When I returned for the Army Officers’ Boxing Competitions, Chris had just arrived home from the States, much thrilled by his travels, and full of stories as to how different were Americans from us British. He had brought home for me the gift of a gold watch, which he had been sold on Brooklyn Bridge. (The only person that I’ve actually met to have had this experience.)

Anyway he came to Aldershot with Henry to watch me win my weight; and took some delightful photographs of the bout which I still treasure today. They told me how I was emitting snarling noises whenever I swung my punches. Still, I was disappointed in that Daphne was still abroad, and therefore couldn’t witness my triumph. But I knew how the others were greatly impressed. And it was always so important to me that I should succeed in impressing Henry.

Then I fell sick with glandular fever. I was bedridden for several days without Dr Graham-Campbell diagnozing precisely what it was. Sore throat and earache were the principal symptoms. But I found it most uncomfortable, and lay in my bed groaning. I was now using a bedroom on the front side of the house, relatively near to the drawing-room, and Henry complained that my groans were disrupting the peace of the household.

The upsetting part was that he seemed to believe that I was faking the whole illness. He had never forgiven me for obliging him, (three years previously,) to fly me back from the South of France with what had been proclaimed to be a broken neck, when his own doctor later pronounced that it involved nothing more than torn neck muscles. And with slightly better justification, he might choose to remind me of the high temperatures that had laid me low at the time when I was about to take up my duties as a newly-commissioned officer. One thing he had always hated was to be conned. (It made him feel so silly.) So he was most unsympathetic to my display of suffering on this occasion. Nor was he sufficiently apologetic once the ailment had been fully diagnozed.

I did not remain bedridden for very long, for there was still my sick leave to enjoy. But there was one particular episode which created a sour note within my present balance of good fortune. I received a surprise telephone call from Captain Taylor, who was the secretary of the Army Officers’ Boxing Club. I had made it quite clear to him when at Aldershot that it was really just an accident of circumstances that I found myself as their welter-weight champion, and that I had no intention of representing the club in any of their fixtures. But he was now phoning me to apply the pressure in getting me to change my mind - with some particular contest lined up for the coming week in mind. I reiterated that I could not be persuaded. So he enquired with a sneer in his voice: "So you’re scared, are you?" And in what must rank as one of the braver responses in my life, I replied: "Yes!" - and rang off.

But the truth of the matter is that his taunt had got through to me. I felt emasculated by it, and thoroughly uncertain as to what my innermost state of mind might be. It hadn’t actually occurred to me to tell him that I was in the process of recovering from glandular fever, so wouldn’t even obtain medical clearance if I tried. But in point of fact, that would only have postponed the issue. He would simply have waited until I had recuperated, and then rung me again. But I didn’t like it that my courage was thus being held in question - motivated taunt though it may have been. I was in two minds in fact about telephoning him back, to say that I’d do as he wished. Or at least I was thinking about it, and I discussed the matter with Henry over dinner.

His own line was to say it would be sheer madness. But I balked on agreeing with him, putting it in doubt as to what my intentions might be. Henry was now growing angry with me, but he now made the error of becoming authoritarian with me. "Well if you won’t listen to reason, then you must listen to me as your father. I order you to say no to them."

This brought me up short, and I didn’t like it. Maybe I did want to be persuaded to that end by reason, but his issue of a directive like that threw us right back into the kind of relationship that I might have been hoping had been left behind. But I’d suddenly been wrong-footed in this entire discussion. What I now needed to do was to disobey him. Yet that would entail my acceptance of Captain Taylor’s challenge - when I didn’t actually want to do that. Suddenly I perceived the impossibility of continuing with the subject in any manner whatsoever. So I just got up and left the room. But it had left me feeling badly inside, for more than just one single reason. And I knew that it must now remain a subject that was closed between the two of us. I must await better opportunities to display my disobedience.

One subject that I did have to thrash out with him was the question of what I should do with myself, after the completion of my National Service. So we did have that discussion before my return to Germany. What I didn’t realize at the time was just how close the divorce between my parents was looming on the horizon. The time was approaching when Henry might be very glad to have me at a little distance from the home scene - at least until the court appearances were safely behind him. So his resistance to my wish to study art in Paris was much diminished. In any case he was prepared to discuss the matter in an open-ended fashion. He would have preferred if I had agreed to go to some provincial part of France, where I would have been less likely to meet up with other people from Britain. But I held out for Paris - because of the art school potential. And he eventually agreed to ask his friend Russell Page to look round for a family which might be prepared to take me in as a lodger.

But the conversation then became a lot heavier, when Henry asserted that we should discuss the more long term prospects. And in particular he wanted me to drop the idea of going up to Oxford. He didn’t think it was in my best interests to deceive myself into supposing that I might be an intellectual. The Thynne family simply didn’t produce intellectuals. Well - there were the Stanley cousins perhaps; or some of them. But it wasn’t our genes that were responsible for any of that. A university education would be wasted upon me. And a man must acknowledge his limitations in life, or he’ll suffer from setting his sights in life too high.

