I had yet to accustom myself to the idea that I now had to develop the relationships with my father and my mother quite separately. And inasmuch that I had recently set up my own private base at Longleat, I felt unable to identify either of their houses as being my home in particular. Virginia had a better chance than Xan of assuming the surrogate parent role, in that her marriage to Henry appeared more natural, more anticipatable, than Xan’s to Daphne. He was after all, nearly a decade younger than my mother, and she was apt to address him more as a younger brother than as a husband. On the other hand I was too old by now to feel greatly influenced by the relationships which either of my parents might choose for themselves. I was aware how I needed to give more thought, and to give more time to the creation of my own identity, distinct from either parent.

But there was as much jollity as ever in Daphne’s descents upon Oxford. She was the partygoer par excellence, and was never lost for any manner of conversational acumen. As in Xan’s case too, all we ever did was just to follow in the trail of her exuberance, keeping her company in her entertainment of whomever might come up to talk with us. But we liked doing that, and there were moments when I felt I could rise to her own heights of extroversion.

Her recent visit had coincided with the Guy Fawkes festivities, and we nearly got ourselves into trouble with the Junior Proctor because we were fringely participating within a crowd where some thunder-flashes were being thrown. He appeared from out of nowhere and tried to take my name. Somewhat unwisely, I claimed that I didn’t come from the university and, putting an arm round Daphne’s neck, declared that I was just taking my girlfriend for a walk. We sauntered away from the scene without realizing that his `bulldogs’ had been set on our tail. And as soon as we got up to some additional antics - with me starting to climb up a lamppost - I perceived that they were bearing down on us. So we all started running in different directions.

It was only [B], who had just attached himself to our party, who actually got caught. He had supposed that his innocence would have been noted, so that he would not be liable for punishment. But punished he was, and he came round to complain bitterly to me about it subsequently. If he was offended however, by the trouble that we’d brought down upon his head, Daphne was equally incensed that [B] had taken it upon himself to tell [A] that she’d been disappointed when opening his gift of a small flat box containing some of his poems, in that she’d been expecting to find that they were silk stockings. [A] wrote to Daphne on the subject protesting that they were the originals, and that she ought to have been better pleased. And this in turn led to a brief correspondence in all directions, where they each endeavoured to establish that the behaviour of others was the more at fault.

With Henry, my relationship was of a very different nature. With him, I did not feel the same closeness of spirit as I did with Daphne, but he did represent to me the idea of anchorage within a sense of family. And my concern now was to see how much freedom he intended to permit me so that I might emerge as my own master at Longleat. In this context it is interesting to take note of the matters which needed discussion between Henry and myself. It is only his half of the correspondence which is available to me, but it seems evident that I had been planning to invite some friends from Oxford for a week-end at Longleat, but was inhibited by the problem of putting them up when I had no spare rooms to offer them - the area that I occupied being limited to the Dowager Suite at this time. The solution that I had evidently proposed was that I might be permitted to have occasional use of the Bachelor Rooms up on the top floor at Longleat. But Henry didn’t seem to like this idea. His letter is dated October 23rd.

It is revealing how Henry comments that it is what he feared might happen, once I had moved into Longleat. In other words he viewed my reoccupation of Longleat as something in the nature of the thin edge of the wedge - that I’d soon be demanding a larger territory within the house, and perhaps threatening his own control of the domain. The letter then switches to a discussion of my coming-of-age present, which was by now some six months overdue.

The subject of my allowance must have been raised in my reply to this letter, and it is a subject which he took up with me.

The biggest worry for myself in our relationship was to discern the length of my leash under this new order - whether my father might at last be prepared to treat me as an adult instead of as a juvenile. There had been too many rules and restrictions for my own liking, when we’d all been at Sturford together - rules imposed by Henry but accepted without demur by Daphne, even if she had finally flown the nest. But I waited to see what difference to life it would make with Henry building up his new identity in life, where Virginia’s hand was clearly discernible. And all the early signs were that things were going to be quite a lot different; that they both fervently desired that the entire family should regard Job’s Mill as a welcoming home. I read this as Virginia’s influence on Henry, and I was thankful to her for it. But I was still conscious that the old sores were still festering not far beneath the surface, and there were subjects which, if raised, I wasn’t going to flinch from discussing - with a vehemence that was only just coming together within my personality.

There was one such discussion over the course of the Michaelmas vacation, and that was on the subject of guerrilla strikes. Henry was on about the need to shoot all the ringleaders, in the same fascist vein that he’d been cultivating since the final years of the war. I knew by now that his values were all awry, and that they weren’t even to be regarded as consistent within his attitude on other matters - such as gentlemanly conduct. But at Oxford I was learning to discuss and defend values that were very different to his own. Whereas before I’d been prepared to listen to him ranting on with an exposition of his merciless dogma for restoring law and order, I now found myself empathizing with the people that he’d so readily execute. So for the first time perhaps, I took him up on the subject and we were both getting very hot under the collar. He was calling me a communist and a traitor to the interests of my class - or worse still, that I was being disloyal to Longleat. But this was a load of trite rubbish, and I told him so.

