The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me by Sofka Zinovieff Page A

house was almost teetotal. Even in the era of cocktails (‘gut-rotting, a pernicious concoction’), Daddy only allowed a bit of sherry and port for guests and the whisky was kept locked up. Food was not adventurous but plentiful – especially breakfast, as Cyril’s descriptions indicate.
    There were several hot dishes, always one of fish, eggs of one kind or another, thin crisp bacon – it had to break with the touch of a knife – and kidneys on toast with parsley butter, or home-made sausages, all in separate silver dishes. A ham on the sideboard … There would also be a large dish of cold partridge or pheasant when in season, a tongue, hot scones, toast, butter in small round pats and a flat glass dish of thick scalded cream, home-made marmalade, honey in the comb, and two sorts of jam.81
    The boys had to eat this bounty in silence unless spoken to and, vocally critical of his sons’ table manners, Daddy liked to sneak up if they had their elbows on the table and knock them off.
    HE FIRST WORLD WAR broke out when Robert was three. His brothers were all away at preparatory schools by then, and Gladys opened up the house as a convalescent hospital with eighty beds. As ‘commandant’, she ‘ruled with a rod of iron’ and terrorised the patients and staff. Her husband was the recruiting officer for the district and travelled around in his Renault, a temperamental automobile that needed endless cranking to start and stalled on hills. Algernon took to treating it like the horses he knew much better, reining back on the steering wheel and murmuring ‘Whoa’ when he wanted to stop.82
    Although his three brothers returned during holidays (the soldiers would give them surreptitious puffs on Woodbines if they were lucky), Robert was inevitably alone much more than before. With many of the male staff gone to fight and his parents extremely busy, the war gave Robert much more freedom and possibly neglect than before. It was easy for him to wander around the house, past the rows of taxidermists’ glass eyes staring out from the walls and the distant gazes in the endless family portraits: Vernons, Hebers, Percys, a sixteenth-century countess, a bishop in his robes. One charming, full-length likeness depicted a flowing-haired young man holding a cricket bat – Richard Heber, the celebrated book collector who amassed over 150,000 volumes. He was, as the current Algy put it, ‘more inclined to the males’, though this would surely not have been spoken of by Robert’s parents. Despite being the brother of the Calcutta bishop, Richard’s good looks, intellect and charm could not save him when, at the age of fifty-two, he became involved with a twenty-three-year-old man. He was forced abroad and, when he returned to England, was ostracised by society, dying alone in 1835.
    Despite his tricks and mischief, Robert showed a degree of sensitivity compared to his siblings. He didn’t enjoy shooting or fishing like them, and Cyril recalled that he read and painted – apparently unusual pastimes in the family, despite their illustrious bibliophile ancestor and the library that was packed from floor to ceiling with books. Robert liked to pick bunches of flowers for his mother and visited her in her huge study on the first floor that looked out over the gardens and the lake to the undulating fields, where cows grazed by the sixteenth-century dovecot. Although Cyril claimed that his mother never showed that Robert was ‘Mummy’s darling’, Robert himself recalled little secrets between them. When his mother returned to Hodnet from London and her youngest boy was asleep in bed, she would place a small bottle of scent under his pillow.83 It is unclear whether this was a sign or a present, a phial of her own scent or some cologne for him, but it was clearly a small intimacy – unusual and delicate in the tough, physical environment where horse tackle and terriers, ferrets and pheasant shoots usually counted for more.
    Hodnet was a