In Search of a Past: The Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933-1945

By Ronald Fraser

Ronald Fraser, the internationally renowned oral historian, turns his attention to his own origins in this remarkable memoir. In Search of a Past gathers the recollections of the servants who worked at the manor house outside London where Fraser grew up. It was the place where his parents-one American, the other Scottish-learned to embrace the lifestyle of the idle local gentry. Fraser paints a vivid picture of a vanished interwar world. Sensitively recorded, the words of his family's former employees capture the texture of English "county" life as seen from below, woven into a background of their personal lives, their work and the social antagonisms they experienced.
Beneath their stories, however, the author glimpses another unspoken narrative-that of his own childhood. He submits to a course of psychoanalysis and delves into a past riven by confusing emotions and conflicting class allegiances. The result is an innovative, honest, and beautifully written account of the search for lost time, one that defies literary categorization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789601053

Ronald Fraser

Ronald Fraser�(1930 - 2012)�was the leading oral historian of twentieth-century Spain. He is the author of several books, including In Hiding, In Search of a Past, Blood of Spain and Napoleon's Cursed War.

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Introduction to the New Edition

This book was first published twenty-five years ago, and then only after two decades of innumerable false starts and unsatisfactory endings. I mention this only because I realized recently that this half-century had covered the best part of my productive life. To say that I am – but also am not – the person who wrote this book is, obviously, a statement of fact, but also an understatement of personal reality.

I originally set out to record the memories of the servants who had worked at the manor house where I lived from the ages of three to fourteen or, more exactly, from 1933 to the end of the Second World War. It was my first venture into what came to be called, or rather miscalled, ‘oral history’, as though it were a category of historiography on a par with ‘economic’ or ‘political’ history rather than what it actually is: the creation of new sources to further historical research.

I wouldn’t say that I’d thought this through at the time; looking back, I was exceedingly ingenuous. I began not with the aim of creating new historical sources, but to try to solve a personal problem with which I had struggled for years: how to write about my past. On the face of it, that shouldn’t seem particularly troublesome; sit down every morning at the same time and at the same desk, put pen to paper and get on with it, as Flaubert more or less put it. During my years in a Spanish village trying to fictionalize the past, it wasn’t the prescription’s tedium that thwarted me but the impossibility of finding a way to put down on paper the intimate sense of nullity that an English childhood had left me with. My flight to the Mediterranean and a novelist’s world, which I had fantasized about for almost as long as I could remember, was an initial response to this problem.

It was 1957 – the year, as I later learned, that Spanish agricultural output again reached pre-Civil War levels. Nothing in the impoverished Andalusian mountain village of Mijas, where I had come to rest, indicated recuperation from the war which had ended eighteen years earlier. On the small terraces descending to the Mediterranean, the wheat crop was so sparse that the individual stalks stood out from a distance; in the village square each morning men waited desultorily for a day’s work that never came; and up the steep, winding dirt road from the coast others shuffled at a fast trot with baskets of fish strapped to their foreheads to hawk round the village streets. In the evening, men returned from the sierra bent double under loads of brushwood to fire the solitary baker’s oven and the wood-fired trailer which, bellowing smoke, fuelled an ancient Packard crammed to the roof that provided the only communication with Málaga other than a donkey or mule or one’s own two feet. The sight of a ‘real’ car stirring up dust in its wake as it came up the road brought villagers out to stare in wonderment at who might be about to arrive; in the evening, too, the post was carried up from the coast on the mailman’s donkey and had to be collected from his front room. Over all this, over the whitewashed houses which looked from afar like a cubist painting, a mineral sun flattened the earth under a sky drained of colour, and the vast expanse of sea lapped the shore and shimmered in the heat; at night it remained so warm that I slept without blankets on an iron cot under a tintype of a haloed Jesus…

As the start of a literary career it was unbeatable. I lay in bed at midnight listening to the children playing hopscotch in the street under my window and singing to the miner’s tune ‘She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain’; and at dawn I was woken by the sharp, rhythmic beat of donkeys’ hooves on the cobbles. One of the two rooms I rented over the bar was a garret of adobe plaster and rafters of thick agave stems with a single unglazed window at floor level; there in the cool muddy light which the sun never penetrated I set myself up at a wobbly table to write.

