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

version of Eden to Robert, yet he was surely aware from a young age that it was one from which he would be cast out. With so much emphasis on the line of inheritance and on preserving family names and traditions, he would have known early on that his eldest brother Algy would get everything. ‘As a younger son, you are very low in the pecking order,’ said Algy, Robert’s nephew. ‘If you’re the youngest son, you know you are never going to inherit.’ Given three older brothers, it was clear that Robert could envisage no future in the place that meant everything to his family. With the English system of primogeniture and ‘the strict settlement of estates’, the winner would take it all. And the same went for titles. As Nancy Mitford pointed out, ‘The rule of primogeniture has kept together the huge fortunes of English lords; it has also formed our class system.’84 It is the great distinction between the English aristocracy and any other; whereas abroad every member of a noble family is noble, in England none is except the head of the family. The sons and daughters may enjoy courtesy titles but as a rule the younger offspring of even the richest lords receive comparatively little money. Younger sons have thus habitually been left without money, property or title, often without the skills to acquire them and, above all, without belonging to the place they care most about. As clergymen, soldiers, sailors and resentful ne’er-do-wells, these highborn outcasts litter the pages of nineteenth-century English novels, with their hopeless attempts to make a way in the unfriendly world and their irresponsible sprees of adventuring.
    Many of Robert’s characteristics were formed by the early knowledge of his place in this scheme and the family hierarchy. Like all the Heber-Percys, he had an intense love of country life, but in becoming a daring show-off, he was demanding attention that was otherwise given elsewhere. A trickster and game-player, he lured people into giving him what he wanted. Easily bored, yet sensitive, he needed a protector who could care for him and get him out of trouble.
    HEN ROBERT WAS THIRTEEN, a decision had to be made about his schooling. His older brothers had failed to get into Eton and ended up going to Harrow. Gladys was worried that her youngest child would not be able to follow in their footsteps. He was already renowned for his bad behaviour at Wixenford in Wokingham (a school that advertised itself as being for ‘the sons of gentlemen and minor princes’). A couple of months before Robert was due to sit the exam for Eton, she approached a new school that must have seemed rather a novelty. Stowe was well known for its extraordinary gardens, landscaped in the eighteenth century into an Arcadian vision, complete with a triumphal arch, a Palladian bridge and any number of temples, sculptures and grottoes. The magnificent house had been sold and, in 1923, became a boarding school for ninety-nine teenage boys. Gladys wrote a somewhat grovelling letter to the bursar, revealing her anxieties about her undisciplined favourite. In the event, Stowe was desperate to recruit new pupils and Robert arrived in the summer term of 1925 – an exact contemporary of David Niven, who was already a popular boy, and whose talent for drawing sketches and caricatures amused his classmates. The two would meet again during the war under very different circumstances, but no evidence suggests they were friends at school.
    There is a portrait of Robert at Faringdon that must have been painted at about the time he went to Stowe – a sugary confection that exaggerates his round brown eyes, bee-stung lips, high rosy cheekbones and golden-chestnut locks. A frilly-collared shirt completes the picture. He looks like the sort of new arrival the older boys would have pounced on, but from all accounts Robert was no victim. Accustomed to fending for himself in a large family with big brothers, he had no qualms about behaving