Too Close to the Sun (5 page)

In 1885, Harold had written a book called
Advance Australia!,
an entertaining mixture of autobiography and imperial polemic. To celebrate publication, he had a silk coat of arms woven depicting the heraldic Finch Hatton griffin boxing with a kangaroo, and when the book went into a second edition the fact was added to the announcement of the author’s boomerang prowess in
Who’s Who.
At the same time, Harold had embarked on a marathon attempt to win a seat in Parliament, and in 1895 he was finally elected Conservative Member for the Newark Division of Nottinghamshire. (It was the year after the octogenarian Gladstone retired, having seen his last efforts to force through home rule for Ireland defeated in the Lords.) Harold was an active parliamentarian. He kept a house in London at 110 Pall Mall East and went for a run around Hyde Park each morning before walking to the Palace of Westminster to join a debate. Although he was a Conservative in his bones, like all Finch Hattons, he was an independent one, and in 1898 resigned his seat in protest against policies that he felt were at odds with Conservative principles.

Through all the twists and turns of his career, Harold couldn’t stay still for long. He was continually getting on and off trains to Lincolnshire or Kent, or, beginning in 1891, Harlech in Wales. He had inherited several hundred acres in North Wales from a distant relation. It was an unexpected acquisition but an intriguing one, and it was to shape the lives of everyone in the family for the next two decades.

WHERE ONE FINCH HATTON
broke a trail, others followed, and by the end of the 1890s Henry and his young family were regular visitors to Harold’s main Harlech property, Y Plas, or “the Big House,” a gabled granite-and-shale building that was once a popular coaching inn. Wales was a foreign land to the children—the exotic double consonants of Welsh were unintelligible and the toponyms positively hieroglyphic. The servants were on first-name terms with sprites and elves that danced in pointy hats under a woodland moon, and the peaty hills behind the town were lively with Bronze Age cairn circles, standing stones, Neolithic burial chambers, holy wells, and other sacred sites. Denys loved the proximity of the sea, the washed dun colors of the hills, and the way the fields flecked with sheep glowed lime-green when the sun fell. To a child with his temperament, inured to the jaundiced fogs of London and the saturnine fens of Lincolnshire, the unruly Welsh landscape was an exhilarating release. For Denys, with adulthood still a distant land, a pattern of almost constant movement between opposing environments had already been established.

Harlech was a small town nestling in the lee of the Lleyn peninsula, the northern claw of the Welsh coast. Up in that isolated corner, the country’s most rugged mountains slid off Caernarvonshire and sank into the Irish Sea. On a summer’s day, it was a dreamy landscape of purple and cadmium hills and fleshy pink inlets streaked with blue. Above the town, the thirteenth-century castle erupted from the rock like a tooth, one of a ring of fortresses built by Edward I to keep the Welsh in order. Between Tremadog Bay and the castle, nearly a mile of reclaimed salt marsh sprouted with gorse, broom, buttercups, dog roses, mustard, and orchids, and at the coastal edge a dromedary line of forty-foot sand dunes fell away to a sandy beach. The low bosomy hills behind Harlech, spotted with gray stone farms, merged into the Rhinog Range and eventually collided with the outer rim of Snowdonia. One could walk there for fifteen miles without crossing a road or passing a farm. Agriculture was at subsistence level, and when Uncle Harold inherited the estates most Harlech men worked at the slate caverns of Blaenau Ffestiniog, a short distance inland. At its height, in the 1890s, the industry employed more than six thousand people. The gray-blue slate was loaded onto the wagons of the narrow-gauge Ffestiniog railway and carried to Porthmadog, where Western Ocean Yachts shipped it around the world. But in 1900 the North Wales Quarrymen’s Union went on strike at Lord Penrhyn’s mine at Bethesda. The miners were asking for fairer conditions. Lord Penrhyn refused to recognize the union, or to meet its representatives; he simply closed his quarry. It was one of the longest disputes in British industrial history, and it culminated, in 1903, in the surrender of the quarrymen. After three years of devastating hardship, several hundred strikers were blacklisted. The industry never recovered. A fresh source of income, however, had unexpectedly presented itself. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Harlech was discovered by the landed classes of both Wales and England, and by the time Harold appeared the town had developed into a fashionable resort. Besides the attractive setting, and the recreational activities offered by both mountains and sea, Harlech enjoyed a mild climate, warmed by the Gulf Stream and protected from the east winds by a curtain of hills. In addition, despite its remote position it was easy to reach; by 1890 Cambrian Railways ran a service to England every two hours, and twice on Sundays.

While practicing his boomerang technique on the salt marshes, the inventive Harold noted that the reclaimed turf under the castle would make an ideal golf links. He was a strong competitive golfer, and within a short time had laid out a course. Soon an aged gardener was employed as greenkeeper and given a scarlet tailcoat by a supporter who had recently retired from hunting. St. David’s Golf Club opened in the rain on November 2, 1894, with Harold as its first president. The club quickly established itself as the premier links in Wales, a mecca for moneyed Edwardian aristocrats. But the scarlet-coated greenkeeper took to the bottle and was found recumbent on the course so often that a rule was instituted allowing a golfer to move a ball lying near him a club’s length away—but not closer to the hole—without penalty.

Denys and his clan spent stretches of every winter in Wales. In December, the children waited with mounting anticipation for the day when the mechanical wax woman appeared in the window of Griffith Jones Williams’s shoe shop, maniacally whirring the feathers from a goose until her arms dropped in exhaustion and Williams wound her up again. In the spring, the whole family walked to the flat-fronted St. Tanwg’s Church for the eleven o’clock Easter Sunday service, the only one in English. Other visitors drew up in broughams and landaus with uniformed postilions, and Welsh children sat on the wall opposite to watch ladies stepping out in their ostrich-feather hats, veils, and boas, vivid plumage among the indigenous grays and blacks. Summers were immensely sociable, with enormous beach picnics at which lords and ladies and their nubile progeny dined off hampers of boned chicken, whole hams, sherry cake, and fruit compotes. The bathing ritual involved voluminous green serge costumes donned within a caravan-like contraption, which a pair of nags towed out into the bay while troupes of minstrels strummed in the dunes or the town band belted out “Men of Harlech.”

