I received another letter from Christopher towards the end of his two years of National Service, in the Autumn of 1954 saying he was longing to get back to civilisation.

Daphne was currently touring round the Barbary Coast with Xan, and I received a letter from her dated 25th October 1954. The address was given as Dzerba Island.

 No firm decisions had yet been taken concerning the exact portion of the house which I might in future occupy, but I had already expressed my own hopes upon the matter. This involved me moving into the rooms which had formerly been the private living quarters of my grandparents, but which were currently occupied by the Longleat guides. Mr Algar had already been sent to examine the plan more closely on the site, submitting his report to Henry no doubt. And in a letter of 2nd November 1954, Henry gave his official response.

 I have now had time to look at the plan of Longleat and the future accommodation that you require. I think we can pretty well fit this in with the existing scheme already in mind, without any detriment to either, which is a very good thing. However I would like you to come over again at your convenience, in order to discuss one or two minor points about it, so it’s in your hands for the scheme to go ahead as soon as possible.

 The details had yet to be revealed to me how a special fund (under my father’s control) had been set to one side in the plans for breaking the entail, specifically to pay for the refurbishment of new living quarters at Longleat. Although I didn’t realize it, this fund was intended to cover these expenses and a lot more yet to come - although (as I indicate later) I was still under an impression (which was encouraged by Henry no doubt) that I myself would be footing the bill. Or in any case the work was to be undertaken by what were now my own buildings’ staff. But the progress was slow. Any acceleration of the transition might have been a mistake psychologically, in that it would have upset the guides.

There was no firm plan as yet for me to employ a staff of my own, so I was still quite frequently going over to Job’s Mill for my lunches and dinners - although I generally cooked a meal for myself at lunch times. And there was still the problem, at the start of the Christmas vacation, of having to be fetched over to Job’s Mill for the occasional meal, and then taken home again - until after my driving licence had been restored to me, that is to say.

There was one occasion when I noted how there was a police car tucked into the bushes at the end of the Redway drive, at the time when I was being fetched for dinner. Never at any other time have I observed a police car positioned in that area. So it was natural for me to assume that someone or other must have made it his business to tip off the police with the false information that I was driving over to Job’s Mill each evening, after my licence had been removed. But they had been made to waste their time in trying to catch me out. Still, it did make my life a lot easier once I got my licence back shortly before Christmas.

Another matter which Henry had raised in his letter of the 2nd November was the appointment of an additional Trustee - Sir Leslie Farrer (the Thynne family lawyer), and Sir Ulick Alexander (a retired courtier, and my Aunt Mary’s second husband) were the existing two.

 I have been thinking about your Trustee and have also rung up your Aunt Kathleen. She said she was quite agreeable to Richard [Stanley] becoming a Trustee, and thought it a good idea, although in her opinion Tommy [Stanley] is really more level-headed in that respect. However, I am inclined to agree with you that Richard is more human.

 The appointment of a new Trustee was made the reason for me to go up to London and meet Sir Leslie Farrer. I comment in my journal that he might have saved me all the trouble of going up to London to be told what Henry had already intimated by letter. But the real purpose was to open our relationship on an official basis I suppose.

I had always got on well with Richard, finding him quietly sympathetic to whatever I might be doing in life. Tommy on the other hand could sometimes be opinionated. I knew instinctively that he might prove more restrictive to my own wishes for personal development than ever Richard would choose to be.

 In my relationship with Henry however, there were still issues where I’d have to tread carefully - like my choice of a career, which always threatened to disrupt our relationship. Henry was always convinced that given time, I’d come to my senses and drop all this absurdity of thinking that I might ever become an artist. Just at the moment however, he wasn’t pushing that point. My studies at Oxford would, he hoped, have the effect of making me come down to earth, and to cease harbouring any grandiose ideas about myself.

As to other matters, there were still one or two niggling points which had the effect of ruffling my equanimity - like his secret concern that I might be developing into a pansy. It’s difficult for me to lay my finger on what first prompted such a thought in his mind, but I think I might analyse it thus - that it had perhaps been a fear within his own heart, in perceiving the feminine side to his own inner nature, and which had been successfully suppressed. And he was sensitive to the hesitation within my own self-regard about any potential development in that direction. Within his logic, there’s never any smoke without fire - so in sensing my inner fear (which may secretly have been rather similar to his own), he supposed that he might be close to catching me out in a development that I was trying to keep secret from him. So he was apt to drop what he would regard as teasing remarks, to head me off from such evolution, or at any rate to make me see that I could never manage to dupe him by pulling the wool over his eyes.

But there is a comment in my journal of 13th January that my relationship with him is much improved. "He seems to be in a more tolerant frame of mind of late, which greatly improves the atmosphere."

