It is time to throw a glance at the kind of person I was, now that I had come up to Oxford in an endeavour to discover myself, and to shape my own intellect. Having rooms of my own in Meadows was something that I did greatly appreciate. Although what I describe are the drunken revelries of university life, for the greater part of the time I was sitting there in solitary in my rooms, to an extent that others were apt to comment on my lack of attendance within their social scene. Admittedly I was only plodding through the books I had to study without any real interest in what I was reading. What was important however, was that I was free to develop my fields of interest wherever I might choose them to be - unrelated to the examinations that I would eventually have to sit. And there were indeed some areas where I was by now acutely aware of the need to fill in some of the deplorable gaps in my knowledge, which amounted to an absence of cultural sophistication.

A rudimentary skeletal structure of my starkly
architected soul is rolled open,
hopeful for the stamp of public approval, but squirming
(worm-like) in rueful memory of mocking tongues.
Young enough as yet to fret the shape,
and drape the contours of newly emergent identity -
plenty of labour lies ahead, doubtless
sprouting its own dread bouts of turmoil.
Germinating somewhere deep inside,
I pride the seed for my vision of its full fruition -
mission accomplished only when the furrowed holes
remould a solid filling, golden gated.
Although my incompletion makes them laugh,
I’m seeing how to build the other half.

There was the field of English literature for example. I made a start by reading a book which furnished a general survey of the subject. I learnt how one particular critic had suggested that our modern literature originated with the writings of D.H.Lawrence, E.M.Forster, Aldhous Huxley and Virginia Wolfe. Up to date I had read nothing by any of them, but this was a matter which I now sought to rectify - gradually as the terms went by adding additional authors to the list. There was also the subject of classical music. I was buying records and playing them while I worked. And my reading of that book upon psychiatric disorders (which included mongolism) made me appreciate how this too was a subject which fascinated me, furnishing an additional extra-curriculum field for study.

Perhaps the most prevalent trait of all within my personality was a dire lack of self-confidence concerning the justification for me sustaining, however vaguely in my mind, the goals which I did in fact sustain - some idea about me being an incipient genius with future burgeoning in both literature and art. I was well aware how there were many people who regarded me as conceited. Henry had always felt nervous about me developing too much ambition, unless it was attributable as some manner of eminence from Longleat. And he had ridicule to offer for any hint that I might perceive myself as some manner of superior human being. I was reading about paranoia too (in that book on psychiatry), and I realized how it might indeed be that I was developing exaggerated notions of grandeur on that scale. And Daphne was showing signs of losing faith in me too. Her encouragement for my painting prowess was now couched in more cautious terms. She was learning such restraint from Xan, as I suspected. So it must surely read as madness if I persisted in these ambitions unreduced, for this high evaluation which I managed to sustain in assessing the merits of my own work left me isolated out there somewhere on my own.

The heavy drinking in which to some extent I indulged (even if it was rather less than my friends such as Bendor and Ian), was motivated by an essential lack of self-confidence. The uncertainty on how I should position myself psychologically, when mingling with others for social merriment, became a lot easier for me when the worries in my head could be anaesthetised. Alcohol did this for me. A few glasses and I was worrying no longer. Nor did my behaviour (when anaesthetised) give rise to offence in others. I didn’t become a problem to others. It was far more a question of me becoming popular from the more outgoing, more extroverted lines of action that I might take. I felt better able to like myself - because it was evident that others were liking me. And my saving grace was that I didn’t permit such drinking to become a question of habit. I was only drinking when socializing and, even then, only to an extent where I still felt myself in good control of my integral personality.

But there had been occasions perhaps when it had led me to get myself involved in episodes mildly to the detriment of my public image - my participation in that performance for the Greek Earthquake Fund Appeal for example, or that other occasion when I’d posed for photographs with a group of dubious friends, wearing colourful waistcoats and smoking cigarettes from long holders. I was learning the hard way that my public image was something that could be distorted and abused within the manner in which it was portrayed in the gossip columns. Not that I was doing anything different to a large number of others within my social group. But in the eyes of the British press, I was someone more especially within their focus of interest - the scion of one of our most famous stately homes, who was rendering himself vulnerable by antics which could be questioned.

Britons had not yet been fully weaned from their exaggerated respect for aristocracy, but they were always agog to learn how that respect might be misplaced. My vulnerability lay in the fact that I was a suitable candidate for the media’s attention on this score. I had some of the best aristocratic credentials, but I was already showing signs that I might be stepping outside their circle of defence. I might become a straggler - or a maverick. They had been quick to focus upon anything that I might say or do, in a ribald attempt to reveal that I was ridiculous - when in fact my behaviour was little different from the majority of my friends who had a less instant appeal to the public eye.

