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marked degree, but concentrated it upon this one house. My father sold it as soon as he could, and thereafter we lived under the shadow, so to speak, of two hammers, the builder’s and the auctioneer’s, and fidgeted about from one house to another on different parts of my father’s estate. Sometimes they were houses which already existed but which were then altered to suit the requirements of so large a family, sometimes they were built from scratch.’
    ‘The first room to be completed was always what my father called “the child-proof room” to which he would retire and snooze (for he never read or wrote) in peace after a day spent entirely in the open air. The child-proof room was invariably fitted with an immensely powerful mortice lock. However, we children usually managed to effect an escape…’
    When they grew up Nancy and Tom were allowed to bring friends to stay. These included both athletes and aesthetes. According to Jessica, ‘at week-ends they would swoop down from Oxford or London in merry hordes, to be greeted with solid disapproval by my mother and furious glares from my father.’ My lamented friend Mark Ogilvie-Grant was among them. Even Lord Redesdale could not help warming to Mark, for he joined his shooting parties and appeared for breakfast punctually at eight o’clock, though brains turned his delicate stomach at that hour.
    Of Nancy’s contemporaries perhaps Mark exerted the most obvious influence on her taste, and it was even rumoured that he hoped to marry her. While adapting himself outwardly to social convention he was capable of exuberant flights of fantasy. He was a cousin of Nina, the shy young Countess of Seafield, for whom he acted as an impresario. Nina then resembled a juvenile Queen Victoria with red hair and a hesitant stammer. Having spent her infancy in New Zealand, she had inherited large estates in Scotland, including Cullen and Castle Grant where Nancy often visited her, surrounded by Mark’s vivacious coterie, whose more serious members were deter mined not to seem so. Robert Byron exploited his pugnacity in a genial and unpredictable way. Oliver Messel, a skilful mimic, entertained the company with spicy monologues about tragi-comical White Russian refugee princesses, ‘refained’ governesses afflicted with wind, and wriggling débutantes whose conversational gambit was limited to ‘Have you been to
No, no Nanette
?’ Mark had a vast repertoire of absurdly sentimentalVictorian ballads which he trilled and warbled with a gusto only rivalled by Robert Byron’s booming vociferation.
    Nobody could have dreamt of the future developments of these young bloods fresh from Oxford whose talent and intelligence were often veiled by flippancy. They parodied the pursuits of bucolic neighbours and their peculiar dialect. Nancy’s first novel reflected their behaviour, the invasion of Presbyterian Scotland, as it were, by Evelyn Waugh’s Bright Young Things. Her protagonist Albert Gates, for instance, was suggested by Robert’s cult of Victoriana to which most of us subscribed in a playful spirit. (‘My name,’ said Albert with some asperity, ‘is Albert Memorial Gates. I took Memorial in addition to my baptismal Albert at my confirmation out of admiration for the Albert Memorial, a very great work of art which may be seen in a London suburb called Kensington.’) A far cry from Robert’s subsequent Byzantinism! Mark was to reappear as the ‘Wonderful Old Songster of Kew Green’ in Nancy’s
Pigeon Pie
. Short, spare, clean-shaven, he remained one of her closest confidants.
    I never visited Asthall or Swinbrook, but while I was at Oxford I was regaled with lyrical accounts of Nancy’s precocious wit and intelligence—‘a delicious creature, quite pyrotechnical my dear, and sometimes even profound, and would you believe it, she’s hidden among the cabbages of the Cotswolds’—from an improbable source, my former Eton crony, Brian Howard. He was so scornful of