Dare to Be a Daniel by Tony Benn

irresponsible.
    This passion for keeping things reached absurd limits, as when I had my appendix out, aged thirteen, and put it in a little bottle of formaldehyde and brought it to the table. This led my father to make a set of appendixes for all members of the family, so that one day when I came to lunch there were little bits of vegetable in bottles of cold tea, one for each member of the family.
    We only had one telephone in the house – VICtoria 0078 – the number presumably indicating the low coverage of the telephone at the time it was installed. Because Father wanted to be able to phone and work at the same time, he acquired from the Post Office a telephone operator’s headset, which was very big and cumbersome and drove my mother mad because when she answered the phone the headset messed up her hair, which had to be brushed back into position.
    Father’s great passion was for what he called ‘improvements’ and the house was full of them, normally installed by a jobbing carpenter who did his best to make possible the extraordinary ideas my father had as to how a house should be constructed.
    For example, just outside one of his offices he built a cupboard in the ceiling and all his clothes were hung on coathangers attached to a bar, which with the aid of a pulley could be hauled up and out of sight. The rope had to be released to allow him to choose what suit he was going to wear that day.
    As a twelve-year-old, I remember getting into serious trouble when we had a visit from his parliamentary colleagues and, in order to interest them, I opened the cupboard door and released his clothes, so that they all came down. Although this aroused a great deal of amusement, as you can imagine, it did not go down very well with my mother.
    Most of the visitors to the house were connected with Father’s work. For instance, on one occasion the Maharaja of Alwar, whom Father had met while Secretary of State for India, came. He was charming and told us stories about hunting tigers, and he gave me an Indian prince’s outfit with a turban, a jewelled jacket and white breeches, the remains of which are still rotting in a box at Stansgate. I later discovered that he had been a brute in his own state, and I think he was subsequently murdered in France. Another visitor was Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian, who had married Ursula, an English student. They were firm family friends.
    We were governed by Victorian principles of prudence and economy. Father always turned the lights out and we were rebuked for leaving them on. The greatest offence that we could commit was to WASTE TIME !
    Despite this rather grim account, he was the most amusing man I have ever met, with a great sense of humour, a capacity to tell stories and play practical jokes that would have done credit to a teenager, and listening to him was always enormous fun.
    S TANSGATE
    All of our holidays have been at Stansgate, on the Blackwater estuary in Essex, since I was a child. My father loved the house and the location; Stansgate also became his title in the Lords, which has given the impression that it is an ancient stately home, and that I came from one of the oldest aristocratic families in Britain – a myth nurtured by the tabloids for their own political purposes.
    My father spent his childhood summers there sailing on the river and taking part in plays, which his father wrote and which were enacted in the garden.
    We had no mains water supply when I was a child and we depended on a windmill to raise water from our well, using oil lamps to light the house and wood fires to heat it.
    There was a disused slaughter house, which my father had bought from a nearby farmer, and it was there that he moved his archives from London when the house in Millbank caught fire in 1940. It would be more interesting to claim that we had been victims of the Blitz, but the real reason for the fire was that, in order to save money, my father had asked my brother Michael (who