 I was trying to build up a regular pattern of dropping in to have a drink with Caroline (and sometimes to stay with her) when I went up to London, so that the relationship was perhaps closer than it had been in quite some time. But there may have been a feeling of mutual suspicion with regard to our perception of the kind of company we kept. Caroline’s friends were so much a part of the smart social world in London - or continental millionaires like the Agnellis. I felt a sense of awe (rather than disrespect) when regarding them. They might assume that I was a gauche young member of their own clan, but a sympathy with socialist ideals was stirring uncomfortably in my heart, to a degree where I sometimes wondered if I were not more liable to emerge as alien to their kind.

And I think that Caroline was a bit dubious about my own sample of friends. Well not Bendor perhaps, who might fit very well within the Mayfair social scene. But her eyebrows were raised when I had stumbled into her drawing room with my tutor, [W], himself the worse for wear from alcohol. There were clearly some misgivings in her mind concerning the type of person I might choose to bring next.

 When Christopher finally arrived back home from Egypt, I had to discover how my relationship with him might now evolve. Any ill-feeling from that letter I had written him on his departure a year previously was now safely behind us. Interim communications had been relatively amicable. So that was the basis on which we opened the new relationship.

 After completing her tour of the Barbary Coast with Xan, Daphne was back in Cornwall. This was in time for Christmas, when all three of her sons went down to stay with them at Cowrie - as recorded in my journal of 31st December 1954.

 Christmas day itself consisted of a boring lunch party with the Abdys, but otherwise the festive spirit was in good shape....

 Christopher has come on a lot since he went to Egypt. Before he went, I was always inclined to think of Valentine as my favourite brother. But I now find that Christopher could hardly be more charming. Nor does it seem to worry him any longer at moments when I am asserting myself over him. I find myself wondering if this is just because the cause for any friction has not yet arisen within this short stretch of time. But I was delighted to feel that we were now getting on very well indeed.

 On Thursday Uncle Tony arrived down in Looe. He is out of hospital of course, but is in quite a state with regard to Mavis Wheeler, who is now spending six months in prison for shooting him in the stomach while he was trying to climb in at the window of the weekend cottage they were renting in Potterne. It is thought she would have been given far longer than just six months if Uncle Tony had been willing to testify against her. As it was, her own claim that it was more a question of the gun going off accidentally had marginally greater credibility. If the full truth were to be told however, it would have to come out that they’d quarrelled because Tony was paying too much attention to the barmaid, and she’d attempted to shoot his balls off! Or that’s what some people think! Fortunately she missed her precise target, so he is still sexually active, and most curiously, still very much in love with Mavis, whom he now wants to marry - come what may.

 Press cutting from the Daily Mail

Friendship became jealousy - Counsel
The love of Mrs Mary Wheeler for Lord Vivian, the London impresario, was overpowering. She was jealous, prosecuting counsel said here today, of any attention he showed to other women. And that love, the prosecution claimed, had led Mrs Wheeler to shoot Lord Vivian, at a range of three inches, with intent to murder him at her country cottage at Potterne, Wiltshire.

[Five lines missing]

 Journal

 On Friday we all came back to Wiltshire. I took Christopher in my TR2, and we had a most exciting race with a Jaguar. He made a big fuss in overtaking us, so I gave pursuit, and the race went on for about twenty miles. We were apt to fall behind owing to the lack of acceleration when overtaking lorries and things. But we seemed to be just slightly faster on the straight. And we finally got him into such a state that he abandoned the race by pretending that it was necessary for him to stop and pee. But the race had the effect of enhancing the feeling of confraternity between Chris and myself, and it’s good to be back on such terms after the frictional way we broke up when he went out to Egypt. Let us hope it lasts. As soon as I dropped him back at Job’s Mill, he had to set off to catch the train for the Crawleys’ New Year’s Eve party....

 Valentine and myself spent New Year’s Eve at Job’s Mill - playing Monopoly to start with, and finally attempting to teach Georgia to jive. She was picking it up very quickly indeed. But my mind was really far away - wondering what might be going on at the Crawleys’ dance.

 So the time has come for me to consider rather more closely what game Christopher might really have been playing over the next three months, and the extent to which [Y] was manipulating him to suit her own ends. I find it difficult, even at this distance in time, to judge exactly what emotions were involved, and what destructive tactics. There are also one or two items of information which were eventually to come to my knowledge which may assist in judging the matter.

