My History by Antonia Fraser

Author:Antonia Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Published: 2015-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

NICE CATHOLIC FRIENDS

“You see, Antonia, we thought that you should have some nice Catholic friends.” It was with these words that my mother explained to me what she chose to describe as “the sad news.” I was to leave Godolphin School in July 1946, and go to St. Mary’s Convent, Ascot, in the autumn.

I burst into tears. Elizabeth tried to comfort me. Whereupon I broke it to her that they were tears of delight, whereupon she was extremely surprised. With hindsight, I suppose her mistake was symptomatic of the distance which could then arise between parent and child at boarding school, before frequent visiting on both sides became the norm. At the time I was simply amazed that she did not know that I had always wanted to be a Catholic.

Of course going to a Catholic school did not necessarily mean I would convert to Catholicism. My mother explained to me carefully that I was to be allowed a choice. After all, I would be fourteen in August. Thomas at thirteen would also be allowed a choice. The other five would simply be transformed into Catholics from the theoretical Anglicans they had become at their splendid Oxford christenings. The event which was to bring all this about had occurred in April: Elizabeth, six years after Frank’s conversion, was received into the Catholic Church.

It will always remain a matter of puzzlement to me that this, the famously—and genuinely—happy marriage included such a long period of what one might describe as spiritual estrangement. Elizabeth, the Unitarian girl, had described the priests she saw in Grenoble, where she was sent to learn French, as “black beetles” and joked that she had been terrified when a black beetle got on to a tram with her. Elizabeth, the Socialist woman who had abandoned Unitarianism and had no religion, was antagonized by the behaviour of the Catholic Church during the Spanish Civil War. Her idea of religion, she once told me, was singing “Jerusalem” “with linked hands and wearing rolled-up shirtsleeves.” (In my whole life I don’t think I ever saw my mother with rolled-up shirtsleeves.) On the other hand, from 1940 onwards Frank regularly attended early morning Mass while we were at 8 Chad. He would return into the family kitchen to hear on at least one occasion a jovial cry from Elizabeth: “Beat the Orange drum, children!” I was intrigued by the notion of this Orange drum, which I imagined to be singularly bright and beautiful like a huge fiery sun. It seemed a pity it was not actually provided for us to play on at the breakfast table.

At some point—my intermittent pocket diaries do not record the start of it all—I started to accompany my father from time to time to St. Aloysius. This cannot have been without my mother’s permission and was perhaps part of the thaw which reached its dramatic ending in 1946. At all events I loved it. I loved the Mass for all the obvious outward reasons which

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