The Captive Reader

The Pakenhams on their wedding day in 1931

I am having a simply marvelous time reading The Pebbled Shore by Elizabeth Longford this week.  I’ve been looking forward to it since learning a bit about Longford while reading her daughter Antonia Fraser’s memoir My History but it’s even better than I’d hoped for.

More ponderously known as Elizabeth (Harman) Pakenham, Lady Longford, she had just the sort of life I like to read about.  Born in Harley Street in 1906, her parents were both doctors (though her mother did not practice) and she grew up in a family where ambition was not limited by gender.  She studied at Oxford and became involved in politics very young, standing as a Labour candidate while still in her 20s.  She was a dedicated social reformer (a passion she shared with her husband), an enthusiastic mother of eight, and, eventually, a biographer.  In short, she is the center of the Venn diagram that charts my interest in 20th Century Britain: she knew all the literary, social and political figures I find most interesting.  Neville Chamberlain was her cousin, Nancy Mitford was a friend, Evelyn Waugh said both horrible and lovely things about her…it is all very, very wonderful.  And, not surprisingly, very, very quotable.

I had to interrupt my reading to share this particularly enjoyable note Hugh Gaitskell scribbled to her while they were at Oxford and which she, deeply amused when writing about it 60 years later, described as ” a gallant effort to raise my spirits”:

Here is an incident to be recorded – On the way home on Saturday night I met [John] Betjeman drunk who having discovered where I had been asked me if I had met a beautiful girl called Elizabeth Harman.  You have such a lot on your side – you ought to make more of it.  Love Hugh.

P.S. This letter appears sinister.  Consciously it isn’t but you never know.