LITMIR.BIZ

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by walls and steps of ancient limestone intricately patterned with dark mosses and pale lichens. As you moved outward a network of flagged paths led you through a walled rose garden, the stonework dripping with bright aubretia, up stone steps and on beneath Japanese pergolas at the path intersections, smothered in tangles of rambling roses; then on past extravagant herbaceous borders and shrubberies bursting with scent and colour. Well away from the house, the walled gardens relaxed into much more casually arranged fruit beds of gooseberries, black and red currants, raspberries, loganberries, rhubarb and, finally, lurking discreetly in the distance, the ordered rows of vegetables.

      Espaliered against the long south-facing wall, ten feet high, were pear, quince, plum, damson and apricot trees, where red admiral and peacock butterflies sipped the fruits’ oozing and fermenting sugars and basked drunkenly in the sun. That wall was an important boundary, a physical and aesthetic barrier between the disciplined world of horticulture and formal gardening and an altogether wilder world beyond.

      Passing through any of its several archways another world opened up, tamed perhaps but certainly not domesticated, another country where long ago nature had claimed primacy, despite periodic, half-hearted summer mowings and prunings of its rampant, inexhaustible verdure. It was a country of ancient orchards, luxuriant paddocks and copses, weedy ponds, nettle banks and marshy hollows, lime kilns long abandoned, fox earths and badger setts, rabbit warrens and thorn thickets where roe deer lay up during the day. Yet further, on to the pocket-handkerchief meadows of the Manor Farm, where the rickety old farmhouse and ivy-smothered labourers’ cottages seemed not to have been built but to have grown organically out of the soil.

      Behind the Manor House a discreet back drive led past the green-painted doors of the old coach house-turned-garages, to a veritable hamlet of outbuildings where the essential services of centuries of self-sufficiency had been performed: coach houses ivy-clad and a wide stable yard with a cast-iron hand pump and loose-boxes under a pan-tiled roof bursting with untidy sparrows’ nests, the laundry cottage, servants’ outdoor lavatories, wood and coal stores, pig stys, potting sheds, apple stores, saw mill, workshops, and four long, brick-based and white-painted glasshouses.

      The Manor House was where, coming and going, we had been for centuries, and where my Victorian widower grandfather, born in 1873, now lived out his horticultural old age with my father’s younger bachelor brother, Uncle Aubrey. Looking back now, I see that to have spent so much of my childhood at the Manor House and to have experienced that rarified, virtually unchanged Edwardian world was a particular privilege no longer attainable in modern society. To me, throughout the 1950s, it was Xanadu, a private kingdom all my own and everything a country child could hope for, even though at some point I became dimly aware that I was a tenuous and perhaps the final tendril emanating from a broader vine, the roots of which were planted elsewhere.

      * * *

      Properly, our family were Yorkshire folk. We had been in the West Riding since the reign of Edward III, whose heralds issued a grant of arms to ‘Johannes Cay of ye lands and manors of Wodesham’ in 1367, which, 150 years later, would emerge as the elegant, stone-built Elizabethan Woodsome Hall at Kirkburton, much as it stands today. As a confused schoolboy struggling to locate our place in history, I once asked my father what we were. ‘We are Plantagenets,’ he replied enigmatically.

      I was always a lazy student of history, struggling with meaningless names and dates, but in early adulthood I began to understand that just as contemporary politics had severely impacted upon my immediate family, so down the centuries we had always been pawns in the grander machinations of power. To hang on to what we had, and even to survive, over the centuries we had been forced to duck and weave. As worthy (and opportunistic) Protestants we wisely ingratiated ourselves with Thomas Cromwell when Henry VIII set about dissolving the vastly wealthy Catholic monasteries. By some deeply devious political chicanery we came in for several thousand acres of rich glebe farms to add to our expanding Yorkshire estates. We leapt into Catholicism to avoid being burned at the stake by Bloody Mary, and bounced out again to appease her passionately Protestant half-sister, the virgin queen.

