stood a metallic filing unit with locked, battleship-grey drawers.
Beyond my father’s study was the drawing room. This was the focal space for the household, valued for its adaptability. It could equally happily serve as a formal adult reception room or a more casual family space.
Before she left home, a modern portrait of my mother hung above the fireplace. Beneath it was a gleaming carriage clock, and a white onyx cigarette box for visitors to help themselves from, even though neither of my parents smoked at this time.
To one side of the fireplace stood a coal bucket, with logs, kindling and Zip firelighters, to fight against the cold Norfolk winters, whose wind blew in from the Ural Mountains, bearing skeins of high-flying geese in its teeth.
To the right, as you entered the drawing room, stood Park House’s grand piano.
My three sisters mastered the instrument, often belting out the more dramatic works of Rachmaninov and Dvo?ák, or playing pacy duets.
More modern sounds emanated from the bleached sixties record-player console in the corner of the room, diagonally across from the piano.
There was a nest of three green side tables at the foot of one of the plump sofas.
Diana and I used these when we were given TV suppers, after bathtime, once we were considered old enough to progress from the nursery wing into the main part of the house.
I have these tables still, chipped mementoes of a long-ago life, in which the drawing room featured large.
The dining room was the most formal setting at Park House.
A nineteenth-century dark wood table dominated, around which stood a dozen high-backed chairs.
The pictures on the dining room’s walls were modern – post-Impressionistic landscapes of Norfolk and Normandy, painted by local artist Edward Seago, whose oil paintings were also popular with the Queen and Prince Philip.
The prince invited Seago to accompany him on a tour of the Antarctic, during which the artist completed dozens of works.
Back in England, Prince Philip asked to see them all and, Seago told my father, neither returned nor paid for them.
When we ate as a family, we used Wedgwood crockery that my father bought at a fundraiser for the World Wildlife Fund in 1962, the year after Diana was born.
The plates from this set were handsome rather than pretty, with black-and-white etchings in the middle, depicting half a dozen individual African wild animals.
If we had a side plate where we sat with, say, a springbok, lion or giraffe on it, and then were served our main course on a dinner plate with an image of the same animal, we two younger children would shout out: ‘I’ve got a pair!
’ Such a dining-table coincidence was surprisingly exciting for us back then.
Off the dining room, down a short corridor, was a cloakroom hung with some of the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster’s newspaper offerings, as well as photographs commemorating my father’s wartime associations, and his passion for cricket. He was an all-rounder in the successful local team.
The shooting man’s creed – known as ‘A Father’s Advice’ – which started with the admonition ‘Never ever let your gun/Pointed be at anyone…’ hung in a key spot here.
My father had two separate childhood friends who suffered the horror of instigating fatal firearms accidents at their homes: one had shot his father (this saw him lumbered with the bleak schoolboy nickname of ‘Baghdad’), and the other had pointed a rifle at his sister, pulling the trigger without knowing that there was a live round primed and ready to go.
My father, a keen shooting man, was determined that no such tragedy would befall his family.
The gunroom at Park House was always locked, and he had the only key to it.
My father’s lesser house rules were generally ignored.
Despite it being forbidden, we often slid down the banisters of Park House’s elegant main staircase.
The wood on this was slim and well-polished, so it was easy to get some good speed up on the sharp downward gradient.
I can hear the squeak of our descent now, hands resting on the banister so a quick stop could be achieved if a grown-up happened upon the scene.
Under the main stairs was a cupboard chock full of the paraphernalia of summer – wooden tennis racquets, as well as two croquet sets: a regular one for adults, and a small-scale one for us children.
Opposite this cupboard was the door to Park House’s garden.
Roses climbed the walls, while a wide shingle path encircled the house, before giving way to a large expanse of lawn.
Back inside, to the left of the dining-room door, stood a pair of thick white swing doors that swished noisily when opened.
They formed the gateway between the grown-up side of the family home and the areas reserved for the younger children and staff.
For, growing up, Diana and I lived in what had been the servants’ part of the Victorian construct.
I guess there was something to the look, if not the feel, of our childhood with our father that might appear to belong to an old-fashioned upbringing.
He oversaw, and believed in, what was in many ways a very traditional English upper-class existence.
He had been brought up with a similar rhythm and tone to his early years at Althorp, the Spencer family’s sixteenth-century stately home in distant Northamptonshire, so he must have thought it normal to persist with it, even in the sixties, when convention was widely put to the sword.
My father always twinkled with kindness, but he had a deep respect for ritual.
At Park House, he inhabited the adult part of the property.
Meanwhile, Diana and I were generally pretty happy in the staff and nursery half of the place.
That is where our bedrooms were, along with the bathroom (which we shared with the nanny), our nursery, and the kitchen, utility and storage rooms of a very large nineteenth-century home.
While my father’s wine cellar (like the gunroom) was permanently locked, we had the run of the rest of our side of Park House.
We just had to adhere to the tempo of the place.
We children would get up early in term time and make our beds. Diana would set her room in perfect order, before coming through to help me tidy mine if I was struggling. We would have breakfast in the nursery with the nanny – porridge or cereal, depending on the season, followed by toast and jam.
If my father was at home, we would go to see him before we set off for school. He would look down at us lovingly, always setting our day with the same question: ‘And what, Diana and Charles, are you going to be up to today?’
We would both anticipate aloud the day ahead, sharing our hopes and aims. While a short-lived nanny would remember us wryly as ‘high-spirited children’, Diana was the chattier of the two of us.
We then headed off together, as part of a school run with four or five other children from neighbouring families, driven by their mothers in a rota.
When it was our family’s turn to drop and collect, a member of staff would take the wheel.
I have mentioned this next tale before, but because it sums up the caring nature of Diana as a big sister it deserves another airing.
In September 1968, aged four, I had excitedly woken up to my very first day at Silfield, the primary school in the nearby town of King’s Lynn where Diana was already a pupil.
After breakfast, before being scooped up in the school run, the two of us posed in Park House’s garden for a photograph in our school uniforms. My father always recorded the big occasions in his children’s life with his camera.
Diana had been at the school for two years, and so was in a senior class.
Her form teacher was Miss Lowe, the venerable, old-fashioned headmistress, whose care for her charges was exemplary.
Miss Lowe told me, many decades later, how impossible Diana had found it to settle in her class that day, not knowing how her little brother was faring in the junior form.
Seeing the unlikelihood of Diana concentrating when in such an anxious state, Miss Lowe said to her: ‘Go on – go and check on him, then!’