Turn up for the books

These days I tend to avoid National Trust properties. I dislike the obsession with romanticising life in servitude while moralising over those who dwelt upstairs. Add to this a need to apply for a mortgage to buy a cup of tea and a slice of Victoria sponge in the cafeteria and a day out at a stately pile becomes a penance rather than a pleasure.

I did, however, visit Ickworth House a few years ago, with my mother-in-law. Ickworth, near Bury St Edmunds, is famed for its Italianate architecture and the racy history of the Hervey family who once owned it.

I left the rest of our group to peer into the heavily brocaded bedrooms to make my way downstairs, a place where I felt markedly more at home. In the catacomb-like servant’s quarters, near