By the 1970s Ronald Fraser had established himself as an expert on modern Spain and an authority on its oral history, when that discipline was an exotic new concept. As a radical socialist, and a friend of the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, he published a series of distinguished books on popular risings and guerrilla warfare in 19th-century Spain. It was society seen from below.
But no one reading the first edition of Fraser’s memoir, published in 1984, would have guessed any of this. Only in a new introduction does he mention his friendship with Gerald Brenan, whose The Spanish Labyrinth was a sacred text to all of us who wrote on 20th-century Spain.
In Search of a Past concerns Fraser’s life as a boy and adolescent in a Hampshire manor house in the late 1930s and during the second world war. It is constructed from his childhood memories and his extensive conversations with the surviving members of that world, which he recorded on revisiting his old home 34 years after he’d left it. What is revealed is that upstairs, downstairs way of life so beloved of television producers. Above stairs were his father, a crusty, conservative army officer, and his mother, a more elusive American heir- ess. Below stairs were eight domestic servants.
Neglected by his parents, who were deeply engaged in the social and sporting world of the local gentry — they were enthusiastic fox-hunters, an occupation which Fraser came to despise and fear — the young boy naturally found companionship with the groom and the gardener, the latter a Jack-of-all-trades who also served as a car mechanic and driver. Fraser’s father was a mean-minded master, paying miserable wages to his overworked staff. The gardener reckoned them ‘no more than a heap of dirt’. But the groom, much to his wife’s fury, accepted life as it came — though, in the depression years of the 1930s, it is hard to see what else he could have done.
As Fraser admits, ‘the absent pressure I’ve always known is my mother’s’. The central figure of his childhood became his nanny instead, a common enough situation at the time. The replacement of that close relationship between a single, devoted nanny and her charge by the more casual au pair — usually a foreigner, out to perfect her English — heralded a silent social revolution in postwar Britain. It was a portent of this collapse of the old society that Fraser’s mother, when her husband was away from home, fell for, and married, a coarse and common Australian RAF officer.
What I had not fully realised until I had read his book was that Fraser had an identity problem, revealed in depressions that verged on nervous breakdowns. He writes of ‘my uncertainty of the I which had emerged from the morass of the past. I still don’t know really who I am’. He describes himself as a split personality; and it is the tensions which this involves that make In Search of a Past such a compelling read.
Ronald Fraser and I are now old men, both of whom have witnessed and written about the steady cultural and social decline of British landed aristocrats. Rich as they sometimes remain, they no longer entertain on the scale that had made them such a fashionable cultural elite before the first world war. A glance at today’s popular press reveals that they have been ousted by new elite: the celebrities of a TV-soaked society. These include the grossly overpaid chat-show host Jonathan Ross, the sentimental pop-singer Sir Elton John, the explosive black fashion model Naomi Campbell, the champions of ballroom dancing competitions, and the football stars whom the guitar-strumming Tony Blair liked to invite to Downing Street.
To me, as a self-confessed social-climber used to operating in the houses of the aristocracy, it is sad to think that, apart from a few survivors who still genuinely try to fulfil their old obligations, a once distinguished class has been sidelined, and reduced to a miscellaneous collection of snobs.
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