Nanny was to tell me, several years later, that there was perhaps no cause for me to have felt quite so angry at the way Christopher had been behaving with [Y], since he had told her that all he’d ever done, on just one occasion, was to kiss her. Nanny must have been assuming that I believed he had slept with her, so she was suggesting that his crime might be less than I thought - when in fact it came as news to me that he had got as far as that with her. But I do now suppose that this was perhaps an accurate statement of how much (and the limitations to what) had taken place between the two of them - especially as this matches Christopher’s own subsequent intimations to me.

But this still raises the question of when such kissing actually occurred. And I might speculate three possible occasions - at the dance which I left early because [Y] hadn’t yet turned up, but with Chris informing me how she had arrived later. This I described in my journal of the 23rd December. Or he might have kissed her sometime over the Crawley week-end, or at the Christie-Miller party during the first week in January - after which he was refusing stubbornly to take his leave when I was sitting up late with [Y] in the drawing room at Job’s Mill. But my most likely guess is that it occurred at one of the parties, concerning which [Y] boasted how they’d been seeing one another - as recorded within my journal of the 23rd January. This was the time when [Y] was most determinedly angling to set him up so that I would perceive him as a rival.

There is an additional piece of information which I shall introduce at this point. I was to meet Henrietta Crawley many years later, and she surprised me with the following story. She said that, shortly after Christopher’s return from Egypt, she went to a dance with him (aspiring to be his girlfriend), and he made her miserable by getting off with [X]. She recounted how they spent the whole evening dancing together, and she was flirting with him the whole time. I do in fact have just a vague memory of how [X] informed me, when she was filling in the gaps for me concerning her dates with other men, while we had been hostile to one another, how she had met Christopher at some particular dance, and that he’d been "extremely flirtatious". It was told me by [X] as a bit of a joke, and I saw no reason to feel offended. But in the light of Henrietta’s evidence, it would rather look as if Christopher’s endeavours to seduce my girlfriends may have been more widespread and determined than I ever perceived at the time. And I have little doubt that they both gave him the necessary encouragement.

Where the situation became painful was in supposing that Christopher might genuinely be trying to assist me, fraternally, to see more of [Y], and then obliging myself to take note that he was setting himself up in rivalry to me. I wasn’t at all sure how best to handle the situation. What offended me most of all however, was to find that Henry and Virginia were supposing that [Y] was Christopher’s girlfriend, rather than my own - so that my own behaviour might then seem liable for criticism in the way I was occasionally dating her.

Shortly after the weekend of the Christie-Miller party, I was over in the drawing room at Job’s Mill when Henry made some comment about "Christopher’s girlfriend". I realized we were talking about [Y], but thought he had made just a slip of the tongue, so I said: "You mean my girlfriend?" In typically tactless fashion, Henry retorted: "Well I’m not so sure about that!" - then suddenly checked himself. And I caught a look in Virginia’s eye to know that she had somehow communicated to him that he ought to shut up. I didn’t take the conversation any further, but I felt monstrously offended that there could be confusion of this kind within my own family. And I did just wonder how the misconception could ever have arisen in their minds.

But let me now examine that question. I daresay that Chris had informed them quite correctly that the [Y] and her brother were coming to Job’s Mill at his invitation. And he may have said more than that, for all I know.

There may also have been the substance of Donald’s evidence. We have already seen how he (or his wife) had been through the drawers of the bedroom which [Y] had been occupying - to find there were packets of Players cigarettes in it. And Donald always enjoyed being the conveyor of privileged information, such as he might well be in a position to obtain in the performance of his domestic duties. To put it bluntly, Donald would have known that a male had occupied [Y]’s bed during the night from the marks which he discovered on the sheets next morning. And on the supposition that I was sleeping the entire night at Longleat, he must have assumed that it was Christopher who had been there. A piece of information which he would have been delighted to report to Henry. And I have little doubt that when Henry chivvied Chris on the subject with a little of his heavy-handed humour, Chris would have been delighted to give the signals in response, that it was he indeed who was the romantic Casanova in the household. Hence the confusion concerning what might really have been going on.

I can also feed in some information which I was subsequently to hear from [Y], concerning this same episode. After I had suggested to Christopher that it was either for him or myself to withdraw from the drawing room, he had apparently been most reluctant to go, and had waited in the kitchen to see if I followed [Y] up to bed. The story I was told is that he waited for so long that he finally fell asleep on the kitchen table, so that he missed out on the event he had been intending to monitor. It also occurs to me to wonder if he confined himself to the kitchen during the period while he was downstairs, or whether part of his purpose may have been to keep poking his nose back round the door of the dining room, so that he might be able to hear what manner of conversation (or the absence of it) was then in progress between the two of us.