There was this terrible feeling of unfinished business within our relationship. I knew in my heart that there were dread issues yet to be resolved, and that we might learn to hate one another in the process. But these feelings coexisted with a genuine desire to love one another - a desire which Virginia was doing her utmost to cultivate in both our hearts. I felt such a shit in allowing myself, just occasionally, to pick a verbal battle with him.

With regard to my relationship with Christopher, I had received no communication from him during the period while he’d been doing his basic training. Once he had passed out as an officer however, he joined the Life Guards at Wolfenbütel in the British Army On the Rhine. I then received a letter from him, which was dated October 30th.

So Christopher came back from Germany just before Christmas on his spell of embarkation leave, before the Life Guards were transferred to Egypt. I only saw a little of him, since he spent much of the time up in London. But we were now finding problems in our relationship. In retrospect I perceive the fault largely as my own - and curiously similar to Henry’s fault within his relationship with myself. They were both cases in which the elder party was guilty of giving insufficient growing-room to the younger’s aspirant individualism.

Throughout our life together, and despite the elements of sibling rivalry, I had been comfortably dominant over Christopher and had grown to expect that he would fall in with my wishes. Over the period of his National Service however, he was emerging as far more his own person - unwilling to be seen to bend to the will of an elder brother. And there was one particular outburst over a dinner at Job’s Mill, which took me quite by surprise.

I was chiding him on the subject of my first photograph album, which had been chucked out as rubbish several years previously - Henry being the real culprit, but he’d been clearing out our store cupboards with Chris there at his side, theoretically as the judge of what might still have some use to me. In the presence of both of them, I was airing my sense of grievance that they have set to work upon such a mistaken premise. But Christopher suddenly lost patience with me. He jumped up from the table dropping a pound note in front of me, and saying: "All right then, I’ll pay you for the bloody album, and now shut up about it!" I daresay we’d been drinking, and it was now my own turn to flare up. Pocketing his pound note, I shouted: "All right that pays for the album, but not for the photographs that were in it!" He then flounced out of the room, but I was left aware that a new period had opened within our relationship, and that I might expect further problems in the future.

Christopher went to spend Christmas with Daphne at Luggala in Ireland. (This was Oonagh Oranmore’s home.) After his departure I was upset to find that he had left my Christmas present for her in his room at Job’s Mill, and it was only by accident that I discovered about this. So in accordance with the nature of our relationship as it once had been, I wrote him a fierce letter of reprimand on this issue - leaving it in Donald’s hands, with a request that he hand it to my brother on his return from Ireland. For my own part, I was off to Cornwall to stay with Daphne the same day that he was due to return, and I wasn’t expecting to see him again before he was due to board the troop transport boat for Egypt.

Daphne had phoned me to say that I could pick up the same train as herself, at Westbury, on her way back to Cornwall from Ireland - via London that is to say. She would be looking out of the window. But what I hadn’t anticipated was that Christopher would be jumping out from the same carriage in order to spend his last few days with Henry. And he rushed up to greet me and to bid me what was intended to be a fond farewell. But I knew how there was a fierce letter waiting for him back home, and I was deliberately cool when telling him about this. So it was thus that we parted.

I always enjoyed seeing Daphne, but I never knew what to do with myself when I was down at Cowrie. Well there were books to read for my studies. But I would have felt more at home doing that at Longleat. And besides there was this awkwardness as to the kind of relationship that I might conceivably develop with Xan. It was just that I found difficulty in perceiving him as my mother’s husband. A sibling relationship might almost have come easier to me, perhaps.

Anyway it was only for a single weekend that I was staying with them in Cornwall, and I was soon back at Longleat. Christopher had now set sail for Egypt, but it seems that he wrote me a reply to my letter while on board the ship, which was to reach me about a week later. The general tone of the letter was something new to me, and was indicative of the attitude I might now expect to find in him.

I replied to this letter in what I hoped was a conciliatory vein - apologizing for the pomposity of the tone I had adopted, while reiterating that I did feel that I’d had some cause for complaint, even if I’d expressed it badly. I was hoping that he might react to my conciliatory approach by sending me a second letter, so that we could put all this unpleasantness behind us. And I was to learn much later that he did in fact post such a letter to me - although I have no manner of knowing precisely what it may have said. All I know is that he enquired - after his return from Egypt - if I had ever received "that letter with a dead scorpion in it". I hadn’t. I can only imagine that someone along the line had assumed that the lump inside the letter was something rather more sinister - like hashish. Anyway it never reached me, so our communication now lapsed for a while.

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