      We were dashing Cavaliers in the court of Charles I – effusive supporters of the Royalist cause – and studiously kept in with Prince Rupert of the Rhine. One gallant ancestor, a knight called Sir John, was appointed Colonel of Horse to the king. He had helped raise 700 West Riding men to fight for the Royalists, for which he accepted a baronetcy in 1641. But in 1645 it all went horribly wrong when they were routed by Parliament’s New Model Army under Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Naseby, the turning point of the Civil War. Sir John galloped away unscathed but would later forfeit everything to Cromwell’s Republican parliament: titles, houses, estates and privileges – the lot. It was a sepulchral moment.

      When by popular demand Charles II was restored to the throne in 166o, while the Republican signatories to his father’s execution were being summarily hanged, drawn and quartered, we somehow inveigled our way back into favour. Our titles were reinstated and we were allowed to buy all our lands back, both in Warwickshire and Yorkshire, for a painful payment of £50 to the newly formed Cavalier Parliament, a pecuniary affront we never forgave, far less forgot. We had learned a bitter lesson. From then on we kept our political heads down and got on with looking after our own interests.

      By the eighteenth century we had stumbled across coal underlying our Yorkshire land just in time for the emerging colonial markets and the incipient Industrial Revolution. On the mining profits and only a few miles from Woodsome Hall, enthusiastically competing with the fashionable expansion of the times, we built Denby Grange, a second, much more stately mansion which would become our principal family home. Its grand Georgian façade was attached to the restored shell of a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey that had been sacked in the Reformation. It overlooked the lush Colne valley, and was where, when I was born in 1946, our close cousin, Sir Kenelm, still lived in arthritic bachelor grandeur. But my great-grandfather had been a second son, not in direct line of succession for the Yorkshire estates. Instead, in 1856 his father had awarded him the Warwickshire manor and its adjoining lands as a wedding present. My grandfather had been born just down the east passage from my bedroom, so had my father.

      It was only after Clement Atlee’s 1948 socialist government nationalised our collieries, removing in one eviscerating Act the family business and capital holdings it had taken us 250 years to develop, that the deeply disillusioned Sir Kenelm debunked to Mullingar in Ireland to live out his days shooting snipe and raising racehorses, while the share-holding family elders took the tough but ultimately prudent decision to up sticks and abandon Yorkshire altogether. The titular heartland then shrank back to our medieval association with Warwickshire, where, on his share of coal profits, my great-grandfather had founded a cement works, later the Rugby Portland Cement Company.

      When, many years later, I was old enough to look back down the drama of the centuries I found that we had somehow managed to produce a colourful, if never illustrious, array of dramatis personae: a few prominent courtiers; a mistress to James I; several swashbuckling soldiers; various undistinguished MPs; an adventurer who travelled the south seas with Captain Cook; a celebrated Lord Mayor of York who built the Mansion House and whose coat of arms still hangs on the Micklegate Bar; a chaplain to George II who became an outrageously greedy pluralist clergyman and Dean of Lincoln Cathedral; an ivory, then slave trader; one of Britain’s first female industrialists; an opium dealer; a bevvy of sporting parsons; several masters of foxhounds; a Groom-in-Waiting to Edward VII; another king’s mistress; a couple of naval captains; a fraudster and card sharp; several Lords Lieutenant; a pioneer Canadian cattle rancher; a successful racehorse breeder of classic winners; an eminent cricketer and a cement manufacturer. There was also quite a procession of probably dull but thoroughly worthy citizens, but, alas, no writers, nor any hint of a naturalist.

      At six years old I knew none of the above. Small children are blissfully unaware of who they are or where they come from. To me the Manor House was a paradise enhanced by the strange, unstoppable passage of time. All I knew was that it was the home where I always felt we belonged, my sister Mary and I, or perhaps I should say where it never occurred to us that we didn’t belong. It was never clear to me whether something we had done meant by us, the living family, last week, or last year or even by my grandfather, who seemed to me to be as old as Noah, or whether it had

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