I owed all this to my mother’s untimely death the previous year of a heart problem (which today would certainly be treatable but wasn’t then) and the promise of a small inheritance which would keep me alive somewhere cheap for a couple of years. I liked to imagine that she would have been pleased to see me setting out on this new venture, about which I had fantasized aloud to her once in a while and which, as I recall, she had not openly discouraged for what it was: daydreaming. Had I known that its realization would come only at the expense of her death I would have kept silent…

I was twenty-seven, poorly educated, uncertain of myself and dissatisfied with a job as a journalist which seemed to me a poor substitute for literature. What I lacked in personality and culture I made up in persistence, the only virtue I could discern in myself. But persistence was no cure for the emptiness that leached out my being and which was filled momentarily only by writing about it. As the pages mounted up, I saw that I was trying to destroy the world I’d hated since childhood in order to create a more valid fictional one in its place; a world in which I’d feel at ease in my skin. But hatred, in my case, was not a good starting point. It foreshortened the distance needed to recreate the past, and I lacked the imagination sufficient to create another. It could be done, I knew: Saul Bellow had brought it off in his first novel, The Dangling Man, and in a different register so had Italo Svevo in his Confessions of Zeno. But it soon became evident that I lacked the former’s skill and the latter’s mordant sense of humour. Meanwhile, I contented myself with the illusion that for the villagers I was an anonymous being, without an identifiable past that summoned me in the present to accept a social role in which I’d signally failed.

When my daily quota of pages was done, I walked in the countryside. I spoke no Spanish and knew next to nothing about the country other than what I’d picked up from Gerald Brenan’s South from Granada which, apart from the cheapness and sunshine, had brought me to Spain. On my outings, I often lay under an olive tree and read a book to further my education. One afternoon, I came across a riveting sentence in Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe: ‘I was walking down the street in disguise’, the great writer told his interlocutor without offering, as I recall, any explanation. Back in the garret I wrote the sentence on a sheet of paper and fixed it above the worktable: that’s what I am, a man in disguise.

After a year, I scrapped all that I’d written – ‘A Hollow Man,’ I’d called it – and began again. I was close to despair but unwilling to admit it when, one afternoon on returning from the countryside, a man approached me in the square. He was unmistakably a foreigner, but where from I couldn’t guess. Of medium height and very slim, his black hair receding from a high forehead above a prominent nose, and with intent dark eyes framed by glasses, he asked, in an accented English I couldn’t place, if I could help him find somewhere to garage the motorbike on which he’d just arrived from Paris. As it happened, it wasn’t a difficult request. I’d recently moved out of my rooms into a small village house which enjoyed the indescribable advantage of a shower and flush lavatory, and also had a diminutive storage room at street level, just big enough for a motorbike. I said he was welcome to it and if he came with me I’d give him the key. He introduced himself as Gerard Horst, and, over a drink, he said he was a journalist with the new French weekly L’Express. He was on a touring holiday of Andalusia. Probably in reply to something I said he murmured diffidently that he’d just published a book in Paris about his problematic past. Something clicked suddenly. ‘You’re not the author of Le Traître, are you?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘What a coincidence! I read a fascinating review by J. G. Weightman in the Observer about it not long ago. It’s got an introduction by Sartre … but I don’t recall the author’s name as yours.’ No, André Gorz was a nom de plume he’d chosen to prevent his mother learning he was the author and taking offence. ‘She’s a difficult person,’ he murmured.

That chance meeting was the start of a friendship that lasted a quarter of a century. It was more than a friendship because like an older brother – he was six years older than I – he guided me into the rarefied world of the Parisian left intelligentsia. There’s a fanciful story that he converted me overnight to Marxism; it’s a myth because – in this I was true to my class – I was resistant to anything smacking of communism. But I was very open to Sartrean existentialism since, to elude my original problem, I’d early chosen to read mainly French literature (some years as a correspondent in Brussels had honed the French I’d studied for a year at Geneva University immediately after the war) in order, I believed, to take on a distinctly non-English persona. I’d thus read most of Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s novels and was gradually weaning myself from an early dependence on Gide; Le Traître, however, which Gerard sent me on his return to Paris, was an overwhelming experience. Here was a writer, a half-Jewish Austrian exile, who used his writing to analyse his lifelong sense of a nullifying non-being in order to lay it to rest and create for himself a new present. As the reader can understand, it fell like manna into my hands and I treated it with the reverence due to divine intervention. That was my first mistake; the second was to try to imitate it.

There’s little more comically self-deceptive than a neophyte’s zeal. For a decade, I struggled, in an autobiographical form, to achieve an imitation, failing to allow for my lack of Gerard’s intellect and the philosophical tools he’d sharpened in the years of writing his exegesis of Sartre’s L’Être et Le Néant (Being and Nothingness) – reflecting on all 1,500 unpublished pages of it at the start of Le Traître. In dozens of letters and with inexpressible patience, he answered my questions about existentialism and Marxism, overcoming my distaste for communism and, when asked, offering helpful comments on my project without ever confronting me with the truth: the task was beyond me. Throughout the years he remained convinced that my writing should serve exclusively to further the search I’d embarked upon, and to that extent he sympathised fully with it. Eventually it was I who betrayed his faith by turning to Spanish history, which seemed to him a wilful evasion of the due task. Intimately, however, I always knew that I had only postponed the inevitable moment when I would return to the earlier endeavour.

