Diana's wedding to Bryan Guinness, by far the grandest, takes up most of the book, and the sepia photos themselves are so huge that they hardly fit the immense pages. One is devoted entirely to newspaper clippings about the family: 'Whenever I see the words 'Peer's Daughter' in a headline,' she once commented rather sadly, 'I know it's going to be something about one of you children.' Another is a collection of her children's wedding photographs.

The most fascinating of all are my mother's voluminous scrapbooks, dozens of them, huge tomes, each arranged carefully in some sort of order either of subject matter or of period. There are shelves of family books in the drawing room: Memories by Lord Redesdale, Grandfather's depressingly huge autobiography Writings of a Rebel, a privately printed volume of letters to The Times by Uncle Geoff Esmond Romilly's Out of Bounds and Boadilla a couple of books by Sir Oswald Mosley an impressive shelf of Nancy's books, both in English and in translation. The Hons' Cupboard, where Debo and I spent much of our time, still has the same distinctive, stuffy smell and enchanting promise of complete privacy from the Grown-ups. Hanging on the walls are framed pictures and poems done by Unity when she was quite small-queer, imaginative, interesting work, some on a tiny scale of microscopic detail, some huge and magnificent. They were put there by my sister Unity and myself when we were children.

In the windows, still to be seen, are swastikas carved into the glass with a diamond ring, and for every swastika a carefully delineated hammer and sickle. The tangible evidences of this past are, it is true, somewhat different from those found in the average English home. When I first revisited my mother's house in 1955, at the age of thirty-eight, after an absence of nineteen years, I too fell under the spell of the past. Most houses, too, bear scars imprinted by those who have lived in them-the still-visible BB gun shots fired by an unsteady childish hand, the hole in the fireplace rug suffered when a party got too gay.Īfter the onset of middle age these trophies begin to hold considerable interest, for it is then that they bring back in startling relief forgotten events, memories completely buried under a mountain of thousands upon thousands of days gone by. In most homes there exist, put away in attics or on top shelves, a row of Baby's first shoes, Brother's prize-winning essay in the school paper, Sister's wedding veil, fading telegrams of congratulations on this, that and the other. Family souvenirs have an almost universal fascination.

Hons and rebels review