My gradual realization that Christopher was setting himself up as a rival to me for the affections of my girlfriends struck me as incredible at first, but I was now feeling the onset of indignation. But it was also indignation against Henry for apparently accepting, or even encouraging, the values under which Chris operated. The son was just proving to his father that the original judgement on him as being "the one with the sex appeal" was fully justified. And he basked himself in the warmth of Henry’s admiration because of him being such a Casanova. But the values of loyalty and fraternal harmony had all gone overboard. In fact they had never featured high upon Henry’s ethical list. It was difficult for me to nudge Christopher into an awareness that other people might judge his conduct as reprehensible, since the moral attitude which he had been fed from Henry dictated otherwise. And it’s not really as if Daphne’s values were much more ethical on that score.

 Incautious to a degree at fault, I hadn’t braced
my face for the slap you delivered, establishing proudly
how you’d overtake me to the rung above
(in lovers’ ratings) - and to hell with loyalty’s due!
Few were the quarrels over our childhood years;
it appears however, you never managed to see
me as an asset - someone who’d give you a hand,
or stand at your side in life’s constant battles.
That might have formed the basis for a fruitful friendship -
amending the sibling rivalry syndrome, and a start
to fraternal partnership, mutually supportive -
the thought that from now, it’s ‘Us’ against the rest.
How sad if our relationship now ends,
entrenched as enemies instead of friends.

To keep updating the news on Daphne, she wrote me a letter dated February 1st 1955, in which (amongst other things) she reveals the latest on her brother Tony.

 We haven’t been alone since Christmas, and seem to have been surrounded by people all the time. My poor brother has just left. He moped continually for his pistol-packing momma. He had two identical Augustus John drawings of her in his room, her teddy bear on his bed, and always wore one of her sweaters. He is going to meet her when she comes out of prison, which is sure to create a great burst of publicity in the press. I do hope she has seen the light in prison and won’t cut any more capers. Tony is still determined to stick to her whatever happens. Poor old thing, and he has had the hell of a time with his punctured guts, but I did get fed up hearing about Mavis the whole time.

 It seems that Henry had written me a letter in the authoritarian style he had formerly adopted in my schooldays. I refer to it in my journal of 18th February 1955, although the letter itself has not survived.

 While I was up in London on Tuesday, I went along to Coles to choose some wallpaper for my future apartments at Longleat. This had been demanded by Dad, who sent me a high-handed letter to that effect - saying that unless I hurried up to send him the patterns, and also went down to Longleat to show some interest in all the work that has been done, he would put a stop to it. And since he is now telling me that I shall have to pay for it all, I feel that he has no business to tell them to halt. But the ultimatum is typical of him, and it doesn’t represent a large enough issue for me to take a stand on that point. I’ll just do as he says without letting him see that I resent the line he is taking. The actual choosing of the wallpaper took me hours. I’m very bad at making up my mind upon small matters.

I appear to have remained on good enough terms with Henry, in that he and Virginia were in Oxford in early March. I had booked them a room with twin beds at the Randolph Hotel. Virginia was to enquire subsequently why I imagined they wouldn’t prefer a double bed. But it was a happy enough visit. Henry was coming as my guest to the Loders’ dinner, and James Spooner had invited Randolph Churchill (a good friend of his) so that they could keep each other company. But it could be that Henry didn’t really enjoy himself, in that he was the first guest to depart. My account of the evening comes from my journal of 6th March 1955.

 
The dinner itself was as boring as usual, although Dad himself was in quite good form. It was only afterwards - in good Loders’ theory that the most enjoyable portion of an evening starts after one has been made (ceremonially) inebriate - that things began to liven up. And of course it was just then, as soon as we all came back to my rooms for further drinks, that Dad chose to take his leave of us - pleading that Virginia was waiting for him back in the Randolph Hotel. And I’m told that he complained to everyone that I wasn’t taking the trouble to accompany him safely out of the college grounds.

Henry was in fine fettle over the weekend of [X]’s dance. And this was the first ever weekend party when I myself was putting up a number of my Oxford friends to stay at Longleat - the men that is to say, with the women at Job’s Mill. I put them in what had formerly been my Grandmother’s bedroom (which has since been transformed into the Botfield Library), although I was still installed in the Dowager Suite myself.

Journal: March 15th 1955.

Saturday evening developed into something akin to a dance. Carpets were rolled up, and we jived to Christopher’s jazz records. Jimmy S made a bit of a pass at Virginia, who seemed to appreciate it. In fact he danced with her practically all evening, and Dad didn’t appear to mind in the least. Peter Z also tried his luck, but didn’t seem to have mastered the same successful technique. When we had finally all trooped back to Longleat, I went along to their room to find Peter softly moaning: "Virginia! Virginia!" in his pseudo-sleep. And I was told later by Adrian S that he got no peace at all, because Peter and Jimmy sat up all night talking about her.

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