In the meantime, I returned dejected to England: rightly or wrongly, I attributed my original failure to others or to social circumstances beyond my control, but this latest failure was solely of my own making. I had deluded myself; I fell into a depression I couldn’t shake off. Aware of my state, Gerard wrote to say that it might be helpful to make contact with New Left Review, the last issue of which he’d just read with interest and which he felt I would find equally appealing. Coincidentally, a Ghanaian friend from my journalist days had mentioned that he’d once met Perry Anderson, the Review’s new editor, and so we set off one morning for the magazine’s office in Carlisle Street, Soho, stopping first for a coffee in a nearby café. We’d barely sat down when my friend nudged me. ‘That’s him,’ he said. I just had time to catch sight of a young man with sandy-coloured hair, wearing a tie and clutching a wad of papers, before he vanished through the door. ‘I think I’d better go home,’ I said. ‘I’m not up to it.’

When at last I summoned the minimal energy necessary, I wrote a brief letter saying I was a friend of André Gorz with time on my hands, and asked if there was anything I could do. In return I was inducted as the magazine’s unpaid business manager – there was hardly enough money to produce the journal, let alone pay salaries – and immediately found myself printing subscription labels with an antiquated hand-held machine and carting piles of magazines to the post office for stamping. I didn’t particularly care for the work but being back in the active world got me going again, and I read with admiration Perry’s newly published essay on Britain, ‘The Origins of the Present Crisis’, which explained the historical aristocratic origins of the country of which I was a reluctant subject.

This is not the place to go into my association with the Review but rather to make a few observations relevant to the matter in hand. As can be expected, I appreciated from the start its rejection of a parochial Englishness and its openness to Continental Marxist thinkers; I admired the young editors’ – and especially Perry’s – intellectual abilities, their university-trained erudition and their command of a left universe which, despite Gerard’s help, I remained largely ignorant of; I envied the way they seemed mentally able to throw off the bonds of the society in which they lived while – with some notable exceptions – materially enjoying its privileges (I had achieved the latter by this point but not the former); and I respected Perry’s practical sense in caring deeply about the excellence of design, print, meticulous editing and proofing to ensure that the Review was the equal of a capitalist magazine. No amateurish carelessness – we were in the serious business of introducing an array of Marxist thought to a country which historically had, in general, been impervious to it. And with his formidable knowledge and skill, he succeeded in attracting prestigious Marxist intellectuals – Isaac Deutscher comes immediately to mind – to publish in the journal’s pages. I was happy to be a part of this enterprise, and I learned a great deal; historical materialism gave me a handle on the world at long last, but I was under no illusion of becoming a Marxist or any other sort of intellectual. Ideas in general still floated nebulously above my head, and I was mired in the concrete, the business of living. Without a book to my name I felt it was bad faith to call myself this, but I was a ‘writer’ – whatever that meant.

Not surprisingly, therefore, it was a book that opened a new possibility of achieving my aim. The Children of Sanchez, by the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, was an ‘oral history’ of a poor, urban Mexican family whose life was presented in the siblings’ multivocal experiences. A short while later, I was lucky to meet the author. I asked him only one question: do you think of your book as anthropology or literature? He thought for a moment: ‘Literature, I guess.’ My heart missed a beat. So one could recreate a past and become a literary man, thanks to others! It was then that I bought one of the new cassette recorders and set out to find the servants; through them, I believed, I could at last pin down the past, and no longer be concerned with my own subjectivity but theirs instead, which collectively would create an objective view of my childhood. And, just as rewarding, the former servants’ experiences in a Home Counties manor in the interwar years, of people who might otherwise leave little public trace of their working lives, were in themselves of equal or greater value.

