My mother completely shared Norman’s values. Not only was she a member of the London County Council, calling her racing greyhound Hammersmith (Hammy for short) after her constituency, but also a JP and social worker and, when the war began, a founder, under Lady Reading, of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), which is still going strong as the WRVS. I remember as a teenager, in the absence of any suitable female, having to model various possible uniforms for my mother to choose from – and hats too. After the war, she also became president of the Mental Health Association, forcing James the butler, a Great War veteran, much to his embarrassment, to shake the Association’s collection box in all the local pubs for what, at the time, was a most unpopular cause. Like Norman himself, she looked down from a great height on high society, quoting the great Lord Salisbury’s description of its members – which she thought her mother, Lady Alice, might have actually heard – as ‘dwarfed, languid, nerveless, emasculated dilettantes’. No efforts were spared to deter her sons from sinking so low.
Lady Alice was another formative influence, and in the same league. Widowed in her early age by the death of her second husband, Major Robert Reyntiens, a dashing Belgian soldier who had been ADC (some said pimp) to King Leopold of the Belgians, she inherited shortly thereafter what remains of the great recusant Towneley property, stretching from Burnley in Lancashire to the Yorkshire border town of Todmorden at the other end of the wild Cliviger Gorge, which figures so romantically in Harrison Ainsworth’s novel The Lancashire Witches. The house itself, Towneley Hall, a massive fortress dating back to the fifteenth century, had been bought by the Burnley Corporation and turned into a museum, which meant that the only available house on the estate for my grandmother to live in was the agent’s hideous late-Victorian villa, Dyneley, overlooking the gorge. Although the country was still rugged, much of its beauty had been tarnished by coal mining and the smoke-belching chimneys of the cotton mills – one of the reasons why so many of the old Lancashire families had moved south to less grimy climes. Strongly disapproving of absentee landlords, my grandmother decided to reverse the shameless exodus. It was a brave decision. Towneley estate was an oasis of old agricultural Lancashire in a great desert of industrial blight. Cliviger village, above which Dyneley perched, served the local mill and at the break of a summer’s day the sound of clogs could be heard in the distance. My grandmother’s smart friends could not understand why she wanted to go and live in such an outlandish place where there was no hunting and no social life – by which they meant no neighbours of the right sort. But she did not want to. It was a matter of duty. For six hundred years, since the time of Edward III, the Towneleys kept the flame of Catholicism burning bright in Lancashire, cruelly persecuted at times for their fidelity to the Old Faith, and my grandmother could think of no good reason not to continue honouring this ancient obligation. Moving north was certainly a great wrench. She loved the pleasures of fashionable life – her sister, Lady Goonie, a leading member of ‘the Souls’, was married to Winston Churchill’s brother, Jack; but no sooner did she inherit than she packed up in London and moved to Dyneley, where she gave over her life to good works – running the local Girl Guides, sitting on the County Council and on the Bench, and reviving the Towneley chapel in Burnley.
Admittedly Montagu Norman and my mother’s family were exceptionally, almost obsessively, public spirited and high principled and therefore potentially a threat to liberty because of their excess of zeal. But the great advantage of the old hereditary upper class was that, being a family association, it included all sorts – including its fair share of dandies and dilettantes – and Montagu Norman’s younger brother, R. C. Norman, who was allowed to live in the big house, was as elegantly and civilizedly relaxed as Montagu was driven and single minded. Ronnie Norman was what Max Weber called a grand rentier, entirely detached from the source of his income, entirely uninvolved in the day-today running of any organization – an agent ran his estate – and therefore able to look at the world from a great distance. By ‘detached’ Weber did not mean impersonal; he meant ‘un-embattled’ and ‘un-embroiled’. Most of us, until we are retired, think about everything with only half our minds, the other half being engaged in worrying about some unfinished business in the office or, if we are a farmer, about the weather or the price of grain. Ronnie Norman was not embattled or embroiled in this way at all. He occupied a more serene sphere. Not that he was idle: he was a great patron of the arts, a great reader, Chairman of the BBC* (then, as now, a part-time job), a devoted father of five, with a wide circle of close friends, including his old Cambridge contemporary, the historian G. M. Trevelyan, who later became Master of Trinity College, and his neighbour, the sculptor Henry Moore; but in all these roles it was his serenity, his detachment, that made him so exceptionally valuable, as it did in his role as brother of Montagu Norman. It was a good sibling combination since at weekends the younger brother’s passion for domestic felicity perfectly complemented the older’s passion for public duty, and vice versa, thereby helping to ensure that in one upper-class family the interest of the State and the interest of the individual were both kept in happy balance. One such miniscule concentration of unofficial power and influence, of course, would count for little; but multiplied into tens of thousands of comparable grandee family concentrations spread across the land, all coming from the same background, with many actually related, certainly did add up to something.
What was that something? I think it was an alternative vision of a good life; a vision beyond the range of the bourgeois or proletarian imagination. In this world, there was no sense of having been frightened into public life by fear of socialism, or driven into it on behalf of the workers. So far as it is humanly possible, ‘interest’ did not come into it. Because the Normans, who had had it ‘made’ from birth, did not have to better their own lot, they felt in duty bound, in their different fashions, to fight for the public good. In no sense did they think this made them superior to those who came from less fortunate circumstances. Comparable public spirit, I was brought up to believe, could be found in all classes; the only difference was that it was easier for some to be active democrats – that is, to participate directly in the nation’s government and law making and to lead a socially responsible life – than it was for others. This was the idea of aristocracy transformed into democratic terms. Far from the existence of a privileged group spared from the strivings and struggles of their fellow citizens being incompatible with democracy, it was in practice, we believed, a necessary condition of democracy. Has this ceased to be true? I rather doubt it. For while Britain is more democratic socially today than it was, I doubt whether it is more democratic politically, in the sense of more people feeling effectively in charge of the State. Then, a class with connections stretching across the whole kingdom felt in charge; today, that feeling would seem to be limited to a succession of small groups of political professionals and political journalists, here today and gone tomorrow, with few connections outside Westminster.
Another lesson from those days also sticks in my mind: the extent to which an hereditary aristocracy, being a civil association made up of families, helped to keep the lines of communication open between the various self-contained and often feuding elites – political, bureaucratic, artistic, religious, sporting, and so on. Again, the extended Norman family (or firm) was a good example of this, since house parties would often include senior members of most of the various elites – one in the Cabinet Office, one in the War Office, one in the City, one in the legal profession, one a racing enthusiast – whose weekday narrowness of vision and exclusive concern with their own separate sections of the governing order would quickly dissolve, allowing the unifying ties of kinship to re-exert their hold. Nowadays, of course, British society is incomparably more compartmentalized than it used to be, and members of the various elites only intermingle at such artificial gatherings as ‘interdisciplinary conferences’, international congresses organized by the great foundations, or in special committees set up for that purpose. But, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘Men who meet only for definite serious purposes, and on official occasions, do not wholly meet.’ That ease of communication that comes naturally in the drawing room or in the salon or in the club cannot be artificially recreated in the symposium or seminar. Even the language is different. Whereas in the former it tended to be urbane, witty, and free-ranging, in the latter it tends to be boring, technical, and focused. Nietzsche made the point well when he said that the problem with the German language is that it developed not in courts and