EARLY IN 1897,
Uncle Murray, the twelfth earl, fell ill and was ordered by his doctor to the south of France. There were quiet hints within the family that the histrionic Edith was bad for his health. She was a hypochondriac, an affliction that had rubbed off on him, and neither could survive long without sickness. Murray had been badly affected by the debacle of the Great Horseless Carriage Company. He died at the Priory on an exceptionally hot September day just a month after the bankruptcy case and eleven years after succeeding his half brother. He was forty-seven. The title passed to Henry, Denys’s father. Toby became Viscount Maidstone, Denys was an earl’s son, and, to the postman’s horror, there were now four countesses of Winchilsea.

The burden of family finances now transferred to Henry. In addition to the title, he had inherited eight thousand acres but no cash. Murray’s will was proved at £16,000 gross, nil net, and there was still £24,500 due in respect of a mortgage on the Haverholme estate. The Priory had to be let again. This latest batch of Winchilseas remained in London. In 1897, they had left their rented house in Sydenham and bought a late-eighteenth-century town house in Kensington Square. Laid out around a rose garden in 1685, the square was among the oldest in the capital, and in recent decades residents had included Sir Edward Burne-Jones, William Make-peace Thackeray, and John Stuart Mill. No. 29, a five-story terraced house, was sandwiched between the worldly clamor of Kensington High Street and the pious quietude of the Convent of the Assumption. Soon after Henry and his family moved in, Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. The country exploded with displays of patriotic joy, crowds surged through the streets, and the plane trees of Kensington Square were decked with bunting and illuminations. The greatest empire on earth was at its zenith, and everyone was glad—or almost everyone. “Imperialism in the air,” the author and socialist reformer Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary that day. “All classes drunk with sightseeing and hysterical loyalty.”

At about this time, the whole clan began to go on fishing holidays in northern Norway, where Granny Fanny’s youngest brother had built a house and invested in a sawmill. (Later, Denys embarked on his first trading venture by exporting timber from the mill.) Sailing from either Hull or Newcastle, Winchilseas and Finch Hattons hopped up the Norwegian coast from Stavanger to Bergen and transshipped for Ålesund and Trondheim and on overland to the Rice house deep in fjord country. There men and boys fished for sea trout and everyone went on exploratory walks, joined by an amoebic mass of relations who seethed back and forth across the North Sea. Nan had by now had enough of Eastbourne, and on their return from Norway in 1897, in the same hot month that their father assumed the earldom, Denys and Toby started at a new school above the rolling Hampshire Downs. West Downs Preparatory School, outside Winchester, had been founded two years earlier by the headmaster, Lionel Helbert. Situated not far from the prison, the barracklike brick buildings caught the full force of the east winds. One mother said the school corridor was the only place where her hat had ever blown off indoors. The balding Helbert was a man of cadaverous aspect, with a vast domed forehead and sunken eyes. He was humane—still a novel concept in the educational field—and to those in his charge he was “a sympathetic, fatherly and boyish friend.” Nan took to him, and to his school, just as she had taken against Eastbourne. When she enrolled Toby and Denys, West Downs had twenty-five pupils, ranging in age from eight to fourteen. Staff and boys walked arm in arm over the chalky downs, and in the dining room everyone squeezed together on benches as Cook loomed through the steam in the hatch, her bosom obscured by a menacing bulwark of spotted dick. The curriculum focused unblinkingly on the classics. Boys even had to ask if they might go to the lavatory in Latin (“Please, sir, may I go to
foricas
?”). Math was taught, but not science, which wasn’t introduced to West Downs until 1964, four years after the launch of Britain’s first nuclear submarine. On the
mens sana in corpore sano
principle, Helbert was obsessed with the health of his charges, leading them on runs—often at night—even in February and sometimes in the rain. A doctor visited every morning, gargling with an unidentified pink liquid was a daily requirement, and bowel movements were monitored, Matron stalking the dormitories before lights-out wielding a jeroboam of syrup of figs. But if a boy was properly ill Helbert sat with him all night.

In 1899, Toby went off to Eton. Denys followed a year later, but before leaving West Downs he was found to have a minor heart condition. Treatment involved physiotherapy and daily immersions in mineral salts at a London clinic. Whatever the condition was, it failed to impair his sporting record, but it never went away and in his adult life it was apparently aggravated by cold weather. Despite this, he was more robust than Toby, and at the age of twelve already taller. The pair were different in every way. Denys had inherited the Codrington panache, as well as his mother’s finely tuned aesthetic sensibility. Toby, figuratively as well as literally the smaller of the two, was more of a stolid Winchilsea. Essex Gunning, a third cousin who spent much of her childhood at Harlech and Haverholme, reflected that “Toby had great charm but he could hurt! I never knew Denys to lose his temper, a word or a look was enough, unlike Toby who could be short tempered.” Henry and Nan’s brood were, in Essex’s opinion, “a wonderful family, quite unlike anyone else.” In particular, she savored Denys’s sense of fun, and his gentleness. “He had such understanding and sympathy,” she said. Essex recalled, too, Denys’s “immense reserves of affection.” Despite his charm and sociability, he could also be solitary, and often sought out quiet places, with the result that his cousin likened him to the cat in Kipling’s
Just So
story: “The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Pig was wild—as wild as wild could be—and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.”