This led to a conversation when he was asking me to tell him what I thought might lie within my limitations. But this whole idea of having limitations declared for me was getting under my skin. It offended me that he should want to perceive such limitations for me. So I became arrogant in my replies - all in an attempt to get him to perceive that I was in fact a far more talented young man than that for which he gave me credit. So I began naming some of the fields where I felt that I might conceivably succeed in life, if I were to put my efforts in those directions. I could become an ambassador, a cabinet minister, an acclaimed author or artist - even a professional boxer I was rash enough to add to the list.

But Henry was unimpressed. "Well now I know that you’re lying," he declared. "You’re just living in a cloud cuckoo land. You’ve got to come down to earth."

My straining fingers stretch out to reach
the peaches, bulging from boughs at tree-top height.
You frighten me, pointing out that I lack the stature
to catch them in clasping clutch. Yet trees can be climbed!
Sublimely disregarding all you say,
I’ll play games, saddling the grey mare
for a fair weather adventure. And do not daunt me
by flaunting the taunt that I never learnt to ride.
Wide is the range of fancy dress I could
(and should) acquire, inspiring colourful behaviour
to brave out this lack-lustre life.
But trust you to knife me with a failure to notice!
So tell me now, in all this lidless sky,
is any spot too low to be too high?

It galled me the way he discounted me: that he could never display a sufficiently similar faith in my own sense of identity to enable me to feel that we were indeed thinking about the same person. On the other hand I knew very well that he did hold my future happiness at heart. He thought I was competent to succeed in life all right, as a businessman or whatever - provided that I didn’t get any high falutin’ ideas that might take me out of his own intellectual orbit. He wanted me to admit that I was the same kind of species as himself. But then - I don’t suppose that’s very different from many a father’s visionary prospectus for a son.

Anyway the net result of the discussion was that Henry accepted that my intention to go up to Oxford in the Autumn remained unaltered. He stressed that I would have to pay for it myself, and that he wasn’t going to increase my allowance. But I don’t suppose he really thought that was going to change my mind.

By the time that I returned home in January with my demobilisation papers in hand, he had fully come round to accepting the idea, and there was a greater feeling of concord between the two of us. Russell Page had found a family in Paris that would be happy to lodge me, and Henry himself was generously offering to pay my boarding fee. It was as if he feared the disruptiveness of all the discord that was about to break over our heads, and just wanted to reassure himself that our own relationship wasn’t going to prove troublesome over this period.

Even so there were some dangerous pointers that he had no intention of being flexible in the relationship where it might really count. I had requested a duffle-coat from him for my previous birthday. And he indeed supplied me with one. But he now made me pay for it. I feel sure there was a reason for this, and I suspect that it was that I had given him an unsatisfactory Christmas present. I had brought some pornographic items back home from Hamburg for him - items like contraceptives dressed up to look like show-girls. He handed them back to me a few days later, saying that he had no use for that sort of thing. I hadn’t intended to irritate him. It was merely a case of mistaken judgement on the level of his bad taste in these matters. But I regarded it as something on the petty side, yet somehow typical, that he should then present me with a bill for the previous birthday present he had given me.

Daphne was back from Crete, but had been spending Christmas with her friend Oonagh Oranmore at Luggala, in Eire - in the company of Xan of course. And Christopher too was away from home, having just started his two years of National Service in the Life Guards. (I could only feel sorry for him in that it was the Caterham experience which he first had to undergo.) So this was the situation when Henry assembled all of us who remained at Sturford to make an important announcement in the drawing-room. He kept it all brief, and to the point. We were told that after a long period of trying to make the marriage work, he and Lady Weymouth had finally reached the conclusion that it would be happier for everyone concerned if they divorced. This would take place in a few months time. And they would each then remarry - to Mrs Tennant in his case, and to Mr Fielding in Lady Weymouth’s case. Sturford Mead would be sold in that Mrs Tennant didn’t want to live here. And we’d all move into Job’s Mill - where the estate agent, Mr Algar, currently lived with his family.

So that was just about the size of the problem. I can hardly say that it was taking me by surprise. But that was only with half of my mind. With the other half, I’d somehow been hoping that life would continue much as before. As for young Valentine, the disbelief was written all over his face in a smug little smile as if he saw quite plainly through the trick that we were playing on him. He was to tell me years later how it was Nanny who had eventually persuaded him that it wasn’t a joke. He had supposed that this was another of those occasions when the family was inventing a tall story just to tease him. (Reminiscent of my own mentality, on that occasion shortly after my arrival at Eton, when I’d refused to believe a letter from my mother, telling me that she’d had a miscarriage!)