Once again the pages piled up, this time of transcripts which, as I went through them, seemed disjointed, inarticulate, fragmented – in short, unreadable – as only a literal, unpunctuated rendering of a conversation always appears at first sight. In memory, I heard their distinct voices, the rural intonations, the stresses that emphasized words or phrases, the sly humour and irony that they expressed, all of which vanished in the typewritten transcript. Nonetheless, in their remembered voices, I recognized that they had described graphically enough their work routines, their anxieties and fears – these were the years of the Great Depression – the small pleasures and greater inequalities of that class-ridden society; they’d even provided significant confirmation of my duty-bound childhood, its passivity and loneliness, its difficult mothering, so that I could write now with some assurance of what the family and the wider social formation had made of me. Yet almost instinctively I knew there was still something missing. I identified it at the time solely in narrative terms: while their work experiences certainly had a unity of time and place sufficient to frame their narratives, they had no principal axis – no ‘protagonist’, as I put it to myself – other than a mute house around which to centre them. It would need, I saw, a greater imagination than mine to make that house speak.

Once again, chance came to the rescue. One morning while I was still puzzling over this narrative problem, I read on the front page of The Times that the last socialist mayor of Mijas, the Andalusian village where I’d lived during my abortive novel-writing time, had suddenly reappeared for the first time since the Spanish Civil War after thirty years of hiding in his village house. To end his long reclusion, Manuel Cortés had taken advantage of a recent Franco amnesty for all survivors who had fought on the Republican side. He had initially gone into hiding to escape certain death at the hands of the Franquistas on returning by night to the village at the end of the war, and had remained hidden ever since. He was a barber by trade, the paper said, a long-time socialist whom the village had elected as mayor just months before the military uprising to overthrow the Republic in 1936. That night the BBC News reported that the world’s press had descended on the village to interview him.

It didn’t take long to come to a couple of decisions: to obtain his consent to work together on an oral history of his life – and not just his time in hiding – and to defer my return to Mijas until the press hubbub receded. This I did, and my collaboration with Manuel, Juliana and their daughter Maria, resulted in a book called In Hiding which, again by chance, led to an important new friendship. To interview Manuel, I’d read extensively on the Civil War; one of the books was Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth, on the origins of the conflict. I found it rewarding but somewhat labyrinthine itself.

For a long time I’d known that Brenan lived nearby in a village close to Málaga Airport. Occasional rumours of him reached me, but he was too grand an author for an unpublished writer like me to seek out. I sometimes wondered whether his account of first coming to Spain in South from Granada had unconsciously influenced me: the choice of an isolated mountain village in which to write and make good the poor public school education we’d shared, a generation apart; two semi-exiles living alone in our Andalusian hideaways trying to make a new life for ourselves. But there the comparison ended. He was a member of the Bloomsbury circle, had friends like Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, had fought in the First World War. Unlike me, he had lived, written a classic history, was famous … A distaste for appearing to want to share another’s limelight kept me away – and would continue to do so – until at last I’d proven myself in print.

The moment came with the publication of In Hiding. In the meantime I’d heard (I don’t remember from whom) that he had moved from the house where he’d lived from before the Civil War to a village on the other side of the mountain from Mijas. I took a spare set of page proofs and set out to find him; I had only to ask a few villagers where El Inglés lived to be directed to his house, a new construction at the end of a dry watercourse. There was no one there. I wrote a brief note and left it by the kitchen door.

A couple of days later a telegram was waiting with my mail. On yellowing paper, as though faded by the sun, was written in pen: ‘Please come to tea on Thursday at 4. Brenan.’ It was a blisteringly hot August afternoon when I set off on my Lambretta, a recent acquisition, on the dirt track to Alhaurín. By the time I reached the house, my shirt was wringing with sweat and covered in dust. As I switched off the engine, I saw Brenan, instantly recognizable from his photos, emerge from the front door. ‘How kind of you to come,’ he said, shaking my hand with a firm grasp. ‘Please, do come inside.’ There was a quite melodious tone, or perhaps it was the intonation, to his southern upper-class English. He showed me courteously through the door and said: ‘You’ll sit by the fire, won’t you?’ and indicated a chair drawn up by the fireplace where a lively fire was burning. Taken aback, with sweat still dripping from my face, I thanked him and sat down, wanting – but not daring – to pull out a handkerchief to mop my forehead. Something was wrong, but what? He looked hale and hearty enough and in no need of extraordinary heat. ‘I trust you’ll take Indian tea, we can’t regrettably get any other here,’ Brenan continued imperturbably from the other side of the fireplace. In his suntanned face his eyes were a piercing blue. On my best behaviour, I replied that tea would be most refreshing, hoping that something liquid would cool me. He rose and went to an interior door. ‘Lynda,’ he called gently, ‘we’ll have some tea when you’re ready.’ Almost immediately, a young woman whose dark hair fell to her shoulders came in bearing a tray with a teapot, cups and biscuits. I stood up. ‘This is Lynda, my muse, if I may call her that…’ ‘Gerald, that’s an exaggeration, you know,’ she responded with a smile as she put down the tray and we shook hands. She was attractive, there was