The malevolence of the gossip columnists transformed each and every one of them into ogres, whom I became terrified of meeting at any social function. Or they couldn’t always be identified, in that so many of one’s friends and acquaintances were suspected of supplementing their parental allowances by phoning up their particular column with garbled information that eventually gave rise to something getting misreported.

But the man whom many of us feared the most over this period was Nicholas Phipps - currently working on the Ephraim Hardcastle column for the Sunday Express. With his parents living at Chalcot, he was in fact the elder brother of Diana Phipps, who had once been Caroline’s best friend - exchanging many a visit with her while they were in their teens. And his mother, Lady Sybil, was the sister of the Duchess of Gloucester and the Duchess of Beccleuch. So it was only the fact of his father being a relatively humble country squire which saved him from being himself an object of excessive scrutiny from the gossip columns. But from our point of view, he was that most dangerous of things - an insider to the aristocratic circle, who knew only too well our points of vulnerability, and delighted in the exercise of his sharp wit in rectifying the balance of social advantage by passing disparaging comment upon those whom he envied (perhaps) for the excess of privilege on their plates. Although I feared him greatly however, he had in fact dealt lightly with me to date - for which I felt grateful.

I must now give some attention to the way my views were developing on the subjects of religion and politics - and I shall examine first, the former. There had been a gap of several years since I had bothered my head very much about it, being an area where my adoption of Henry’s own views had been quite healthy for me. That is to say his current disrespect for the essential Christian faith of his own parents had enabled me to feel under no particular pressure to believe anything to which I might feel disinclined, or dubious. I was probably an agnostic, although faintly nervous of describing myself as such in that Henry was apt to ridicule that position, as being a description of someone who didn’t know his own mind.

One of my good friends at Eton, who had now come up to Oxford with me, was Steve Arkwright. He was at Worcester College, and had been turning his attention to religion in quite a big way. And I suppose it was the more introverted reclusive side to me which he identified as being similar to his own - something which he regarded as potential for religious conversion. On several occasions he had come round to my rooms for earnest conversation, where he appeared inhibited from broaching the one topic which he really wanted to discuss - which was God. So we never got round to it that Michaelmas term. But I somehow sensed how it was a subject he was going to raise sometime or other.

My own religious development at this time was really centred upon the fact that I started to keep a journal. It had been my intention to start one as soon as I went up to Oxford, after receiving advice to do so from no less a person than Duff Cooper, Lord Norwich, on that occasion I went to stay the weekend with them near Chantilly. But the intention had slipped my mind during the excitement of adapting myself to the new environment at Oxford; and when I did remember, I decided to start it at the New Year instead. This I did indeed do, and it is a practice which I have since kept up without break - making an entry about once a week, or about once a fortnight perhaps. Or more accurately, whenever I have felt in the mood to write such an intimate letter to myself.

I have come to regard this practice rather in the light of a religious exercise - something akin to Confession within the Catholic faith. In the absence of really intimate friends with whom I might discuss my own life, without boring them, I have availed myself of this journal. My intention throughout has been to develop an attitude of total candour with regard to the events in my life. I record the essential details of all that happened and my feelings on the subject as well. During these early years, what I wrote does not make good reading. I was too imprecise in coming to grips with my analysis of any subject. I waffle to an extent that I become boring. But it still furnishes me with the gist of what I now require to analyse with hindsight, and with a more mature understanding of events. The journal has been invaluable to me in my task as an autobiographer.

But it has been more than that. It has furnished me with the thread along which my entire life can be rationalized and comprehended. I look forward to these moments of setting myself down upon paper - in the same way as a Catholic may look forward to his visit to the confessional. Once my behaviour has been recorded, with whatever depth of analysis that I may have managed to put into it, I feel that I can set it behind me to start contending with all the rest of whatever life may have to offer me. I begin to feel how I relate to the universe and, to that extent, it is most certainly a religious endeavour. So let us take note of the words with which, at that date, I establish my hopes and my intentions within the opening pages of this journal. The entry is dated 31st December 1953.

I started the journal while sitting in the Dowager Suite at Longleat, waiting for midnight and the New Year. I was reflecting sadly upon Tom Renyard’s suicide, for his body had just been recovered from a dell in the woods at Cannimore. He had shot himself through the heart with his twelve bore gun. I had spent many hours with Tom in my childhood, supposedly learning about rabbiting and shooting, but rather more perhaps about the way my father’s employees on the estate conduct their lives, and the nature of their values.

