We weren't really aware as children just how much of a strain our parents marriage might be undergoing at that particular point in time. We knew that they quarrelled, but for the most part it was discreetly done and, on most matters, they presented a broadly unified front. It just never occurred to us that they might be heading for a divorce. The family unity was such an accepted tenet within our lives.

Yet I suppose that a professional observer would have noted all the danger signals, and offered a pessimistic forecast. One of the people who sometimes came down to stay at Sturford was Xan Fielding. It certainly never occurred to me that he was Daphne's lover at this time. Indeed, I felt no antipathy for him, and liked him rather more than the usual visitor. There was something glamorous about him having been awarded the DSO for his activities as a secret agent during the war - first in Crete where he organised the resistance on one half of the island, and then in the south of France where he was captured and only saved from execution in an escape that was organised by another agent. He was tersely direct in all the viewpoints that he offered, with a level of cultural sophistication that was well above that of Henry's. I enjoyed it when he came to Sturford because it always seemed that the conversations were then both lively and interesting.

Then Daphne went off on a holiday with some friends which included Xan. This was while we were away at school. But it was noticeable even after her return, how Henry was becoming increasingly irritable. We discovered when we ourselves were back at Sturford that Miss Parker, the cook, had departed. It was explained to us by Daddy that she had taken objection to the idea that he came into the kitchen each morning, during Mummy's absence, to determine what the day's menus were going to be. She regarded this as an unnecessary male intrusion into a female preserve, and promptly handed in her notice. Henry regarded this as a piece of bluff - and called it. And neither of them would back down after that.

So this led to Mrs Sims taking on the duties of cook, instead of housekeeper. And Simbags was in fact such a superb cook that the whole family wondered why we hadn't put her in the kitchen long ago. The only disadvantage being that, once there enthroned, she was at the hub of all the household gossip with every chance to disseminate it to the wider audience of the local tradesmen. But that was all part of the established order in life, which we accepted for what it was.

This was a time when everyone was feeling uncertain of where their real niche within the household might lie. Henry's prompt retirement of Mr Hillier - after Grandpa's death - had drawn their attention to the potential uncertainty in their job tenure on the death of the incumbent Marquess. What Henry had done, then so might I. It left them looking over their shoulders, to see if they were in my own good graces, as well as in my father's.

Donald was the one to bring these matters to my attention. He would talk round the subject rather than directly, yet probing to see if I was a firmer base for his loyalty than Henry might furnish. I saw what he was getting at, but had no wish to make him feel that I personally could turn disloyal to my father's interests. I just listened, taking it all in.

Donald was inviting me to take note that the relationship between himself and my father during the war years had been far from perfect. I heard stories about the disrespect that was felt for him - by the rank and file in the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry - of the tenor that he was just a bull-shit parade ground soldier, whom nobody would want to follow into battle. Donald was always edging towards a suggestion that here we were, in the same rank and file situation ourselves within this household (for no one nowadays would regard the three sons as having superior status), so that we all ought to recognise where our own best interests lay. One should always take care of Number One!

If I had shown my willingness to collude with him within a scheme for setting up - along with himself - some household opposition group, then Donald would have preferred it. He would have been happier identifying with the rank and file, in opposition to authority - as it was during the war - than to play the role that Henry was foisting upon him, which was to become his lieutenant in the reinforcement of law and order within the family. But my lack of response on this suggestion may well have decided him (once again) to look after Number One as best he could.

The responsibility of taking good care of Longleat had always been something very dear to Henry's heart, and I caught a first glimpse of how there were always dangers afoot when he made a fuss about us taking the son of Kitty, who was Daphne's lady's maid, to examine the treasures of the Longleat library. This was a young man called Cornelius - or Con - who had recently been demobbed from the army. As I see it in retrospect, he was a thoroughly untrustworthy individual, whose expression of interest to be shown the first edition of Shakespeare's collected works did not relate to his cultural or educational background. He was making a big thing about being friendly to all of us children in too sly and overt a fashion. And we did take him to the library, leaving him with the first folio of Shakespeare in his hands. It was only at a subsequent date that the title page was discovered to have been torn out at some unidentified period in its history. But I noted how Henry looked at Con long and hard when he heard how he had been asking to examine such books; and I recollect how Con had a shifty expression. But at the time I judged that Daddy was displaying an unnecessary degree of suspicion - to which he had always been inclined concerning the trivialities of our own misdemeanour.

