Untitled Document

1.1: Prologue

My purpose is to reveal myself here on paper, at considerable length until, to the best of my ability, something approaching the entire Me has been laid open to view. The material comes from my journals, which I never show to anybody. Their writing has been a central discipline within my life, involving a sustained stint which I set myself while I was still very young, always with a view to producing an autobiography before I died. On the first page of each note- book is always inscribed the phrase `Strictly Private'. But it is now time for much of this material to be translated into a literary form intended for self-exposure.

There are seven different categories into which this material falls, which might be listed accordingly.

1. Ancestry, parents and upbringing.

2. Siblings and relatives.

3. Power, authority and hierarchy.

4. Career and activities.

5. Love, sex and marital group.

6. Fatherhood, children and futurity.

7. Identity, worship and Deity.

I shall be switching between categories as the whim takes me, and as irreverently as I might please, always hoping to entertain my reader, as much as to explain and to define myself.

By way of introduction however, I had best summarise the accounts which already exist of the curious background into which I was born, with the essential information derived from the book on my family by David Burnett, and from my mother's own autobiography, combined with some original observations which would no doubt be disputed elsewhere.

I regard this as a necessary prelude incidentally, because there is no way of comprehending the anxieties which fashioned me without perceiving them in the context of Longleat House and its traditions. Whether in acting to conform with those traditions, or in revolt against them, I am still the product of Longleat. For better or for worse, it has always been (and always will be) my life's stage.