Tom’s health had been collapsing, and he’d recently suffered a heart attack. His doctor had persuaded the Head Keeper to oblige him to retire, and he’d taken the news badly. He had always led an active life, out of doors in the woods, and he couldn’t accept the idea that he must now find other means to occupy the daylight hours. I felt distressed at the way he had seen fit to terminate his existence - in a manner that left us all wondering if we should not have done more to preserve his interest in life for whatever short period might remain to him. But I could recollect how he had sometimes talked in a light vein about the cleanness (conciseness?) of dying that way. Nor was he afraid of death. I could remember him poking fun at all the nonsense that was promised to us by the vicar. In his own way, I suppose he was a pantheist - or in any case nature was all important to him. As he might see it, it was from nature that he came, and it was back to nature that he now departed - of his own volition.

My political views at this time were something which I did attempt to discuss within my journal, in relation to the row I’d had with Henry concerning guerrilla strikes - when Henry had been advocating that the ringleaders should be taken outside and shot. I clarified my own position by advocating what amounts to a comprehensive wages’ policy, along with a high degree of worker participation within management - combined with state subsidies for industries regarded as essential for the national economy. I suggest that the relative value of each professional contribution should be assessed in percentage terms by the industry’s own Wages’ Council (incorporating the functions of an industry’s trade union perhaps), and that the gross income - after production cost had been deducted - should be split up in accordance with those ratios. A successful product would thus have good financial reward for both management and work force, whereas a failed product would leave all parties unrewarded. I was advocating a system which might generate the psychology of co-operation between all elements in the production team, but it left unanswered how disputes concerning the value of a particular professional contribution might be resolved. The potential need for strike action had not significantly been obviated, despite my suggestion that each Wages’ Council should be represented on some central committee for such councils, where the differences of opinion might be resolved.

I had arrived at Oxford eager to listen to whatever the case for socialism might be - without actually hoping that I’d find the need for it proven. It was more a question of knowing just how heartless and unreasonable were Henry’s own political views, and I’d permitted myself to be far too influenced by his attitudes in time past. He had always displayed this total lack of empathy for human beings who were in positions dissimilar to his own. Nor had the people with whom he conversed at his dinner table shown much sensitivity on such issues. I knew how I needed to reassess my values in that area, and I was eager for the task now that I was at university. But that did nothing to diminish my knowledge of the fact that I was destined one day to champion the interests of Longleat, or at least to resolve those interests so that they could be perceived as something compatible with (and conducive to) the welfare of society as a whole.

On the question of what I might really have been like as a human being, I suppose it is fair to give due consideration to [X]’s own charge that I was selfish and inconsiderate. I might be justified in seeking to reduce the charge of selfishness to that of egocentricity. I daresay that it was all part and parcel of the general isolation from other members of the family, which had characterized my upbringing. But I’d always endeavoured to take the feelings of others into consideration. So I think it was more a question of me feeling irked at the differences in logic that I was encountering with [X]. I was intolerant perhaps, of conclusions which had been reached from processes of thinking which I couldn’t track.

Of greater accuracy I suspect, was the charge that I was humourless. Not that I was incapable of laughter, for I did my share of that within situations which I found appropriate. But there was an over-serious vein in which I was apt to monitor all that was said to me, taking it in too literally perhaps. I did not rise spontaneously to the quicksilver shifts in meaning, or interpretation, such as inspires the humour in more polished wits. And I felt vulnerable on the issue - a knowledge that there was this plodding insensitivity in me which I hoped to keep concealed. Not that it really caused any problems for me, but I mention it as an evaluation to keep somewhere in the back of the mind.

What others frequently missed however, was that there was a side to me which was constantly viewing the folly of my own identity almost as if I were a person apart. Remarks that I uttered were inserted on my lips, spontaneously, but virtually to the self-ridicule of the person I found myself to be - something in caricature of myself, which I too could find grotesquely funny. To mention but two examples which have already been mentioned within my text, there was the instance when I replied to [H]’s query concerning what degree I thought I might obtain, by saying that I hadn’t yet decided. Or there was that other occasion when, on meeting Kate Ward for the first time at some party and she had enquired where I lived, I replied: "Don’t you know?" I did imagine in my heart that I was amusing others (in addition to myself) by such seemingly unconscious humour, but it seldom registered in their minds that way. They were more inclined to laugh at me, rather than with me.

And I did mind enormously what manner of image I might be creating in other people’s minds. I minded for example if I discovered that anyone supposed that I might have been accurately represented in the gossip columns. I minded when people supposed that I might be homosexual. And I minded when Daphne informed me that [F] had been taking the line that we’d had a trial of strength, and that he’d got the best of it. I felt precarious in my sense of identity, and I didn’t like it at all when anyone attempted to rock my boat.

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