There was an incident around this time which underscores just how scatty Daphne could be - despite her intelligence. She had a young white Pekinese dog called Maggie at the time, which she took out with her for a walk up Clay Hill in the company of Christopher. They chatted happily, as I imagine, for the duration of their outing. But when they returned to Sturford, they discovered that Maggie was no longer with them - with the last sighting that they could recollect being on the hill itself. Despite extensive searches by the local population, Maggie was never found. Fortunately she had been more attentive about the welfare of Chris.

It had always been, and still remained, a house full of dogs. Danny the whippet, had long been with us with ownership largely unspecified. Then after Maggie, Daphne acquired a giant poodle who was appropriately named Puddle, while Henry still had Clare, the corgi. She had cancer of the stomach however, and soon had to be put to sleep. She was replaced by Thpider, a mongrel fox terrier - with an uncanny ability to smile sycophantically, or perhaps just from unmerited guilt.

My father always held Thpider's origins to be suspect, having bought her impromptu from a Cornish farmer when she appeared grinning, to greet them at the farmhouse door. But he was never quite happy about the subservience of her demeanour, while putting it down to a question of initial upbringing rather than genetic inferiority. As far as he was concerned the initial disciplinary upbringing to which he had subjected all of his sons, for example, would surely entail that we overcame whatever disadvantage might exist within the intellectual substandard of the Thynne genes, and the insanity which was liable to crop up wherever the Vivians were concerned.

In my parents' attitude individually towards myself, I think they found me the most difficult to handle of their children. My awkwardness took the form of sudden outbursts of being argumentative, plus a tendency to withdraw into myself - in a manner they dubbed as sulking. From my own viewpoint, seen retrospectively, it may have struck me that they were furnishing for me an uncertain environment where my natural sensitivity was passing uncherished, and where my endeavours to assert my own identity were getting baulked by an aggressive father who had his own problems of household order to resolve. Daphne was always more sympathetic towards me than Henry over any item of misbehaviour in me that had been observed. But she had no strong personal views upon the subject of how her sons should be brought up, merely accepting the precept that we were really Henry's concern.

The attitude that gifts could be presented and later withdrawn, still prevailed as much as ever. Now that I was displaying an interest in science, and had requested a cheap microscope for my birthday, he decided instead to present me with the 19th century microscope which had been collected by our ancestors, and which was now housed up in the Old Library at Longleat. It was something far more complicated than I had been anticipating, but I was delighted with the gift and made an effort at learning how to use it. What upset me however was that Henry later heard from friends how the microscope was valuable, and declared that it must be restored to the Old Library. No offer was ever made to give me an alternative birthday gift - like the cheap modern microscope that I had originally requested.

I also resented the way in which Henry was becoming increasingly obsessive upon the general subject of tidiness. It wasn't just a question of his own rooms, or even his own part of the house. He would make it his business to sort out the boys' rooms - but never Caroline's - at times when we were absent from the scene. He would rummage through our private cupboards, making piles of what he regarded as waste matter. But there was a horde of what I personally regarded as treasures - like poems and short stories, along with childhood toys of a sentimental nature, which got discarded along with such refuse. He never accepted that anything we possessed was truly ours.

In his obsession for dredging all the lakes in the park, I became aware how alternate values might prevail from the way my friends at Eton commented upon it. I learnt from Parker and Graham-Wigan for example, that what was generally admired within their own background was the wildness of nature, or at any rate some manner of proximity to it, and it made me think about the beauty of all the bulrushes that Henry was so assiduously concerned to suppress - in order to present the lakes with clean sharp edges. Those values had spread everywhere in his life. So it began to occur to me at this time, that I might evolve my values upon a different line, more in a spirit of compromise between order and disorder: promoting an image of the taste for order within disorder, without destroying its random self-creativity.

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