What were her views of Hindley? “I never met her. I want to make that
quite clear. Didn’t want to meet her. Wasn’t asked to meet her. I think that
I admired my father for his position that no one is beyond redemption, very
much. But the children were the same age as my oldest children so
I could never really read about it and if I did, I felt too unhappy. I did
think, ‘Why shouldn’t she be parolled after 35 years, just logically, you
know, she cannot be a danger.’ On the other hand, a bit of me thought about
the wretched parents. So I just didn’t want to be involved in either
position.” But did she talk to him about her? “No. Didn’t want to.”
As she says, the Pinters’ shelves are full of books stuffed with horrific
details of the torture of prisoners and human rights travesties – indeed, it
could be argued that her husband is almost as famous for his political
anger, these days, as for his plays – so it is not as though Fraser’s
sensibilities are too delicate to dwell on unpleasantness, complicated or
otherwise. But, equally, there was something so viscerally horrible about
the Brady-Hindley cases that one can understand her reluctance to form any
sort of connection with the murderers. Her father once tried to read her the
letters Brady had written to him about his daughter’s Mary Queen of
Scots. “And I said, ‘Stop there! I’ve no interest in
what Ian Brady thinks of Mary Queen of Scots.’”
The eldest of the Longfords’ eight children – Antonia’s sister,
Catherine, the baby girl of the family, was killed in a car crash at the age
of 23 in 1969 – Fraser is still protective of her father, who became a
somewhat lampooned caricature of an eccentric, with his anti-pornography
stance (he was nicknamed Lord Porn) and the public unease about his
championing of Myra Hindley. “I liked talking to my father very much and we
had a lot in common,” she says. “We were both fascinated by history and
politics and oratory and as I say, I admired his principles. But the
nitty-gritty of prison visiting wasn’t for me.” (Rachel Billington, her
writer sibling, has taken up their father’s prison mantle and still
contributes to Inside Time, the only national newspaper for
prisoners, which she helped found in 1990.)
The one position Lord Longford took that caused his whole family to blanch was
his intolerance of gays. “The funniest moment was when my father got up in
the House of Lords – it was the homosexual debate, Clause 28 – and he said,
‘I am proud to say that none of my grandchildren is homosexual,’”
Fraser recalls. “And one of my children [they range between 40 and 50
now] rang up and said, ‘I’ve a good mind to come out of the closet,’ not
that the child was in it, you know, but, ‘I’ve a good mind to declare myself as
gay... I found that so irritating.’” Did they give him a hard time over it?
“No, not really. They loved him.”
Reading about her family background, one can quite see how impossible it would
be for any of the offspring to lead average lives. Her father, Frank
Pakenham, was a peer four times over – three baronies (Pakenham, Longford
and Silchester) and one earldom (Longford). After the predictable trajectory
of Eton and Oxford, Longford (the seventh earl of) became a don at Christ
Church, where he met and fell in love with Elizabeth Harman, a bewitchingly
attractive undergraduate, described as the Zuleika Dobson of her day.
Fraser’s maternal grandparents were Unitarians – a non-conformist
faith with a strong emphasis on social reform (notable followers include
Charles Dickens, Beatrix Potter and Elizabeth Gaskell). Her mother was a
great niece of the Tory radical Joseph Chamberlain and a first cousin once
removed of the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. (Harriet Harman is
Elizabeth Longford’s niece.) “All of that was very important to us,” Fraser
says. “I had cousins my age I could stay with in Birmingham where my
grandfather – N. Bishop Harman – was a very distinguished doctor and
secretary of the BMA. He was also a lay preacher and I remember his great,
thundering, terrific sermons – sort of Reverend Ian Paisley [I’m also
thinking of Pinter’s lambasting oratorical style]. Many years later, when I
came to write about Cromwell, I started to think about my grandfather again.
Various people said, ‘How can a Catholic write about Cromwell?’ And I said,
‘I have no Catholic blood. My father was Protestant Church of Ireland and my
mother was Unitarian up to the age of 20, when she abandoned it.’”
It wasn’t until she was in her thirties that Fraser discovered that her father
had suffered a nervous breakdown when she was a child. In the earliest
cuttings, before she was aware of this, the writer referred to him being a
gentle but rather shadowy presence in the home, with her mother by far the
more vivid character. This makes rather more sense in hindsight. She
remembers reading in the newspapers that he had announced that he’d had a
breakdown, “and I said to my mother, ‘But that’s not true, he just had very
bad flu.’ And she said, ‘No, he had a breakdown in the Army,’ which he
insisted on going into very bravely… because he was 35.” And not cut out for
it? “No, but because his father was a war hero who died at Galipolli…” So he
had to live up to that? “Yes, and then he was saved by the Catholic faith.”
She says that on his prison visits he would read from the New Testament and
took it very literally: “I’ve got one of his huge-print bibles – he was
pretty well blind – and he’d marked things on all the pages.” She can’t be
sure but she thinks it was Evelyn Waugh who converted him. “They were good
friends and certainly became much closer after my father became a Catholic.”
There were other conversions, too. Elizabeth Longford became a committed
socialist in the early Thirties when she was a Workers Education Association
lecturer in Stoke-on-Trent and witnessed the reality of ordinary people’s
lives. It was she who persuaded her husband to leave his job at Conservative
Central Office and switch political allegiances. He went on to become a
junior minister in the Labour government from 1945-1951 and was a cabinet
minister under Harold Wilson from 1964-68. His wife had her own political
aspirations but finally abandoned them in 1950 after fighting the general
election unsuccessfully as Labour candidate for Oxford. Antonia used to joke
about, “Mummy’s red mac for canvassing and grey fur coats for everything
else.” To which her mother’s reply was: “If I could have found a red fur
coat, I would have worn it.” Elizabeth went on to write her own acclaimed
historical biographies in her late fifties on Queen Victoria and the Duke of
Wellington and in 1986, at the age of 80, she published her memoirs, The
Pebbled Shore.
Her daughter, who kindly gave me a copy as a parting gift, wrote a foreword to The
Pebbled Shore in 2004. In it she makes the observation that her mother’s
life demonstrates that, “The problems of what is now called ‘having it
all’ are nothing new. They are on the contrary endemic in the life of a
woman who is intelligent, ambitious and idealistic as well as being a loving mother
and wife.” She also writes disarmingly that she never witnessed in her
mother “the ratty solipsist behaviour of the working-mother-at-home –
‘Don’t interrupt me, I’m a genius’ – with which I
undoubtedly greeted my own children.”
In 1946, six years after Lord Longford’s Catholic conversion, Elizabeth
followed suit. In the epilogue to her memoirs, she makes it clear that her
faith gave her support and “saved me from asking the terrible questions,
‘Why? Why her? Why me?’ when her youngest daughter was killed”.
Antonia became a Catholic in her teens. I wonder what sort of imprint her
faith has made on her own life, expecting her to talk about the way it has
guided or nourished her, but she talks about its effect on her writing: “All
my books have a very strong theme, one way or another, of religious faith.
People to whom their faith was important for good or bad. My book about
Louis XIV is really stressing that although he philandered for the world, at
the same time his mother was very religious and her example haunted him. He
wanted to be saved. Literally, salvation. I think he always wanted to get
back to someone like his mother… devout, you know.”
