My father looked for somewhere more modest near Swinbrook, a small village where he owned land, fifteen miles from Batsford. It was too expensive to keep up and was sold in 1919.
Grandfather Redesdale’s huge house and estate in Gloucestershire, Batsford Park near Moreton-in-Marsh, was inherited by my father in 1916. Years later Mabel, our parlourmaid, told me, ‘I knew what it was by your father’s face.’ When the telegram arrived Nancy announced to the others, ‘We Are Seven’, and wrote to Muv at our London house, 49 Victoria Road, Kensington, where she was lying-in, ‘How disgusting of the poor darling to go and be a girl.’ Life went on as though nothing had happened and all agreed that no one, except Nanny, looked at me till I was three months old and then were not especially pleased by what they saw. The sisters were at home and Tom was at boarding school for this deeply disappointing event, more like a funeral than a birth. ‘Nancy, Pam, Tom, Diana, Bobo, Decca, me’, intoned in a peculiar voice, was my answer to anyone who asked where I came in the family. My parents’ dearest wish was for a big family of boys a sixth girl was not worth recording.
The first entry in April, in large letters, is ‘KITCHEN CHIMNEY SWEPT’. There is no entry in my mother’s engagement book for 31 March 1920, the day I was born.
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