It wasn’t so much the divorce itself, or even Daphne’s pending remarriage to Xan, which took me by surprise. It was the identification of Virginia Tennant as the person that my father was going to marry. He had somehow been far more discreet than Daphne with regard to the existence of an affair. I was aware of her being a most attractive woman, on the rare occasions when I had seen her at Sturford. But it had never occurred to me that Henry might be on such intimate terms with her. Caroline would have known of course, for she was far closer to the hub of London gossip; and closer to Daphne too, when it came to discussing matters of concern in their lives. But it made me feel a bit stupid in that I’d missed out completely upon what he’d been getting up to.

Others in the household such as Donald and Mrs Sims, were severely shaken. Donald seemed to take a dim view of Mrs Tennant trying to fill Lady Weymouth’s place. "Well I ask you," he said, "do you really think she’ll be able to cope with all the parties, and the Women’s Institute for example? She’ll never be able to fill your mother’s shoes. She’s simply not in the same class." And as for Mrs Sims, despite all her disloyalty to the family in the way she gossiped round the village about the goings-on at Sturford, she knew that Daphne was her special friend. The uncertainty was now plain to read upon her features. But we were told that the household would remain unaltered, once we had all moved into Job’s Mill.

I wasn’t too happy about this last point. I had my own room at Sturford, and the privacy had become an essential part of my life. But Job’s Mill was smaller than Sturford, and Virginia had two daughters of her own. So how were the rooms going to be shared out? When I raised this subject with Henry, he declared that the boys would all have to share one room together - as we did when we were in Cowrie. Well I didn’t like the sound of that. But it was a matter that I’d need to cogitate for a while before coming up with any of my own suggestions.

My innermost feeling on the subject of a pending divorce was by no means one of dismay. There had been too much tension building up over the past few years in the relationship between Henry and myself. I worried about it sometimes, in that I didn’t see how I was going to loosen his excessive grip on my development. But with a divorce on the horizon, that might just give me the opportunity that I’d been waiting for. An opportunity to establish my own identity as something separate, and apart from the rest of the family. The notion that I might set up my own household at Longleat, on my own, was taking shape in my mind. But I wasn’t quite ready to suggest it at this juncture.

Daphne had in fact written to each of us separately, on the subject of the divorce, so that the letters arrived the morning after Henry had made his public statement on their plans. And she was due to come back to Sturford in a couple of days time, to collect all her things and take them down to Cowrie. I realised how she would be working herself up into a terrible state over there at Luggala, so I hastened to write her a letter to lessen some of those fears. I told her that I understood how the marriage had been going badly of recent years, and the important thing was to get her settled in a happy relationship once again. When she finally arrived back at Sturford, I could tell how she was grateful that I had seen fit to communicate with her in this fashion. She told me how she’d had this feeling that everyone was saying awful things about her, behind her back. So it all helped.

The de Vulpian family in Paris had agreed to take me on as a paying guest from the beginning of February, so I didn’t have very much time left to me. But I did accompany Daphne down to Cowrie for a while. I found somewhat of a paranoid atmosphere prevailing there. Daphne was terrified that she might be reported to the Queen’s Proctor - by Miss Prokinar in particular - and the evidence used against her in court. Xan wasn’t even staying in the house. He had taken lodgings locally - in Polperro I think - and used to sneak over for visits once the cook had gone back home. If this was really the way that adults were obliged to conduct their amorous affairs, then I regarded the whole business as being unpleasantly hypocritical. But it was important that Daphne should feel that I was close to her over this period - as indeed we were. My love for Daphne was unaltered by the pending divorce in any way at all, although I wasn’t used to the idea of having to regard Xan as being of such importance in her life.

I took the opportunity of this visit to give Daphne The Millions and the Mansions to read. In point of fact she wasn’t an ideal critic. She lacked the capacity to pick upon essential aspects of what was either good, or bad, in my approach to writing a novel. Her wish was more to identify with my aspiration to become a novelist and, inasmuch that she had always been the instigator of my literary and artistic ambitions, she now found it in herself to praise what I had written. She thought it would need polishing up a little, but she declared it to have the makings of a novel. And encouraged by this judgement, I returned to Sturford feeling that I might yet astound Henry by emerging as the youngest author of my generation.

Henry however was not happy to hear me talking that way. He felt that he knew me quite well enough to know that he did not have a precocious young genius as a son. Moreover it offended him to hear me talking as if I might be that kind of thing. It was just another instance of me showing signs of aspiring to outgrow him, and it wasn’t a thought that he was going to encourage. There came a point one evening when we disputed the issue in terms of a bet. He even offered me odds of a hundred to one that I’d never get this novel published within a period of three years; and this wager was written down on a piece of paper, and signed by both parties. I only stood to lose my £1 stake. But it was somehow a lot more important to me than that. I daresay he regarded it as a good incentive for me to improve on whatever I had written. But I stood to lose face so badly if I failed - and I knew it.

© The Marquess of Bath 1999 Clauses & Disclaimer