Like pigs

Miranda Seymour

In Search of a Past Ronald Fraser (Verso £.15) More than ten years ago, Ronald Fras- er set out with a tape recorder and a sizeable grudge against the English class

system, to find and talk to the servants who had worked for his parents at Amnersfield Manor in the years before the war. Later, still looking for explanations, he under- went analysis and recorded the experience. The picture that emerges from this dual account is, while decidedly lop-sided — Mr Fraser's own left-wing views are never more than a shrimp's distance from the surface — absorbing, entertaining and as full of detail as a Breughel scene.

The Frasers were not strictly speaking a county family. Mrs Fraser was a rich American, very pretty and a good deal younger than her tough little Scots hus- band, a man who drove his servants as hard as his horses. They had come back from Hamburg in 1930, when the author was three, to pursue the life of the foxhunting gentry from an ugly but imposing house in the Home Counties. While Ronald divided his time between Ilse, his German nannY, and Dolcie, a half-witted old woman with a face like Beethoven and a firm impression that she was a cow, his parents talked, dreamed and lived for their horses. Be- tween times, they gave dinner-parties and played Monopoly. Small wonder that their employees, while envying their wealth, felt no desire to exchange places.

'Look at your father. He'd go out in the morning, come home at night, put his kilt on

and sit there and smoke his pipe. I can't see it, I shouldn't like it, life would be verY monotonous. The money side of it is al! right, but the other side, no thank you . • •

Sixteen hours was the average working day for the Frasers' employees with seldota so much as a nod of thanks or greeting from their employers and very few perks. But although Ronald Fraser gives thein

every opportunity to voice their resent-

ment or hostility, only Bert the gardener leaps at the chance. Diverted from the subject of remembered pleasures (BBC: beer, bacco and crumpet), Bert warms te Mr Fraser's gentle and persistent prornr

ting. Didn't he feel he was unfairly trea- ted? Did he really have to touch his eaP when Captain Fraser walked past? Indeed he did.

'Real impolite they were, though • • ;

they've got no manners because They don t speak to the working class, don't have allY conversation with them. A pig can't spelic' he's got no conversation, therefore they re more or less the same . . Given Mr Fraser's own political views, it

is not altogether surprising that the major- ity of his recorded conversations take place With Bert. The other old servants, while readily admitting that they were over- worked and under-paid, are far more Interested in bickering about each other than in telling tales of hardship. The housemaid remembers how she had to hold the drunk butler from behind so he wouldn't fall over when serving guests at dinner, and titters with glee as she recalls sweeping all the dust off the stairs into the nanny's room to teach her not to give orders. Bert remembers how Mr Carvell the gardener thought himself so superior and wouldn't lend a hand in the stables, and how the butler used to get the cook to Sit on his knee, dressed up in his uniform. (After five minutes Johnson said, Cor, bugger, I think you'd better get up, girl . It broke his heart when she left, although she got the bloody carving knife to him once . . .') Everybody remembers how Bert got put in his place by Captain Fraser for saying he fancied sleeping with the parlourmaid. It was not for tales like these that Mr Fraser returned to Amners- field, but for the reader they form the most enjoyable part of his book.

The second part of the story takes us into wartime and introduces us to Colin, the author's cheerfully extrovert brother. Ronald is rescued from a hateful boarding- school and comes home, very stuck-up and disagreeable in the servants' memories, until he meets Ron Jones in the village and starts learning to build and fly model Planes. Colin, meanwhile, was learning about racing pigeons and going to football Matches with Bert. A very subversive Character, Ronald eagerly interjects. 'A subversive, not a revolutionary! In many respects I made his views my own . . .' But Cohn refuses to play the game, offering Only the cautious comment, 'He didn't talk to me much about things like that.' The brothers are in easier agreement about the remarkable transformation of their mother When she was left to manage Amnersfield On her own. The still distant horsewoman cixchanged her mounts and riding-habits 10r dungarees and a milking stool, spent ,nng hours gossiping happily with the cook tsomething she had never done when Captain Fraser was around) and came across the fields in the evenings to watch lonald and his friend flying theit planes.

or the first time in the book, we are given the sense of a happy family.

The family was broken up when a retshing young Wing Commander was bil- ,sed at Amnersfield and rapidly embarked '11 an affair with Mrs Fraser. The ending as sudden and traumatic, for the servants as well as for Colin and Ronald: That was the end,' the Viennese cook remembers. 'I come down one morning and all the carpets are rolled up and there are labels on them, on the chairs and pictures saying they belong to your father. He was home, the Wing Commander was in the Invasion. What's happening here? I say • . . and Madam explained. Your father

was leaving, taking all his things. It was only a short time before I left. I get a letter from my husband in India, he has me and Lisel on the priority list for a ship. Madam comes into the kitchen and I tell her . . . and we left.'

The children left shortly afterwards, trailing along in a life of perpetual flight behind their mother and the Wing Commander, who never settled anywhere. They never saw Amnersfield again until Ronald Fraser went back with his tape- recorder.

It is a sad story, but not nearly so harrowing for the reader as for the author. Colin Fraser seems hard-put to share in his brother's sense of agony and deprivation. The psychoanalyst maintains a sceptical silence with the exception of a few fairly trite comments on mother-son rela- tionships and the significance of Mrs Fras- er's gift of a telescope. (A penis, symbolis- ing her wish to make a man of her boy.) The servants are far more interested in telling tales about each other than in talking about the child who is an oddly shadowy presence in their memories. As an exercise in self-discovery, the book can only have been a partial success. As an oral reconstruction of life on either side of the baize doors of an old-fashioned household before and during the war, it is unusually honest and illuminating.